everybody charles hoskinson here i wanted to make a video to talk about the etc proposal meeting that we had today it was rather inconve inconveniently timed i i had to get up at around 5 30 in the morning prepare for it and some of my guys actually had to get up 4 30 in the morning and get to it ready for it we showed up with our cto some lead engineers brian mckenna and also one of the scientists and we moved a lot of meetings to make sure that we had this our understanding of the meeting was that it would be a meeting to discuss the checkpointing solution that we'd come up with and we were going to present an ecpi ecip next week wednesday on apparently was only a small item on the agenda and other items on the agenda were things like changing the consensus algorithm of etc and alternative systems like pearl guard and vera block and there was no one there to represent any of those ideas and to be honest i'm not really sure what the point of the meeting was they said it was kind of a filter meeting but this is not how these things ought to be done so instead of just complaining i'd like to propose a slightly different way of doing business that i think would be much more fair to everybody in the ecosystem uh and also uh make sure that we actually make good decisions uh it's not necessarily the things that you decide that define you it's the process you follow to get to those decisions and the legitimacy behind them so if you will i have a little presentation so first there's this concept of understanding these are not simple topics for example how does proof-of-work work or proof-of-stake work there's enormous details there they're deeply technical a lot of science a lot of security considerations and so forth and really the first goal of any ecip should be to gain a degree of understanding amongst the people so my recommendation is whoever is proposing it does a presentation and that presentation uh maybe it's audio or video but it the goal of the presentation is to try to explain in the most useful way possible what they're trying to accomplish and how what and how and the people who are watching that presentation they should be given the opportunity for a lot of q a and the point here isn't to kill the proposal rather it's to understand what exactly they're doing and ask for clarity okay if you walk into with a hostile mind uh you're not really gonna get anywhere so even if you oppose what the person's trying to do the point is you're trying to understand at a deeper level to a point where you actually get it as much as the person proposing it and you know when you ask what and how you know things like uh what what exactly in the system is going to change um you know how is this actually proposed to be implemented uh you know these types of things then the next level in the process is practicality now practicality is all about well complexity and again the goal here in understanding the practicality is not to kill or no kill this is not the goal this is rather still in that understanding phase okay and when we wrangle complexity we're asking things like do we need a hard fork uh do we need substantial code changes for this does this fundamentally change the way that we've been doing things like for example if i propose going from ethereum style accounts to extended utxo this is not a very practical thing for most cryptocurrencies why because there is certain every single smart contract would have to be fundamentally rewritten to be compatible with extended utxl so you kind of have to start with that model or have a device like chemeric ledgers or and have both accounting models live at the same time but the practicality is quite low whereas for example if we propose something to do an extra step in how network handshakes work or something like that it may be quite straightforward and practical to do that or perhaps upgrading a library or something like that this is a change that can be done in a matter of days or weeks with a limited impact on the system okay then third you have a philosophical conversation and the philosophical point is this is kind of like is this a good idea according to my values i strongly disagree all the time with donald he's a community member in the etc community and he writes these blog posts and generally speaking uh the reason why we disagree is we carry different values so he just has different values in me but we actually do agree on certain things like simplicity versus complexity or etc etc so this is where you actually start getting into the opinion stage these are more fact-finding and the point of fact-finding is to give the person who's proposing an idea the proper platform necessary to be able to discuss that idea in a way where everybody who has an opinion at least understands what they're trying to do what they're trying to accomplish and the order of magnitude of difficulty of this particular idea and again this is all about supporting evidence and conversation so you would expect to see questions like has this been implemented in other systems or has this succeeded or failed before uh things like is this just an idea or does there exist a formal paper or a formal specification or code like has this already been implemented as a branch of an existing client and we just have to pull it in okay these types of things and it's an opportunity for q a lots and lots and lots of questions and the point of the questions are clarity so people can better understand why they're doing this what they're trying to do how they're trying to accomplish it okay the philosophical side is the first time where we start actually having an explicit opinion now in the treasury debate etc labs decided to start here we hadn't even presented an ecip we hadn't even really done anything we even didn't have a conversation about it in fact the first conversation was thursday of last week and we had no opportunity to even discuss what we were thinking no opportunity to talk about the practicality of what we were doing rather they said this is against the values of ethereum classic they said that their blog post okay well then what are the values of ethereum classic i did a prior video about simplicity versus complexity and we all kind of agree this concept of code is law but code's law has nothing to say about changes in monetary policy because if it did we've already violated it we changed the monetary policy i was there in the early days of etc we decided to put a hard cap and there was a community-wide discussion about that so we changed from what vitalik had constructed to a new monetary policy okay so that doesn't seem to violate the values of codes law and as for who gets paid that was an arbitrary decision that was made by vitalik so we should live with that decision forever so there was really no enumeration of what does this buzzword values mean and so that's the point of the philosophical conversation is to be very specific donald as much as we disagree is specific about his values and i enjoy that clarity from that perspective i would love to see other people do that so let's think about the first part of the conversation random x which is monero's proposed consensus algorithm versus sha-3 this is a question that and by the way there was nothing productive said in that meeting about these things i said well can we vote oh we don't vote okay well what do we do well first off understanding there are i guess ecips we never talked about them there is a practicality question there are questions like supply chain of asics for example if you're going to go to an asic friendly algorithm you have to understand does one person have a monopoly over that supply chain or is this open and there is competition and i as an outside party can purchase one of those asics to participate if only one person controls the supply chain only one person can decide whether you get to mine or not is that a decentralized consensus algorithm or a centralized consensus algorithm and yes you can make the argument well you know it's open world anybody can create their own labs and do their own research and that's true but if the barrier to entry is five or ten million dollars or one to five million dollars or quarter million to a half million dollars these are all very different categories with very different populations when you're talking five to ten million you need a company like i'll global to make a strategic bet there if you talk about one to five million maybe you could do some community funding if you're talking about half a million dollars an individual who wants to take a a risk could probably do that okay so while you're having these discussions this is what the the clarifying questions come up what is the barrier to entry what's the supply chain look like how many people are participating can we do an open source asic or not what is our anticipated hash rate what's the transition look like all of these things are clarifying questions and the point is not to come up with a judgment immediately but rather fully appreciate and understand who what the person proposing is trying to accomplish okay and then we get to the philosophical side and this where opinion gets introduced and that's where you start asking okay asic resistance or no asic resistance what do i feel about that it is maximally inclusive to have asic resistance why because everybody's got a laptop and a desktop and everybody can buy graphics cards these are consumer products that are extremely well distributed and the odds are that you have a much more egalitarian pool of computation the downside is that you're much more at the mercy of botnets you're much more at the mercy of a volatile hash rate and so your probability of 51 attacks goes way up person who has to buy an asic is some especially if it's the only uh cryptocurrency using that algorithm they're pretty vested in the success of the system so you actually get better than 51 resistance because while on the surface is 51 the very people who would be doing the attack would be destroying effectively the value of their mining hardware if they attacked you so it's almost like proof of stake in that respect you're getting some intrinsic endogenous security connected to the value of the token as opposed to just a mercenary exogenous argument okay so there's strong arguments to make on both sides and these arguments aren't necessarily technological they're philosophical about who should be participating in consensus and what does one cpu one vote mean and so forth and reasonable people can disagree but at least those reasonable people fully appreciate and understand the practicality and exactly what the proposal is before they even have that conversation and then finally the last stage because you know you have to make decisions the last stage is looking at alternatives okay so alternatives compared to what so even if for example you were doing sha-3 there are other things we could do sha-256 there's even asics i think for script at this point so even if you're pro-asic there are other algorithms that you could potentially compare and so once you've done the job of understandability and practicality and philosophy okay this is option one option two oopsie still getting used to this wacom tablet option two dot dot dot you have n options here and you have to be able to score these options inside your decision space and it should be a policy that you at least have two to three of these in the set you should have at least two to three because if you have two to three options then at least there's a real conversation having if you just have one option there's no conversation and this is where governance comes into play the point of a governance process is to ensure that you have this diversity of thought and that people are feel free to participate it's to ensure that when people are participating here they have a fair chance to have a discussion without criticism because they have a right to be heard if they're willing to put the time and effort to volunteer writing at ecip and proposing a solution that's not trivial it takes a lot of resources to do that and a lot of time to do that uncompensated and then you know when you have a philosophical conversation this is a sampling of your community and where do they stand and people really aren't used to having strong philosophies be explicit we all implicitly have values and things in the gut don't feel right but philosophers are the ones who write these things down and make strong arguments and they they actually have a core about how their philosophy is self-consistent well similarly etc needs to go through this exercise because the reality is we can never come to consensus or agree if we have implicit philosophical differences because the reality is that these things can all be very awesome but when you start getting to the philosophy side of things if you're here and i'm here even though we could probably find common ground we're not going to find that common ground because we're philosophically strongly opposed to each other we carry different values so at some point you have to make a decision and actually this is the source of all hard forks reasonable hard forks in our space what ends up happening is the philosophical differences get too strong and then the decision space of one group is just pairwise disjoined from the decision space of the other group meaning that they can't agree and they have to go in separate directions for example in eth the decision space was how what is the best way most practical way to do a hard fork to reverse a transaction in the etc realm there was no hard fork so one was discussing different ways of doing something the other was saying don't even do it at all there's no compatibility between these two ideas and as a consequence there was no reconciliation and if you go with this side you end up with a completely alternative system with a fundamentally different philosophy the challenge is that this alternative system didn't do a lot of work on building consensus around a unified philosophy and that's kind of a silly thing when people say oh but we're decentralized we don't need to do that that's not true decentralized means no one's in control but let's be clear here a cryptocurrency is an encapsulation of values and philosophy they're value-driven systems they're mission-driven systems and there's a million implicit things you agree to when you are in that ecosystem if you're a non-speculator for example if you're in bitcoin you could walk around and say hey let's change the monetary policy from 21 million to 22 million coins it'd be laughed out it's never going to happen because the philosophy of bitcoin is this finite monetary policy and uh there's a very strong austrian bent in their viewpoint if you walk into bitcoin say let's go from proof of work to proof of stake even if you make an incredible scientific argument about it as many have the values are simply different so it's kind of a silly thing to say that even though this ecosystem is decentralized uh that that somehow this means that we can never reach consensus on philosophy we do so much so that of course f labs seems to think they know the values of vtc put it into a blog post and before we even have an opportunity to have a discussion say it's a non-starter because it's against the values of etc whatever they are so not enough work in my view has been done in the community at reaching a consolidation of philosophy and if and if this hypothesis is right i'm deeply concerned that there's not going to be a good resolution for the challenges that are coming ahead uh things as simple as random x versus sha-3 it's an unanswerable question unless you have the philosophical side figured out because ultimately you're not asking algorithm a or algorithm b you're asking who's in control this checkpointing idea that we're pushing through is another example of that the checkpointing idea basically makes etc immune to 51 attacks they just can't happen with the system that we're proposing however it means that you have to accept a federated backup system now we can put lipstick on this pig and go to an alternative system where there's a dedicated blockchain that does that but at the end of the day you're going from saying all of the consensus is internal to the system and it's a self-contained unit to it's a system plus another system that other system can be another blockchain it could be a checkpointing federation it can be blah whatever blah happens to be it's saying you're going from one source of truth to n sources of truth now we can make it more palatable for example we could pick rotate the quorum for the federation by people who would mine certain types of blocks that tend to come up with some degree of randomness like the nepa powers concept or things like that we could do all kinds of kabuki and things but at the end of the day you're accepting that there is a federation now you can also have an opt-in system there's question of values opt-in opt-out proof of work is an opt-out system you actively have to modify things to get out of it the checkpointing system that we're proposing is opt-in where you can choose just to follow the proof of work chain or the proof of work chain with checkpoints exchanges would probably want to do that because it would protect them against 51 attacks and it's in their best interest but again this is a values conversation we can't really get any resolution on this values conversation until we have a philosophical understanding of it but even if we have a strong philosophy you need the other two things to be done people actually have to fully understand what you're trying to do so you write it in the ecip you do presentations you give a lot of opportunity for q a and that's how these meetings should be audio meetings should not be used to make decisions or filter things because what if a person doesn't speak english how's that fair to them etc is a global movement their people only speak chinese what they're going to show up and somehow participate when it's written down at least they have the opportunity to use some form of a translation mechanism to try to understand what the hell you're doing or else they're going to have to find intermediaries to come in that's just linguistically biased it doesn't make sense in a decentralized global ecosystem and then practicality is another deeply technical conversation that comes into the ecip process of how much risk are we taking how much complexity are we taking are we going to have to hard fork for this okay this is all information gathering good governance allows the system to happen organically the better you are at it the more people participate and the more creative you happen to be in that process and that creativity will invite lots and lots and lots and lots of alternatives in your decision space then you can have deep philosophical conversations with the community and saying we have four five 10 15 good options of where to go and what to do but you know what the differences now are no longer practicality or understanding how to get it done it's now values and what are our values we did this actually with the monetary policy debate it was very successful in the early days of etc because there were a lot of different ideas for monetary policy the two big philosophies were deflationary or inflationary does the supply have a cap and it grows towards that cap like bitcoin does uh or is the supply just persistent inflation and it's uncapped and they just keep growing and growing and growing and growing and there are strong arguments on both sides and we had in that decision space lots of things but because etc tends to follow a btc-style philosophy of immutability in code's law we also tended to borrow some of the other btc ideas like that austrian monetary policy concept and so we ended up adopting that and that value is pretty much set the treasury proposal that we're prepared to create is agnostic to the monetary policy it's possible to fit it into the current monetary policy or an expanded new monetary policy okay so you don't actually have to have a value position on the monetary policy to be able to participate in that you have multiple options in the decision space that can be reflected accordingly so i think there's a better way of doing things and i don't think these meetings are productive at all uh i brought everybody my cto brian a developer a scientist and we were prepared to do a full presentation we had prepared a 30-minute video uh before and we had a powerpoint ready to go we actually had code ready to go to show people and we could walk them through it and have discussions about the practicality of putting it into geth or bessu or other clients in addition to just the mantis client and actually we're going to show a video this week of a 51 attack i was walking into that meeting with the belief that we were just going to be about understandability and practicality and be available to answer all questions we were told we only have five minutes it's just one item on the agenda there's many items on the agenda of which major philosophical changes to the consensus the heart the single most important discussion you're ever going to have as a cryptocurrency we're also on the agenda um and you don't discuss these things frankly uh for a 51 attack mitigation you just don't you discuss these things because you're actually discussing who should be in control of the system that's deeply philosophical and we of course are new we've come back after being out of the ecosystem for a while so obviously we don't understand the implementation path at the moment we do have some sense of practicality because we build proof of work systems and we've done research in that space so we could of course give opinions on how would you transition to a system you know like a gradual transition a hard four combinator style approach uh et cetera et cetera we could give some comment there but there's a lot of understandability work that we have to do catch up we're happy to do that that's our ad but this is not productive to blend this in with a 51 attack conversation and blend it in with a checkpointing uh conversation and especially since there's no mechanism apparently to explicitly have a conversation about the values of the ecosystem in fact in that meeting the filtering meeting they said we're not going to talk about philosophy or values okay so how the [ __ ] do you filter anything i'm sorry it's not enthusiasm that makes me yield that comment and i understand we're not going to vote so i'm and how do you filter if you're not voting isn't the act of filtering voting on the things you don't want so nothing makes sense to me about this particular process and uh as i said we're new here uh we'll we'll try to accommodate and find a way to do things but this is uh my proposal for moving forward to make some difficult decisions not just about what's in front of us which is how do we get past the 51 attack but also major philosophical conversations about how do we get to a consolidated roadmap how are we going to get use and utility for the system uh how are we going to preserve the underlying philosophy of code is law what does that actually mean to people in the system these fundamental things uh and how are we going to compete with the other 500 options that are on market it's not good enough to say you're against something that's great um i'm against plenty of things in life it tells you nothing about who i am it tells you nothing about whether you want to be my friend or not you want to associate with me or not being against something is not a philosophy it's just a preference choice tell us where you want to go what you want to do and good governance is a process that makes people feel empowered to do that even if they lose in the end they feel like they had a voice and they had a say and they feel like they weren't censored and there was no uh there was no shenanigans or kabuki i don't feel like this process right now is very inclusive i had no opportunity to have any discussion about understandability or practicality before incumbents in the system said that this idea is a non-starter and immediately opposed it and then we showed up with the full idea of explaining checkpointing in a very rigorous way we were given no opportunity in the process to realistically do that in fact the channel they told us to go to we went to and waited in 10 minutes and apparently the meeting was being held in a different channel and they had already started the meeting without us knowing full well that we were waiting in the other channel it's not an inclusive process especially given that some people can't participate in audio some people don't want to participate in that format needs to be done differently so i hope this provides some clarity on how we think and how we make decisions we've written a lot of this down we have a cip process for cardano cardinal improvement proposal process we spent six months working on it and the very first cip is how the cip process works and there's already people proposing changes to it and we think about governance and decision making exhaustively with the voltaire project in cardone we even have partners like submittable and an innovation management firm idea scale and we work with them to ask not just how do you get consent to do something but rather how do you have a discussion so that when you get to the point to give consent even if people are in the minority side and they lose they at least understand why you chose what you chose and more often than not can go along with it and see where it goes so that you don't end up with what happened with bitcoin and bitcoin cash where you have this very contentious very hostile split that shatters the ecosystem permanently damaging the ecosystem losing great people along the way if etc is to survive and be competitive have a real road map be able to fund that road map we must have a good governance system and it's my opinion that the incumbent one is definitely not going to get it done it's definitely a good system if all you're doing is deciding whether you want to adopt an idea from ethereum or not so if you're filtering ideas that other people come up with that'll probably work if you want to actually change things go on your own trailblazing go do real stuff you have to have a much more robust way of discussing things so i hope this helps as i mentioned in the meeting we'll have an ecip available for the treasury and an ecip available for the checkpointing system on wednesday next week we released a video today on the checkpointing system discussing the science of it we will release the video before the end of the week uh demonstrating recovery from a 51 attack i would also love the pearl guard and the vera verablock guys to participate in this structure there was really no representation for their viewpoints in that meeting because i was actually really interested in understanding and practicality i was hoping we could have that discussion and they could also do presentations and explicitly show how their solutions work these solutions have different implications in terms of liveness and persistence and also how that federation works whether it be an external system or an a wired on system like the bft system that we're proposing and you know i'm agnostic actually to this we're writing an ecip because this is an in-house solution uh but we don't embrace not invented here ism at iohk we're happy to entertain other ideas and i really would love to understand more about the implementation path and the security model and what validation they have and this is their opportunity to shine and i would be just as happy selecting one of those solutions over the checkpointing solution that we're bringing to the table we're only bringing the solution because we understand it we created it we've implemented it we know for a fact it solves the problem but it does carry some philosophical weight to it that distinctly has an impact as donald and other people have pointed out in their conversations and we're happy to have that discussion as well let's do that instead of what happened today it's very bizarre anyway thanks for listening i hope this video helps bring a bit more clarity and i'll keep making them because it's my channel and i can make them and that's the beautiful thing about having alternative distribution mechanisms is that gives you a voice and i would highly encourage any member of the etc community to not feel silenced or censored but to do the exact same thing use your own channels and if you do even if i disagree with you i will retweet your videos and your content because you need to have a voice in this if etc is to actually converge and decide what it's going to do and don't ever allow anybody to tell you that this is not the process if the process was so good you'd already have a solution and you'd already be a pretty innovative system it's not it's a reactive process that seems to be constructed to follow another cryptocurrency and make arbitrary decisions of whether to adopt something or not it's not a process for creativity it's not a process for innovation and it sure as hell is not a process that actually explicitly writes philosophy down thanks so much
