one two three all right guys So for anybody listening out there we've got a special update from Charles hoskinson uh founder of iohk and also leading the uh growth Indique team who's focusing on the new scholet client for ETC as well as a whole bunch of other stuff for ETC a lot of Works going on so we've got a bunch of updates from Charles Charles take it away hey Carlo thanks for having me on um I swore I'd never be on let's talk Etc but I felt uh why not it was kind of a spur of the- moment thing um anyway big longtime listener first first time on the show uh growth and de uh has been kind of moving along swimmingly so I think it was about eight months or nine months ago when I was on Tien show I said we'll be hiring a development team to go and build a client um which was kind of a crazy idea and we originally said H you know we'll hire like three people or four people and they'll spend a few months and we'll kind of just get the ecosystem where it needed to go then when we actually got into the process of interviewing people it was just brutal we we received a lot of resumés and we had to give everybody a technical test and there was a bit of an issue and then we eventually came down to um two teams an Argentine team and a Polish team and we couldn't choose between them we were like we like these guys so much so I just threw in the towel and I said H hell we'll just hire everybody so uh the growth antique team is is now at seven people uh it's led by a wonderful Irish guy named Alan mcherry um and uh basically they all came on board semi fulltime full-time is around November December they kind of trickled in because we had to wait for them to finish other obligations and projects and the whole team reached full strength about mid January so um managing expectations the the first thing that we assigned them to do was just to understand the ethereum protocol so the people we had hired are all very solid computer science people they have good backgrounds like master's degrees and they've been Developers for quite some time so you can give them documentation you give them white papers you can give them pretty complicated tasks to do and they can do these things and do them well and securely um but the challenge is that this team uh while they had experience with distributed systems they didn't have experience in the cryptocurrency space so the first challenge for us with uh this team uh was to just kind of bring them up to speed and introduce them to all of this exotic and new technology and that's what they're currently working on so I gave each of them a pretty dense set of white papers and reading m materials and some courses including the smart contract udemy course and so forth just to get their feet wet and they spent basically two months reading documentation looking at code and and walking their way through uh this ecosystem and they've learned uh a huge amount in a very short period of time um now that that is through uh they're about 50% of the way 60% of the way through the ethereum uh protocol uh and they've implemented as a go code and they've implemented about 15 20 % of the protocol in Scala the goal will be to implement everything into Scala and uh there's kind of like a pedagogical phase where it kind of works but it's not a production client and then the next stage will be to transform that effort into a secure production Enterprise great client written in 100% new code in Scola so um I'm very impressed with Allen's leadership you know I get daily reports they're using utra uh Gant charts and everything so your standard scrum driven development is is occurring you know the other thing is we just started live standups with uh with the growth and deque team so on the six we uh broadcasted the first meeting and uh every week thereafter we intend on broadcasting a meeting and the road map the Gant charts all these things will be made public um within the next few days or week or two just depends on how long it takes our web Debs to get it up and make it pretty and so forth so uh one of the reasons why I wanted to get on was just to kind of manage expectations because when you say you're building a client um that can mean many things and it's important what people should expect when they should expect it and uh what the purpose of this client is so let's discuss that um so with respect to the pedagogical phase that is nearly ended uh and uh this team the growth Indi team has a pretty deep and detailed understanding of how cryptocurrencies work in general at this point and a pretty detailed understanding of how ethereum works so um now they're getting to the point where they're getting into the nitty-gritty like they're opening up the evm they're looking at each and every op code they're trying to really understand this stuff at a level that only uh people like Gavin wood or or people who actually built a client would would understand it uh this process will probably take another two months in my estimation maybe a little faster maybe a little longer it depends on really a Litany of factors and you know the quality of documentation and other things but so far the documentation has been pretty good and the code that they've read has been pretty good although we've noticed a few little issues between gu and parody which were differences is of opinion but for the most part the protocol is pretty well fleshed out uh so exiting April then the effort will be saying okay let's take this pool of work and transform this pool of work into a beta something that people can install they can run on their computer it'll connect to the test net and it will give us uh basically all the functionality of ethereum um and then from that the question is how do we make it secure and Enterprise grade so how how do we take it from something that works to something that works and you can trust with your money uh that process will probably take another month to two months depending upon how fast they can move and you know a Litany of features as well as how fast the security Auditors and other people move so we will put all the software that we write through security audit we have a very good firm we work with for other projects called Grim we may retain them for that or we may use a different firm um we've also been collaborating lightly with um the guys at rootstock two of our developers are collocated in the same workspace with Bonas Aris so we do have a chance to talk to Sergio learner and so forth and they've they've made certainly a lot of really good Innovations on their side like decor and they have some overlay protocols for speeding up smart contract computation and they've also improved the evm they're getting like a five times speed up over um the ethereum J evm because of some of the things that they've done so our hope is to take some of those Innovations and have them work their way into the growth and declin as well so it's kind of like managing expectations don't expect anything beta until June uh and don't anything Enterprise grade until maybe a few months thereafter depending upon the review but my hope is by the third quarter of this year that we will have uh a completely independent Code 100% built from the groundup uh ethereum classic client that is uh in direct support of all the other clients meaning you can talk to parody you can talk to gu um the other hope is that bundled with it we'll have an IDE and all the tooling that people have built for solidity like truffle and so forth um probably pretty easy to do because we're going to use electron is our wallet we have a platform called datalis which is built on top of electron we've already built a cryptocurrency wallet with it and so we're the way we built datalist is it supports multiple currencies so it' be pretty simple for us to upgrade that front end uh and then make it support ethereum classic furthermore um electron was built by GitHub for the atom editor so it's probably going to be pretty simple for us to get an IDE to work well with that and so you can have a development environment uh and also your wallet directly connected to each other so that's uh what's coming down the pipe for growth Andi nice nice good stuff uh so yeah that was a really good overall update on what's going on and also uh I think you had something you wanted to mention about monetary policy as well yeah so um it's important to keep in perspective the difference between short-term and longterm So currently the actually all of the major development work that's meaningful is being done by uh splick and you know the the GU client and the other core developers who are working on parody and so forth so uh they're responsible for the the two hard Forks that have occurred and they've done phenomenal work and so what they've done is taken code base that someone else wrote and they're keeping it on par with ethereum and and changing it where we we deem necessary as a community so um it is unlikely that the growth and decline will be operational prior to uh the monetary policy being locked down so it's likely that uh MP will be set and implemented by the GU and the parity clients uh and future features are going to have to come from us three working together so uh this said we have to really start getting the ball rolling on on getting some basic principles down and getting a an actual Improvement proposal finalized so that we can get consensus around it and get it implemented my hope would be to get it implemented sometime in March to April if possible um so uh I think the community so far has been pretty gung-ho about sticking with proof of work uh second there's been a lot of discussion about what ghost needs to do and if we need to stay with ghost upgrade ghost replace ghost there's a there's there's a component there because ghost does have an connection to the monetary policy um the other thing is that uh there has to be some discussion about basically uh whether this is going to be the final monetary policy or if we intend on setting a date to Tinker with it uh for example if we wanted to do something like install a Treasury System so for our firm we released a paper last year um in Q4 on the dash Treasury System and we didn't stop researching we actually kept thread and we have another set of uh documents and requirements and Designs coming out uh in the next week or two and this is basically our philosophy of what a Treasury System needs to look like and we've been in discussions with um a university in England to inculcate that project um there and develop it over an arc of time such as three to six months so it is interesting if we're going to go with a final monetary policy in the next two months and say that's it never going to change we're now like Bitcoin it's set forever or we would do a monetary policy with a hook saying that we have to come back in a year and clean it up and finalize it with an understanding that we may add a treasury system or not so our hope is to have something really meaningful out um in the next week or so so that we can share it and uh our hope is to have a monetary polic event in China sometime towards the end of the month um and I think you've been trying to coordinate that do you have an update on it uh yes so there's a etc Aon that's going on at the end of this month uh February 25th 26th and 27th I believe I'll link to we'll put a link for that in the description for everyone who wants to check that out and since uh you know we figured all the the key players and a lot of people that are very interested in this conversation will be all together for that etcon that would be a good time uh since everyone's together to continue the discussion uh Beyond Etc development and also talk about monetary policy right yeah and uh that that's absolutely necessary and it has to be done in China because we've already done some events avar and others put on some great events over in Europe uh but China is one of the key drivers of our community and so they need to be represented I've always uh believed that so um yeah monetary policy is kind of a tricky one but I I do agree that it we really need to get the ball rolling and we we have to get that stuff Set uh we won't be able to participate in it from an implementation standpoint because I don't think the growth and declined again is going to be available for that there's too much of a lag on it but I I do have utmost confidence that once it's set it'll be pretty easy to push and Implement in for uh the GU into the parity client um then uh you know a slightly different topic but interconnected is the overall road map and like where will the technology of ethereum classic go like what are we planning on doing so I I really believe in this philosophy called um shuhari which is like a martial arts notion like learn master and then innovate so uh before anybody earns the right to go ahead and say hey let's take this existing system which has had a tremendous amount of critical thinking and trial and error built into it and let's throw it all away and build something new they have to prove they know what they're talking about and just being a founder of it doesn't uh doesn't make me credible because I left the project pretty early on relative to its history uh so uh it was important to me that before from I case side we made any proposals at all about where we'd like to take the platform outside of uh Conversation Pieces like these are things we could do um that we demonstrate that we have a Mastery over the protocol that is only equaled by people on the ethereum foundation side so this is the kind of the first point of the girth and de project is to say the proof is in the pudding we've delivered a client we understand a the at a very Elemental and deep level we have shown our transparency by having weekly standups a public road map uh open code uh and also when we go through the security audit and all these other things these things will also be public so people understand there's nothing up the sleeve it's you know they see the intent so after that's done um there will be some proposals that come from our side about for 20 late 2017 and 2018 what can we do with ethereum classic to differentiate it from ethereum and make it a a platform and a protocol in its own right that has a kind of perhaps different use cases or at the very least a different view of computation now um we've already started the research and the engagements we actually have already started collecting uh a lot of information from just going and talking to great people uh I was in Shanghai recently at the Shanghai winter school and I had a chance to talk to a lot of different cryptographers about their research in ethereum everything from State channels to new consensus Concepts um we've had a lot of discussions about uh basically what can we do to speed up validation or Shard uh the state space blockchain partitioning has been a really hot topic that we've been going over so there's uh a lot of really novel Concepts and actually what's really cool is that while ethereum Foundation has been really focused on proof of stake and frankly we have too we have 10 people working on proof of stake every day so uh it is co cool and intoxicating it turns out that there's a lot of innovation the proof of State the proof of work world for example there's these proofs of sublinear complexity that agalo has come up with which are really neat it seems a lot easier to implement a secure zero knowledge checkpointing system with a proof of work system than it would be with a proof of stake system um we have a better notion of how to do side chains with proof of work than with proof of stake although I think we can uh eventually reach parody there um so I think that there needs to be better PR for proof of work um there needs to be certainly some acknowledgement of its downsides I don't think it's standall Beall m would be the first to tell people that five mining pools control all the hash power for Bitcoin and so you know if you want five people control the state uh that's not so good so there really does need to be some conversations about how we we decentralize mining or make it more efficient but does seem to be a viable Paradigm and I do think it is something that is uh compatible with smart contracts in general but I think there needs to be a broader conversation like there's been some great work out of Cornell on trusted Hardware in particular using Intel sgx to do all kinds of things like smart contracts uh that are private um they have this concept called sealed glass proofs where you can prove you know something and sell it to a person uh it's a really novel notion uh you know they also have uh basically like augur enabled by trusted Hardware it's called Town CER so we're just at the beginning of using these types of Frameworks but they're very well proliferated because every Intel chip has them now and arm has it equivalent Notions with its with its secure Hardware zone so uh when you start talking about having every cell phone and every computer have these special modules you have a very Democratic distribution of of hardware and this can become a second layer to assist in removing some trust or to speeding up computation so I do think there needs to be a more meaningful conversation about where trusted Hardware's role is in uh our technology and what we can do with it but I am pretty excited about the notion of sticking with Mining and perhaps doing something like business coin or twin chains so maybe a two-stage protocol um I am also really excited about the notion of innovating on the friending side I think we would be very stupid as a community if we passed on the opportunity of trying for a treasury because that's like the ultimate repudiation of the whole notion of of centralized funding to a foundation you know you say like okay well one model is you have an Ico and you raise all this money I've done it myself it's a good model but on the other hand the problem with that model and no one has you know fully addressed address this is uh dealing with the centralization of that money you only have one decider um and if that person's like good and honest and fair and wise maybe they make great decisions if they turn out to be like Donald Trump or something like that your your whole ecosystem may go a little crazy for a little bit so uh so it's important to say that the capital is decentralized that there's some way that more than one actor can have access to that at some point um and the tech there for this it just needs to be properly packaged and vetted and assembled and it's uh as a company one of our priorities to do very rigorous research on it so we're going to be presenting that and our our hope is we can get the ethereum classic Community to uh to get behind it the last point is about formal verification um this is one of the most butique and uh exotic Topics in in development um and it's not commonly done by most developers if you go to like a full stack web and you say where's your proof for this they're going to probably look at you pretty weird because it's just not a common notion um but it do occur in Academia especially in PLT when you're talking about functional programming and it turns out that there's like 20 years of theory uh that has really Advanced things and made the tools a lot better and sped things up a lot but that theory hasn't worked its way into industry now one of the things that iohk as a company um is extremely focused on is is basically basically how are we going to build a pipeline where we can not only write good functional code and and make that work well it's amazing we found a way to build a cryptocurrency in hll that was not easy and we're almost there and we're like Yay great but that's not good enough because hascal is just hasal we want to do formal verification as well and because because we're like it's like the spinal tap of cryptocurrencies we have to take it up to 11 so uh the formal verification component is is really an interesting discussion but then you have to kind of have like an antology of what's meaningful what what should you verify what should you talk about what should you what guarantees should you give uh obviously there's the crypto and then there's a lot of discussion about the network stack and Consensus These are three lwh hanging fruits and there's already been some great work like veric coock and so forth so um we're retaining a really really super good super specialized firm um to come in and help iohk as a company learn how to do this well and um our hope is that we can take some of those techniques and methods and come June and bring them into the growth Indique team and start putting those methods and techniques and first into our development practices so that that client we produce will be the first formally verified ethereum classic client or ethereum client General second that we can take those techniques and have them work their way into the smart contract stack which I think is much more meaningful um the good news in that part is we're not alone there's actually already been some great papers like there was an interest paper out of charmer University which said how do we use dependent typing in uh smart contracts and it was very well written um also yuichi is working with the ethereum foundation he's working on verifying the evm bite code so I I think there's a lot of great progress that's being made and some good thought that's starting to be put into it it just it's kind of scattered and our hope is over the next six months we can unify all of it and actually figure out how to make it work well and get it into our development Pipeline and then eventually build some tools that as smart contract developers can actually do this um I don't think all smart contracts require formal verification honestly it's probably going to be Library level work so like the stuff that Zeppelin is doing or if you're going to do a dow or something like that that will be the standard in the community but then your everyday smart contracts will probably use continue to use solidity which is a good language and there's good tooling for it so that's what's coming like an analysis of proof of work and how can we make it more efficient transparent Fair uh the idea of overlaying trusted Hardware into the network in some capacity and trying to understand what that does to the network and where we'd get benefit from it and if it increases democracy in the system or not um a really deep analysis of decentralized funding and then finally uh bringing formal verification both into the client itself as well as the smart contracts that the client runs on it um the research is ongoing so expect outputs on the second half of this year and uh our hope is to take that research from white paper into production sometime in q1 to Q2 of 2018 yeah so um just kind of a overall uh to really boil all that down to as as simplified as I possibly can it's kind of sounds like you've got all these great puzzle pieces on the table and now it's just a matter of putting all these awesome puzzle pieces together into something that um can really do great things for the community yeah you know it's it's amazing because I didn't honestly think a theum classic was going to survive when I first came on board you know it was uh it started as a protest movement and it was just like you guys spent two years uh very vigorously defending a particular philosophy and then because it became inconvenient you walked away from it it would remind me of like you I'm a Ron Paul guy if Ron Paul woke up one day and said like you know what that war in Iraq was a good idea you know just we would be like what happened to Ron Paul where's the Alzheimer's you know it's like Bizarro land right you know it's like I went to the anti he'd be having a goatee or something and it's anti-pot so along the same lines that a lot of people felt this way and and at the very least um you know it was a way for us to say it's not all right it's not okay you can't take people's money create a social contract with them and then violate that social contract and pretend like you didn't and expect everybody just to take it silently and feel good about it so then when it became clear to me that the project was going to survive then we had this terrible problem you were in in the beginning so you saw it too where the community was just all over the place it was horrendously fractured we had interesting fellows like Michael trout and others and it was it was a very big challenge of like what are we really doing here is this just a protest or are we actually going to try to build something real and is this thing going to turn into a cryptocurrency that has the right to exist and being just a copy paste coin does not have the right to exist we have to have some intention to go somewhere with this community so what really got me excited what made me pull the trigger and commit to developers and get them in was that the community did solidify and this was thanks to your hard work and a lot of other people's hard work but I saw that there was a very pass group of people who said we want to do something cool and you know ethereum's going in a particular direction and we're probably not going to go in that direction and let's go try something else I I want to stress that that uh you know I was definitely working on it but there were a ton of great people um that really helped pull pull a lot of this together yeah absolutely and and once I saw that I was said that is so cool you know the other thing was that uh it felt like the early days of ethereum again you know when the early days of ethereum is like we didn't really have a clear road map we kind of had a notion of what we wanted to do we had a white paper eventually a yellow paper but God there was a lot of like question marks and how were we actually going to get this thing deployed but there was this just amazing community that was so passionate and so excited and they were all like wow this is going to change the whole world this is so cool and that gave us the inspiration to work harder and work longer and do crazy things and eventually make those crazy things reality um and so when I started interacting more with the ETC community and seeing these people I kept getting all these messages of these people people are like exactly like the early days of ethereum uh so that was so cool and I said okay that I don't I don't know where this is going I don't know what's going happen the price you know a dow hacker can do something crazy you know guow could do something crazy I don't know I don't care I don't care if this cryptocurrency worthless we're still going to be here we're still G to have some fun because the people here are cool uh and uh and I like talking to them and I like hanging out with them and I could I could go drinking with them that's that's really neat uh and uh and it's amazing to see how it just kept going down and down and down and down we found out the ethereum foundation sold 90% of their Stak so maybe that had something to do with it anyway but it kept going down to 60 million and and and I saw sins and some other people in the channels saying like the sky is falling we're all gonna die and I was like I don't care should go to a dollar I would still be here but then it went back up and all of a sudden the liquidity went back up and the community got really uh inspired and I and I think we've reached a a a plateau of stability for the time being and um that's really encouraging to show that you can have a philosophy and a really chaotic movement kind of work hard with it and get it structured a bit and then have a return to normaly and then and all of a sudden have this great template to do some amazing things with so um I'm profoundly excited about the future and I think ethereum Classic's best days are ahead of it and we're going to have a lot of really cool things that come up I think there's going to be a lot of challenges going to be probably a few scams that are littered in because every cryptocurrency has that but you know Mount gox couldn't kill Bitcoin any more than some scam can kill Etc uh and we're just going to keep plugging away and chugging away for the next year or two and our hope is that uh by the time we're done and we finally hang up the towel if we ever do uh we'll have left something behind that is very significant and that the community will be completely self-sufficient and it'll uh it won't need anybody it's just going to do its own thing it's like the honey badger of smart contracts sounds good uh so anything else You' like to touch upon or let the community know I know this is the first time you've uh kind of addressed everybody in a little kind of a little while here but anything else you want to let everybody you know oh um let's see um I do want to apologize for all the people that have reached out to me with projects that they've wanted to work on I've been tremendously busy with a lot of stuff and I really do want to have like a detailed discussion about dap development uh it's just we just haven't found the time for that yet but it is encouraging to see that organically those conversations are happening and people are doing amazing things second I'd like to thank you and Christian for you know doing a great podcast and you I really just killing it with Community Management I also like to thank Elaine and Carlos and a whole bunch of other people Cody Cody Burns as well and avar oh yeah absolutely absolutely all the the Chinese guys uh Roy and everybody out in the Chinese Community yeah I think I think I'm having s sushi with Eric goo and in Japan um also I'd like to thank you for going out to Japan that was uh that was kind of a trial by fire how's your your Japanese Excursion been you don't you don't have to thank me for going out to Japan this is this is awesome yeah pretty cool have you done a show yet while you you've been in Japan or were all your shows New York based no no it just uh didn't line up properly as far as like timing was weird and you know getting up and stuff like that but uh I've got something lined up uh for anybody listening to this right now uh a show for Allan mcer who's the lead of the growth and de team uh he's going to be on uh I've got a show lined up for this Friday okay to have him on and talk about some of the stuff they're working on that you you touched upon as well oh brilliant yeah yeah a little bit of backstory about Allen he's a a very senior developer and manager and actually you can tell when you watch the uh standup meeting he just has a wealth of experience a wonderful guy yeah and you know it's funny when we asked him to be the project manager the first thing he did he says well I got to fly out and meet everybody so so uh because we were basing the technology on skorx and scorex was built in Russia he he went to Russia then then uh then he's planning to go to Poland and then he's also planning to to go at some point to Argentina and uh we're probably going to drag him to Malta and also to a Smart contract meet up in Athens and so Allen is married and everything and he I don't know how his wife feels about it but he's like living on a plane meeting all of our people and and trying to make sure that the group dynamics are where they need to be and that everybody's doing the right job but uh someone mentioned this who was the guy from contact that lived on the plane oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I feel like that guy right eventually he died in the space station though right I don't know I forgot his name but yeah he lived on the plane also I like the way you introduced Allan earlier you said that we've got a really great Irish guy Alan mcer Alan mcer right you love him you got a really great Irish guy he's always uh he's always at the blood alcohol content legal minimum for for iron no I'm just kidding no actually he's he's a true professional and he's a he's a very solid engineer good scholar developer and uh what I really admire the most about him is that uh he has very reasonable expectations about deadlines I'm always like a very hard driver our hasal developers will tell you that where I'm like why don't we have this here let's let's see if we can get it this week and we just keep pushing and pushing right but then I tried to do that with Allan and Allan's like no it's gonna come out on this date that's when we can do it and I was like okay okay all right Allan that's great all right you know it's like you just really can't you can't uh you can't bully the guy into giving you like a better deadline he's just gonna do it the way you needs to do it but that's the mark of of a very good manager and you need a you need a ying and yang uh to to coexist exactly exactly you know the other thing is that when you learn ethereum especially when you start dissecting the evm you also start learning kind of how smart contracts work at a very high level so what's really exciting to me is like once the growth in De team is done with the growth and decline it's not going to require seven people full-time to maintain it occasionally there will be like developed Sprints to put in forks and things like that but it is really cool to see what we can do with them for smart contracts and uh so I I really do like when people send me dap ideas um it just unfortunately we don't have the resources at the point to to develop them yet but it would be cool to start doing some dabs on ethereum classic and I think that team is going to be the uh the Nexus of that effort on the second half of this year um and almost certainly as they understand more they're going to have like 50 ideas of cool products that they want to do and we're going to have to kind of tamper them down and that's why Allen is like the perfect guy to lead them because if you can say no to me you can say no to them right you know but uh it's been a lot of fun uh what's your experience been like have you have you enjoyed being in this Community Management role you know has have you been burned too many times yet or you still you still got Gusto and passion no no you know there's a there's a pro and con list to uh everything in life so there there's there's a ton ton more Pros than there are cons to so obviously I you know been burned a couple of times and I get some some hate mail or some hate messages every now and then but uh overall everybody's really supportive all the time and I'm you know obviously really happy to be a part of whatever you know in any capacity that I can be of the community and just do whatever I can for them you know the thing I was most proud of was how organically efficient and well executed the Die Hard Fork was it wasn't like there was some Grand planning committee and there was six months of process behind it and then there was the decider who came in and did it they they just came together and said this is something we need to do and yeah seriously it done yeah and I I've heard um I you know I've spoken to uh Elaine a couple of times and she's she said she's like oh splick is like a beast you know that he's like a coding machine and so all them just getting together and uh you know splick the lane don't panic and if I'm forgetting anybody I apologize uh it's just they've gotten so much work done just in in such a an organic way like you say and also I mean snap roll's uh uh proposal for the for the monetary policy was completely organic as well it's not like he has a he has a monetary policy background but he said he's like a spreadsheet junkie and he put something together that's really awesome which is cool right you know I actually really like the proposal and um I think it's a good starting point especially when we we go into China with it and uh I I'm very confident that something like it or it will end up Surviving the trial by fire and if that ends up being our final monetary policy it's it's not a bad deal you know um monetary policy is one of those things where you could potentially fight about it forever but once it's set it's set and you just have to have a community consensus this is it we're not going to do anything anymore like Bitcoin is that way it's like yes probably could dream up of a more fair way of Distributing Bitcoins but damn it man it's 21 million accept it deal with it it is what it is you know we just have to get to that stage from go ahead I was gonna say um I said this one time it's almost like um the The Soup Nazi from Yes uh from Seinfeld and it's like the soup is so damn good but it's like take it or leave it no soup for you right right right no monetary policy for you right so that's the monetary policy of Bitcoin and it looks like uh Etc as well it's like don't ask for the bread just take the delicious soup and get out of the store that's it right right right you know it's been uh it's been a lot of fun though and it's nice to be you know thinking about ethereum stuff again uh that's another thing I kind of missed I didn't realize how much I missed it until I started working with the growth in De team and actually thinking about this at a very deep level and I was like Wow there really is a lot of magic here and I kind of got very bitter and divorced from that magic for about two years and so that's another thing I'm internally grateful for in this this space is to have an opportunity to be able to contribute in a meaningful way um and actually uh have a community that's very receptive to it um you know even if our ideas don't end up being the ones that win that's okay because it means that probably some better ones won uh and uh we all benefit from that we're all yeah I think that's that's the most important point is the the meritocracy aspect that that ET has wholeheartedly and it's just you know people put forth proposals and ideas and different things and um you know everything is just completely Merit based which is I think how you end up with a really great platform you know right oh I guess one last thing we should mention so there was a lot of discussion about the picture with me and vitalic in h in Shanghai yeah that was that was fun I I I I guess I I saw it different way than not too many people had an issue with it at all I'd say a very small percent but I guess I just saw it in a completely different light than the people who didn't like that picture you know I even posted one time in the uh ethereum Reddit about you know a friendly competition between a chains I I just never saw it as such like a blood bath in my opinion but you know everybody's entitled to see it I feel like I should tell people the backstory behind the picture so so they have some kind okay go for it yeah yeah so so anyway I um I was in the Shanghai winter school and I was I flew out some of my employees as well because we have some cryptographers who work for us in Japan that came out and we were all chatting in the hallway and then I see vitalic come on in he walked right by me and and I was like Wow fic's here okay I didn't know that that's that's cool and I hadn't talked to vitalic in person since June of 2014 so it's been a little bit of time i' you know I've chatted with him over Skype and we've exchanged some emails and we've had some Reddit conversations which are known um and but in person so like it's a multi-day conference and so I expect that maybe with coffee or something we'll run into each other again and we didn't and like a day goes by and another day goes by another and for some reason we just never got around to talking to each other so we had no conversation so right before the end of the conference Hong Shang comes up to me and he says uh Charles would you like to be on a panel on the conference I wasn't a speaker I was just attending the conference and I said okay well who's on the panel oh just be you and John Catz and a few other people I said sure yeah so I go to the panel and vitalic is sitting right there on the other side uh and um I like how he I like how he threw in vitalic with the few other people Asos I Andrew Miller and vitalic was on the other side with ly Lou and a few others and um anyway John immediately says we're not gonna talk about ethereum and ethereum classic not gonna get into this at all and they just like ask privacy questions for a whole hour and everybody audience every time they ask a question it's like it's not an ethereum question right they're like no no it's not like that's funny at the end of the whole panel um I I got up to leave falic started leading and so then I said vitalic and he said ah and he turns around and we I walk up to him and he looks at me and I look at him and there's like this silence that seems like it's for a whole minute and all the cryptographers are just like Frozen like what are they gonna say to each other and uh and I go over and I hug them and and I said uh you want to you want to take a picture he said sure So then I held up my fingers I said Peace and we we got a pitcher and that's that's that's the the story behind the pitcher and it's a it's a better more productive world that way in my opinion yeah it is and maybe none of this stuff is personal it's like I I got I was on Skype like months ago and in the Bitcoin Business Association Channel somebody's like oh the only reason you're an ethereum classic is just to get revenge on ethereum and I'm like guys it's good business train up a team of people that know how smart contracts work and the stack works it doesn't cost a lot of money to train them up and then once you have an Enterprise grade client you can do a lot of stuff with that we're in the business of building cryptocurrencies and eventally smart contracts so that's a good investment for me the fact that I can do that for a community that's really awesome and do it on a live Network and um get that data and benefit them is just icing on the cake so it was a it was a rare case of where something happens and it allows you to do something that's beneficial for other people but also good for your business it's just like you choose some open source technology for your stack to just so happens to be useful for somebody else you're going to make it better for everybody and it's good for everybody yeah so there's no there's nothing personal there and and frankly I I think that if we do our job right uh we're actually going to provide a tremendous benefit to ethereum overall um principally because they need they're 100% committed to moving the proof of stake I don't think that's going to change and yeah there's going to be some minority of people who really just don't want to do that and if ethereum classic stays on proof of uh work then a place to go where the tools are the same the experience is the same that the philosophy may be somewhat compatible with what they believe and so it may actually make it easier for the ethereum foundation to transition to uh proof of stake and that's going to be one of their biggest challenges because this is not just repricing gas or something this is a massive philosophical shift on monetary policy on the operation security of the network and also the long-term scalability of the network and it's not something that you treat lightly so you need a lot of people on board for that that more than just the Dow hack so yeah y great well um I mean thanks thanks for coming on Charles and I'm uh glad we got a got to give the community kind of an update on what's going on behind the scenes as well as maybe some stuff uh on the front lines that maybe they didn't know about or couldn't keep up with you know there's just so much going on in the community so it's sometimes it's tough to to keep up with all the news you know absolutely all right thank you so much and have some fun tomorrow with Alan micher all right take care Cheers Cheers
