The Pomp Podcast - 359: Pierre Rochard on the Ethereum Supply Issue

Episode Date: August 12, 2020

Pierre Rochard is the Founder of Bitcoin Advisory and one of the strongest public proponents of Bitcoin. He has the unique combination of skills and experiences that can only be captured with a background in accounting and software development. In this conversation, we discuss the Ethereum supply controversy. We review what happened, why Pierre thinks this is a big deal, how the Ethereum community responded, what the latest update is, and what Pierre hopes will come out of this debacle.  ========================================== Athletic Greens is an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. Even with a balanced diet, it’s difficult to cover all of your nutritional bases. That’s where Athletic Greens will help. Their daily drink is like nutritional insurance for your body that’s delivered straight to your door. You can get yours at https://athleticgreens.com/pomp ========================================== Coinbase Wallets are adding support for .crypto and .zil domains through their partnership with Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains provides an all-in-one solution for blockchain domains. You can send money using these new domains instead of long Bitcoin wallet addresses, while also storing your domain in Coinbase's collectibles section. Go to unstoppabledomains.com in the dapp browser to register and manage your domains.  =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Pierre Rochard is the founder of Bitcoin Advisory and one of the strongest public proponents of Bitcoin. He has the unique combination of skills and experiences that can only be captured with a background in accounting and software development. In this conversation, we discuss the Ethereum supply controversy. We review what happened, why Pierre thinks this is a big deal, how the Ethereum community responded, what the latest update is, and what Pierre hopes will come out of this debacle. I really enjoyed this quick conversation with Pierre, and I hope you do as

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I've got pomp.crypto. None of y'all are getting it. If you want a domain, go get it at unstoppabledomains.com. And then lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry, you can subscribe at Pompletter.com. Again, Pompletter.com. Go get yourself educated. All right, let's get in this episode with Pierre. I hope you guys enjoy it. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital

management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. Pierre is back. Thank you so much for doing this on short notice there, my friend. Yeah, sure thing. Thanks for having me on, Pomp. Of course. All right. You've had an eventful weekend, but before we get to that, let's start with anyone who didn't listen previously. Just give us kind of a quick, you know, 60 seconds on you, your background, and kind of what you've done in Bitcoin.

Yeah, sure. So I graduated from UT Austin, Hookum in 2013, with a bachelor and master in accounting. And they've got the number one accounting program in the nation there, I'd argue, maybe in the world. And I enjoyed that a lot because I was interested in learning about accounting from an Austrian economics perspective. I'd studied Austrian economics when I was in high school. I was really into gold and sound money back in 2005 before anyone was, before Bitcoin was even a glimmer in Satoshi's eye. And I wanted to get into accounting because Ludwig von Mises had this quote about how that's how business people can make decisions, right? The profit and loss system, the price system that's aggregating all this information in a very

complex economy. And, you know, that I found really appealing, more appealing really than finance itself. I kind of wanted to see how the numbers, you know, got put together. And I graduated in 2013, immediately started learning how to program because I didn't like the bookkeeping part of accounting. I didn't like having to copy paste things manually and all this. So I wanted to automate that part so I could focus on, you know, the interesting parts of accounting. And I got interested in software development itself. So that's what caused me to learn Python and SQL and to pursue that as a career rather than accounting. So I worked in Big Four at Deloitte.

I worked at Hudson River Trading, which is a high frequency trading shop in New York in their back office. And I worked at BitPay, too, which is a Bitcoin payment processor in Atlanta. So since then, you know, all along, I've been very interested in Bitcoin. I got interested in Bitcoin back in 2013. And something that I found really fascinating about it was because of my accounting background, I realized the value of being able to reconcile all of these numbers in real time and to have a transparent, immutable ledger. So it immediately clicked with me. Combined with the scarcity supply schedule of it, with my sound money Austrian economics background, that part also clicked with me that, hey, this is inherently going to appeal to different people and increase in value over the long term because the unit itself on the ledger is scarce. It's not like wow gold, where a company can just issue as much as they want. So yeah, that's the TLDR on me. All right.

You are one of the strongest, most public proponents of Bitcoin. You do a fantastic job talking about all the positive aspects, all the other things. I've not heard you talk that much about Ethereum or Ether. And this weekend, all of a sudden, chaos breaks out. What exactly happened? Take us back to what was kind of the impetus for all of this. Yeah, sure. So, I mean, we could go all the way back to the Ethereum pre-sale because I was around back then.

And I personally was skeptical that it was going to launch and they proved me wrong, right? They did the pre-sale. They actually launched the product, which I got to hand it to them because that's fairly rare in crypto, right? That someone gets all the money up front and then actually executes and actually is able to build a self-sustaining ecosystem. So I think that they deserve a lot of credit for that. And I was skeptical from the get-go that they would succeed at doing that. And, yeah, so I didn't really have big reasons to criticize Ethereum. My view at this point is really that Bitcoin can succeed and altcoins can succeed as well.

And so that's because that's what we've seen over the past 10 years. So that's just like an empirical observation of what has been happening. And I just expect that to continue to happen, that all these different systems in different iterations. and yes of course some will fail and fall by the wayside or you know become unpopular or whatever but that um largely like the reason bitcoin is going to succeed is not because it is better than altcoins it's because it's better than the status quo uh and uh it's better than the u.s dollar like i really do see it as competition between bitcoin and the u.s dollar um and then the competition about like u.s dollar versus euro or litecoin versus dogecoin like those are

secondary considerations, because we're not really talking about the title fight, right, of the night, the two heavyweights here. So in any case, so I don't talk about Ethereum very much. But, you know, this came up over the past week, because there was a lot of back and forth between Bitcoin proponents and Ethereum proponents about the relative merits of these systems. And there's a view that they're not even comparable, that it's actually unfair to judge one using the criteria of the other, and that there's kind of a fundamental values debate between these two systems. I think that's plausible. Actually, though, when I look at what decentralization means to me, it's all about verification. And it's not just that I'm saying that because my background is an auditor, and so that's just where my mind goes. I think that a lot of the software engineers who work in this area would agree that verification is really one of the key parts of keeping these decentralized systems decentralized and immutable. If nobody's verifying anything, then anything can happen, right?

And we've seen that with the Federal Reserve. That's why people are always saying, hey, let's audit the Fed. And, you know, they want to dig into the details of what's going on so that we can figure out is there's something bad happening or are we not achieving good outcomes that we want? Is there embezzlement or fraud going on? All of these, I think, are valid questions and, you know, merit verification. So in any case, the nice thing about cryptocurrencies is that we can use cryptography, right? It's right there in the name, crypto, cryptography to do the verification, right? Where, you know, someone does a cryptographic signature, and then others can verify that that signature is in fact valid. And that's kind of what causes Bitcoins to be transferred from one person to another is the validity of cryptographic signatures. So that's kind of on the transfer part. And then on the issuance part, we're also able to verify the issuance because, and I'll mention, I'll keep this conversation focused on Bitcoin, right, because we're going to get to Ethereum.

But in Bitcoin, you know, every time Bitcoin are issued, it's because a miner is proposing a block to the network to add to the blockchain. chain. And when they do that, the process by which they do that is called hashing. And what they're doing when they're hashing is that they're trying to get a certain number of leading zeros in some random output. The input is not random. The input is actually the block header data. And it contains a lot of information, but the salient part is the difficulty, which is going to determine how many leading zeros you need to have in your hash and which is going to determine how much hashing you're gonna have to do in order to be

able to submit a block for to the network and other the the guiding principle in this proof-of-work system is that it is very expensive to propose a block and then on the other side it's very inexpensive it's very affordable to verify a block right so then we can double check this work without having to redo all the work because we can just uh do the the cryptography uh very quick uh verification um on the on the node side and so this creates a balance of power in the system where it's not like the miners control how many bitcoin get created um it's actually this decentralized peer-to-peer network of nodes that is receiving proposed blocks and double-checking them to make sure that the miner

is following all the rules and that they have, in fact, found a valid proof of work. So basically, the way that this system works is, one, like you just described, the miners are proposing blocks. They then get added to the blockchain through a process. If you run a node at any point, you can query the blockchain and you can get a whole bunch of information, right? And that information can skew from super complex, nuanced things around a blockchain to just how many Bitcoin exist, right? And the chaos this past weekend came down to if you ran a query with a Bitcoin node on the Bitcoin blockchain at the same time, anywhere in the world, and multiple people did it, they all got the same answer. Here's how many Bitcoin are in the circulating supply. If you did that same exact thing on the Ethereum network, people started getting different answers.

And so at high level, I think people will say, why? Maybe before we get to the why, just describe, how did you uncover the fact that people were getting different answers? Where did you first see, oh, wait, there might be an issue or people might not actually have the answer to this question? Yeah, it's funny. I know that at some point over the past five years, somewhere I read a tweet that you could not calculate the total amount of ETH out there with just a command line thing. And so that was planted in my mind at some point over the past five years. I can't point to it specifically. Um, but then when I started, uh, seeing some of the debates, uh, over, uh, the past week

about running an Ethereum node and, uh, this verification that resurfaced to my mind. And I was like, wait, did, did they, did they write this piece of software? So let's talk about three different numbers. There's the total issuance, which is kind of, um, like how, what's the total amount of Bitcoin or of Ethereum or of ETH that could have been created while following the protocol rules. So that's kind of the theoretical issuance. And you could derive that just by looking at what their issuance formulas are. The second number is the total supply. So let's say, okay, so there can be a total number of 21 million Bitcoin issued. Subtract from that all of the Bitcoin

that have not been issued so far, right? So that's about 3 million Bitcoin. And then subtract from that, historically, there have been bugs in some minor software, which caused them to not claim Bitcoin that they were entitled to claim. And so we're actually below issuance because of that um and you can you can do this math you can reconcile these numbers and you know exactly you can point to which blocks are lacking the the what's called the block reward right the total amount of bitcoin those owed so so there's there's um and then there's the third number of circulating supply um that that's really a number that nobody could really know because the concept there is that someone might have lost their private keys and so they no longer have access to the underlying asset

and so well you know hypothetically we should just remove that from the supply but how are we going to know that someone actually lost the keys versus it's just been a long time since they have transferred the asset and we kind of want to have the presumption that someone can transfer bitcoin to their keys and sit on those keys for years and not have any concerns about needing to refresh that or needing to rotate their keys or anything like that, assuming that their private key management is secure. So circulating supply is really unknowable. There are estimates of how many Bitcoin have been lost using various heuristics. But ultimately, that's not the part that interests me because that's not something i can audit the first two numbers are numbers that

i can audit i can i can i can derive the issuance number and then i can go and add up on bitcoin what you do is you add up what are called unspent transaction outputs and so that's kind of the current ledger balance right of okay how many uh bitcoin are locked up to how many addresses So that's a UTXO set, and you can just sum that up. It takes a few seconds, and you've got the total supply. Ethereum is much more complex than that. So they don't have the output model. What they have is called an account model.

And so you have to go into all of these accounts and add them all up. Now, this is orders of magnitude more data than the UTXO set, and I would argue that that makes Ethereum less scalable, but it's actually, it's not fair to them because that's not what they're optimizing for. They're optimizing for something completely different, which is trying to have expressive smart contracts. And so this is where we can get into like, okay, why would we judge Ethereum's account-based model against Bitcoin's output-based model? Because those are two different trade-offs, right? And that's fair. I just want to highlight that what you're trading off is your ability to get a solid accounting for the total supply. It feels like in this scenario, you've got Bitcoin, which has a very understood, simple framework that is all about provability when it comes to supply and ultimately scarcity.

So I can prove to you that there's 21 million total Bitcoin that will ever get created. I can prove to you the 18 million and change Bitcoin have actually been issued. And then I cannot prove to you what the current circulating supply is because of the issues you described. When you then go and you apply those things to Ethereum, I think a lot of people are asking the question, well, is this bad if all of a sudden, if you have a public transparent ledger with a digital asset that's supposed to operate on a decentralized permissionless network, but you can't prove some of those things, is that maybe not fatal, but is that a red flag or is that an issue? And I think that's really kind of what you raised the flag on and was saying, wait a second, I can't do this. Why can't I do it? Or who has the answer? Correct? Yeah. And I think that we're getting close to an answer. The latest reconciliation I've seen was able to, if I'm reading it correctly, because frankly, they didn't really format it to where I don't know if they're plugging a number or if they actually separately calculated this number of Ethereum that have been destroyed, of Ether that have been destroyed. So I think that we're within about 2400 ETH of kind of having the reconciliation done. I, you know, I kind of found it, this whole thing has been surprising to me from the beginning, because I thought that this would be pretty buttoned up that like the that this wouldn't be an issue because, you know, it's not impossible what I'm asking for.

And it's been interesting to see if prominent Ethereum influencers imply that I'm asking for something unreasonable or something that cannot be calculated. And I think they're wrong. It can be calculated. They've just never done it before. And I think that, you know, it does speak to the Ethereum culture and kind of the value proposition that they have. What I find disappointing is that they have been promoting this narrative that ETH can compete with Bitcoin as a store of value and i just fundamentally disagree with that because of what you you were mentioning um and also because of the actions of the ethereum community right like if if if if their response to me had been hey you're right we're fixing this right now and it was over in

a matter of hours that would be great but we're on like day four or five right now and we're down to 2,400 ETH, but we're not down to zero, which is what I look for in an audit is to have it foot to zero. Well, and I think part of this, because I'm with you, to clearly state, and I wrote about it this morning, we're recording this on Monday, and we're going to release it the next day or two. But when I originally wrote the piece, I said, look, I'm a fan of Ethereum, the network. I actually believe that it can empower a whole bunch of things that Bitcoin doesn't empower. It is solving a different problem. And my whole point is like, Ethereum should go double down on what it's great at, and Bitcoin should go double down on what it is great at, and forget all the

maximalism and tribalism and all that nonsense. And so I appreciate, I think, that you've got a similar view in that. The one thing that I'll say, though, is I was shocked, as it sounds like you were, at the cavalierness and the nonchalantness of the Ethereum community when you asked the question like to simply ask like hey can you calculate this uh to be told we're close enough and then it comes out that you know it's like 300 000 uh ether a part or about 130 140 million bucks it's kind of like wait a second like well i saw somebody tweet and i said if they think that you're close enough on this well what else are they close enough on right and it starts to kind of like you start to poke a little bit you're like wait a second there's some smoke here like

is is there a fire and and not in the sense of like ethereum's gonna fail but you just start to get this sense of like, wait, there might not be as much first principles thinking as I previously thought. There might not be a sense of urgency like I previously thought. And so it doesn't necessarily going to change. If you're a hardcore Ethereum or Ether believer, I don't think you're going to change your mind over this. But it was surprising and unexpected, in my opinion, the reaction that you got specifically. Yeah. And to be clear, I don't think anyone listening to this should go out and make a financial decision based on what I'm saying. All I'm asking them to do is to do some research and to really scratch under the surface on these assets and to figure out what I consider to be kind of like due diligence questions, right, of how many exist, how did they come about existing, how many are going to exist in the future.

And, you know, that's kind of like corporate governance, right? You want to know what the cap table looks like, and you want to know who's authorized to issue more shares, what is the process around that? like. Because if you don't do that, then you run the risk of getting diluted out. And you have to be able to protect your rights, right, defend your rights as an investor. And the way you do it with these decentralized systems is by running a node. And by running the numbers, right, adding it all up of seeing what percentage of this ledger do I own, you know, and that way, you're able to make some. And that's where I think it's really important is to have like the highest quality information out there. And it was surprising to see Vitalik point to CoinMarketCap as his

trusted data provider for how many ETH exist. I think that that should be open source. It should not be a proprietary number that is only calculated by a select few of people who work at CoinMarketCap or who work at another data provider. I think that anyone in the Ethereum community should have access to the tools for doing the math and figuring out what's the total supply out there. And I think part of this too, is it's not a anti any third party data provider specifically, right? It's just simply saying the third party data provider should be able to calculate for their needs, but so should you. And you should be able to verify what is it the third party data site, you should be able to verify what's on the blockchain, all that kind of stuff.

So I think that that's pretty non-controversial. And I think we'd be fooling ourselves if we said, if this same issue was brought up by somebody who was not a Bitcoin proponent, it probably would be handled differently. To me, it feels like there was just this reaction of we're being attacked almost. And so my hope is that eventually that stuff dissipates and people realize there's a better way to work together to some degree. And so maybe talk a little bit about, you issued a Bitcoin bounty, which, you know, as I wrote, I find hilarious that a Bitcoin proponent is literally paying for the creation of something that helps the Ethereum community. But if you kind of take away the irony with that, what kind of was your thought process behind the Bitcoin bounty and then where does that stand now? Yeah, sure. I mean, so fundamentally, like Ethereum is the number two asset in this space.

And if something bad were to happen to Ethereum, I actually think that would reflect poorly on Bitcoin as well. So I think that if as a whole industry, right, we're going to say these are decentralized immutable ledgers that we're building, then we should work towards that. And I kind of want everyone to have the same expectations on that. Um, so I, I do think that the end result is going to be that we have a clean audit, right? And that, um, there aren't going to be any, uh, surprise surprises at the end of the day. That's my expectation. We'll see if we get there. But, um, the, if, if we get that, then I think that it increases confidence in this space overall, and including in Bitcoin. I think that there really is a positive effect here, especially from like an education perspective of why did Pierre go through this exercise? Like, why did it matter? And I've seen a lot of people asking about that. Like, why does this matter that that we're doing this? And it's about decentralization. If we're going to trust centralized third parties, then we might as well just go back to the Federal Reserve.

right like we um and i know that there's there's also a spectrum right so like some things are going to be more decentralized than others so for example you might argue well um you know aren't you trusting the developers who are writing the script that's all true um and that's why when i did the bounty the bounty is still up i don't want just one script right now i have i have two scripts i have a script that calculates the issuance rate and i have a script that calculates the total supply, currently outstanding. But I don't have a reconciliation between those two scripts. And I also don't have separate iterations of those scripts. So in auditing, you always want to be recalculating what the client has given you. And so you don't just want to have like one

methodology, you want to have multiple, so that, you know, maybe even write them in different programming languages and with different approaches and with different sets of sanity tests so that you can have a lot of confidence in the end result. And I think that, so I'm going to keep the bounty up. The bounty is a million Satoshis, which if you do the math, that's about a hundred dollars. Although, you know, the exchange rate is very volatile. It's going up generally. So it's more than $100 now. But you're gonna have to pay income tax on it, because it is, you know, compensation for work done. And the so the the grant I created, because I really think that it's hard to get developers to open source their code and to do work for free. And, and it also,

I felt like mitigated the critique of, you are doing this in bad faith, right, that you're just trolling. Well, you know, if I put money up, and you know, okay, I could put up more than a million Satoshis. If that's what I need to do, I'll put up more than a million Satoshis. But right now, you know, I think that a million is a fair price for what I'm asking for. Everyone says it's a simple script. So I feel like 100 bucks should be okay for a simple script. But it's turning out to be fairly complicated. So maybe I'll have to increase the bounty. I also wanted to use this opportunity to talk about Satoshis because saying a million Satoshis and that I'm going to make someone a millionaire is provocative. But I think that one of the problems in this space has been

the issue of kind of the numbers bias of, oh, one Bitcoin is too expensive. I can't afford $10,000. So I can't buy Bitcoin. And that's actually wrong because Bitcoin is divisible out to 100 million Satoshis. And so when I say a million Satoshis, that's $100. So if 100,000 Satoshis is $10. So anyone can buy Bitcoin is my point there. Yeah, look, and I think that part of this too is, although there will be many people who disagree, the idea of one, identifying a problem. And two, I do think it's a good faith effort of, hey, I'll pay somebody to create this solution here um frankly it was pretty clever on your part so it's uh it's pretty interesting to see uh before we finish up what do you think um is kind of the outcome here right or like what do

you hope that uh we end up um you know over the next couple of days or weeks yeah so there's a couple of different considerations one is that um if if we get the reconciliation working uh you still need to run a full ethereum node to actually do it to actually run those scripts so um i'm going to start syncing an Ethereum node. And that way, I'll be able to double check the work that I'm paying for. Secondly, is thinking about kind of the roadmap going forward. The Ethereum community is hard at work on Ethereum 2.0. And unfortunately, Ethereum 2.0 makes what I'm talking about even more complex of adding up the total supply. Because of sharding, now not only do you have different accounts, but they're going to be on different shards. And so if Ethereum 2.0

is extremely successful and a lot of people use it, it's going to become extremely expensive to count up the whole supply of ETH on Ethereum 2.0. And if it becomes too expensive and nobody can do it, I think that introduces a vulnerability whereby your ETH could get diluted and you're really in the dark as to whether when you're buying ETH, are you actually receiving legit ETH or is this fractional reserve ETH that was kind of created out of thin air, but nobody's running a full node, so there's no way to know. So I think that this really impacts the scaling debate and the debate about the direction Ethereum 2.0 is going in. Now, maybe, you know, maybe that's okay, that we can have a world computer where the math is a little fuzzy on what the underlying asset is.

And the metaphor that they use, which I think is plausible, is that ETH is like oil. You don't need to know the current supply of oil at all times. You just want to put it in your tank and use it. So maybe that's the case with ETH, is that you just want to put it in your wallet and you know, get utility out of it in various ways, you don't actually need to know the total supply because you're not going to be a long term investor in ETH. I think that's a great perspective of like these two things do two different things. And they should both double down on what they do well, right? Kind of this idea of ETH as money doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I think there's a lot of people in even the Ethereum community that says that doesn't make sense to them either.

But I think that we're headed to a world where I love how you opened it up with just like more than one thing can win at what they're trying to accomplish because they're trying to accomplish different things, right? Yeah, that's right. And I think that if we want to bring it back to a debate, it's like, all right, which of these has the biggest total addressable market? Which of these is going to accrue value? But those are kind of like different and it gets religious, right? People have lots of opinions. The market's going to decide. What's needed for the market to decide those is clear and accurate information.

And so that's something I want to continue to promote. I love it. Listen, thank you so much for jumping on so quickly. But where can people find you or find more of the work that you're doing? Yeah, sure thing. So go on Twitter at Pierre underscore Richard. It's a firehose of information, especially on a weekend like this where everyone's working really hard crunching numbers um but that's that's where to find me and my dms are open so if you

want to chat and talk about different questions you might have um i'm available that way you uh you were cranking out the tweets this weekend i was loving every second of it and and frankly i thought uh you navigated nicely between the uh the smart ass comments and also the uh the actual kind of substantive ones of let's try to figure out a solution to this. So hopefully people realize that this will be a plus one,

I think, in the history of Ethereum and also in Bitcoin at some point. Thanks, Pomp. Have a good one.