Unchained - Is Code Law? Should the Hacker Be Punished? The DAO Creators Disagree - Ep.325

Episode Date: March 1, 2022

During my research for The Cryptopians, I found information that I believe identifies the perpetrator behind The DAO hack on Ethereum. Three founding members of The DAO and Slock.it (Christoph Jentzsch, Lefteris Karapetsas, Griff Green) discuss how and why they created The DAO, how they helped save the funds being siphoned off by black hat hackers, their personal feelings about The DAO, along with their reaction to the news about who I believe was The DAO attacker. Show topics:   Part 1: Background on The DAO Christoph, Lefteris, and Griff’s background and how they came to Slock.it what Slock.it was and why the Slock.it team decided to create The DAO what The DAO has to do with venture capital funding why the Slock.it team did not cap The DAO sale what made The DAO such a popular investment vehicle why The DAO developers were scared at the amount of money they raised   Part 2:  what Christoph, Lefteris, and Griff’s initial reaction to The DAO was saving funds from The DAO via a hard fork versus white hat hacking whether they thought Ethereum Classic would survive a hard fork how the Ethereum community has treated Christoph, Griff, and Lefteris in the wake of The DAO attack   Part 3: why they disagree on whether code is law their reaction to my naming Toby Hoenisch as The DAO attacker which actor would play them in a movie about The DAO attack Come to My In-Person Book Signings and Events! New York:  Wednesday, March 2, at 7pm At The Strand Bookstore Moderated by CoinDesk’s Christine Lee https://www.strandbooks.com/events/event403?title=laura_shin_the_cryptopians_idealism_greed_lies_and_the_making_of_the_first_big_cryptocurrency_craze   Bay Area:  Tuesday March 8, 6pm San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club  Moderated by The Information’s Kate Clark https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2022-03-08/laura-shin-inside-first-cryptocurrency-craze   Seattle:  Wednesday March 9, at 7:30pm The Forum Moderated by Steve Scher, of Town Hall Seattle.  https://townhallseattle.org/event/laura-shin/ Thank you to our sponsors! Crypto.com: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/unconfirmedcardearnfeb2021            Beefy Finance: https://beefy.finance     Cross River Bank: https://crossriver.com/crypto    Episode Links   Guests Christoph Jentzsch ​​https://twitter.com/ChrJentzsch Griff Green https://twitter.com/thegrifft  Lefteris Karapetsas https://mobile.twitter.com/LefterisJP    DAO Hacker Reveal:  Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2022/02/22/exclusive-austrian-programmer-and-ex-crypto-ceo-likely-stole-11-billion-of-ether/ Unchained: https://unchainedpodcast.com/exclusive-cryptos-biggest-whodunnit-who-was-behind-the-2016-dao-attack-on-ethereum/  Medium: https://medium.com/@laurashin/who-hacked-the-dao-on-ethereum-heres-how-we-jumped-past-one-critical-step-60aec489a127 Bulletin: https://laurashin.bulletin.com/who-was-behind-the-2016-dao-attack-on-ethereum-the-backstory-to-my-investigation Forbes on YouTube: ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuICbAucfn0  Daily Tech News Show: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1306972988    The Cryptopians http://bit.ly/cryptopians  On Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Cryptopians-Idealism-Greed-Making-Cryptocurrency/dp/1541763017/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1645037311&sr=8-2 On Barnes. &. Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-cryptopians-laura-shin/1138980345?ean=9781541763012  On Bookshop.org:  https://bookshop.org/books/the-cryptopians-idealism-greed-lies-and-the-making-of-the-first-big-cryptocurrency-craze/9781541763012 Unchained: https://unchainedpodcast.com/how-writing-the-cryptopians-shaped-my-views-on-ethereum/    The DAO Hack https://www.coindesk.com/learn/2016/06/25/understanding-the-dao-attack/ https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao https://unchainedpodcast.com/how-matthew-leising-confronted-his-suspects-in-the-dao-attacks/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, all. Thanks to everyone for buying my book and sending me such nice notes and tweeting such nice things about it. And also for being so congratulatory about my news about who I believe the Tao attacker is. I've had a really wonderful whirlwind of a first week as a book author. And I was so glad to be able to enjoy most of it at in-person events, which was super fun and also got to personally thank some sources who helped me with the book. I just wanted to give you a heads up about more in-person events that I'll be doing in case you want to get your book signed or in case you just want to say hi. So New Yorkers on Wednesday, March 2nd, yes, that is the day after this podcast episode drops.

At 7 p.m., I will be doing a reading and signing moderated by Coin Desk's Christine Lee at the Strand Bookstore. Again, that's Wednesday, March 2nd, the day after this episode drops, and it's at 7 p.m. at the Strand. As of this moment, tickets were close to selling out, so if you're on the fence, I would get one now. The link to the event is in the show notes. For folks in the Bay Area, on Tuesday, March 8th, I'll be doing a reading and signing at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club, moderated by the information's Kate Clark. Doors open at 515, the program begins at 6, and the book signing is at 7 p.m. For people in Seattle, I'll be doing a reading and signing as part of Town Hall, Seattle,

on Wednesday, March 9th at 7.30 p.m. at the Forum, moderated by Steve Scher of Town Hall, Seattle. So again, a quick recap, I will be at the Strand in New York City on March 2nd at 7 p.m. I will be at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on Tuesday, March 8th, and I will be in Seattle at the forum on Wednesday, March 9th. Check out the show notes to buy tickets. And now, on to the show. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, a journalist with over two decades of experience. I started covering crypto six years ago,

and as a senior editor at Forbes was the first Mainstream Media Reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the March 1st, 2022 episode of Unchained. Welcome to a new world of crypto-friendly banking with Cross River Bank. Request your Fiat-on-OffRamp solution now at crossriver.com slash crypto. Buy, earn, and spend crypto on the Crypto.com app. New users can enjoy zero credit card fees on crypto purchases in the first third. 30 days. Download the crypto.com app and get $25 with the code Laura. Link in the description. This episode of Unchained is brought to you by Beefy Finance, the multi-chain yield optimizer.

Beefy is the easiest way to earn more from your crypto. Deposit funds into Beefy's secure vaults to auto-compound yield across 12 blockchains. Got crypto? Choose Beefy. Today's guests are Christoph Yensh, Laverteros Carapetis, and Griff Green, all formerly involved with Slocut and the Dow, which takes up two months of Ethereum's history and yet is about a full third of my book. Welcome, Christoph, Lovteris, and Griff. Thank you. Hey, thanks for having us. Hey, thanks.

So we are going to discuss what is easily the biggest event in the book and, in my opinion, in Ethereum's history, and that is the Dow attack on Ethereum and the Dow in general. And we will try to do our best not to give too many spoilers and stick to kind of more publicly known information. But for those of you who find this episode interesting, you should definitely check out my book, The Cryptopians, which came out last week. So first, let's start with each of you saying, thanks, Griff. Yes. Oh, yes. I also have my cut. Yes.

Why do we do an ad right now? So let's each of us go, or each of you go around and say what your involvement had been in Ethereum and what your involvement was in the Dow at the time that this event starts, which is kind of like late 2015, early 2016. And why don't we start with you, Christoph, because I think you're really the origin. Well, the origin is the idea of the Dow was older than me. I mean, this is coming, Bitcoin is a down itself. Ethereum wrote a white paper. So maybe starting with the white paper by Vita League, which is like a prophecy because

most of it actually got fulfilled. So I read this in, I think beginning 2014. I was doing my PhD in Tritical Physics. I got totally, like, sucked into it. And after the crowd sale, I started in the group with Kevin Wood and C++ team writing tests. It was full time on working with the Ethereum Foundation. Working actually closely with Jeffrey Wilker, Gavin Wood and Vitalik Buterin, because they were both the heads of their clients, Python, Go and C++.

And I would write tests that they always would, like, sing with each other, always be true to the protocol. And the protocol itself written by Gavin and the yellow paper. That's why, like, per default, he was kind of right. And the other ones needed to check that they were also doing the right thing. So working for the foundation, one and a half years, and then leaving end of 2015, with my co-founders then my brother Simon Yenj and Stefan Toaul, we started slog it.

Long story short, we wanted to build like a decent-ized sharing economy. We called it Universal Sharing Network. I just think Griff came up as this term, I guess. This was also the time Griff joined, like beginning 2016, end of 2015. And so then the idea, of course, was to do fundraising. We didn't want to go with VCs because we wanted to build a decentralized universal sharing network. You want to have lots of people access to it. And back then, even token sales were pretty rare and new.

There was, I think, Arbor did one pretty early. We had, of course, the Ethereum crowd sale itself. So we thought the best thing would be to raise from the community. But now this Ethereum being launched and we know the tech, we could do much better. So we said instead of just doing a simple token sale, let's give them more voting power. And then basically it evolved to let's just have the power over the money. We keep the money in the small contract. And we said, let's do a full blown down, like fully decentralized.

as it should be with no compromises. And this actually happened in the week of DefCon 1. This decision was made one day before the talk. So I changed my slides and then presented it. We got a lot of traction, a lot of interest. So I wrote the paper about the Dow, meaning like how it should work, the smart contract, the first version.

Then we got more people joining it since it was an open source project. Left Harris joined the company. Some people has had some open source contribution, but not too many. then we got the audit, we coded it. We don't want to get into all the details, but we know we launched. Not exactly we launched. If you describe it in the book how it happened. I committed the last commit and then made it public under version 1.0.

This was like officially the last step from Slocut. Of course, we are very involved in the select community and hope that people would launch it, as they did. Got launched. You read in the book, it raised lots of money, about $150 million. Then the price of ether went up. At some point, it's close to 250 minute. Okay, let's stop there. Now we're going too far in the future.

Sorry. No, no, no, it's okay. But why don't we, I think it's Levert. Next, who joined? Do you want to go, let Levertarris? I joined Ethereum back in 2014, yeah, along with Christian. And I worked on the Solidity Team, writing the Solidity Compiler and the C++ Climbler.

I was hired by Iron Buchanan and I was working under Gavin and just worked on there until the launch of Ethereum. And right after DevCon1, Espaired the book also, we all were let go of our positions. And then I knew Christoph who was also working with us. And he told me about this really cool new startup slot kit. And I had seen also the DevCon1 presentation. I was like, why not? That sounds like a cool thing to do. And joined Slokit in beginning of 2016 or end of 2015.

Like somewhere there. I don't remember exactly where. And then, yeah, worked there. I actually find the coolest stuff that we did was before the Dow. Like, it's not mentioned at all, but, you know, we did all this universal setting, planning the Ethereum computer we were trying to create and went with Simon. So, Christos brother and co-founder of Slokit, and Stefan, of course, like to Barcelona. Swampi Ubuntu?

MWC. Yes, the conference in Barcelona. Yeah, the mobile conference. Yeah, and there we got the Ubuntu guys all really excited about stuff, and it was really, really cool. And there was no down mention almost at all there. We were just talking about the actual Ethereum computer that we wanted to create. So IOT devices that are, well, controlling physical things and everything happens through the blockchain. Yeah, but then funding came up and then it was the Dow that...

Trimetic experiences here. Yeah, it's like... The moment I think about is like I stammer. But no, it was like... It is also presented in the DevCon 1 presentation. wanted to get funding from the community, not from VCs. So we started to work on the DAO and yeah, that's probably already towards the end of my involvement that's locked.

I don't need to go to the hack already, right? No, no. Wait, there was one thing I felt that I wanted to say. But so, I mean, Christoph was saying that he thought that, you know, they had decided to do the DAO right before DevCon, but you're saying that you guys almost got the VC funding at the Mobile World Congress? There was no funding there. The Dow was at least known in DevCon 1. That's when I basically announced we will do this. But the event, of course, to conferences, it's not where we see money. Just like to get the Ethereum computer, this IOT device out, to get people excited about

connecting IoT devices to the blockchain. This is what left here I stood there. It's the Ubuntu fault. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So there were many people who were really excited about, you know, like the actual thing that we wanted to build. So that was just a mechanism to get funding in a more cypher funk way rather than just, you know, going the old VC way. But the thing that we wanted to build was completely different. This is also why Christoph and Slokitt appealed to me, like, because we were talking a lot also while we were working together about, you know, IoT. I was very much into low-level stuff back then. And yeah, I really liked the idea.

And I got really, really excited. And I thought that this Dow thing is just a distraction. from what we actually wanted to do. Huh. Okay. And Griff, what about you? Yeah, I mean, like they're saying, we were a sharing economy company. So I came in way, I didn't know much about Ethereum beforehand.

I actually had been in crypto for a while, but had heard Ethereum was vaporware and just didn't really think much of it. And so, but then I was getting a master's degree, actually the first master's degree ever, or any degree ever in digital currencies. and which I collected a week after the Dow hack. It's kind of funny. But for my interest in crypto, I was really excited about Dow's

specifically interlacing with the sharing economy. And I wrote a white paper for one of my classes about a bike sharing economy. And so I sent, and then I just was Googling like sharing economy, crypto, you know, or Bitcoin probably at that time. Sharing economy, Bitcoin. And Sloket came up and it's like,

they're using Ethereum. That's crazy. Whatever. And then, but, but I'll, I'll DM them, you know, and I think I sent, I don't know how many emails I sent to Christoph, but many. And thankfully for, you know, no one's going to read some random dudes white paper, but I took a video recording of me presenting the white paper for the class.

And, you know, I'm pretty engaging to listen to. So, like, he was like, oh, this guy's cool. I think, I don't know what you were thinking, Christopher, but you let me in. I was so excited. And I was like, I will work for free. Just let me, like, participate. in this amazing thing. I can't believe you guys are doing

exactly what I want to do. So I jumped in as, I don't even know, I guess I was like an intern or something, right? And help make the Slack and coordinate the community around Slacket. And that was really how I got in. So you guys had this idea

for this universal sharing economy that had these kind of like smart locks that would open with Ethereum transactions. Is that like a good kind of general description? This is one. Wow. That's actually the one. That's the one from DefCon 1.

Wow. And can you hold it up once more for a bit longer? What is Zo? Can you see this? Wow. It's a doorknob. Okay. Okay.

Nice. That's so funny. For people listening on audio, you might want to check out the video for that. And so then you had this idea to get funding from this Dow, which would kind of, I mean, the way most people thought of it was that it was going to be this decentralized venture fund because it would be like proposals and then the community would vote on which ones they wanted to fund. So when you announced the Dow, what was the community's like general response to the idea? I would say very positive in the beginning.

It was like really what always people wanted to do. But also it was not thought of as a venture fund, although of course later on it became more this direction because people talked about it like it. In the beginning, it was more like their company, which would be, behind the decent-lized sharing economy or behind the universal sharing network. And we would be one of many getting funded by it because he would build it and work for it.

Let's say we would do like, let's say, bike locks or door locks. And another company would do washing machines, whatever. So they could also go to this Dow and ask for funding because they want to connect some other stuff to the sharing economy. But I was thinking at least more of, this is the company which builds the universe and share network. Or companies, maybe the wrong world. So more the organization which is doing this,

completely distributed. and we would just be a service provider. But yes, the community was actually very interested in it. That's why we got like 5 or 6,000 people on Slack within a couple of weeks. At DefCon 1, people got excited. They love to go to our booth and feel and touch kind of Ethereum. I think it was more like for the first time people could touch Ethereum in some way. They could get a feeling of an Airbnb was a big thing back then.

Like it was really exciting to taking off and people learned how Airbnb works. And just this idea of I could pay kind of the door lock to open. and people got really excited to see it firsthand. So that's, I think, one reason we got such a positive feedback. Yeah, I actually, I'm in an Airbnb right now, and I had trouble with the lock, and it would have been really nice if I could have used to transaction on my phone to open it.

But anyway, and Griff, we're left here, so you want to add anything to that? I can just say 100% agree. You know, the venture side of the Dow was kind of rewritten after the Dow hack, And really during at the time, it was, of course, the Dow could do anything. But I think we imagined that the main Dow would follow Sloket or like that was kind of the cultural thing that we expected. We had no idea. But the Dow had this feature where it would split off.

And so, you know, at least I thought like other people might want to try other ventures, but they'd probably end up splitting off into a separate Dow in siphoning some of the original funds. So it would have been a very fractal sort of VC fund, you know, if it went that direction. But we never know. I think it came a bit when a lot of money came in. In the beginning, we saw it about $5 million. Like this, you cannot fund hundreds, hundreds of ventures with like $5 million or even 10. So it was like maybe $5, maybe 10, maybe even $20 million.

You could still use all of this for the Universal Share Network for like, let's say, five companies building things around it. But then there was $150 million in it. But then it really looked like a venture fund. It was like, this can fund so many things in the Ethereum world. And people accept that this is like that decentralized venture fund for the Ethereum community, funding, everything in there. This was how it was after received that much money, but not before. And why did you guys not cap the sale? There were several reasons for this.

I remember we had a discussion in Slack about this, pros and cons. The pros, of course, security point of view, like we don't need that much money. This was a pro. the con was what if one big whale just gets all of it or 50 or 60% of it just very quickly because you saw those ICOs very getting the big guys getting in very quickly and this was one thing we were afraid of and that maybe would just some people want to get in and cannot get it and maybe we feel overconfident in the security of the Dow that we didn't think of this kind of hack that's also why we tested that much and people could like split off if they don't like it

So that in the end, we decided to not do it because it got things more complicated than it needs to be. Of course, in hindsight, from a security point of view, it would have been better if you would have done it, of course. But back at the time, we decided not to. And just to go back to how popular the Dow became and how it raised so much money, why do you think it raised that much money? Because it was a lot. And Ethereum wasn't even that big at that time. The split function, right?

Like it felt like a risk-free investment because you could always split your money out. And it's kind of like what is now the rage quit mechanism in Mullock Dows where it feels like, well, okay, I can put my money in, but I have like cryptographic security that I can pull my money out. So it felt like something to do. And then, of course, once it cascaded and got so big, people fomoed in like, like, no tomorrow. You know, at the time, we didn't understand fomo. Right? Like it was this is long before all the ICOs and all that stuff. So that's my guess. Left, what do you think? I mean, I credit Stefan for this. He was really good at what he did. And we had, let's say, the cream of the crop of the Ethereum community back then as curator. So it was, it really looked as if it's approved by everyone and everybody and it's the next big thing. This is how it looked like. And probably that's a loan should have. That's a loan should have. pointed to us that it will get bigger than we expected.

But nobody expected this much money. Like, I don't think that Christopher expected. Like, reading the book, I don't think you expected that much. Absolutely not. I also have to say, in hindsight, I was very naive at the time. Like, I didn't make a big deal of those creators. Like, Stefan, I think he understood a bit more of what we were doing there because he was more like the marketing and community management.

And so for me, it was really, we needed a list of creators who know. what they were doing. So of course, it would be nice if they're respected the community. That's why I asked them, but I didn't think of it as like also a marketing thing. Like you have those names there. Stefan understood this very well and used this also. And I can't blame him for this. Again, he did a great job. His job was to build a community and to get people excited about it, which he did way better than we expected. And the second thing, why I think that's what Chris said, after, let's say, the first 10 or 15 million, it got attention. and then people started to single it as an investment fund.

And so if all the companies building on Ethereum would be funded by the Dow, then this would be the perfect investment if you just want to invest in the Ethereum ecosystem, but not the base layer and the application layer. It looked like curated by those guys, even though their job was not like to judge those projects, the job was actually to check the address, maybe the idea that everything is correct. But it looked like they would like actually create and look at what's good, what's not, and all the applications would just get funding from there.

So then from an investor point of view, I got one call from an Israeli guy that we want to put in 20 million maybe. And if it's safe or not, I just said nothing. Well, you have to decide on your own. You have to do a security audit. I can tell you anything. So, but this was clearly a guy who thought about it from a purely investment perspective. Like, is this the way I can invest in the Ethereum application layer?

That's how it became later on because it started like to raise the first 10 or 20 million. And then, as Scrif said, they fumbled in because they maybe thought. there's no other way to get into those application layer companies building because it would all get funded by the DAO. That could be one reason. Yeah, that makes sense because I did realize in the report, in the course of my reporting, that there were multiple companies that were looking to make proposals to the DAO, and ultimately later they had ICOs. But at the time, there were a lot of people that were like, oh, I'll go get funding from the DAO.

One thing I want the listeners to know is that we have mentioned, Stefan a few times. That's Stefan Twal, who actually started in Ethereum as the, well, I think he started kind of more as like community management and communications. And then later he was brought onto the management team as chief communications officer. And then you will read what happened in the book to him at the EF, at the Ethereum Foundation. And then later he ended up at Socket as a co-founder. And again, he kind of had, yeah, this sort of outward facing communications type role. So once you guys realized that it was going to be huge,

how did you feel? Yeah. I mean, I think I was the only one that was happy about it. Well, maybe Stefan too. Stefan was pretty happy about it. Everyone else, the developers were scared as like profanity, insert profanity here. It was a really intense time. But I don't know, Christoph, I think you have to say how you felt.

again, we did not expect anything like this at all. And the one side, happy, like, the plan worked, they actually got money. Because there was also a fear that maybe gets us like a couple of hundred thousand and this was like nothing. And we worked so much for it. Because from a financial point of view, we did not expect this taking so long. And also Simon, like he was using his credit cards to buy food for his family. Like, he didn't get money for a long time.

We were so bad developers. We were naive. Like, always two weeks. You know, it can put anything in two weeks. So we thought maybe end of December, January, we get. the style out. And then, of course, it took longer and the more legal work. And then it tracked on until April. And so we really needed funding. And we were totally stressed because we are working like crazy all those hours. So me was like, now I didn't need a break. And this was not a break.

Like this was just more exciting. More people asking me and just, I just needed a little break. And I was really scared about it. I mean, there's a photo of me with one of like one guy in Berlin, EY advisor. And he was like concreted, giving us shaking hands, concreting us. I could not be even be happy. Like, they were making dinner for us. I was just to leave me alone for a couple of weeks. I've not, because this is like, I don't know where this will end. Like, if there's so much money in it, I have no idea what this will become.

And maybe I don't want to be associated with this anymore. If there's funding some crazy stuff, which I don't like. But I also didn't know I could never ever stop this. Like, even if I'm 80 or 90, this is true. I mean, on Ethereum, you will always see this. This will always be there. Just not alive anymore, not that much at life. Love Harris.

Do you want to add on that? I was, actually, when, for the entire duration, I think, of the race, I was not in Germany. I was at my parents' place in Greece. And they were also watching it and saying, oh, look at what our son is working on. It's gathering money. And it's like, yeah, yeah, that's sure. And then he's like, oh, wait, that's, you know, this is the lot? And didn't you guys call this?

Are you sure that it's okay? And then I said, yeah, yeah, no worse. And then it started going five, ten, and then it went up. And I just didn't want to go back to Germany. I got similar stress as Christoph because, I mean, it's actually quite simple. As a developer, you just know that things can go wrong. Like, there is no such thing as bug-free code. And yeah, it's just stressful to know that something that you worked on has gathered

and is securing so much money. And, well, probably that stress had a reason to be there. Did you do what happened? Yeah, so let's talk about that because before the actual hack, there were a lot of conversations online about how there were flaws in the Dow. Nobody picked up on, you know, the ultimate exploit, but obviously, like there was a New York Times article of flaws that Emin Gunsier, the Cornell professor, pointed out along with, I think it was like Dino Mark. And I forget who else was on that paper. But in Dino Mark used to work at consensus. Oh, yeah, Vlad Sam Fair.

yeah, who worked doing, yeah, Ethereum research. But there were other things because I know you guys were looking at how to enable people to remove their money more quickly and kind of arguing about whether or not you should do that and things like that. So at that time, when people were pointing out the flaws, the sale was done, you knew, you know, you had raised. So by my calculation, the day that the sale ended, it was $139 million, but then the price of ether was rising.

So by the morning of the hack, it was a quarter billion dollars. So while people were talking about all the flaws, and then you're seeing the dollar value of it rise, what were your feelings during that period? So I did take them seriously, but also, as I said, nobody pointed out like the real, really bad flaws. Like you can take money from it. It was more game theoretical things that you could, for example, disbiased towards yes. And those are true things, but they're usually not fat hell. Like this is not like the end of it. It was more like, yes, it needs improvement.

So sometimes they did write it in a manner it sounded like everything is going to end. The thing is like completely broken. And so that's why we defended it sometimes that no, it's not completely broken. It needs improvement. And then we started working on this Dow version 2. You made on GitHub, like already created those issues. I started providing code. We all know that Dowell version 2 is not just a simple click and deploy.

It is like deploy and convince everybody to move there. And so that's why we also try to work on what can we do like as intermediate solutions, what we could do was working on the smart contract of the receiver of the funds. So we made this like a small contract which from which you can make proposals to receive money from the Dow would hope that people would use it as a default. And there you could build in a bit more security things so that people could, for example, get their money back from there as well if they would vote it for it, things like this, like a daily payout, not all at once.

So that's the kind of things you've worked on. And since you were not scared for this thing would lose all their money, is just like, yes, needs improvement. We need a second version. And also because it got that big, we said, let's create the security group. You wrote about this in this book. We make a proposal. And since it got that big, I was scared.

I was like, let's get like five of the top-nutch researchers. And they are costing like $300 or $500 per hour. It's sort of like if you're asking for those security audit companies, they charge a lot. And so we said this is very expensive. We want to have 24-7, everybody, like all the time watching the ether scan or something, what is happening. And so we made a proposal, which was like, expensive and you wrote how the community reacted was not happy.

So we said, okay, we don't want this. We make a smaller one, which of course just one guy, not that much security. But we felt, of course, this was so new and so much ways this could maybe be attacked. So you wanted to do something. Also, even though we saw none of the flaws mentioned were brutal, critical and would stop everything, just small things which needs improvement. And that's what you try to fix. I felt a bit annoyed by all of this stuff because I'll be honest

I felt that people wanted to make themselves famous through associating with the DAO in a negative way like we had a lot of problems pointed out but these problems for example like the negative vote thing the bias for voting yes I think or something like that does still have this problem like I I had not fight, but argument with someone from the E&S tower right now that a proposal was not going to pass because he was abstaining. And then he says, oh yes, you're actually right.

And then he voted no just to make the proposal pass. Even though he wanted to say that he didn't want to vote no, but he wanted to so that he doesn't agree and he abstained. And that with three hours for the proposal, basically it would make it not pass. Even though if he voted no, the proposal would pass. It's exactly that same thing. It still happens. So it's not as if the problems that were pointed out were serious.

Maybe the most serious one was something that was not found by any of them, and it was the one that, yeah, the withdrawal. How was it called? Yeah, the stalking withdrawals, which this is, yeah. So we can talk about that later when we talk about, you know, my article revealing who we believe did attack the Dow. So, okay, so why don't we do this? So we're going to take a commercial break to hear from the sponsors who make this show possible.

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Welcome to a new world of crypto-friendly banking. Request your Fiat-on-OffRamp solution now at crossriver.com. slash crypto. Back to my conversation with Christoph, Love Terrace, and Griff. All right. So let's talk about the Dow hack. How did you,

when did you each just tell us briefly, how it is that you found out and how you felt at that moment? I think I was the first to find out. I feel like it was, I want to say his name was Mo. I mean, I can't even remember anymore. So long ago,

I woke up and went to the Slack because that's my job, you know, and just talking to the community and they're like, hey, something weird is happening. You know, looks like the data, ether scan, maybe he's broken or something. And then started looking into it. And then I started DMing everyone because it was pretty, looked really bad. And eventually got a hold of Simon, who's not in this call.

And I was like, you got to wake, find Christoph, go to his house, wake him up. You know, because this is like 630 a.m. or something. Yeah, and then we had to formulate a plan. And I think I ended up getting a hold of Left Harris. I can't remember. Who got a hold of you left? Definitely you. I remember this call.

It was you and it was early morning. And how did you feel when you heard the news? I just didn't believe. So, first of all, I didn't believe what Griff was saying. So I wanted to verify. And I verified that something is wrong by going to Etherscan. And then I felt really bad. And I just tried to realize what's happening.

I think that my first reaction was to actually, because it was maybe eight or nine, so close to my, like I had to wake up, I had walking up, and then I probably started to try and understand and also talked with others and Christoph, I think, and others in the chats about trying to figure out what the attack was and remake the contract. So not remake, recreate the attack basically to understand what's happening. And Christoph. I think it was Friday morning, if I remember right? Yeah. My brother called my wife. She was waking me up because I was working long, so I was sleeping a bit longer in the morning. And she was just saying, Simon was just saying, well, there's something strange happening.

Just check on an ESO scan. So when I went on an ESO scan, you could see this very regular thing going out. I could look like it was a split-down function, which was called. At the beginning, I was saying, well, it's just a regular thing. People can call the split-down. It's just something, for whatever reason, someone doing it in a very regular way. But looking deeper at it, that's like having some kind of going through other contracts and going back, then it seemed like, no, this isn't hack. And then I really realized this is over.

This was like game over for me because I know how less we could do. I know that they had no power over the doubt. We couldn't change the code. We couldn't do anything. So this was like the worst case scenario. Like I prepared in a way that people could split and get their money out. Like that's what the last test I did was always, if something is wrong, people can split and get their money out or they can make a proposal. and get the money out.

So the money can never get stuck. That's like, I was more worried about. But this like money was flowing out of the system. I was then laying on my crown. It's like, this is over. So then I really have to like get all my stuff together again. I say, well, now let's fight back. I have to do what I got to do.

So call Vita Lake. They've called the Ethereum Foundation for help because I wanted to have as many people as possible looking at the code seeing because I could not see directly what was happening. Like in the first, let's say 30 minutes or so, I did not. attacked what was happening. So that's, and we started a call with the Ethereum Foundation. And this was a strange feeling because I haven't talked to them since a while. And so like, like, hi, guys, I'm here again.

And I'm really sorry. This was like, I think that's how I started. So they just didn't want to hear this. Like, okay, let's just dig in what's happening here. Is anybody a clue? And then we just right into what can we do? And I think even this first call, we thought about all options. And just like, your soft fork, something quick, like can we somehow get a mind

to not include transaction to the style, just to win some time. This was the first thought. We need time to analyze this. That's why the soft fork was the first idea. I think hard fork. I don't know if this came up or not in the call, but soft fork, first let's buy time. But we could not find it out in this calls. We just, after speaking to each other, sharing all the information, he got back to work

and tried to figure it out what it was. I don't know exactly who found it out and reported it. I think it was on some Skype or Slack channel, someone who shared the details. Yeah, one thing I want to clarify for people when you said that you couldn't like fix it, it's because you would have needed to get the whole community to agree to this upgrade and then get everybody to migrate their tokens. So, you know, since it's decentralized also, you like weren't in control of it, you couldn't just kind of be like, okay, we're going to fix this and, you know, redo it.

It was live on Ethereum and it would have needed all the community support to change it. And frankly, the tooling is not what it is today. So even though it was technically a Dow, there was literally no way for the token holders to really manage it, which is like another funny thing. But also cool to see how much progress has been made in Dow's. Okay, so this next part only involves Left Harrison Griff because I believe, and Christoph, you can correct me if I'm wrong. At this point, you just decided to focus on coding up a hard fork in case Ethereum decided to go that route. It was not this day. It took a bit more time until this decision was made.

I don't know one or two weeks, not too long, but it didn't take too long for me to realize the heartfelt would be the only, like, clean solution that everybody could get everything back. Everything else should be tried and then you take it over on left-hairs and drift because you focus on plan B. Yeah, so during this part, Lapturz and Griff were involved in trying to rescue the money. So talk a little bit about what that was like and what was going on in your mind while you were working on that

or trying to work on that. Well, it was definitely a team effort, right? Like the night before the Dow, I was starting a blog post about Jordy Belina who made Liquid Democracy for the Dow that I had already used, which we still don't have today on Ethereum anywhere as far as I can tell.

So, you know, the rain... Which is like delegating votes, right? Yeah, liquid delegates. So you could delegate to... someone who could delegate who could delegate. And so there's one hop delegation on Ethereum, but I haven't seen too much liquid democracy. But he had made the thing, right?

He created this contract and it was there, but just never got used due to the Dow hack. I used it to vote on something. Oh, wait, wait, in the Dow? Because I could have sworn he told me that he created it too late so it actually didn't get implemented in the Dow. It didn't get implemented in the Dow code as a default for voting everywhere.

So then he re-implemented it on top of Ethereum as separate contracts so that you could just send your Dow tokens to a contract, and then you'd get Dow Vote tokens, and then you'd use those Dow Vote tokens to signal how your delegate should vote. Oh, cool. Or kind of. You know, or you could, like, your delegate would have to vote by a certain time, and then you could use your delegate Dow tokens to pull out your Dow tokens

so his vote doesn't have your way to. if you disagree. There's a super cool thing, and it worked. And so I was writing a blog post, you know, da-da-da. And then, of course, the next day, well, that wasn't the priority that blog post anymore. But while Leverteris was figuring out the hack, how the hack happened, I think you were first left. I can't remember. Yeah.

So this is something that was really, it wasn't in the book. I was like, ah, no, my moment of glory. Well, he didn't tell me then, because I didn't know this. I don't remember. Actually, I tried to forget this stuff because I also was too scared about the implications. I think I haven't talked to anybody about this stuff until you contacted me. And the only reason why I think I talked to you is because a lot of time passed since then. But it was just that as far as I recall, I had recreated the attack

and had an attack contract ready on the same night. But we never used it at that day. we used it later. Yeah. And Jordy had his own attack contract, right? Yeah. This is in the book. So Jordy was also mentioned pretty well there about that last four million.

Well, love terrorists. If I ever, I don't know, if I ever update the book in any way, I will try to put your moment of glory in there. Yeah. So we had figured out a couple, we had figured out how the, we had figured out how the, attack happened. And then we kind of like gathered other people who we trusted that to figure out if we should make an attack because the hacker stole $50 million, but there's $100 million still sitting there. Right. And while the hacker was attacking, we didn't have it still. But then the

hacker just the attack just stopped. And we didn't really know why. And then we figured out how to hack and so then it was like, well, but there's no sense of urgency. The drain, the draining has stopped. So when do we attack? And this was like a big debate amongst the, at that time, the Robin Hood group. Yeah, which people can definitely read about this in the book because this was fascinating to me. And it still is part of kind of the philosophical question around what really even happened. So during this whole time, did you guys think that the Dow attacker was going to attack again? I mean, nothing stopped him, right?

I think Griff, you maybe mentioned that he was. stopped because, not mentioned, like theorized, right? That maybe he stopped because, you know, if he took everything, then to be, you know, like too much. But if he just took 30% of it and then maybe he can get away with it or something like that. Other theorized that maybe his contract got broken somehow, he had some kind of flow and then he just stopped. But as you also mentioned in the book, like once, I mean, if I realized it in the, in the, in

in less than a day, then others can do that also. And once that's publicized, everybody can copycut the entire attack. So then even if it's not the original hacker, someone else will perform an attack. It was just a matter of time. So the next kind of like month for you guys was very intense. Do you want to talk a little bit about what that was like during that period between, and we didn't even really cover the initial rescue. So we can talk about the initial rescue and just in general what you were doing between then and the hard fork and like what was going through your head and what your life was like.

It was Dow Wars. It was wild. I mean, at the beginning, Leff and Jordy were just practicing attacking. It was like drills, like military drills. And they were going all day, all night, like just practicing attacking the Dow. And I was going more from the social angle, gathering capital, because to attack the Dow effectively, you needed a lot of money. And so it was like we were, there was a lot of, on the social side, it was finding all of the curators getting their private keys, you know, it's hard to get people's private keys.

I can't believe they were handing them out. But so we got their private keys. We're asking other people for Dow tokens and ether so that we can achieve the attacks in a, in a faster way. And it was just kind of a waiting game until eventually someone actually started hacking. And that's when it was wild. It was really crazy. We were, you know, I mean, people still have gas issues to this day, right?

We were having gas issues. It felt like a military operation, but at the same time, we're not military people. You know, we were just hackers trying to make it work. And then once we ended up rescuing the funds, then it was like kind of just pushing for the hard fork as well as, you know, there ended up being eight, nine different hackers. that all had money in it. So we had to figure out how do we, you know, we didn't stop, you know, it was just this constant.

Christoph is holding down the hard fork stuff. Let's figure out like the hard fork will work, you know. But what if it doesn't? And that was Lift Terrace and I and Jordy and the crew. Because after we stole $100 million from the Dow, some people didn't want to be any part of it anymore. So the Robin Hood group became the White Hat group, a much smaller group.

and we just kept practicing, like, how are we going to hack the other hackers? And how can we engineer a solution to get into the dark Dow? Right? And I'm sure you talk about all this stuff in your book. Yeah. And so for people, Dark Dow was the split Dow or Child Dow where the hacker had siphoned the funds, the 3.64 million, the 31% of the Eiff and the Dow. Left Harris, what about you? What was your life like during this period?

Not fun? It was, yeah, basically like this. Like, basically what Griff described, described it very accurately. Since the night of the, I think it was evening, right? The initial white-hat attack. Yeah, like Tuesday night around 7 p.m., I think if I remember correctly. Yeah. Like you explained how it happened in the book.

I don't know how much detail you want me to go. I think that it was mostly accurate. That we also, like, I think we shared. We shared the same private key and just had different people do their attacks, had scripts. So the initial attack was successful in taking everything out of the Dow, except for the last remaining, in which Jordi had a different contract that he had made. And that was basically, I remember it was different than mine, and it just didn't have the already made attack. So he just made it work and take the last four million.

And from that point on, Griff had this amazing curve. spreadsheet, I still have a link to it, I think, where he just organized everything very, very nicely. So I still think that this is a very nice. I think you probably had access to it, right? Because you use the same names that we used there in the book. Yeah, I can't remember if I had access to the doc or if Griff gave me a screenshot of it. But I'm now actually listening to my own audiobook because I have never heard it all the way through. And earlier today, I went through that section. I was narrating it to myself. And yeah, it's very intense because also, if I remember correctly, it was like color-coded.

So it's like very, you know, there are like certain days where it's just like, you can tell you guys were like, ah, we have to do this thing right now. There's like a lot of exclamation points too. So basically, Griff's job there was exactly like gathering before the initial attack, gather the funds to do the, because this required a lot of effort. And no, no, don't doubt out tokens. I don't remember. No.

Both. Mostly doubt tokens. It required, yeah, no, it required, was it Dow token? Yeah, Dow. Mostly Dow tokens. Yeah, Dow tokens to get ETH. The more Dow tokens you had, the more ether you could score out of the Dow. Exactly, yeah.

You were sending in Dow tokens and getting out ETH. Yeah, we had the whales that gave us Dow tokens and then just used them for draining. But also the fact that there were many copycuts that indeed attacked at the same time as us, which is what caused us to actually take action finally, all those copycats got funds and they had to be followed. And it was people like Griff organized. I think that Griff basically organized the entire thing on the dates. So when did this guy attack?

When is his two-week period? How much do we have there? And he was basically counting. Like, we have this prescient that counts. How many tokens do we have in its dark dow? Which we basically followed all of them in the original chain, at least. Yeah. this is, I think, like, this was one of the hardest parts of the book for me to explain, you know,

there were just so many DAOs and like the money was kind of different types of money. Like some of them were dark, meaning they were, they looked, you know, nefarious, like people who had hacked for bad reasons. And then others were people like trying to innocently take their money out and just, you know, be like, I'm done with the Dow. And I had a very hard time explaining this because it's got super, super, super complicated. But the point is, I mean, it was much worse for you because you were trying to chase all that money. All right. So let's move ahead to the hard for it.

By the way, so we are going to skip over a very, very interesting side story with the Dow, which is kind of crazy and mind-blowing. And if you have not read the book yet, just please read it because there is something really crazy and a nice little subplot going on here that is yeah very mind-blowing all right so so you guys hard fork after the hard fork did you expect a therine classic to survive and um you know once you saw it did survive how did you feel about that i in no way expected the theran classics survived it didn't make any sense to me at the time uh now it makes more sense but at the time it was like everybody who had ether got et C why wouldn't they?

just sell it. Like, who care? There's no development going on on ETC. There's nothing. It just, I even, it took me a while to call ETC. I was pretty irreverent. I was calling it dead-eth. Right. So you can use your dad-eth for nothing. Just sell it, you know. So, but I don't know, maybe other people had thoughts. I also did not expect it at all. It's more because also we had hard folks before, also the Ethereum, and nobody did care about the minority chain. mostly, there was a nice blog post by Vita Lig recently about Legitism. I cannot say this in English. Legitimacy, yeah, to say, like, is it legit or not?

And Lachid, this also came with, like, Vita Lake, the Ethereum Foundation, like the community in general. And it did feel all the time, nobody wanted to change. So meaning, even though somewhere against the Hartford, they mostly said, but I will follow whatever the maturity of the Ethereum community will do. That's what it felt before. So meaning, I had not experienced. at all, the diverse a large group would say I don't follow the maturity. I want to make this

chain kind of work and to put it and listing the coin. So I did not even think about selling because I did not think that someone would actually list it. But it would continue to be mined. So I was totally surprised by it. Left Harris. I think that here I was very much, how do you say, like affected by grief's comments because I didn't know anything about, you know, what he called sitcoins back then or Alkcoins or I went with what he said and thought that there is no way. And I also didn't imagine that this could happen.

And I just thought that this would not exist. It can't exist. It's a joke. And then it actually existed and stayed. I didn't expect it. Let's just keep it short and say that I just would not have expected a film classic to survive. It made no sense. And then now, so I know Christoph and Lufterris have read this part of the book

in Griff hasn't because he just got the book yesterday. Now that you guys have read this part, do you guys have more understanding about why that happened? I'm just curious. Even later, I kind of understood what happened. I mean, the things that you explain in there, after the stuff with Switzerland, there are some things that are not in the book, I think,

that we were contacted by some of these people. And I realized that there was a lot going on behind the scenes that I didn't know at the time. And if I had known those, I would have expected for it to stay, that there are powers that want it to stay because of financial reasons. But at the time, which time means first days after the hard fork, no, sorry, listing from Polonix, that is what made it for me and everybody else.

I think the listing by Polonix meant that it survives. At the time, I thought that, no, this can't be serious and that it's a joke and the Polonics makes a mistake and we'll just, you know, we can just get free money. But then I, well, yeah, I realized it a lot. later. Yeah, inside. I mean, also when I read the book, I have been very naive and I've lived in this Ethereum bubble, so to say. I was never like a hardcore Bitcoin, even though I love Bitcoin still do.

I never was so much engaged in this community. And so that's why at a time I didn't anticipate there was so much hate against Ethereum because they maybe missed out at the crowd sale, but it's just hated Ethereum because it had like a pre-mine, how they call it. So because of all those reasons, there was a lot of negative energy also with a lot of money and also with a lot of influence on those exchanges. And of course, on the crypto community in general. So in realizing now, of course, the power was there, the financial incentive was there.

There was enough reason to hate Ethereum and to see this is a chance like especially the hard for those against Bitcoin philosophy a lot. So this was a lot of reason for them to stay on the other side. So it makes a lot of sense today. But again, I was in my little crypto bubble, Ethereum bubble. And from that bubble, that bubble's point of view didn't make sense. Yeah. And so for people, like Lef Terris was sort of referencing that subplot I mentioned, and you're right,

he, I think shortly after this, he understood probably why it survived or why it would survive. But okay, so why don't we just quickly catch everybody up on what you've done since all these events in Ethereum, just kind of the last few years? And like, if you could just talk about kind of how people in Ethereum treat you, or maybe they don't know that you were involved in this. I don't know. But I'm just curious to hear. Well, I think the story starts really with DefCon too.

That's when I, like, this was shortly after that. And I was really, really afraid of going there. Like, I was really like, even on the airport, I was saying, like, what if like just some crazy Chinese guy just like on the street just, yeah, punches me or whatever? I was really even afraid of physical violence against me. So I did not know what to expect when going there. I actually did. That's also a thing.

You cannot read this in the book, but I think it's okay to say now. I was not allowed to speak about the Tao. I wanted to speak about the Tao. And I wanted to like what happened and how I feel about it. And I was, if I wanted to talk about it, I was not getting a talk. So like Ming was really, really strict because of as you see, they feared like that Ethereum would be connected to a Tao. This was like a forbidden topic.

I was not allowed to mention it. They were standing there with the trigger to like shut me down and have a do because they didn't know if I would talk about it now. So that's why I had to talk about smart contract security, which seems like a bit boring after the Dow. I mean, sure, it's also related, but it would expect me to speak about what happened, but I was really not allowed to. So I made a more or less boring talk about smart contact security,

like what we learned, what should be done in the future. But in the end, DefCon 2, 80% of the talks were about smart contract security. Like this was every talk saying the same. So in the end, yes, I at least said a little bit, like, thank you very much for like what you get. I'm sorry for what happened, kind of. And I tried to give a little bit of like the emotion, which I actually felt all the time, what I really wanted to say. And I got a very positive feedback. And during DefCon, so many people came to me and said, thank you and like what you went through.

And like, very, very positive. I was very relieved to feel this way because it meant for me I can continue to be a part of this community. I can continue to walk into space. Of course, there will be people who hate me for what happened, but the maturity of people understand and support me. And this is like everything which came after it was more or less the same. Of course, the closer you get to the Dow from a timescale perspective, the more people remember me and about this.

But now, six years later, if you go somewhere, people don't know about the Tao anymore. Maybe something happened like there, but only really people who were in the community at that time know my involvement or our involvement and know me. So this kind of time forgives lots of things. So after like one year or two, it wasn't that big of an issue anymore. And I stayed in this ecosystem as an entrepreneur, building Slokit and as we sold it.

Now I'm building a venture studio. There's lots of projects in this direction. So that's future. But as I made more or stayed there as an entrepreneur and trying to build things on Ethereum. I had similar feelings with Christoph. I was not welcome anymore in this because I had the part in the Dow. I didn't want to go to DevCon 2. I was afraid.

For similar reasons, but also for reasons you have in the book, violence and problems because of some characters. But there I felt, so just talking to people, I just felt relieved, like completely relieved. There was not a single person who was aggressive. Everybody was saying, you guys did great. And that's without anybody knowing what I did there. Like from...

So this is something that actually has pissed me off to this day. At that point, I decided that after leaving that subplot, that I would never talk about what happened with the hack that I was not involved in... Even though some people mentioned my name, I never said that I did this. And Kriv, I had asked him to not mention my name. And that's why I was not known to be much... Like, the only thing is some Reddit posts, that some people assumed that I am part of the Robinhaq group,

but I never actually said anything until basically you contacted me or maybe Matthew Leasing is the first guy that I talked to, but I think that we talked more than anything else in more detail. Back in DevCon2 I felt just by mentioning that I worked in the Tao and that it was, you know, like bad time, everybody was just saying really good things. Nobody said, oh, you guys, you know, like did something wrong or we hate you or anything like that. And something that I think that's Christoph sometimes is a bit too

sigh. He didn't just get voice with feedback. Probably this in the video, but you will see that he got a standing ovation at the end of his DevCon 2 talk. And it was a very, very, it was a very emotional moment, I think. At least for me, because I was there in the crowd and it felt as if you can still be part of the community.

Because after leaving there, I really thought that, So after leaving that subplot, I thought that I would be out of crypto completely. And Christoph's talk and the reaction to it and the experiences I had in Shanghai basically made me change my mind completely. Yeah, yeah, I watched that video and I chronicle it in the book because also it was emotional even just watching it for me. So yeah, it was really lovely how people treated you afterward I felt. Grip, sorry, did you want to talk a little bit about what you had done since and how people treated you? Sure, and Leverteris is totally underselling his contributions, as always, to the space after he left from Radin and all the BrainBot work and to starting Rokey, which is like... Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention what I did since then. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I joined BrainBot. We made a payment channel network, a layer, what they call now layer two.

but I left that position at some point and then I started my own company which is like a privacy preserving portfolio tracker and accounting tool for Ethereum and many other blockchains and yeah that's what I'm doing right now like my own thing. I want to add one small thing which was a hard thing is we kept the name Sloket and continue to do Slokit.

This was like the decision like should we now say well this is over like after what happened many people told us burn down Sloket And you can create a new company if you want. You can even have the same co-founders, do even the same thing. But don't use Lockett anymore. It's like over. We make this decision to not do this, to stand with the name, even though the Dow happened

and all of the stuff. Even the co-founders stayed together. You made right after the Dow decision, like we did some consulting. I even saw a crib wearing a suit. And when they go to us to like a company in Berlin, just selling our time, basically. And Stefan, to all had the task. try to get an investment. And if he would not have gotten an investment,

I think we would have shut it down maybe six or 12 months later. Yeah, I think we all had it really easy. Honestly, I feel bad for Stefan Twal. Like, Stefan really got the worst. And it's unjustified. I mean, I guess he had already, he kind of became the fall guy, which is just really sad.

But he had already kind of had tenuous relationships with other people. And he did make huge mistakes at the end. when everything was falling apart. So, you know, I think we all had it easy, especially me, because I was publicly known as part of the White Hat Group, and Left Harris wasn't publicly known as the White Hat Group. And obviously, Christoph wasn't so involved as a wise decision. He has family and stuff.

I don't have any of those things, you know, so I can be a lot more risky. Yeah, so I had it really easy. There was lots of love being thrown my way and Jordy's way the whole time because we were publicly known as fighting day in and day out. out to save the Dow the best that we could. And Jody and I actually continued to work together to start a few different orgs. Went to DevCon too and all that stuff.

But after, I think it was after DevCon, we started Giveeth. And we took a lot of the lessons from the Dow. We created a mini-me token contract that kind of, you know, took a lot of the learnings that we had and applied them. Okay, if we want to create Dowels for charity, that could eventually even replace government services, then we're going to need secure, like people need to be running their own servers and stuff like that.

So we found a DAP node, and Jordy is now really focused on doing ZKEVM, which is like a roll-up that you can run a smart contracts on. And I'm still focused on Giveth, and I've also spun out more technical, like token engineering focused solutions through the common stack. And so Giveth is like really pointed at nonprofits.

And the common stack is trying to take techniques of funding public goods using token engineering and apply it with the nerds of the nerds, kind of applied research. And then we hope to pull that into Giveth. So that's what we're working on. So a couple of things. So one thing I want to say is like people should definitely read the book to find out about the stuff on 12 situation.

that is chronicle, you know, kind of how people perceived him and what happened to him. But one thing that I have to say before I ask you guys the next question is just thank you so much for giving me so much of your time and energy to tell the story, you know, as accurately as I could because it was a lot of time that you guys gave me because obviously just on a technical level, this was probably the hardest for sure part of the book that I had to, you know, describe for people I mean, you know, I'd been covering crypto for years at the point, you know, when I was reporting this. And I had never come across a lot of the things that I was having to explain at this part in the book. So, you know, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, for helping me with that because I just would not have been able to do it without your help.

Okay, so we went through this whole thing together, all these hours of interviews. And, you know, I was working on your story. And then the book was going to come out and very, very, very, very late in the process when kind of, the book was basically done, suddenly there was this break that happened where my sources and I thought that we had figured out who was behind the Tao attack. So I reached out to you all about this and thank you for keeping that secret between then and when the book actually published because I know that's kind of a long time to keep a secret like that. So when I told you that I thought we had found the person and I presented the evidence, what were your thoughts and feelings?

Okay, let me start then. Yeah, I was surprised. I never expected to hear about the Dow Hacker. I just had given up completely on finding out who it is. To be honest, the subplot that you mentioned for me still is the most stressful part. I just thought, okay, the hacker did what he did. It's just, you know, okay. But to see the name that you gave there and to remember all our conversations,

and especially the conversations in Reddit that we had after the hack and during the Tao Wars to actually think that I was talking to the guy who did the actual hack pretending that he is trying to help us. Oh, wait. So that's what I didn't understand. In the Reddit messages with Toby, is that what you're talking about? You thought that he was trying to help you? Oh, interesting. Because whatever the original post was was not clear.

Yes, it was probably something about, I don't remember, exactly, but some of the attacks that we did and asked him to not go into details? Or I don't really remember because he deleted everything later and there is no links to the posts anymore. Yeah, but actually, you know what? I came across something where I think this came out after my article came out. It was something about, oh, I think, actually, I can't remember where I came across this. I think his idea was to break this split mechanism.

I think that's what it was. I don't know how I figure this. I can't remember. I've had the craziest week. So at some point in the last few days, I think I came across this. But anyway. Could be. Could be.

But we were talking about something. And he was giving hints out. And he basically gave them to us. No, he gave them in public. And I think I told him not to do that. And then the last message that I have from him, I think that we even have it in the book, was, I'm sorry if I messed things up. And that's it.

Like in the conversation with the attacker or something like that. I'm sorry if I mess things up for you in the Dow Wars and something like He did. It's crazy to actually think that this guy pretended to, and he was talking about the hacking and the third person, which of course, like, if you don't want to say that you're the hacker, that's what you do. But yeah, I never expected this. I would not have expected this because I don't know, I really thought that the guy who was the hacker would have been, you know, like precision strike, just do his thing, disappear. not stay and I mean as you wrote in the thing he was trolling after he was being kind of an asshole right so I really

had the hacker the reason one in a bit higher regard kind of a guy who just did his thing disappeared and that's it like Satoshi but you telling me who Satosi is yeah so that's how I felt totally I completely agree I feel like it almost took away the mystery

that was almost kind of enjoyable to have, you know, oh, no one knows to the DACA. I still, you know, it's really hard. I haven't looked at the evidence yet like in depth. I've been in Denver and doing my thing for the conference here, but, you know, it's

really hard to prove unless someone's unless he straight up says, oh yeah, it was me. You know, I feel like there's still a chance that it could just be some mistake that he's being thrown under the bus. And I just, I hope that's not the case.

And it's probably not. I really trust you, Laura, and your ability to, you wouldn't go out without a real, a real person. So, but at the time, like, when you told me, I just, I don't know, it feels like, it feels anti-climactic, honestly. It feels like I almost wish it were just always going to stay in mystery forever. I didn't have any interactions with Toby. Toby was more of a developer, and we really divided and conquered.

I worked with the non-development side. So I think Christoph had probably a lot more internal reactions with it. Well, I was also absolutely surprised. I did not expect this to come at all because I know that many people tried to find him. You know the book by Matt Leisling, who really tried to. And so that's why I thought this is over. There was someone who really, really tried and didn't find him so over. For me, it was more, after the Dowheck, I did actually never care about him at all.

Like even during the time before the heart fork, it was for me like, okay, this is someone did it. I cannot understand why. I don't know him. I know that if he is sophisticated enough technically, he can't stay in the universe forever. There are not coins out there which give you the privacy you need. And there are some ways to somehow cash out without revealing the identity. For me, this was like, you never know him.

Also, all the messages we got in between, like between the hack and the heart fork, I never 100% trusted if they were either true or also like this could completely be played. Like even if he would say, I will give you the money back. This could be just like an attempt of like making us do no work for another week or so. So that's why I actually completely ignored him. I never tried to go after him. But nevertheless, there were some people actually, even before you, this was a couple of months or weeks after the doubt, even after the heart fraud, which came to us and say they think they know who,

is. And they gave us some information from, I think it was from Poloniacs where they tried to find like some return address or actually who gave the ether to fund the attack. And they gave us some company names. They gave us even some some persons who say, do you think this is the one? But since I have not seen the evidence myself, I actually said, I cannot blame him. I can do anything because I don't know. You might be true, maybe not. And I had contact with some of those people. And so I also try to not blame them, to not like say, are you the hacker? It's just completely ignored it. So now you say you have much more evidence. And I have not seen it personally, but as Griff said, I trust you, that you have done your job. You would not go

out with an actual name if you're not 100% sure. So I just hope that, I hope it's true like for you that you don't tell anything which is not right. Of course. I hope for him just the best. I mean, I have no feelings whatsoever towards him. And of course, he did something which destroyed a lot. Sometimes I thought about what would happen if you wouldn't have done this. And I don't know if something good would have happened. I just don't know. Maybe yes, it's

got big, lots of money in it, many people get funded by it, yes, could also go in a completely wrong direction and it could be like billions in it today and something I would hate all my life. That's why I somehow was also relieved that the story was over. So I try to not like,

since this is out of my control, I basically said, well, nothing I can do. I don't understand the background, so I didn't really try to find him or anything. But yes, I was very surprised that you found him. Yeah, the best part is that the people who were originally accused of being the Dow hackers are no longer are like free of that stigma. I mean, there was one conference where left Harris never accused. That's the thing. Like, I probably haven't read about that part of the book. Probably in chapter nine, I guess.

Do you mention anything about? Your interaction with one of the suspects. Yeah, I wrote about it. I actually have very friendly relations with one of the co-founders of the original company. And he talked to me and said, no, no, there is no way. Later, like we came to know each other after that stuff. And I mean, the evidence that was shown to us was not really. It was a circumstantial.

Yeah, sure. But as for the particular hacker, for Toby that was. named. Yeah, I'm actually really curious about the technical details of, yeah. It would be so cool to see his contract. How you guys found it? Yeah, that would be really interesting. And also I'm glad that back then we didn't like make it public who we thought it was and also not going to them because those guys actually invited me to like a hackathon. They met him in Berlin. I was like politely declining and didn't want to interact with them too much, but I'd never like accused them. I'm very happy for this today that I didn't. So that's why I think also

knowing that even people accusing stuff found to all and even us because the thing we know what this is about. So I'm kind of glad that we have this out that we know who it is and who it wasn't. I think who it wasn't is actually even more important. Yeah, definitely. There was this one time where Jordi, Lifteris and I

are talking to one of the Dow hacker suspects at a conference and it was very civil. FCC right? It was FCC. The first one. We all felt really awkward about it. But they're doing good work. That's the thing. And like, okay. And I feel like even with Toby, honestly, like, yes, he destroyed a lot of things.

But personally, I hope that nothing bad happens to him because of this. Because in the end, everyone, the only people who lost in the Dow were the speculators. As much of the chaos that was there, like everyone who had Dow tokens got ETH back plus ETC. Like everyone, it's the only hack I know of where everyone made money, except for Slokka, of course, we got really screwed. But everyone else really, It made out okay. So I guess I just hope that, you know, nothing bad happens. He doesn't go to jail or anything. I don't think it's necessary at this point.

It's hard to understand, like, how we felt back then in terms of, like, the cultural thinking. We never thought about going, like, to court or asking a lawyer or anybody like this. It was still kind of funny money in some way, even though it had a real exchange course. So it was, it's not as criminal as if someone would have stuom that much a dollar. Like, that's how it felt. And you could also understand. this position of code is law and this Bitcoin kind of thinking and kind of even not seeing anything

wrong with doing this. I can understand this way of thinking. And I think no court, no lawyer, no normal guy out there can understand how we thought back then. That's by saying it's very hard to judge him today, especially also in the amount of money, because you cannot really see how we thought back then, the ideology, the decentralization, all of this. I don't know about that, but I have a very, very different opinion there.

I never was Code is law guy. I never thought that. And I still don't. And there is many instances of steel of Defi hacks. He did something bad. What he did was bad. I just want to give this perspective how we thought. Yeah, yeah, sure.

I get that. But even back then, I remember I still have the Dow, Code is Law, green t-set that you gave me money. Like, this is my reminder of that time. I never believe Code is law. that scares me. If my code would be, this makes absolutely, I find it nonsensical. I hate the term. And there is people who are using it today. I don't know if you know the index finance hack, this guy. So people today who steal money from companies and try to use code is law and they are going to court right now in Canada somewhere.

but so for example for me it's a very personal thing after the Tao and I think that if this field wants to go forward code can't be law it's my personal opinion and I really hope that basically he gets what he deserves

I don't know what that means but I am not a forgiving person it's not in my nature I'm sorry well he did take other people money and he did have the opportunity back then to give it back several times. And he did not do this.

This is, I think, the most serious part about it. Yeah. He could have done so many. I think that you also mentioned in the book in the epilogue, like Griff's opinion on that, at least according to the book, it says that he could have done so much good. And they had ample time,

like from the time of the hack until the hard fork, so many times. We tried to contact you said there were posts, they were, you know, asking him to come forward. But yeah. He still can send the, ETC back to the withdrawal contract, you know, still could. Wait, wait, there is no withdrawal contract on the Ethereum Classic chain.

Yeah. So he'd have to convert it to the white, the white hats. We still have this ETC contract. Oh, right, right, right, right. He could still deposit ETC into it. And then all the Dow token holders could get it back. If anybody is listening from anybody who ever had the Dow tokens, guys, you have ETC there, you can go take it.

A lot of money is sitting there. It's a lot of money. And we just like guys, just go take it. It's there. It's waiting for you. Yeah. And by the way, if you are one of those people, please do that because I think that Griff is keeping a lot of Dow tokens in order he, in order to do any rescues that he might need

to do. And he would like to sell those Dow tokens in order to actually use that money for something else. So go ahead and take your ETC. Okay. And one last thing I want to clarify earlier just from some of your comments, you know, I'm not going to say that I 100% for sure know that it was Toby Honish. which, you know, what I was saying is the evidence is very good and I presented it all. So, you know,

I wouldn't present it if I didn't think it was very strong. And the other sources who worked with me on this, they also believe it strong. And chain analysis takes credit for that step of the demixing, which obviously that's a very complicated thing to do. And that's their little secret sauce that they, you know, finally revealed to the world. But from all the people who worked with me on this, we feel that the evidence is good. Okay. So last bit, this. This is just a funny, silly question. But people have already been saying things to me, like, who should play which characters in the movie? So, by the way, just so you know, there is no movie yet, but people are saying this to me.

So if that were the case, who would you want to either play you or who do you think should play, you know, the other members of this group? Someone suggested online, not me. I should be played by, I hope I pronounce it right, Jack Gillenhall. Jake Gyllenhaal, Schillenhall. Yes. It's not me, someone else on Twitter who proposed this idea, so I'm fine instead. Love Terrace. Now I reveal my complete lack of knowledge about American film actors.

I have absolutely no idea. I know the big names, but I mean, I know Brad Pitt, I know like Bruce Willis. Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise. I don't know. No. Yeah.

Tom Cruise. No, but Tom Cruise is probably what, like 20 years older than, like. left Harris? Oh, that's true. To look close from the 80s, maybe. Yeah, exactly. The one in the underwear, sliding on the ground, you know, risky business guy. That's who I think you got. Okay, Griff, what about you? You know, people used to say, I don't have a man bun now, but I used to have hair that was

kind of like Ashton Coucher, and people used to say it looked like Ashton Coucher. But you wore a man bun during the time of the doubt attack because I wrote that in the book. Yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. But we could still, we could do action culture with a man bun. Yeah, exactly. Throw him with a man bun.

And, uh, and, and I think, I think he'd get the right vibes too. Okay. All right. Well, you guys, thank you both, thank you all so much for coming on the show. I'm sorry for some of the traumatic memories that we had to dredge up here. But I think also it was kind of fun to reminisce. It's, it's been a while now, almost six years. So, um, yeah, I hope, I hope this was.

yeah, not painful and maybe somewhat fun. Let's also not forget about all the other people who are not here in the call, like Sifam, Tuar, Yoli, and many others. We have played such an important role here and did so many things, which are very helpful and good. And honestly, we're all so busy people. It's just really nice to be in the same room with you guys. It's been too long.

Likewise. Yeah, likewise. It's really nice to see, like, the two of you here, like, see your faces. I haven't seen you in quite a long time. Yeah, it's like a reunion of old war buddies, you know. Okay. All right. Well, thank you all for coming on Unchained.

Thanks, Laura. Thank you. Thanks so much for joining us today to learn more about my book, The Cryptopians, Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the making of the first big cryptocurrency craze. And also to learn about the Dow episode and to learn about a person that my sources and I believe is a Tao attacker. Check out the show notes for this episode. Unchained is produced by me.

Laura Shin with help from Anthony Yun, Daniel Nuss, Mark Murdoch, Shashon, and CLK transcription. Thanks for listening.