S17 E42: Bob Summerwill on Ethereum Classic & Bitcoin's Fork Season

0:46Vlad CosteaWelcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 17, Episode 42. We are live with the veteran of forks, a master of stewarding, a fork of a popular project, who is here to talk about the upcoming forks that Bitcoin is going to get. Actually, one of them is live. That's the Balake Luke Jr. fork. But the Paul fork, the BIP 300 one using drivechains is coming out on the 31st of October of this year. So Halloween, which is also Bitcoin's 18th birthday, is going to be very eventful.

1:23This episode is sponsored by Orange Rock, LayerTwo Labs, Cake Wallet, SideShift, and Braiins Hashpower. And in the chat, you can already start typing numbers for the contest. Bob has written, yes, his name is Bob Summerwill. I haven't said that yet. He has written a number on a piece of paper, which we're going to reveal in about one hour. Welcome, Bob. Thank you. Great to be here. So you have been with Ethereum Classic since 2016, when the DAO hack happened.

1:56Bob SummerwillWell, as an active job and role at the ETC Cooperative, that actually started at the beginning of 2019. But yes, I was certainly, you know, a frontline witness to that forking in 2016, for sure, yeah.

2:20Vlad CosteaFor people who don't remember, there was an exploit in a contract. And basically, the community in Ethereum was split between just leaving it as is, deciding that code is law, and it was their fault. I mean, the developer's fault, which is the Ethereum Classic side, or hard forking to return the money to the investors, and that was the ETH side, which, from a philosophical point of view, they were wrong. But I guess more of their lead developers and founders were on that side of the fork. So it's part of a reason why it became the successful one, nonetheless.

3:07Bob SummerwillYeah, I mean, it was certainly a very interesting kind of scenario. So I was actually working for the Ethereum Foundation at that time. I was working on the C++ client, which Gavin Wood had started at the very beginning of the project. And so the mainnet had been live for just under a year. And then you had this project called the DAO, which came about through a company doing a project called Slock.it. So Slock.it was smart locks. So the idea being that you could do Airbnb things or bike rentals or any kind of lockbox thing and have those connected with on-chain transactions.

4:14So you could do these things in a decentralized, autonomous way, where somebody could pay crypto for an Airbnb-style rental. And that could be used in a smart contract to unlock a box or what have you. And so for Slock.it, they were doing fundraising for launching the project. And it was sort of the very beginnings of the ICO era, but you'd already had some pretty bad ICOs that did not deliver, that were like, thanks for the money. We think you promised to do something, but there's no means of enforcement.

5:11So what the Slock.it guys decided to do, and this was announced at DevCon 1 in November, 2015, was that they were going to do a DAO from the very beginnings of Ethereum. And prior to Ethereum even beginning, you'd had these ideas going around about decentralized organizations, decentralized companies, I mean, various Bitcoin-adjacent projects, looking at that, back to the earlier days. I don't know if it was the case that Nick Szabo maybe thought of some of these things. They were certainly a very hot topic around that time of November, 2013, when the Ethereum white paper was written.

6:16So anyway, they thought, well, okay, let's go and do one of these, right? There's been lots of talk about that a smart contract platform would let you do some of these things. Okay, so let's stick with that and actually do one of them. But as that was going through, other projects were sort of thinking, well, okay, like if someone's written this sort of stuff, like maybe we could do it as well. So it morphed from something specific to their project into this, like, let's make a DAO framework that multiple projects can use.

6:53And it just got bigger and bigger and bigger, because it was such early days on Ethereum that there weren't a lot of applications. Certainly no DeFi, nothing very big happening yet. So this sort of ended up being the first sort of big project that people could engage with, you know, actually use smart contracts, actually do a real thing. Because a lot of people have just got their ether from the sale and they're just sitting on it and nothing had happened. You couldn't do anything.

7:28One of the features of that DAO contract was that they'd got this mechanism called child DAOs, which were used really for two purposes, say within a particular set up, you know, particular community, maybe some people are like, right, we want to go off and do something slightly different, right? You know, kind of a fork of the people in the community and the purpose. So you could go off and basically make your own child DAO. The other thing that you could use that for was if people started like voting for shit things that you didn't want and you're like, okay, this is like nuts, some stupid thing is going to pass and it's going to like lose all the money and it will be terrible.

8:23So what you could do is say, well, actually I'm going to go off and like basically like move my funds into this child DAO, right? I'm kind of opting out. And then there was an exit strategy where after about a month or so that you could basically like get your ether back. It's like, okay, I pulled it out into the side, nothing's happening and the money goes out. So anyway, that was presented by some people as the DAO being risk-free. It's like, you know, if anything, you know, you don't like it, well, it's fine.

8:59You can get your money back, right? So it's almost like, you know, a risk-free sort of like sovereign bond, you know, you kind of can't go wrong at the bottom end. So what that led to was just a huge number of people like putting their ether in because it's like, well, like you can't lose, right? So, and I can't do anything else. Like there's not a lot of other apps. So sure, why not? The other thing that they did was there was no cap on the raise, you know, so a number of the ICOs even earlier it had set a cap, you know, this is the maximum amount that we want to raise, but they didn't do that.

9:43So it's just uncapped, whatever anyone puts in, like there's no top. Both because you've got this, well, you can't lose. And also because you've got this pattern of saying, okay, it started out being Slock.it, but this is anything. So it's like, okay, this is basically going to be like the fund for ecosystem development, right? You know, maybe a lot of other people are wanting to build things and we kind of, you know, we can provide them funding out of this. So it's kind of like, sort of like, here's an ecosystem fund for the whole of Ethereum, you know, ended up being very big and broad.

10:27And as this was going through, I mean, there were a couple of major reservations I had. Firstly, like, is this even legal? Will it be seen as like, you know, money laundering or, you know, like an illegal security? Which it did actually turn out to be like the SEC after the fact did retroactively declare it a security, but it ended it by then, so there were no consequences. But the other thing was, actually another two, another two. You had a whole bunch of people who were, you know, the primary known people specifically in the Ethereum Foundation put forward as they call them curators.

11:21So what they were meant to do is as people sort of made proposals and the proposal would include like a smart contract thing to run for their stuff. The curators were meant to sort of verify that people were, it was what people were saying, not necessarily, they weren't making judgments on what could or couldn't go in, but they were sort of seeing this seems legit. And on the website for this, those people were all front and centre. It's like, you know, DAOhub, you know, Gavin Wood, Ethereum, well, Parity, you know, Vitalik, Ethereum Foundation.

12:05And so all of these people, it looked like it was basically their project, and it looked like it was an Ethereum Foundation project. And so my concern was like, those individuals have probably got like personal liability for this thing fucking up. You know, they haven't got a legal entity within them. They've not got any of these like levels of protection. It's just like, okay, it looks like it's an Ethereum Foundation project. And it looks like you guys are the ones that are doing it. So, you know, a bunch of these people potentially having big liability.

12:39And then the other concern I had as well is it's like, so you've just got like a big load of money. It's like, in the real world, how's about this for an idea? Anyone can just pour money into the bucket. You don't know who they are. You don't know what their judgment is, what their experience, and then we'll just like vote on what happens with the money. It's like, how on earth is that a good idea? You know, just here's a bunch of randos and they're just going to like make some decisions and you kind of have to go along with it.

13:14It's like, okay, if the goal is to build the ecosystem. And the other thing was with these proposals, it was like, they were meant to be like money making, right? It's not, it was like, here's our business plan of how we're going to spend the money and how that's going to like make funds back for you. So those are my concerns. It's just going to be a fucking shit show. It's, it's not going to be a good way of achieving it. What actually ended up happening is that, you know, there was a, there was a bug in the smart contracts.

13:58And somebody basically drained giant amounts of funds. I think it was, I heard it was like 14% of the market cap was put into that. You know, it was a significant chunk of the whole money supply went into that smart contract. And, you know, so somebody worked out that there was a, you know, that there was a particular sequence that you could, that you could have of a re-entrancy where the smart contracts could have like called back on themselves. And it was, you know, it was like an accounting issue of saying like, here's an ATM and you're like withdrawing the money, but it doesn't actually like change the balance in the database before the end.

14:55It's like, okay, can I withdraw some more and withdraw some more and withdraw some more? And, you know, it's like, it's not accounting for that till the end, just because of this issue. So, so yeah, you ended up with a situation where basically somebody's, you know, effectively like run away with a giant chunk of the, of the money supply. And it's not a bug in the platform. It's a bug in a particular application built on that platform.

15:28But the other difference that you had, because it was a, you know, a particular application was because of this like child, like withdrawal mechanism thing that was time locked, the person had not run away with the money instantly. You know, it's, and funnily enough, just thinking the last few days, the thing with Liquid, right. It's, it's kind of an analogous situation where Liquid did not have a time lock. So, you know, somebody could find this bug and basically just instantly run away with that money.

16:08You know, and that's, that's obviously very problematic because you haven't got any time to act, right. It's done, right. It's, it's gone. The money's gone. And I mean, I guess a number of exchange hacks or other things are of this nature, but what you had with the DAO was that there was an opportunity to decide or to try and talk through what would happen. So, and what you had at that point was this real schism of the community where the minority side was really, you know, typical cypherpunk original mindset of saying, well, the whole point of a blockchain is to have an immutable database.

17:11And if something's happened and, you know, the money's got stolen or what have you, well, tough, you know, it's just suck it up. You know, that's, that's unfortunate, but if you start interfering, you know, you're really undermining the whole, you know, the whole ethos and purpose of a blockchain. So, I mean, that was certainly my immediate reaction is like, of course you don't do anything like, what are you talking about? But you also had many people, which in the end turned out to be the majority, probably 80 to 85% of people.

17:59And their view was, if you can do something, you should do something, you know, that you can have this kind of situation. And unlike any other prior point in history, you don't have to appeal to authority. You know, you don't have to go and talk to the police. You don't have to, you know, talk to a government or regulator or any of that stuff. You have the ability to change the situation just within, you know, the people can consensually collaborating within that community. And I think for that group, especially, it was felt that way because the intention with a lot of that money was to build the ecosystem, right?

18:56That money was for building things. You know, it's almost like community money. It's almost like you had a treasury. I mean, it's not a centralized treasury, but logically it's close to that.

19:15And a reaction from a lot of people with that mindset would be, okay, so this is a theft, you know, someone's stolen all my fucking money. Like, fuck you, man. What, what are you doing? And if there's an opportunity to, you know, to stop that happening, then, you know, we should take that opportunity, right? That's the mindset of saying, you know, that maybe this thief assumes that there is such a rigidity of thinking that we're just going to let you run away with the money. Like, no.

19:58Another, another thing there, the way I saw that explained, which funnily enough, I saw from Charles Hoskinson. So Charles had a, had a talk at Ethereum, sorry, ETC summit in 2017, where he said, a lot of people would say that there were, there were two Ethereums from the time of the fork, but from his perspective, there were always two Ethereums from the very start in that multiple visions were presented and were appealing to different groups of people. You know, so one of those being Bitcoin with smart contracts, you know, that you, that you had a, I mean, prior to Ethereum was basically had Bitcoin, like Bitcoin was everything that was, I mean, you have, you know, some other small projects around it, but essentially Bitcoin was like, everyone was a Bitcoin.

21:10So Bitcoin with smart contracts is just like, okay, well, yeah, I want Bitcoin, but I want some program, I want more programmability, but still seeing Ether as money in the same way as Bitcoin as money, but you can do more. And if you are of that mindset, then yeah, you know, you don't want interventionism. You know, the immutability is absolutely sacred and like, of course you don't change anything. But there was an another chunk of people which ended up being the majority in the end, who did not view Ether as money.

21:53That for that group, Ethereum was a decentralized application platform, you know, more analogous to like, here's Android or iOS or Windows or the web or whatever. You know, here's a platform that you build applications for and the applications are what is important. You know, it's not primarily money. It's like, yeah, Bitcoin's your money. That's fine. We don't need, we don't need another money as well, but we do want to build a whole bunch of other applications. I mean, messaging that you would have from the project and from the foundation in those early days was explicitly like saying that.

22:37It's like sort of saying Ether is, it's like, it's oil, right? It's a commodity. It's not a, you know, it's not a currency. It's a, it's a commodity. And, and yes, there's, there's value in that commodity, but it's also consumed. You know, it's, it's fuel for you, fuel for the engine. You know, you're, you're using it and spending it to do that computation, but that's the primary characteristic, right? It's not primarily money. And if you're of that application mindset, then you're like, okay, well, this is a bug, you know, there's a bug in the platform.

23:18And yeah, it manifested in a particular application, but the end effect is that like end users are getting damaged. So we're going to fix it. And you could say, well, you're fixing it in the wrong place. You know, why, you know, but if you, it should be fixed in the application. But I mean, the fact is if you, if you, if you're a software engineer or you've been around the tech a long time, you know, that like hacky fixes happen all the time. You know, like some little horrible patch put in, which is not in the right place and it's some kind of special case.

24:03But the outcome of it is, you know, that you, that you fix the, fix the thing. So when you think of Windows, for example, you know, the Windows applications, like from decades ago, will still work. And the reason for this is that, you know, Microsoft has wanted to keep them working, right? It's kind of been this kind of user pledge of saying, we're going to keep all this old stuff like runnable, like forever. And how that is going to manifest is, you know, in Windows, there'll be a whole load of shit that's just like, if application version is Office 3.1, then, you know, return a different value than you would normally because that fixes some hack or whatever.

24:52So, so yeah, for people with that application mindset, you know, there's a bug and you can fix it. Like, of course you're going to fix it. And also, you know, it's like someone's stealing money, so fuck him as well. You know, if, you know, the, if you've got this assumption that someone's going to just be allowed to get away with it, well, no. So, you know, that kind of discussion, you've got, you've got sort of basically a full month in which that was what that was happening.

25:27Both between people at the foundation, client teams, the multiple client teams, some outside of the foundation, some within, community members, you know, application developers, project people, like everyone, of saying, well, what's going to happen here? So, you have immediately as it was happening, this sort of request, hey, exchanges, please stop trading while we work out what's going on.

26:00Vlad CosteaOkay. "Can you guys please stop trading?" It's a very famous quote by Vitalik in some IRC chat.

26:07Bob SummerwillYep. That's right. I think it was actually from George Hallam, not Vitalik himself, but yeah, that message went out. I can't remember it. One of the, one of the heads of one of the exchanges also said, you know, I regret trading this shit coin. What a fucking disaster this is kind of thing. And, and yeah, you had proposals. Okay. Well, maybe you can do a soft fork that's like blacklisting these particular addresses. It's like, okay, well, maybe we can just do this, right? It's just like freeze it.

26:48You know, it's just going to get blacklisted and stuck forever. That was one of the first proposals, but they worked out fairly quickly that that would become a denial of service thing. And that was just not viable that it would be problematic that way. And then the other proposal was a hard fork. And that hard fork, it didn't rewind anything. You know, it wasn't that kind of like go back to an earlier block kind of thing. Instead, it was what was called an irregular state transition.

27:30It's quite a good euphemism. But what that did was it basically changed the smart contracts that were deployed at particular addresses. So all of these, like the DAO and the child DAO, all of the, you know, basically all of the infrastructure that being put together on chain for the DAO. All of those just got turned into refund contracts, you know, really simple refund. That's like saying, okay, just call this contract and it will send your ether back to your original address. And, you know, it never happened.

28:22So, so, yeah, not undoing, but basically saying, okay, that that stuff is not going to continue, right?

28:30Vlad CosteaThat's interesting because the narrative about the situation is that there was a rollback of the blockchain. And it returned to the previous state before the DAO hack happened.

28:44Bob SummerwillYeah. So that is not what happened. You know, I've seen that as a common kind of misunderstanding, often from Bitcoiners who didn't really like know about smart contracts or anything. You know, we're just like, hey, Ethereum is a scam and, you know, smart contracts are useless. So not really caring to understand those details. I mean, one funny consequence of that is users had to take this action to get their refund. So even now, there are some of those that have still not claimed their refund. You know, people, I guess, who didn't have their eyes on the ball or just never bothered or whatever.

29:31But yeah, you've still got some of this stuff just like hanging around for potential future refund. So yeah, it was not a trivial flip back at all. But it was a breach of immutability because it was changing that whole betting state. Another thing I guess to say about that is that it was effectively changing ownership of coins without use of a private key. So again, that's kind of your breach is that the fork was changing those semantics and that ownership. Because it was taking ownership away from the attacker.

30:33You know, so there was some kind of message that came that was published, supposedly from the hacker, or maybe it's just a complete, you know, trolling, saying that if there was a hard fork, that he intended to take legal action on that basis of saying that his funds were being stolen from him. That he had, you know, found a feature of the smart contracts and he just used that feature of gaining this money and saying, well, look, I didn't, you know, I just used the code as written.

31:19You know, I didn't do anything wrong. You know, I didn't infiltrate anything or steal keys or anything. I just used the smart contracts as published. So these funds are mine. You know, if you are doing this, you're stealing my property. Just, yeah, kind of, I guess. You know, it's not, it's not completely like irrational because another thing that they said as part of the DAO launch was code is law. You know, this really strong, like, you know, code is law. Ethos of saying, we're building this new thing, right?

32:06This DAO is, it's a new type of thing in the world, right? You know, this is a, this has never been possible before, right? It's, it's kind of like, when corporations first happened, right? You know, here, there's this new thing, you can make this corporation and it's kind of like a person, but it's immortal, but it can sign contracts and, you know, here's a new thing. So really saying that this DAO was this new kind of thing, which was code is law, you know, it was independent of people. You have not got third parties involved. It's, it's, it's this new kind of thing. And also then saying explicitly, our textual descriptions of this thing are ultimately just informational. And if you participate in this, the actual reality is the code on chain. You know, in case of dispute or disagreement, the code on chain is the ultimate truth, right? That is the contract that you're, that you're participating in, you know, and for the first time ever, it's a, you know, an executable contract and you've got this duality of this is, these are the rules and this is the implementation and they run.

33:41So then it's like, well, if you actually really say that, then any bugs, like they're on you, right? That's what you did. That's what you published. That was the contract. You explicitly said that was the contract. So if there's a bug and somebody takes advantage, well, like they're, they're not actually doing anything illegal. They're not hacking. They're just using the functionality you made. Right. And maybe it isn't what you intended, but you know, well, tough shit. You didn't have any disclaimers. You, you literally said this is, this is the deal.

34:15So, yeah, you know, some really kind of interesting, patterns and consequences and this overlap between technical understanding and, you know, the social pieces and that, so yeah, how that then manifested is that ultimately you had new, client software releases, which had this. This hard fork in it. And, but they supported both ways. So it's really like, here's a vote essentially, you know, here's some new software. You don't even have to run it at all. Like you can run on, you know, stick on existing software and nothing will change, or you can use this newer stuff with, you know, support hard fork on or off command line settings.

35:16And, you know, we're going to see what happens. There will be an activation block and people are going to run what they're going to run. You know, ultimately that's the, that was the decision-making, you know, you did obviously earlier have polls, various polls that people did coin votes, minor votes, just whatever, you know, Twitter, you know, and variety of different, polling. And just ongoing discussion, most of which was on Reddit, but nobody really knew what was going to happen. You know, it kind of looked like there was this, you know, majority in favor of it, but no real certainty as to what would happen on that activation day.

36:03You know, would people be running this, you know, do not hard fork mode? Would people be mining on that? You know, would there be miners mining that original chain or would everyone go, but what ended up happening was, I'd say probably, you know, 80 to 85% of that hash rate. But also just, you know, of people running clients and just involved on social channels. But you did have this strong majority in favor of the hard fork.

36:45And you know, it's, it's not like, oh, Vitalik was the dictator that forced that, or even, you know, the Ethereum Foundation, like, you know, forced that decision or anything. From what I saw, it was very, open and consensual that you just did have a very large chunk of the Ethereum community that had quite a different mindset than the Bitcoiners that they had come from. That, that you had this large chunk of people who, you know, had really quite different, priorities or thoughts, and were not that hardcore enough for that to overwrite somebody stealing all the money.

37:39And on the ETC side, I mean, Ethereum, you know, that naming came a little bit later, you know, maybe some people were starting to say classic, but, you really had that minority and some people mined it. So, you know, the chain, the chain kind of kept going. I think it was a bit sort of start the first little while with like difficulty adjustment stuff, though the difficulty adjustment on Ethereum is a lot more rapid than on Bitcoin. You know, like you saw with a BIP 110, you know, utterly stalling where you had that soft fork, right?

38:26And, and if being a very minority, of the, of the hash rate, which mined BIP 110. So it's effectively the chain ground to a halt. So I think you had that a little bit on ETC, but, the adjustment is an awful lot faster. So, if you had people mining it and off you go, you know, it continued. And then, fairly soon after that, you had an exchange listing as well, with Poloniex, choosing to list it. And then there you go, you know, you have a minority chain that survived.

39:12And to my knowledge, that's the first time that had ever happened. The received wisdom at that point was you would have a winner and a loser. You know, I guess like there's the quote from Satoshi, right? About, you know, it will go very badly for you if you're on that, on that side. But yeah, what you had with ETC is, oh, right. So that can work. You know, if you... If you have a situation where you have got these irreconcilable differences, you know, you don't have to stay together in misery, you know, you can get a divorce, you can secede from the union.

39:54It's, it's kind of okay. And that was, that was a learning. And, and, you know, I remember at the time, just thinking, you know, well, what a wonderful thing that is. It's like, well, great. You know, you know, everyone can have what they want, you know, and you don't even have to pick a winner, you know, just hold both sides if you want. Or if the other side, you know, whatever disgusts you so much, well, sell your coins. It's some free money.

40:29Like, you know, you've, you've lost network effect in that split. You know, it's not, it's not like a zero cost thing to have a have, to have that split. Cause I mean, if you think of it in terms of, you know, like a country, if you think of that, whatever, Texas seceding from the union, all of a sudden, a bunch of things that were done federally, you've got to do yourself. So you have that kind of analogy as well here on forks or say with just with open source projects, you know, nothing to do with crypto, you know, whatever different Linux distros or, you know, any of those kind of applications.

41:09If you split well, yeah. Okay. Well, you're going to have to set up a, you know, set up your website and your communication channels and automation, you know, there's a bunch of things that you've got like redundant costs from. But you know, people do this all the time, you know, that you, this is the pattern of countries and groups and everything is, you know, things, if you, if you've got differences after a certain amount of time, you know, you can't make it work.

41:43And so, I mean, the fact that you can do that with blockchain projects was great. You know, that was a, like a learning at that time of, well, okay, that's fine.

41:58Vlad CosteaYeah. Something that I do like to argue is that forking is part of the Nakamoto consensus and you can have friendly forks where everyone agrees that this version of the code is not fitting or does not work anymore, or it should be left behind. For some reason. And then everyone moves to the new version. That's one way of doing it. But another one, which is quite, I guess, more common is one where you leave behind some people who don't want to upgrade to the latest version. They don't like the new rules.

42:31So they're going to be like a different faction going forward. And we're going to see some of that in Bitcoin. Before we get to that conversation, I just want to acknowledge that Sal the Agorist was in the chat like 30 minutes ago. And he said that he got wiped out in the DAO hack and he still supported ETC, the one true Ethereum. And I think this is not an unpopular opinion. The first episode that I did of the Bitcoin takeover podcast, which I remastered like a couple of weeks ago, was with Donald McIntyre, who was a collaborator of Nick Szabo's and his wife, Elaine Ou.

43:10I'm not even sure if that's public or not, but I've heard people talk about this. I think even Tim May in his last interview ever, he mentioned that. So I hope I didn't reveal anything secret. But my point is that a lot of these cypherpunks were on the side of Ethereum Classic trying to make it work. And for a long time, there was also some funding that was given to Ethereum Classic because there was a long term bet that this fork is going to be the one that takes the miners once ETH is going to switch to proof of stake.

43:43Bob SummerwillYeah, yeah. So, I mean, famously, Barry Silbert, you know, purchased some ETC at the time of the fork and said, you know, that's my first ever non-Bitcoin, you know, digital asset that I've been involved with. And he said, I don't know if he said like he thinks there was a 50-50 chance or 25% chance that ETC would win, would become larger market cap than Ethereum in the end. And then from that Grayscale side, they had, I think, was their second fund that they had in this period where you had private funds before ETFs happened. So for a long time, and even now, they had a fund holding ETC. And a proportion of the fees for that were given to the ETC cooperative, which I was later the executive director of for six years.

45:03With the idea that being, if you have funding for doing developments and building that ecosystem, then that's going to have a good upside on the price that then benefits those holders. So again, it is sort of almost like a treasury in protocol funding kind of thing, apart from not in protocol, you know, an option on top. But yeah, you had a decent number of people who haven't participated really within the Ethereum ecosystem to that point. But that they felt that that ETC flavor was aligned with their interests, that if you did have an Ethereum flavor, which did not have the Ethereum Foundation sitting on ICO funding.

46:08And that you did have this strong immutability conservative ethos, basically like Bitcoin philosophy, Ethereum technology, that that was something that was appealing to them.

46:27So yeah, I mean, you have a stronger conservative flavor arising. So yeah, it's kind of like, which group is leaving, I guess you could say? Is it the wild child being thrown out of the house or is it a group of people moving on to do something exciting and leaving the people that don't want to participate behind? I had a shared house at one point in my early 20s, where there were five of us, just random people, you know, we'd not met each other before. It was just like, you know, renting rooms in a shared house kind of thing.

47:21So, you know, we all turned up and nobody knew each other. But, you know, we're all at the beginnings of our careers, not a lot of money and just doing that. And one of the girls that was there, she was so weird. She was just like really weird, really sort of like antisocial, like you'd be sitting in the living room and like she comes in the door and then just like pisses off straight to her room, you know, without even saying hi or anything. She'd like put marks on the milk bottle.

47:55She's like, how much milk is there? I'm putting my marks so that nobody can steal my milk. And she was just really weird. And so the other four of us, we just went and got another house. We didn't even talk to her, but we just like all left. We're just going to go somewhere else and have a shared house, but without you. So just leave someone behind, you know, and that can happen. Or a party, right? You know, some weirdo turns up a party and he's just completely wrecking it.

48:31Well, you know, you don't have to stay. You can just go off.

48:37Vlad CosteaIt's interesting that usually it's the intolerant one that remains and it's the sane ones that leave for some reason.

48:47Bob SummerwillYeah. And I mean, maybe it's just as simple as being proactive versus being reactive is, you know, some people, they do take things in their hands and then they're active and they go and do stuff. So yeah, maybe that's not so surprising is if you're sort of a frontier adventurer, you know, off into the brave world, well, you know, you're going to be moving around. You're not going to be staying. So yeah, off you go.

49:20Vlad CosteaSomething similar happened to me in my 20s, except that I was renting an apartment, like everyone had their own room, and I had my own. And at some point, one guy showed up and he was friends with someone else. And he said, Can I sleep at your place until I find a job? And we're all the same age. And we're like, Sure, man, you can stay with us, whatever. And then he ended up being the freeloader type. Like he hasn't left. It was like three months, he got a job.

49:49He wasn't paying for anything. He was eating our food from the fridge and whatever. And then he had no shame. And actually, we had a PS4 or something. And he was playing on it all day. And I was like, What's happening here? It's like we have this parasite inside our place. And the only solution to actually get rid of him was to move to another place without him. So it's very similar in this regard. But yeah, I do want to ask you on the topic of forks, like, why do you think that Ethereum Classic, despite being the more sane version of the fork, the one that actually respected the cypherpunk tradition, the one that had support from these guys who are actually veterans in the field and having a fixed supply, which is something closer to Bitcoin and trying to scale in a more conservative way.

50:40I think for a while the conversation was to have sidechains. I think they were called Strata or something. Yeah. I remember interviewing Igor Artamonov. And he was mentioning that this was sort of his project. So in spite of all of these, somehow ETC ended up just copying Ethereum, ETH, like just porting MetaMask and whatever, trying to keep up. And also, it did not succeed. So where do you think the tipping point actually was? And what was it that actually prevented this from becoming the dominant Ethereum fork? Because this is also relevant for what's happening in Bitcoin today.

51:25Bob SummerwillYeah. Well, I mean, I think on the simplest level, it was because you had such a vast majority in support of the fork. The foundation just ceased funding the ETC side. Like, I think a criticism people had is like, oh, the foundation is picking the winner. Right. And it's like, right, you're cast out. It's like, you've got a rebellious teenager and you're just like, get out of my house. I'm never speaking to you again. And it's like, okay, that's not great parenting. Maybe this kid doesn't want to talk to you and hates you, but still keep saving the money for him, keep supporting him. Right. So that is not what happened.

52:25It was really like, okay, well, the fork has happened. That's the winner. We've got the trademark as well. You know, so the foundation determines what's Ethereum because you have a trademark associated. And yeah, like no funding is going on that side.

52:48But you also had the major project then deciding, okay, well, we're just, you know, we're going to stick on Ethereum side because that's where most of the people are, where the eyeballs are, the users, you know, all of our peers. So you didn't have a lot of application development left on that ETC side. And I think a misconception that a number of people had as well was, well, all of those applications, you know, they're going to be on the ETC side as well. Right. You know, it's the same chain. We forked the same chain. It's all deployed. It's all the same. But for those to work, you have all of these social pieces that go with that tech stuff. It's like, well, is there a website? You know, well, you've got to have a different version of that website that's pointing to a different chain. Maybe if you've got funds within there, well, like if the existing developers aren't like continuing, well, that stuff locked, right? They've got the private keys on both sides. And if they just don't want to carry on and participate, well, you know, the thing is stuck.

54:04And maybe you could, if those are completely open source, you know, somebody else could do a new instance of these things, but they're not going to be the same. They're going to be different. And you know, any integrations you've got of those into particular platforms, you know, those need like redoing. So, I mean, I guess it's the same on these more recent Bitcoin forks is, well, you know, maybe, you know, the mining pool code is going to be changing or the wallet code is going to be changing.

54:36And, you know, any kind of like online services using those or integrations with payments or anything, right? Everything has to be touched.

54:49And if the majority side people don't have interest in also having a deployment on this other instance, then it's, you know, it's just going to like die. So this assumption, oh, well, like ETC is going to be, you know, a complete clone of Ethereum and have all of the same things. That wasn't actually true. So, yeah, I think that combination of less eyeballs, less developers, basically no access to the existing funding sources. So, you know, what you had with Barry and others coming in, that was net new.

55:32And that was essential, but you had significantly smaller resources and potential. And I think that's really the same for any fork. But if the initial ecosystem is really big anyway, even a tiny fraction could still be, you know, really significant. So let me have a look right now, for example, at Bitcoin Cash. So Bitcoin Cash is obviously like significantly, you know, that you could see that's, you know, the failed side of that fork, obviously, in terms of, you know, adoption and usage. But the market cap is still $4.5 billion.

56:27Vlad CosteaI mean, there are multiple factors in play. Maybe that some BTC holders never claimed their BCH. So there are a lot of dormant coins that aren't doing anything. And that's part of the reason why the market cap is so high and the price held up. But also, I think it benefited from a lot of grassroots adoption, thanks to Roger and a bunch of other guys who went to some places that they knew previously because they were doing this for BTC. And they just asked them payments, processors, exchanges, ATMs, whatever.

57:06They're supporting BCH also. And in times of high demand or whatever, it's an alternative. Like I've developed this theory that I don't think Bitcoin is one unique project or one network. It's a greater idea that multiple projects are trying to achieve. And maybe that BTC will be the one that achieves everything, maybe not. But I don't care which one is going to be the successful one, as long as we get the promised peer-to-peer electronic cash that works in a fungible way that scales, that has contracts, that does everything.

57:44So in the end, I don't think it really matters. For investors, it matters a lot for people who put their money into this. But for someone who looks at this as a piece of technology and wants it to succeed from a list of criteria that makes it successful, then that's going to be the one Bitcoin that we're going to have. Even if it's not called Bitcoin, if it's called something else, but it still achieves this goal. And of course, it can't be USDT or whatever, because these tokens are centralized and they have an issuer that can freeze your account and whatever.

58:25And that's very anti-Cypherpunk, anti-Bitcoin, anti-eCash even, like Chaumian ecash. That was never part of the intention or design. But I've been researching forks lately. I'm working on a magazine about forks. I did a presentation about forks last weekend in Amsterdam. And I've come to the conclusion that a lot of projects, if you just read the white paper and Satoshi's writings, and then you look at, for example, Litecoin, you're going to come to the conclusion that yes, Litecoin is a Bitcoin. It does share code base.

59:02It does have some of the same features with small variations, but there is no 21 million cap in the white paper. And Satoshi did not aim for 21 million coins. He just wanted 50 coins per block with this halving schedule and whatever. Like it was kind of accidental that we ended up at 21. There is the older November 2008 version of the Bitcoin client that was tried by Hal Finney and Ray Dillinger and James A. Donald and a bunch of other guys on the cryptography mailing list.

59:37And that one had 100 coins per block and also had much sooner halving cycles. So if you added up everything, it would give you like 20 million coins in total. So we almost had 20 instead of 21. I guess they created a cult of the 21 million. But on the other hand, is it really that bad if we're going to have 500 million or something, but of different types of coins that achieve different purposes? And it's not created by governments, but created fairly on the free market.

1:00:14Like, I don't think that's a horrible outcome. But also, if there's going to be just one network with 21 million coins that wins, becomes like the number one global currency. That's also not a bad outcome. And if it's not the one in which I invested and which I spent most time studying, I'm not going to be mad about it.

1:00:35Bob SummerwillNo, I mean, the fundamental characteristic that you have in all of these systems is that you have individuals forming voluntary consensus. And it really is, well, what software do you choose to run? You know, what you would describe as, you know, here is the protocol.

1:01:07Anyone can run anything, right? There are absolutely no constraints. It's utterly permissionless. Anyone can do anything they want. And the consensus that you get to on particular sets of rules is completely voluntary. Nobody can compel anyone to do anything. Anyone can make their own fork, make their own, you know, fork of the code, or can make completely new implementation, you know, like libbitcoin.

1:01:47You know, you can do anything you like, but really nobody can compel anything to happen. But the thing is, if you are making yourself changes which are incompatible with what the other people are running, well, you know, you're off on your own. You know, you've got to persuade people to come with you and form a new consensus. Like, none of that can be mandated. So given that situation, well, you know, forks can happen anywhere, you know, that splits of that consensus, splits of that community. Any of that can happen at any time for any purpose.

1:02:32You know, I guess we don't necessarily always think of it that way. You know, there is more of this, well, what is Bitcoin? And I kind of, I don't get to say what Bitcoin is. You know, people are, the people that do the Bitcoin are deciding that, right? And feeling that, you know, the decisions are made there kind of follow through to everyone, but ultimately anyone can do anything. So given that situation, saying, oh, you know, there shouldn't be forks are bad, whatever. I mean, that's just bullshit.

1:03:10Like, it's completely not the case at all. What you're often saying there is you're basically saying, hey, you can't do this, right? You're not allowed to do this. Like, that's not what it's about. You know, I want to compel you to stop doing the thing that you're doing. So a simple thing, you know, saying with BIP 110, you know, in ordinals and, you know, data carrying is you can say you don't want these things to happen as much as you like, but, you know, shut the fuck up.

1:03:48It's the code. You know, the code decides what's happening. You know, the voluntary consensus that you're part of. That's the rules. And yeah, you know, if you don't like those, well, you know, make some new ones. But the consequence of that is, you know, you're going off on your own new adventure. And if you can persuade enough people to come with you to make that viable, well, you know, great. Off you go. But, you know, you're going to end up with Bitcoin Blake, which is, you know, this tiny new thing with, you know, hardly any support or use, but you can do it.

1:04:27But it's always strange to me this, that we're building this freedom technology. And then you get these little dictators who are like, yeah, but not like that. You can have freedom, but not in that bit. You know, you have this very authoritarian, you know, allergic reaction kind of thing going on, which is completely inconsistent with how the things really work, which is just straight, voluntary consensus.

1:05:01Vlad CosteaYeah, in the case of the Blake Fork, I like to call it Balake sometimes just because of that Key & Peele skit with the schoolteacher. So in that particular case, it's very weird because these guys are obviously authoritarians and they do like to make changes and they pretend that it's voted by the community or whatever on Discord. But it's very hard to verify whether or not these accounts are real people voting or whether or not it's rigged from the beginning. Seems like a lot of the decisions are pre-made and then they put up a vote just so that they can justify making the change.

1:05:42And to me, it's very anti-Bitcoin. I don't know who came up with this ideology, but they think that nodes are in control and therefore nodes form a democracy and they can fire the miners and they can tell the miners when they should stop mining or how much they are allowed to mine, like they can set ratios or whatever. It's crazy. Bitcoin was always about competition between miners. The way that Satoshi solved this issue of the double spending problem was with incentives and proof of work. If you're going to make that secondary, you just have what you call this a Sybil attack where you can spin up more nodes and then pretend that you have more users and more votes.

1:06:29And that's how everything is going to collapse. But I guess it will not be a problem in a situation where you have a clear leader who makes decisions and the voting is only a way to justify the decisions that were already made. And honestly, I wish them all the best. But on the other hand, it's very hard for me to identify with their movement. It's very hard for me to understand why anyone who's been into Bitcoin for so many years would even consider that this is what they call the real Bitcoin.

1:07:02Because now they're fighting this cultural war of trying to appropriate the ticker and the name, the branding, everything. Of course, nobody is really taking them seriously, but it's a weird derangement. And on the other hand, we have Paul's Fork. Paul's Fork is like Paul Sztorc, Paul Sztorc's, but whatever. Nice pun. He's deliberately trying to distance himself from the Bitcoin branding and create a new GitHub repository, a new website, a new Telegram chat, a new Twitter account, everything with a different branding. And he's trying to tell people that this is different from Bitcoin.

1:07:47It is a Bitcoin competitor because it's merge-mined SHA-256. And it's also going to continue from where Bitcoin ends up at the moment of the fork. So basically, he's going to serve the same holders.

1:08:05But he's going to try new technology. I do like this juxtaposition or I don't know comparison between the two of them because they're like the polar opposites you have the BIP 110 or Blake or whatever you want to call it that fork which is reductionist and they're trying to make everything less useful. They say well it should be money but on the other hand they reduce the block size they diminish the impact of the miners and they try to control it as much as they can without adding any useful feature.

1:08:41And on the other hand you have Paul's fork which is called eCash, the BIP 300 one which is truly maximalist in the maximizing sense which means it's trying to do everything on sidechains which is an idea that is kind of old to be honest and it's surprising that we never had that in Bitcoin or Ethereum for that matter. Like sidechains have never been really used or tried to their fullest potential. And it's good that this is finally happening. It might be a bit too late for this in this industry or market because it seems like some coins are consolidating their position as that smart contract coin that whatever the privacy coin.

1:09:28And then when you come up with something which is an ecosystem that uses the same coin for all the use cases across multiple chains it might be a bit too late for it. I don't know if the market is going to pick it but I still like it and I support Paul's idea because I've been a fan of drivechains since I read about them like eight years ago. And it's good that they're finally happening. Will the market pick them? There's only one way to find out.

1:09:56Let's see what the market thinks about this. I definitely see more value in this than in most of the other experiments out there. Yeah, no, I mean I agree.

1:10:11Bob SummerwillLooking back a couple of years back to 2024 and especially around the BitVM paper from Robin Linus and earlier there was a Bitcoin roll-ups paper that was written by John Light a few months prior to BitVM.

1:10:34Vlad CosteaYeah, the rollups stuff, I remember. Yeah.

1:10:37Bob SummerwillYeah, so basically like mapping out that landscape where Ethereum had gone through so many different kind of ideas, you know, on the Bitcoin side it's been like, here's lightning is going to fix everything. Not really, no real work happening on anything else. Where on the Ethereum side, and I think, you know, a lot of that's because of the programmability of that base layer, but also just the, you know, the more developer experiment friendly kind of social side. That you had gone through state channels or payment channels, which are basically lightning-like and then state channels, similar thing, but with state just not balances.

1:11:28And then there was a thing called plasma and then you started getting like optimistic roll-ups and then ZK roll-ups. But really that kind of, on the Ethereum side of saying, well, look, hey, we can have this rich L2 ecosystem, you know, many, many different approaches can be tried and, you know, this kind of works and that kind of works. But there in early 2024, you've got this, well, maybe this stuff can happen on Bitcoin as well, right? Maybe you can have this thread the needle of just having, you know, a little bit more programmability that then opens up this like raft of variable, again, opt-in L2s.

1:12:19You know, it's this, you're not forcing anything on anyone. You're saying, you know, hey, let's open stuff up and you can have all of these things happening. So there you had this real sort of feeling of, oh yeah, you know, like what an opportunity there is here. If you looked at the market cap there of Liquid and Stacks and Rootstock, maybe a couple of others, but if you look at the market cap of those compared to the market cap of all the Ethereum L2s, the stats I saw was, and I think this was from Dan Held, was that the L2s on Ethereum were 30% of the L1 in terms of the market cap.

1:13:16And for Bitcoin, it was like 0.1% or something, you know, so that if you did have a growth of coin, like, you know...

1:13:44Vlad CosteaI think you have some signal issues with your internet because you keep cutting out. I only hear half the words that you're saying.

1:13:57Bob SummerwillI keep breaking up?

1:13:59Vlad CosteaYeah. And you're also delayed. Your video is moving like a few seconds later, which is counterintuitive because the speed of light is faster than the speed of sound. But on the internet, you know, the audio is easier to broadcast, takes less bandwidth.

1:14:17Bob SummerwillYeah. Give me a sec. See if I can wire myself.

1:14:26Vlad CosteaSure. I will plug the ads in the meantime. So check out SideShift, the place where you can swap your stablecoins for sound money. SideShift is at S-I-D-E-S-H-I-F-T dot AI, and they have a lot of trading pairs and also a lot of liquidity. If you receive a payment in stablecoins and you don't want to hold on to that, you can just go to SideShift. You put your Bitcoin address in there, click the shift button, and from there you're going to get like this stablecoin USDT or USDC or whatever address where the payer needs to send the coins.

1:15:05This means that you don't have to wrap your head around gas tokens or whatever. You just copy that stablecoin address. You send it to the person wanting to pay you. There's going to be a swap in the middle. And what you get is BTC directly to your wallet. Check it out. It's called SideShift. There is also the eCash fork that's launching. And if you want to learn more, you go to layer2labs.com or ecash.com. Right now they are in their alpha network stage, which means that you can get some free coins from a faucet or you can try to mine them yourself.

1:15:38And then engage with the community to learn more about how this technology is going to play out. It's very grassroots from this point of view. I think that some of the drivechains were activated organically with just community members deciding to pick up the code and some miners wanting to receive transaction fees from them. So it's still very early. The official launch is on the 31st of October. But you can still engage today at ecash.com. And there are some public Telegram chats where you can join and ask for some free coins so you can play with the system.

1:16:14There's a wallet that's called the eCash wallet at ecash.com. And there's also BitWindow on desktop, which I think is the more advanced and honestly the option that I recommend. Check it out. Once again, ecash.com. It seems like Bob left, but he's going to be back, I hope, with a better connection. There is also Orange Rock, which is the place where you can trade without limits and without KYC. And it's actually very cool. They have an application for iOS that's available. It's called Orange Rock. You can look it up today.

1:16:51They're also going to be available on Android and desktop soon. And what this is is perpetual trading made specifically to not require any kind of information. And without custody, without KYC, this is like the future of trading the way that it should be. There is some leverage there if you want to gamble, but I don't recommend it. If you think you're smarter than me, you can use it. It's your money, not my concern, not financial advice or whatever. But if you want to trade without KYC, go to OrangeRock.com.

1:17:28And there's also Braiins Hashpower, which is the company that is renting hashrate to you. You set up an account, you pay with your BTC for the time that you're going to be renting the hashrate. And then you can point it anywhere. So you can mine BTC, you can mine BCH, you can mine BSV. You can even attempt to mine the new eCash fork. I think around October when the launch is happening, there's going to be a lot of this activity. So it's better to learn how the tool works from now and then maybe use it strategically, wisely, whenever it is that you need it.

1:18:07It's hashpower.braiins.com. And last but not least, we have the giveaway from Cake Wallet. Cake, as I found out, recently got more than 2 million downloads. I was advertising it with the intention of getting it to 1 million because I think in July they were at 700,000. But it seems like they hit 1 million and then the next million came very fast. So this is like a celebration giveaway. Bob, you wrote a number before I started this interview. And this is going to be the big reveal to the people in the chat who put some numbers in there.

1:18:47Drumroll. You ready? I'm going to hit my Rubik's Cube, which I've been spinning during this. 96, or is that 69?

1:18:59Bob SummerwillThat's 96.

1:19:00Vlad Costea96. So if there's anyone who wrote 96, I'm going to reach out to you. I'm going to give you $100 in any coin that you like. That's available in Cake Wallet. Most likely, Bitcoin or Monero or Zcash. It's up to you. I don't see any 96. I see a 93. I keep scrolling. 94. This is the closest one so far. 95. Let's see if there is actual 96. Yes, there is AllisonFDZ33 who said 96. And there might be someone else. So if you're watching this and you wrote 96, please be here in the chat and claim your prize. It's important to prove that you didn't just hit and run. Just log on with a new account and then type a number. I don't like that. Just prove that you're listening to this conversation. And now, Bob, let's talk some more about the forks because I think this is the main topic of our conversation. And it's also a fascinating one because you would assume that the best technology wins and people follow the signal and the progress and the one that seems to have most money and most support.

1:20:17But there's also a very strong social layer where people, even though they wear Don't Trust, Verify t-shirts and they say that they're true cypherpunks who follow no leaders, they do follow leaders.

1:20:31Bob SummerwillYeah. Yeah. I mean, the markets are not rational and humans are not rational. And yeah, you know, the best technology does not always win. You know, if you think of, you know, video standards, so VHS tapes, you know, they were worse than the Betamax that you had at the time, but they won in the market.

1:21:05Vlad CosteaBut that's the classic example. I think there's another counter example that happened later with HD DVD and Blu-ray, where you can argue that HD DVD, yes, it was better because it was compatible with older devices, but Blu-ray had more storage. And I guess if you look at it from an evolution perspective, like Blu-ray was better.

1:21:29Bob SummerwillRight. Or think of the web, you know, JavaScript, you know, JavaScript is terrible. You know, its characteristics, certainly in the early years as a language, you know, is significantly worse than other things that were around at the time. But, you know, but it was good enough. Or say like the C language. So, you know, even though numerous other things have happened since, the vast majority of system software and operating systems, you know, are written in C because again, you know, it was good enough in the early days and it got the network effect.

1:22:08The same with Bitcoin, you know, what Bitcoin from a, you know, a coding perspective and, you know, the protocol itself, you know, there was never a written spec for the protocol. There's a lot, you know, a bunch of like weird oddities there, but, you know, it didn't matter. Right. You know, overall, what you were getting as that sort of memetic core that attracted people, you know, that was good enough. So, yeah, having the best technology does not ensure, you know, that you come out on top. I mean, I guess you see this in any kind of like tech projects or companies, the marketing and the narratives and the sales are, you know, they're hugely important.

1:23:06And they can be more of a dominating factor than any particular technical characteristics.

1:23:17So, for example, Tether on Tron, you know, Tron, you know, is a nasty clone of Ethereum that was just like hacked up to, you know, have more throughput or what have you at the cost of having a fixed set of validators, you know, versus mining. Tether, obviously, like for the longest time, you hadn't like no kind of audits on the assets behind it, still kind of a bit shady as to what they do have or don't have. But those two together met a need that many, many people in the world, especially in developing markets had, which was, you know, a lack of access to US dollar based banking and payments and money transfer.

1:24:08So, you know, that kind of one, it's like on Tron, like what the, but there we are. It's a lot more than just the tech.

1:24:21Vlad CosteaYeah, I remember when that happened and it was sort of a joke, but the joke became something that people took seriously. I think that Tether even built their own layer two, which was called Polygon, I think, for the purpose of trading Tron on it. And it seems like for some reason of trading Tether on it, I said Tron, I think, for some reason, Tron became the most popular option. Even if it's not the best one, it's not the most convenient one, because you still need to buy some Tron as the gas token when you're sending USDT.

1:25:06It doesn't have the nicest user experience of them all, but somehow this is the one that became the most popular. And people in the global south, like in South America, the Middle East, Africa, I think they use USDT on Tron a lot. And it's surprising to me to find out every time, for example, when I'm in Argentina and I see people just saying, well, we accept Tether here. It feels bittersweet when I realized that this could have been Bitcoin and then this could have been Ethereum, but it's really not.

1:25:44And it makes you wonder what was it that happened in the background. Like maybe that there is something that we don't know as to the reason why Tron became so popular. Because I remember when it came out, it was like the laughing stock of the whole market. I

1:26:00Bob SummerwillThink a lot of it is just it was cheapest. It was just the cheapest. And that year, that was enough. I don't think that's

1:26:09Vlad CosteaThat cheap, because the last time when I tried it, I paid like three dollars for the fee. Really? Well, OK. It's cheap when you use Tron, but when you use USDT, they sort of bump that fee or maybe it's the wallet that charges extra. And they have some sort of smart contract in the middle where they take a slice of that transaction fee.

1:26:31Bob SummerwillYeah, but no, I mean, Tron was was quite a joke. I remember when I first saw it, which I think was in very early 2018. And it was just, I think, you know, looking at CoinMarketCap and there's like this thing that just like popped up like number 15 or something. And you're like, I've never even heard it. It's like, what on earth is this thing? You know, like that just appears and never heard of it and just look into it. And they had the in the white paper, there was just a bunch of plagiarized stuff from IPFS.

1:27:12It's just like straight cut and paste, like rip off. There was this talk about Tron is Web4. Liked Web3? Hey, here's Web4. And they had a roadmap. So maybe it was late 2017. They had a roadmap coming out to 2027 for the full build out of this Web4 vision. I don't know how much of that has been delivered. It's nearly time. I don't know what happened. And then they had TRC20 tokens, you know, so like ERC but for Tron. Which again, it's like, OK, but ERC20, like the 20 was just like, here's the 20th like request for feedback, right?

1:28:06It's not magic. So it's like, again, it's almost like a cargo cult thing, right, of just like copying Ethereum but with a Tron flavor. You know that, again, it looks clownish because it's like you don't even know like what that spec or process or anything. Like you're literally just turning up at the party and copying, you know. But, you know, like I guess a lot of people just didn't care. You know, that maybe what you had on that Tron side, especially like in China and other Asian markets was, you know, just a bunch of people, a bunch of users.

1:28:47And it's like, hey, this thing kind of works for us. And then we don't care about the. You know, about the philosophy behind it or the, you know, all the, those cypherpunk origins, like, or like almost anything. It's just like, hey, here's this crypto thing. And I guess also at that time you've got a real bull market. So it's like, hey, you know, get a hold of Tron, like, you know, the numbers are going up really fast and whatever just succeeded in a way that really was nothing to do with the tech.

1:29:27Vlad CosteaWell, yeah, I remember 2017, right? Everyone was about writing fancy white papers. That was kind of the thing. Everyone was writing white papers and everyone was pretending to read them to understand what the project is about. And somehow this white paper was considered to be a constitution of sorts. Like it was kind of taboo to change your white paper after you promised something to come up with something else. But it sort of degenerated to the point where in 2021 it was all about, well, does it have a dog JPEG on it?

1:30:00Then let's buy it. If it doesn't, then, well, let's think about what this is. But what I'm trying to say is that in 2017 there was already a Chinese copy of Ethereum that was called Neo. And that one seemed to have like more credentials or be more serious about it. It's just that it faded. It never went anywhere. There was also EOS, which was the largest ICO ever. And that seemed to be like a real serious competitor to Ethereum that never took off. I think they found some consensus bug at some point and then it just faded into obscurity.

1:30:42And there were a bunch of others like NEM. Does anyone remember NEM? That was a thing for a while. It was a top five coin, I think, at some point. And what else was there?

1:30:55Bob SummerwillI never found out whether EOS actually stood for Ethereum on steroids or if that was an urban myth.

1:31:03Vlad CosteaI don't know. I never understood what it stands for. I never knew if it's EOS or EOS, but it seems like people sort of agreed that EOS is the way to say it. So maybe the fact that they do pronounce it as EOS means it's likely that it was meant to signify Ethereum on steroids?

1:31:27Bob SummerwillYeah, I don't know. I mean, the funny thing there is they raised like $4 billion over a year. It's just absolutely ludicrous. I mean, any kind of fundraising, it's like you've got to have room for growth. However much you've raised, you've got to deliver more value than that, right? There's got to be potential for those funders to get some return. But you put in $4 billion. I mean, what the hell can you do that's going to deliver value on top of that amount of money? And they were quite clever with it, where in the same way as a number of other ICOs at that point, they had language that's sort of saying, our side of the bargain is that we're going to deliver the tech and we're going to make a live mainnet.

1:32:23Like that's kind of the promise. And that's what they did. But like, they didn't need $4 billion to do that. And essentially Block.one just sort of like ran away with the money. They were like, right, mainnet's live. Bye. Thanks for the money. They also got an SEC settlement. The SEC did investigate were there sales to Americans of this that would have been in breach of regulations, which they blatantly were. I mean, I was at Consensus Conference in New York there, which I think I'm pretty sure is 2018 that was happening.

1:33:15And, you know, you've got billboards in Times Square, these massive, big EOS billboards out in the public. And it's like you're not selling it to Americans, like really. But they got a total hand slap of a fine.

1:33:34Let's see what it was.

1:33:37Vlad CosteaWell, it was a very small amount compared to the money that they raised. Yeah, $24 million.

1:33:45Bob SummerwillIt's like nothing to them, right?

1:33:46Vlad CosteaIt's not even one percent.

1:33:48Bob SummerwillNo. So they kind of got away with it then, because then it's like, oh, we've had the settlement, right? We're legal. You know, other projects, they've got this ambiguity. Like, are they, you know, are they in the good or the bad? But EOS were like, oh, yeah, we've settled, it's fine.

1:34:06Vlad CosteaYeah, for a while it was very uncertain whether or not even Ethereum was going to be labeled as a security or a commodity. Yeah, yeah. And if it's going to become a commodity, it's very ambiguous in the sense that, as you mentioned about an hour ago, people were trying to claim that this is not money and it's more like something else, like gas that you pay for contracts. And then they came back, I think the top of this narrative was sometime in 2021, when they were saying that, no, this is ultrasound money.

1:34:43They had this EIP, I think it was 1339 or something, and that then decided to slash the, no, burn actually, the transaction fees.

1:34:56Bob SummerwillYeah, so it was adding a burn so that you, it wasn't just like less inflationary for a while, it was actually deflationary. I mean, that's changed over time, but yeah, there was this real push of that kind of narrative on the Ethereum side. And it probably tied in with DeFi as well, right? It's just saying, oh, look, you've got all of these DeFi things going on and a more financial focus on Ethereum than had been the case prior to that. In those earlier years, it's like this is an application platform and you can build all these different things, not just money.

1:35:48But with the success of DeFi and of Stablecoins as well, you suddenly have this fresh push of saying, oh, actually, Ether is money and it's money that's taking part in this decentralized DeFi economy. And saying, you know, hey, this is really like the manifestation of what a number of us were looking for earlier from a digital asset, which is a currency is, okay, well, you can do like doing payments. Okay, there you go. You can like pay your money between each other and like that's always been there from the very start.

1:36:29But that's like table stakes. And here, look what you've got with these rich DeFi ecosystems where you can do all of the sort of things that you do with money or financial instruments. You know, it's bigger and richer and okay, you can do more than just money, but look, hey, here you can really do all these financial instruments and they work and stablecoin payments and everything. You know, here's the fuller vision. So you have this push. And I mean, it's a bit of a sort of like cheeky, mimetic thing of saying, hey, Bitcoiners, you know, you've been saying, you know, how important hard money is and how, you know, Bitcoin's digital gold and so on.

1:37:24But actually you're more inflationary than Ethereum. Ha ha ha ha. You know, we're even sounder than you are because we're, you know, we're not, we haven't got this inflation to the same degree for the block rewards. I

1:37:42Vlad CosteaAlso miss, so about an hour ago or longer, you said something about the DAO, the DAO's purpose being that of, for example, enforcing contracts between someone renting their apartment on Airbnb or borrowing their bike or whatever. I do miss the times when projects were more ambitious in terms of disrupting the real world and trying to do something in meatspace as opposed to just saying, well, this is for borrowing stablecoins against your assets and whatever. Feels like there used to be a time when everyone was more optimistic in this space.

1:38:19And I've taken this feedback like two or three years ago from a photographer in Prague who was, I think he's been the photographer of events at Paralelní Polis for like a decade. And I was just having a casual conversation with him and he told me, you know, I feel like this space is failing. And I told him, what do you mean? The prices are up. Everyone's doing fine. The projects are much more mature than they were in the past. Like, what do you mean by that? He said, well, I remember when I first came to these events that everyone was talking about how to change the world and how they're going to revolutionize something.

1:38:56And now they're just talking about very specific use cases. But the ambition is definitely dialed down compared to what it was before. And that was like a wake up call because I realized I got the… …perspective of someone who's not involved in the space actively, just someone who's casually participating and just observes from the sidelines. And he was right in this regard. People used to be more enthusiastic about disrupting, breaking stuff. Maybe it's because the banks have caught up and now we have the Venmos and we have Cash App and whatever.

1:39:39It's not as cumbersome as it used to be in the 2010s. It's also easier to pay with your card in lots of places. You just tap it with your NFC chip and that's it. You don't have to worry too much about… You know, it used to be that you would swipe your card and then you had to sign a piece of paper after you input your PIN or something. So there's definitely some improvement here. But I still think that we're missing out on some opportunities to provide value and real world use cases.

1:40:14And maybe that would become more, maybe not cowardly, but more comfortable with this position on the market where we're no longer a competitor. We're just something out there which is experimenting with stuff.

1:40:30Bob SummerwillYeah. I mean, I certainly agree with that. So February 2014 is where my Bitcoin journey began. I was aware of Bitcoin in earlier years as well. But I wasn't really interested because I was a gold bug and a silver bug and a software engineer. And it's like, I know how shit most software is. So, you know, there's some dude we don't know who it is and he's made like magical internet money. It's like, come on. Like, come on. This is like a scam, right? Like this can't work.

1:41:08You know, I've got my borrowed gold. Like, why would I be interested in this? But I met a guy at a pub and we had this most like wonderful conversation about what are the other things that you could do as well as money. You know, and just really thinking, well, hey, you know, this is a really, a really revolutionary thing that we can like rebuild, you know, we can rebuild society, right? It's like, you know, I was really thinking, well, you know, the stuff that had led me to be a gold bug was really like after the world financial crisis, just wondering, like, how can this happen, right?

1:41:52Like, how can it be that everything's like fine and then all of a sudden like it's screwed and we're like losing our homes and like everyone's out of work and like, how on earth does that make sense? Right. You know, we've got the same resources in the world. We've got the same people. Like, you know, what happened here? And then, you know, learning about money and central banks and inflation and, you know, I guess like all kind of like levels of control that we've got within, you know, governments and so on.

1:42:27So to me, then, you know, having this conversation and realizing, okay, like, yeah, you've got money, but like you can do anything, you know, got these sort of visions of sort of like robotic warehouses that are like, you know, moving stuff around and doing machine to machine payments and that going into, like, you know, like your car, you can move things around or whatever. And just thinking that with that means of payment or other decentralized applications that you combine that with what you already have with the internet, all this sort of like commerce and all this voluntary transaction stuff can suddenly happen, right?

1:43:18And no one can stop it. You know, the banks, the governments, the credit cards, like, you know, we don't need any of you. You know, like all these things can just like flop out of the way, you know, because you've got this unstoppable immutable chain as well at this time. Like, you know, at the start there on Bitcoin, you could even do free transactions, you know, right. They're going to be slower, but, you know, they did get picked up. So you've got all this narrative as well as like, you know, this is like free or super cheap anywhere in the world, you know, like absolutely better than the status quo.

1:44:03But also this like freedom tech from the very base. And yeah, I was utterly like thinking, you know, like this is going to change everything, right? This is like so revolutionary and all of these like drags that we've had on humanity because of, you know, the elites, the powerful people controlling all the levers and, you know, constraining what we can do. But, you know, like that stuff can go away. And yeah, it's going to be like very uneven how that happens because you've got so much existing power and control.

1:44:45But, you know, I was really thinking, okay, you know, like maybe within about five years, you know, maybe you can have some little country somewhere that's like, you know, the blockchain country. And, you know, you're going to have this arbitrage between different jurisdictions, but like this tech is going to be so empowering that, you know, it's going to change how the world works. I really thought that, you know, but yeah, that didn't happen.

1:45:16Vlad CosteaWell, we have Liberland and we have El Salvador, which apparently is even difficult to pay with BTC if you travel there nowadays. I've read some tweets from people who actually live there, in El Zonte Beach, and the locals, like if they're asked to pay with Bitcoin, they're going to sort of comply with the request, but it's not their preferred way of payment. And some of them even, they don't have a wallet anymore and they need to download it again or whatever. So it's definitely a situation where you can tell that there's a regression.

1:45:57I still remember, I think in 2022, I was invited to go to the Adopting Bitcoin conference in El Salvador. I bought my plane ticket. I bought my hotel and then I got sick. So I didn't travel in the end. What I remember is that when contacting the hotel, I've asked them if I can pay with Bitcoin and they said, please don't like just give us dollars. If you want Bitcoin, we have an ATM nearby and you can go and withdraw some cash from there and pay, but we would give you a discount if you paid with your card or whatever online.

1:46:31I was like, okay, there's something wrong here. And of course you can be an asshole about it, turn into a Karen and say, well, I want to speak to your manager. And I know that the legal tender law means that you cannot deny a request that I want to pay in Bitcoin. I never did that, but it was interesting from the beginning that they prefer US dollars. Yeah.

1:46:58Bob SummerwillI mean, if you look at payments for things with Bitcoin and ATMs and everything, I mean, I'm sure that that was in a better state in like 2014 than now. It's worse. What I saw in that very beginning is you did have various like retail and coffee shops and things that they did start accepting Bitcoin. And it was like, oh, great. Yeah. And in no time, it will be like paying with crypto will be like just as common as paying with fiat. Right. It'll just be like, you know, it will be just as simple, whatever they'll work out the, you know, how best to do whatever apps and stuff.

1:47:48And you just, you know, that it would be just the same. And then, and then of course, you know, because it's better, you know, it's, it's going to be cheaper for them. They're not paying, you know, the fees to the credit card companies and like, you know, this will just happen, right? It will be like unstoppable. Like it's going to be, it's absolutely better than what we have. And it's also got this freedom benefit of taking away that control from, you know, from these oppressive, you know, our oppressive overlords.

1:48:23And, you know, a beautiful age of freedom will, you know, inevitably arise.

1:48:29Vlad CosteaI don't think I've ever asked you the question about Bitcoin, how you first discovered it and what was your first reaction. You sort of gave small breadcrumbs of your journey there, but it wasn't in a complete response. Like, do you remember where you were, what year it was and what was your first reaction?

1:48:53Bob SummerwillWell, I, I will have first heard of it actually through Alex Jones. So I had a... An exciting period, shall we say, which I do call my Alex Jones phase, where having, you know, gone through this, I think, so it started actually because, so I was working for EA doing video games, and I'd managed to pay off...

1:49:22Vlad CosteaWell, no wonder you couldn't stay in the industry. If you're watching Alex Jones, like you're not part of the typical profile of a video game developer nowadays.

1:49:32Bob SummerwillNo, but anyway, because it, you know, it was pretty well paid and we ended up paying off our mortgage and then it's like, oh, well shit. Like, I guess I should like invest in some things. I don't know what I should be doing something now. And, and then, yeah, so I was learning about money and I, you know, got like a, an exchange account, you know, start getting some stocks and things. And, and yeah, so I started getting like, resource stocks were doing really well. And then that took me to like physical, like mining stocks.

1:50:05And then that took me to like physical gold and silver. And, and through all of that. Yeah. I mean, I was, yeah, I was watching a bunch of Alex Jones, but also just a bunch of like, oh, well, you know, what is money? You know, the evil overlords and Bilderberg group are like controlling us and, you know, the World Bank and everything, you know, so, you know, very easily goes into quite a conspiratorial sort of mindset, right?

1:50:35And, and then I was watching other stuff to do with like peak oil and, you know, whatever, like we're going to run out of oil. And then like, we're going to go into some like Mad Max, like collapse. And I was doing sailing lessons because I'm like, right, I'm going to get a boat and sail away in a disaster or whatever, because all the roads are going to be blocked. I was learning to like learning gardening and growing my own vegetables and like stockpiling, like, you know, military rations and like water and grains and all, you know, boxes and boxes of shit in the basement.

1:51:20I got, I got like a radiation, like a Geiger counter. Cause you got like Fukushima had happened around there. But yeah, like a whole bunch of that. And, and yeah, sort of people within that ecosystem, either, you know, like guests Alex Jones would have, or I started reading like the creature from Jekyll Island, that's talking about the birth of the Fed, you know, how the Fed came about and income tax and all of this. And, and yeah. Oh, and Max Keiser as well, you know, before he turned into the monster he is right now, you know, when he was, got his show on, like, what's that, Russian TV?

1:52:14Yeah, Russia Today.

1:52:16Vlad CosteaI mean, I can argue that he was still sort of a monster in some ways because I'm Eastern European and I'm close to the Russian border. And I do remember in February of 2021 or 22, I think it was 22 when the Ukraine war started, that he was tweeting that there is no war in Ukraine. It's all psyop. It's a lie by whoever. And I was at the airport watching how the Ukrainian immigrants are coming and everyone was freaking out because they had no idea what's going on and what they should do with these people.

1:52:49And I was like, well, there's obviously something happening here and people are fleeing their country. And this guy is telling me on Twitter that there is nothing happening and there's no reason to worry. And then of course he had to resign or he got fired, I'm not sure, but he sort of landed on his feet when he became the personal advisor of the president of El Salvador. And he's like the main propaganda guy for him. I'm getting the feeling that he's always done this to a degree, except that for different masters or whatever.

1:53:21I'm not saying everything that he did on Russia today was horrible, but he was obviously biased in some perspectives that deal with geopolitics.

1:53:33Bob SummerwillYeah, yeah. But yeah, he'd show up now and again, watch some of his stuff. And so it was probably through him he'd have been talking about Bitcoin and other things because he had a MaxCoin. I don't know what year he did MaxCoin.

1:53:48Vlad CosteaI think that was like 2014, MaxCoin, StartCOIN. He shilled Dash for a long time. He had some Monero people on.

1:54:00Bob SummerwillYeah, yeah. So it's, yeah, 2014 he did MaxCoin. But yeah, he'll have been talking about Bitcoin earlier than that. Quite recently I saw an interview that he did with Amir Taaki on his show there. I don't know exactly what that year was, but yeah, Amir was on Max's show way back, way back when. So that would probably have been the era that I first sort of became familiar with it around probably there 2011, 2012.

1:54:38Vlad CosteaYou mentioned Fukushima and that was 2011 also.

1:54:42Bob SummerwillYeah, yeah. But yeah, I mean, it was just like, okay, there's a thing. But yeah, like I said, it wasn't very interesting to me basically in comparison with physical metals. It was just like, yeah, okay. And I know at least one or two people, I think, are friends of mine who were a bit more involved at that time. But yeah, it was only really when I met this guy in a pub who became a good friend who really, I guess, opened my eyes up about what at that point was really sort of being called Bitcoin 2.0 kind of ideas.

1:55:27You know, what are the other things that are brewing up around the sides? So you'd have had BitShares, Counterparty.

1:55:43Vlad CosteaMastercoin, NXT. These were some of the Bitcoin 2.0 projects. Ironically, it was the one that was launched by a teenager and a bunch of friends that became successful. It's very weird. It's very counterintuitive, but this is the one that became successful out of the whole crop.

1:56:03Bob SummerwillYeah, yeah. So I mean, there in February 2014, so that was three months after the white paper for Ethereum. So I don't know that you, I mean, you'd maybe got a little bit of code, some little bit of, you know, test netty, a couple of things talking to each other. But it was, I mean, it was a full year and a bit before mainnet happened on Ethereum. So at that point, Ethereum was just one of many projects that, you know, there was discussion about, like Ripple was really big at that point as well, you know, like the original Ripple.

1:56:45And again, you've got this much more open kind of mindset at that time. So it's like, oh, you know, there's this Ripple thing, which has got a different form of consensus. And it's like, oh, right. Okay, that's interesting. Yeah. You know, and you're not thinking, fuck you Ripple. It's like, okay, you know, okay, there's another thing, you know, or maybe this is better. Maybe this is, you know, maybe this is useful. You really got, most people who were involved were pretty open minded because at that time it was such a frontier, unusual thing that the people that were drawn to it that early, you know, they're not, you know, they're not regular people.

1:57:29They're very curious, you know, risk tolerant, brave adventurers. So of course you don't like, okay, I found Bitcoin and now that's the answer forever, right? There you go. We've got perfection. Everything else is bullshit. Like, no, that like makes no sense at all. You know, it's just like, even Bitcoin is like new and obviously like a lot more can be done. So yeah, it was a different kind of world. But so that, yeah, so that was 2014 where I, you know, got really interested and started going to meetups and, you know, really like actively following along.

1:58:18You know, it wasn't what I was doing for work. It was like an interest and a hobby. And I didn't like, whatever, buy a load of crypto or whatever. I didn't have a lot of money at that time, actually. All the money I had was in other things, right? I did have some real estate for a while and then physical gold and shares and, you know, just sort of conventional sort of stuff. So it was more of a, oh, this is a really interesting technology. I wasn't thinking in terms of, oh, I can get rich here.

1:58:52Like, and funnily enough, that was the case for a lot of the people involved with Ethereum early as well, is like... At that time, there was no certainty that the thing would even work, that it'd even ship, that it, you know, maybe it's illegal even.

1:59:14You know, many, many people who were around in those early days, you know, it was doing it for, you know, for that philosophy, for that interest, for that technology. It was not at all, like, for the speculation. If anything, you're like, you know, you look at the people that are just speculating and like, you know, you guys are fucking leeches. Like, you're not doing anything, right? You're not helping. You're just like sucking off profits for yourself and you're doing nothing. So yeah, but it was 2015 that I, you know, really went all in terms of my time and efforts.

1:59:55I was, I live in Vancouver, but I was actually in Toronto for six months, doing a contract. Actually for TD Securities. So working for a bank, I had a bank job. It was my first time I'd ever, like, done that. I was 40, but I got this contract to do that through an old friend. And it was kind of like, I guess it was just sort of interesting. It's like, how does, like, how do banks work? Like, what's it actually like on the inside? But while I was in Toronto, that's where, like, most of the...

2:00:34A lot of the Ethereum people were from, right? Like Joe Lubin was there and Vitalik and various other folk. And Anthony Di Iorio as well. So while I was there, I took the opportunity, you know, to go to their meetups and it's like, orders of magnitude bigger, and you've got like the main people there. And I just really got engaged. And it was like, the mainnet was launching. So it's like, oh, right. So that thing I've kind of been following along on and off for a year.

2:01:06Like, so that's like, you're going to ship and it's like, this is a real thing. And it kind of worked. And it's like, wow, okay. You know, I can't not get involved. You know, it's kind of like, whatever you meet, you meet Tim Berners-Lee and he's about to launch the web, or you meet, you know, Linus Torvalds, and he's just started on Linux. And it's like, you don't get many opportunities in your life to, you know, to get engaged. On something that's potentially really impactful and revolutionary and interesting.

2:01:41And, you know, like you're there and you're talking to the people and there's, you know, there's any, you know, hundreds of people around, you know, involved in the whole thing or even smaller number of people, like actually hands on. And it's like, you know, I can't not do this. Like I have to do it. I don't know what that means. I'm just going to start like volunteering and doing some coding and development. And hopefully maybe I can get some work, some paid work for some startup that's doing something.

2:02:12But I ended up getting hired into the Ethereum Foundation. So it's like right into the center of it. And it was like, wow, this is like amazing. I'm, you know, just got this opportunity to be involved in something, you know, something really big. And the other contrast I think that there was for me is when I was in that earlier kind of like Alex Jones phase, that was a really like negative, destructive kind of mindset. Which is like, things are fucked. You know, the whole world is fucked and we've got all these controlling things and where, you know, we've got no power.

2:02:50And, you know, just God knows what's going to happen. You know, we're going to, you know, have another world war, you know, US civil war, collapsing, you know, economies and just, you know, we're heading into this like disaster. And then the only kind of rational thing to that is like, well, I'll try and survive, right? I'll do my prepping. I'll be good and I'll run away. And, you know, we can close the walls, have our citadels or whatever. And if you like feeding yourself out day after day and I'm watching Alex Jones listen to the show for like hours every day of like, it's fucked.

2:03:30It's all fucked. You're all fucked. You know, that, you know, led me to a very deep depression and just, you know, despair.

2:03:41And there's a guy called Michael Ruppert who did a documentary. There was a documentary with him that was called Collapse. And that came out in 2009. And he was like a whistleblower on CIA moving drugs into the US. And then he, so he was doing all this reporting about like terrible things happening in the world. And so 9-11 is another one. You know, I was really into like, you know, 9-11 is an inside job. And he talked about that a lot. Anyway, so Collapse was a movie where he was primarily talking about peak oil and basically like the collapse of oil supplies, that nothing else was as good.

2:04:42So, you know, all of society was utterly dependent on oil. And when that collapsed, you know, you're going to have this hellscape. Anyway, he was one of the ones I was following. And he ended up committing suicide. You know, he was just like so despairing about the world in the end. It's just like fucked and, you know, there's, I might as well be dead. And I think that was a real wake up call to me of like, that could be me, right? If I don't change the path I'm on here, I'm just immiserating myself so much that, you know, I'm just going to kill myself.

2:05:17Like that could totally happen to me. And the timing of that just sort of seemed to be in with when I met this guy, David Lowy, and it was like, oh, well, maybe there's an alternate path here, right? Maybe we can build better places to go, right? You know, you can have an escape valve, you know, it's like a life raft. Here's the life raft where, you know, maybe we can build this better future, right? That it's not inevitable that you're going to have this horrible collapsing scenario where you're hopeless.

2:05:54You know, maybe we can build alternate systems that won't have this, you know, this sovereign debt crisis and collapse of money and, you know, these, you know, recessions or depressions. You know, maybe we can build this better thing and I can help, you know, so daily I can be thinking of these positive things that I can be actually putting my skills to work of trying to help this world, you know, come to fruition. And maybe it's possible, maybe it's not possible, but it's going to be a lot healthier to do that.

2:06:34So that was where I was really coming in is like, you know, maybe there's a way better place that we can get to here and, you know, and I can help with that.

2:06:47Vlad CosteaI'm not sure exactly how, but this became dark very fast, but then it became sort of hopeful, like I'm happy you're still here. You're building on something and you have high hopes for the future. In regards to peak oil, I remember that being like a big talking point. I was in high school or something, so that was before Bitcoin even. Maybe the 2007, 2008, around that time people were talking about, well, there's going to be a point where we're going to run out of oil and the whole world requires oil and the hope was that electric cars were going to come around and just replace everything that runs on gasoline.

2:07:31Of course, now I'm not even hopeful about electric cars now that I know what their batteries are made from and how scarce this resource actually is. So there's going to be a point where if it all goes fully electric, most of the people who own cars today will not own a car in the future. And maybe that they're going to share one, like the concept for the robo-taxi or whatever, but that's still dystopian. And if you ask me, the whole self-driving car thing is just opening up the market for assassination markets where you have young, healthy people who can just have a glitch where they drive off a cliff and then, coincidentally, there's going to be someone older and wealthier who needs their organs.

2:08:16I think about this sometimes and it gets very depressing when you realize that once you lose control or you teach a new generation of drivers to not have any responsibility, you're just going to have incentives for people to game the system. And of course, political dissidents, whatever, they're screwed. They get inside a car. Before this, it used to be more complicated, like you had to sabotage their cars or you had to have someone chasing them or something to drive them off the cliff. Now it's so easy.

2:08:52It's just remote control. You're like, oh, this guy, poof. Okay, it's like a video game. It's not even real in some way. You just control their cars. It's crazy.

2:09:05Bob SummerwillWell, is it going to be like LLMs and you're going to have open source cars? It's like, yes, I run my own car stack. It's not online connected. It's using a pre-trained model.

2:09:20Vlad CosteaI mean, I sure hope so, but the adoption, I suppose, is going to be abysmal for this kind of stuff. People will like the convenience of Tesla or BMW or whatever, where they pay a subscription to something and they feel safe about it. And then they will say, well, it's like a 0.1% chance that you're going to get into an accident. I'm sure that there's going to be like a legal agreement that nobody reads, that people are just going to click and agree. And then who knows, maybe one day they tweet something nasty about the government and then their local government decides that they're a person of interest.

2:09:57And maybe that they tweet more and they become threatening to the establishment in some way. And it's just better for the collective good and that this is like a direct quotation of dictators and people who read Rousseau and think that they're geniuses. That they just take this person away. Take this person out, not away. Take this person out. That's the expression. Anyway, I don't want to spend too much time on the dark stuff. You did say that you found hope in this technology and you felt like Tim Berners-Lee launching the Internet.

2:10:36Do you feel the same about the eCash hard fork? Because I know that you're interested in this nowadays and you seem to like drivechains. Does it give you the same feeling that maybe Ethereum gave you more than a decade ago?

2:10:51Bob SummerwillI'd say less so because it's not a whole new thing.

2:10:58Here's a different kind of setup or configuration of the existing Bitcoin setup. So it's a tweak on Bitcoin rather than a whole new category of things.

2:11:12But I think it's a very important project. And the reason why I think is it's kind of like tied into the Bitcoin L2 stuff I was talking about. And then my, you know, got all screwed up, the internet there. Yeah. I mean, what I was just saying was that the figure that Dan Held had was that Ethereum L2s were 30% of the market cap of the L1. Whereas on the Bitcoin side, L2s were 0.1% of the L1, you know, that added together.

2:11:54Vlad CosteaMarket cap or supply?

2:11:56Bob SummerwillThat... I can't remember. No, yeah, sorry, market cap, that was...

2:12:02Vlad CosteaOkay, interesting.

2:12:04Bob SummerwillSo yeah, you know, that added together, like Liquid, Lightning, Rootstock, you know, it's nothing, right? It's like a rounding error, the actual usage of those things. So that if you could have had or you could have a sort of a growth of a similar ecosystem on top of Bitcoin, that's like a 300x growth for that area. So obviously there are huge incentives for people to chase that. And you saw that with all of the Bitcoin, sorry, all of the BitVM projects specifically that you've got this chase to market of saying, well, can we bring EVMs on top of Bitcoin so that then you've got all of that same kind of...

2:12:56You can port existing smart contracts and projects. And I think that is a really necessary thing that the Bitcoin ecosystem has gotten very, very stalled where earlier efforts on those kind of just dropped off. All of the chips were on lightning, you know, lightning is going to save everything. And what that really meant was that all of that Ethereum inside on Bitcoin is stuck with same tech base for 10 or 12 years, you know, with small exceptions of SegWit, Taproot. But yeah, I mean, I think chains are a great approach and Paul has spent many years, you know, trying to educate and persuade to move towards that soft fork activation on Bitcoin.

2:14:07And it's, you know, it hasn't happened. And I think, you know, I don't know. I mean, do you think are there going to be any more soft forks on Bitcoin?

2:14:20Vlad CosteaWell, there has to be at least one hard fork to fix that time stamping issue that's like a few decades away. So at least from this point of view, there's going to be one. I do see now with the Coldcard hack and with the liquid hack and the lightning issues, people are starting to take vaults more seriously. But I don't see any serious conversation about CTV in the same way that maybe we had it two years ago when it seemed more of a certainty that we're going to activate some covenant soft fork. And this was like the prime candidate for activation. Now we just see like some very scattered comments from people who are like, well, it would be good if we had some covenants and vaults for this. It's just that I think Saylor tweeted like a couple of months ago that covenants add complexity and also Saylor is behind this. I think it was 50 million dollar fund for development, which is going to give money to developers and the head of Chaincode Labs. I forget his name. He's Schmidt or...

2:15:33Bob SummerwillMike Schmidt.

2:15:36Vlad CosteaMike Schmidt. He's going to be in charge of allocating the funds. So I think it's obvious for a lot of developers in Bitcoin that there's not going to be any allocation for this particular idea. The question of what's actually going to get funding is quite interesting because nothing right now seems to be happening. If anything, there is a regression of projects and even organizations like OpenSats are starting to remove funding from some projects which turned out to be very amateurish with spaghetti code and a lot of advertisement or marketing behind them or hype just because they're Bitcoin only and accomplishing something that sounds interesting.

2:16:18So maybe it's good that there's a compression of projects and only the strong ones will stick around. But the question is what will Bitcoin actually be used for? And the obvious answer for the finance people is that it's going to be this asset that people use as a collateral, this speculative investment that some organizations will leverage for some purpose. And that purpose is just to make more US dollars. So it's easy to be bullish on BTC as an asset. But Bitcoin, the network seems like it's not going to get any significant upgrade, at least not with the current mindset.

2:17:03And for every vulnerability that people find, they're like, well, it's so good that we never did this because if we did look, we could have had more issues.

2:17:12Bob SummerwillYeah. I mean, it's just very disappointing and depressing really when you compare that to, for myself, how I was feeling there back in 2014. It's like saying, okay, well, Bitcoin is going to just like sit there and be like an asset. It's like so boring. It's so boring and it's not changing anything. That isn't changing the world. There's no revolution there. And yeah, it's just a very, to my mind, very super conservative, low risk, like hopeless, useless mindset. I mean, you know, something like OP_CAT, it's literally just concatenate two entries together on the stack.

2:18:16Like it's the simplest tiny little thing. But, you know, you get people going, well, what, you know, we don't know what the consequence of this may be and, you know, whatever, it's just going to introduce shit coining and risk and, you know, we don't know what the consequences of that are. And it's like, you know, you know, are you fucking joking?

2:18:40Vlad CosteaThat just means they don't want new users to actually use Bitcoin. And you can see this being reflected in the usage in the mempool right now. What's the average block size and what's the median fee? I think it's very low. You can actually get in the next block with a one sat per vbyte transaction fee right now, which is depressing. The bet was that if you keep the block small, there's going to be lots of high fee transactions and people willing to write a lot of money to settle their transaction on Bitcoin.

2:19:14It seems like it's really not the case. And then people will look at this and say, see, it was a bad idea to increase the block size because there is no demand for it. But. A lot of the industry moved somewhere else. That's why there is low demand. We have new networks that fulfill sort of the same purpose or they fulfill it faster or with different features that Bitcoin does not have. And that's why they prefer to use something else. But we could have had everything on Bitcoin.

2:19:42And that was the true maximalism, not the one that rejects use cases.

2:19:46Bob SummerwillRight. For sure. Like, like WBTC, you know, on Ethereum, you know, that that's significantly more Bitcoin in there than.

2:19:57Vlad CosteaIt's like 120,000 BTC that's locked on Ethereum in comparison to Lightning, which is like 3,000, 4,000.

2:20:06Bob SummerwillYeah, it's just like ludicrous, right?

2:20:09Vlad CosteaI've never heard anyone, so I got to put this on record. I've never heard anyone praising WBTC saying, oh, my God, this is amazing. It's the future of payments or whatever. But it does seem to have more users and more accounts because that's what you have on Ethereum. More accounts using it every day and more value that's being used there. And of course, the Lightning defenders will say that, well, it doesn't matter how much, how many coins you have locked in the network.

2:20:39It's all about the number of transactions and the economic activity that they enable. And my joke about it is that you already know how many Lightning transactions there are because you can count them in tweets and then Nostr zaps. Every time someone makes a Lightning payment, they sort of announce it to the world by posting a picture or a video saying, look, I just paid for this with Lightning.

2:21:02Bob SummerwillYeah, yeah, yeah. Or then the other thing that you have is if it is just like an asset class, you know, you get the, you get ETFs and DAT companies. So then a lot of the more conventional minded financing people, they're going to use those. You know, they're not going to set up self-custody. Of course, they're not going to self-custody.

2:21:35But then, you know, well, what's left of the revolution? Not a lot. And then the other thing is, even if people are really wanting to self-custody, you know, you can't do that in very sophisticated ways. If you have, you know, a very simple scripting system that is missing, you know, absolutely basic operations and the consequence of that is, you know, lots of the activity just ends up being custodial. So what's the fucking point?

2:22:11Vlad CosteaIt's also crazy how Bitcoin self-custody was promoted as something so sophisticated, so professional, something for which you need to roll the dice 100 times and whatever to generate your own entropy. And then you have Ethereum users who are just using MetaMask on a browser extension and they never lost their funds because they did some basic 2FA. It's so stupid. Like self-custody is very simple, but somehow people, there's an entire industry of people trying to make this complicated and expensive. And then you end up with a Coldcard situation where people actually did everything that they were told and still they found a way to blame them for not rolling the dice 100 times.

2:23:00It's really crazy.

2:23:01Bob SummerwillYeah. I mean, I think some of that on the Bitcoin side probably comes from the lack of programmability that in the same way as you had the public dialogue moving away from the developers to influencers. I think in the same way on the sort of the application side, well, you know, it kind of all has to be wallets and payment stuff because you can't do anything else. So like that's where all the churning is happening because you literally can't do anything else. And then that becomes the only thing that you can like really sell is like, well, what Bitcoin businesses are there?

2:23:50You know, well, there's ones that can custody for you, like, I guess, mining services and then like walleting payments and things like that's literally all there is. So then you've got a bunch of companies that, you know, trying to push those, you know, push that stuff and iterating on it because that's all they can do.

2:24:14Vlad CosteaYeah, it's very depressing when you look at it, but the fact that we can still fork and we can still look at existing forks that do interesting things. Like during this whole madness, when people were trying to define what spam is and were trying to push for the activation of first it was called BIP 444 and then it became BIP 110. So during that time, I found my refuge in just looking at Zcash and I was blown away. Like these people are actually doing stuff that I expected from Bitcoiners to do.

2:24:52Like look at developers, fund development, try new stuff, try new cryptography, fail a few times, but still rebound and try to bring this back on course. Like this is something that I expected from the Bitcoin project and it seems like it's paying off to them because they're courageous enough to adventure themselves in a new realm, which has lots of pitfalls, but is also exciting. And the market seems to be rewarding Zcash for doing this, whereas in the case of Bitcoin, I mean, it's boring, it's predictable. Some people like this about it, but I just wish it was more of a cypherpunk project.

2:25:34And some guys will say in the comments, well, you should go to Monero. I don't find it that exciting for various reasons. The biggest of them all is that there's no real plan for scaling. It's just bloating. It's only growing bigger and there's not enough room for everyone to be transacting. So in some ways the design choice is going to keep it niche for a while until they figure out something else like L2s or whatever might happen to them. I think Zcash actually has a plan for this and they have been refining their zk-SNARKs to make them smaller.

2:26:11They have been improving the propagation times for their blocks. I mean, they're actually making efforts and there's Tachyon, which is like client side validation for their zk-SNARKs, and that will potentially change the way in which people transact. But with good user experience, I think it's pretty bullish and it can teach us a lot of lessons. I'm also bullish on Paul's eCash, by the way. I've been one of the first people to actually reach out to him and be like, hey, I heard you're launching a hard fork.

2:26:43How can I help? And it's not just because he's sponsoring my podcast. That's like just a sign of mutual respect that he likes my work. I like his work. And I've been really trying to help him with the marketing side and asking like various services like, hey, would you be willing to support this? So if you get a DM from me asking about eCash support, it's probably not that my account got hacked. It's just that I'm trying to help Paul. And I do want to see this play out.

2:27:14I want to see how the market is going to react to it. I want to see how some of the various types of FUD that were said about drivechains are going to be addressed in a real market situation where there is real incentives for miners to steal or there's real incentives for the various sidechains to be priced differently. So if you're going to have like an Ethereum, EVM sidechain, maybe that the price of the asset is going to be different from that of the base layer potentially.

2:27:47I don't know. Or maybe that there's going to be fast enough arbitrage so that it compensates for everything. There's really one only one way to find out. And that's by launching a live network.

2:28:00Bob SummerwillNo, I do agree completely that you've got to be brave and try things.

2:28:14Something which Exiled Surfer said to me in Prague, I think it was in 2013. So I gave a talk there at HCPP titled Jaded as Fuck. So I was feeling bitter in 2013. Yeah, sorry, 2023.

2:28:36Vlad CosteaOK, makes more sense. You couldn't be jaded in 2013. It was so exciting.

2:28:40Bob SummerwillNo, no, but just really I oh my God, all these stupid things happening and whatever. And and yeah, what he said to me at that time is like everything is an experiment, like everything is an experiment, right? We just don't know humans. We don't know. We just try things. You know, we have theories, we have ideas, we try and build things, we try and learn. But ultimately, you know, everything is an experiment and you can't get upset at other people trying things. You can't get upset at other people trying things.

2:29:19Because that's how they learn, you know, and you can say, oh, well, that's stupid, it'll never work or that, you know, that's already been tried. Like, how do you not know? But often you need to do things yourself to really learn. And I think there has been definitely massively insufficient experimentation in the Bitcoin space. And that wasn't the case at the start. But, you know, a hard fork is, it's one of the cleanest ways of doing such an experiment. And the reason why is it's completely opt in.

2:30:04You know, your default is nothing to happen. If you have a hard fork, people choose to participate, right? Nobody can force you to do it. Again, it's this like, people run whatever software they want. And so what you have with a hard fork is really you know, some people saying, hey, you know, we want to try something different. We're going to do a different thing. You know, we would love you to join us, but we can't compel you to join us, right? So it is, you know, the opposite of that BIP 110 kind of approach of like trying to change what the active current thing is.

2:30:45You know, with a hard fork, it's entirely optional. And you choose by actually opting into participation there. And it is a positive sum game. You know, you're not taking away from something that was currently happening. You're doing a new thing as well.

2:31:09And so say something like in the block size wars.

2:31:17Imagine like what I would have liked to happen in that if you didn't have that like religious kind of mindset is like, okay, so maybe blocks should be bigger. Well, can someone just hard fork Bitcoin and do two meg blocks and like measure it, see what happens? Like how many nodes do you have? How, you know, how does that affect the growth? You know, not like trying to guess what's happening. Just fucking do it. And if it works great, you know, we've learned something, you know, that really works.

2:31:51Okay, well, great. Let's, you know, let's increase the block size on Bitcoin. And that one, that was an experiment and it kind of can wither away or whatever. Like, you know, it's not economically important, but it was an experiment, a real world experiment that you actually like learn from. So can you imagine like how much more progress that you'd make if people are in that mindset, right? Not in a defensive mindset of going, oh, this is an attack. You're attacking Bitcoin, you know? No, it's like an experiment.

2:32:26Like, you know, looks like we're running out of throughput. Okay, well, what would it be like if we tried this? Without that, like, yeah, that super defensive religious, you don't need, it's just an experiment. It's just like, you know, hey, we're trying to do digital currency, right?

2:32:52So, yeah, so on eCash, I think it's absolutely the right thing to do. You know, Paul spent all these years like trying to educate, trying to persuade. But, but yeah, you know, it's obviously it's not fertile ground for these kind of experiments. You know, and I think it's exceedingly unlikely that there's going to be anything other than a handful of little soft forks that get pushed through on Bitcoin. I can guess another one is quantum. You know, if you have to do something for quantum, that's obviously got to happen, right?

2:33:29You can't argue about that. You can argue about what it should be, but obviously something has to happen. But yeah, you know, like Paul had done on the ecash.com website, there's, you know, he's got his scenarios, right, of mapping out what, you know, what might happen, you know, if this is a success, if this is a failure, if that, like, persuades people somehow that Bitcoin should do drivechains. And, and yeah, so let's do it. Yeah,

2:34:07Vlad CosteaIt's good to find something exciting in this space and something that actually can solve real world problems. And the experiments are nice. Like, I think Luke's coin is like a social experiment with some ideas about, well, how do we stop spam from happening on Bitcoin? And then how do we fire the miners? Like all of these ideas, which are more political than they are technical. In Paul's case, it's like the extreme opposite of trying to solve technical problems that are sort of meant to minimize the social problems.

2:34:47But still, there are some social situations that emerge because he extends the game theory of how the miners will behave in certain situations. I do like to see all of this stuff playing out and see what the market thinks about it, because that's another aspect. You promote an idea and people don't give or assign any value to it, but then you launch like a product that's out there on the internet and anyone can invest. And that's when you finally see how people use it, how people trade it, how people work on it.

2:35:24Because it does take a lot of work to get a project to mainstream adoption or at least to have it in the top 10 on CoinMarketCap or whatever. There's a lot of work and you know better. You've been with the Ethereum Classic project for a long time and you saw what it's like to be the underdog and to be on the side of the fork that's not even acknowledged. I think there were some moments when there was hope, like, for example, when the Coinbase listing happened. That was like a sign that maybe that the market is going to care about this and it's going to value it to its full potential.

2:36:01There were moments when, for example, Ethereum switched to Proof-of-Stake and you guys were going to get all the miners, but there was another fork, I think, Ethereum Proof-of-Work, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah,

2:36:16Bob SummerwillThere were two of them, actually. There was one called EthereumFair and one called EthereumPoW. Yeah. And EthereumPoW was really promoted by Chandler Guo, who you may remember. He was around at the time of Ethereum ETC fork as well, but one of the major Chinese miners. But yeah, like EthereumPoW, it's a funny one because it was blatantly a cash grab. You know, it's like, oh, you know, we've got this transition point. And so they spun up, you know, this sort of narrative of saying, miners are getting thrown aside by Ethereum, you know, they've provided all this service and now, you know, that they're going to be thrown away.

2:37:14So, you know, we don't think that's right. And we want to provide continuity for miners.

2:37:22And they also said a bunch of stuff about, you know, the Ethereum Foundation being controlled and all of this. Like, it was almost like their sales pitch was kind of like ETC. It's like, okay, what you're saying, if you believe that stuff, that happened like six or seven years ago, right? It's called ETC. If you want to keep mining, mine ETC. Like, it's just trivial for you to go. You don't need some new project. And so they just got all of this sort of rhetoric and it's going to launch.

2:37:57But it was a total scam of a thing. So firstly, they didn't actually provide any of the software until after the transition point. So it's like, if your narrative is we want miners to be able to keep mining, well, give them pool software and everything like a month in advance, right? Here's your software. It's going to activate at the fork and off you go. They didn't do that. So basically at the time it split, they solo mined, you know, I think it was at least 24 or 48 hours of thanks for the money.

2:38:34We're solo mining. There isn't even any released software that people could use. And then they did release it. And it was like, here's a fork of geth with a single massive splat of a set of changes on top. There you go. It also, talking about the ultrasound money stuff, they changed the code for that so that on EthereumPoW, it didn't burn those fees, but it sent them to an opaque multisig that they controlled, you know, to pay for costs in quotes. So it's like, thanks, we'll steal a bunch of money from every block as well for us.

2:39:22And we don't even know who us is. We're not saying who the holders are or anything. So they did that. And then like after that, there was zero changes. Ever. It's like, there's your changes. Here's the new chain. Thanks for the money. Fuck you. We're not doing anything. We've grabbed, you know, thanks for the cash grab. And I mean, even now, it's down to 27 million. But like, for the longest time, it was, you know, it's like hundreds of millions, like 200 million market cap. But something which is literally like a cut and paste and the edits are send money to us.

2:40:05Thanks.

2:40:09Vlad CosteaSo... But it did take away some of the momentum of Ethereum Classic. Like it was waiting for this moment, right? It was designed to thrive in that specific moment.

2:40:20Bob SummerwillYeah, it was like, thanks for the grab. Though, yeah, in the end, it, you know, it went small fast. ETC got like a 10x on hash rate at that point.

2:40:36So yeah, looking at this. So EthereumPoW launched at like $60 per coin and it's 25 cents now. So yeah, down 99.6%. It's a winner.

2:40:56Vlad CosteaBut somehow, ETC is still a top 100 coin. If you look at the top 100 on CoinMarketCap, Ethereum Classic is on the 68 position right now. Yeah, it's not that bad given the circumstances.

2:41:15Bob SummerwillNo, I mean, so, you know, market cap over a billion dollars.

2:41:21And there was a little peak in 2021 where ETC got up to, I think, about number 15. It's really, really high.

2:41:34Vlad CosteaYeah, I think it was the, I guess, the top of Ethereum also, when there was a lot of activity with DeFi Summer and then the NFT mania. Yeah, yeah. Why would you say like, in a nutshell, why would you say that Ethereum Classic did not become more successful? Was it the sabotage? I remember covering the story with ETC Dev at some point, which was like a developer team that was, I guess, sabotaged. And then there was another one called, I don't remember exactly what it was, but they tried to take the developers from it and basically take over.

2:42:16Bob SummerwillSo that was ETC Labs. Yeah. So ETC Labs were funded by DFG, which is Digital Finance Group, which is like a Chinese based, I don't know, like, they invest in crypto kind of thing. And ETC Dev was the development team behind the classic Geth client that was carrying most of the network. So Igor was the tech lead there that you mentioned earlier, and Donald worked there as sort of business dev stuff, Donald McIntyre. But yeah, they basically were running out of funding and DFG had sort of said to them, oh, well, ETC Labs had, you know, don't worry, we'll be able to fund you.

2:43:12So Igor stopped looking for alternate sources of funding, and then they stiffed him basically. So he had not got enough money to continue with that project. And then basically Labs kind of like hired all of the team, apart from Igor and Donald, like all the devs, everyone apart from those two, went across to this new ETC Labs core group. So yeah, they kind of, I guess it's a little bit like the moving house rentals thing that we were talking about is like, okay, Igor and Donald are like the hardcore strong ones that we don't want.

2:43:57So like, we'll make a new house and persuade everyone else to come across and leave the developers behind.

2:44:05Vlad CosteaI just remembered the sidechains project was called Orbita. Yeah, that's it. I've called it Strata, I think earlier in this interview, but no, it's Orbita.

2:44:17Bob SummerwillYeah, you're right. But yeah, so and yeah, we had this period where ETC Labs were kind of, you know, a main part of the ecosystem, but they were kind of a bit rogue and untrusted. They were certainly looking to like, control and drive ETC. And again, I mean, I think heading into that proof of stake transition, it was sort of like, okay, well, we would like to control and drive ETC, right? You know, we feel that we can, you know, that there's a gap and an opportunity there where heading into that transition, you know, ETC could be pumped up and could become a big ecosystem.

2:45:02But they did that in a very messy kind of way. I mean, I don't think they, in particular, like, caused failure of ETC. But you also had the IOHK and Charles being involved at various times, which was sometimes good and sometimes bad. I mean, I think ultimately, it was just that there weren't enough people who cared about that key philosophical underpinning more than they just cared about, you know, money and usability and numbers and things. You know, I think ultimately, the market decided and, you know, Ethereum was the winner.

2:45:51Vlad CosteaDo you think that there is like a parallel universe where some decisions were made so that ETC could flip ETH? Or do you think it was always meant for ETH to win because everything was aligned for it to win?

2:46:07Bob SummerwillI mean, I think I know there are some people sort of who have got a conspiratorial mindset and say, you know, ETC was, you know, was stabbed in the back, you know, was made a failure by, you know, people who, whatever, didn't want that to, you know, to happen. And specifically, there was a thing about defaults. So on the, on the Geth client, a decision was made very, very close to the fork that supporting the fork would be the default. You know, so if you ran Geth, it would, by default, it would support the hard fork.

2:46:50And that was based on a coin vote thing, which had happened just within a few days prior to that. It was called CarbonVote.

2:47:04And that happened on a very short kind of like timeline. And there was one whale who'd like voted late. And he was like 25% of the votes was just this one person. So that was Martin Becze, who was one of the Ethereum core developers. So some people were like, you know, well, this was like an outrageous, like late decision. And it went, you know, it was like the thumb on the scales that made the thing happen. You know, of course, like everyone will, like a lot of people will just use the default.

2:47:39So all of a sudden, it doesn't matter what the actual support was. Lots of people end up, you know, ending up pro fork just because of that default. And I think that's that's bullshit. Like because you'd have a whole month of the most like vigorous kind of like discussion about this, right? Nobody could not know about this DAO thing in the fork. It's inconceivable that nobody could have this. And especially on the mining side, you know, it's like if you like end up on the wrong side as a miner.

2:48:15Well, you've you've given away loads of money, right? You've given away your block rewards. You're not having them anymore. You know, you you're just in the wrong place. And also that to have the option, even you'd have had to upgrade your software, right? And by default, you just stick on what you've got. So if you take the latest version that has this default, like you're doing so willingly and knowledgeably and the main thing in the release notes and everything. I think it's like inconceivable that anyone could accidentally make that choice.

2:48:46So the reality, I think, is that, you know, 80 to 85 percent of people were in favor of that. And, you know, that was that was the consensus. So I don't know that any kind of like different decisions would necessarily have made a great deal of difference on that. Is that just the majority of people wanted to stop some dude stealing the money like that was that was the reality and that they valued that a lot more than those pure philosophical cypherpunk, you know, ethic questions.

2:49:30Vlad CosteaIf there is any piece of advice that you would you would give Paul now that he's launching a fork and you have so much experience with being on a minority fork, what would it be?

2:49:49Bob SummerwillI mean, on the ETC side that, you know, the two key pieces were that the miners kept mining, you know, so you had you had that, you know, that network keeps chugging along.

2:50:06And I think I'm right in saying, right, that the plan for eCash is that the difficulty is going to get knocked right down to almost nothing, right?

2:50:19Is that right?

2:50:22Vlad CosteaWell, I'm not sure how Paul is going to approach this. He's going to take some feedback from what happened with the Alphanet mining. I don't think I mean, he tweeted that he wants the difficulty to be one, whatever that means, that there's going to be chaos with thousands of blocks or whatever being mined in the early phase of the network until there's like an equilibrium. But I'm not sure. I'm not sure if it's a good idea to make it one. I'm not sure if there is a good number for this.

2:50:55Bob SummerwillNo, but I think it's, I think it's important that you have that mining earlier and that it's not like a completely wrecked network, you know, so you saw on BIP 110 basically like no block production, right? And then it's like maybe you'll get one a week or something, you know, like I think that's a pretty disastrous scenario if you have that. Because for anybody other than those that are like, you know, deeply religiously committed, it's like, well, this thing is useless. Like you can't even do anything.

2:51:30So like what the fuck have you made, you know? So I think that's important that you have sufficient mining and that you've got enough of the throughput that the network can be used. And then the second piece is I think, you know, exchange listings are key and maybe now you can kind of get away with it's like DEXs. If you've just got, you know, if you've got some DEX-based means of doing that, you know, maybe that's kind of okay, but really you could use some exchanges or at least, you know, one decent profile one.

2:52:14Because on the ETC side, that's what really like made the thing come alive was, okay, there's an economic value here, you know, there's a market, people are interested, people are buying and selling, you know, this project is alive, not dead. So those I think are really the key things is you want it to come out of the gate working and alive and interesting that people, you know, are really watching and engaging and, you know, even something just as simple as like, okay, I want to like dump my coins.

2:52:57That you know, that you have a market for that, you have liquidity and that exchange of hands where that stock is moving more into people who do value it, right? So it goes from that airdrop place to, okay, let's swap hands and get a real market going. Like on ETC, you had a real dumping sell off where, especially the foundation, but other big holders, lots of them did just dump. So the price on ETC, you know, like went down a lot at the start, but, you know, that runs out pretty quickly.

2:53:41You know, the people who really want to immediately dump a load, it's like done. And then you've got new hands and it can find, you know, find a market, find a real price. So yeah, you want to go through that kind of phase early. You don't want to have like a, you know, a dead chain situation where you're like, oh yeah, just wait a few weeks and the adjustments will get there. It's like, you know, those weeks that the interest in the eyeballs have gone, right?

2:54:15It's just, oh yeah, it's a dead thing.

2:54:18Vlad CosteaYeah, and in this space, even a week can mean a lot of time. Like think about the Coldcard hack and how everyone was hyper focused on that and searching for reasons why. And then something else happened and they sort of shifted their attention to that new event. And a lot of people forgot, even though a lot of coins were lost and people hurt because of that, the focus shifted to something else. And that's something that you really don't want where users forget about this. In the beginning, like if you really want to be a historian of Bitcoin, you're going to say, well, Satoshi was solo mining for a while and the network stalled a few times because there was nobody else to mine with him.

2:55:01I think it stalled like a dozen times in the first 500 blocks or something. Don't quote me on that, but look it up. The point is that we're not in 2009 anymore. There is like a huge industry and there are lots of projects that compete with each other. And if you don't get it right, I mean, if you get it too right, you're not getting enough attention because everything works as expected. So it's good to reserve something for later. But also, you don't want to be like the laughing stock of the market and be the one that everyone pokes fun at.

2:55:37So there is like a middle ground that needs to be hit somehow. And it's very difficult for Paul to cut through because there is a lot of noise. The BIP 110 fork seems to get more attention just because they're silly and they made all sorts of design choices that people like to make fun of. But that means that they're in the news all the time and they sort of take the whole attention. And that's very unfortunate when especially you have something that's technologically more interesting. But I do want to ask you something before I let you go, unless you want to continue this point.

2:56:19Bob SummerwillYeah, I'm going for a bit more.

2:56:22Vlad CosteaYou first drink some water. You worked at Electronic Arts and I think a lot of us grew up with the FIFA games and you happen to have worked on some of the best ones. And I just want to get this on record. There's going to be a transcript of it and whatever. So I want to ask you, which was the first FIFA game that you worked on? And then you sort of turned the project around because you told me this story in private that some of the devs at EA were actually playing PES, Pro Evolution Soccer.

2:56:58That one was actually more engaging and more fun than the FIFA games. And then you sort of managed to make FIFA great again.

2:57:05Bob SummerwillWell, I won't claim sole fame for that, but I was part of that. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, so I did computer science at University of Leeds and I was lucky enough straight out of that to get a job in the games industry working for Sony Psygnosis. So Psygnosis were best known for like they made Wipeout, which was like this like hover future driving thing that was a PlayStation launch title. Anyway, so I worked for them for a while, and then I...

2:57:40Vlad CosteaIs that the same team that launched Gran Turismo later or am I confusing them?

2:57:45Bob SummerwillNo, no, Gran Turismo is another group. But anyway, I worked for them for two and a half years and then I ended up working for Electronic Arts in the UK. Actually working on a couple of football management games. So it was like Premier League Manager, two different ones of those. And then a Harry Potter game. But yeah.

2:58:08Vlad CosteaWhich Harry Potter game? It's very important.

2:58:13Bob SummerwillChamber of Secrets.

2:58:15Vlad CosteaThat's the best one. Honestly, on the PS2, you actually had that level that started at Ron Weasley's family home. It was not on PC. On PC you had the first level at the weeping, what do you call this, like the tree.

2:58:31Bob SummerwillYeah, Whomping Willow.

2:58:33Vlad CosteaExactly. That's where it started on PC. But on PS2 you had the bonus with like the tutorial that was happening at Ron Weasley's family house. Yeah, going around. I think that's the best one in the entire series.

2:58:48Bob SummerwillAnd gnome tossing in the garden. That's how that one ended. You're throwing the gnomes at targets in a field outside there. Yeah, that was fun. Just to give you a little detour on that. So EA signed the license for Harry Potter games just before the first movie was going to come out. Or maybe it was a while back anyway. But that first movie. It was coming too quickly for us to be able to do a game for it internally. You know, there was just like a few months or whatever between signing the contracts and that coming out.

2:59:36So that first game, it just got outsourced to some other company, you know, just fucking put something together fast. And I think it was PlayStation One at that point and PC. But then we basically started working on Chamber of Secrets, you know, in parallel with that internally. So that it would come out at the same time as the second movie, which was I think in late 2002. But we got to see some of that first movie before it was done. And that was super interesting, because I've never seen that.

3:00:15It was only a couple of months before the movie was going to come out. And they'd got like scenes without the CG. It's just like, you know, a big green screen in it. Or there was like a conversation with a centaur. And it was just like a static model and somebody saying, and the centaur says, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you're thinking, oh, God, like, they're just like we are in the games industry. So like, it's just this total scramble. Like nobody sees how utterly screwed and incomplete things are.

3:00:49But like most of the time, and then they just come together at the end. So, yeah, we got to see some of that first movie before it came out. And also, oh, goodness me, I forget his name now. But the guy doing the narration and the two actors for Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, they all like came into the studio, got to meet them and see the game that we were working on. But yeah, I spent, so I spent two years working on that.

3:01:24Vlad CosteaFor the record, so I did, when you said Psygnosis, it did sound familiar. And it's the studio that did Lemmings, which is also a legendary game.

3:01:36Bob SummerwillYeah, and there was another, they did like a bunch of Amiga games as well.

3:01:45So, yeah, what did they, some of the famous names, games developed? So, yeah, they did Barbarian, Shadow of the Beast was well known on Amiga. But yeah, Lemmings, Wipeout, a bunch of Wipeouts. They did Formula One games as well that were really very popular. But yeah, anyway, so I worked on that for a couple of years after doing those soccer management titles. But the, Larry Probst, who was the chairman of EA, came to visit that UK studio for the first time in 2002 there. And they had like a town hall meeting with Q&A going, ask questions at the mic.

3:02:36And they didn't filter any of the questions. It's just like rock up and ask what you like. So, yeah, I went and I said, you know, there's a bunch of us here, big football fans, you know, like we're playing, we're playing it, we're supporting, going and watching the matches. We actually like worked on titles here as well, you know, that there was the management title, but we also did a FIFA derivative that was called Premier League Stars. So it was like a standalone game with only like the English Premier League in it.

3:03:12And I said, you know, but none of us play FIFA. Like nobody here actually plays FIFA, right? We all play Winning Eleven. We play Konami's one, just sometimes called Pro Evolution and sometimes called Winning Eleven.

3:03:29Vlad CosteaThere was also ISS, International Superstar Soccer.

3:03:32Bob SummerwillYeah, I think they were all like much the same. And, you know, so I was saying, so I hear the team in Vancouver, you know, they're just doing the FIFA every year, you know, on this really tight schedule. They never get a chance to, you know, to fix these quality issues. So I was saying, you know, like, are you aware of this problem, you know, any kind of like plans to resolve it? And then I sort of sat down and felt the blood draining from my face, just thinking, oh, my God, you know, you've told a very rich and powerful person that their baby is ugly and they're stupid.

3:04:13It's just like, am I going to get the shit kicked out of me? Am I getting sacked here? Like, what have I done? But yeah, a number of us ended up getting early releases. It's like, OK, if you want to give feedback here, you know, you can see as we go, that's kind of a bit pointless because it's like it's too late by that time. But then just a little bit later, got the opportunity to move to Vancouver and to join the FIFA team. You know, it's kind of like, if you're so clever, you know, do you want to go and like actually help?

3:04:48And, and yeah, at first I was like, oh, no, you know, I'll just be like a cog in a giant machine and won't be able to do anything. And like, you know, it's just going to get crushed to death by the machine, you know, but they said, OK, well, do you want to go to Vancouver? You know, like, see, meet the team, see what the city's like. It's like, OK, do I want to have a free holiday? Sure. Yeah, I'll do that. And just sort of came here and it's like, oh, this is really nice.

3:05:19And, you know, met the team. It's like, all these Canadians, they're really, they're really good. You know, they're really nice. And, and yeah, so I came out here and that was, that was 23 years ago. And so the first one I worked on there was FIFA 2004, which was on PlayStation, Xbox, GameCube and PC.

3:05:47Vlad CosteaOh, I remember that. It was such a big game for my childhood. The first one that I played was 2000 on the PS1. Right. Then I played 2000 and no, 2002 World Cup. That was another one that I liked. 2003, I didn't really like it. It felt very weird. But 2004 was kind of a big one for me because I had like a new computer that I could play it on. And it had this crossover with Total Club Manager. So you could, Total Club Manager, manage your team and then insert disc 2 from FIFA 2004 and you could actually play your games, which was really amazing at the time.

3:06:27Yeah.

3:06:28Bob SummerwillSo TCM was a continuation of that Premier League manager that I worked on. So that was in 99 and 2000 that I worked on those two. And it actually got, it actually got three different, it was like a, it was like the Premier League manager, but you'd also got like a Bundesliga manager. The German one was a Bundesliga and there was a French one as well. But they're all basically the same game, but with different assets and teams. But at various times that was called like FIFA Manager and then Total Club Manager.

3:07:04I don't know if it even still goes right now.

3:07:10But, but yeah, there was, there was some crossover, I remember. Yeah. Well, it looks like it's still going, maybe.

3:07:19Vlad CosteaThere was the other one called Football Manager or something?

3:07:22Bob SummerwillYeah, well it was Championship Manager originally. So Championship Manager was a really big popular one, but it was Football Manager later as well. But, but yeah, I mean, what you had there really with FIFA is, so FIFA actually started in 1994. It's like 30 plus years of it now.

3:07:45Vlad CosteaIt's not even called FIFA anymore. They call it Football Club or something.

3:07:50Bob SummerwillYeah, EA Sports FC it is now. Yeah. I mean, that was another case of FIFA, the organization being awful and terrible, you know, that we see all the time, like FIFA are a god-awful, corrupt group. But they, two or three years ago, maybe they were like, right, the license is up for renewal. And they just tried to like, try to get EA to pay, you know, some gigantic amount of money for that FIFA license continuing. So EA are like, well, okay, forget it. You know, we're just not going to be FIFA anymore.

3:08:29And I think what FIFA didn't understand is like FIFA wasn't a brand before the game. Like it's not like FIFA is some amazing, like, you know, huge, well-known great brand prior to the game. It was the success of the game that gave like FIFA the cachet. So I think, you know, they really didn't understand as well how much value there was in that game. And in the 30 years of iteration and development, you know, all of the effort that's gone into that game over all those years.

3:09:10And also the other licenses, you know, there's like hundreds of licenses within that game as well as FIFA, you know, because you've got different licenses for each league. You've got licenses for particular teams. You've got licenses for particular players. For authentic stadia, you can have multiple different architects that made like the north stand and the east stand and the west stand and you have to do a license with them. You know, they really didn't understand like the depth of licensing that you have to have for an authentic game.

3:09:48But also just like 30 years worth of iteration on a piece of software. You know, like we think of something like Linux. Can you imagine a situation where it's like, right, we want to do like a new deal with a different kernel? Like anyone can make a kernel, right? It's just a thing and loads some files and memory or whatever, right? Yeah, we'll get different. We'll just, some other company will be able to do that, right? It's like you don't understand the cumulative, you know, work that's gone into that.

3:10:22Vlad CosteaThere's also the other big thing that used to be very important in video games in the 90s and 2000s, which is the soundtrack. Like the licensed songs were really amazing. I've discovered so much music through not just the FIFA games, but Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and everything else. It was just amazing. A great time to be alive. There's also my video editor in the chat. I want to acknowledge him. He says that he lived, or maybe it's a typo and wants to say loved, Wipeout. But maybe he lived.

3:10:55Who knows?

3:10:57Bob SummerwillYeah. I mean, the thing that was special about Wipeout was, again, talking about authenticity is, and soundtrack is Wipeout was one of the very first game that had like licensed soundtrack, like real, like club, you know, club kind of music. So they did, they had that and they had really authentic design. Like there was Designers Republic, who probably still are, you know, a big design bureau or whatever for graphic design. So it's like, here's a game, but it's got like professional graphic design and real authorized music, you know, in this, you know, one of the first PlayStation games.

3:11:50So it's like you've got this new console and it's like, wow, look at this amazing graphics. And, you know, the feel of the ships going round and the, you know, and then the design and then the music. And then they did a bunch of like collaborations with nightclubs. So it's like, right, let's have a games room inside a club. So, you know, you've got clubbers turning up and then playing this game and the music and everything, right, that all of these things coming together. So that was, that was massively successful, Wipeout was.

3:12:23But yeah, on FIFA, I mean, they've really fucked it by not having EA. I don't know that they, I don't think they've still done a new FIFA, right? You know, here's FIFA 2026 or whatever, that would be this new one. I don't, I think it's been like two, three years without one now.

3:12:44Vlad CosteaBut we started this thread, which we did not finish, about the FIFA games that you were working on. You said 2004 was the first one. Yeah.

3:12:55Bob SummerwillSo 2004, so I worked 2004, 2005, 2006. And then again, 8, 9, and 10. And for the 7th one, I was off in a different role. But yeah, what we had was FIFA in 2002, I think was in a really bad state. And what had happened is it started in 1994, like the story about that. But you'd had this real sort of, like, Americanization, where at that point, EA, a California company, they'd got Madden and NBA and other North American, but they didn't have a full...

3:13:52Vlad CosteaYour audio is interrupting again. I'm not sure if it's just me. But there's something wrong with your internet, I think. Can you hear me now? Yeah.

3:14:06Bob SummerwillLet's see if this works. Anyway, so they'd made the game in 94, and it was great. But what had happened is that the guy, Bruce McMillan, who'd started that, who was a Chelsea season ticket holder, had gone on to other things. And you'd ended up with people running it who were Americans with no understanding of the sport. So they kind of did this Hollywoodization of it, where it's like all of these big reaction shots. It's like, oh, you know, all these crazy, like, overreactions. And like the shots, it was like, you know, like bullet shots and like Superman diving around.

3:14:48And just really very, like, unrealistic, over, overdone. Which one was that? That was 2002, but it had been built up to it over the last couple of years. And you basically got, like, the push was not about, like, authentic gameplay and football. It was like all these different modes and reactions and everything. So, and the worst part of that was that the ball didn't have real physics. So it's like the ball is rolling in front of you, right? So you're walking around and if the player turns, the ball would, like, rotate with them.

3:15:29You know, it's just utterly unrealistic physics on that. And so what they had was the sales were still good, like, but the reviews, like, sucked and people were just not playing it. So, you know, what happened is, you know, I went there, but lots of other people went there as well. They basically got told in heading into 2003, they got told, right, you've got to turn this around, or we're going to take the game away from you. You know, we'll move it to the UK studio or somewhere that's going to be better.

3:16:08It's like 2003 is your last chance. And yeah, I mean, you were saying you didn't like 2003, right?

3:16:17Vlad CosteaI mean, I've played it a lot because it was the only one that I had for a while. You have to understand that in Eastern Europe, we were pirating the games. So when you got your hands on something which is new, it was like the Holy Grail. But I remember not liking it too much. It felt weird. I really liked 2000 for some reason. Maybe it's just because it was the first one that I actually played and it was so such a novel thing to be able to play a football game that sort of looks like football on TV.

3:16:48And you're able to control the players. The thing with 2000 is that the goalkeeper was like a god. It was very hard to defeat the goalkeeper. You had to shoot the ball from an angle. And once you figured out how to do it was super predictable.

3:17:04Bob SummerwillYeah, same shot every time.

3:17:06Vlad CosteaYou could score like 100 goals in a game if you made it long enough. And you could also just take, you could do stuff with the goalkeeper, I remember. You could pass the ball to the goalkeeper and just dribble everyone with the field and then just score goals with him. It was kind of silly that this was possible. And you could also, I think you could get a red card with the goalkeeper. That was also funny.

3:17:33Bob SummerwillBut yeah, Winning Eleven was way better than FIFA at that point. So it was clear that there was a real quality issue.

3:17:41Vlad CosteaI can confirm that in a very isolated case, I was going to this place that had an internet cafe but instead of internet they had PlayStation consoles. And I was playing FIFA 2000 because that's what I knew to ask. Like you had a list of games that you could ask to play. And I was like I'll just play some FIFA 2000. But the older kids were playing ISS. They were saying that it's more advanced and it's more interesting. And I remember trying it but it was difficult to learn the controls.

3:18:13FIFA was easier. You were pressing X to pass, circle to, what's the name of it? It was circle to shoot and the square to do the long pass.

3:18:26Bob SummerwillYeah. Those Konami games they were way better at that point. And they didn't have licensing. It was just totally made up team names and player names but it didn't matter. But yeah, what we had there was, okay, FIFA needs to be rewritten but how is that going to happen? And there was the Xbox 360 release happened in 2005. So the thought was, okay, well maybe when this new console comes in, that will be the rewrite. You've got more power. You can do better animations. We can make a new game.

3:19:13But the rewrite stuff, it wasn't ready still for that. And then I think there was... FIFA, so that was, yeah, it was FIFA Road to World Cup, it was the launch title. And then you've got FIFA World Cup. And then you've got FIFA 07. And all through each of these, it was like the new AI is going to come in. And it's like, it didn't. Every year, it wasn't quite ready. So it was actually 2008, where the complete rewrite actually got delivered. And it felt, yeah, it felt way different, but it wasn't like well tuned or whatever.

3:19:53It was like, here's the new one. And it's obviously better, but not really totally good. And then through 2009 and then 2010, that got like super polished up to where it was getting, you know, like 90, 95% Metacritic ratings. So yeah, it took like seven years, all in all. But that stuff to really get kind of fixed. I mean, another thing that happened through that really made a huge difference was a guy called Dave Rutter, who is another British guy who came in as the, as the line producer, the guy basically in charge of the gameplay and the development.

3:20:37And what he did was he said, like, every year, 80% of the resources are going to be spent on the core gameplay. So it's like passing, shooting, tackling, right? That's where nearly all of the effort is going to go, is like the feel of those key pieces, right? Just the core gameplay and experience. It's like, you know, forget about different game modes or all that other bullshit. Like, it doesn't really matter. It's like make the gameplay great and focus on that for a number of years.

3:21:09And then, and then that happened. So yeah, I didn't work on the gameplay. I would have loved to, but that didn't happen. But yeah, I was part of the team that was making that change.

3:21:25Vlad CosteaThat's so cool, man. I think a lot of people listening to this will relate to the fact that you worked on one of the most popular game franchises of all time in a time when we were kids, maybe not kids, teenagers or something, or preteens. But it was amazing. I remember 2005. It was possibly the last one that I liked, but not because it was maybe the best. One or something. It's just that I sort of acquired a different taste in video games growing up. I was like, I'm not watching football as much as I used to.

3:22:00I'm just into other stuff. I was playing basketball. I was like a different person with different interests, but I remember really liking 2005. And there was a time when the changes from one game to the other felt more consistent, possibly because the technology was also evolving more. After a certain point, it felt more like there's more of a roster update and some minor changes with the menu, but otherwise it's the same as last year's game. I've heard this from my brother. He was like a prodigy when it comes to FIFA games.

3:22:38He was eight years old at game fairs, whatever, where they were highlighting. I think in 2003 or 2004, there was a UEFA Champions League game that came out from EA Sports. That was on display at this thing, this event. And my brother just went there being eight years old and he was beating everyone. Like adults walking there, grabbing the controller and being like, oh, I'm going to beat this kid. And he was winning. I have no idea how he was doing it. He was like the pinball wizard in the Who song.

3:23:14Actually not blind, because that's kind of the song about a blind kid. But the point is that he was young and he was able to make adults feel like complete idiots. So he was very good at this. He's more interested in FIFA games even today. He plays and when he was in university, he was going to tournaments with other students. But yeah, I guess he knows much more about these games than I do. I'm more into RPGs. But FIFA is an RPG, but that's like a different topic for another time.

3:23:49Yeah,

3:23:50Bob SummerwillYeah. But yeah, there were two a year. And I don't know if that's still the case, but you had the main FIFA game every year. You've got World Cups. So World Cup is every four years. The UEFA European Championships is every four years offset from that. And then you had Champions Leagues in the gaps. So it was like World Cup, Champions League, UEFA, Champions League, World Cup. And then the FIFA's. So you're trying to sell two games a year. I mean, now it's obviously like a bunch more Ultimate Team and card games and just like ongoing updates.

3:24:32But yeah, yeah, it's fun.

3:24:35Vlad CosteaYeah. It's too bad that you, I mean, I'm happy you left the video game industry because it seems like everything got worse since then. But you're also very wrong about Nintendo when you said that, well, they should just give up and launch their games on PlayStation. Like right now, they're like the only real video game company out there. All the others are trying to do something else.

3:24:59Bob SummerwillYeah. So I had a notorious tweet there just for everyone listening where I tweeted, Wii U is crap and a series of other things.

3:25:10Vlad CosteaI mean, it sort of was, for its time. Like it was not as ambitious as the PS4 or whatever. Xbox One.

3:25:20Bob SummerwillNintendo are always so far behind on hardware. You know, they are absolutely not leading edge. But yeah, the Wii U in particular was absolutely terrible. The Wii was great, but Wii U, that was a mess.

3:25:35Vlad CosteaI mean, they were sort of ahead when you think about it. The Super Nintendo was better than the Sega Genesis. The N64 had more processing power than the PlayStation, but lower storage capacity. The GameCube was the most powerful of them all, I think, graphically. I'm not sure about the Xbox, but it was more powerful than the PS2. But it had the tiny DVDs.

3:26:01Bob SummerwillThat wasn't the case. Like when we were doing one of those, like the GameCube was worse. You know, it was worse than the PS2 and Xbox. We put very little effort into the GameCube one. It was basically like a scaled down version of the PS2 or Xbox.

3:26:16Vlad CosteaYeah, but I think it was because of the storage. If you look at the raw specs, I think it could do much more.

3:26:23Bob SummerwillI don't think so. But maybe I'm wrong. We didn't do a lot with it. But yeah, I think GameCube there was probably like the last time it was kind of nearly here. Like everything else, they've been kind of old and underpowered as they launch. Switch now is so old. You've got the Switch 2, obviously.

3:26:51Vlad CosteaI have the Switch 2. I love it.

3:26:53Bob SummerwillYeah, my 12 year old loves Switch as well.

3:26:58Vlad CosteaIt's so convenient. You have two questions in the chat, and then I'll let you go. Okay. The first one comes from AlphaArc84, who says, you've appeared on Bitcoin podcasts talking forks while being the Ethereum guy. Have you ever considered just showing up wearing a professional chaos agent name tag?

3:27:23Bob SummerwillSo, yeah, I'm a pluralist, shall we say. I don't really try and fit into any particular religious niche. So I mean, you and I, I guess, Vlad, really like got to know each other at Proof of Work Summit.

3:27:50Vlad CosteaOh, yeah. How come I haven't said anything about that? You did two of the coolest conferences ever with the Proof of Work Summit in 23 and 24. I'm sorry I couldn't contribute more to keep this alive because it was such a cool concept.

3:28:06Bob SummerwillYeah, well, thank you. So yeah, so I hosted two conferences there, Proof of Work Summit, and those were really bringing together all the different proof of work ecosystems. So Bitcoiners, it was a collaboration actually with the Litecoin Foundation. But we also had...

3:28:29Vlad CosteaI think for the 24 event, it was the collaboration with the Litecoin. Both of them. Oh, brilliant. It was more evident in the second one.

3:28:37Bob SummerwillYeah, yeah. But, you know, and we had people from Monero, DarkFi. I had to get some...

3:28:46Vlad CosteaDoge?

3:28:47Bob SummerwillYeah, with Doge people as well. But yeah, I mean, that was, you know, the thought there really was that, you know, various of the sort of Ethereum conferences ended up being like Ethereum and friends, really. So it's like, not just purely Ethereum, but it's like, you know, whatever, you end up with people from all sorts of other, you know, other chains as well, including, you know, Bitcoiners in more recent times. I mean, you were at ETHDenver yourself, right? Last February. No, it was this year.

3:29:31Vlad CosteaYeah, well, yes, it was this year. Sorry. For me, last February means last year.

3:29:36Bob SummerwillRight. So yeah, five, six months ago, there you go, you got a bunch of Bitcoin things happening at that. So yeah, it was it was really well, why, you know, why would you not have that on the proof of work side as well? You know, we've, we're all doing these similar kind of things, you know, like you've spoken about all the different Bitcoins. And obviously, like, you know, Bitcoin maxis would not initiate such a thing, you know, they'd be horrified by such a thing. But yeah, that's what we ended up doing.

3:30:09And, you know, those were really, really enjoyable events to me. Just looking at some of the speakers we had in the second year.

3:30:21Vlad CosteaSo, Phil Zimmermann, and I got to thank you for that one. Because if you didn't have him, I couldn't actually meet him in person and interview him in 23. It was surreal. I spent like an entire day talking with him. What was even funnier was that the next year when I met him at the proof of work summit, he had no idea who I was. I guess he meets so many people that he doesn't remember. But to me, it was like a big deal. And if you did not organize the proof of work summit, you know, it was a big deal.

3:30:50I guess I could never have him on my podcast. And to me, that was like one of my favorite interviews, just because I got to sit down with this guy and learn some of his stories. So thank you for that.

3:31:02Bob SummerwillNo, it was great. Yeah, so he was a keynote speaker both years. I was just really delighted to get him. He's a lovely old guy, you know, just sort of like a grandfatherly, you know, kind, you know, interested sort of guy. And yeah, Jameson Lopp spoke both times as well. Charlie Lee, Sergio Lerner came in 2024.

3:31:26Vlad CosteaOh, yeah, he came with that whole team, with the Rootstock guys, and they did their presentations. And it was amazing that they chose to come. I think they had a choice between your conference and Amsterdam or something.

3:31:39Bob SummerwillIt was BTC, you know, Prague.

3:31:42Vlad CosteaBTC Prague, exactly. So they chose to come to the proof of work summit as opposed to the larger Bitcoin conference, which was sort of big.

3:31:52Bob SummerwillYeah, it was great. So, and yeah, and then that 2024, there was a big focus on Bitcoin layering. So you had Janusz and Orkun from Citrea and Alex from BOB and Yago from Sovryn. So, you know, a bunch of different of those people. And then David Burkett talking about...

3:32:18Vlad CosteaThis was only two years ago, and it seems like it's another lifetime or another timeline. None of this stuff actually took off. Not yet. Not yet, yeah.

3:32:33Bob SummerwillAnd actually Paul was meant to be speaking as well, both times. But yeah, he ended up having to bail on that. But yeah, he would have been a very interesting voice to have had there.

3:32:47Vlad CosteaI see. You also have a story with Charlie Shrem or something?

3:32:52Bob SummerwillOh yeah. He was meant to be a speaker that first year. But he was meant to be remote as well. And somebody who was organizing this didn't work out the time zones. And it was like he was scheduled early in Europe. So it was like, you know, middle of the night in North America. So that, yeah, that just dropped down. But yeah, he was meant to be speaking. He did agree to it. It was our fuck up. It wasn't him.

3:33:25But yeah, I don't know if you've spoken to him. I've never met him in person myself.

3:33:33Vlad CosteaI don't think we were ever in a place where we could meet each other, but I did have him on my podcast twice. Right, right. And he's an interesting character. Unfortunately, still living off his 2011 or something fame and trying to capitalize on it. But yeah, he's still around doing stuff.

3:34:02I remember you also had Nick Spanos or something who did not show up.

3:34:06Bob SummerwillHe was meant to come and he just ghosted us.

3:34:14Vlad CosteaYeah, I was hoping to interview him. I think that was in 2024.

3:34:19Bob SummerwillYeah, yeah. But yeah, in terms of a chaos agent, yeah, I mean, I've just been in all the buckets, really. I'm not partisan. I mean, it's funny. I really got more interested in Bitcoin during my time at ETC. And I think the reason for that was, you know, when I was starting this sort of 2014 Ethereum journey, that was kind of my first really active thing. Like I was actively an Ethereum person. Like I kind of jumped over Bitcoin at the start because of that history. And, you know, some of the received wisdom I guess I got from some of the other people I was working with there was like, Bitcoin is obsolete, right?

3:35:10It's like Ethereum can do everything Bitcoin can do and more. So, you know, Bitcoin has just got the, you know, the lead. But when that ends, like it'll be over for them, you know. It's like as soon as Ethereum has got more market cap than Bitcoin, well, you know, Bitcoin's finished. That was the first generation. Ethereum's the second one. And it was really when I was working more actively on ETC that I really got the understanding that, you know, it is more than just the technology. You know, you have got all of these other elements and that you don't have to be like the leading tech project to be, you know, to be leading in terms of usage and, you know, being in a good place.

3:35:58It took me a while to see that because of the history. So then, yeah, at that point, I really opened up a lot more, I think, to possibilities across many projects.

3:36:13Vlad CosteaLast question. It's from someone named Aaron Zdax or something. If you had a time machine and could only give one piece of advice to 2015 Bob, would it be about Ethereum, about career choices or just buy more GPUs earlier?

3:36:35Bob SummerwillI think it would be look after your private keys better, because my sad crypto story is that I got a grant in the very start of 2016, which was $10,000 worth of Ether. And I kind of like was like, OK, I'm not going to do anything with it. And I was using the computer for other things with development and I ended up like wiping it by mistake. So I lost control of those funds. So that would be, I don't know, a couple of million maybe. So look after your keys.

3:37:16If you are self-custodying, you have quite a responsibility on you to be careful.

3:37:26Vlad CosteaCrazy. I guess this was before BIP39 became standardized in Ethereum.

3:37:32Bob SummerwillYou had to store a file. Yeah. Yeah. There was I think it was like a JSON file and the passwords, something like that.

3:37:44Vlad CosteaNo comment there. I'm happy that we have better self-custody solutions nowadays, but still be careful out there. Everyone listening to this, take care of your keys.

3:38:00Bob SummerwillSo I could be retired. I could be retired, but that's not going to happen.

3:38:04Vlad CosteaYou still got to work. Now, I don't think you can retire with or maybe you can, depending on the country. But yeah.

3:38:15Bob SummerwillWell, I'd have my mortgage paid off and I would be working as I wished, shall we say.

3:38:23Vlad CosteaWhat I want to say in closing is that I got to meet Donald McIntyre for the first time in person. Thanks to your conference, which was the Proof of Work Summit 2024. And that's where he traveled for the first time in a while to a conference in Europe. It was because of you. And that was so cool. And unfortunately, he did not get good news because at the end of the summit, you announced that basically ETC Co-op, which was I'm not sure if it was a company or a larger developer.

3:39:01Nonprofit. So you announced that you guys ran out of funding and it's the last proof of work summit and also everyone working at ETC Co-op will have to find work. And I remember trying to convince Sergio Lerner because he's also Argentinian, just like Donald. I was like, don't you want to hire Donald? He most likely already understands all the technology. He's a Bitcoiner. He's into Ethereum. It's like the perfect profile for someone that you would want to hire. I don't know what happened afterwards. All I know is that Donald is not with us anymore.

3:39:39And you're the one who told me about it last year. And I feel happy that I remastered and published an article about our interview because his knowledge is preserved. And we have the most of it on, I think it's still up. It's called Ethereum plan. No, it's ETH plan. Ether plan. Ether plan. E-T-H-E-R-P-L-A-N. I think it's dot com.

3:40:10Bob SummerwillYeah, I think the website is down, but you can find it on the Internet Archive.

3:40:17Vlad CosteaYeah. I mean, this guy was obviously very smart, shared his knowledge to the world. And there's still a lot that you can learn, especially because he was such an avid scholar of Nick Szabo's. And he was reading all the articles and trying to make sense of them. And publishing his own articles with summaries or just extensions of what he learned. And yeah, this one's for you, Donald. Hope you're somewhere out there and you can hear us. We love you.

3:40:49Bob SummerwillAnd did you release a new video of that then on YouTube?

3:40:55Vlad CosteaYes.

3:40:56Bob SummerwillThe remastered?

3:40:57Vlad CosteaYes. It's on YouTube. I mean, it's not recorded at the time. I was only doing audio interviews, so it's just static graphics that I put there. But yeah.

3:41:10Bob SummerwillYeah. Well, I will share that with his family. Because, yeah, I went to his memorial last year, so got to meet his ex-wife and his sister and her family. But yeah, he was a good dude.

3:41:29Vlad CosteaAlso, I want to thank him since we're at this stage. He sort of set me up for an interview with Nick Szabo. Like, he actually was nice enough to connect us by email. And then Nick Szabo was like, oh, that's cool, but I'm on a remote location and I don't have stable internet. And we're going to have to do this. Like, you send me the questions and maybe I will record myself answering to them. And then I sent the questions and I guess I overwhelmed him. It was like 20 long questions and maybe he was like, oh, I don't have time for this.

3:42:01And then he never answered again. I almost had Nick Szabo on the show, thanks to Donald McIntyre.

3:42:08Bob SummerwillThere you go. Yeah, they were close.

3:42:12Vlad CosteaNow, I'm not even sure how I can get a hold of him.

3:42:18Bob SummerwillWell, Elaine, who you'd mentioned, Elaine, she's one of the directors of the ETC Cooperative, which is not dead yet, by the way. It's gone along for the last couple of years just without me, but essentially there to support the last core developer who's still working on the client. But yeah, Elaine is one of the directors that she's his wife. So I have her email. If it's possible, I could connect you.

3:42:53Vlad CosteaI mean, I would be interested to get Elaine also. She's been doing some interesting work and I'm past the point where I care about purity or whatever. I mean, honestly, my first episode, season one, episode one was with Donald. So you can argue that this was never like a purely toxic maximalist show. Maybe I fell down that hole for a couple of years, but yeah, I've always had. I've had Igor. Later I've had Vlad Zamfir. And it's funny because when I had Vlad Zamfir, I think that was season nine, Donald told me that I should delete the episode with him because he doesn't want to be on the same show as this guy.

3:43:38And I told him, you know, Donald, just wait for a few years and you're going to see that in perspective. You're going to regret not being here. And I never deleted the episode. He was like, no, but I wanted you removed, whatever. You know how he was, very stubborn. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I'm happy I never deleted that. And it's still there for anyone to listen. And then I've had Vitalik and that was surreal for the first time. I could not read the chat anymore because it was just like a cascade of messages.

3:44:12People asking him for stuff or promoting their own tokens or whatever. And I was like, I don't know how this is going to happen, but it happened for three hours. And I sort of respect Vitalik much more right now because I realized that he's not overrated. Like, he really knows what he's talking about. He really is a genius in his own way. And he's sort of like, he's one of the smartest people I've spoken with for three hours. And I was like, OK, this guy really like, you know, there's this crap that's being talked about him in the Bitcoin circles, but sort of earned his place.

3:44:53Bob SummerwillYeah. And I mean, he's very humble with it and he's very giving with his time. He's selfless and he's not arrogant or anything like that.

3:45:05Vlad CosteaWell, he was more edgy. If you think about it, like 10 years ago, the tweets that he was posting, you can actually cherry pick some stuff. Like when he said that owning some sexual material is not as bad as doing heroin or whatever. Like he was trying to be edgy in some ways a few years ago. Now he's more, I mean, he's matured a bit. He's 30 something.

3:45:36Bob SummerwillI mean, I think some of that stuff is just like autistic, you know, lack of social cues kind of stuff. You know, he got so caught out a little bit saying, doing weird things or whatever, but it's, you know, it's I'm sure it's more more autistic than anything else. But yeah.

3:45:58Vlad CosteaMy tweet from yesterday was that the biggest challenge in this space is to tell what's autism and what's genius or if it's both of them, which one is like the dominant feature.

3:46:08Bob SummerwillYeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, the other thing with Vitalik that maybe some people don't know is, you know, he's not like at all materialistic. Like he doesn't give a shit about money at all. You know, he's just like a dude who walks around the world with his cat backpack and his laptop, you know, like nomading around. You know, I don't think he owns a house or a car. He just, you know, he's just a geek walking around doing shit, you know.

3:46:42Vlad CosteaI mean, for his own security, it's possibly the best choice when you think about it. But

3:46:49Bob SummerwillYeah, I mean, he's just been doing that for a decade or so now. That's just how he is.

3:46:56Vlad CosteaYeah. It looks like Ethereum turned out to be the best Bitcoin sidechain. Whether or not some people in Bitcoin like it, that's another conversation. But there is 120,000 BTC on Ethereum and there is nothing you can argue against from this perspective. Like people chose that as the place to store their Bitcoin or use it for other stuff. It wasn't Liquid. It wasn't Lightning. It wasn't Rootstock. It was Ethereum.

3:47:29Bob SummerwillYeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, something we didn't talk about, that we're not really going to go into much, is I've got this site called Early Days of Ethereum, which is just a history project basically. So profiles for everyone involved in the early days. I've done interviews with a bunch of people. I think I'm up to about 14 of them now, talking especially to people who are involved in 2014, 2015. So, yeah, that's been a lot of fun. I started some of that in like 2017, kind of put it aside and came back to it more recently, especially with AI assisted development.

3:48:14I was able to, you know, gather together some notes into a pretty detailed site. And that's, you know, that's really enjoyable. I do know where the bodies are buried. You know, I was around early and I know most people. And for ETHDenver this year that we mentioned you being there, I did a collaboration with Jessica Angel, who's the creative director there, to do a thing called the Museum of Ethereum. So that was a mixture of physical and digital artifacts. So again, you know, some of that profile stuff and some historical photos.

3:48:56But also talking about forks, I had a project where I revived an old fork of Ethereum. So it was back to Homestead as of 2016. So I rented GPUs and I mined that old fork back to life and then reduced the hash power there from multiple GPUs down to less GPUs down to CPU. So you could actually CPU mine this old fork of Ethereum and run like 10 year old client software and the wallet software there. And you could send funds back and forth between those machines that were running their own, you know, extension of that network.

3:49:46So that wasn't a fork. It wasn't a testnet. It was a continuation of a prior fork, you know. So I called that the Ethereum time machine. So that was a lot of fun.

3:50:03Vlad CosteaI'm looking at your website, which is earlydaysofeth.org. And there's this grid section where you can see people who are involved. It's amazing to see that in the whitepaper phase of it. There are four Romanians that I counted, which is pretty amazing. I knew about Mihai, who is like a co-founder. He also co-founded Bitcoin Magazine with Vitalik. But there are a bunch of others. And the other interesting discovery is Eric Lombrozo. Eric is one of the architects of SegWit. Like there used to be a time when participating in other projects was not like a toxic tribal kind of thing.

3:50:47It was just dev work or maybe just another interest in something else. Oh, well, there's Merkle also, which is amazing.

3:50:57Bob SummerwillThis was a crazy thing I found out. So there's two of them there. There's Ralph Merkle and who's the other dude?

3:51:10Vlad CosteaPaul Snow?

3:51:12Bob SummerwillNo. Paul Snow is an interesting one because he works on Factom, right? So, you know, another deep Bitcoiner being involved there. Yeah, it's Ralph Merkle. But there's another mathematician dude. Oh my goodness, where's he gone?

3:51:36That's fine. And anyway, so with Ralph Merkle, so that was a funny one, because I saw at some point, like just on the Ethereum website, so Internet Archive was so valuable here for looking at this stuff, that Ralph Merkle was listed as like a team member, like advisor or something. And I was like, yeah, fucking right. Is Satoshi an advisor as well, Ralph Merkle? But he really was. Like Ralph Merkle and another dude who I've bloody lost track of now, but, you know, another famous cryptographic breakthrough person.

3:52:14They were both advisors for a short time. Oh, Neal Koblitz, that's it, who was the co-inventor of elliptic curve cryptography.

3:52:28Vlad CosteaYeah, it's very hard to argue that Ethereum is not a cypherpunk project, like looking at all of this stuff, all the people involved.

3:52:43Of course, someone even got rich and there's a lot of hatred for the rich among Bitcoiners for some reason, like we're socialists or whatever. Yeah. But I see a lot of people who went on to build something successful afterwards or people who became Bitcoin maximalists afterwards and I was not even aware. Like there is Chelsea Palmer and I remember her from Twitter that she was very anti-Ethereum. Yeah. But she seems to have been involved in 2014.

3:53:16Bob SummerwillYeah, well, I mean, through this DCTRL, which is a co-working like meetup space here. But yeah, I mean, you couldn't not be involved really. Like, you know, it was an earlier time and, you know, you may or may not have liked particular things, but you didn't have that hard line, you know, won't even talk to each other, you know.

3:53:45Vlad CosteaSo you created this page to celebrate. Oh, there's also Peter Todd here to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of Ethereum. What would you say?

3:53:59Bob SummerwillNo, that wasn't a driving thing for it. The conversations, if you look here, so the first, there were basically three videos that got done in 2023, which was primarily memories from the founders of BlockApps, a company I ended up working with these last couple of years. But basically saying, you know, they, aside from the business that they got together, they were involved with Ethereum really early. So they were writing down, you know, they wanted to basically make some podcasts and remember, you know, have their, get those memories down.

3:54:37And I ended up being a guest on the third one and, you know, making copious notes out of all of these. So then last year, when I was actually working at BlockApps, we decided to revive that series. So firstly, we're talking to Taylor Gerring and then to Texture.

3:55:00And then really with those interviews, I was like, oh, I have actually got a lot of biographical information and timeline information as well from earlier efforts. And it's like, okay, I'm going to combine all of these into a single project, you know, have some AI assistants to put together the website and the structure here. So then, yeah, if you click on individuals in that grid, for example, you will find like a bunch of cross links and then backlinks at the bottom. So it's kind of a really pretty rich Wiki structure.

3:55:36Vlad CosteaI found Amir Taaki here and it's kind of funny because nowadays he's bullish on Ethereum and he says that it's actually something good. And he's trying to launch like a competitor to Ethereum, which is doing zero knowledge proofs and smart contracts. But there's a quote from him here, and I think it's very funny in the context. He says, when Ethereum was being formed, Amir Taaki was asked to be the lead developer. He declined saying they did ask me to be the lead Ethereum dev, but I just didn't.

3:56:07I was like, we can build this on Bitcoin. Why do you need a new thing? Yeah, because I know you can build it on Bitcoin.

3:56:14Bob SummerwillYeah. Yeah. It's a very common mindset at the time.

3:56:20Vlad Costea2014. So it wasn't like alien or foreign that people were hostile or at least technically, how should I put it, challenged to build this on Bitcoin. There was Counterparty and Mastercoin. So you have these two that sort of tried to compete by being protocols on Bitcoin. We also had the OP_RETURN wars, which is another interesting history episode for Bitcoin. Like when the core devs decided that they don't want to support arbitrary data and tokens on Bitcoin. That's what led to the legitimation of Ethereum and NXT and whatever BitShares was around at the time.

3:57:03Because if you wanted to be serious about this and build decentralized companies with tokens and shares and whatever, or trade commodities with automated market makers or something, you needed something else that had smart contracts and enabled tokens and where people would never tell you to not use it.

3:57:23Bob SummerwillNo, no. I mean, you know, from what came out of that, it was very clear, you know, this is a this is a hostile area for innovation, really.

3:57:37Vlad CosteaThat's sad. Anyway, cool page earlydaysofeth.org. Check it out. I know I'm going to have some fun scrolling through these names like Gavin Andresen is here, David Johnston. He was on my podcast. I know that he was doing some Mastercoin stuff. And Andreas Antonopoulos. He actually wrote many years later Mastering Ethereum. And people were so hostile to him when he launched the Mastering Lightning book, which was like the next one in his series, that he sort of rage quit. He was like, I can't please these people.

3:58:15I'm just going to do something else. Yeah.

3:58:23In hindsight, like if you look at these names, you would guess that Ethereum was going to be a big deal just because it had the social layer being involved. I hope that 10 years from now, we're going to have like early days of eCash or something with the people who made the success of the Bitcoin hard fork actually a thing.

3:58:47Bob SummerwillYeah. Well, and that's... I should buy the domain. That's brilliant. But yeah, you know, you've got to do things, right? You've got to try.

3:58:59Vlad CosteaYou've got to try. That's a good way to conclude our conversation unless you think that we missed something.

3:59:07Bob SummerwillNo, that's great. Cheers, Vlad.

3:59:09Vlad CosteaBob, how can people follow you before you go? What's the best way for anyone listening to this to keep up with what you're doing?

3:59:15Bob SummerwillYeah, so I'm Bob Summerwill on Twitter, on X. So Summerwill is, Summer like the season, W-I-L-L. My personal website is bobsummerwill.com. As you mentioned there, earlydaysofeth.org. So yeah, probably most active on Twitter. I can never bring myself to say X.

3:59:40Vlad CosteaMe neither. It's so weird. Thank you, Bob, for everything. Thanks to the sponsors. Once again, LayerTwo Labs, they're launching eCash. Check out ecash.com. SideShift, which is the place where you can swap your stablecoins for sound money or something that cannot be taken away from you. Braiins Hashpower that you can use for mining Bitcoin or eCash or whatever SHA-256 chain you like. Orange Rock, where you can trade without KYC. And Cake Wallet, which did the giveaway and has a very cool wallet that you should try.

4:00:15I think they're going to support eCash too, soon. It's coming. Thank you very much. It's been four hours of fun and learning. And I'll see you in the next one. Cheers, everyone.