Unchained - Live From Ethereal: Eep! How Should Ethereum Be Governed? - Ep.60

Episode Date: May 20, 2018

This recording of a panel I moderated at Ethereal with Ethereum researcher Vlad Zamfir and GovernX founder Nick Dodson covered the topic that it seems everyone in crypto is discussing these days: governance. We talk about how the community should decide whether or not to unlock the funds frozen by bugs, on-chain governance, what role the Ethereum Foundation plays and what it means that nearly all the people who write Ethereum's code are men. Nick Dodson: https://twitter.com/iamnickdodson Vlad Zamfir: https://twitter.com/VladZamfir If you liked this discussion, also be sure to check out my recent episode with Aya Miyaguchi, executive director of the Ethereum Foundation: http://unchainedpodcast.co/aya-miyaguchi-of-the-ethereum-foundation-on-who-makes-the-final-call-ep59 And this Unconfirmed episode on blockchain ethics with Cara LaPointe of Georgetown: http://unconfirmed.libsyn.com/from-the-bellagio-blockchain-summit-blockchain-ethics-with-georgetowns-cara-lapointe-ep016 Thank you to Ethereal for hosting a great event! https://etherealsummit.com/ And thank you to our sponsors! Keepkey: https://www.keepkey.com/ Preciate: https://preciate.org/recognize/ Token Agency: https://tokenagency.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone. This is recording of a panel I moderated at Ethereum called EEPP. How should Ethereum be governed with Ethereum researcher Vlad Zamfir and Governex CEO, Nick Dodson. We cover topics like what process should be used to decide what to do with the frozen funds, what role the foundation plays, and whether or not the cryptospace is perpetuating the inequalities we see in society today. The hall was packed for this discussion and it generated a lot of audience reactions. and conversation afterward. Out of all the panels I've ever moderated, I've never had one that has prompted so many people to come up to me to tell me how much they enjoyed it or what discussions that sparked amongst their friends afterwards. I hope you enjoyed this much as the attendees did. A quick note that if you enjoy this panel,

you should definitely check out the recent unchained episode with Ayamiyoguchi, the executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, and the recent episode of Unconfirmed, unblockchain Ethics with Kara LaPoint of Georgetown, a link to both in the show notes. Enjoy. Unchained is sponsored by Precciate. Precate is building the most valuable relationships on Earth. In each episode of Unchained, Precheet recognizes an individual or group in crypto for an achievement.

Who in crypto will be recognized today? Stay tuned to find out. Token Agency is a proven full-service blockchain startup accelerator, helping launch only the best and brightest projects in crypto. With a project's acceptance rate of less than 1%. Let their team of experienced advisors and marketing specialists build gravity around your company. To learn about their top projects and more, check out tokenagency.com. Today's episode is brought to you by KeepKee, the easy, safe, and simple way to protect your Bitcoin, Ether, Lightcoin, and many other digital assets. There's no time like the present to protect yourself from hackers, malware, and viruses.

Visit KeepKee.com to order your secure hardware wallet today and use the code Unchained 10 for a limited time 10% discount. Please welcome Laura Shin, host of Crypto Podcasts, Unchained and Unconfirmed. researcher Vlad Zamfier and Nick Dodson, founder of Governex and senior engineer at Consensus. Hi everyone. Welcome to our panel. Eap, how should Ethereum be governed? I gave it a somewhat cheesy name, and I was a little bit embarrassed when I looked at it earlier, but they actually really like it, so I'm glad. So we're going to be discussing some of the major questions that Ethereum is facing today

around what to do with frozen funds, whether or not to cap the money supply and other questions, and all those things raise an even bigger question, which is, how should Ethereum be governed? And here to discuss this topic with me are Nick Dodson, founder of GovernX and a senior engineer at Consensus, and Vlad Sam Fair and Ethereum researcher. So why don't we start with a little background on each of you? Why don't we start with Vlad? What is your background and what do you do in Ethereum? Well, I guess I work on consensus protocols

and specifically proof of stake and sharding. And I also do some work on blockchain governance, which is still a work in progress, but I'm happy to share what little insight I can garnish. And Nick? Hello. So I work with consensus, and I've been researching and developing governance systems and organizations for like about three years. So Governance is kind of consensus's governance research and development body.

And so, yeah, it's been a pretty crazy ride so far, especially with the Dow and much of other stuff. My focus is more on internal governance mechanisms and kind of looking at systems that will work, say, inside Ethereum. But I think I have some insights on governance itself and, you know, protocol governance. I'll shed as much light as I can on that as well. Okay, great. So let's start with the most basic term. Let's define governance. When you think of governance, Ethereum, what are you thinking of?

Sure. Well, I like to give a kind of three-stage definition. First, I try to tell people like, governance is about making decisions. And then I try to tell them that governance is about how we coordinate around our decision-making processes. And then I try to tell them that governance is actually the way in which we legitimize and delegitimize the processes that we use to make decisions. So it's kind of a decision-making process, but kind of like super meta, because it also includes all of the politics by which we legitimize and delegitimize the ways and norms that we use to actually make these decisions. And what about you? How do you think about that?

Yeah, I'd agree with that for the most part. I think I kind of divided into a few different tiers. I think there's just broad governance and process in general, which can be used in any system. And then you have internal governance systems like DAWS or organizations where it's fairly opt-in. And then you have protocol governance, which is effectively being communally and organizationally agreed upon in many different contexts. and with a lot of different people and players involved. And, you know, so when I think about the three, I kind of think of them like that.

Yeah. And so what models from traditional governance do you think apply here? Do you want to start? Well, I'm not really familiar with traditional governance. So it's a bit hard for me. But I do benefit somewhat from conversations I have with people who are more familiar with traditional governance. And I think I've learned kind of a lot from, like, lawyers and people with backgrounds

on political science and sociology. But, you know, I think mostly the story is actually not so much about the particular decision-making processes, but about the humans and the politics and the kind of debate and that goes around actually legitimizing and getting people to actually agree to use and go with the decisions that are made, as opposed to the actual voting systems. So let's just talk about how Ethereum is governed today.

How would you describe it? Well, I mean, so I'll provide my view how I think it's being governed. So right now I see the foundation is offering what they believe to be there, view of Ethereum and their protocol and the standard for that. And as Vlad and I were talking before,

that there's a development wing that's going to go and develop that as well. There's EIP admins and they're kind of straddling between the conversation and the community signals that they're probably getting privately. And let's just define EIP for people

who may not know. Yeah, so that's the Ethereum Improvement Protocol. So it's just a basic application, you know, processed to say, I want to improve a particular standard, whether it be a token standard or actually changing lower-level op-codes or any aspect of the Ethereum ecosystem

that the standard's going to rule on or have ideas about. And so, you know, the admins do effectively, you know, a vote and they draw in what EIPs that they think are most relevant, and then they're going to, you know, push forward on those. And so there's more processes to it, But, you know, that's, in my view, the current system that we have.

And there's a lot of different consideration that goes into it. I think the people who are currently doing it have to sit between minors, actual community members, community leaders, people in the foundation, business. Like, there's a lot of different factors going into the considerations of those EIPs right now. And, of course, the technological vision that, you know, was started by Vitalik and has now grown into this bigger thing. Yeah. But that's my view. Yeah. Yeah.

Way to jump into the weeds. Yeah. So I would just take a step back, just to frame the EIP process a little more. I think blockchains are fundamentally distributed systems, which means that there are software running on computers on some kind of network, usually the internet. And so we have like two things that fundamentally need to be governed just because of that, right? There's like the nodes that run the software,

and there's a software and the software repositories. Nick mentioned the software developers and the EPS process, which is a process by which developers of the different implementations of Ethereum and receive input from basically anyone with a GitHub account about maybe some proposals or request for comments and things of that nature to try to improve the protocol. So the Ethereum improvement process is a place where you make it. They're in improvement proposals,

and that eventually, if you're lucky, the developers will talk about your proposal and implement it into the implementations of the software. And if they're lucky, the people who are running the nodes under distributed system will actually install the software. And normally the developers kind of care a lot about making sure that the software that they write people will use. And so they're worried a lot about making sure that they don't do anything unpopular, making sure that the things that they do basically follow the consensus. And when

there's a lack of consensus, the developers have this kind of headache of trying to decide what to do. Given that, actually, there are, you know, there are, there are costs to failed upgrade. So it is important. Yeah. Well, I mean, Ethereum Classic, yeah. I mean, we have, we, we, we somehow, I wouldn't call it, I wouldn't call the Dow. hard fork failed upgrade at all. But the Ethereum Classic is actually a good example of a lot of, there's a lot of coordination costs around a few things. One of those, well, there's replay, those transaction replays. And then there's also the trademark issue,

which is something I haven't brought up yet, but blockchains are also identified by name. And this means that the trademark and the name by which people use to refer to the blockchain is another resource that ends up being a super important part of blockchain governance. But what I meant in that regard was I think like the fact that Ethereum Classic even exists at all is because people didn't think that decision to hard fork after the Dow was legitimate. Am I wrong in thinking that? So basically, when the Dow happened and during the

following kind of governance debate, there was a tremendous amount of attention from a tremendous amount of people. And definitely there are people who thought that the decision was illegitimate and didn't go with it. But, you know, I think that for the most part, people who started the Ethereum Classic community and joined it in the early days. We're not part of the Ethereum community. And actually, we're outsiders who were upset with the precedent that Ethereum was setting. And so, yes, but I'm not sure if that is as true within the Ethereum community, as much as in the broader blockchain community.

Oh, interesting. Well, let's just go back to this question of how Ethereum is governed, because you described this super open system where, you know, anybody can submit these different proposals and stuff like that. So how do we funnel from that really open system to? a decision? Like, how do the different people make their voices heard? Who does the listening? Who makes the final call? How does all that happen? Or how should it happen? Well, it's a really complicated kind of process because there's no single decision-making. There's lots of little decisions,

but none of them are like the one decision that makes the change, right? So there's commits to software repositories, there's software releases in software repositories. There's like the choice of like at what height the change becomes activated. There's people's decision whether or not to install the software, and then people's decisions about which chain to call Ethereum or Bitcoin after the fact. And so all of these processes are kind of separate, and each of them are involved in like kind of collectively pulling the trigger. But I think that looking at each of these individual processes too closely misses the broader story

of the political conversation and coordination that goes on around around this problem because everyone wants to be with their peers. Mostly the overarching drivers, like, I want to be where my friends are. I want to be using the blockchain that everyone else is using. But also people have different intentions for the future of the blockchain and when there's emergencies or things like the Dow where things don't behave as intended. People want recourse and they want to use blockchain governance to make these decisions.

but they can't do it themselves. No individual developer or node operator can actually institute these things. You need to coordinate with the community to get them to get in such a way that it works. Let me rephrase. The communities to coordinate around upgrades. And there definitely are people who are more well-connected in the community, and in some way they naturally have much more political power and much more ability to convince people or to, you know,

make people feel like everyone is going that way as opposed to this way. And so I think there's a lot of soft power. And there is some extent to which some people in the process have explicit power. Like, for example, there is someone who plans the all-deves call, which is this every two weeks Friday call. And they, to some extent, get to decide, like, what the schedule is going to be, what to include in there. And to some extent, who gets to show up on the call.

There are our EAP editors. And wait, who leads those calls? So the The Theorem Foundation has been facilitating it for the start. Right now is only Hudson, Hudson Jameson, who is not here, but you should all be familiar with. He's a hero of Ethereum governance. And so keep going. I interrupt up. So the EAP, and then there's EAP editors.

EAP editors have some discretion over which EPS go, when EPS go from different stages. And that's a little bit complicated. And every node operator has discretion over what software runs on their node. every exchange has a discretion over which token take order to list next to which blockchain. Every blockchain explorer similarly. But none of these people are actually going to be calling the shots for the whole system. They have a limited scope of their decisions. And who gave each of those entities power?

Obviously, the Ethereum Foundation, I guess, is the one who said, like, OK, Hudson-Gemason will manage these calls. but then, like, what about the EAP editors? Like, is it all the foundation that's putting all these people in these roles? Well, so the foundation has, you know, they have their assignment of the people they believe to be EEP editors and, you know, ones that are ready to do that role of editing, prioritizing, and actually accepting based upon all the feedback in the community. But there's also, as Vlad mentioned, a tremendous amount of peer, literal peer pressure or networking that's going on constantly. where if Vitalik tomorrow just said, we're putting a hard cap on Ethereum,

there's a tremendous amount of peer coordination that would probably work against him on that. And so even if he tried to do that and tried to push it through, both the processes of the EPE editors, the social community, and all the different peers that we have together in our system, the miners and everything else,

would probably root against that. And so some may be for, but some may be against. So I think what we're trying to say is, you know, our governance is inherently social, but most governance is actually, the real work is social. And I think out of all the research that I've learned right now with working with governance and working with Ethereum primarily is that the contracts and implementations are fairly uninteresting. It's more about how you're going to socially coordinate structures and just you're leveraging the mechanisms within Ethereum.

We're leveraging these new kinds of ways of thinking. but primarily the majority of the coordination is still social and still just convincing people, just like you would on a board or in a company, to come to your side. And we don't want half the community to be one way or the other on a particular EIP. We want people to come to a broader consensus

and a broader majority before it moves forward. And there's always going to be people who are in a minority who will disagree with it, but it's trying to reduce that pressure constantly in the minority. role. And when you said that, Vatelic, if he tried to kind of unilaterally do something, there would be pressure against him. Is that just because he would be trying to do it unilaterally? Or, like, you know... It's because of the absence of the, like, preceding political discussion and settlement

where we kind of have the public debate and where, like, where the ideas and are, like, you know, fleshed out and we kind of get to a point where we feel like there's actual... consent. So, but right now it feels like there isn't kind of like an objective measure of figuring out what the will of the community is, right? Like, are there, you know, like ways to measure that or is it all just sort of this loosey-goosey like, oh, let's check the discussion boards and sort of see where we think the wind is blowing?

I think this is where an interesting conversation is going to happen potentially about the fact that I think it's, I think it's messy to like simplify it, this whole, this whole consideration and process. But the thing is, is it's naturally forming, and there's a lot of nice natural formations within it, even though it is slightly messy. Wait, so what are some of those natural formations? I would say that the fact that the foundation is actually deeply considering lots of different angles as EIP editors, and they are acting in a way as a delegate to the whole community, and that comes with a tremendous amount of responsibility and role, and they take it very seriously. And I think that that was not written into a system. That was not derived or directed

that they do that. It's just what they feel because they care and they love so much about what we do. And so I think these are part of the naturally forming things that the community brought together and that, you know, when I joined Ethereum, I was naturally attracted to because it is the collective whole that's moving this forward. And I still feel like while our formal or objective process is messy, that the collective whole is still moving forward in a really positive and somewhat objective way, which is really interesting. So is it the Ethereum Foundation's job

to kind of like, you know, make these decisions and say like this is how we're going to do things, these are the processes we're going to follow? Like are they kind of the ultimate deciders about all this stuff? I don't, I mean, I definitely don't think so. And I think you look historically or what's happened, like for any of the, like, I mean, the EPS process, you know, wasn't like, it happened out of necessity.

the all devs call happened out of necessity. They weren't really like official foundation's decisions either, even though they were made by people who were paid by the foundation. The foundation mostly plays like a support kind of role where they provide a lot of administrative support and financial support for developers. But the foundation isn't even, I mean, like somehow, I think the found, people misunderstand

and think that the foundation has a much bigger role than it does because it doesn't, like, I don't think there's been like too much, like, clear communication about what those roles are because, I mean, somehow we don't, really know, but also historically, if you look at, for example, the Dow crisis, the foundation was pretty much not involved at all. It was completely unwilling to participate because of fear of being legally somehow responsible for that. And so we had to, like, all coordinate extra protocol. And it definitely is a huge challenge to figure out where people are. We can think

about different types of stakeholders in the community. And some of our peers might be in some of those, but it's very, very difficult, for example, for us to get input from people who are buying tokens and who don't really participate except for on a speculative basis. And they don't know about, like, you know, coin votes, right? There's people who do know about the kind of coin voting. But coin voting, if we were to institute that, it would disenfranchise everyone who isn't a big coin holder. And then there's okay mining. So we can measure mining powers. We can measure transaction fees. There's a fee, there's a, but I would say there are a ability to signal to each other what our opinions are in a way that is civil-resistant and

secure in crisis is kind of lacking and definitely could be improved. I think the number one kind of way that we kind of gauge community sentiment around stuff is we participate in the forums and we talk to our peers and we watch the kind of discrepancy and think about and we think about the kind of state of the conversation in public and we think about the state of the conversation and private channels. And somehow some people in the community are much more connected than others. So not everyone is able to tell. And if you are super connected, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're not in a bubble either.

And so it is really hard to tell what the community kind of wants. But, you know, we do always have contentious hard forks. Yeah. Yeah, well, it's good that you answer this question about the role of the foundation as saying that they're not deciding everything. Because where I was going with that was, if the foundation is sort of deciding all these things, then that sort of lends credence to this argument that Ether could be considered a security. But since we didn't go that road, then I won't push that. Because that was something

I was going to ask you about. If there is this reliance on the foundation, then if a single entity is seen to be in control of that. So this comes back to what my view is on the foundation, which is more or less that it's offering a very peer-oriented view or signal to everyone of where they believe this particular technology should be going. But it's really up to miners in the entire collective whole to truly buy into that and believe in it, whether it be actually technically running nodes or technically mining. And miners after the Dow Fork collectively moved forward in general with that particular EIP. Now, there was some that didn't, but they were.

relatively opportunists in the sense that they were just taking the opportunity to mine classic and probably profit greatly. But the collective hole of the miners really truly made the final decision there. And when we saw that there was mining on the new chain with the fork, we got further confirmation that the verifiers and the huge stakeholders that put in the verification to our network have decided that they were going to verify this particular channel, not the other. Yeah. Yeah, well, actually, I want to go back to something Vlad also mentioned, which was voting. As we know, in general, in life, not just in the crypto world, participation in voting can be low. And I worry that if we move sort of like toward a more on-chain governance thing,

that will end up in this sort of oligopoly where, like, people, the big whales who have lots of coins are really the only ones to be motivated to vote. So what do you, think of kind of these ideas around on-chain governance and ways to improve participation in voting. Because as somebody mentioned in my podcast, I think it was Ryan Zer of Polychain, and he was talking about how after the Dow, there was some decision to be made that should have been a no-brainer. I think it was like to extend the time. I don't remember the exact details, but he was just like, oh, this is something where if anybody put money in, like they should have wanted to do this, right?

But they didn't have a quorum because people, it was, like, difficult to vote, and they just like kind of didn't care. So where do you think that's going to go and what do you think the potential is in on-chain voting? Yeah. So, I mean, I have a huge problem with on-chain governance. Basically because on-chain governance creates a default where there's

something on-chain, some smart contract system somehow, which determines the default upgrade path for all of the node operators. Which means that node operators are now kind of if they do nothing, they will upgrade to follow the signal

of this on-chain mechanism. And so if they develop a norm, or even if this happens a couple of times, they'll build the expectation that node operators just follow the on-chain governance mechanism, and then node operators become disenfranchised of their role in governance.

Your role as someone who runs a full node is no longer that important because the full-node operators have a norm where, instead of having to coordinate on every upgrade and actively consent to them, Instead, they're left with the default, the tyranny of the default, which basically is the tyranny of whatever coin holders or whoever gets the votes in the on-chain governance system. I'm assuming, for now, just like that is a voting system.

So the on-chain governance system is going to have to say who gets to, like, you know, exactly formally specify what leads to a decision. And that's going to empower some people and disempower others, and it will definitely disempower node operators. And I actually think that node operators are an incredibly important part of blockchain governance, because there are the exchanges, the block explorers, the, you know, the services, the people who actually have users, whereas like coin holders and miners are, you know, don't have, necessarily representing users at all. And so they have, I think, you know, less of a reason to believe that they're going to be, that they're going to have interest in line with user interest than, note operators. Yeah, I think

so I also adamantly agree with the current ideas about implementing on-chain governance, and it's mainly because, as Vlad beautifully mentioned in every way, that it enforces a rigidity

that is not going to accept a lot of the new social context and logic and different understandings that we have, and it will not be dynamic enough to flex and flux with what the community is currently coming up with and also in general implementing these rigid systems, it really, you shoot yourself on the foot in a big way. And so we have a tremendous amount of different stakeholders and different

systems at play and different people who are shaping this ecosystem. And to think that you can write some code and put some logic in a chain that's going to somehow mediate between all those stakeholders effectively at this current time is really, really, really important. immature. And anyone or any protocol that's mentioning or enforcing or saying that their protocol is significantly better in any way, because there's on-chain governance, they are truly not understanding the depth of social consensus that is enormous with these protocols. And I truly mean that. So... Throwing shade at ethereal.

I'm throwing shade at particular protocols that like to ship on-chain governance. It's a big thing. So not just on the governance, but I'm curious, like, do you think voting as a mechanism is also not useful? So here's kind of my feeling, right? I actually don't think that voting is normally a decision-making process. I think voting is a process by which we legitimize decisions. And so actually, the voting is meant to make clear for everyone what is the political environment that we find ourselves in. And so somehow the decision isn't meant to be in the voting, but it's meant to be in the political conversations that you have.

and the political debate before. So in my kind of view, the main reason why people want to on-chain governance is because they want a clear source of legitimacy for their decisions, more so than actually because of their concern of making good decisions or effective decisions.

So the streamlining of the process to make decisions isn't, you know, is it really going to speed things up? Because actually the bottleneck is the governance, is the political aspect, the social side, much more than actually the, the, is much more of a political problem than a process problem.

So I don't know if I fully understand. So you want to incorporate voting in what way? I mean, I don't know who would get the votes. And so I'm terrified of that. Yeah, I do. But I just don't think that in general people use voting to make decisions. I think in general it's mostly used to legitimize decisions that they make extra protocol. They make decisions extra protocol, coordinate to push it through the voting system, you know,

so to legitimize decisions that are made. Action protocol. So, so, so like when we talk about voting, it's, it's in many ways what becomes the big flag in our head that like, oh, well, no one votes or these particular problems are there, but it's actually, as Vlad mentioned, voting is in many ways just the, it's a final signified flag on a particular, you know, representation of what people are feeling or what consensus has happened. And so really, you know, when we talk about voting systems being broken, I think what we're talking about is that representation is fundamentally being broken because the finalization process is not very good. And so a lot of people in the room have a

tremendous amount of dynamic interests and preferences that are being factored into what's happening. And I think right now our current system with Ethereum governance is actually more in tune with that being in its current status than if we implemented some rigid voting mechanism where we gave weight out to whoever we thought were stakeholders, because we would then break the finalization process or representation process more than it's already broken out. But I agree that we should move towards more objective systems and measures, but it needs to come from a lot of good sources of debate and logic

and really understanding what everyone's truly feeling and thinking, and it can't just be, you know, yeah, we have this vote and now we're upgraded, like not yet at least, maybe in the future, but not right now, in my opinion. So the benefit of voting is that it lends legitimacy to any outcome. But yet you guys aren't in line exactly with that process and, you know, overall. Like what would you prefer? Like what other system?

Because I think like right now, we all think this isn't, you know, the best way we could be. Well, so I think people are voting right now, but it's implicit voting. It's kind of like when nodes choose to run the new protocol, they're voting. in a way to choose that particular channel or that new thing. When miners go to validate, they choose by their vote of their resources and their power to move towards that channel. But the thing is, is, you know, to flag some kind of explicit system, what may end up happening is we improperly wait the various stakeholders, and we improperly wait the various people who can vote,

and then you're going to get a lot of problems with representation. So I think we actually are voting right now in many ways, but we're doing it in many tiers in a more dynamic fashion. And it's more implicit than anything. But the foundation does actually do between the EIP editors, there is a vote, there's a sign-off between them, so there is some kind of voting in the foundation. But like, that's not where that ends.

Like there's a lot more voting or representation that happens to get things moving. along with the protocol. Yeah. Wow, do you have thoughts? Yeah, so I mean, I think there's a couple things here. One of them is like, oh, if people had like a formal system that they knew they could follow,

it's easier to participate and that kind of creates some legitimacy, right? And the other is if there's a clear decision to be made and anyone can identify a decision, it's easier to go with it, and so like that creates legitimacy also. But I think that like we can get

legitimacy for blockchain governance without making it owned by people who hold votes. So I don't think that anyone should explicitly control the blockchain. I think it's really dangerous to create a class of like blockchain owners, which is who these voters would be if you did like an on-chain governance type of thing where everyone had to upgrade effectively. So I'm actually very optimistic that we can find legitimate or sources of legitimacy that aren't votes with some specified set of voters.

And I think just leaning on that too, like all of this stuff that's happening right now in terms of what we're doing with this technology and where this space is shaping is really a form of human expression and we're just moving towards certain direction of that expression. And, you know, it's not,

it doesn't have to necessarily be this explicitly scientific kind of thing. It really is a lot of really critical thinkers, expressing in a certain direction that we want to head towards a more fault-tolerant or decentralized world and, you know, we're going to move there and get there. And I think people get way too down in the weeds on the particular nuances of the system, which are important to formalize and finalize, but which are not the be it end-all of the system or how we collectively move forward.

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So something else that I want to ask about is that the power really rests in the people who write the code and the people who suggest code. And that's primarily men, I think. Well, I mean, even, I mean, they're primarily men whether or not the power is there, right? Like, even if it's the, the cryptocurrency is primarily, right? Right, no, I'm not saying it's just Ethereum. But I just was kind of thinking, like, you know, for talking about blockchains and about how they're going to democratize everything and, like, more inclusion for everyone and blah, blah, blah.

And yet we've kind of got this power that's consolidating amongst this group in a way that just perpetuates the inequalities of our current society. Do you have any ideas around how to change that? Well, I mean, I think it's actually much less bad than you've painted it because you do have the ability to opt out and everyone can access the system and the system is provided in a non-discriminatory fashion. Anyone can make a transaction, like really anyone. And in a way that is really super open. And that's the way in which it's inclusive really is that it's like super public.

Like the system is not owned by anyone and it's public. Right, but the rules of the system are being decided by... So I actually, I think with this, once again, what we're seeing is that, you know, there is a predominant male system here that's unfolding, and I think what we're talking about is the shaping of the future of this form of human expression is not being done with enough representatives of the diverse planet that we have, because it's supposed to be collectively for everyone, and it's not supposed to be just particularly,

particularly directed by men. And I think I completely agree with you that women are not represented enough in all the processes and in tech in general. And I think, you know, we definitely need to move toward a world where that's changed and that's addressed. And I think, you know, when we started doing this, like it was basically a bunch of guys that I remember. Definitely.

you know, and so it does need to change, and representation does need to be increased significantly. I think we just need to allow everyone to believe that they can be a part of this, and that it really is truly for all of humanity, and just because it is a bunch of guys in general right now doing it, that doesn't mean that it's the way that it will be or the way that it should be, and I think, like, we'll get, we're moving toward it, and we can do more work to get there, I think. Yeah.

Yeah. I just want to say it's the developers don't control the blockchain. I don't even think the developers actually have that much power. Developers can't really actually do almost anything contentious. They're petrified by their fear of legal consequences. Developers will get you there. By their fear of the community not liking what they do. Developers are really much less empowered than actually you might think.

Even though they're the ones writing the whole system, I mean, so who do you think has the power then? So they have the power to propose things, but if they propose something that people don't accept or don't like, then that looks bad on them and makes, it actually wastes their time and effort and it gives them a lot of headaches. And so what I'm saying is they're not even close to unconstrained.

And actually, I think people who participate in the media actually have a lot of the times much more power over governance than people do in the actual, developers, because if you can set public sentiment around whether or not a fork is good or not, that is much more powerful. Like me or something? No, no, not you specifically. Like maybe CoinDesk or someone like that.

We're all in different stages. CoinDesk, for example, participates in blockchain governance all the time, right? They use trademarks. They don't, and they do it without really noting, they might be confusing. There's lots of ways in which people influence outcomes in the blockchain. space. And actually, the developers, for the most part, are just trying to get along and write code. They don't even, they especially don't want to be involved in any politics. Yeah. And I think that makes it maybe in some way hard to participate in, with the developers. I think the developers

maybe don't recognize the power they have because the people that are writing the rules for the system, they're the ones who really control it. Sure. So developers of projects that haven't been released yet have a tremendous amount of power. They get to set the rules. But after the system is live, yeah. It's a completely different story. I think just to talk to that for a second, too. So we have incredible engineers working on all this stuff, and they're doing fantastic work. But I'm an engineer, and the thing is, is that engineers are great at getting you from point A to B.

But if you don't know what B is, and it's not very clear, they'll try to get there, but they'll fuck it all up if they don't know where the Northern Star is. And trust me, in my own life, I've kept fucking it up a lot because I had no idea what the Northern Star was, but I was trying to get there. I was trying to engineer it, engineer toward it. But if you can't present the clear vision, you can't present the trajectory or the direction, engineers are great and they're incredible and they'll get you there. But if you don't know where there is, it doesn't matter how many engineers you have. You don't know where there is. So I think, you know, yes, engineers are great, but you need to present what it's going to be. And so that's more than engineering.

That's a lot more than just engineering. Yeah, you guys should actually check out a podcast I just released on Unconfirmed, which is my short podcast. It just came up Friday. But there's this woman who's been doing this research on, like, blockchain ethics. And it's just all about how, like, you should be really intentional about thinking about these things. because I think you're right. Everybody's just, like, doing stuff, but nobody's, like, being really conscious about, you know,

where this is all going. And I'm glad, like, you know, I raise these questions because I think they're important, but I think, as you can see, like, maybe you guys are heads down just, like, doing work, but you're not thinking about, like, big picture, you know. Well, I mean, so I think developers tend to not think about big picture. Yeah, I agree.

Developers don't. But there's a lot of people who do, right? There's a lot of people in the blockchain space who are here, most people, I would say, in the blockchain space, are here for, you know, because of some system they're unhappy with or because of some distrust that they have or because of something like there's,

people have really, they're here for a reason. Even though there's a lot of the times developers just get into this mode of where they're here to maintain the code base or they're here to, you know, just do engineering. Yeah. The blockchain space is incredibly intentional. I mean, we are here for a reason.

Yeah. So I just, want to say that I think the buy-in for engineers don't need to be convinced to go change the world. They just say, yeah, I think this could change the world, and they'll go do it. They don't need to be convinced, but they go heads down and then they start working, because that's what they do, and they're fantastic at that. But the thing is, is, you know, with Ethereum in general, like, in my view, and especially after working with it for three years now and working in blockchain for a little longer, most of this technology is a technology of ethics. It's not,

necessarily going to make things more efficient in certain terms. Now, of course, if we come to fruition with what we want to build here, it will be tremendously more efficient. But the more blockchain you jammed down any product right now, it's going to make it fucking way worse. And it just does. Everything makes it way worse. But we're doing it because we believe it's going to democratize

or make it more fair, make it more ethical, make it more inclusive. And that's why we move towards the direction of using it. And the thing is, is like, there are certain things. that it will make tremendously more efficient. And there's no debate about that. And a lot of us are here for efficiency. But there's many of us in the room who are here because they believe it will change the ethical state of our world.

It will change ethics, or at least it will represent how we truly feel about the world and about ethics. And so we're here to try and change the world. I do agree there is a disconnect in many cases where you get your head down and you forget about the world you want to go see in the world you want to go change. and then you just kind of, you know, wake up every now and then and go, oh, yes, that's right, we were supposed to change the world,

and then you, you know, keep working. But the thing is, is like, I do agree you have to keep your eye on the prize that, you know, this is about collectively moving humanity forward, and so we're trying to get there as best we can. I think there's just a lot of different stakeholders and people in the room, but it's supposed to change the world in a positive way. Yeah, I mean. Or at least,

prevent bad outcomes. Yes, or prevent bad outcomes, which is still a better outcome in general. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look at what's going on with the Petro and with North Korea mining cryptocurrency. I mean, I don't know of, like, all the idealistic views about all the good that blockchain can do will, you know, come to fruition. So it's not a foregone conclusion. I do agree that, like, there's a lot of potential there, but. Oh, yeah. But, you know, the story that is going to prevent bad outcomes isn't the same as the story that the good will be more than the bad, right? Definitely people can, will use, will abuse the blockchain and use it for things. that the U.S. government doesn't agree with. But that doesn't mean that, like, the blockchain as a whole is something that isn't

something that we can justify working on. And actually, I think that there's a really good case to be made that they're, like, you know, we want the blockchain to exist, and we want it to exist, and we want blockchain governance to be outside of the jurisdiction of the United States, and we want it to be outside of the jurisdiction of the EU. We want to make sure that we have a system that is kind of globally, and they need to be governed on a global international basis, as opposed to it's something that unilaterally can be ruled on by a single court. Okay, well, let's talk about law, actually, because, like, existing laws,

because that's another topic that I wanted to discuss. How do existing laws intersect with blockchain governance? Well, that's a great question, and it's complicated a little bit, because the different components of blockchain governance are in different jurisdictions. nodes exist in different jurisdictions, and their node operators are presumably subject to the law in that jurisdiction. And, you know, the software developers are in different jurisdictions, and they're presumably subject to the law in their jurisdictions. All of the services, you know, who use the trademark, similarly, presumably are subject to their jurisdiction. And so everyone is subject to the jurisdictions that they are subject to. and the blockchain doesn't exist in just one jurisdiction, right?

It has, it's a consensus protocol where a lot of the value comes from the fact that it expands across many jurisdictions. And that means that everyone will want to have a say on this, you know, and that actually it's kind of complicated. And it's super unclear to me how things will go. But I'm excited it's going to be a lot of popcorn time. So, I mean, if the blockchain is governed by multiple jurisdictions, then have, do you set up rules in such a way where it's not, you know, like, where it can operate across multiple jurisdictions? Well, I mean, we have to coordinate on a global basis.

Yeah. Yeah. I think, so, jurisdictionally, it is complicated. And I think the actual physical act of running nodes or validators or mining or making a transaction from a particular IP is going to be where, you know, the concept of Ethereum, the world of Ethereum, the computing machine. Ethereum actually touches the earth and is then in an actual country's legal jurisdiction. I think the thing is, when we talk about governance, it is considered in a lot of the decision

making as well, like, would this make this particular thing tremendously illegal in most jurisdictions? If it would, then we shouldn't do it. However, we can't operate on a basis where just because it may be minutely or irrelevantly or illegitimately somewhat illegal in certain jurisdictions, a big factor in our decision-making when we're trying to move this particular protocol of technology forward. And I think it is a bit of a balancing or navigation act. But at the same time, like, you know, this is a really formal instantiation of laws and

protocol in our own opt-in system called Ethereum that is moving towards a direction and is currently shaping laws and jurisdictions as well. And laws have to be updated, just like the protocol has to be updated. And I think updates are coming all around the world to both better understand where this is headed and to better adapt to a more reasonable situation. I just think some of us are definitely scared of certain laws or certain things where it doesn't feel like they've built a strong enough understanding of the technology. And they're prematurely regulating certain things that it clearly would present huge hassles, huge inefficiencies, and would definitely ruin this particular benefit of the technology in that jurisdiction. So it's a very complicated balancing act, but I think it's shaping law, it's changing the way lawyers think about law, it's changing the way lawyers think about every day of their lives and lawmakers as well. And so just like any new technology that rapidly changes society, you have to build laws that are going to adapt and change to that.

So, yeah, but it's a really complicated story. And there's this kind of perverse thing that happens also, which is that the lack of legal clarity means that everyone's petrified and no one's willing to take. responsibility for anything that happens. And that means that the probability that there's going to be some blowback that actually warrants legal action is much higher. So, like, people in blockchain governance just don't want the blockchain to be their responsibility because they're afraid about what that will mean from a legal point of view, which makes them, like, directly unable to do the thing that they should be doing in blockchain governance

because they're too scared. And actually, I think the lack of legal clarity is a pretty big issue. And if we had legal clarity, then I think it would be easier to say, think about whether or not you have liabilities as an EP editor. Yeah. And I would also say too just to that, that there's a lot of businesses and a lot of new concepts

that when they started were in what was effectively a legal gray zone, where lawyers and the project has to carefully navigate what they believe to be the most ethical or best practice to move forward in this legal gray zone. And because there

truly isn't laws that are going to either directly interact or not interact, So sometimes it is just a navigation act between lawyers and their best interpretations. And so I think with Ethereum in many ways, there is going to be a lot of legal gray zone that they're constantly trying to clear. And it is a huge navigation act between many different legal analysis of the situation to move there. So, yeah, it's tremendously difficult and tumultuous. And, like, I think everyone in the community has to, you know, they have to feel comfortable that we're navigating that well. and like, especially the EIP editors right now, one of them left because they felt they were

somewhat responsible for the protocol. And to be honest, I can't sit here with legal clarity, and that makes me uncomfortable. I want to say that that's not true, but at the same time, we have to gain more legal clarity, navigate the gray zones. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm going to ask them one last question, but we're going to take Q&A after that. So for those of you who want to ask questions, there's a microphone there. And I think there's another one. Maybe we were there somewhere. I'm not actually sure.

But just so you know, also, this is being recorded for my podcast. We're going to release on my podcast. So I just want you to know that when you state your question, please speak into the microphone, but also we'll go out of my podcast. So just before we take the questions, last question is just about the GDPR, like this right to be forgotten. And how does that intersect with blockchain just quickly? Because there's a lot of people lining up.

Yeah, it's a great question. It's one of these many questions that we don't really. really have an answer to, because basically the law hasn't really been tested and we don't really know, we don't have that much clarity. And also, we certainly are not set up in blockchain governance to comply with GDPR. And that means both that, like, well, note operators may be prepared to take their notes offline. The developers definitely are not prepared to institute GDPR compliance and to the core protocol, partially because that's incredibly contentious and is absolutely not something that it's clear that people would accept.

Okay. Let's move to questions. Go ahead. First question. With regards to the recent parity issues, do you think there will be a hard fork? And if a hard fork will happen, do you think there will be a chain split because of the hard fork? And if there's a chain split, do you think both chains will be, like,

live or one of them will fade into obscurity? Great question. Oh, well, okay, so I think right now, given my current understanding of the parity wallet situation, which to remind everyone, a wallet exploded, people want to change Ethereum to fix it. It happened again, but in a smaller way. So I don't see the sentiment to actually hard fork

or to fork in general. I see that certain projects that have a lot of community involvement definitely support it. But I think in general, the sentiment is not there to support a hard fork. And I think in general, the motivation to push towards that

it's not really there because with the Dow, it was, I think, 7 or 9% of all the ether was trapped in a contract. 14. Yeah, sorry? 14%. Yeah, 14%. Yeah, 14%.

And, and, And so that was a tremendous amount of the ecosystem. And not only that, you know, a tremendous amount of believers in the system. And it was just a different time. It was a much more immature and earlier time. I think right now we're at a different stage where given the amount, given the size, given what happened, given the nature of it, given the sentiment, I don't see a hard fork happening. And if they did, I mean, once again, everyone's welcome to hard fork at any time and create

their own fork and go do that. there is a trademark thing that like you know you have to deal with but yeah let's try to move a bit quickly I don't know how do you feel you want to give 10 seconds on this yeah I mean I actually don't entirely agree with you

Nick I'm not prepared to read the sentiment and so I don't really know okay but what I will say is that I think this conversation should be escalated to a broader conversation about like irregular state transitions the EPS like our responsibilities in governing the platform and basically

to make sure that whatever decision we make now follows a process which will be happy to follow in the future because, as Nick said, there's not a certain level of attention that we had in the Dow and because there's not everyone paying attention to this conversation, the

process that's followed is super important because it can't really be secured just by like a huge threshold of attention. Okay, great. Next question. As individuals that think very deeply about governance, what is your opinion on the

United States governance system, and do you think there are any small changes that we can make to make it better? Ooh, fun. I mean, I do say, I can say that from my outside perspective, it seems like there might be a crisis of legitimacy of some sort, of some branches of government and maybe the media. But it doesn't seem like there's like a crisis of legitimacy of the Constitution, just of particular branches of government. So maybe just like a reset. But honestly, like, I'm not a, this is not my area. Yeah, this is a little bit off topic. Let's take the next question. Also, we're two Canadians sitting here, so we have, you know, we have a wall of hugs that liberalism. I'll tell you my opinion. Yeah, yes. It's different. Hi. I'm interested in the life cycle of the ERC process.

So when there's an Ethereum request for comment made, can you go through the whole life cycle? requests it, who makes it, how is taken, who votes on it. Let's go through maybe, for example, an ERC 23, and how did it originate and what happens to it? I'm actually not too familiar with the ERC lifecycle. I tweeted a flowchart that has it on there. Yeah, so, I mean, like, in broad strokes, you're submitting on a GitHub, not joking. an application that follows a general format that I even yelled at Vitalik because he didn't follow it initially when he made one recently. But it was more fun than seriousness.

But so... So what happens after it's submitted on GitHub? Right. So once you submit it, it's discussed and debated initially. I think... By whom? The initial EIP admins are going to... they do consider all of them.

I think actually they would be better people to tell you all the formal process of it because I'm not an EIP admin, but I will say that an application is made, discussion happens, EIP men's look at it, it's considered and weighed by a lot of different people in the community. If there is an enormous amount of sentiment around changing it, and the foundation does feel the need that they need to move on that EIP, then they come to a vote every now and then on new IPs that they're going to bring in, and they vote on them, and they bring it into the system. Which means that they become a pull request that's merge into the EPS repo,

as opposed to be an issue in the EPS repo. Yeah, so they move from an issue to a pull request, and then it's emerged. But it's technical and talk to the EPS people. Yeah. Okay. Let's move to the next question. Hi, I'd like to ask, so existing net neutrality rates, regulations are scheduled to end in early June in the United States.

Can you speak up again? Sorry, is this better? Yeah, better, yeah. Okay, sorry. So existing net neutrality regulations are scheduled to end in early June in the United States. Is this something that the Ethereum Foundation is, like, is the Ethereum foundation from a governance perspective, worried about the future of net neutrality and the implications of that for Ethereum and public blockchain technologies?

Not as far as I'm aware, but I'm also not think I'd ask. Try to find ISMR. Yeah, I couldn't tell you the foundation's like formal view on that stuff, but I think like some of us are very worried about net neutrality and some of us are also

very market oriented and oddly just in favor of letting things happen. And so I think there's different views on that. But it's hard to know what the foundation's formal view on that. I don't think they've released anything. They might have, but I don't know. Okay, well, we're all out of time,

but thank you so much for all your questions. and thanks for enjoying our conversation.