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name date time location length
ETC Community Call 012
2022-02-08
1500 UTC
Discord
30-60+ mins

Description

A casual voice chat to discuss ideas for ETC. All are welcome.

The ETC Discord can be joined at https://ethereumclassic.org/discord

Please join us in the #community-calls channel ask questions or bring up topics.

This week, with special guest Afri, where we will discuss Hard Fork Coordination.

Agenda

Status

Meeting Minutes

Overview

The meeting was joined by Mr. Afri to discuss hard-fork coordination and various other related topics. Most of the time was allocated to Q&A session held with Mr. Afri. Mr. Afri shared his experience/ knowledge about the goal of hard fork coordination, the factors involved in hard fork coordination and his long lasting relation with blockchain/ Web-3 and ETC. Along with that, he shed light on the things that can go wrong while transitioning to a new fork. He also briefed the participants about the mitigation techniques. Responding to various questions, he explained the network monitoring tools and proposed measures to be taken when there is a chain split. In addition to that, he spelled out the kinds of chain splits, the ways to resolve things when the hard fork results in a chain split and the post scenario of a permanent chain split. He highlighted the role of Hard Fork Coordinators to act as a trusted point of contact and also shared his prospective on multiple client implementations. At the end, he shared his thoughts on the current state of ETC and addressed the question as how the things will go in case of merger of Ethereum. After the Q&A session, the issues like ETCDAO Gigs and Uncle Rewards were discussed in the meeting. However, no significant action was taken on these two points.

Action Points

  • The participants are requested to peruse Henry's Whitepaper so that meaningful discussion could be held on it in the next meeting.
  • Veterans like Afri may be invited in the Weekly Calls as and when possible for benefiting from their experience.
  • One or two proposals on ETCDAO Gig may be submitted within a week so that we may start testing out our system.

Announcements

(1). There would be a dev call on the 21st of February at 1 500 UTC to ponder over the proposal to reject ECIP 104.9 and that would be to reject the SHA-3 proposal. Those who are interested can join the debate through the link in the discord.

(2). There will be discussion on the paper submitted by Henry. He has come up with the proposal to do a hybrid proof-of-work transition using SHA-3 instead of an immediate switchover to some kind of phase transition. You can peruse the Paper through the link given in the Agenda Item.

Preamble

  • Upcoming Mystique Hard Fork is coming on 13th Feb.

  • Currently ETC Coop has taken charge of this fork including coordination/outreach, you can follow bob's twitter.

  • ETC will likely be experiencing hard forks for many years to come, so we wanted to "open source" some of the knowledge that has been accumulated over the years by speaking to a qualified hard fork coordinator, in the hopes that it can help ensure future forks go smoothly

  • We are pleased to be joined by one of the most experienced and qualified coordinators out there, Afri, who is veteran and prolific caretaker of various blockchains and testnets. Afri has previously helped coordinated forks on ETC, such as Agharta etc.

ETCDAO Gig

After the Q&A session, the Chair opened the discussion for ETCDAO Gig. The participants were apprised that an MVP product related to ETC DAO has been launched. It is in a very beta stage at the moment but, with the passage of time, it will evolve into a grants system or funding platform type. Currently, it is just a Github repo at github.com etc gigs. It will grow and then will be used as a testing ground for how we might be able to raise funds and allocate funds via various different DAOs that are running in ETC. It can be built like a business to create positive revenue. We can have a protocol to start building little gigs that generate more funds to build more little gigs and fun more gigs. We can learn a lot from Monero in this regard. The chair requested for submission of one or two proposals in the next week so that we may start testing out the system.

Uncle Rewards, Pool Centralization, Monetary Policy:

Werner informed that Uncle Rewards were brought up by Mr. Crazy who is still on vacation. Explaining the term "Uncle", he stated that an uncle is a block that that is correct and that passes all the controls but does not make it into the longest chain. Instead, some other block makes ways and then future blocks can reference those uncles .There was this other block that was submitted but it was not there to be part of the lowest chain but it would still like to acknowledge that this was a valid block and its content can be considered part of the blockchain. When you make such a reference, then the one making a block that contains such a reference gets a little reward and also the producer of the uncle block gets a reward. It is a relatively significant compensation you get for your uncles. So, they are not worth as much as blocks that move the chain for what they on the longitudinal direction but you still get something for making blocks. While in Classic you get very little and this means that any pool that has a lot of hash weight which is the especially the case around the field Classic where even mine is currently must be close to 50 percent and let me just check how much it has at the moment. At the moment, it has 50.46 percent, which means 7 percent of the global hash rate of Ethereum Classic. So, they are very close to fifty percent already and so this means that because they are so dominant they have a very good chance of being able to make consecutive blocks and cash and receive always the full block rewards while other pools only get well but have a much higher chance of getting only uncle rewards instead of full block rewards. So, this creates an unfairness between the poles which goes beyond the differences you would expect based on hash rate. So, it is basically a bonus for the biggest. It is sort of kind of the subsidiaries for the elites in a way. At the moment, it doesn't seem to happen to the full to the worst extent imaginable which would be the largest pool trying to actually suppress other pools by simply ignoring their blocks, then they could probably already be able to get away with this by just looking at their own blocks and ignoring all others. Eventually, well no other pool could keep up with them and it is unlikely that they all would agree on the understanding of the same competing chain and then they could basically make all the other pools unprofitable. We do not see this happen so that is good that they are not doing anything actively agnostic but still we can see that there are benefits from the synergy effect and this might get worse over time and of course one big issue with having such a massive pool concentration is that the pool diversity system drops so you have less diversity in the software higher risk but you create a single point of failure and it will cross.It will also make the pool more attractive for attacks. The idea is to improve the uncle rewards to make things more attractive for smaller pools and to reduce the risk of an unintentional boosts basically to a very large pool so that the minor distribution would be a bit more even so that we do not get one dominant pool and that could then cause all kinds of centralization issues.

Q&A Session with Mr. Afri

The Q&A session held with Mr. Afri is being reproduced verbatim as under for perusal and record:

Question No 1 : Who is Afri and how has he been involved with blockchain-3 and ETC?

Answer : I am a long-term member of the crypto community. When I found out about Bitcoin, I was really excited. I think I would say I got into the space by mining. I really found it so interesting that you could come so like Satoshi's vision that one CPU is one vote. I mean this does not necessarily hold through today but it was just something that fascinated me about Bitcoin and in the early days, I had really fun just assembling mining with like assembling GPUS and mining not Bitcoin necessarily but like a lot of Altcoin in the back in the day like litecoin and other interesting experiments .And for me, it was really interesting both from a technical perspective, I am an engineer by degrees so I really enjoy the technicalities around us. I was intrigued by the potential impact this could have on us for the financial system or in society in general. So, eventually I came across Classic very early when I read the white paper by Vitalik Buterin and tried to test writing my first smart contract in 2015 which was a complete mess, but eventually I was sucked into Ethereum in first place because it was so interesting to see that you have this entire potential unlocked by a programmable virtual machine, and as I said I am an engineer, I am naturally curious about these technical aspects and I have been a long-term member of this Classic community. I was hard fork coordinator for both Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. This is how the story began.

Question No 2 : What would you say is the goal of hard-fork coordination?

Answer : Hard fork coordination is technically nothing. It is basically the same thing as the traditional software engineering project management. You have to coordinate a group of people to reach a common goal and eventually in the specification to hit a certain deadline of delivering the various pieces of software towards certain deadlines that need to be met, because in this case it is very interesting with all these aspects around consensus between different clients, teams and themes that might work on applications or tests or whatever else involved. So, the heart for coordination is basically just a new application of a traditional software engineering profession and it is a lot around orchestrating engineers, doing a lot of QA but also doing a lot of project management around timing estimating and all these kind of things.

Question No 3 : In the process of coordinating hard fork what are the things that you are trying to avoid happen ?I guess there are a number of potential things that you could say that this hard fork didn't go well. So, what might those be and how do you try and avoid them typically?

Answer: That is an interesting question. So, a hard fork is not really strict. There is no strong definition of this term. But, I think we can all agree that that this is a set of changes applied to a consensus system such as a blockchain protocol that introduces breaking changes. So, the ultimate goal of a hard fork coordinator should be, first of all, to convince or not convince but help the community to find consensus on such an upgrade not only on a technical level but also on a community level. Because there needs to be rough consensus to move forward if the community is not aligned on a hard fork then it might not happen or you risk a chain split if the community goes in different directions or creates different tribes with different opinions and a hard fork coordination basically assists community in finding the path to rough consensus and this is both important on logical level or on community level but also on technical level. The risk here is as to answer your question is that there are many facets to it. It could happen that the community does not care about an upgrade and just does not upgrade at all so you have to take ready but miners keep running the old software they don't upgrade. Another risk is that like only a small amount of miners or other network operators upgrade and then you risk a chain split because you have two different protocol versions and the worst case is obviously that you have if you have different protocol implementations that you have consensus issues that only reveal on the main net activation and this needs to be carefully prevented and prepared and that is all what hard fork coordination is about planning, testing and iterating both on technical but also on community and communications level.

Question No 4 : So a lot of things can go wrong and I guess especially when operating with a live test net. Some of these issues are not going to be apparent even in testing and it is only like an economically incentivized real world use case that some of the problems might emerge?

Answer : Totally this is always a risk and that is why we have so many different test nets in the first place. So, usually the process is that the engineers test everything in private. I do not know under development or feature branches and eventually when they believe in you know software development is never final but in the end, if you believe that your feature is ready, then you will test and talk to the other client teams and then you create private test nets and you test different implementations of the same thing against each other and even then you just grow confident that your code is working and that the other team's code is also working. Eventually, you can approach community and try to schedule these features on test nets and even on test nets, you do not have the same utility as on the main net and you can really try to stress test everything on test net, and even on extremely heavily used test nets such as the old modern Classic test net even such as assume foundations Robson test net, you still can miss certain edge cases and there is always a small risk that the day you activate a feature on main net you miss something and it eventually will trigger only on maintenance and break main net consensus which would be the worst case or the biggest failed of hard-fork coordination in that regard.

Question No 5 : In terms of the actual like fork block arriving on main net what kind of tooling and monitoring systems would a hard fork coordinator typically utilize to ensure that things are going smoothly and how would you detect any anomalies that you were not expecting?

Answer : So, in an actual hard fork different parties involved so the hard fork coordinator as a state it is kind of just orchestrating different involved parties so on the one hand you have the core developers that are basically let's assume for one moment we are talking about the test net and hard fork. So, in case the hard work activates on the coty or mortar test net, then developers could just basically look very closely or at their code or at their clients they run in certain debugging modes or monitoring modes. They try to actively break it by triggering the new features that are activated, but you also have other stakeholders and validators on the proof of authority networks. You have miners on proof of work networks and also these stakeholders need to carefully monitor what and how their nodes operate and as they operate correctly and what I do as a hard fork coordinator usually is that I get a number of bare metal machines and install it .I also try to install all existing protocol implementations, all clients in different configurations. So I usually have a pre-fork and a post fork configuration ready so that I can easily compare outputs of both clients, both versions of the protocol against the matrix of all clients. So, if you have three clients and two different network versions, you have basically a matrix of six different clients and versions and in the moment, the hard fork activates you can use different tools for monitoring what's going on. I personally use the so called fork monitor which is basically just a very tiny html page with some embedded javascript that queries an RPC end point and gets from all these different versions and clients the latest block information and compares a lot of metrics such as block height block cash block and total difficulty and so on. With all these little metrics if you put them all next to each other, you can easily spot any misbehaviors and if something is going wrong, you can immediately spot it. You can immediately talk to developers, ask questions. You can approach miners and so on and so I will leave the fork monitoring dashboard that is one of the most important tools, but there are also other tools that I use mining pool software to run my own miners I use the start of dashboards .These are also called ethernet network startups dashboards where you can get a more wide overview of the network status and there are some more smaller tools you could use.

Question No 6: I see on top of this you are not just monitoring the network but also potentially reaching out to different stakeholders that might include exchanges and wallet operators for example and I guess depending on the type of problem with the fork would depend on who needs to update that client or who is behind on the old network and it seems like you need to be able to contact basically any major player that has not updated properly or needs to push an update and that requires some level of a central point of contact that are somewhat trusted by these other counterparties?

Answer : Yes, in a way this role of hard-fork coordination is a very crucial that needs to be very carefully executed because you are not a hard fork manager, you are not a chief hard fork executor but it needs to be very clearly communicated as that coordination is a process of management without authority or without hierarchy because the fact that you hold a lot of strings in your hands and try to tie them together does not necessarily mean you are in a position of power and you should also not try to become a position of power. So, with that said, I would say you still if you execute this correctly then you come in a position where people trust you and they understand that if you are working for a certain client team or for the econ Classic community in this regard that people accept your kind of authority when you reach out to them and inform them about certain upgrades in future.

Question No 7 : I see in the example of there being some kind of problem with a chain split what would it look like from the hard fork coordinators perspective to try and fix things like if they need to send a message to an exchange to get them to update for example would that be done by the coordinator themselves or by some other would they be asking the client team to request that or who is pushing messages around?

Answer : So I mean we need to differentiate here that there are two different types of communication. So, one is prior to support and the other is post four communications and the communications leading up towards the hard fork are much more relaxed because you still have time to prepare people to upgrade their notes and this is a process that can be fairly decentralized anyone from the community can reach out to coinbase to assume Classic pools, or they can look up network statistics which are the biggest pools which are the most important they can individually reach out they can just share like common resources from the ecips repository or news items just to prove that there is something going on that pooled or other infrastructure providers needs to be aware of this changes a lot in the event of emergency. So, let us assume the hard fork goes wrong we have a consensus issue between two client implementations or something else goes wrong not enough miners upgraded and I do not know the clients try to reorganize to the wrong chain. It is like a complete mess in this regard then the hard fork coordinator has a certain responsibility to orchestrate people or like to delegate people to directly identify the issue as soon as possible. To reach out to involved parties as soon as possible, it is not necessarily the role of the hard fork coordinator to also reach out personally. It has been done a lot of outreach just because when you have this responsibility that everything goes right and nothing goes wrong and you kind of want to have perhaps on all the involved stakeholders. So, it naturally evolves this way that you start also doing the outreach but I would carefully say that it is not necessarily the job of the hard fork coordinator and specifically in decentralized communities anyone could technically do it.

Question No 8: I see I guess one of the challenges that decentralized networks face in particular is the ongoing managing of these books and maintaining some level of trust in a system that can be decentralized enough but also not so decentralized that you know anyone could just like tell any exchange to use this version of the hardware, sorry this version of the software or this version and that could itself cause issues and the other issue I suppose is sometimes exchangers probably do not want to give out their sort of private battle stations and communications channels to anyone. So doing it in a completely in decentralized way seems like it is very challenging going forward. Do you have any ideas of how like what the boundaries are in terms of how decentralized it could be going forward and how like this could be coordinated in a in a sort of standardized way going forward?

Answer : It is not really that it has always been a pain point to reach out to exchanges especially the ones that are not the major players, but this not just the entire, not the very small ones, but like maybe the medium-sized ones. Some are like really difficult to reach the only way you can really find out how to contact them is basically just creating a support ticket on their zendesk, and it is like really annoying and you get like one support employee that tells you that nothing is wrong and their system is fully operational and then you roll your eyes and say no that is not my point and but I am not coming with a recipe for this. I know that in the past both ETC labs and ETC cooperate, if they were facilitating strong ties towards certain infrastructure providers or exchanges they used just through established business connections contacts, but also through other official channels and I know that I do not know. For example, he maintains a long list of contacts which is well around for these cases and there is really a good recipe. Ecosystem is changing so fast with each and every hard fork that you have to like basically start all over and find out who are the biggest exchanges with regard to volume. So, when I say the biggest unit is important because how much money is at risk who are the biggest miners with regard to network sure. So, how this is important because the more hatch rate you have on the right side of the consensus the better your hard fork will execute or the more smooth, the builder hard work be and this is basically each and every hard fork you have to basically reiterate your list and check, and these players still do you have contacts, do you know anyone worst contact, and still I would hold my point that this is still the processes can be decentralized, because in a large community many people know many more people and you can basically facilitate these contacts and keep them alive, but then again there is no cookbook for this situation. There is no definite guide to upgrading a protocol with regard to communications.

Question No 9: Right, very interesting in the case of a let us say ,it is a temporary chain split because of some client incompatibility, are there any heuristics that are like go-to that you can use to say this side is wrong and they need to upgrade versus the other side like if two clients have the same version and you are not really sure which one is misbehaving like how do you decide which chain to follow in the case of a chain split like that, or is that not really a problem?

Answer : I would not rule this out it certainly is something is always a problem if something goes wrong, how fast can you identify the issue, how fast can you identify rules responsible not in term of head but in term of which line of code is responsible. How fast can the developers fix it patch it releases and announces it, and I would carefully argue this is something where the core developers are really. This is one of the biggest responsibilities during hard forks that might go wrong that they need to be very quick in identifying what the issue is and then based on that you can make calls but I would never make a call without knowing what is going on or what could be wrong. So, it is in most cases you can fairly and quickly find out which of the clients or which of the versions of the client or which parts of the code base misbehave and once you have identified that you can make pre-announcements. Once it is patched and released you can make announcements to to act upon that is but I would say it is a really a huge responsibility on core developers in such a really tough situation to quickly identify these issues and make the calls.

Question No 10 : Let us see this kind of ties in the debate slash conversation about client diversity and whether or not having multiple clients is worth the benefit of these potential problems. When would it be better to have a system closer to Bitcoin where there is a single source of truth in terms of the client, the reference client and then other clients can support it, but if ever there is a consensus issue then it always defaults to one client and they don't have to maintain multiple channels to different core devs, do you have thoughts on the client diversity issue?

Answer : Yes, totally I mean this is just the answer to this question is highly opinionated and I know that there is a Bitcoin way with just one implementation and there is an assumed way with as many implementations as possible and I do not know what is your opinion on that I would say I have been kind of slowly growing into this Humidism Classic ecosystem and I have been working at parity technologies with Gavin wood for several years and he always said I do not know if you know what let me just quickly tell you a story about the parity Bitcoin client. I do not know if anyone remembers or even knows about this Gavin Wood released a parity Bitcoin client I think in 2018 or in 2017 and this was the only client as far as I know back in the day that did not use this central Bitcoin consensus and he refused to use this consensus library published by the Bitcoin core developers and he was attacked heavily for doing this because they said he puts the network at risk. He puts consensus at risk by creating a secondary implementation of the consensus protocol but then again he defended anyone should be able to build their own implementation of this decentralized protocol because if there is a bug in the in the main or in the quote-unquote official implementation, how do you know if there is not an additional implementation and this is a technical aspect, but there is also the political aspect of protocol governments if you have only one implementation that is maybe controlled by only one entity. How do you ensure that this one entity does not abuse a position of power that just you need to literally change this implementation and this is now I can conclude my personal opinion is that the Ethereum assumed Classic way is the better one because by distributing this power of implementation to two three or more teams, ensures whenever anyone wants to make change to the consensus protocol it needs to go not to one place but to all teams and need to convince all teams or the community all together and I believe this is technically a risk I agree and I understand that Bitcoin believes in being technically more on a conservative secure side, but on the political side, I believe it is the strength of having multiple clients implementations for the sake of being more resistant. It is some kind of Meta decentralization you cannot just go to one client and hack it or even if there is a bug in one client you still have other clients that run the correct protocol and it is just I would argue that client diversity is a strength rather than a weakness.

Question No 11 : Yes, it is a very sort of esoteric topic and one that I think there are pros and cons to both sides of the argument and the additional complexity and coordination effort involved can definitely pay off in a lot of cases. I am still personally not really decided as to whether or not diversity without a single at least like clear defined thing is better I am still open to the debate really but hint is one I think that is extremely interesting nonetheless?

Answer : Totally, it is an interesting topic and we have different size of black blockchain ecosystems, I mean Bitcoin is a huge ecosystem assume maybe, it is a huge polka dot might become a huge ecosystem. I would carefully say that assume Classic is more like a medium-sized ecosystem they still have this the strength or the ability to maintain more than one client implementation, but again you can look at all these smaller ecosystems you name it you just scroll down a coin market cap and they only have one implementation and you never know there is a bug in their code. Do they even test, do they even have the ability to test this again, do they have any specification, how do they know that there is a bug and if there is a bug this is part of the protocol now because once a bug is included in a block on a public blockchain, most blockchains would not re-roll a royal back you know and therefore I would say it is very good for issuing Classic to still have this feature of having at least two clients that can be taking on each other. So, I would say it is one of some more major blockchain ecosystems out there.

Question No 12 : Right and I believe that very client diversity has in the past saved Ethereum Classic I think back in Shanghai spurious dragon hard fork right there was a bug in one of the clients that would have caused a major network problem but luckily parity did not have that bug so at least part of the net was able to continue?

Answer: Exactly.

Question No 13 : Okay, so moving on to the topic of I guess the current state of affairs with regards to ETC and what you think having spent a good number of years in the ETC ecosystem of recent events that you know the treasury debate. I am not sure if you've been following the shah 3 but what's your general sort of impression of where ETC is right now?

Answer : That is a tough question I mean is serum Classic is moving very slowly and again this is something you can discuss about this is a feature actually is it like doing the Bitcoin way just rather not move at all before breaking things or could there be more accelerated development towards building out the ecosystem being more developer or application friendly. I do not know I would carefully say esteem Classic has always been in this risk area between these two things and always been in this risk to be not strong enough to be relevant for application developers but also not fast enough to make a difference. So, it is difficult to say but it was also a very broad question so maybe you can talk about certain aspects of what's going on right now in the past.

Question No 14 : Let us put it this way what was it about Ethereum Classic that drew you to it in the first place, and why are we even working on a Classic at all?

Answer : I mean I have been in Classic from the beginning and I have been very close to the Robin Hood group I have never acted upon it, but I have been in touch with them for a long time and I have always been making jokes about how to explain your tax advisor that you not only have one issue but two issues now and I have been always following along and eventually when this card development team kind of imploded due to actions I do not want to comment on right now. It was basically a matter of how can is sum Classic be saved and be moved forward and this was when I realized that I actually have a set of ideas that could improve the network or the net the protocol and eventually stepped up to join edc labs and assist the ECIP editors with hardware coordination and we executed a series of protocol upgrades that brought issue Classic to the point where it is today and I think the most important feature of issuing Classic is as of today protocol parity was with other networks which is really not to underestimate because all tooling solidity everything if you everywhere to have a different version of the evm on Ethereum Classic.It would be a huge mess and we would have to provide our own tooling for developers and this is something I would argue is the biggest benefit of using a swim Classic today and i would say I am partially proud that I could assist Ethereum Classic do it over the last years in getting there and sticking there and yes I think it was also great to meet many people of the issuing Classic community in Vancouver at the ETC summit and there was so much energy, so much good energy and so many people building and moving forward it was a great time.

Question No 15 : Yes, I agree to everything you have said there and for sure the tooling point is on point I really do believe that a lot of the innovation happening on Ethereum, is inherited only because of that fact and the compatibility is super important to maintain but this kind of leads into the next question and the next like obvious big thing on the horizon that is not specifically on ETC but massively affects. It is the merge on Ethereum main net and how do you think well first of all is it going to happen and if it does, do you think miners are going to try and mine the old chain and continue like Ethereum main net version one and if not are they going to come to ETC and if they do does that pose a problem for atc or is it a benefit in your in your eyes?

Answer : yes, that are many questions.So, first of all, I am a miner by heart so I love just how slower miners does not matter. I love this feature of proof of work that anyone can be part of the consensus of the protocol and that is why I believe proof of work is a great way of consensus. I was once going to a museum here in Berlin, they had I think a small programmable calculator that was mining Bitcoin blocks and printing them out on a small piece of paper. So it is literally putting every hash on paper and it was so slow that it was ridiculous to watch but then again is not it amazing that even a small calculator could I know it is not practical, but it is theoretically possible that this calculate their minds a Bitcoin block that just has this potential here and this is something that you entirely lose with proof of stake. There is nothing like this in proof of stake and it is an entire paradigm shift that is just not an easy move when I understand that many people call for example for Bitcoin to also move to proof of stake and then this entire energy consumption debate that everyone hates so much kicks off again but then again ask yourself what is the alternative and I believe proof of stake is not a good replacement for proof of work in terms of their features it gives you and to your question with regard is the Ethereum would totally happen because there I have been contributing to some of the issues to work in the last two years and I am a kind of stopped contributing because it was such a difficult development environment. People are like very competitive you can feel that there is a huge pressure on Ethereum to deliver proof of stake because it has been promised since I do not know six years, because this repeated Bitcoin energy consumption or eco energy consumption debate they just want to ship it no matter what it costs and it will happen. I cannot tell when it will definitely happen and I have mixed feelings about this and with regards to will miners continue mining the proof of work chain. I do not think so for different reasons because the reason number one is that the difficulty bomb is still something that would have to be removed actively. So, this means in addition to the merge you would also have an active actively proposed hard fork to remove the difficulty bone bomb and in this because you have to actively propose it, you need to come up with a name you would have to call it estrogen Classic Classic or Ethereum Classic two or whatever and this is what people will not accept as real Ethereum or Ethereum Classic or issue Classic two or whatever you would call it and the other thing is that I believe that because this entire assumed ecosystem is so keen on delivering proof of stake and I do not know how many million have been deposited onto the beacon chain and already it is basically we are beyond that point of return and Ethereum will certainly move to the proof-of-stake consensus algorithm for sure. Whenever this will happen I do not know but I do not think there is any proof of work future in the Ethiopian foundation network and if these miners will actually move to ecom Classic this is something we will have to see but fact is that there are not so many proof-of-stake systems left and I am sorry, proof of work and Bitcoin is the biggest proof of work network and what comes next right now it is Ethereum but what will be the next one after Ethereum switches to proof of stake. We don't know there is a lot of hash rate that needs to be redistributed and we cannot really tell but if you scroll a coin market cap like by or coin whatever metrics you use most of the top coins are actually moving towards proof of stake and it does not leave many options for miners or mining hardware.

Question No 16: Right, I even heard that doge coin is planning a switch to prove a stake or something it is kind of surprising and yes, I would add that the whole defy ecosystem is basically the deciding factor I think in terms of where the value is going to shift and it seems like it is in their interest if they are holding either to go to staking I think a lot of them, seem to believe that they can reap the rewards of staking and get that value that miners would be providing so in terms of if there was an exodus of miners looking for other chains. This would mean there is a lot of hash rate going around as you mentioned and there are some people in the shah 3 debate they're saying that this is a very dangerous thing for Ethereum Classic because Ethereum Classic will no longer be profitable for most miners and the latent hash rate is just going to be used to 51 attack the chain, do you think that is a reasonable possibility or do you think they're more likely to just honestly mind the chain?

Answer : I mean to answer this question you need to speculate a lot I would argue that 51 percent attacks are very involved and it happened to assume Classic it happened to other chains. It will certainly happen in future again whenever someone believes the effort you put in there is worse the risks you are taking and the 51percent attack is much more complex than having 51 percent of the network hash rate is much more complex because you also need to have someone you can double spend on you need some smaller or mid-size exchange that you can execute these attacks on and this comes with a lot of work. So, I believe there is a fair amount of miners that just do not care as long as they get more coins out of it than they pay on electricity then they would rather mine honestly than go through this extra mile of preparing and executing a very risky 51percent attack right.

Question No 17 : Thanks for your perspective on that is good to add some additional viewpoints into this debate now we're nearing the end of the pre-planned questions and I will open this up to the chat shortly but I just wanted to end on a kind of open thing for your effort what are you up to these days and is there anything you wanted to add to this discussion or wanted to mention a shout out or something like that?

Answer : that is a great question I mean I am working at chain safe now chainsaw systems is it a block chain development company that is very chain agnostic and this is something I really appreciated. I have been in Bitcoin for so long I have been experimenting and developing for so many different altcoins. I have been in this room, I have been in the Classic, I have tried to launch the poker parachainersit is just the system ecosystem is so interesting to just be limited to one project and I would just say everyone should be open to all the projects and just you can easily build on multiple block chains if you want to and you should not be sold to one solution in first place and this is something I appreciate about working at chain safe. I can work on many different block chain ecosystems in many different programming languages without being sold or sold out to one solution and this is something I would just leave here for everyone to, I do not know to appreciate it or hate me for that this is something I do right now and in my free time I actually started to work on evm tooling I am maintaining. I took over maintaining the ruby cerium gem so if any one of you builds applications in ruby or on rails and hit me up it has Ethereum Classic support that is what I do right now.

Question No 18: Yes, I have a question, okay what do you think may happen to Ethereum Classic ecosystem if a chain split would happen a permanent step in case one side moves to SHA-3 and the other one continues to mine the current algorithm?

Answer : Just look at Bitcoin cash and Bitcoin as we, I would say it is always possible and it is I mean we have to appreciate this opportunity that communities if there is no rough consensus or is there no consensus at all. It is always a feature I would say that communities can just fork off if this ETC hatch versus charge three debate can never be resolved it. I mean it might be even healthy for the ecosystem to create two smaller ecosystems or communities that not only separate logically but also technically. Of course, it has shown in the past that there will be always one strong side of the chain and one at one more week fork. So I would not encourage to split the chain over consensus issues but in in the last step you could always do this and consider individuals would not be afraid of forking or splitting if there is no other way.

Question No 19: But in terms of daffy or not, or the apps how do you see this change?

Answer : Yes, it is very involved everyone not only node operators or miners have to make a decision which chains they want to support, but also everyone in communities includes developers of applications of decentralized exchanges d5 everyone has to make call and I know I remember an issue foundation network there, where this risk of I remember when the parity multisec was hacked there was a strong debate what if parity just forks this theorem and unlocks their funds on a minority chain and everyone was like freaking out about the impact on applications from met mask over stable coins such as die what happens to a forked stable coin and I know this is like very involved and that is in first place why it should be avoided. they should roughly consensus that they should be always the ultimate goal but that said as I said there is always this opportunity to decide to make this final decision to say okay. We want this feature so hard that we are willing to fork off and then everyone needs to make the call will your stay let us assume you have a defy stable coin, will you support it on network or network b or will you even go that far that you should support it on both sides contentious as hard forks are always a very difficult task to pull off and many people lost many people lost money in the Dao hard fork for example, when Nissium foundation patched a protocol and there was replay detections on replay attacks on Ethereum Classic and this one Classic was forced to implement a different chain and it is always not recommended but it is still a possible route thank you.

Question No 20 : Another question is related to the treasury debate what are your thoughts on attacks for miners for getting basically money to fund development improvements research and stuff like that?

Answer : This is a very nuanced question the general sentiment I would say it is always good to have funding for ecosystem is always crucial to have funding for developers especially for core development. The treasury proposals we have seen on issue Classic were kind of controversial and this is mainly because of the power that comes with this responsibility. This potential of abuse that could be introduced so the question is less of a technical one but more of the governance question how do you have much money, do you put where who is controlling,who gets money ,how do you make change to the system and I was in the beginning I was following this debate closely and I was another impression this was going completely backwards that some stakeholders and ecosystem tried to fill their own pockets based on those proposals. So, I believe it is better to have no treasury than something like that was proposed back in the day, but then again it is always good to explore ways to fund development long term and communities should not be afraid of doing so, and you could always I mean Islam Classic has a very strictly defined monetary policy you could always revise this, but this is something you need to do with the entire community together, you need to clearly define the goals who should be funded, how much funding is acceptable and also how much can you take away from miners or will you create additional block rewards that not go to miners but to a treasury. However you call it ,you map it out, you need to be very careful and I would not say it should not be done but it is very difficult to do it in a fair way and eventually all mechanisms of governments around us in the end are very messy, let us face it.

Question No 21: Thank you, this is my last question. Do you they think that the developers are now scared of coming to edc or they just bypass it and develop on Ethereum because there is more money there and more users what they think it is is a slowing development for ETC?

Answer : Yes, that is an interesting question I mean there was a time when Ethereum clearly did not scale when the econ foundation network was so contested that you had to pay thousands of dollars to get a transaction broadcasters brought broadcast and included in the blog. This was a time before layer 2 was a thing when side chains were seeing like. I would say POA network was an interesting example x die, these are all chains that were created well after Ethereum existed issue Classic existed was the ultimate goal to provide a cheaper alternative in parallel to the issue foundation network. This is something I have always believed was a huge chance for Ethereum Classic that is why I also tried to assist in bringing issue Classic back to protocol parity so that Ethereum developers could also have this option to not only deploy to one chain but to choose which chain they deployed on and eventually in the end this never worked out and I believe this is always complicated because the differences between assume Classic and assume foundation networks, are not only of technical nature but also in political nature and people rather decided to deploy applications on extern network orit is called nosos network. Now because they believed they do not or they did not want to get involved in politics because the moment you move an application from issue foundation network to assume Classic network it could necessarily have to be but it could look like to outsiders as a political act and this is probably something that prevented a lot of applications to experiment with issue Classic in first place. Today I would say it is a bit more as it is a different situation because now we see layer twos coming up so layer ones in general lose relevance a little bit and at least from an application perspective. So in 2022 I would say it is really even more difficult for his home Classic to attract developers.

Question No 22: Hey afraid Henry, good to hear from you thanks for insight on the hard fork we have always wondered what goes on in the background. My question is related to Ethereum, what do you think the chances are of a 1.0 fork and you know it does pose a lot of difficulties for people trying to carry on the 1.0 chain as they have to try and maintain the for 2.0 chain which is hard to do and then we have also got you know threat of the ice age and the higher difficulty that the core does from Ethereum can impose ?

Answer : Hey Henry thank you for this question as I said earlier I believe the chances for an east one fork are very long for multiple reasons so the one reason is that removing the difficulty bomb would be an active fork you would have to actively fork against the merch you cannot only maintain the status quo and lean back and say we are the original econ foundation network but you would actively have to oppose what not two ,not three but like eight or nine client teams have been working on for several years so this sees one thing and the other thing is that I believe that miners really do not care too much politically about how a network evolves. I mean they are not very happy about the move to proof of stake but I also believe they will not necessarily mine a debt chain because they also have to pay energy bills in the end and the risk that these coins are worthless are fairly high and also I mean technically proof of fake has always been only assumed is on the Ethereum roadmap so it is really difficult to argue that there is some value behind this is one proof of work fork coins.

Question** No 23**: This is Kevin again I just wanted to thank you for continuing to this project as it is pretty noble of you, but about a potential switch of the mining algorithm like I totally agree with you and you know the bit mains user activated hard fork and then be cash and then you know segwit2x and none of that really ever happened because there just was not you know what you were talking about like, there was not any as you know other clients available but I think you make some really good points. I think a lot more people should listen to you more often and thanks for being around.

Answer : Well thanks for having me. I mean it is still interesting developments on Ethereum Classic. I am really curious to see how it moves and works out as I am also interested about I did not really follow but how your discussion around the 1559 concluded in the end. I just saw today that you eventually decided not to include it. I mean I know that you never wanted to include it and it makes totally sense not to include but like not having type two transaction types or a base fee up code for compatibility. It is still interesting because now we are leaving basically the field of protocol parity a little bit.

Question No 24 : Yes, the most definitely would you say or think you know maybe Ethereum is sort of like a test net for Ethereum Classic in a sense?

Answer : In a sense maybe, I mean they have a lot of new features and a lot of users that test these features in the end assume Classic can just cherry pick and technically that is what sim Classic has done in the last years. Yes, I would in 2022, I would even argue it might be worth revisiting the monetary policy of issuing Classic under the circumstances of burning minor fees as it happens with eip 1559, but this is I am just more interested in the technical implications but I am not really following or thinking about economic implications. So, just I am not really opinionated about it, I am just coming more from an application or tooling developer and seeing that Ethereum Classic will not really support type 2 transactions which most of the EVM tooling is moving towards making a default.

Question No 25 :Yes, that was actually one of the concerns at the very beginning of the monetary policy debate that is to happen eventually you know there is not going to be you know the mining rewards there to be sufficient for developers to develop. So, I think for sure that'll probably be revisited because from what I understand and all the research I have looked at everything I have seen ,it was geared more towards the investor side so it will be interesting to see the developer side share their thoughts and opinion on that.

Answer : yes, totally.

Question No 26 : With regards to the base fee opcode lack of support, I am also not sure why that was intentionally avoided. I think it was rejected from the mystique fork right but maybe, it will be added later on and potentially if Ethereum Classic implements a versioning system then that could also be added as one of the many EVM versions that it supports?

Answer : I think the reasoning was that by not completely implementing 1559 this opens up a lot of unknown vectors because you would have to partially implement it and change the way it is supposed to work and by even setting base feed to zero or hard codings certain aspects that we do not want means introducing a lot of complexity and this is probably the reason for convenience that you just or the quarterback decided against implementing it and makes sense from a technical perspective but looking at all as I said I am coming from a developer perspective that most wallets move towards and I mean issue foundation network is the biggest EVM network we have to admit this and they in most cases default to type 2 or like eip 1559 transactions by default because it is otherwise it would be a waste of transaction fees on the issue network and therefore, it could further broaden the gap between Ethereum and the assume Classic and make it more difficult for assume developers to build and deploy applications on the same Classic.

Question No 27: I see so this is a compatibility issue that will affect wallet and message signing primarily or transaction construction as opposed to contract authoring, is that correct?

Answer : Yes, this is basically about how transactions look like but I mean Ethereum Classic, so there are transaction envelopes I don't know how familiar you are this is there are legacy transactions that are basically just the most simple way to have a transaction on an EVM network and these basically get wrapped in an envelope and Ethereum Classic already has this feature ,there are so called type 1 transactions that have this feature. So, you could, maybe also have a different type two implementations that just maps. I don't know max priority fee to guess price or something like that just because the only difference between eip1559 transactions from a transaction perspective to legacy transaction, also called type zero transaction is that you have two different types of gas price.

Question No 28: I have one question about the timing of parts of a hard fork if we look at the final stages of a hard fork then there are things like having a feature freeze for all the things that should go into it, then a point where all the relevant code should be stable and once you have reached that then I guess the next step would be to set that a square transition block just schedule when the hard work will happen and make an announcement and well first of all do I get this sequence right, would you do things in a different order and the second question would be then how much time would pass between the announcement and the actual forks, how much time do people in general need to do I mean like exchange operators and such or maybe wallet developers who have not been paid attention yet h ow much time do they need after the announcement to get right out there on their side?

Answer: That is a very interesting question always there is no general rule to this and that has a lot of moving parts here that need to work together correctly in case to ensure that hard fork will execute properly on a given timeline. I personally always coordinated hard forked backboards so, if you would task me with coordinating a hard fork on Ethereum Classic today I would say okay. Let us do it in June that is five months and I think the minimum time, and minimum convenient time to execute a hard fork if you already know what the features are then you would have to go through governance and I would do this entire process of implementing it and testing it and finding rough consensus something that can be executed in parallel that is not blocked by timing a hard fork because you can always adjust dates later but ideally you don't want to adjust dates too often so it will create confusion between node runners and miners exchanges. You want to avoid announcing dates before you actually know when you want to. So let us assume you want to have five or six months' time now in advance to plan and execute this fork then you basically go backwards to say let us talk on Wednesday the June , 21st and then you go backwards okay. You want to have at least six if not eight weeks of stable test net activate activation so you go six weeks before June 21st. So, you basically have beginning of May this would be the last test net activation. In this case on coty test net maybe two weeks before so, end of April you would do a motor test net more but much less stable than cotty so you would do a mortar test activation and now you already have a very tight timeline. So you already see okay in the end of April is just two months out. So you would have to deliver this entire development cycle this entire private testing or internal testing cycle needs to be delivered within the next. Let us say eight to nine weeks starting now in February and this would also include the ECIP governance process so you would make a proposal to make this hard fork on the state and you can do already run some numbers and suggest number sit is really always numbers block numbers with moving target and it is very difficult to estimate months in advance because block times on proof of work networks are very strong. They are not very consistent. Unfortunately soit is really hard to predict months in advance. So, I think my point is if you want to do a hard fork you basically define a wanted hard fork date in the future and try to estimate, will this work also by calculating backwards the main net activation, the test net activation ,the internal feature freeze and internal testing deadlines and this needs to be coordinated with the core developers and they say yes this is possible or they know they say no it is not or they say it is possible but we need to have certainty from the community governance or from the ECIP process. We don't have some client teams might say they don't start implementing a feature unless it is in last call soas you see there are many moving parts to this. I hope this answers your question.

Question No 29 : It seems like the main arguments for SHA-3 to be implemented that for not to be for them, not to be until implemented is a6 will take over um and then you know it will be a centralized network um and then the opposite side is that you know all these GPU miners are just going to overwhelm the network with their you know one pita hash and that's gonna you know just uh destroy uh ETC um but I mean just like with Bitcoin and how that progressed from when it did when it was worth pennies to where it is now um do you think that would be the most likely um way forward for it or I guess the path of least resistance for that um you know the mining ecosystem

Answer : I honestly don't know um I am I am a big fan of SHA-3 but that said I am also a big fan of many other algorithms uh iron in this entire CPU mining versus GPU mining uh versus specialized hardware FPGAS A6 I never really found my spot in this debate because I can't really tell what's better this is you know you have this CPU mining networks that are run by botnets basically you have this uh you have gpu mining networks that have like this seek I mean there are people that claim that there's there's no way to make something CPU proof gpu asic resistant in first place and you can always have you can tell the community is it is gpo only and then you have the com companies see secretly having specialized chips mining it anyways on their more efficient hardware I don't know I i would say I would carefully say something like chassis would be very fair because it is like a gold standard in cryptography it would it is extremely efficient and fast and it would be easy to optimize for anyone who has access to building specialized hardware and it is also um there might be even uh applications for specialized three beyond mining I don't know I am not an expert on that but I would carefully say it is you should not be afraid of moving towards something like char sri I am not necessarily saying you should do it but I am also not a very opposed either but since we are on a nissium Classic call looking back at I don't know maybe , did this talk in Vancouver and EDC summit advocating for three in 2019 and then looking at the horrible I am I mean I am happy that all teams that were involved in the last months and years where we had to mitigate 51 attacks and patch different you know we had this mess protocol we had we moved from east to ETC all these solutions they kind of worked and we managed to prevent further attacks but then again what if we had taken alex seriously in 2019 and just executed upon his ideas and stand out from move away from Ethereum uh move towards a different algorithm that could be more efficient more fairly distributed with regards to hardware and I mean um yeah what if I mean there's a lot of water autism but uh yeah I cannot give a definite answer but I would say it you should not be afraid of and I also like a lot uh henry's idea about having even more than one algorithm if it is carefully specked out.

Question** No 30**:Afri I want to say um I want to say thank you so much for all your work on the protocol parody I remember the days when you were working on this quite a bit and and um I think that that was a really big value lift for this network one thing I heard you talking and you might have addressed this earlier I apologize I have been kind of in and out of this call was um a lack of users and how we didn't see the shift when the fee markets were extremely high on Ethereum I also was of the opinion that we might start seeing that migration over to Ethereum Classic my question to you is do you have any thoughts on um why we didn't see that shift and perhaps there's some bridges or some sort of products protocols maybe on top of Ethereum Classic that would help in kind of ushering people over to the network um I believe that you cited you know people didn't want the political statement but nowadays I think that that's kind of fallen to the wayside as we've seen with finance smart chain and some of the other ones where um they kind of created those type of bridges some through their centralized exchanges um and you started seeing protocols pop up on those other EVMS do you have any opinion on some of the high priority um protocols that need to be built on Ethereum Classic to try to jumpstart that type of ecosystem

Answer : It is a really interesting one I think it all comes down to network effect do you want to do d5 on issue Classic if there's only limited set of exchanges if there is only limited set of tokens you can trade if there are not sufficient bridges to other networks and um I don't really have a protocol to recommend um I would just try to I mean we are running out of time but I would try to for everyone in new Zealand Classic to zoom out and think about what could be two options what could be the opportunities for assume Classic going forward because I mean let's face it in 2022 assume Classic really you cannot only be immutable and have a monetary policy and stick to your values and then again nobody I am I am trying to be provocative please don't take my word for it but just nobody cares to build applications on museum Classic you need to try to define why you need to find out why would people build on this and maybe it is worse to like take a look at I mentioned layer twos earlier on Ethereum which kind of they kind of fill this gap between they still use this network effect from all these applications and protocols available on Ethereum foundation network but they also fill the skip of being cheaper and faster and still as accessible as issue foundation maintenance but also what I don't know how many of you are following the network effects of polkadot which is also interesting they also have EVM chains they also have very similar uh applications they even use they even work with the same uh browser plugins and they came much later than issue Classic how did they build this up from scratch how what did they do to attract so many people to actually do uh defy on pokedot or I don't know there are other pockets just one example I i could go on and go on um for isilon Classic specifically it might be time to like just really step back zoom out and like get this helicopter view of this ecosystem and think if I were an application developer what needs to happen to actually use or make this attractive to deploy my applications on this network and or as a user stifle user as a trader whatever why would I use sim Classic and maybe it is really time for assume Classic to if cells desire to be more attractive for developers and users maybe it is time to also be open for more radical changes in in the technology stack in in how you position yourself do you always want to be a little sister of Ethereum foundation network or do you want to maybe do a bold move towards a new ecosystem do you want to build upon a much more modern technology stick all these things that could be considerated but you would have to be courageous and step out of this little bsu and coregas cloud is step out of this ecip process I am not saying you should ignore all this and it is so far these values are very high goods in the community and they should be preserved but you should allow yourself to think about where to move to from the point we are here today and we are still here this is a good thing but you also need to think where do you want to go and um eventually this is something I believe this is not a technical not necessarily a technical question but just something um issue Classic needs to needs to discuss uh openly and yeah this is um a discussion I would happy to follow yeah but we are running out of time yeah thank you I am free you've been super generous with your time and left us with a lot of amazing uh food for thought so uh we are over time.

Transcript

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Timestamp
00:00 [Music]
00:03 hello and welcome
00:05 to ethereum classic community calls
00:09 etc community course is a weekly voice
00:11 chat that happens on the ethereum
00:12 classic discord server every tuesday
00:14 usually at 1500 hours utc
00:17 the content of these calls is decided by
00:19 the etc community if you'd like to
00:20 contribute you can join us on discord at
00:22 ethereumclassic.org discord and you'll
00:25 find us in the community course channel
00:27 if you'd like to help spread the good
00:28 word of classic make sure you comment on
00:30 this video like it subscribe share and
00:33 hit the notification bell
00:36 thanks to all involved in contributing
00:38 to etc
00:43 hello and welcome to ethereum classic
00:44 community call number 12 on the 8th of
00:47 february 2022. today we're joined by
00:50 special guest afri to discuss
00:53 hard-fought coordination as well as
00:54 various other etc related topics we've
00:57 been collecting questions from the
00:58 community this week and a few lined up
01:00 but there will be opportunity later on
01:01 to ask questions directly if you're
01:02 joining us on the voice chat or you can
01:04 post a message in the community calls
01:06 channel and we'll keep an eye on that
01:07 before we begin with the q a i just
01:09 wanted to
01:10 make a couple of quick announcements
01:12 both related to shah 3 debate which is
01:16 ongoing
01:17 first there is a dev call
01:19 on the 21st of february
01:22 at 1 500 utc
01:24 which we'll be discussing a proposal to
01:27 reject
01:28 ecip 104.9 and that would be to reject
01:31 the sha-3 proposal so if you're
01:34 interested in joining that debate
01:37 it's it's planned to
01:39 there's a link in the uh the discord as
01:42 well as the um
01:43 the show notes for this um so you can
01:46 join us on the 21st of february there's
01:49 also a
01:51 paper from henry who has just updated
01:54 the community with his proposal to
01:57 do a hybrid proof-of-work uh transition
02:00 using sha-3 so instead of a an immediate
02:03 switchover some kind of phase transition
02:05 i believe
02:06 this white paper has literally just
02:08 landed so
02:09 um you're the first to hear about it and
02:12 there will also be a link
02:14 in the agenda item to that white paper
02:17 and we hope to be discussing that white
02:19 paper in a bit more detail next week
02:22 but we will
02:24 recommend you read that
02:26 if you're interested in continuing the
02:28 debate there so um
02:30 let's kick things off with the
02:32 q a with afri so
02:34 just a bit of background first of all
02:36 there is an upcoming hard fork on
02:38 ethereum classic called mystique which
02:40 is landing on the 13th of february now
02:43 previous hard forks i believe have been
02:46 having a dedicated hardfought
02:47 coordinator luckily the same is true
02:50 this time with etc
02:52 etc co-op taking charge of this fork and
02:54 they'll be helping with coordination
02:57 you can follow bob's twitter with
02:58 updates about that and thank you to
03:01 etc co-op as etc is likely to be
03:03 experiencing hard forks for many years
03:05 to come we wanted to open source some of
03:08 the knowledge that has been accumulated
03:09 over the years by speaking to a
03:11 qualified hard-fought coordinator in
03:13 hopes that it can help ensure future
03:15 forks go smoothly so we're pleased to be
03:17 joined by one of the most experienced
03:19 and qualified coordinators out there
03:21 afri who is a veteran and prolific
03:23 caretaker of various blockchains and
03:24 test nets afraid has previously helped
03:26 coordinate walks on etc such as agartha
03:29 and i believe a number of previous forks
03:31 as well so first of all warm welcome
03:34 afree and thank you very much for
03:35 joining us today to share some knowledge
03:36 with the etc community
03:38 um
03:39 hello thank you thank you for this warm
03:42 introduction uh
03:43 tumbled
03:45 yes and thank you for inviting me and
03:47 thank you for giving me this opportunity
03:49 to share my insights with the community
03:52 great no it's our honor thank you so uh
03:55 first question and i asked this to
03:56 pretty much everyone so who is
03:59 and how has he been involved with
04:01 blockchain web 3 and etc
04:05 you spend so much time do you have
04:07 i am um
04:09 i i i
04:11 i'm a long-term member of the crypto
04:13 community i
04:14 when i found out about bitcoin i was
04:17 really excited i i think i would say
04:20 i got into the space by
04:22 mining uh i i really really found it so
04:25 interesting that you can um so like
04:28 satoshi's vision that one cpu is one
04:31 vote i mean this does not necessarily
04:33 hold through today but it was just
04:35 something that fascinated me about
04:36 bitcoin and i i in the early days i had
04:39 really fun just assembling
04:41 uh mining with like assembling gpus and
04:43 uh mining
04:45 not bitcoin necessarily but like a lot
04:47 of uh
04:48 altcoins in the back in the day like
04:49 litecoin and other
04:51 interesting uh experiments um
04:54 and
04:55 for me it was really interesting both
04:57 from a technical perspective i'm an
04:59 engineer by degrees so i really enjoy
05:02 the
05:03 the
05:03 the technic
05:05 technicalities around us but i also uh
05:08 and really enjoy uh are really uh
05:11 intrigued by all these um potential
05:14 impact this could have on uh for the
05:16 financial system or in society in
05:18 general
05:20 so there and eventually i came across
05:22 issue classic very early on when i read
05:25 the white paper by vitalik buttering
05:28 and
05:30 tried to test
05:33 test writing my first smart contract in
05:35 2015 which was a complete mess but
05:39 eventually i kind of was sucked into
05:41 ethereum
05:42 uh
05:43 in first place because it was so
05:45 interesting to see that you have this
05:47 entire uh
05:50 potential unlocked by a programmable
05:52 virtual machine and as i said i'm an
05:54 engineer uh uh i'm naturally curious
05:57 about these uh technical aspects
05:59 and yeah here i am i've been a long-term
06:02 member of this human community or also
06:03 iso classic community
06:05 i
06:06 i was hard for coordinator for both
06:08 ethereum and ethereum classic
06:11 so um yeah i think just how the story
06:14 begins and um here i am now guest on
06:17 this
06:18 call uh uh
06:20 you have a hard fork scheduled that is
06:23 basically the first one after the time
06:26 that i was involved with this classic
06:28 yeah i'm i'm not really
06:30 i didn't really had the chance to leave
06:31 the space in first place i'm kind of
06:34 still in here with one foot that's
06:36 awesome yeah it's really good to uh um
06:39 kind of help us hand over the baton to
06:41 the next generation of coordinators um
06:43 so thanks for that and uh let's kick off
06:46 with the first sort of real question and
06:49 i guess
06:50 what would you say is the goal of
06:51 hard-fought coordination
06:54 hard for coordination is technically
06:57 nothing
06:58 is basically the same as traditional
07:01 software engineering project management
07:04 um you have to coordinate
07:06 a group of people to reach a common goal
07:09 and eventually in the specification to
07:12 hit a certain deadline of delivering
07:16 delivering
07:17 the various pieces of software
07:20 towards certain deadlines that need to
07:22 be met because
07:24 in this case it's very interesting uh
07:26 with all these aspects around consensus
07:29 between different uh clients different
07:31 client teams between different themes
07:33 that might work on applications or tests
07:35 or whatever else involved
07:38 so the heart for coordination is
07:39 basically just
07:41 just a new application of a traditional
07:44 software engineering profession
07:46 and it
07:47 it's a lot around orchestrating
07:50 engineers
07:52 doing a lot of qa but also doing a lot
07:54 of project management around
07:57 around um timing estimating um and and
08:01 yeah all these those kind of things
08:03 okay and the
08:05 in in the process of coordinating hard
08:07 fork what are the things that you're
08:08 trying to avoid happen uh i guess
08:11 there's a number of potential things
08:13 that you could say this this hard fork
08:15 didn't go well so what what might those
08:17 be and uh how do you try and avoid them
08:20 typically
08:21 yeah that's an interesting question so a
08:22 hard fork is not really
08:25 strict there's no no no strong
08:27 definition of this term hard fork but i
08:30 think we can all agree that that this is
08:32 a set of changes applied to
08:34 a consensus system such such as a
08:36 blockchain protocol that introduces
08:39 breaking changes so
08:40 the ultimate goal of a hard fork
08:43 coordinator should be
08:45 to first of all
08:46 convince or not convince but um help the
08:50 community to find consensus on such an
08:52 upgrade not only on a technical level
08:55 but also on a community level because
08:57 there needs to be
08:58 rough consensus to move forward because
09:00 if the community is not
09:02 if the community am i
09:05 i'm sorry i'm just confused by my push
09:06 to talk if the community is not aligned
09:09 on a hard fork then it might not happen
09:11 or you risk a chain split if to if the
09:14 community goes in in different
09:16 directions or creates different tribes
09:19 with different opinions
09:20 and a hard fork coordination basically
09:23 assists community in in finding the path
09:26 to rough consensus and
09:29 this is both uh important on um
09:33 on logical level or on community level
09:34 but also on technical level and the risk
09:37 here is as
09:39 to to answer your question is that um
09:42 it's there are many facets to it um
09:45 it could happen that the community does
09:47 not care about an upgrade and just does
09:49 not upgrade at all so you have to take
09:51 ready but
09:52 miners keep running the old software
09:54 they don't upgrade
09:55 another risk is that like only a small
09:58 amount of
10:00 miners or other network operators
10:02 upgrade and then you risk a chain split
10:04 because you have two different protocol
10:06 versions
10:07 and
10:08 and the worst case is obviously that you
10:10 have if you have different protocol
10:13 implementations that you have consensus
10:14 issues that only reveal on the main net
10:17 activation and this needs to be
10:20 carefully prevented and prepared and
10:24 that's all what hard fork coordination
10:25 is about planning
10:27 testing iterating
10:30 both on technical but also on community
10:33 and communications level
10:35 so a lot of things can go wrong and i
10:37 guess um especially when operating with
10:39 a live test net some of these issues are
10:41 not going to be apparent even on um
10:44 even in testing and it's only on like a
10:46 an economically incentivized real world
10:48 use case that some of the problems might
10:50 emerge
10:51 totally this is always a risk and
10:55 um that's
10:56 why we have so many different testnets
10:58 in first place so usually the process is
11:00 that you
11:01 um that the engineers test uh
11:04 everything in private on the i don't
11:06 know under development or feature
11:07 branches and
11:08 eventually when they believe when they
11:11 you know software
11:13 software development is never final but
11:16 in the end if you believe that your
11:18 feature is ready then you test then you
11:20 talk to other client teams and then you
11:21 create private test nets and and you
11:24 test different implementations of the
11:26 same thing against each other
11:28 and even then
11:29 you you just grow confident that your
11:31 code is working and that the other
11:33 team's code is working and then
11:34 eventually you can
11:36 approach community and and try to
11:38 schedule
11:39 these
11:40 features on test nets and even on
11:42 testness you you don't have the same
11:44 utility as on the mainnet and you can
11:46 really try to stress test everything on
11:49 testnet and
11:50 even on extremely heavily used test nets
11:53 such as the old modern classic test net
11:56 even such as uh assume foundations
11:58 robson testnet you still can miss
12:01 certain edge cases and there's always a
12:03 small risk that the day you activate a
12:05 feature on mainnet you you miss
12:07 something
12:08 and it eventually will trigger
12:10 only on maintenance and uh
12:13 eventually
12:15 break mainnet consensus which would be
12:17 the worst case or the biggest failed of
12:19 hard-fought coordination in that regard
12:21 i see
12:22 um and i guess uh the the big day of
12:25 those four walks must be fairly uh
12:27 stressful it's like a a lot of work
12:29 coming into one thing and if nothing
12:31 happens uh you've done your job but if
12:33 it goes badly then yeah it sucks
12:36 so
12:38 in terms of the actual
12:41 like
12:41 fork block arriving on mainnet what kind
12:44 of
12:45 uh tooling and monitoring systems would
12:48 a hard fork coordinator typically
12:50 utilize to ensure that things are going
12:52 smoothly and how would you detect any
12:54 anomalies that you weren't expecting
12:57 yeah so in an actual hard fought
13:00 different parties involved so the hard
13:01 fought coordinator as a state it's kind
13:03 of just orchestrating different involved
13:05 parties so on the one hand you have the
13:07 core developers that are basically
13:11 let's let's assume for one moment we are
13:13 talking about the test net hard fork so
13:15 in case the hard work activates on the
13:17 coty or mortar test net then developers
13:20 could just basically look very closely
13:23 or
13:24 at their code or at their clients
13:26 they run in certain debugging modes or
13:29 monitoring modes they try to actively
13:32 break it by
13:33 triggering the new features that are
13:35 activated
13:36 and
13:37 but you also have other stakeholders you
13:39 have uh validators on the proof of
13:41 authority networks you have miners on
13:43 proof of work networks and also these
13:46 um stakeholders needs to carefully
13:50 monitor what how their nodes operate and
13:53 as they
13:54 operate
13:55 operating uh correctly and what i do as
13:58 a hard fork coordinator usually is that
14:00 i get a
14:02 number of bare metal machines and i
14:04 install
14:05 i try to install
14:07 all
14:08 existing protocol implementations all
14:12 clients
14:14 in different configurations so i
14:17 usually have a prefork and a post fork
14:19 configuration ready so that i can
14:22 easily compare outputs of both
14:25 clients both versions of the protocol
14:27 against the matrix of all clients so if
14:30 you have three clients and uh two
14:32 different network versions you have
14:33 basically a matrix of
14:35 six different uh clients and versions
14:38 and um in
14:40 in the moment the hard fork activates
14:42 you can use different tools for
14:44 monitoring what's going on and
14:46 i personally use the
14:49 so called fork monitor which is
14:50 basically just
14:51 um a
14:53 very tiny html page with some embedded
14:56 javascript that
14:59 queries an rpc endpoint and
15:02 gets from all these different versions
15:05 and clients
15:06 the latest block information and
15:09 compares a lot of metrics such as uh
15:12 block height
15:14 block cash block uh
15:16 total difficulty and so on and with all
15:19 these little metrics
15:20 if you put them all next to each other
15:22 then you can easily spot any
15:24 misbehaviors and if something is is
15:27 going wrong you can immediately spot it
15:29 you can immediately uh talk to
15:31 developers uh
15:32 ask questions you can approach miners
15:35 and so on
15:36 um and so i will leave the fork
15:39 monitoring dashboard is one of the most
15:43 excuse me
15:44 one of the most important tools but
15:46 there are also other tools uh i use
15:50 mining pool software to run my own
15:52 miners
15:53 i use
15:55 the the start of dashboards uh the these
15:58 is also called ethernet network startups
16:01 dashboards where you can get a more
16:04 more
16:05 wide overview of the network status um
16:08 and yeah there are some more smaller
16:11 tools you could use
16:12 i see and uh
16:14 on top of this you're not just
16:15 monitoring the network but also
16:17 potentially reaching out to different
16:19 uh
16:20 stakeholders um which might include uh
16:24 exchanges and
16:25 uh wallet operators for example and i
16:28 guess depending on the type of
16:30 uh
16:31 problem with the fork would depend on
16:33 who needs to update that client or
16:37 yeah who's behind on the old network and
16:39 it seems like you need to be able to
16:40 contact basically any major player that
16:43 hasn't updated properly or needs to push
16:45 an update
16:47 and that requires some level of i guess
16:50 you as a central point of contact are
16:52 somewhat trusted by these other
16:54 counterparties right
16:56 yes in a way
16:59 this
17:00 role of hard-fought coordination is a
17:02 very um is
17:05 a role that needs to be very carefully
17:07 executed because you are not a hard fork
17:10 manager you're not a
17:12 chief uh
17:14 chief hard fork uh
17:16 executor but but it needs to be very
17:19 very clearly um
17:21 very clearly communicated as that
17:23 coordination is a process of
17:25 management without
17:27 authority or without hierarchy because
17:30 the
17:32 the fact that you
17:34 hold a lot of strings in your hands and
17:36 try to tie them together doesn't
17:38 necessarily mean you are in a position
17:40 of power and you should also not try to
17:42 become a position of power so um with
17:46 that said
17:47 um
17:48 with that said uh i i would say uh
17:50 you you
17:52 still uh if you execute this correctly
17:54 then you come in a position where people
17:56 trust you and they understand that if
17:58 you are working for a
18:01 certain client team or for the econ
18:02 classic community in this regard
18:04 that people accept your kind of
18:07 authority when you reach out to them and
18:09 inform them about
18:11 uh
18:12 certain upgrades in future
18:14 i see so
18:15 in in the example of there being some
18:18 kind of problem with a with a chain
18:19 split what would it look like from the
18:22 hard fought coordinators perspective to
18:24 try and fix things like if they need to
18:27 send a message to an exchange to get
18:29 them to update for example would that be
18:31 done by the coordinator themselves or by
18:33 some other would they be asking the
18:36 client team to request that or who's
18:39 who's pushing messages around
18:42 so i mean we need to differentiate here
18:45 uh there are two different types of
18:47 communication so one is prior to support
18:49 and the other is post four
18:50 communications and
18:52 the communications leading up towards
18:55 the hard fork are much more relaxed
18:56 because you still have time to prepare
18:58 people to upgrade their notes and this
19:01 is a process that can be fairly
19:03 decentralized anyone from the community
19:05 can reach out to coinbase to
19:08 assume classic pools or they can look up
19:11 um network statistics which are the
19:14 biggest pools which are the most
19:15 important they can individually reach
19:17 out they can just share like common uh
19:20 resources from the ecips repository or
19:23 news items just to prove that there is
19:25 something going on that pooled or other
19:27 infrastructure providers needs to be
19:29 aware of
19:30 um this changes a lot in
19:33 the event of emergency so let's assume
19:37 let's let's say the hard fork goes wrong
19:39 we have a consensus issue between two
19:41 client implementations or something else
19:43 goes wrong not enough miners
19:45 uh uh
19:47 upgraded and
19:48 i don't know clients try to reorganize
19:50 to the wrong chain and it's like a
19:51 complete mess in this regard then the
19:54 hard fork coordinator has a certain
19:57 responsibility to orchestrate people or
20:00 like to delegate people to
20:02 directly identify the issue
20:05 as soon as possible and reach out to
20:08 involved parties as soon as possible
20:10 it is not necessarily the role of the
20:12 hardfork coordinator to also reach out
20:15 um i personally have done a lot of
20:17 outreach um just because um
20:20 when you have this responsibility that
20:22 everything goes
20:23 right and nothing goes wrong and and you
20:26 kind of want to have perhaps on all all
20:28 the
20:29 all the involved stakeholders so
20:31 um
20:32 it naturally evolves this way that you
20:34 um
20:34 start also doing the outreach but
20:37 i would carefully say that uh
20:40 it's not necessarily the job of uh uh
20:43 the hardcore coordinator and uh
20:44 specifically in decentralized
20:46 communities anyone could technically do
20:48 it
20:49 i see
20:50 i guess one of the um
20:52 challenges that uh decentralized
20:54 networks face in particular is the
20:56 ongoing
20:58 managing of these books and
21:00 maintaining some
21:02 level of trust in a system that can be
21:06 decentralized enough but also
21:08 not so decentralized that
21:10 you know anyone could just like tell
21:13 any exchange to use this version of the
21:14 hardware sorry this version of the
21:16 software or this version and that could
21:18 itself cause issues and the other issue
21:20 i suppose is
21:22 sometimes exchangers probably don't want
21:24 to give out their sort of
21:27 private battle stations uh
21:29 communications channels to anyone so uh
21:33 doing it in a completely decentralized
21:35 way seems like it's uh
21:37 very challenging going forward do you
21:39 have any ideas of how
21:41 like what the boundaries are in terms of
21:43 how decentralized it could be
21:45 going forward and how
21:47 like how this could be coordinated in a
21:50 in a sort of standardized way going
21:51 forward
21:53 not really it's it's it has always been
21:56 a pain point to reach out to exchanges
21:57 especially
21:59 the ones that are not the major players
22:01 but this not just the entire not the
22:03 very small ones but like maybe the
22:04 medium-sized medium-sized ones some are
22:06 like really difficult to reach the only
22:09 way you can really find out to to
22:12 how to contact them is basically just
22:14 creating a support ticket on their
22:16 zendesk and it's like really annoying
22:18 and then you get like a
22:19 uh tire one support uh
22:22 employee that tells you that nothing is
22:24 wrong and their system is fully
22:25 operational and then you roll your eyes
22:27 and say no that's not my point
22:29 and but
22:31 i i don't i don't i'm not coming with a
22:32 recipe for this i know that in the past
22:35 uh both etc labs and etc cooperate if
22:38 they were facilitating
22:42 strong ties towards certain
22:44 infrastructure providers or exchanges
22:46 they used just through
22:48 established business
22:49 connections contacts
22:52 but also
22:53 through other official channels and
22:56 i know i don't know for example
22:58 he maintains a long list of uh
23:01 of contacts which is well around for for
23:03 these uh
23:05 cases and uh there's really not not
23:08 really a good recipe also this uh
23:10 ecosystem is changing so fast so with
23:12 each and every hard fork you have to
23:14 like basically start all over and find
23:16 out who are the biggest exchanges
23:18 um with regard to volume so when i say
23:21 biggest uh it's important because how
23:23 much money is at risk who are the
23:25 biggest miner with regard to network
23:27 sure so so how
23:29 so this is important because the more
23:32 hatch rate you have on the right
23:34 side of the consensus uh
23:36 the better your hard fork will execute
23:38 or the more smooth
23:40 uh
23:41 the builder hard work be
23:42 and
23:43 this is basically each and every heart
23:45 fork you have to basically reiterate
23:48 your list and check are these players
23:51 still do you have contacts do you know
23:52 anyone worst contact and this is in and
23:55 still i would hold my point this is
23:57 still um
23:58 the processes can be decentralized
24:00 because in a large community many people
24:02 know many more people and you can
24:05 basically facilitate these
24:07 uh contacts and keep them alive
24:10 but then again there is no
24:12 no cookbook for this situation there is
24:15 no
24:16 definite guide to upgrading a protocol
24:18 with regard to communications
24:21 right very interesting um in in the case
24:24 of a
24:25 let's say it's a temporary chain split
24:28 because of some client incompatibility
24:30 are there any heuristics that are
24:33 like go-to that you can use to
24:36 say oh this side is wrong and they need
24:39 to upgrade versus the other side like if
24:42 if two clients have the same version and
24:44 you're not really sure which one is uh
24:46 misbehaving like how do you decide which
24:48 chain to follow in the case of a chain
24:50 split like that
24:52 or is that not really a problem
24:54 uh
24:55 i would not rule this out
24:57 it certainly is
24:59 something is always a problem if
25:01 something goes wrong how fast can you
25:03 identify the issue how fast can you
25:05 identify rules responsible not not in
25:07 term of head but in term of which line
25:10 of code is responsible how fast can the
25:14 developers fix it patch it release it
25:16 and announce it and
25:19 i would carefully argue this is
25:20 something where the
25:22 core developers are
25:24 really this is one of the biggest
25:26 responsibilities during hard forks that
25:29 might go wrong that they need to be very
25:32 quick in identifying what the issue is
25:35 and then based on that you can make
25:37 calls but i would never make a call
25:39 without knowing what's going on or what
25:41 could be wrong so it's it's in most
25:43 cases you can fairly quickly
25:45 find out which of the clients or which
25:48 of the versions of the client or which
25:50 parts of the code base misbehave and
25:53 once you have identified that you can
25:54 make pre-announcements once it's patched
25:56 and released you can make announcements
25:58 to to to act uh
26:00 upon that and yeah that's
26:04 but i would say it's
26:06 this is a really a huge responsibility
26:09 on core developers in such a really uh
26:12 tough situation to quickly identify
26:15 these issues and make the calls
26:17 let's see this kind of ties in with the
26:20 um
26:21 the
26:22 debate slash conversation about client
26:25 diversity and whether or not having
26:27 multiple clients is
26:29 uh
26:30 worth the benefit of of these potential
26:33 problems when
26:35 would it be better to to have a system
26:37 closer to bitcoin where there's a single
26:39 source of truth in terms of the client
26:41 the reference client and then other
26:43 clients can support it but if ever
26:45 there's a consensus issue then it always
26:47 defaults to one client and they don't
26:49 have to maintain multiple
26:51 channels to different core devs uh do
26:54 you have thoughts on the client
26:55 diversity issue
26:57 uh yes totally i mean this is just the
27:00 answer to this question is highly
27:01 opinionated and
27:03 i know that there is a bitcoin way with
27:05 just one implementation and there is a
27:07 assumed way with as many implementations
27:10 as possible
27:11 and
27:12 i don't know what's your opinion on that
27:13 i
27:14 i would
27:15 say i have been
27:17 kind of slowly growing into this
27:19 humidism classic ecosystem and i have
27:22 been working at parity technologies with
27:24 gavin wood for several years and he
27:27 always said
27:28 i don't know if you know what let me
27:29 just quickly uh tell you a story about
27:31 um
27:32 the parity bitcoin client i don't know
27:33 if anyone remembers or even knows about
27:35 this gavin wood um released a parity
27:38 bitcoin client i think in 2018 or 2017
27:42 and this was the only client as far as i
27:45 know back in the day that did not use
27:47 this central bitcoin consensus and he
27:51 refused to use this consensus library
27:54 published by by the bitcoin core
27:55 developers and he was attacked
27:58 heavily for doing this because they said
28:01 he puts the network at risk he puts
28:03 consensus at risk by
28:05 creating a secondary implementation of
28:09 the consensus protocol but then again he
28:11 defended
28:12 anyone should be able to build their own
28:16 implementation of this decentralized
28:18 protocol because
28:20 uh
28:21 if there's a bug in the in
28:23 in the main or in the
28:25 quote-unquote official implementation
28:28 how do you know if there's not an
28:31 additional implementation
28:32 and this is a technical aspect and but
28:35 there's also the political aspect of
28:37 protocol governments if you have only
28:40 one implementation that is maybe
28:42 controlled by only one entity
28:44 how do you ensure that this one entity
28:46 does not abuse a position of power
28:49 to just uh
28:51 you need to literally change this
28:53 implementation and
28:55 this is um now i can conclude my
28:57 personal opinion is that the ethereum
28:59 assume classic way is the better one
29:01 because
29:02 by
29:03 distributing this power of
29:05 implementation to
29:07 two three or more teams
29:09 ensures whenever
29:11 anyone wants to make change to the
29:13 consensus protocol it needs to go not to
29:16 one place but to all teams and need to
29:18 convince all teams or the community all
29:20 together and i believe this is
29:23 technically a risk i i agree um and i
29:26 understand that bitcoin
29:28 believes in being
29:29 technically more on
29:31 a
29:32 on a conservative
29:35 secure side but on the political side i
29:39 believe it's the strength of having
29:40 multiple clients implementations
29:43 um
29:44 for the sake of
29:45 being more resistant it's it's some kind
29:47 of meta decentralization you cannot just
29:50 go to one client and hack it or
29:53 or or even if there's a bug in one
29:56 client you still have other clients that
29:57 run the correct protocol and it's just i
30:00 would argue client diversity is a
30:02 strength rather than a weakness
30:04 yeah it's a very um sort of esoteric
30:06 topic and one that uh i think there's
30:10 uh
30:11 pros and cons to both sides of the
30:13 argument and the
30:14 additional complexity and coordination
30:17 effort involved can definitely pay off
30:20 uh in a lot of cases um
30:22 i i'm still personally not really
30:24 decided as to whether or not um
30:27 diversity per se
30:29 um
30:30 without a single at least like clear
30:33 defined thing
30:34 is better i'm still open to the debate
30:36 really uh but uh it's one i think that
30:39 is extremely interesting nonetheless
30:41 totally it's an interesting topic and um
30:45 uh
30:46 we have different size of black
30:47 blockchain ecosystems i mean bitcoin is
30:49 a huge ecosystem assume
30:51 maybe it's a huge polka dot might be
30:53 become a huge ecosystem i would
30:55 carefully say
30:57 assume classic is more like a
30:58 medium-sized ecosystem they still have
31:01 this the strength or the ability to
31:03 maintain more than one client
31:05 implementation but then again you can
31:07 look at all these smaller ecosystems uh
31:10 yeah you name it you just scroll down a
31:12 coin market cap and they only have one
31:15 implementation and and you never know is
31:17 there a bug in their code
31:19 do they even test do they even have the
31:20 ability to test this against do they
31:22 have any specification how do they know
31:24 that there's a bug and is if there's a
31:26 bug
31:27 this is part of the protocol now because
31:29 once
31:30 uh a bug is included in a block on a
31:32 public blockchain
31:34 most blockchains wouldn't re-roll a
31:36 royal back uh you know and um therefore
31:39 i i would say it's it's very good for
31:41 issuing classic to still have this
31:42 feature of having at least two clients
31:45 that can uh be
31:46 taking on each other so uh i would say
31:49 it's it's one of some more
31:50 major blockchain ecosystems out there
31:53 right and i believe that very client
31:55 diversity has in the past saved ethereum
31:58 classic um i think back in shanghai
32:02 uh spurious dragon hard fork right there
32:04 was a bug in one of the clients that
32:05 would have caused a major network
32:07 problem but luckily parity did not have
32:09 that bug so
32:11 at least part of the net was able to
32:13 continue exactly
32:15 okay so um moving on to the topic of i
32:19 guess um
32:21 the current state of affairs
32:23 with regards to
32:26 etc
32:27 and
32:28 what do you think having spent a good
32:30 number of years in the etc ecosystem
32:34 of recent events the
32:37 you know the treasury debate i'm not
32:38 sure if you've been following the shah 3
32:40 but
32:41 what's your general sort of impression
32:42 of where etc is right now
32:46 that's a tough question i mean um
32:48 i mean
32:49 is serum classic is moving very slowly
32:52 and
32:53 again this is something you can
32:55 discuss about this is a feature actually
32:56 is it like
32:57 doing the bitcoin way just rather not
32:59 move at all before breaking things
33:02 or could could could there be more
33:05 accelerated development towards um
33:08 building out the ecosystem being more
33:10 developer or
33:12 application friendly
33:14 i don't know i i would carefully say
33:16 esteem classic has always been
33:18 in this risk area between these two
33:20 things and always been in this risk to
33:22 be not strong enough to be
33:26 relevant for application developers but
33:28 also not
33:29 not not fast enough to to make a
33:31 difference so um it's difficult to say
33:34 um but it was also a very broad question
33:37 so maybe you can
33:39 talk about certain aspects of what's
33:41 going on right now in the past
33:43 let's let's put it this way what what
33:45 was it about ethereum classic that drew
33:47 you to it in the first place why are we
33:49 even working on a classic at all
33:52 i mean i have been in classic from from
33:54 the beginning and uh
33:57 i have been
33:59 very close to
34:00 the robin hood group i have never
34:03 acted upon it but i've been in touch
34:05 with them for a long time and
34:08 i've always been
34:11 making jokes about how to uh explain
34:14 your tax advisor that you you not only
34:16 have one issue but two issues now and
34:19 i've been always following along and
34:20 eventually when
34:22 when uh
34:24 this
34:25 card development team kind of imploded
34:28 due to
34:30 actions i don't want to comment on right
34:31 now
34:33 it was basically a matter of how can
34:36 issum classic be saved and be moved
34:38 forward and this was when i realized
34:41 that there that i actually have
34:43 a set of ideas that could improve the
34:46 network or the net the protocol
34:49 and um eventually stepped up to
34:52 join edc labs and
34:54 assist
34:55 the ecip
34:57 editors with hardware coordination
34:59 and
35:00 we executed a
35:03 a series of
35:05 protocol upgrades that brought issue
35:07 classic to the point where it is today
35:09 and um
35:10 i think the most important feature of
35:12 issuing classic is as of today
35:16 protocol parity was with other evm
35:18 networks which is
35:21 really not to underestimate because all
35:24 tooling uh solidity uh
35:27 everything
35:28 if you everywhere to have a different
35:31 version of the evm on ethereum classic
35:34 um
35:35 it would be a huge mess and we would
35:37 have to provide our own tooling for
35:39 developers and this is something i would
35:42 argue is um the biggest benefit of using
35:45 a swim classic today
35:47 um
35:48 and um
35:49 i i would say i'm partially proud that i
35:52 could assist ethereum classic do it over
35:54 the last years in in getting there and
35:56 and sticking there and yeah i think uh
35:59 it was also great to meet many people of
36:02 the issuing classic community in
36:04 vancouver at the etc summit and
36:07 uh there was so much uh so much energy
36:09 so much good energy
36:11 and so many people building and
36:13 moving forward it was a great time
36:16 yeah i agree with everything you've said
36:17 there um and for sure the um the tooling
36:21 point is on point uh i really do believe
36:25 that a lot of the innovation happening
36:26 on ethereum
36:27 is
36:28 inherited only because of that fact and
36:30 the compatibility is super important to
36:32 maintain um but this kind of leads into
36:34 the next question um
36:36 and the next like obvious big thing on
36:38 the horizon
36:40 that's not specifically on etc but
36:42 massively affects it is the merge on
36:45 ethereum mainnet and
36:47 how do you think well first of all
36:50 is it going to happen and
36:52 if it does
36:53 do you think miners are going to try and
36:55 mine the old chain and continue like
36:57 ethereum mainnet version one and
37:00 if not uh are they gonna come to etc and
37:03 if they do does that pose a problem for
37:05 atc or is it a benefit in your in your
37:07 eyes
37:08 um yeah that's that's many questions um
37:11 so first of all i'm a miner by heart so
37:13 i love just
37:15 how however slower miners doesn't matter
37:17 i love
37:19 this
37:20 feature of proof of work that anyone can
37:23 be part of the consensus of the protocol
37:26 and
37:27 that's why i believe proof of work is is
37:31 a great way of consensus
37:35 i
37:36 was once um
37:38 going to a museum here in berlin
37:40 um they had um
37:42 i think they had a small programmable
37:45 calculator that was mining bitcoin
37:47 blocks and printing them out on a small
37:49 piece of paper so it's literally putting
37:51 every hash on on paper and it was so
37:53 slow it was ridiculous to watch
37:56 but
37:56 then again isn't it amazing that even a
37:59 small calculator could
38:01 i know it's not practical but it is
38:03 theoretically possible that this
38:04 calculate their minds a bitcoin block
38:07 yeah that just has this potential here
38:10 and this is something that you entirely
38:12 lose with proof of stake there is
38:13 nothing like this in proof of stake and
38:16 it's an entire paradigm shift that is um
38:20 it's just not an easy move when i i
38:22 understand that many people call for
38:24 example for bitcoin to also move to
38:26 proof of stake and then this entire
38:28 energy consumption
38:30 debate that everyone hates so much uh
38:32 kicks off again but then again ask
38:34 yourself what is the alternative and i
38:36 believe proof of stake is not uh
38:40 a good replacement for proof of work in
38:42 terms of
38:43 their
38:44 the features it gives you
38:46 and to to your question with regard uh
38:49 is the ethereum merch would totally
38:51 happen because there i have been
38:53 contributing to some of the issue to
38:55 work in the last two years
38:57 and
38:58 um i kind of stopped contributing
39:00 because it was
39:02 it's such a difficult uh development
39:05 environment
39:06 people are like very competitive uh you
39:09 you can feel that there is a huge
39:11 pressure on ethereum to deliver proof of
39:14 stake because it has been promised since
39:16 i don't know six years
39:18 um because this repeated bitcoin energy
39:22 consumption or eco energy consumption
39:23 debate they just
39:25 want to ship it no matter what what it
39:27 costs and it will happen i cannot tell
39:30 when it will definitely happen
39:32 um
39:33 i have mixed feelings
39:36 about this um
39:37 and with regards to will miners continue
39:40 mining the uh
39:43 proof of work chain
39:44 i don't think so
39:46 for different reasons because the reason
39:49 number one is that
39:50 the difficulty bomb is still something
39:52 that would
39:53 uh would have to be removed actively so
39:56 this means
39:57 in in addition to the merge you would
39:59 also have an active actively proposed
40:03 hard fork to remove the difficulty bone
40:05 bomb and in this in this
40:08 because you have to actively propose it
40:10 you need to come up with a name you
40:11 would have to call it estrogen classic
40:12 classic or ethereum classic two or
40:14 whatever and this is what people will
40:17 not accept as real ethereum or ethereum
40:19 classic or issue classic two or whatever
40:21 you would call it
40:22 and the other thing is that i believe
40:25 that
40:25 because this entire assumed ecosystem is
40:28 so keen on delivering proof of stake and
40:31 i don't know how many million e's have
40:33 been deposited onto the beacon chain
40:35 already
40:36 it is basically we are beyond that uh
40:38 point of uh
40:40 return and uh
40:42 ethereum will certainly move to to the
40:46 proof-of-stake consensus algorithm for
40:48 sure whenever this will happen i don't
40:50 know but um i don't think there is any
40:53 proof of work future in the ethiopian
40:56 foundation network and if these miners
40:59 will actually move to ecom classic this
41:01 is something we will have to see
41:03 but fact is that there are not so many
41:07 proof-of-stake
41:08 systems left and
41:10 it's uh i'm sorry proof of work and um
41:13 bitcoin is the biggest proof of work
41:15 network and what comes next
41:18 right now it's ethereum but what will be
41:19 the next one after ethereum switches to
41:21 proof of stake we don't know we there is
41:23 a lot of hash rate that needs to be
41:24 redistributed and uh we cannot really
41:27 tell but if you scroll a coin market cap
41:30 like by
41:32 or coin gekko whatever metrics you use
41:34 most of the top coins are
41:36 actually moving towards proof of stake
41:39 and
41:39 it does not leave many options for
41:41 miners or mining hardware
41:43 right i even heard that dogecoin is
41:45 planning a switch to prove a stake or
41:46 something it's uh kind of surprising and
41:49 uh yeah i would add that the uh the
41:51 whole defy ecosystem
41:53 is basically
41:54 the deciding factor i think in terms of
41:56 where the value is going to shift and it
41:58 seems like it's in their interest if
41:59 they are holding ether to go to staking
42:02 i think a lot of them seem to believe
42:04 that
42:05 they can reap the rewards of staking
42:09 and get that value that miners would be
42:10 providing
42:12 um so
42:13 so
42:14 in terms of if there was a
42:17 an exodus of miners looking for other
42:19 chains this would mean there's a lot of
42:21 hash rate going around um as you
42:23 mentioned and there are some people in
42:26 the shah 3 debate they're saying that
42:28 this is a very dangerous thing for
42:30 ethereum classic because uh ethereum
42:33 classic will no longer be profitable for
42:34 most miners and the latent hash rate is
42:37 just going to be used to 51 attack the
42:39 chain do you think that's a a reasonable
42:42 possibility or do you think they're more
42:44 likely to just honestly mind the chain
42:47 um i mean to answer this question you
42:49 need to speculate a lot i would argue
42:52 that
42:53 51
42:55 attacks are very involved and it's it
42:58 happened to assume classic it happened
42:59 to other chains it it will certainly
43:02 happen in future again whenever whenever
43:05 someone believes the effort you put in
43:07 there is worse the risks you are taking
43:10 and
43:11 the 51 attack is much more complex than
43:14 having 51 percent of the network hash
43:16 rate is much more complex because you
43:17 also need to to have someone you can
43:20 double spend on you need some
43:22 smaller or mid size exchange that you
43:24 can execute these uh attacks on and this
43:27 is this comes with a lot of work so i
43:31 believe there is a fair amount of miners
43:33 that just does not care as long as they
43:35 get more coins out of it than they pay
43:38 on electricity then they would rather
43:41 mine
43:42 honestly than go through this uh extra
43:45 mile
43:46 of preparing and executing a very risky
43:49 51
43:51 attack
43:51 right thanks for your perspective on
43:53 that it's uh it's good to add some
43:54 additional viewpoints into this debate
43:57 now
43:58 um
43:59 we're nearing the end of the pre-planned
44:01 questions and i will open this up to the
44:03 chat shortly but i just wanted to end on
44:06 a kind of open thing for you efforty
44:08 what are you up to these days and is
44:10 there anything you wanted to add to this
44:12 discussion or wanted to mention a shout
44:14 out or something like that
44:16 uh that's uh that's a great question um
44:18 i mean i'm i'm working at chainsafe now
44:21 chainsaw systems is
44:23 it's a blockchain
44:26 company development company that is very
44:29 chain agnostic and this is something i
44:31 really appreciated i i have been
44:34 in bitcoin for so long i have been
44:36 experimenting and developing four so
44:39 many different altcoins i have been in
44:41 this room i've been in the siom classic
44:43 uh
44:44 i i have i tried to launch the poker
44:46 parachainers it's just the the system
44:49 ecosystem is so interesting to just be
44:52 limited to one project and i would just
44:55 i would just say everyone should be open
44:57 to to all the projects and just you can
45:00 easily build on multiple blockchains if
45:03 you want to and you should not be sold
45:05 to one solution in first place and this
45:08 is something
45:09 i appreciate about working at chainsafe
45:11 i can work on many different blockchain
45:14 ecosystems in many different programming
45:16 languages without being sold or
45:19 sold out to one solution and
45:22 this is something i would just leave
45:24 here for everyone to i don't know
45:26 appreciate it or hate me for that um
45:28 this is something i i do right now
45:31 and in my free time i actually started
45:33 to work on evm tooling i'm maintaining
45:37 i took over maintaining the ruby cerium
45:40 gem so if any one of you builds
45:43 applications in ruby
45:45 or on rails and uh hit me up
45:48 it has ethereum classic support
45:51 um
45:52 yeah that's that's what i do right now
45:54 awesome um and i know the chain save guy
45:57 is a fellow team and uh doing really
45:59 good work and i would add that i think
46:02 that
46:02 whilst uh we all love ethereum classic
46:04 it's um
46:05 really it's the end goal that matters
46:07 and if that means then
46:10 using other chains and connecting the
46:11 chains i think the future is a
46:14 multi-chain system so i think you're
46:16 you're right on the money with that
46:18 so yeah uh
46:19 thank you afri for answering these uh
46:22 pre-planned questions um and if we have
46:25 time i would now like to open the floor
46:27 up to some
46:28 other questions from some community
46:30 members if there are any
46:33 yes i have a question
46:35 okay
46:37 what what do you think
46:39 may happen to ethereum classic ecosystem
46:43 if
46:45 if a chain split would happen a
46:48 permanent jstip
46:49 in case one side
46:52 moves to chattery and the other one
46:55 continues to
46:56 to mine the current algorithm
46:59 um just look at bitcoin cash and
47:02 bitcoin as we i would say it's it's
47:05 always possible and it's uh i mean we
47:07 have to appreciate this
47:09 this opportunity that
47:11 communities if there is no rough
47:14 consensus or is there no consensus at
47:16 all it's always it's always a feature i
47:18 would say that communities can just fork
47:21 off
47:22 if if this um
47:24 etc hatch versus charge three
47:26 debate can never be resolved it i mean
47:29 it might be even healthy for the
47:31 ecosystem to create
47:32 two smaller ecosystems or communities
47:35 that uh not only separate uh logically
47:38 but also technically
47:40 um
47:41 of course
47:42 it has shown in the past that there will
47:45 be always one strong
47:47 side of the chain and one at
47:49 one more week
47:51 fork so
47:53 i would not encourage to
47:56 uh to split the chain over consensus
47:58 issues but
48:00 in
48:00 in the last
48:02 uh
48:03 the last step you could always do this
48:04 and consider individuals would not be
48:05 afraid of forking or splitting if there
48:08 is no other way
48:10 but uh but in terms of
48:12 daffy
48:13 or nfts
48:16 or the apps
48:18 how do you see this
48:20 this change
48:22 yeah it's very involved everyone
48:24 not only node operators or miners have
48:27 to make a decision which chains they
48:29 want to support but also everyone in
48:30 communities includes developers of
48:33 applications of
48:35 decentralized exchanges d5
48:37 everyone has to make call and um i know
48:41 i remember an issue foundation network
48:43 there where this risk of
48:46 i remember when when the parity multisec
48:49 was hacked there was a strong debate
48:52 what what if parity just forks this
48:54 theorem and unlocks their
48:57 unlocks their funds on a minority chain
48:59 and everyone was like
49:01 freaking out about uh the impact on
49:04 on applications from metamask over
49:07 stable coins such as die what happens to
49:09 a forked stable coin and i know this is
49:11 like very involved and that's in first
49:14 place why it should be avoided they
49:16 should rough consensus should be always
49:18 the ultimate goal
49:19 but that said as i said there is always
49:22 this opportunity to decide to make this
49:25 final decision to say okay
49:27 we want this feature so hard that we are
49:30 willing to fork off and then everyone
49:33 needs to make the call will
49:36 will your stay let's assume you uh have
49:39 a defy stable coin will you support it
49:41 on
49:42 network a or network b or will you even
49:44 go that far that you should support it
49:46 on both sides
49:48 um
49:49 contentious
49:50 uh hard forks are always
49:53 a very difficult task to pull off and
49:55 many people lost many many people lost
49:58 money in the dao hard fork for example
50:01 when nissium foundation patched uh a
50:04 protocol and there was replay detections
50:07 on replay attacks on ethereum classic
50:10 and this one classic was forced to
50:11 [Music]
50:13 implement a different chain id
50:15 it's always not recommended but it's
50:17 still a possible route
50:20 thank you another question is
50:23 related to
50:24 the treasury debate
50:26 what are your thoughts on
50:29 on attacks for miners
50:32 for
50:34 for getting basically money to
50:37 to fund development improvements
50:40 uh research
50:42 and stuff like that
50:44 um
50:45 this is a very nuanced question the the
50:48 general sentiment i would say it's
50:50 always good to have funding for
50:51 ecosystem is always it's it's crucial to
50:54 have funding for developers especially
50:56 for core development
50:57 um
50:58 the
50:59 treasury proposals we've seen we've seen
51:02 on issue classic
51:03 were kind of controversial
51:06 and this is mainly because of
51:08 the power that comes with this
51:10 responsibility uh
51:12 this
51:13 potential of abuse that could be
51:15 introduced so the question is less of a
51:18 technical one but more of the governance
51:20 question how do you
51:22 how how much money do you put where
51:25 who is controlling who gets money uh how
51:28 do you make change to the system and i
51:31 was in the beginning i was following
51:32 this debate closely and i was another
51:35 impression this was going completely
51:37 backwards that some stakeholders and
51:39 ecosystem tried to fill their own
51:41 pockets
51:42 based on those proposals so i believe
51:45 it's
51:46 better to have no treasury than
51:48 something like that that was proposed
51:50 back in the day
51:52 but then again it's always good to
51:53 explore
51:55 um
51:56 ways to fund development long term
51:59 and communities should not be afraid of
52:03 doing so
52:04 and you could always i mean islam
52:06 classic has a very strictly defined
52:08 monetary policy you could always revise
52:10 this but this is something you need to
52:12 do with the entire community together
52:15 you need to clearly define the goals who
52:17 should be funded how much funding is
52:19 acceptable also how much can you take
52:21 away from miners
52:23 or will you create additional block
52:24 rewards that not go to miners but to a
52:26 treasury
52:28 however you call it however you map it
52:29 out you need to be very careful and i
52:31 would not say it should not be done but
52:33 it's very difficult to do it in a fair
52:35 way and eventually
52:37 all mechanisms of governments around us
52:41 in the end are very messy let's face it
52:44 thank you this is my last question
52:47 um
52:48 do you they think that the developers
52:51 are
52:52 are now
52:54 scared of
52:55 coming to edc or
52:58 they just bypass it and
53:01 develop on ethereum
53:03 because there there is more money there
53:06 and more users what what they think it's
53:10 uh
53:11 it's a slowing development for etc
53:15 oh yeah that's an interesting question i
53:16 mean
53:17 there was a time
53:19 when ethereum clearly didn't scale
53:22 when the econ foundation network was so
53:25 contested that um
53:27 that you had to pay
53:30 thousands of dollars to get a
53:32 transaction broadcasters brought uh
53:34 broadcast and included in the blog
53:36 this was a time before layer 2 was a
53:39 thing when
53:40 side chains uh were seeing like uh i
53:44 would say poa network was an interesting
53:46 example x die these are all chains that
53:49 were created well after ethereum existed
53:52 issue classic existed
53:53 um was the ultimate goal to provide a
53:57 cheaper alternative in parallel to the
53:59 issue foundation network
54:01 this is something i've always believed
54:02 was a huge chance for ethereum classic
54:05 that's why i also tried to assist in
54:08 bringing issue classic back to protocol
54:10 parity so that ethereum
54:12 developers could also have this option
54:14 to not only deploy to one chain but to
54:16 choose which chain they deployed on
54:19 and eventually in the end this never
54:22 worked out and i believe this is always
54:24 complicated because
54:26 the differences between
54:28 assume classic and assume foundation
54:30 networks are not only
54:32 of technical nature but also in
54:33 political nature and people rather
54:36 decided to deploy applications on extern
54:38 network or it's called nosos network now
54:42 because they believed they don't or they
54:45 didn't want to get involved in politics
54:48 because the moment you move an
54:50 application from issue foundation
54:51 network to assume classic network it
54:53 could it doesn't necessarily have to be
54:56 but it could look like to outsiders as a
54:58 political act and this is probably
55:00 something that prevented a lot of
55:02 applications to
55:04 experiment with issue classic in first
55:05 place
55:07 today i would say it's a bit more it's a
55:09 different situation because now we see
55:12 layer twos coming up so
55:14 layer ones in general
55:16 lose
55:17 relevance a little bit uh at least from
55:20 an application perspective so
55:22 in 2022 i would say it's really it's
55:25 even more difficult for his home classic
55:27 to attract developers
55:29 thank you
55:31 i just wanted to
55:32 because kevin i just got a quick uh
55:35 question kevin could i just quickly jump
55:37 in here um
55:39 i i previously um
55:41 just wanted to
55:43 allow henry because he has a a hardcore
55:45 offline to quickly make a comment about
55:48 his uh his white paper before he leaves
55:50 and then we can get back to the q a if
55:52 that's possible
55:53 cool
55:55 great thanks um thanks everybody for the
55:58 opportunity um
55:59 i've been listening to the
56:01 you know i've been involved in the
56:02 discussions
56:04 you know about the fork to shaw three
56:06 you know all the implications on the
56:08 ecosystem you know people's thoughts
56:10 about
56:11 security and whatnot and um
56:15 you know while i really appreciate the
56:17 work that alex did and want to see
56:20 etc succeed you know with a more secure
56:24 proof of work chain i think that the
56:26 differences are
56:28 hard to hard to bridge
56:31 you know we've seen that repeatedly
56:33 through all the other gpu communities
56:36 you know ethereum being a good example
56:38 of the
56:40 threat you know their stance against
56:42 asics
56:43 nevertheless in this case
56:45 you know there's a threat of a big
56:47 onslaught of hardware that comes in that
56:50 will
56:51 that will be
56:52 basically will render mining
56:53 unprofitable and uh you know i
56:56 personally feel that ethereum classic
56:59 needs to make some changes so um looking
57:02 at other networks and
57:04 you know how
57:07 i came up with the
57:08 uh stole this idea from grand ashley and
57:11 you know from
57:13 from some of the ongoing work of monero
57:15 is came out with a scheme for dual proof
57:18 of work where the
57:20 we have the ability for gp existing etc
57:23 hash to coexist with
57:25 pacheck and really the what this does is
57:29 allows existing miners on gpus to
57:32 continue mining and then adds a nuclear
57:35 security with the
57:37 sha-3
57:38 chains and are proof of work the you
57:41 know
57:42 adding the sha-3 will basically render a
57:46 lot of the gpus
57:48 will make the chain more secure because
57:51 you know each
57:52 each gpu
57:54 is equal to about
57:56 you know 10
57:58 somewhere between 10 and 30 fpga so
58:00 right away you've got a new class of
58:02 hardware that can come in and bolster
58:03 security and uh you know if you divide
58:06 the divide the proof of work in half
58:09 then basically it makes it impossible to
58:12 attack this also addresses the issues
58:14 around silicon right difficulty
58:17 because there's a lot of concern about
58:19 the initial setting the initial
58:20 difficulty on shaw three could check and
58:23 that could disrupt the chain if the
58:25 difficulty is too high or too low as we
58:27 saw in other chains so um you know we
58:30 took a look at
58:31 work that's been done in other chains
58:33 and really came to thought that this
58:36 would be the best for the community i
58:38 put together white paper that describes
58:41 you know
58:42 what other chains are doing and how etc
58:44 might want to do it and then i've also
58:46 answered on an faq at the back of the
58:49 white paper
58:51 you know concerns i heard from the
58:52 community like what happens is there
58:55 risk of a chain split you know what kind
58:56 of
58:57 what kind of hardware is out there you
58:59 know is it unprofitable mine and so
59:02 there's i think if i remember there's
59:04 about 10 questions i answered and you
59:07 know i welcome
59:08 discussion with the community to
59:11 try and improve
59:13 etc and especially on the security side
59:16 so look forward to everyone's comments
59:17 uh next week uh in the meantime we've
59:20 posted this on github there's a link and
59:22 i look forward to people's input
59:26 thanks henry and yeah um
59:28 you can find the link on the agenda of
59:29 this community call and we will be uh
59:32 looking at that in detail next week so
59:34 uh thank you over to you
59:36 to you kevin
59:37 okay sorry can i before i go can i ask
59:39 after your question oh yeah sure go
59:41 ahead
59:42 hey afraid henry um good to hear from
59:44 you thanks for insight on on the hard
59:46 fourth we've always wondered what goes
59:48 on in the background uh my question is
59:50 related to ethereum
59:53 what do you think the chances are of a
59:55 1.0 fork
59:57 and you know it does pose a lot of
59:59 difficulties
60:00 for people trying to carry on the 1.0
60:02 chain as
60:03 they have to try and maintain
60:05 the for 2.0 chain which is hard to do
60:09 and then we've also got the
60:11 you know threat of the ice age and the
60:13 higher difficulty that the core does
60:16 from ethereum can impose
60:18 uh hey henry thank you for this question
60:20 um
60:21 as i said earlier i believe the
60:23 chances for an
60:25 east one fork are very long for multiple
60:28 reasons so the one reason is that
60:31 removing the difficulty bomb would be an
60:33 active fork you would have to actively
60:36 fork against the merch you cannot only
60:38 maintain the status quo and lean back
60:40 and say we are the original econ
60:42 foundation network but you would
60:44 actively have to oppose what
60:46 not not not two not three but like eight
60:49 or nine client teams have been working
60:51 on for several years so um this is see
60:55 one thing and the other thing is that i
60:57 believe that miners really don't care
61:01 too much politically about how
61:04 a network evolves i mean they are not
61:06 very happy about the move to proof of
61:08 stake but i also believe they will not
61:10 necessarily mine a debt chain because
61:13 they also have to pay energy bills in
61:15 the end and the risk that these coins
61:17 are
61:18 worthless are fairly high and also i
61:21 mean technically proof of fake has
61:22 always been only assumed
61:24 is on the ethereum
61:27 roadmap so it's really really difficult
61:29 to argue that
61:31 there is
61:32 um
61:33 some value behind this is one proof of
61:36 work fork coins i know does this make
61:39 sense
61:40 yes it does thank you very much i i
61:41 missed the i guess i missed the part
61:43 about the dead chain um but that was a
61:45 that was a valuable contribution thanks
61:47 for that
61:48 also um i wanted to comment on your
61:50 paper uh
61:52 i haven't read it but
61:53 uh we had early ideas about when this
61:56 chart three debate um i mean we have
61:58 been having this debate for what two or
62:00 three years now and there was always
62:02 this notion of
62:04 what if we had a transition phase where
62:06 we have both
62:07 uh consensus algorithms
62:10 available so i would be really curious
62:12 to read about your paper also about the
62:14 implications or how you balance out both
62:16 algorithms would be really interesting
62:18 to learn more about this look forward to
62:20 input on that effort
62:23 okay so anyways aubrey this is kevin
62:26 again i just wanted to uh thank you for
62:29 to continuing to contribute to this
62:31 project
62:32 um it's pretty
62:34 it's pretty uh noble of you but um
62:38 about
62:41 a potential
62:43 switch of the mining algorithm
62:46 like
62:47 i totally agree with you with the the
62:49 you know the the bit mains or bit means
62:52 user activated hard fork and then be
62:55 cash and then
62:56 you know segwit2x and
62:59 none of that really ever
63:01 happened because there just wasn't
63:03 um you know what you were talking about
63:06 like there wasn't any um you know
63:09 other clients available but
63:12 i think you make some really good points
63:13 i think a lot a lot more people should
63:15 um
63:16 should listen
63:18 to you more often
63:19 and um
63:21 yeah thanks for for um
63:23 being
63:24 being around
63:25 well thanks for having me
63:27 it's not up to me
63:29 i mean it's still interesting
63:30 developments on ethereum classic uh i'm
63:33 really curious to see how it
63:35 moves works out
63:37 i'm also interested about um i didn't
63:39 really follow but how your discussion
63:42 around the
63:43 1559 concluded in the end i i just saw
63:47 today that you eventually decided not to
63:49 include it i mean i i
63:51 know that you never wanted to include it
63:54 and it makes totally sense not to
63:55 include but like not having type two
63:57 transaction types
63:59 or a base fee up code for compatibility
64:02 um it's that's still interesting because
64:05 now we are leaving basically we are
64:06 leaving the the
64:08 the field of protocol parity a little
64:10 bit
64:11 yeah most definitely uh
64:14 would would you
64:15 say
64:16 or
64:17 think
64:19 you know maybe ethereum is sort of like
64:22 a test net for ethereum classic
64:25 in a sense
64:26 in a sense maybe i i mean it's
64:29 they have a lot of new features and a
64:31 lot of users that test these features
64:33 and in the end assume classic can just
64:35 cherry pick and technically that's what
64:38 sim classic has done in the last years
64:40 yeah uh i would i would at in 2022 i
64:43 would even argue it might be worth
64:45 revisiting uh the the monetary policy of
64:48 issuing classic under the circumstances
64:50 of uh burning minor fees
64:53 as it happens with eip
64:56 1559 but this is i'm just i'm more
65:00 interested about the technical
65:01 implications but i'm not really
65:04 following or thinking about economic
65:06 implications so just i'm not really
65:08 opinionated about it i'm just coming
65:10 more from an application or tooling
65:12 developer and
65:13 seeing that ethereum classic will not
65:15 really support type 2 transactions which
65:18 most of the
65:20 evm tooling is moving towards uh to make
65:23 a default
65:24 yeah that was actually one of the
65:26 concerns uh
65:28 at the very beginning of the monetary
65:30 policy debate was that
65:34 that is to
65:35 happen eventually um you know there's
65:38 not going to be
65:39 you know
65:41 the the
65:42 mining rewards there to be sufficient
65:45 for developers to develop
65:48 so i think for sure that'll probably be
65:50 revisited because uh from what i
65:53 understand and all the research i've
65:54 looked at everything i've seen um it was
65:57 geared more towards
65:59 the investor side so
66:01 it'll be interesting to see the
66:04 developer side
66:05 share their thoughts and opinion on that
66:08 yeah totally
66:09 with regards to the the base fee uh
66:12 opcode lack of support
66:14 i'm also not sure why that was
66:16 intentionally avoided i think it was
66:18 rejected from the mystique fork right
66:20 but um maybe it will be added later on
66:23 and potentially if ethereum classic
66:26 implements a versioning system then that
66:28 could also be added as one of the many
66:31 evm versions that it supports
66:34 yeah i think the reasoning was that
66:36 by
66:37 by not completely implementing 1559
66:42 this opens up a lot of unknown
66:45 vectors because you would have to
66:47 partially implement it and change the
66:50 way it is supposed to work and
66:52 by even even setting base feed to zero
66:54 or
66:55 hard codings certain aspects that we
66:57 don't want means introducing a lot of
67:00 complexity and this is probably the
67:02 reason
67:02 for convenience that you just or the
67:05 quarterback decided against implementing
67:06 it and makes makes sense from a
67:08 technical perspective but
67:10 um looking at all
67:13 as i said i'm coming from a developer
67:15 perspective from a tooling developer
67:17 perspective
67:18 that most wallets move towards and i
67:21 mean issue foundation network is the
67:23 biggest evm network we have to admit
67:25 this and
67:26 they in most cases default to type 2 or
67:29 like eip 1559 transactions by default
67:33 because it is
67:35 otherwise it would be
67:37 a waste of transaction fees on the issue
67:40 network and therefore it could con
67:44 could further broaden the gap between
67:47 ethereum and the assume classic and make
67:48 it more difficult for assume
67:51 developers to
67:52 build and deploy applications on the
67:54 same classic
67:55 i see so this is a compatibility
67:57 compatibility issue that will affect uh
68:00 wallet and message signing primarily or
68:03 transaction construction as opposed to
68:06 contract authoring is that correct yes
68:08 this is basically about
68:11 how
68:11 transactions look like um
68:13 but i mean ethereum classic so there are
68:16 transaction envelopes i don't know how
68:18 familiar you are this is
68:20 there are legacy transactions that are
68:21 basically just uh
68:24 the most
68:25 simple way to
68:26 have a transaction on an evm network and
68:30 these basically get wrapped in an
68:32 envelope and and ethereum classic
68:34 already has this feature there are so
68:35 called type 1 transactions that have
68:37 this feature so you could maybe also
68:40 have a different type two
68:42 implementations that just
68:44 maps i don't know max priority fee to
68:47 guess
68:48 price or something like that just
68:49 because the only difference between
68:52 eip1559 transactions from a transaction
68:55 perspective to
68:56 to legacy transaction also called type
68:59 zero transaction is that you have two
69:02 different
69:03 types of gas price
69:05 looks like something that's worth
69:06 looking at for future updates and uh
69:09 definitely to keep track of in terms of
69:11 as you say like diverging from
69:13 compatibility be a real shame if one one
69:16 of the major libraries for example
69:18 stopped working with ethereum classic
69:24 i have one question about
69:26 the timing of
69:28 parts of a heart fork
69:30 if we look at the
69:32 final stages of a hard fork then
69:34 there are things like having a feature
69:36 freeze for all the things that should go
69:38 into it
69:39 then
69:41 a point where all the
69:42 relevant code should be stable
69:45 and
69:46 once you've reached that then i guess
69:48 the next step would be to to set the
69:51 to set that a square transition block
69:53 just schedule the when the hard work
69:55 will happen and make an announcement and
69:58 um
70:00 well first of all do i get this this
70:02 sequence right would you
70:04 do things in a different order and the
70:06 second question would be then um how
70:09 much time would pass between the
70:11 announcement and the actual forks how
70:14 much time do people in general need
70:16 um
70:17 to do the
70:19 i mean like like exchange operators and
70:21 such and or maybe wallet developers who
70:25 haven't been
70:27 haven't paid attention yet how much time
70:29 do they need
70:30 after the announcement to to get right
70:33 out there on their side
70:35 um that's that's a very interesting
70:37 question so
70:38 um
70:39 as always there's no general rule to
70:42 this and um
70:44 that has a lot of moving parts here that
70:46 uh
70:47 need to work together correctly in case
70:51 to
70:52 ensure that the the the hard fork will
70:55 execute properly on a given timeline i
70:58 personally always
71:00 coordinated uh hard forked backboards so
71:04 if you would task me with coordinating a
71:06 hard fork on ethereum classic today i
71:08 would say okay let's do it in june
71:11 that's that's
71:12 five months that's the
71:14 i think the minimum time
71:16 um
71:17 the minimum convenient time to execute a
71:19 hard fork if you already know what the
71:21 features are then you would have to go
71:23 uh through governance and i would this
71:25 entire process of implementing it and
71:27 testing it and finding rough consensus
71:30 something that can be executed in
71:31 parallel that is not blocked by
71:34 timing a hard fork
71:36 because you can always adjust dates
71:39 later but
71:40 ideally you don't want to adjust dates
71:42 too often so it will create confusion
71:44 between
71:46 node runners miners exchanges you want
71:49 to avoid announcing dates before you
71:51 actually know
71:53 uh when you want to so let's assume
71:55 you want to you have five or six months
71:57 time now in advance to plan and execute
71:59 this fork then you basically go
72:02 backwards to say uh let's let's talk on
72:04 wednesday the june uh 21st of june and
72:08 then you go backwards okay you want to
72:10 have at least six if not eight
72:13 weeks of stable
72:15 test net activate activation so you go
72:18 six weeks before
72:20 june
72:22 21st so you basically have beginning of
72:25 may this would be the last testnet
72:28 activate activation in this case on coty
72:30 test net maybe two weeks before so end
72:32 of
72:33 april you would do a motor test net more
72:36 bus much less stable than cotty so you
72:38 would do a mortar test activation and
72:40 now you already have a very tight
72:41 timeline so you already see okay
72:44 end of april is just
72:46 two months out so you would have to
72:49 deliver this entire
72:50 development cycle this entire
72:52 private testing or internal testing
72:55 cycle needs to be
72:57 delivered within the next
72:59 uh let's say
73:01 eight to nine
73:02 weeks starting now in in february and
73:06 this would also include the ecip
73:08 governance process so you would
73:10 make a proposal to make this hard fork
73:12 on the state
73:14 um
73:15 and you can
73:16 do already run some numbers and and
73:18 suggest numbers it's really always
73:20 numbers block numbers is always a moving
73:22 target and it's very difficult to
73:23 estimate months in advance because block
73:25 times on proof of work networks are very
73:29 strongly uh
73:31 they're not very uh consistent
73:34 unfortunately so it's really hard to
73:36 predict uh months in advance so
73:38 yeah i think my point is um
73:41 if you want to do a hard fork you
73:43 basically
73:44 define
73:46 a wanted hard fork date in the future
73:49 and try to estimate
73:50 will this work also by calculating
73:52 backwards the mainnet activation the
73:54 testnet activation the internal feature
73:58 freeze
73:59 and internal testing deadlines and this
74:02 needs to be coordinated with the core
74:04 developers and they say yes this is
74:07 possible or they know they say no it's
74:09 not or they say
74:10 it's possible but
74:12 we need to have certainty from the
74:14 community governance or from the ecip
74:16 process we don't some client teams might
74:19 say they don't start implementing a
74:20 feature unless it's in last call
74:23 so there are as you see there are many
74:25 moving parts to this i hope this answers
74:27 your question
74:28 yes thank you thanks a lot hey offering
74:31 um
74:32 i mean if nobody else has a question or
74:35 anything i don't want to take up you
74:36 know any any other time so um
74:40 i just wanted to mention i just wanted
74:41 to mention that uh
74:44 i believe afree has a hard cut off in
74:46 the next few minutes so if there's any
74:48 burning last questions then now is the
74:50 time to ask
74:51 and if not you can take the floor kev
74:53 cool so um aubrey it seems like the main
74:56 arguments for um
74:58 for shot three to be implemented
75:01 are that
75:02 um
75:03 [Music]
75:05 for not to be for them not to be until
75:07 implemented is a6 will take over
75:11 um and then you know it will be a
75:13 centralized network
75:15 um
75:16 and then the opposite side is that you
75:19 know all these
75:20 gpu miners are just going to overwhelm
75:23 the network with their you know one pita
75:25 hash
75:26 and that's gonna you know just uh
75:30 destroy uh etc
75:32 um
75:33 but i mean just like with bitcoin
75:36 and how that progressed from from when
75:39 it did when it was worth pennies to
75:41 where it is now
75:43 um do you think that would be the most
75:46 likely
75:47 um
75:48 way forward for it or i guess the the
75:51 path of
75:52 least resistance for for that um
75:56 you know the mining ecosystem
75:59 i honestly don't know um i'm
76:02 i'm a big fan of uh
76:04 shar3 um but that said i'm also a big
76:07 fan of many other algorithms uh
76:10 iron in this entire
76:13 cpu mining versus gpu mining uh
76:17 versus
76:18 specialized hardware fpgas a6
76:22 i never really
76:24 found my spot in this debate because
76:27 i can't really tell what's better this
76:29 is you know you have this cpu mining
76:31 networks that are run by botnets
76:33 basically you have this uh you have gpu
76:37 mining networks that have like this seek
76:40 i mean there are people that claim that
76:41 there's there's no way to make something
76:44 cpu proof
76:45 uh gpu asic resistant
76:48 in first place and you can always have
76:50 you can tell the community is it's gpo
76:52 only and then you have the com companies
76:54 see secretly having specialized chips uh
76:57 mining it anyways
76:59 on their more efficient hardware i don't
77:02 know i i would say
77:03 i would carefully say something like
77:05 chassis would be very fair because it's
77:08 uh it's it's it's like a gold standard
77:11 in cryptography
77:12 um
77:13 it would it is extremely efficient and
77:16 fast and it would be easy to optimize
77:20 for anyone who has access to
77:22 uh
77:25 building specialized hardware and it's
77:27 also
77:28 um there might be even uh applications
77:32 for specialized char three uh uh a6
77:35 beyond mining i don't know i'm not an
77:37 expert on that but i would carefully say
77:39 it's you should not be afraid of
77:42 moving towards something like char sri
77:45 i'm not necessarily saying you should do
77:47 it um
77:48 but i'm also not a very opposed either
77:52 but
77:52 since we are on a nissium classic call
77:54 looking back um at i don't know maybe
77:56 alex did this talk in vancouver and edc
77:59 summit uh advocating for three in 2019
78:03 and then looking at the
78:05 the horrible i'm i mean i'm happy that
78:08 all teams that were involved in the last
78:11 months and years where we had to
78:13 mitigate 51 attacks and
78:16 patch different you know we had this
78:19 mess protocol we had
78:20 we moved from east to etc
78:23 all these solutions they kind of worked
78:25 and we we managed to prevent further
78:28 attacks but then again
78:30 what if we had taken alex seriously in
78:33 2019 and just executed upon his ideas
78:36 and
78:37 stand out
78:38 from
78:39 from uh move away from ethereum uh move
78:42 towards a
78:44 different algorithm
78:47 that could be more more efficient more
78:49 fairly distributed with regards to
78:51 hardware and i mean um yeah what if i
78:54 mean there's a lot of water autism but
78:56 uh
78:56 yeah i cannot give a definite answer but
78:58 i i would say it you should not be
79:00 afraid of and i also like a lot uh
79:03 henry's idea about having even more than
79:05 one algorithm if if it's carefully
79:08 specced out
79:09 yeah i totally agree uh you know if it's
79:13 uh there's if there's a time and a place
79:16 you know
79:17 go for it um
79:19 if there's not then you know that i i
79:22 don't think it should and i guess i'm
79:24 impartial yeah well we don't have
79:27 consensus for it so we're just wasting
79:29 wasting time talking about it so um afri
79:31 i want to say um
79:33 i want to say thank you so much for all
79:35 your work on the protocol parody uh i
79:38 remember the days when you were working
79:39 on this quite a bit and uh
79:41 and
79:42 um
79:43 i think that that was a really big value
79:46 lift for this network um
79:49 one thing i heard you talking and you
79:51 might have addressed this earlier i
79:52 apologize i've been kind of in and out
79:54 of this call was um
79:56 a lack of users and how we didn't see
79:59 the shift when the fee markets were
80:01 extremely high on ethereum i also was of
80:04 the opinion that we might start seeing
80:06 that migration over to ethereum classic
80:09 um my question to you is do you have any
80:11 thoughts on
80:12 um
80:13 why we didn't see that shift and perhaps
80:16 there's um
80:18 some bridges or some sort of products uh
80:22 protocols maybe on top of ethereum
80:24 classic that um
80:26 would help in kind of
80:28 ushering people over to the network um i
80:32 believe that you cited you know people
80:33 didn't want the political statement but
80:36 nowadays i think that um that's kind of
80:39 fallen to the wayside as we've seen with
80:40 finance smart chain and some of the
80:42 other ones where um they kind of created
80:45 those type of bridges uh some through
80:47 their centralized exchanges um and you
80:50 started seeing protocols pop up on those
80:53 other evms um
80:56 do you have any opinion on some of the
80:58 high priority
80:59 um
81:00 protocols that need to be built on
81:02 ethereum classic to try to uh
81:06 jumpstart that type of ecosystem we are
81:08 we are running very close to time so i
81:11 will let apprey finish this question
81:13 pretty quickly because i know he has to
81:14 go in a couple minutes so uh uh
81:17 yeah you could wrap up and then uh we'll
81:20 say
81:20 very big thanks to afri for joining us
81:22 and uh yeah massive thanks from everyone
81:25 here and it's been extremely useful to
81:28 have this conversation so i'll leave you
81:30 to finish it every
81:32 um yeah thank you for having me and also
81:34 thank you for those questions it's a
81:35 really interesting one
81:37 um
81:38 i think it all comes down to network
81:41 effect um
81:43 do you want to
81:45 do d5 on issue classic if there's only
81:48 limited set of exchanges if there's only
81:50 limited set of tokens you can trade if
81:53 there are not sufficient bridges to
81:55 other networks and um
81:58 i don't really have a protocol to
82:00 recommend
82:02 um i would just try to i mean we are
82:05 running out of time but i would
82:07 try to for everyone in new zealand
82:09 classic to zoom out and
82:11 think about what could be
82:13 two options what could be the
82:14 opportunities for assume classic going
82:15 forward because i mean
82:18 let's face it in 2022 assume classic
82:21 really you cannot only be immutable and
82:24 have a monetary policy and
82:25 [Music]
82:28 stick to your values and then again
82:30 nobody
82:31 i'm i'm trying to be provocative please
82:33 don't take my word for it but just
82:35 nobody cares to build applications on
82:37 museum classic
82:39 you need to
82:40 try to define why you need to find out
82:42 why would people build on this and maybe
82:45 it's it's worse to like take a look at
82:48 i i mentioned layer twos earlier on
82:50 ethereum which kind of they kind of fill
82:53 this gap between
82:55 they still use this network effect from
82:57 all these applications and protocols
82:59 available on ethereum foundation network
83:02 but they also fill the skip of being
83:04 cheaper and
83:06 faster and still as accessible as issue
83:09 foundation maintenance
83:11 but also what i don't know how many of
83:13 you are following the network effects of
83:15 polkadot which is also interesting they
83:18 also have evm chains they also have
83:20 very similar uh
83:22 applications they even use they even
83:25 work with the same uh browser plugins
83:28 and
83:29 they came much later than issue classic
83:31 how did they build this up from scratch
83:33 how how
83:35 what what did they do to
83:37 um
83:38 to attract so many people to actually do
83:41 uh defy on pokedot or i don't know there
83:43 are other pockets just one example i
83:47 i could go on and go on um for
83:50 isilon classic specifically it might be
83:52 time to like just really step back
83:55 zoom out and and like get this
83:56 helicopter view of of this ecosystem and
83:59 think if i were an application developer
84:02 what what needs to happen to
84:05 to actually use or make this attractive
84:07 to to deploy my applications on this
84:09 network and or as a user stifle user as
84:12 a trader whatever
84:14 why would i use sim classic and maybe
84:16 it's it's it's really time for assume
84:19 classic to if cells desire to be more
84:22 attractive for
84:23 developers and users maybe it's time to
84:26 also be open for more radical
84:28 changes in
84:30 in the technology stack in
84:32 in how
84:34 how you position yourself do you always
84:37 want to be a little sister of ethereum
84:39 foundation network or do you want to
84:41 maybe
84:42 do a bold move towards a new ecosystem
84:45 do you want to build
84:46 upon a much more modern technology stick
84:50 all these things that could be
84:51 considerated but you would have to
84:54 be courageous and
84:57 step out of this little uh bsu and
85:00 coregas cloud is step out of this ecip
85:04 process i'm not saying you should ignore
85:06 all this and it's it's so far these
85:08 values are very
85:09 high goods in the community and they
85:11 should be preserved but you should allow
85:13 yourself to think about where to move
85:16 to
85:17 from the point we are here today and we
85:20 are still here this is a good thing but
85:22 you also need to think where do you want
85:23 to go and um eventually this is
85:25 something i believe this is not a
85:26 technical not necessarily a technical
85:28 question but just something um
85:30 issue classic needs to needs to discuss
85:32 uh
85:34 openly and
85:36 yeah this is um a discussion i would
85:39 happy to follow yeah but we are running
85:41 out of time yeah thank you i'm free
85:43 you've been super generous with your
85:45 time and left us with a lot of amazing
85:47 uh food for thought so uh we are over
85:50 time and uh thanks for joining us
85:52 thank you have a great day
85:55 you too thanks bye-bye
85:58 okay so that was uh afree um the call is
86:01 continuing uh as long as we still have
86:05 enough coffee in us um because we do
86:06 have some other items but before i
86:09 continue to the next section were there
86:10 any other comments on uh afri um
86:14 ball's open
86:16 uh
86:17 wish there were more devs
86:19 like him
86:20 especially on the other side of the uh
86:24 ethereum
86:25 yep he's definitely uh
86:27 i guess an mvp
86:30 yeah very agnostic too
86:33 okay so um
86:34 i wanted to uh continue the call with
86:37 the next section um with i guess a mini
86:40 announcement of a an mvp product uh
86:43 that's related to etc dao which uh has
86:45 just been sort of launched in a very
86:47 beta stage but will be over time
86:50 evolving into hopefully a
86:53 grants system or funding platform type
86:56 thing currently it's just a github repo
86:59 github repo at uh github.com etc
87:03 gigs and over time
87:05 this is going to
87:06 grow and
87:08 basically be used as a testing ground
87:09 for how we might be able to raise funds
87:11 and allocate funds um
87:13 via various different dows that are
87:15 running in etc so uh thanks to ronin for
87:18 the initiative there
87:20 that's awesome you're the one that fired
87:22 it up
87:24 thanks to you
87:25 inspired from uh monero so uh credit
87:28 where where is you
87:29 and if anyone has any suggestions or
87:31 updates um
87:32 questions yeah feel free to contribute
87:35 to the repo sorry kid
87:37 i i i know somebody who really likes
87:39 monero
87:40 yeah me too
87:42 yeah so i actually i attended one of
87:44 their conferences here in denver and uh
87:46 it was one of the most insightful
87:48 conferences i had um but
87:51 one thing that i really like about i
87:52 think that community is that they figure
87:55 out a way to fund and improve their
87:57 protocol
87:58 and they're pretty honest about their
88:00 protocol too that's what i learned at
88:01 that conference was they they really do
88:04 take privacy privacy seriously and uh
88:07 they're honest about their shortcomings
88:09 uh which i think is really helpful when
88:11 you're just trying to make the tech
88:13 better um and here i i i feel like we
88:16 have a lot to learn from monero in that
88:18 regard um
88:20 i think uh i think sometimes we aren't
88:23 entirely honest with ourselves of what
88:25 we need uh to do for this network and i
88:27 think afri was really hitting on uh on a
88:29 great thing there is i think we need to
88:31 zoom out take a bird eye view of you
88:34 know how do we stay competitive in this
88:36 landscape you know we get in these very
88:39 micro debates
88:41 over um you know stuff that franklin
88:44 isn't adding value to the network it may
88:47 in a very very long time but the network
88:49 might not even be around if you don't
88:50 get traction so the whole thought of
88:53 this etc dao
88:55 thing was this actually was something
88:57 that i had noticed in maniro a long time
88:59 ago um and uh when i came into the
89:03 ethereum classic ecosystem kind of um i
89:06 think i was watching it in
89:08 2018 um
89:10 and
89:11 i was saying these p you know
89:14 there should be some sort of funding
89:15 mechanism
89:17 in this system and i thought something
89:19 like this made sense
89:21 i remember posting about it in the
89:23 server and there was no appetite at all
89:25 for it um and it was hey we have three
89:28 private teams um or i can't remember if
89:32 it was three or two uh
89:34 but anyways there was no appetite for it
89:36 and now what we've seen is we've kind of
89:38 seen
89:39 those teams starting to fall to the
89:40 wayside uh and then we've also seen the
89:43 risk of um
89:45 of
89:46 of losing funding and how that affects
89:48 the network and so
89:51 my whole thought was you build it like a
89:53 business where you create positive
89:56 revenue
89:57 um
89:58 loops right so you have a protocol that
90:01 uh
90:02 you start building little gigs that
90:05 generate more funds to build more little
90:07 gigs and fun more gigs and it's just
90:10 that's that's my thought of doing it um
90:12 i always never won that thought that we
90:14 needed to adjust the protocol um
90:17 to build a treasury and all that uh so
90:19 anyways so you know i think that's kind
90:22 of where this has started is that the
90:24 treasury fell to the wayside there is a
90:27 real funny need um and there's tons of
90:30 great protocols on the ethereum
90:32 foundation network that could be ported
90:35 over here um people just need some money
90:38 to do that and you can start
90:41 filling up blocks with transactions on
90:42 ethereum classic and give it a go
90:45 um
90:46 and i think that that's a more
90:47 productive
90:48 uh use of our time
90:50 um
90:51 than us fighting over extremely
90:53 contentious ecips and trying to shake
90:56 the foundation of this network again
90:59 um so that's just my piece on it is that
91:02 i believe that this is the right
91:04 direction for this network um
91:08 and
91:08 you know hopefully it grows to be
91:10 something that's meaningful you know
91:12 over time and hopefully as
91:15 it props up protocols
91:17 um
91:18 via out you know open source development
91:21 right uh
91:22 hopefully
91:23 transactions increase on their on
91:25 ethereum classic and the fee market gets
91:29 sparked and then
91:30 um
91:31 all of a sudden all of the great things
91:33 that we've seen on the ethereum
91:35 foundation network which we watched over
91:37 it was about two or three years it took
91:39 to really jump start it hopefully we
91:41 have that happen over here
91:43 and we didn't have to
91:45 do
91:46 crazy changes to the network protocol
91:49 um
91:50 that are destabilizing in nature
91:52 to achieve
91:53 that type of user adoption um so anyways
91:57 that's just that's just where this kind
91:58 of came from and uh
92:00 and kind of what i think it can do and
92:02 you know and thanks to uh estora for
92:06 setting this up you know
92:08 do you think something like that is a
92:10 lot uh more efficient than something
92:12 like bitcoin
92:14 well i think they probably can't be used
92:15 the goal was to use git coin with this
92:17 as well if i if i understand correctly
92:20 right
92:21 the thing with git coin is uh it's more
92:24 for
92:25 finding
92:27 or actually funding projects that you
92:28 know that you want to create as opposed
92:30 to deciding which projects to fund in
92:32 the first place and i think i think why
92:34 we wanted to use bitcoin was uh the
92:36 developers already there so rather than
92:38 making the developers come to us we just
92:40 go to where they're hanging out um i
92:42 know i know many open source developers
92:44 just go and they check in there and they
92:46 see oh is there you know is there a gig
92:48 that um that i already know how to do so
92:51 i can make a you know a scalp of that
92:53 real quick um also i think that is good
92:56 i um we had talked about um last call it
92:59 was you know are we paying the right
93:02 amount for these jobs i think that um
93:04 it's a good market to look at that too
93:06 like what's a reasonable fee for
93:08 development um of a certain code base
93:11 that we want on ethereum classic so
93:14 yeah for sure um i envisaged this giggs
93:17 platform as a kind of like
93:20 meta
93:21 like central organizing location for
93:24 deciding what stuff should get funded
93:27 and it could be that
93:28 like
93:29 one gig is use get use github sorry use
93:33 git coin to fund blah blah blah another
93:36 is use this uh
93:39 charity llc or whatever it is to fund
93:41 this other thing but uh it could be
93:44 using any number of different sort of
93:45 funding mechanisms or
93:47 um
93:48 something like that but it's more of
93:50 just like a
93:51 coordination um
93:53 central point
93:55 do you are you guys aware of any um
93:58 potential competitors or uh potential
94:01 competition in in the dial space um with
94:04 etc
94:06 not that i'm aware of
94:08 yeah and i'm not i'm not sure what you
94:09 mean by that of a competitor to adapt
94:12 okay yeah so um
94:14 yeah saturn that that project they're
94:17 they're working on um developing some
94:19 dowels uh they're still you know trying
94:22 to get their their stuff together
94:24 um there's that other molok dao
94:27 um the etc version of that um i think
94:31 alex might have been the only con
94:32 contributor to that um
94:36 and i think there might be one other one
94:37 but i was just curious if you guys had
94:39 heard of any any other ones yeah i
94:41 actually i knew about those but uh
94:44 but i thought saturn folded and then i
94:47 thought alex's thing never took off um i
94:49 think that that wasn't that spurred
94:51 around that when the treasury was coming
94:53 up from iohk um i can't remember but i
94:57 thought that that's that's where that
94:58 came up um i think i don't i don't know
95:01 if those are i wouldn't think of those
95:03 as
95:04 competitors because i think just the
95:06 concept of this is to try to
95:08 figure to try to organize in some sort
95:11 of way of getting stuff built on uh
95:14 ethereum classic we had we had three
95:16 private teams that built no protocols
95:19 not one protocol went up you know and so
95:22 um we're seeing we're seeing uh ethereum
95:25 co-op or etc co-op and we're just not
95:28 seeing the funds go into
95:31 meaningful protocol development on top
95:33 of ethereum classic we're seeing it go
95:35 to
95:36 ecips that may be beneficial way down
95:39 the road but you know it's not
95:41 addressing any immediate needs um so
95:44 this is i think the urgency of this is
95:47 starting to come up because there just
95:49 isn't anyone uh that's pushing on that
95:52 type of like immediate need on this
95:55 network which is um to prop up protocols
95:58 and get it so that the end user can fire
96:02 up a token and there's an ecosystem you
96:04 know there's an amm there's just just
96:06 all of the other stuff that you see on
96:08 other evms i mean the model is out there
96:10 it's extremely easy to see as aphro said
96:13 zoom out to a bird eye view you know
96:16 it's a barren landscape on this network
96:18 in the sense of uh saturn was probably
96:20 the only thing that uh
96:22 was a
96:24 type of amm to trade tokens on this
96:27 network uh but even so i mean that was a
96:29 really really i mean i'm sorry if one of
96:32 you guys are work worked on that or
96:33 whatever but i mean that was some old
96:35 looking web that just wasn't enticing at
96:37 all and it also like
96:40 it also
96:42 i what's that
96:43 i said yeah you're right
96:45 yeah it was like it was like old-ass php
96:47 i mean it's just like it just didn't
96:49 even look like it was of this decade um
96:52 which you know it's fine if it was an
96:54 mvp but
96:55 you know it got no adoption right and
96:57 and there's no surprise to me on that uh
97:00 we have the models out there there's the
97:01 protocols out there i think the i think
97:03 the thought is to
97:05 get this going um and i we've had
97:08 previous calls on this and it was
97:10 um let's start really small
97:13 let's do you know identify small things
97:15 just start trying on the proper you know
97:19 or really it's kind of like try get coin
97:22 try any way to start getting stuff built
97:24 onto this network um because as afria
97:27 was saying is you know the hourglass is
97:29 is ticking here you know we have to
97:32 start doing stuff on top of the network
97:34 you know the the network in itself is in
97:37 a pretty good shape um it just needs
97:40 the right protocols on top of it um we
97:43 can't just be stuck in 2018 we got it we
97:46 got to keep moving it forward that's
97:48 that's
97:49 what i think is the general purpose of
97:51 this i don't think it's to compete with
97:52 another dow to to do any of that it's to
97:55 really try to get stuff built on top of
97:57 ethereum classic so
97:59 all of our etc is worth more money yeah
98:02 that's a really good motivation behind
98:04 that um
98:06 yeah sounds like a really good project
98:08 but i as far as saturn goes they're
98:11 trying to do the exact same thing i mean
98:14 all the all the original developers
98:16 they're gone but a new set of people
98:19 have have come in and
98:21 really devoted their own time and stuff
98:23 and tried to are trying to get this
98:26 thing back together but
98:28 um
98:29 yeah it'll be interesting to see what
98:31 what happens with etc because
98:33 this space is so valuable and it's going
98:36 to be such a missed opportunity um for a
98:38 lot of projects if they choose not to
98:42 use
98:42 ctc yeah and you know i look forward to
98:46 seeing whatever comes out of the saturn
98:47 guys um
98:48 well you know we'll see what goes with
98:50 that but you know something needs to
98:52 happen over you know something needs to
98:54 happen in this discord and
98:56 uh
98:57 you know we need to we need to be
98:58 propping up protocols you know there's
99:00 plenty of solidity developers out there
99:03 right there's tons of them and why are
99:05 they not building on this because no
99:07 one's paying them to prop up these
99:08 protocols so that's you know it's it's a
99:11 money thing it's a put the money in the
99:13 right spot um
99:15 there it's there it's not a lack of
99:17 development talent it's not like uh
99:19 the the network is not integrated in
99:22 damn near every exchange right
99:24 like it's everywhere
99:26 literally everywhere
99:28 yeah it's it's literally everywhere and
99:29 then on the wallet side for an exchange
99:31 it's extremely easy to add the ethereum
99:35 classic network uh just like you would
99:37 do anything with ethereum so so anyways
99:40 um we just you need to have the use
99:42 cases on there and i think that that's
99:44 the direction that this network needs to
99:46 go um
99:47 we really need to start get filling
99:49 these blocks with transactions on chain
99:51 transactions
99:53 and not just someone moving funds back
99:54 and forth we're talking you know trading
99:57 transactions um all of the stuff you see
99:59 on the ethereum network that fee market
100:01 uh you know when people are saying oh
100:04 the merge is a very bad thing for
100:06 ethereum classic well if you have that
100:07 fee market you have that activity it's
100:09 not it just means that ethereum etc will
100:11 be worth a lot of money in the future um
100:14 but you got to build it you got to build
100:16 what what do they call them in ethereum
100:18 the lego stack i think is what they used
100:20 to always say you got to build the lego
100:22 stack on top of the etc network
100:26 i haven't heard that one
100:28 yes oh i think i think it was their 2019
100:30 uh marketing thing to get people to
100:32 build build uh protocols on top
100:35 yeah and i hope to see uh maybe as an
100:38 action item for this week hopefully we
100:40 can get one or two uh proposals
100:43 into this uh giggs thing so we can start
100:45 testing out the system because uh yeah i
100:48 think as long as we do something every
100:51 week and make some progress we'll
100:52 eventually get there it's not gonna
100:54 happen instantly but we just need to
100:55 constantly be
100:57 uh having activity
100:59 yeah and i think if there's any uh if
101:00 there's any developers and you know you
101:03 know
101:04 what i've already what i've learned is a
101:06 lot of developers just learn like a
101:08 single code base and they try to apply
101:10 that to numerous networks uh if any
101:12 developers are listening and you're like
101:15 hey i know how to put that on the
101:17 ethereum classic network prop up a
101:19 proposal you know this is this is an
101:21 open thing uh go and submit the proposal
101:25 on this repo and get it in line um
101:28 and you know we'll figure out how to get
101:32 money to you guys that's i think that's
101:34 the goal
101:35 yep sounds awesome um i wanted to uh
101:38 move on now to the uh topic of uh pool
101:42 centralization and
101:44 uncle production because this was an
101:46 interesting uh item that was brought up
101:48 this week i believe by
101:50 wp
101:51 whack rack i'm not sure how i should
101:53 pronounce your name um did you want to
101:55 jump in there
101:57 um
101:58 easier the easiest pronunciation is just
102:00 to say werner
102:05 this this this cryptic acronym is simply
102:07 to have something that's reasonably
102:09 unique so that i don't have to pick a
102:10 new name a different name for for every
102:13 every site
102:14 um yeah the uncle rewards that was
102:16 something brought up by mr crazy who i
102:19 think is still on vacation
102:22 so um
102:24 the issue is basically that if you have
102:27 pools that are very big with a lot of
102:29 hash rate um
102:31 then they have a very good then when
102:32 they mine a block
102:34 um then they have a very good
102:35 probability to be also able to mine the
102:38 next block and they have also have a
102:42 time advantage
102:43 and because um they will see
102:46 the
102:47 if they mine up a block that will end up
102:49 on the blockchain they will
102:51 they will see this block immediately and
102:53 all the other other pools or the other
102:56 clients channel i will see this block
102:59 with some delay so they they start they
103:02 start later
103:04 being able to make blocks that sit on
103:06 top of this of this new block so if
103:09 there's a if there's a pool that
103:10 controls a lot of the hash rate this
103:13 block has a good chance of at this pool
103:16 it has a good chance of being able to
103:19 get
103:20 runs of consecutive blocks that come
103:23 from that
103:24 from that same pool this in turn means
103:27 that they have a good chance of blocks
103:30 that they that they find to be
103:34 blocks that really move the chain
103:36 forward instead of of being ankles
103:39 and
103:40 now on only feel you
103:42 if you find an anchor then you get paid
103:44 a bit but you get paid less but could
103:47 you briefly explain for the audience
103:49 what an uncle is
103:51 an uncle is a block that
103:53 that is correct that that passes all the
103:56 controls but it
103:59 it didn't make it
104:00 at the
104:01 into the longest chain instead some some
104:04 other block wonder wounded ways and
104:08 then uh future blogs can reference those
104:11 ankles and say by the way i found that
104:13 there was this this other block that was
104:15 submitted but it
104:19 it wasn't it wasn't there to be part of
104:22 the of the lowest chain um but it would
104:25 still like to acknowledge that this was
104:27 a valid block and its content can be
104:30 considered part of the blockchain and
104:33 when you when you make such a reference
104:35 then the the one making a block that
104:38 contains such a reference gets a little
104:41 reward and also the um the the
104:45 producer of the uncle block gets a
104:47 reward and only fear well i don't know
104:50 the numbers for a few but only film it's
104:53 it's a relatively significant um uh
104:56 compensation you get for for your uncles
104:59 so
105:00 it's it's they're not not worth as much
105:02 as as blocks that move the chain for
105:06 what they on on its on the longitudinal
105:08 direction but uh but um you still get
105:12 get something from for making blocks
105:14 that's that make it a bit wider
105:16 while in therm classic you get very
105:18 little
105:19 and
105:20 this means that uh
105:22 any pool that has
105:24 a lot of hash weight
105:26 which is the k especially the case
105:27 around the field classic where
105:29 even mine is currently
105:32 must be close to 50 percent and let me
105:35 just check how much it has at the moment
105:38 at the moment it has
105:40 um
105:42 50
105:43 46.
105:44 seven percent of the global hash rate of
105:47 ethereum classic so they're very close
105:50 to fifty percent already and
105:53 so this means that um
105:55 because they're so dominant they have a
105:58 very good chance of being of being able
106:00 to make consecutive
106:02 blocks and
106:03 cash and receive always the um the full
106:06 block rewards while other other pools
106:08 only get well not only gets unknowns but
106:12 have a much higher chance of getting
106:15 only ankle rewards instead of full block
106:17 block rewards so this creates an
106:18 unfairness between the poles
106:21 which goes beyond the
106:24 um the uh the differences you would
106:27 expect based on hash rate so it is
106:29 basically uh
106:31 a bonus for the
106:32 for
106:33 for the biggest
106:35 it's sort of kind of the
106:37 subsidiaries for the elites in a way and
106:41 also does the this is well first of all
106:43 it's not nice for the smaller pools
106:45 and because it also encourages i mean at
106:48 the moment it doesn't seem to be um
106:52 to happen to the to the
106:54 full to the worst extent imaginable
106:57 which would be the uh
106:58 this uh the largest pool trying to
107:01 actually suppress other pools by simply
107:03 ignoring their blocks then they could
107:05 probably already be able to get away
107:07 with this by just making by just looking
107:09 at their own blocks ignoring all the
107:11 others and eventually
107:13 well no other pool could could keep up
107:14 with them and it's unvery unlikely that
107:17 they all or would agree on the
107:18 understand the same competing chain
107:21 and then they could basically
107:23 make all the other other pools
107:25 unprofited we don't see this happen so
107:26 that's good they're not doing anything
107:28 actively agnostic but
107:32 still we can see that
107:33 there's there are benefits from the
107:35 synergy effect and this might get worse
107:37 over time and of course one big issue
107:40 one issue with
107:42 having such a massive pool concentration
107:44 is also that um
107:46 well first first of all the the pool
107:48 diversity the system drops so you have
107:52 less diversity in the software
107:55 higher risk but you create a single
107:58 point of failure and it will cross it
108:00 will also make the pool more attractive
108:02 for attacks i mean
108:04 you don't need to have 50 51 of the hash
108:07 rate if you can control a pool that has
108:09 that is 52
108:11 then you just need to take over the pool
108:13 and make it make it to your bidding and
108:15 you control the chain just as much and
108:17 you haven't spent anything in hash rate
108:18 so it's even cheaper so um
108:22 what idea is to improve the
108:25 the uncle rewards to make
108:28 make make things more attractive for
108:31 smaller pools
108:32 and to
108:33 to
108:35 reduce the risk of of such such an
108:38 unintentional
108:41 benef boosts basically to the
108:43 to a very large pool so that the
108:47 minor distribution would
108:49 be a bit more even so that we don't get
108:51 get one dominant pool and
108:53 that could then cause all kinds of
108:56 centralization issues
108:58 and
108:59 um of course it's just one of many
109:01 possibilities i may have there have been
109:03 some criticism that we think uncle
109:06 rewards
109:07 would
109:09 would mean changing the monetary policy
109:12 um
109:13 this could be well if in a way it would
109:16 obviously um
109:18 it wouldn't necessarily have to mean
109:21 that
109:22 there would be an increase of a
109:25 significant increase of overall emission
109:27 but instead
109:29 we just be done by reducing the the
109:31 block reward and moving moving some of
109:35 them moving that
109:36 through the two angular wave to the
109:38 unclear words part of the
109:40 of the
109:42 general reward scheme but um there might
109:45 be other options so that's
109:47 uh the
109:48 there's no specific proposal on on that
109:50 side just
109:51 the general consideration that those
109:53 small anchor rewards mean that small
109:56 pools have have a disadvantage that is
109:59 implied by this structure
110:01 and that can
110:03 lead to problems
110:05 interesting um is there a
110:07 link or document that we can add to the
110:09 show notes to uh to help people get
110:11 their heads around this
110:12 no there's nothing yet um i was thinking
110:16 of trying to
110:18 to do a numerical simulation
110:21 that would let us
110:23 see how
110:24 how how things go um
110:26 how do you see how to see how does he
110:28 start his effects um depends upon his
110:30 parameters and and
110:32 what uh what the possible outcomes are
110:35 of such conscious concentration but i
110:37 haven't gotten around to this there's no
110:39 larger description of this thing it's
110:42 it's basically something something that
110:44 uh
110:45 that mr crazy race
110:46 uh i guess he noticed that that he was
110:49 seeing more uncles on the small pool
110:51 then
110:52 then we see on only on on ether mine and
110:57 then he realized this probably due to
110:59 this and i think this is
111:01 a very very plausible observation um the
111:04 airport hypothesis for this effect and
111:06 there's the indeed science that's the
111:08 that there's there's such a such an
111:11 unbalance um
111:13 but no there's there's nothing uh
111:15 there's no
111:16 there's no paper on this yet interesting
111:19 one of the potential ways to mitigate uh
111:23 an increase in
111:25 the reward of uncles is by having longer
111:28 block times so that you get lesser
111:31 uncles overall
111:32 i'm not sure the number of er either the
111:35 block time changes this this effect
111:38 i wouldn't really expect
111:40 i mean
111:41 the effect is simply that you have a
111:43 higher chance of of mining
111:45 the next block and
111:48 this
111:49 if you change the block time this
111:51 doesn't change your probabilities
111:53 because they are determined by your hash
111:54 rate
111:55 okay i guess uh yeah i was going to say
111:59 i'm pretty sure this has been discussed
112:01 i think like six or seven years ago
112:04 um
112:06 i'll try to find the the
112:08 ecip i think it was uh
112:10 in ecip or maybe it was just a
112:12 discussion um but it was by dexran he
112:15 was he was trying to propose all this uh
112:18 all these types of solutions so i'll try
112:20 to find that um
112:21 and post it
112:23 that's great thanks kevin
112:24 so we are reaching the two hour uh time
112:27 and uh
112:29 that's a fairly long one um it's been a
112:31 very fruitful discussion once again uh
112:34 are there any other final topics that
112:35 people want to bring up before we wrap
112:37 up
112:38 okay so yeah you and all people
112:42 yeah it's good isn't it
112:43 it's uh it's got some momentum now we'll
112:45 just keep on rolling
112:47 most definitely
112:48 all right so that concludes this week's
112:50 call thank you to those who contributed
112:53 and for listening and sharing if we
112:55 don't if we didn't cover something that
112:56 you'd like to discuss you can always
112:57 submit your questions and topic
112:59 suggestions in the community course
113:00 channel and we can bring it up in a
113:02 future talk hope to see you all hope to
113:04 see you all again next week thanks bye

Hard Fork Preamble

  • Upcoming Mystique Hard Fork coming ~13th Feb
  • Currently ETC Coop has taken charge of this fork including coordination/outreach, you can follow bob's twitter (thank you)
  • ETC will likely be experiencing hard forks for many years to come, so we wanted to "open source" some of the knowledge that has been accumulated over the years by speaking to a qualified hard fork coordinator, in the hopes that it can help ensure future forks go smoothly
  • We are pleased to be joined by one of the most experienced and qualified coordinators out there, Afri, who is veteran and prolific caretaker of various blockchains and testnets. Afri has previously helped coordinated forks on ETC, such as Agharta, and (I believe that series of A-name forks?).

Questions for Afri

  • Firstly, warm welcome, and thank you very much for joining us today to share some knowledge with the ETC community.
  • Who is Afri, and how has he been involved with Blockchain/Web3 & ETC?
  • What is the goal of hard fork coordination?
  • What is involved in hard fork coordination?
  • What are the pitfalls; what kind of things can go wrong when transitioning to a new fork, and how can this be mitigated?
  • What kind of network monitoring tools do you use, do you spin up your own nodes to check?
  • What happens if there's a chain split; from a coordinator's perspective, what should be done?
  • What are the kinds of chain splits that can occur? Accidental, intentional, temporary, permenant, etc...
  • If a hard fork results in a chain split, how to resolve things?
  • What do you think would happen to applications on a network if there is a permenant chain split (DeFi, NFTs, etc)?
  • It seems that part of the role of HF coordinator is to act as a trusted point of contact on behalf of a project, but does this pose any centralization risk that could be exploited?
  • How can projects with no central organizing comittee like ETC coordinate forks in a maximally decentralized way?
  • What is your perspective on multiple client implementations, is it helpful or annoying, and would a bitcoin-like approach make coordinating forks easier?
  • Thoughts on where ETC is at right now?
  • Do you have any thoughts on how The Merge on Ethereum will go, will miners continue the legacy chain?
  • What is Afri up to these days? Anything you'd like to shout out?
  • Q&A OPEN TO CHAT
  • SHA3
  • Bridges, Chainsafe?