A call for an end to tribalism in Ethereum - 2 years later

Transcript

good morning everybody so I guess we might as well get started a good morning thank you for coming not many people here I saw this with Evan Evan done this yesterday we've got a pretty empty Hall start of the day not a great time but off we go [Music] it begins as an idea transforming into a problem that begs to be solved like a great cycle each answer eals another p

the vista promises more beautiful ends and the new journey pushes us for we have our buildings our visions the rebels the troublemakers and the dreamers then we arrived at a new peak with more dreamers or billions a few more rebels and of course we still have the trumpets some journeys are coming to a noble end and some can you me yeah so that was a

video called your turn which was made in 2014 right at the very start of the etherium journey ooh have another one let's not have that so good morning I'm Bob Sam all i've been involved with the with the etherion project since 2015 actively i met the talaq in 2014 that was really well my my blockchain journey began and i previously worked at the etherium

foundation at consensus on enterprises their reliance done some stuff with hyper ledger and all over the shop my current my current day job is on the executive director of the etherium classic cooperative so i gave the talk very similar to this as the opening keynote of of this conference two years ago so this talk is really a bit of an update two years later kind of see where we've got to but funnily enough as i was looking through my notes a lot of them i'm just going to present them for Batum because they're still exactly the same topics of relevance much of this started

with with Bitcoin not everybody involved with etherium has been a Bitcoin er knows about Bitcoin understands Bitcoin that was something that was pretty much the case for me as well I only really got actively involved in aetherium I kinda didn't really have the the Bitcoin phase actively but Bitcoin really laid down the basis of pretty much everything that the whole of the blockchain space is doing and if you are not Bitcoin aware I would urge you to become Bitcoin aware and not just dismiss it as a relic of the past because it absolutely is not

a few years later we had the etherium white paper written in and until released in December 2013 by Vitalik really saying that with with Bitcoin you'd have sort of the first DAP you could consider Bitcoin to be adapt really a payment stamp but it's a single application platform there were many Bitcoin to point naught kind of projects floating around in the years afterwards like colored coins named coin the idea of

dows and and really the breakthrough that he had with if they're in white paper was sort of the observation that really what you needed was a platform if you had a general platform that you could build any of these things on it so from from the white paper some some key goals and aims were simplicity universality modularity agility non-discrimination and non censorship I mean I think these are all fairly on controversial aims so a brief history of etherium there are at least three books being written at the moment about

etherium which should be out some of them this year some of them next year you have Laura Shin is writing a book map lacing of of Bloomberg and and Camilla as well so I really hope that they're going to shed some light on the past because lots of people have a very false narrative about how of their own came about because the VIX has always write the history you know it's very easy to think well hey you had Vitalik and Vitalik was the genius and bestowed the thing on the world and there you go and that's the center of the story but

the fact is that lots and lots of people were involved with aetherium both early and in later phases were maybe onto about the fourth different phase of people involved two years ago I put together these these timelines and a list of people involved I really should update them but those those links are there I shared these notes by the way on Twitter and something I learnt just quite recently which was really quite sad is that the the Bitcoin talk announcement was actually edited eight months after the event to write various people out so that sucks so here was the original one if you if you if you follow

the the time machine you know noticeably with with Charles Hoskinson there but also various other people you know Eric lund browser was was involved Jonathan Mohan has been written out of history you have Antony do free Oh a delightful texture who many people see tweeting and don't really know his his history brew was involved very early as was Taylor Goering and and Paul snow of factum many others in there but eight months later boom all of those people off the list anyway Taylor

Goering wrote a great article in 2016 about this which was on the the etherion blog and it still is that that's a great kind of start I'd made my notes and we've got these books forthcoming anyway the talaq tweeted this not so long ago which was a snapshot of one of the earliest emails that he had with gaff so the date on that is December the 19th 2013 in which gaffes as Johnny gave me the heads-up I can do C++ how far are you with aetherium so that was Jonathan Mohan there who got written out of it

anyway there we are in February well so that was that was December 2013 so really to my understanding what you had was the the white paper being shared around various various email groups friends people who you know might might be interested a lot of that flowing around Bitcoin D central in in Toronto which Antony diario setup you've got collaboration between Vitalik and Antony and me hi you've got Jeff Coleman and others who are still around but shortly afterwards

you had the launch in 2014 and I think it might actually be January the 31st not quite the February but they're three months later you sort of had the official kind of like launch public launch at a public event which was the Bitcoin Miami conference so you know around three months later in you had that bunch of people I mean the I'm not sure on the date of that Bitcoin talk post but it would probably have been January I guess 2014 so you did have this big bunch of people that were that were working on things at that early

stage prior to even the foundation existing or any real plan of how the thing was going to go you just had a dream and various people's interpretation of that dream so Vitalik presented there and then was mobbed so apparently to pretty much everyone in that the room then went out into the corridor and they were having this sort of mobbing and so on I once met the guy who was the poor sucker who got to present after Vitalik and apparently like there was nobody left in the room at all this again is a is a photo in in Miami back there in in in early 2014 so you can see on the front row you've got

gaff with his arm round Vitalik you've got antony dro next to him then Taylor Goering the the the guy and the glasses with a little beard is called Jason Colby I met him for the first time at this conference actually two years ago on the back row there you've got Charles hoskinson's standing a pub metallic Joe Lubin in the background there these photos were from Bitcoin Expo in Toronto 2014 which was a sort of a further a further launch just prior really to the

migration off to after Switzerland so I'm gonna share some of these you've gotten for tonight Stephan's while probably you know again a lot of people here if you knew her you probably all of this is a complete prehistory and you don't know who's Stefan is or anything but he was you know he was basically a community leader did a lot of the the the sat up at the Forum a lot of onboarding Antony dro there and Amir shettrick standing behind Antony nobody knows who Amira's he was one of the founders who left quite early in the background there with the with the

glasses that's Geoff Wilker again he's been absent for quite a while but was an incredibly key figure doing the original go etherium gas development and Joe we all know he and Michael there with a long hair was a graphic designer who did loads of the original work that you'd see on the theory morgue and backdrops for meetups and things Taylor again apparently Amir you see Amir that he refused to wear the t-shirt you see everyone else is wearing the t-shirt

he's he's their witness trench coat anyway kind of happy days right because you think everyone's aligned but no in around May I think it was May 2014 he had the first major schism within aetherium which was Charles Hoskinson getting removed as as the the CEO and you also had Emir leaving and and really that first schism was about how are we going to do the etherium

project and the way it's been explained to me is crypto Google or crypto Mozilla you know is it going to be a full profit that produces a you know produces the etherium codebase and then that is you know then that is mutually developed from that point or are you doing it you know collaboratively in a non-for-profit way from the very start so that was the first split really was that the the FF Swiss for profit foundation sorry not for profit the F Swiss for profit was

cast aside in favor of doing a stiff dual doing the foundation so that was the first kind of split of that founding group was again this realization that the stuff that's in your head is not the same for everybody and some people thought it was going to happen this way and some people thought it was going to happen the other way and you have a an irreconcilable difference and off you go so really that was the core of of Charles being the Emmanuel Goldstein of big brother you know the the hate figure you have to have have somebody that you hate that unifies you and Charles fell into that a little later on you had some

further schisms where so joe lupin and antony Diorio kind of hung around despite being on the losing side at that initial schism and joe is obviously hung around through out he's been fantastic but still you have this demonization of consensus as some god-awful you know only caring about profit marketing arm we had another schism when gaff parted company with the EF and you know you have the beginnings of parity and then

this you know this forever fear or distrust or whatever you like about parity oh are they looking to take over a theorem you know are they are they building it you know is it a corporate capture like are they are they looking to undermine if they're in what's happening here and you know you see that ongoing I mean I made these notes in in in 2018 and this was this was prior to a free being hounded out as their as the the Hulk of hard fought coordinator because obviously if he worked for

parity he really you know meant to subvert ethereum and then you had another schism in in in mid-2016 early 2017 where you start having enterprise blockchain and enterprise aetherium appearing so you have hyper ledger and you have the EA and this this sort of fear is aetherium being subverted they don't understand so again this is a slide from two years ago there's even more factions now but here's where we were two years ago is you know the etherium foundation and vitalik Vitalik

is a dictator who bailed out the Dower single-handedly you know to to save his friends and with Cardno and mantas and et Cie and nioh HK and Charles you know the demon demon and Joe is only an empire builder he only cares about money and you know everything that that that consensus do is obviously completely selfish and and yeah and parity and the web story foundation and polka dots you know they're obviously Gavin is egotistical and non collaborative and everything that they're doing is to subvert the

dream and and an Antony Diorio and everything it's central de central and Jax you know just an opportunist and he cares about money and that all of these enterprise things are trying to co-opt etherium for the bank's in the status quo you know when I left the foundation to work at consensus on helping to set up the enterprise etherium Alliance and spend a year on that you know a lot of people could not understand that why on earth would you do that we're trying to get away from the banks how can you work with them and I mean all of these that they're just demonization 'z because that's how human brains work it's very

hard for us to understand that other people have different world views than us they have different perspectives different priorities and that they may be thinking different ways than us and they have different different goals and aims but nearly all of the time that kind of demonization is really very very self-defeating I mean if you if you look at pretty much any project within the whole of blockchain the end goals of the people involved are all pretty much the same probably 90 to 95 percent of what we're trying to do is is aligned you

know we're trying to build better systems for trust minimization and for collaboration another element to this which is not insignificant is is really that the kind of people who were attracted to Frontier projects to doing new and innovative things they're not neurotypical you know many many people involved with blockchain and this is the same for technology in the broader case you know I previously worked at Electronic Arts I worked in video games for 18 years you know lots and lots of

lots and lots of weirdos myself included you know so as I say here under my temp we have people who could be labeled autistic sociopathic egotistical chronic social anxiety severe depressive suicidal greedy selfish I mean I could also add narcissistic but you know on the upside autistic genius altruistic visionary selfless fearless you know people who can deeply deeply obsess on problems in a really unhealthy way actually find solutions you know you need you nerds but what

that's really led to is is or the other one I didn't have there is paranoid you know anybody who is a cryptographer is deeply deeply paranoid about the world right that's why that's a motivation for doing what they're doing I mean it's something that texture pointed out to me is is you think about incentive mechanisms what kind of person would be incentivized to build a trust minimization system and it well it's somebody who's got trust issues that does not trust the world you know that it's scared or paranoid and and that's actually it that's not a negative label

either it's actually very rational to be scared in the world at the moment right but what you end up with is the kind of people who start these sort of activities are not necessarily the best as you get further down the line when you when you get Ward's mainstream because they're not necessarily very good at working with other people you know there may be very introverted don't have good interpersonal skills don't like politics and so on so yeah so here's my truth you know is diversity is strength and that everybody has got a mixture of good and bad traits you know there's no such

thing as absolute good or absolute evil all of us have a mixture of those characteristics and you know we are all misfits in some way or another in terms of the people who are involved early you know maybe we're getting to a more mainstream kind of place now but looking back to 2013 2014 2015 you know if you are a quote normal person you wouldn't be spending your time on this and it's the same for is the same for entrepreneurs or anything you know it's it's the crazy folk that go and find new stuff and really that

the that the founders of etherium and and you know founder itself as a bit of a crappy label people who around early you know they were just a bunch of dudes and that's relevant that they were male there's not a lot of female involvement early and then the guys are really pretty poor interpersonally you know and they were people trying their best to do something that was a complete moonshot that may or may not have worked and it might have been legal even you know many of these people with poor interpersonal skills stomping all over each other don't know how to say sorry and now they hate each other but you know here's the thing is if you look back from where we

are now and this is even more the case two years on them when I first said this you know we've succeeded beyond our wildest dreams you know there's no doubt you know is blockchain a thing is there some value here you know you look at you look at the the breadth of engagement in the world you look at you know central banks looking to do their own digital currency you look at all of the fortune 500s doing blockchain things so you know really we've got no need to hate each other like anyway since I did the talk two years ago I found myself on the etherion

classic side and this is one of the reasons why I really wanted to have this talk is is I've walked the walk on my rhetoric from two years ago by joining the dark side and I didn't have an explicit schism in that list for a theory in classic but you know obviously there's a there's another schism there so I just wanted to quickly explain what aetherium classic is and why it's not anything to be scared of and also that none of this stuff is a zero-sum game so this is Charles Hoskinson three years ago etc' summit 2017 where he said let's talk about philosophy the first question is when

did we have to etherium x' the conventional answer is we had to etherium after the dow but the answers actually no we have to or theorems from the very damn beginning but we didn't know that because at the beginning we had two philosophies at the same time one was this notion of code is law then there was its other philosophy this notion of a world computer this was Vitalik speck child he loved this idea the idea that you could have universal infrastructure that one day would get rid of Amazon ec2 and get rid of all these other things and this thing would be this beautiful layer this computation layer to be added to the Internet as ubiquitous as BitTorrent or

something else and that computer would just work you could deploy your apps on it dip apps on it these kind of things here is the fundamental problem code is law and world computer these things are philosophically so different that they can't coexist at the same time when you're the world can pewter you have to fork a lot you have to embrace mutability you have to have a lot of flexibility in your platform when your code is law you like Bitcoin where you set the principles whether they're good principles or bad principles you just set them up live with them and build on top of them they're like artificial laws of physics in a certain respect if you're a

mountain climber you cannot current you cannot suddenly say boy gravity's inconvenient for me it would be so nice if gravity would stop for a moment and give me a break you can't do it so anyway this is a pretty for a profound insight which most of the blockchain world has never heard and today we call those two visions etc' and after two and e.t.c is no longer a process coin with developers so really it's is this this thought that you've you have Bitcoin with smart contracts in which F is money and you know you know you have this second vision which is will computer

which is really know F is not money it's an application platform so then really what you had at the time of the dow fork was depending on which of these visions you liked which was the thing that spoke to you because both of these visions were used you know if you if you if you look at all the presentations at the time both of these were given everyone was talking about both of these but there wasn't really a recognition that the two of them were mutually irreconcilable you know they were trying to both happen within the same project because yeah I mean if you're if you're Bitcoin with smart contracts and aetherium as money well of course you don't intervene you know it's money you then you're

being a for Condren you're moving people's money around if you are a world computer you know if if aetherium is a world computer to you well there's a bug in the application platform of course you fix the bug it's a bug like eff isn't money it's it's just fuel so I mean what that means is that while you have the most kind of you know socially painful split at the time of the day of fork the two projects are not you know then it's not a zero something that they're different and you know that they are both useful visions anyway

where we are now on et Cie is that you know that kind of view of et C which was wrong in the first places is really really wrong now so what you really have with et C is it's it's aetherium technology but with Bitcoin philosophy so like Bitcoin it's hard money with a fixed supply truly decentralized and that you don't have you know you don't have any foundation you don't have a trademark you don't have a pass of money you don't have any particular legal entity with any special position and and the value is really a you know the the key values are around censorship resistance and trust minimization with security and safety being valued over

throughput so people will say well what's the scaling plan for et Cie that there is no scaling plan for e.t.c e.t.c will be proof-of-work forever the scaling is l2 you know look around all the fantastic l2 projects there are that's where you're scaling is l1 scaling every single l1 scaling solution that's been proposed so far so my mind compromises the decentralization in some way or another but yes unlike unlike Bitcoin you you have rich stateful listener a deterministic Turing machine so for the past four years building on

et si was basically a philosophical choice like if you were rational you would not have built on e.t.c because it would be in a massive pain you know the tooling was just inferior there's nobody there you haven't you know you didn't have even such simple things as as a reliable block Explorer or or tooling but but you know you've got this sort of a magical ability right now with e.t.c to say imagine you could go in a time warp back to 2016 and you get all the good tech but none of the bad things happened so you know the fork never happened aside the Dow hacker never actually axes it with the funds it was obviously ideologically driven to my mind not a ICO mania never

happened crypto kissies never happened so you don't have the chain bloat on e.t.c that you do on a theorem you can still full sync from Genesis on a commodity laptop and you know you don't have this a few in furor addiction and we have a pending hard fork where we are going to be hard forking in Istanbul lock codes we've gone through Byzantium and Constantinople over the last few months so you know from an objective point of view deploying to et C over F is now a viable thing that rational people might choose to do not based on ideology necessarily but just on practical concerns so I mean I think

that that's really where you've got is is is is that you have et Cie as the we intend to keep running as proof of work for decades proposition I think probably a better claim to digital silver than like coin and you have f2 is you will computer so there you go and it's not a zero-sum game they are different projects sharing large parts of technology anyway what is tribalism so I had a look on Wikipedia so tribalism it's a state of being organized by or advocating for tribes or tribal lifestyles human evolution has primarily

occurred in small groups as opposed to mass societies and humans naturally maintain a social network so you know the worst element of tribalism really is is a type of discrimination or animosity based upon group differences you know we are hard-wired to live in small social groups you know you have your your well-known dumb bar number kind of phenomenon saying that we can you know that we can form close bonds with perhaps up to about 120 130 people and beyond that you just there's just too many people's just just the numbers

make it impossible to sort of do that so that's kind of how we're hardwired is to is to select our tribe and this about in-group out-group dynamics you know essentially I'd say pretty much all crypto tribalism is is this in-group out-group dynamic of identifying you know your group some elements of commonality however shallow that might be and these things really are a form of social scalability it's really how we have grown to these societies with with millions or billions of people is myths the shared myths

oh you're Canadian I'm Canadian as well or and thinking that that's actually meaningful you know we have many many myths you know the corporation is a myth nation-states are a myth all religions obviously are based on myths and and the pattern of all of these myths is common it is saying this thing is is god-given is universal and is self-evident when that's not the case for any of these things and therefore if

you do not believe that thing well you're obviously you are mad or you know or you're bad you are an evil person because you don't believe this the same myth as me saying on this that studies show that people can form self preferencing in-group within a matter of minutes and that groups can form even on the basis of such arbitrarily sorry arbitrary and invented discriminatory characteristics such as preferences for certain paintings obviously you see this within sports as well Sports is probably the most common kind of thing you know all you support the same team as me well obviously we you know we've got a lot in

common and that might be not the case at all another thing I've seen is that there's probably a lot more commonality between urbanites across the whole world between those groups of people than people who are not urban within the same country ie that somebody who lives in New York and somebody who live in London they probably have a lot more in common than British people in general or Americans you know obviously America is a juggie and it's practically a continent in itself so they thought that you know you have commonalities is it's almost impossible at that scale but what we

have is these these myths these in-group out-group dynamics and that's obviously happening to a huge degree within blockchain something Avis had a little while ago aetherium currently lacks temperament for harsh criticism some say it's not aligned with aetherium culture whatever aetherium culture is yet this feeds to long iteration cycles redundant development and unsafe products I propose that we normalize constructive whistleblowing to tighten feedback loops the reason I raised this specifically is as I was writing this this talk I was thinking you know people are going to

say to me well Bob your tribalist I've seen you I've seen you criticizing Vitalik criticizing the foundation criticizing the the governance and I just highlight that criticism is good and it's not the same as tribalism you know really tribalism is saying you know you're an idiot well the thing that you'll do is never work you know screw you you other you other it's basically you know you are the other therefore your your stupid criticism is not the same criticism is very important and it's not the same you know you you'll have people

saying well look at you you're just being tribal you're being toxic we're actually a lot of that is actually misidentification of criticism to try and improve things maximalism is is another point so you know when I gave the keynote here two years ago one of my biggest fears at that point was that we would start to see aetherium maximalism that really you know many of the people who started the etherion project did so because there was not really the opportunity to build that smart contract functionality within Bitcoin you know

behind the general rhetoric a few years earlier was because of network effects of course Bitcoin will be the the one true solution to everything in the world and innovation outside a Bitcoin can be just be absorbed back into Bitcoin so you don't need any other projects and then it's like you guys going off building aetherium this is an attack on Bitcoin how dare you and and really you know to my mind the thing that was fantastic about aetherium was that you you really had a set of a little bit more open-minded people who did not see

things in that black and white kind of sense and wanted to explore and build ons on smart contracts so you know my hope at that time and still my hope is that is that the people that I had met and was working with on aetherium were not of that kind of rigid mindset and that if something else came along that was objectively better than aetherium great let's all go and do that right we're not gonna sit holding onto our ether and saying well you know I'm a big F back holder so everything else is garbage um and we saw the beginnings of some of that and some of that is still

ongoing and you know here's a specific example our beloved auntie Pro synth you know so vitalik says here I think his tweets have been quite positive some overall and he's only one of many recipients of the the media matching you know so this this was the the gate coin grants right that you had a lot of controversy over anti Pro synth gang but a large amount of map itching for basically being paid to tweet but being paid to tweet about etherium but in a very etherium maximalist way so I just

want to point out that it was actually his eighth maximalism which triggered my tweet storm which turned into this talk two years ago which then talked into it turned into another talker ed corn me getting invited to a theory on classic summit and ultimately me working on a theory on classic you know there is there's a direct line to my current work on aetherium classic and the maximalism which anti Pro synth started two years ago and he's just even worse now you know so he what he did was was reacted to a thing where I I dared to put card on Oh in the same category as aetherium

as a small contract platform you know on earth you putting it at the same level and you know he he triggered me and I mean I think I think the thing is we've we're still so so early you know we're scaling off into the you know we're heading off into the into the blue ocean and we're we're elbowing each other out of the canoes before we even started so Eman said here no single coin will moon by itself either the entire ensemble goes up together or they all mop the floor mired in regulation scams and lawsuits and it is essential for us to work together my friend Kent again wrote this great

article two years ago divided we fall the irrational insanity of crypto tribalism really talking about the fact that you have a bunch of the most altruistic genius fantastic people and they are all squabbling like kids anyway I said this two years ago and I'll say again aetherium is just the start the same behaviors have happened time and time again across blockchain there is repeated tribalism across projects your project is a scam you are idiots this is an attack and we seem to have forgotten how science works you know which is through experimentation and data and trying things out and seeing how they

work not saying how dare you try something different you are wrong well how about you let me try and if it fails it fails but you don't need to preempt that so in a quest to build a perfect machine we've forgotten how to be human and you know I think we really need to show leadership within aetherium and then can extend that across the whole ecosystem of actually being a bit more grown-up and and stepping beyond those narcissism of small differences because we can build a better world and everybody has got the power to do that

you just have to look at your behavior and get beyond our biological defaults which are not very helpful okay any questions you mentioned before that you set up the EEA and I remember like hearing oh the I remember seeing the price of ether shoot up and then that was kind of around the time when Microsoft or something was joining the EA and yes what was the point of the EEA why was it set up in the first place so

Microsoft were amongst a large number of companies that were doing enterprise aetherium work already so yes there was a 10x in in F in response to the creation of the EA the goal of the EA was really to avoid vendor lock-in when using aetherium for enterprise purposes as in you had a large number of companies that were taking etherium clients and making modifications so that they were you know better suited for enterprise use cases one of the things that was stated at the the launch event was there's no reason why suitably

modular code bases shouldn't serve all of these public and private use cases you know if you look at say the Gauley test net ring a proof of authority consensus there that's hardly any different to what you would have for a banking consortium doing some settlement thing or whatever so really the goal of the EA which is still an ongoing goal is to it's a specification body kind of like a standards body and the the primary output of that is a specification for what an enterprise aetherium client should you know meet and ultimately you know the the test net

work has just started there so a goal would be to be able to have a heterogeneous network of enterprise aetherium clients running together in the same way as any kind of public network but with characteristics for a you know for enterprise so really EA and an enterprise a theorem you could see that as kind of a superset of public aetherium but with more options but having those in a specified way so that you don't have a situation of someone going well you know we started using aetherium and we were using hyper ledger bosu but then we later decided we wanted to use quorum and then it was

incompatible and we've got not in and oh this was a mistake we should have just gone with IBM yeah well I mean I an analogy so the question was like like UNIX so I think the analogy that there is is I think a good etherium specification would actually be like POSIX it would be saying if you think of f as system 5 unix and then you had all the different unix versions appearing and it's like oh solaris that isn't unix AIX that's not unix and then you get Richard Stallman daring to do goo new and it's like oh that's really not Unix and all the BS DS and everything and

obviously is is everything that's ever happened with Linux or iOS or mac o s-- of no value because they're not Unix I think that's really kind of you know the situation that we're in really is that you could see the etherium a net b that's sort of like being the granddaddy of smart contract platform you know implementations and really i think the goal of the EA specifically is to try and nail that down you know into something that will become you know a worldwide standard it would go into w3c IETF ISO I Triple E all that right but you basically like the etherion protocol

would be a protocol like any other you know like well you know and of course everything uses that right you know like like like USB or Wi-Fi or anything possibly getting right down into the kernel one more question oh right the back come in just within the talk and I understood a little bit of were you obsessing okay I before him

it's see it's easy for a while on discord and I think apart from the or discrimination on stuff that is this general issue I notice I don't know what it is doing to good community I think Adam is facing the same thing too just a little bit yeah trying to I just know so oh it is it building community like just different from the product and the protocols are was the effort on community building yeah so you know how is ECC building community but I'd say the answer is that ultimately is is to my mind you have this broader the

greater etherium which is more than just the F main net you know you you have all of these etherium flavors and that extends well beyond aetherium etherium classic EA you have a large number of of layer to scaling solutions or alternate layer one proposals which are using the EVM or using solidity you know that really you have this sort of de facto smart contract standard which is aetherium a theory umber technology and I think that's the most important thing that we have and that's the thing which is common across everything so on the et si side you know like a I

guess a naive approach would be like well right we're gonna build you know we're gonna build a parallel things with Ihram right we're gonna have our own conferences and our own things and our own everything but it it make sense like so I think the answer to how how that's going to help is talks like this so what you've had through 2019 specifically but it did start a little bit in 2018 was having an ethereal classic talk at an aetherium event became socially acceptable right prior to that it's like no don't let them in demons they're trying to fight us you know and that really isn't the

case so I think the answer is is really you know by the et Cie is part of the same ecosystem we're part of the same community and it isn't her it isn't a one or the other kind of proposition that really e.t.c and f2 are you know that they're quite you know complementary that the different property know that they are that they're different flavors are the same thing in the same way as all of these enterprise if they're in these cases you know they they are they're all useful and I think ultimately the reason for that is that the whole of the blockchain ecosystem the most key piece to that to my mind is

trust minimization right that's the theme across everything and the the reason and that's useful is because of humans and how humans work and that that trust minimization has got this marvelous characteristic of being able to transform zero-sum games into positive sum games and that is like the the kernel of genius which gives us a potential to build you know a better world of better forms of collaboration and that that characteristic is there at every micro and macro level obviously like you know a worldwide consensus on something you know that's like the the

big massive bang but that same pattern you need that within any and every grouping of humans because humans don't trust other humans so there are many many aetherium flavors that will apply across all of those so that's really my answer is is is we don't need a separate thing [Applause]