Core dev updates, Privacy is not a crime and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #773 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the Del refuel where recap latest news theum ecosystem I'm your host and the 27th of May 2024 all right everyone let's get into it so a lot to get through today I am going to try and catch up on uh the biggest things I guess over the last couple of weeks that I missed and talk about them uh there were a lot of suggestions in the daily way Discord Channel as well of things to talk about so I'm going to cover all of that this episode will probably go longer than 30 minutes again uh but I think this will be the last one where I cover kind of pre news you know older news I guess it's only two weeks old but still old news uh but tomorrow I'll be kind of going back to the regularly scheduled kind of 24-hour news coverage

instead of just doing coverage from you know two weeks ago because I know that I wasn't around but I want to cover it because I think it's important but it's also really old news when it comes to crypto I mean weak old news is like very very old right but I'm going to cover all of that but before I dive into that I do want to just quickly uh note for you guys that there'll be no refuels On th th and Friday this week I know I just got back but unfortunately I have a medical procedure on Thursday I'm going to be in hospital for a day it's nothing serious but I am not going to be able to do the refuel it's a recovery time of a few days there so I'm I'm doing that on Thursday going to be in the hospital till Friday basically and I don't think

I'm going to be able to do one on on Friday either so I'll be back next Monday but there'll be episodes obviously tomorrow being Tuesday and Wednesday and today you're listening to it but there'll be no refills on Thursday or Friday so very sorry about that guys I know I as I said I just got back but unfortunately uh that's that's kind of how the timing lined up there but now that that's out of the way let's dive into some of the news so first up I want to talk about core Dev related stuff so obviously there has been a lot of movement on the pectra upgrade over the last few weeks for those of you who have seen this on Twitter a lot of the CBS have been tweeting about it I know there was a little back and forth about this as well on Twitter while I was away

a little bit of drama but I don't want to really focus on that because I feel like that just takes away from all the good that's been happening so essentially it seems like Petra is not going to ship by the end of this year I think I speculated on this like maybe even a couple months ago a few months ago where I said that it's a tall order to ship Petra by the end of this year given that there are a bunch of things going in that require you know quite a bit of work and also pectra is a pretty broad upgrade generally now Georgio here from the Paradigm uh Team who's working on WTH put together some of his own thoughts on this recently where he said some more upto-date thoughts on the hard Fork Fork which is Petra ship Petra by end of q1 2025 include Pier for rollups

to scale and include EF for improving the evm on both L1 and L2 and there's a longer document that was linked uh here which I'll link in the YouTube description below but there is a little bit of back and forth about this right now I think that there was the idea entertained that we could split pectra up into two little hard Fork so that we would have one by the end of this year and one early next year but personally from the out looking in I don't think that would actually work I feel like that would add just more overhead it would add more kind of complexity to everything it would just add more uh I guess like work to do rather than just doing it in q1 I don't think anyone's actually clamoring right now for any upgrade to go alive obviously with chapella it was pretty critical because

it enabled staking withdrawals and obviously denum was pretty critical as well because of 4844 but right now blobs aren't at capacity so pias is awesome I've talked about pias before about how it's going to enable rollups to scale even greater than what they are right now uh but that's the data side right now the main bottleneck for rollups is still on the computation or the execution side which is the L2 or rollup uh they have to deal with that it's not got to do with L1 L1 is really just data right and blobs as I said are not at capacity yet so we're not really getting the push that we had in the past for upgrade so I do think that we can wait until q1 or you know to 2025 to ship Petra now of course uh pias and other kind of related updates aren't the only

things that are going to be going into Petra there's a broad spectrum of things including my favorite Max EB uh but again I feel like we can wait for these things I feel like those things aren't critical I feel like it's not worth kind of adding more overhead it's not worth adding more risk it's not worth adding more work uh for the core developers just to ship this thing by end of year I feel like shipping it early next year is just fine there but there are ongoing conversations around that in terms of timelines but if I had to put money on it I would definitely say that it happens in q1 of next year it being Petra rather than later this year so there was a lot kind of happening on that those conversations and they'll continue to evolve on the core dev's calls now of course Tim boo had a thread

recently um covering the latest core Dev call and I wanted to kind of just drill into into this tweet here where essentially there was a devet that was launched uh while I was away so this is Dev Net Zero of pectra and all clients managed to join the network but given the uncertainty around 3074 not much testing of that EIP has been done that's another thing that I missed covering as well it seems like EIP 3075 was initially included in in Petra but it's kind of on the fence now and this is the account abstraction EIP because I think vital proposed another EIP I think it was 7,000 and something I can't remember the the exact number off the top of my head I saw it somewhere um but yeah he proposed that as a I believe a replacement or at least it goes

alongside 3074 to take away uh the risks that were associated with 3074 I have to dig deeper into that I haven't had time there's just been so much to catch up on uh but it's great to see that we have a devet going as you guys know the typical process is Dev Nets test Nets and Main net and then in between all of that is Shadow Fox of main net of course and that's all happening as it usually does which is great to see uh going on there but what's really exciting actually outside of the devet being live is the fact that pias is probably going to make it into uh into Petra now just a Refresh on on what pias is essentially it allows us to scale blobs up even further because uh it enables the use of I guess what would produ Ally being known as

sharding where essentially only a subset of nodes have to have a subset of data so Das being data availability sampling uh and this I believe is like a it's like a Proto or I guess like a yeah prototype it's probably the good word prototype version of like full dank sharting full data availability sampling um and and data availability sharting generally there so p is very exciting but as I said before because we're not at capacity with blobs yet there's no one clamoring at the door but that could change very quickly I mean we're going into the next leg of the bull market I believe obviously with the eth ETFs being approved the ethereum ecosystem is heading up again ler 2's continue to grow they're at alltime high activity and all-time high tvl and all that good stuff there but we still have time right

now obviously because blobs aren't our capacity but that could change very quickly so I'm very glad to see that pias is is being worked on kind of uh there and potentially could make it into Petra alongside the other great earps that I've talked about in the past but you can go give Tim Boo's threat a read for yourself to to check out everything that was going on there as I said I'm still catching up on all the cev stuff that I miss cuz there was a lot of movement happening so I did want to touch on something that was related to Petra but basically goes beyond that so the ethereum L1 client research testing and devops teams gathered at a weeklong interoperability event or an offsite which focused on Petra pias and veral and Tim said here we also hosted a first of its kind Community event for African

Builders and here's a full recap so this is great I mean not only did they get together in a place where I guess like they haven't gone before or at least they haven't been kind of um very active before in Africa but they've also uh gotten together to really nut out the details of the next two years worth of ethereum upgrades here because as you guys know verle trees looks like it will be or verle generally looks like it will be as part of the next upgrade after pectra hopefully I mean there's a lot of work happening there you guys know that the best place to keep up with that is at verle doino which I'll link in the YouTube description below for uh for you I'll just uh bring it up here on my screen as well uh but at this interoperability event as I said they

worked on not only veral but pias and launch pectra devet zero as well as a bunch of other stuff I'm sure I mean look at the this this picture here just the collection of the biggest gigar brains within the ethereum ecosystem you know not all of the core devs and researchers but a lot of them there uh and it's great to see them all getting together to nut these things out because the last time they well not the last time they do this but every time they do this things seem to progress really really quickly on some of the I guess critical things within the ethereum ecosystem I remember when they did this for launching the proof of stake Beacon change so this is way back in like 2019 2020 they were doing a lot of these offside events because launching that in of itself was a huge deal and then

obviously with the merge they did more events around that too but there are always critical things that need to be worked on here and I think that for the next a couple of years obviously the most critical things have got to do with on layer one have got to do with ethereum scalability and making sure that roll up can continue to scale as they have been but on top of that also allowing for more stability and more reliability of the chain with things like the vericle upgrade statelessness State expiry uh and also tackling me so there's a lot of work still left to do you guys know about balic ethereum road map that is still being executed on that has not really changed in any kind of fashion from what I've seen yes like like technical details of each thing will change but the general road map is

that essentially and those are the things that are being executed on there and those are the things that are being worked on there and I believe not probably not all of the people in this picture but I would say that most of them are recipients of the protocol Guild funds as well so just great to see these people being rewarded for this work now because traditionally in the past they were rewarded for it but uh in different ways where essentially there wasn't a central kind of I guess like uh a public goods funding source for them it was more that they were part of a team and they' rais money from somewhere or they get acquired by another team or they'd be funded by another team or they' rely on donations you know and so on and so forth or they'll just be self-funded in other ways so I'm glad

that they have something in the the protocol Guild there but you can go check out this blog post recap that Tim put out I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so but yeah I mean as I said guys a lot of stuff happened on the core devs front I will definitely uh keep up to date with it and and kind of relay that to you guys uh but I think that uh I mean the tldd is really just progress is is continuing on the Petra upgrade looks like that will ship in q1 2025 instead of the end of this year a lot of lot of progress is is being made on things outside of picture as well such as veral trees and things got to do with meev as well I've always being worked on uh but yeah they're not slowing down really I

mean it it's always kind of funny when I see some of the fud around especially like the fud that happened while I was away right while I was on my break where people were saying that or ethereum is washed ethereum is cooked no one uses it no one cares about it blah blah blah and and I I saw those comments and I'm like like that doesn't even it's it's not even fud it's like just straight outright lies like it doesn't even make any sense when you match up with reality the reality is is that the core development and core research ecosystem of ethereum has never been in a better place ever like I I know I say that from you know sometimes like every couple of months or something but it just keeps getting better not only are they extremely well funded now via the

protocol Guild and other efforts but they're also a well olded machine at this point and they're also executing on a well-defined road map so those three things alone I mean there's plenty of other stuff that goes into it but those three things alone are enabling a global coordination of people uh to essentially execute on one of the most ambitious technical road maps in the world at least that's what I believe uh and in doing it all in public as well because as I've said before the reason why the ethereum ecosystem gets so much hate is because it does everything in public like absolutely everything happens in public the co cev calls and research happens in public all the conversations happen in public especially on Twitter and other places there the Discord channels are all public very rarely are things happening in private and if they are it's probably

just DMS between different people talking about things they're going to talk they're talking about in public anyway right so it's all happening publicly whereas if you're working at a traditional web 2 company such as like a big Web Two company such as apple or Microsoft or so on and so forth you're not working in the public right you're working in a very kind of private environment where everything is locked down you have code names for everything because you don't want things to leak all of your latest product stuff in R&D is like many many years out but no one knows what's happening because of the fact that you haven't publicly announced it yet hasn't gone through your PR machine whereas in ethereum there's no filter it's basically all out there it's all out in the open and it's all out for everyone to criticize everyone to see

and that's exactly why these things happen whereas if you were seeing the internal I guess like development and research of what goes on at these big tech companies it would be the same thing and on top of that as well the cool thing at least I think but also I guess like can lead to negative uh negative externalities is that anyone can have a say when it comes to ethereum development like you just have to prove your Merit you don't you essentially need to prove you know what you're talking about to start with right but anyone can have a say anyone can get involved with it and there's been countless examples of this over the years of people just coming out of nowhere really smart people and making a difference within the ethereum core protocol uh and beyond that as well so just wanted to add that note there to

dispel some of the fud that i' been seeing flying around uh while I was on break and know you know as I said to you guys I went back and checked a bunch of that stuff and it was just pointless guys I'm L I'm very glad that I didn't have to be exposed to any of that because it had literally no bearing on anything I mean I mean during all of that eth was what $3,000 the ethereum ecosystem well I guess like the ethereum network and the layer 2s we still thriving and now uh what a couple of weeks later eth is at almost $4,000 the eth ETFs are happening suddenly everyone's bullish on eth just because e sorry ethereum just because eth went up when we all know the reality here guys so yeah just figured I'd um I'd kind of let you guys know my thoughts on that

one there all right moving on from core Dev stuff into another big announcement that happened and it happened actually shortly after I took my break and that was the igen foundation launched the igen token now you guys know I'm an investor angel investor in Anan uh in Anan layer I am not an adviser to Igan ler some people are saying that I am which was weird I'm not an adviser to Igan I know that there were a bunch of people like the bankless guys that are and maybe people thought that I was as well uh no I'm an angel investor but really when it comes to I guess all the same all the GU all the all the similar things that go into each of those I think advisor Ang I mean I have exposure to it right I have I have private exposure to it which

I think is basically the same thing but yeah I just wanted to clarify that bit there but I also wanted to put that out there because you guys know I like being transparent um but I have a lot of thoughts about this not particularly about the token itself or anything like that but more so with the reactions to the Token so first thing I'll start off with is that when it comes to the Token itself uh they have a new design around the token that a lot of you guys have read you know they're not just putting this out there as a useless governance token it is also meant to act as a utility token for the igen layer ecosystem and the way they're doing that is uh through something called a subjectivity uh workflow token I believe there's some buzzword in there that they

used but essentially this is probably one of the most interesting token designs I've seen in quite a while and what I got really upset about because you guys know I took my Twitter break on May 6th so from April 30th when when this was announced till May 6 which was about a week I saw the reactions to this and I was reading them on Twitter what really upset me is that people always complain about the tokens or most of the tokens being useless right there are useless governance tokens they do nothing and then aan L comes along or the igen foundation comes along and says hey we have this igen token yes okay it is a governance token but hey it can do so much more than governance and here's what it can do and then people all over it it's like okay like I understand

being critical of it I understand giving constructive feedback to the team I understand maybe you don't think it's a good idea but hey we should be encouraging teams to do this because if we don't then essentially teams are not going to want to keep doing this they're not going to want to keep experimenting they're just going to launch this useless governance token they're going to be fine with it because it's their exit you know uh and their VCS are going to be fine with it because they got in really early so what ends up happening is that the ecosystem is just far worse off for it at least in Igan Lay's case they came up with this new token design which I thought was quite interesting now of course I'm not going to dive really deeply into the token design because I'm sure it's going to change

over time here but yeah that was one kind of thing that I saw that I really wanted to to touch on there now with regards to a few other things on this the other thing that I think that people wanted me to talk about was the conflicts of interest between the advisers to Igan L the ones that have been publicly revealed since the token went live and the ethereum core protocol so for those of you who don't know Justin Drake and Dan crra feice two of the most well-known ethereum core researchers have joined as advisers to igen layer and they are getting a substantial amount of igen tokens uh that's these These are um these are their words not mine uh for being an adviser to Anan L now of course this I guess like stirred up the hive as you as

you can say right for a number of different reasons obviously the biggest reason is that people strongly believe that this is a massive conflict of interest since that uh since um Justin and Dan cred both have huge voices within the ethereum court protocol itself and you know what I don't necessarily disagree with that but I do want to add my kind of take here on why I don't necessarily think it is a big issue and I don't necessarily think that people looking at what a conflict of interest is in the right frame of thinking here so when it comes to conflicts of interest generally I think that actions speak for themselves right so if you say that someone has a conflict of interest and they're saying something that they would only say because they're getting paid to say it

or they have a bag in saying it that's that's pretty obvious right we see the VCS do this all the time you go on Twitter and you see a VC Shilling something you're like okay well that VC obviously is invested in that and they won't shield things that they're not invested in right they won't talk about things that they're not invested in it's very obvious that they have a conflict of interest there where essentially they're conflicted where they have they want to pump their own bags and they don't want to pump the other bags that are competing with them and we see this all the time like I'm sure you guys have seen this I don't have to elaborate on that because it's it's quite obvious here so in the same kind of line of thinking if Justin Drake or danrad were to act like that towards Anan Leia now

that they've joined as advisers where they were compromising the etherum core protocol doing things within the ethereum core protocol research SP that would be seen as a conflict interest where they're pushing IG layer's interest rather than the ethereum core protocol's interest then that would be quite obvious I think because people are very sensitive to this especially within the core uh developing environment because who do you think pays attention to core development stuff it's really the people who are the most involved with the ethereum ecosystem and the most uh sensitive to anything negative happening within the ethereum ecosystem like look how quickly people reacted to the U proposal to change the issuance of e of of ethereum recently to uh deal with um too much eth being staked like that was with in like a day basically of it of it being posted of the um research

post being put out there and the researchers saying hey we want to get this included in imp pectra you know the hive just went nuts over it and yeah I've talked about this in in the past and I said that I think that there was an overreaction of the immune system here but it's still shed light on it and it still uh kind of sounded the alarm Bells so I think that the same thing would happen here if for example Justin or D crra was to start pushing things in ethereum core development that would uh essentially compromise the core protocol uh in or at least do something in the core protocol that would favor igen L specifically I think that would be quite obvious because as I mentioned before everything within the ethereum ecosystem when it comes to the core protocol is done is done out in the open it's all

open source it's all publicly documented there um but also on top of that conflicts of interests can come from anywhere it doesn't have to come from just monetary conflicts of interest I would argue that the ideological and social conflicts of interest are more powerful than the monetary ones especially for people like Justin and danrad which yes okay they care about money I'm not going to speak for them but like obviously they care about money just like everyone else does but I do think that the that people like Justin and danrad are very ideologically I guess like motivated more so than monetarily motivated um and I think that a good example of this is that Justin Drake gets criticized all the time for the ultrasound money meme people say oh he only came up with that

to pump his eth bags and the thing is is that like you can't prove that he didn't come up with that to pump pump his eth bags but there's nothing wrong with that either like if you invested in something and you're invested your whole life's invested in it like why wouldn't you want to get more attention on it why wouldn't you want to promote the I guess positives of that thing that's what I do with ethereum as well it's what I do with eth like I'm heavily invested in eth obviously and so is um everyone else in the ethereum ecosystem and we want to see eth do well for a number of different reasons not just for our own personal wealth but also for the fact that we understand that eth number go up is very good for the ethereum ecosystem it brings more attention in it brings

more developers in brings more users in and really there's nothing else better out there in terms of marketing ethereum so you know even though Justin gets criticized for this he I I believe he didn't just do it to pump his bags or anything like that I believe that he came up with the meme because of the fact that he wanted to uh Market or advertise or essentially get bring more attention to ethereum's monetary policy which he and I also believe this is the best in the in the crypto ecosystem I I believe ethereums is the best and most sustainable Monet policy that we have and Ultras sound money you know is a bit of a meme to poke fun at Bitcoin is for saying that Bitcoin sound money and so on and so forth but still that is something that people would criticize Justin for and say that he has a

conflict here he pushes ultrasound money because he just wants to pump his eth bags right so like I I think to summarize what I'm saying here is that conflict conflicts of interest are are very hard generally U because they're not just monetary they're also ideological stuff and social stuff you know think about all the incentives uh all the different incentives that play in the personal relation ships between the core developers and researchers I'm sure there are certain things that certain core developers and researchers won't say to each other because they're friends right they're not going to be as brutally honest as someone else would be because they have a direct personal relationship with that person and I think when you take that lens I think that as I said is more powerful than the monetary stuff because at the end of the day these core developers and

researchers they're humans as well they're directly affected by their personal relationships directly affected by uh you know the monetary incentives and direct ly affected by their ideological incentives and that all has to come together to be to push forward the ethereum ecosystem so when it comes to conflict of interest specifically with with Igan ler with Justin Drake and Dan crra and whoever else I don't know if there's others out there but I do know that there's those two there's the bankless guys but obviously um David and Ryan are core developers there's me as an investor and there are a lot of investors in Igan Lair as well uh but I think that you can be invested in something while also being critical of it and I think that Justin explained this in tweet and so did danra they both basically said that they joined based on

a bunch of conditions and the conditions were essentially that they wouldn't obviously favor igen layer uh if they feel felt like at any time Anan L was doing things that would harm the ethereum protocol they would leave as advisors I mean you can go read their tweets for yourself it's it's all it's all kind of written there but I think that people just had this visual reaction where they said oh look how easy it is to pay off the ethereum core developers uh you know if you're a big project which I think is the the wrong take here I think that because everything is out in the open and done uh and done publicly I think that we would be very easily be able to spot if anything was being pushed by Justin and Dan crad to directly benefit Igan layer especially at the expense of not only

ethereum the ethereum core protocol but other projects building on ethereum uh AKA to compromise ethereum's credible neutrality but at the same time I do think that Justin and J Daner had have enough kind of I guess personal Integrity not to do that either I mean like it's also reputational too like how much is their reputation in the ecosystem worth versus pushing forward something that may or may not affect the value of the igen token right because at the end of the day there are certain tokens that don't perform well even though they have a large market share look at the Lio token for example has a huge market share the aluro token is one of the worst performing tokens uh it's just basically sideways because of the I mean I've mentioned this before because of the the um the overhang from the early investors but also people just

don't want to buy it for some reason I'm not going to speculate on why but just because you do something that if it's a protocol doesn't mean that that will drive uh value to the Token as well so really when you kind of put out the game theory on this it doesn't really make much sense from that perspective there uh and I guess like lastly what I wanted to mention here as well is that while I was thinking about all of this you know this is exactly why the most functional and free nations in the world have checks and balances on power structures because you can't trust anyone really I mean you can't build a system based on on on just trusting one person right or just trusting one organization you have to have checks and balances on power that's why uh democracy works I mean it

is the least worse system but it works to an extent it works better than any any of the other systems we have out there right or the ones that we've tried in the past um and it it works because it has checks and balances on Power and it also is uh is is up to the people a lot of the time right to in in in Fair democracies I mean there are some out there that aren't as Fair as others I don't want to go into the whole politics of it all but of course you have this kind of thing where essentially there are these checks and balances in place and I think within the ethereum EOS system we do have that but they're less formal they're not formal checks and balances where you have like the house the Senate the judicial branch you know

the the president uh so on and so forth you have essentially a flat organization where there are no leaders uh there are no there are no people who basically can dictate I shouldn't say there's no leaders there's no dictators that can say what goes on it's really just completely open to anyone to come in have a say you know definitely people uh people like Justin and Dan crab would have you know way way more weight behind their words than someone else just new coming in but that's earned over time over many many years of working within the ethereum core protocol that reputation is earned and hey that reputation can be destroyed overnight if they were to do something that was to compromise the ethereum core protocol at the benefit of uh their advisor bags whether that be Igan lay or something else out there uh there so yeah anyway

um I just wanted to cover that because I know people were interested in my take on the conflicts of interest when it came to the igen token here uh but yeah I think that's everything I'll say on igen layer now before I jump into the rest of the Stu people told me to to speak about actually this is one of the things that people told me to speak about and I completely missed this while I was on break so you guys probably know this by now but Alexa perv one of the co-founders of tornado cash was found guilty of laundering $1.2 billion worth of crypto and has been sentenced to more than 5 years behind bars now we all know this is we all know that the only reason that he was prosecuted was to make an example out of him we all know that that was this was done as a

chilling effect on uh people building privacy tools essentially what the Netherlands uh government is saying here and by extension probably even like other governments around the world is that if you build privacy tools uh and if it it all is being used uh for money laundering which there are some Choice quotes in here that imply that all it's used for is money laundering then you're going to go to jail that's the message that they want to send and hey that's a pretty effective message because no one wants to go to jail especially not for writing open source code and not for putting uh you know tools out there that can be used for both good and bad but some of the quotes in this wi article were kind kind of wild to me so one of them and I believe this is from the judge where they said uh he being alexe

chose to look away from the abuse and did not take any responsibility and the reason why the judge said this is because uh the judge continues and says perv made choices writing the code deploying the code adding features to the ecosystem Choice after Choice all the while he knew that criminal money was entering his system there's a lot to unpack in just that statement there but essentially what the judge is saying oh not maybe not the judge I think this was the prosecutor's argument sorry not the judge I'm maybe misquoting here but either the judge or the prosecutor was kind of saying this year was that they they essentially put forward the argument which they won on obviously that alexe was directly involved uh with this money laundering because of the fact that he allowed it to happen on

quote unquote his platform or essentially it was not his platform once tornado cash was deployed to the ethereum blockchain uh they were no longer in control of it it's a decentralized protocol on ethereum but because the torado cash devs controlled the front end because they kept adding features to it because they had so much of the token the essentially the court saw that okay well they are materially involved with this protocol this protocol is um laundering money so Ergo this person is guilty that was really essentially what it boiled down to now you can apply this logic to anything really imagine if you applied the same argument to someone and I'm going to use an obvious example here but someone that sells uh you know firearms in in the US

let's let's just use an easy example here where essentially you could say that well this person knew that some of his customers might be using these Firearms to do things that are illegal but he still sold them to these people and he still marketed them to these people and he still increased his business and used the profits and reinvest in his business to grow his business see what I'm where I'm going with this you can use the same arguments here for firearms which can be used for good and bad uh to and you can and you can use the same arguments that we used in in the tornado cache case here against someone selling firearms and that's just the really obvious example there are so many other examples out there of this guys what about people who sell uh all the um maybe not people who

sell this but like all of the medications that are sold to people who abuse them right like what about all the stuff that's legally sold to people that abuse them I mean in a lot of places now weed is being legalized and there's honestly weed is is is better than alcohol for you not to say that it's good for you but alcohol is much more damaging for you and alcohol is maybe the better example here but just as as a recent example people can abuse weed as well right people can abuse it to the point where it has very detrimental health effects for them but hey we don't go after the the weed deals and say hey you you know you're selling to these people who are addicts I'm going to blame you for it I'm going to arrest you for it same as we don't go after people who

sell alcohol and and um you know dispensary at dispensaries for weed but like also shops that sell alcohol we don't say okay we're going to blame you and we're going to go after you because uh some people abuse alcohol and are alcoholics so that that's where I'm going with this kind of line of argument here because that's exactly what it reads like to me when I read these quotes is that you can apply this to to anything um and and especially when it comes to things that are you know that that are illegal obviously like obviously when it comes to people being addicts to weed or alcohol that's that's not illegal right but the Firearms example is the the proper one here I think and is the one the one example where essentially if you buy a firearm completely legally from a shop owner and you go and kill someone

with it the shop owner is not arrested and prosecuted for you killing someone with it they are not involved in that case at all besides basically giving you details over to anyone that's looking into the murder because obviously they'll you know they'll get the firearm they'll know that it was bought from your store you'll give them the details and Away you go you're not going to get arrested for selling that gun right whereas This Tornado cach developer Alexa and and other were arrested for people using their protocol that they deployed for I guess quote unquote nefarious purposes right or quote unquote a legal purpose purposes and again that was not the fault of of Alexa here not the fault of other tornado cach developers so that's my general take on that but again guys this goes back to what I've been saying for probably years

now uh governments don't like Financial privacy that's one of the the number one things they hate and they're not going to let us have it easily their warrantless surveillance regime was not built on uh I guess like self custody was not built on people um being able to use their own uh use their money privately especially when a lot of the governments around the world are trying to phase out cash when you're reintroducing privacy back into the financial system via crypto and Via things like tornado cach uh they get very upset because they don't know what to do they don't know how to regulate it there's no existing laws for this so they use blunt Hammer essentially they look at this and like okay we're going to try and stamp this out in any way that we can and essentially the best way to stamp it out or at least the most

effective way I think is by uh through fear and that's exactly what they're doing here they're just trying to scare off people from building privacy tools and trying to neuter the Privacy ecosystem I don't think they're going to succeed because torado cash is still live on the network yes it has a lot more usage now yes it is illegal for US citizens and persons to use it but at the end of the day the criminals that they're trying to stop from using it are still going to keep using it and they might even just deploy their own uh I I guess like instances of tornado cash or instances instances of privacy protocols so really I don't think it actually helps anything here and I really feel sorry for alexe that he's been sentenced to jail for more than 5 years uh that's a outcome that's really really

shitty outcome but honestly guys I thought this was going to be the outcome all along I don't I didn't think he was going to get away with no jail time on this because as I said governments absolutely hate Financial privacy more than anything for a number of different reasons you know uh which is just shitty for the individual it's shitty for personal freedoms but at the end of the day they hat it enough to essentially make examples out of people and make examples out of people in a really extreme uh way here and he is and alexe is the sacrificial lamb here he's basically the uh example that's being um made right now but there's probably going to be others in the future as well so we have to keep fighting we have to keep fighting for uh Financial privacy but I think the fight is going to be

have to done be done probably anonymously you can't really tie your your identity to these protocols if you're building them because the message is out there that hey you will be found and arrested and prosecuted uh for building these tools even if you have no control over them which is as I said a really really crappy outcome but it is what it is unfortunately there all right so let's move on to some of the stuff that uh I was I said in the Discord channel for me to cover so mwj had a bunch of stuff that they wanted me to cover and I'm just going to read through the list here for you guys uh because I I I think I want to cover a bunch of these things in in a lot of detail here so essentially uh the first thing you wanted me to do was to keep

the mental health discussions going because he really appreciates the discussions and the times that I've discussed it with Eric Connor as well and I agree with that I think that my break that I took was very very therapeutic honestly and was probably like the best kind of thing I've done in crypto for a very long time uh because of the fact that it recharged me it essentially allowed me to discover that there's more to life than crypto again because I had forgotten about that because I had spent so long in crypto and I think that you have to do it cold turkey where essentially you have to kind of not if you want to take a proper break you have to take a proper break you can't just be like okay well I only check Twitter and Discord like two times a day no I think that a proper like

weeklong break where you don't do anything crypto related and you just do completely different things uh is the way to go if you really are serious about taking a break and I would also recommend taking up something that you don't normally do and starting a new habit starting a new routine so for me on my break the two biggest things I I did was I changed my sleeping pattern so you guys know I used to go to bed at 3:00 a.m. wake up at 11:00 a.m. now I go to bed at 1:00 a.m. wake up at 9:00 a.m. I do want to change that to 12:00 a.m. and get up at 8:00 a.m. just to have a normal kind of sleeping pattern it is a lot easier generally because everyone else that I know in my real life works on those hours doesn't work on my weird

hours right uh and it's Al just also just healthier in general especially in the uh winter months and the colder months in Melbourne the sun goes down pretty early I think like 5:00 p.m. or something 5:30 p.m. so I'd rather get more Daylight out of it uh and also um more Daylight out of my day and also I started bike riding as much as I can in the mornings uh and that was really really good as well exercise obviously getting out of the house so really enjoyed doing all of that but I will keep up the mental health discussions we will make sure that uh people talk about it people aren't afraid to talk about it I think at the end of the day there is too much of a stigma around mental health generally not just within crypto but just generally in life people like

to look at it and think that it's a weakness and that they don't want to talk about it because it's a weakness and they shouldn't be feeling this way and why they feeling this way their life is so good so on and so forth but it it's not about that what it's about is essentially having balance and stability in your in in your kind of personal life in your mind both in you know mentally and also physically obviously physically has a lot to do with it too and given that we're in crypto a lot of us aren't as physical as we should be because we're in front of computers or in front of screens all day so I think that making sure that you're exercising regularly and regularly is always thrown out there as this turn that people are supposed to just understand I I think

that you need to do at least an hour of exercise a day I know that may not be possible for people so half an hour is probably good enough for those who this is not possible for but I think you need to do at least an hour a day of of physical exercise and and at least 30 minutes of that or half of that should be relatively intense exercise just to get the blood flowing just to keep up being fit also doing like stretching routines uh meditating as well all these things that are just keeping you healthy both physically and mentally are a must and then of course also eating healthy is I think probably above that above all else because a lot of people don't don't seem to understand maybe because they aren't taught this as they grow up or they forget it and they fall into bad

habits that like I know it's cliche to say this but you are what you eat you know you are what you put into your body and there are numerous very I guess like strong studies out there that show that your gut and your mind have a direct link to each other so if you're putting food into your body you're going to feel like it's going to exacerbate the shitty moods that you may already be in it's going to cause things like a depression to be more for you to suffer from depression more likely than you otherwise would have so just eating healthy getting enough protein getting enough greens right and exercising regularly it it's not a hard thing to do but you have to get yourself into those habits in order to do that so yeah anyway I I'll leave that one at that but

I will keep talking about this as as time goes on uh there so the next question or the next thing that um mwj e wanted me to cover was what I thought about staked eth being a security uh and there's obviously different flavors of staked eth so what's going to happen with it all so staked eth is a tricky one because the SEC as we know is not a good regulator and I don't know what their actual view of this is it seems like they view any staking as a security which is I think wrong because as you guys know the different flavors of staking include pure solo staking where essentially you run all your own Hardware you run you manage all the software yourself it's all of your own eth so how can that be a secur ities

contract or an investment contract there is no one else doing the work it's it's just you doing the work yourself you're not relying on anyone else to run the hardware and software for you you're not you're not taking in any other eth from outside investors it's all just your own so I would I would argue that it's very very difficult to classify or at least impossible to classify solo staking true solo staking as a security or an investment contract it just doesn't meet any prongs of the Howie test really but I have discussed in the past how something like quein base staking definitely meets at least three out of four of the prongs of of the hoe test and I've covered this on a previous episode I don't know which episode it was but you guys probably remember it I went into detail about this and I played

Devil's Advocate essentially if I was the lawyer on the SEC side this is the arguments that I would use and I think it's going to be difficult for coinbase to win that part of their case I think that that the may not end up getting coinbase on the asset side of things so basically arguing that they trade unregistered Securities but I do think it's going to be very difficult for uh coinbase to win the staking portion of the case I do think the SEC could win uh on on that part it's not just coinbase it's binance and Kraken as well I mean Kraken already folded on that it's not even just Kraken as well Kraken literally folded on that because these staking operations that are run by coinbase Kraken binance whoever they very much do look like a security or an

investment contract because of the fact that it's rely I mean relying on the efforts of others is only one of the prongs of the of the of the how test but essentially that would that would be the argument that was made by the SEC it's like you're r on the efforts of others there is an investment of money which I think is the weakest prong um there is an expectation of profit obviously via the yield but the yield doesn't come from coinbase it comes from the ethereum protocol but again you could argue that the yield actually does come from coinbase because it comes from coinbase's efforts in running the hardware and software so you see how I'm going with this it's a very murky discussion but then that opens up to the discussion around other prot other staking flavors out there such as staking pools like Rocka pool uh like

newer ones like ethery um like lighter obviously like is that a security is that a transaction is that an investment contract and and I actually don't think that they are and I don't think the SEC would have any luck going after those especially because a lot of them aren't even based in the US I mean Lio itself I think has a foundation but outside of that the Lio Dow doesn't have a jurisdiction that it's based in it's a dow right and the LI n operators most of the actually exist outside of the US so I think that ler would be fine Rocka pool would probably be even more fine because of the fact that Rocka pool is thousands of individual not operators uh the Rocka pool team operates a subset of those and yes they develop the software for Rocka pool but they aren't running

people's validators for them they aren't running the uh the kind of hardware and software for them they're all part of like this I guess uh autonomous pool obviously rocket pool is a decentralized taking pool but there's like an autonomous pool there where people put eth in it gets mat with other eth and then validat get spun up by the note operators right and they run it so again very hard there but I think that the there's more than three flavors here but really I guess the summary here is that solo Stak pure solo staking true solo staking uh in my eyes impossible to deem that as an investment contract or as a security uh centralized exchange staking highly likely that the SEC could win on this and it's not just the SEC it's other reg Securities Regulators as well but highly likely they could win on that

just given the nature of the operation um and then the decentralized taking pools or even the the the relatively more centralized ones uh would be fine I think because they're open pools they're not run by any kind of central entity here they're run by different sets of node operators that are based in different sets of jurisdictions here so I think even on that front it should be fine but yeah I I really will don't have much confidence in centralized exchange staking operations being able to exist as non-securities in saying that though if it is a security it actually doesn't matter because as long as coinbase can eventually or even other exchanges out there can eventually secure a license to trade Securities which they should be

able to do but we know the SEC has been dragging their feet here but as long as coinbase could secure that license then it stands to reason that they should be able to still offer this staking product just in a different way because this there would be allowed to trade Securities on the platform right so there's a lot to be fleshed out here but essentially that that I think is is the Crux of it there um so essentially uh there's two other things that I want to get through uh sorry maybe three other things that I want to get through here before I move on to rh's uh request of what what he wanted me to cover here so this again comes from mwj eth where he said great call on doing into The Ether do you have thoughts on the language branding of The Ether versus ethereum

for non-technical mainstream contexts I wrote an article about this that you covered on the refu back in December what spe specific things do you visualize a fully mainstreamed ethereum technology world looks like that maybe maybe people haven't envisioned yet so this might be an unpopular opinion but I think the vast majority of the world is not really going to know what ethereum is and not just because we have like the L2 scaling road map or essentially users will know that they're using Bas or they're using arbitrum but they won't necessarily know that they're using ethereum under the hood I think ethereum existing as like backend technology is fine um I don't think people need to know what like I guess like what backend technology is powering the apps that they're using just like they don't have to know it in web too right like you

don't know what backend technology you're using on Twitter or on Facebook or on YouTube you can look into it and you can find out because these uh web 2 companies have like developer blogs but the vast majority of people aren't going to do that so they don't know that that's happening they just know that hey I go to YouTube I click on a video and wait and and I mean it I can adjust the volume right I can have subtitles on there I can adjust the quality that's all running uh you know code in the background but they don't need to know what that is they don't need to know what's powering that they just know that they can do that so the same is true for like mining an nft on bass no one needs to know that bass is secured by ethereum L1 and it's posting its data down to

ethereum L1 and it's it's it's it's it's it's running on fraud proof so to catch any bad guys doing anything bad on the network and no one needs to know any of that all they need to know is that hey I'm ined an nft uh maybe they don't even know that they're doing it on base right it's like ah I'm ined an nft it cost me nothing here we go sort of thing so from that perspective I think that the particularly branding for ethereum isn't too I guess um important for like the mainstream audience where it becomes important is The Branding around eth as an asset so I think ether's an asset doesn't have a central narrative and I think that's actually a good thing you know this gets discussed a lot on Twitter but I think this is a really good thing that ethereum or eth itself

doesn't have a central narrative because you can't shoot horn or can't you can't like put eth into a small little box that you can with Bitcoin you know Bitcoin is digital gold sure okay whatever but you can't be like ethereum is digital oil or ethereum is gas or ethereum sorry or I should say eth or eth is you know a story of value or eth is a commodity or eth is this e is that eth is all of that and more I mean eth is programmable money that's probably the best thing that we can call it programmable money because with programmable money you can have anything and then we're not even talking about the what the ethereum the network can do and what the ler twos can do and how that feeds into eth the asset right you can stake eth you can restake eat you

can use it as collateral so on and so use it as a store of value use it as money right there's so many different things you can do with eth that I think that you should we shouldn't be trying to create some Central narrative for eth as an a asset but in saying that now that eth has the uh ETFs right now that eth has a more I guess like um trafi uh player base uh kind of working within its ecosystem their marketing teams are going to come up with so many different narratives so many different stories around what ethereum is around what eth is that crypto Twitter would only dream of being able to come up with guys like these marketing teams I mean when it comes to an asset manager like black rock or really any other asset manager out there their number one goal is to

bring in AUM right it's to bring in money how do they do that they do that via Business Development sales and marketing right particularly sales and marketing which feeds into business development right and sales and Business Development are kind of hand inand as well there and okay well if that's what they need to do to bring in money well that's where they're going to invest the most amount of money so they're going to have their BD and sales teams going out to all of their clients and in whether it be one-onone or through email blast constantly telling them hey you need crypto exposure and hey we have BTC and eth and hey Bitcoin is this you know BTC is digital gold it's a story of value hey and but eth is also that but it does all of this you know the ethereum network does this the ethereum network

allows for you know Finance at the speed of light hey we're actually doing tokenization on ethereum so now you can trade your other things with us much faster with lower fees and so on and so forth so they're going to have so much Shilling going on in the background you're not going to see most of it because it's going to be done in their private channels but that's going to bring in trillions of dollars into this asset class over the next 10 years and BDC and E won't be the only things that have atfs over the next 10 years but it it is going to bring in literally trillions of dollars guys because if only you know I this is on the low side of thing I think it's going to be more than this I think we're going to see crypto allocations go up to 5 to 10%

generally of a person's portfolio but let's say that it's at 1% and say that the total amount of money in the asset management sphere right now is and this is globally right but let's say right now within um sorry there's globally but I wanted to say it within the US I don't know what the actual number is here but let's just say it for argument sake is like I mean there's black rocket 10 trillion and then there's the others as well like Vanguard another maybe 10 trillion or less than there and then all the other ones let's just say it's like 40 trillion or something like that so 1% of $40 trillion is $400 billion right that's that's only 1% and I'm I'm I'm actually checking my mouth over here because I'm yeah 400 billion I knew that was right so $400 billion that's only 1% now let's imagine

that they up that to 5% so 5% of $40 trillion is $2 trillion guys like that's $2 trillion entering the ecosystem it's not going to happen all at once but over the next 5 10 years on top of all the other money or entering the ecosystem from everywhere else this is just the ETFs that are going to bring this kind of money in here um and what do you think that it's going to do to the price of eth and BTC you know what do you think it's going to do to the price of other things that get ETFs and it's going to it's obviously going to rely on the way these things are weighted but I do think that a portfolio will eventually be 50/50 Ethan BTC I do think that eventually they'll be considered equal especially if their market caps close because a lot of the waiting tends

to be done based on a market cap uh kind of basis here so if Ethan BTC are very similar in market cap at some point then a 50/50 split would make a lot of sense whereas right now it would be more like a 730 split because of the market cap differences here but I do think we're going to get to that 50/50 split there so could you imagine a trillion dollars of fresh Capital going into eth over the next 5 years N I remind you each current market cap is less than half of that market cap right market cap we all know that you know $1 in equals more than $1 um addition to the market cap you have maybe a 10 or 20 x multiple on that so imagine if if a trillion dollars of fresh money comes in over the next 10 years that could be $2 trillion of

Market cap added to to eth you see where I'm going with this right you see how crazy this can get in 10 years time eth could very well be $100,000 plus as I've said before by the end of the decade it could be that maybe I'm getting too bullish maybe I'm getting too ahead of myself but these are the kind of numbers we're dealing with here so to go back to the original kind of statement here around ethereum and ether needing a you know a central narrative or a central visualization around what a mainstream ethereum technology will look like the mainstream Normy audience interacts with onchain stuff they'll be doing that at the l2s they probably won't know about ethereum but ethereum will be known within the circles where it matters in order for eth to be to remain a very strong store of value where it will

gradually go up over time I have zero doubts about that guys like I have never been more confident of anything in my life then I am and i' I've been this confident about eth for a very long time now that eth will continue to Trend up over time against USD and against other Fiat currencies and I also believe it will Trend up against BTC over time it'll take longer than people will like it to take uh you know maybe the flipping happens in 10 years instead of like 5 years or something like that I don't know I still believe that e is going to be worth more than BDC one day but these things tend to take time and I do believe that e is still going to be outperforming uh USD especially another Fat currencies in a really big way over over the coming uh

years to come there now last thing uh from mwj eth that I want to cover he just asked what's your favorite potato dish and the reason why he asked this was because Eric bolun one of the Bloomberg ETF guys called eth Small Potatoes once and it became a meme he later apologized for calling it small potatoes and I think he did that once the eth ETFs were approved or shortly before they were approved um but my favorite potato dish I mean I love potatoes like absolutely love them sweet potatoes whatever it is I love them but I'm kind of a Normy when it comes to potatoes I'm happy just chopping out a potato putting it in the air fryer with some oil uh with some olive oil and paprika for 20 minutes and then eating it like that with some Sriracha which is um for those of you who don't know a

spicy condiment um that's that's what I like that's how I like my potatoes there but anyway enough about my uh my uh interest in food uh last thing before I wrap up today's very long episode wow I've almost gone for an hour here RH asked me to cover eth Sydney now I didn't cover this because I went to eth Sydney uh and there were no refuels happening and then I went on my break so e Sydney was amazing honestly like it was a perfect way to kind of like uh start my break so to speak where I went there it was it was honestly crazy I went there I went straight into it there was so much happening there was pragma that happened and there was the hackathon there was so many side events I met up with so many people had so many conversations non-stop really I don't

know if I mentioned this on on one of my other episodes but there was a period of time where I was where I was at um eth pragma Sydney where I stood in the same spot for 8 hours straight because people kept coming up to me to talk to me it was packed there was so many people there uh people kept coming up to talk to me about everything ethereum and I literally didn't realize 8 hours had passed my friend came up to me and said you know you've been standing here for a very long time and I hadn't looked at my watch or anything or even my phone and I looked and I'm like oh wow and I worked out in my head I'm like wow I've actually stood in the same spot for 8 hours straight um because people were bringing me uh drinks and stuff too like

I people like oh do you want you want water I'm going to the bar or something I'm like yeah yeah sure sure and I didn't even have to move for that so I literally stood in the same spot for eight hours and of course I realized I had to pee at that point because I had just been so involved with talking with people that was the highlight for me honestly just given that how many people were just coming up and talking to me about ethereum I love it it was like a an 8 hour long daily gr refill episode essentially but yeah that was probably the highlight of the event for me but there was so many other cool things that happened a lot of great talks at pragma a lot of really cool projects built at the hackathon which I did uh retweet you

can probably find that somewhere on my Twitter there I I was a judge there as well got to meet all of the teams building they were all so passionate about what they were building guys like if anything I've always said this like I bet on the ethereum Builder Community it's just so so good I mean this was the first eth Global event in Sydney so it was relatively small compared to other places around the world because it's Sydney right it's Australia like people don't really want to travel here from Europe and the US and I mean I don't blame them because I know what it's like to travel to Europe from where I am it's a minimum 25-hour trip and a lot of jet lag right um so it was a lot of local a lot of the local community but still people from other places like Asia and

India as well and uh at least from what I saw uh but it was a really strong showing for the fact that Australia generally has a you know I mean it's a relatively small crypto Community because our population is like 25 million uh it's not that big of a of a country uh generally and most of those people aren't into crypto but yeah I know I I just wanted to to say that I had a really great time there it was really awesome everyone was in really High Spirits there was so much going on it was hard to keep up with there was so many people I talk to so much so many old friends that I caught up with as well I mean I had really long conversations with Kane from synthetics I love talking with him because he's an OG like myself we were just Reminiscing

on the good old days but what he's building with infinex and what him and his team are building with infinex is super interesting so if you haven't checked out infinex yet be sure to do so I'm not an advisor and investor in infinex I'm not Shilling it to you guys just because of that uh I just was talking to Kane for a long time about it and what they're doing with infinex uh is is awesome so I I highly recommend checking it out if you haven't yet but I think on that note that's going to be it for today's episode so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone