EB144 – Charles Hoskinson & Alex Chepurnoy: IOHK, Scorex And The Case For Ethereum Classic

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter Bitcoin is brought to you by The Ledger Nano s the hardware wallet which sets the new standard in security and usability get it today at Ledger wallet.com and use the code epicenter to receive 10% off your order and by Jax Jax is the userfriendly wallet that works across all your devices and handles both Bitcoin and ether go to jx. and embrace the future of cryptocurrency wallets hello and welcome to epicenter

Bitcoin the show which talks about the Technologies projects and startups driving decentralization and the global blockchain Revolution my name is Brian faan Crane and I'm M Roy today we are joined by Charles hoskinson and Alexander Chapo who are part of the company input output Hong Kong iohk we'll be talking about the company iohk one of the projects called scorex and uh since Charles hoskinson is now supporting ethereum classic we'll be trying to get a feel about what are the opportunities and challenges we in front of ethereum classic so before we begin let's have an introduction from both Charles and Alex starting with Charles so Charles tell us

a bit about your background hi I'm Charles hoskinson I'm the Chief Executive Officer of input output uh we're a service and a research company uh my background is in mathematics I studied analytic number Theory a long time ago briefly had a foray into cryptography and then somewhere along that sojourn I decided to go into the cryptocurrency space I've started three companies in victus Innovations I helped start ethereum and uh now I have input output and Alex a bit about your background I'm developer uh with unfinished PhD and uh I'm writing computer program science 12 so for right 20 years now and uh I used to be an XD core developer and I also was a

co-founder of smart.com and uh now I'm working on scorex in ihk research cool so let's start with ihk so what does the company exactly do Charles well after um doing bitshares and doing ethereum I I really wanted to start a company that wasn't a project but more of an actual company you see the the prior efforts were all about let's build a team of people and let's go raise some money and go build something and release it an open source protocol and I said it would be a lot of fun to actually do that full-time so actually let's create a company that's like a factory for cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency Technology um The Challenge behind running a company like that is is not just development there

turns out that on the academic side of things there's a lot of uncertainty on whether things are secure or how certain technology actually supposed to work so we set up both a service and a research company together so on the research side we have a very diverse large team of researchers a lot have phds in cryptography a lot of very skilled developers like Alex and others uh and uh basically that side of the organization focuses on first principles research so we do everything from develop new consensus algorithms to study new anonymity schemes to worrying about secure multiparty computation uh we also have actually a dedicated Center within our research team that wor about governance and basically how do you govern an open source project on the

service side we build cryptocurrencies for clients and this can be everything from something deployed on top of a chain so like an overlay protocol or an appcoin uh to a full stack cryptocurrency and we can set up everything we can kind of consult on how a crowd sell should look um talk about the long-term governance model uh and also what the code needs to look like um on the service side everything we do is functional so we're a hasal shop uh but we also like erlang and we found Cloud hasell not too long ago so now we don't even have to choose between the two we use cloud hasle and hasle together uh and we also really love formalisms so we're big fans of things like Isabelle and and other formal methods to actually prove that the code being WR is

correct very interesting and and so with your service projects you mentioned specifically crypto currencies uh do you guys also build the blockchain systems for for non-currency purposes you know we could and we've actually explored a lot of different ideas from cloud funding uh platforms to ways to incentivize certain things for example we're really interested in incentives for Network relay so we've had some conversations there um then there's also incentivizing Behavior like how do you incentivize voting and participation in a system that's an open topic and it's something we think a lot about um you know there's a lot of practical problems that would be really nice to solve like continuous real-time auditing using triple entry accounting

um we're also really curious about what a central bank cryptocurrency should look like there was a recent project that UCL and Bank of England did called RS coin uh where they kind of invented a cryptocurrency that would be a drop end replacement for conventional currencies and uh we're the first team to independently Implement that so if you take a look at our our GitHub repos you can see a full functional build of RS coin along with a lot of cool nyop stuff to make it uh Deployable with single script uh so these are the kinds of things that we do um but we're always open for interesting IDE and projects and that's one of the cool things about our company everything is open source and we try to collaborate with everybody and as a result uh we get a lot of ideas that are sent our way and we say wow if

only we had the resources or okay I don't care if we have the resources we're still going to go do that so what are some of the the projects you've built through that or some of the clients you've built for can you share anything about that we have um one major project that we're working on which will be released in December and we're still under NDA so it's gradually being being lifted so around September to October we'll probably make a a larger more prominent announcement but it's a multi-tiered cryptocurrency with a settlement control and an application domain uh and it's h going to be really cool it looks like it's going to be on proof of stake we actually have a a fully formalized proof of State coming out this month with security proofs and everything we started with the gkl 15 model and just worked our way from there

uh but that's one of our biggest projects that we work on but then we also work on smaller projects for example Alex is the director of scorex and in the interview we'll have a long conversation about uh what scorex is and why Alex did it uh you know RS coin is a project we work on and then we have some internal projects we haven't announced yet which we think are going to be really fun and cool so what's the reason why you're setting this up like that that you have this research arm and then doing this a lot of different projects why not choose something and and go all in on that and and build some uh substantial projects do you kind of view the services side as as kind of funding the the research side yeah in a way it does that um and that's that's the cool

thing so you know the reality is that 80% of the good tech for the space in my view hasn't been built yet or researched yet uh so I I want to have a company that has a very substantial and meaningful impact on the future of this space and so my goal is to uh get as much research done as quickly as possible and get it all out into the open domain in the form of white papers at Major conferences or in code and make make it available to everybody because I believe that this technology causes a cascading disruption to society you know when the internet came out uh if you think about how information worked before the internet uh you know let's say a library it took time effort money to move information yeah I remember as a kid I had ride my bicycle to the library

to grab the book you know check it out go home you know and then when the book was due go back and that took effort then the internet comes out and then information moves instantaneously and this was a massive disruption to society and whatever eruptions occur they always expose um infrastructural problems for example uh the internet exposed that there are serious problems behind how our financial system works just like when cars came out they exposed that maybe the roads that we had weren't good enough and we needed to upgrade those roads so uh it's really exciting to have a company where we get to kind of Define or at least make a major contribution to a lot of the core Technologies that's going to rebuild the world's Financial infrastructure and uh my hope is to make it built in a way that's more

transparent more accountable as well as more inclusive so that's why we started the company because we wanted to have a very proactive say in where this Tech is going to go in a very philosophical say in saying that Tech needs to be open free patent free and transparent as opposed to where you know other organizations may want to take it as just an extension of an existing business model so I I checked out I's website before the uh before this interview and I realized that most of the researchers were from from Asia in Russia in Eastern Europe so is there a particular reason why you chose that like why this is so or is it like a deliberate strategy of any kind well I mean to be fair we also have very strong

roots in Japan in fact we actually have a research partnership with Tokyo Tech and Mario Lera lives in uh Tokyo so we're pretty diverse um it just came from that the developers and researchers that we initially recruited happened to have a geographic bias but it wasn't done on purpose um you know the other thing is that the the company is trying to be inclusive uh so we don't want to make this just another Silicon Valley startup or something like that where we're just going to make rich white people richer if your goal is to um make the technology as inclusive and AS Global as possible you probably should start talking about how do we get people in Eastern Europe and Russia and India and in Central Asia and Africa and other places in South America we

actually have a South American team in bonates uh involved uh number one because they're just as bright as everybody else and they can make very meaningful contributions more importantly a lot of these people come from Financial systems which are intrinsically bad you don't have to go ahead and talk to a guy in Argentina about what if your money goes bust it's already happened multiple times if you look at Ukraine the money is not working so well there Russia's gone through some hard times in terms of its monetary policy so it's nice to have researchers on your staff who really get it from a societal end if you live in America we've never really had a major currency crisis where we have had to worry is the dollar in my pocket going to be worth substantially less tomorrow or next week than it is today and have to plan for

that whereas if you've lived in Ukraine Russia or Argentina or other places you actually have had that worry so when you say maybe we should build a better kind of money a new kind of money it's not only just an academic and a research interest but it's also a personal interest so I guess that's why it's been easy to attract talent in that respect uh but we're inclusive and a lot of our eastern western Talent excuse me comes from University Partnerships that we've been setting up and we'll make some announcements over the uh the summer and the fall about who we're working with in England and in other places so I've also noticed that you actually have a a very large team I think it's around maybe 30 people uh you mentioned somewhere um did you guys raise Venture funding or how how is the company we're one of the very

few cryptocurrency companies that actually makes Revenue uh so we uh We've we've made quite a bit and uh we're solvent for many years with or without any future Revenue so we've actually not taken any VC money it was initially self-funded and uh we just sold our services and uh we're doing pretty good uh so that's uh that's also a really cool uh thing for me because I I don't have a VC master or something and some you know short-term expectation of an immediate return at some point we probably will get a VC partner and then the hard choice for us is should we do that in China or Asia where we're trying to base a lot of our initial products and optimization and things like that or should we go to Silicon Valley and gather some money there and that's still

an open conversation but we're doing quite well and the team is going to grow I think we'll probably be at around 50 by the end of the year um and then by the end of next year about a 100 well sounds sounds really cool um yeah I'm I'm I'm looking forward to all of these announcements that are going to come out of ihk in the future well the first one is going to be our proof of stake paper we're we're really proud of that because it's a good piece of research and it'll be coming out sometime this month okay so later in the show uh when we discuss ethereum classic we'll obviously talk about um whether ethereum classic should transition to proof of stake in the future and uh obviously that also ties

into Casper and that proof of stake algorithm so perhaps we could spend a bit of time on understanding what's the difference between your proof of stake work and and Casper but probably that's for later we'd like to start off with uh talking about scorex first cuz personally uh when I went to the scorex website and I checked out the project it was it was it was something that I could really identify with so um so scorex as far as I understand is basically uh kind of uh it's it's it's a it's a it's a blockchain design that's very modular and it's quite simple because it has only 4,000 lines of code so and it enables various kinds of applications in

in Education and Research so let's let's let's talk about what the aims of this scorex project are and Alex could you walk us through why you why you built this why you built scorex uh so scorex was started um as kind of vend project uh in order to check some properties of modified NXT uh proof of State concern protocol and uh later uh you know it becomes a modular framework exactly so I started uh with aim to build something uh simple and um then I uh realized uh the simple product could be not good for experiment so uh it's not enough to to

be simple you also need to have modular structure and um that's how I went to the current state of scor so for now uh you know you can change trans model or consens model and leave other parts intact and then why Parts into an application and run it against testbed Real testb very easily uh but for now I'm going to next release it's will come in September I hope and uh it will come also with a kind of tutorial and also a trick

on just a second so if you if you take a step back uh can you just like what is scores because it's not a cryptocurrency right uh yes it's not a cryptocurrency and it's not uh intended at the moment to build cryptocurrencies so um you know what's uh needed for people in academias and also in the industry so uh for example uh guys in uh academias are writing some paper uh usually they do not understand how to implement it and uh uh there is usually a lack of resources in order to implement a proposal uh so

here the scorex comes uh so you can for example try your new consensus protocol living transactional Parts without any changes and uh test your product very quickly going into tests uh in the same way you can uh consense part and change to actional language and also test things very quickly and uh so scorex is for experiments and uh for Qui prototyping let's take a break to talk about The Ledger Nano s the new flagship Hardware wallet by Ledger I'll let Ledger CEO Eric larc tell you all about how simple the Nano s makes it to

securely store all your private keys The Ledger Nanos is our latest generation Hardware wallet this is a multicurrency hardware wallet it has a screen and buttons to manage everything on screen you can generate a new seed restore a seed or set up your pin on the device your seed will never be exposed to the host computer on the Nan you have different apps you have the Bitcoin app you have the ethereum app and you have the pho UF app for strong Authentication for instance with Google Dropbox or GitHub you can manage your cryptocurrencies with The Ledger wallet Bitcoin Chrome app or The Ledger wallet ethereum Chrome app with the Nanos all

your Bitcoin and etherum addresses are derived from one unique seed with one seed you can have in the same time Bitcoin ethereum ethereum classic balances and also if you restore your seed you will also recover all the keys Associated to other apps such as Pho u2f SSH gpg so it's very simple just one seed and multiple applications the Nano s sets the new standard in Hardware wallet security and usability you can get yours today at ler wallet.com and when you do be sure to use the offer code epicenter to get 10% off your first order we'd like to thank Ledger for their support of epicenter it was

mentioned in the I think in the vi Vicky for scorex it was actually inspired ired by or partially inspired by by taso so some of our listeners will remember that we we did an episode on that few weeks ago and one of the aspects of tesos was that that he kind of divided uh cryptocurrency protocols in a few different layers which was the consensus layer transaction layer networking layer and and state I think uh so if I understand correctly right with scorex it has kind of the same divisions and then it allows to make changes and any of those levels and just kind of experiment very quickly and see okay how do different combinations of Technologies work on different levels is

that kind of roughly what the the goal of the project is uh so yeah it was initially started with exactly this design so consensus part transactional part and you can get network part almost for free just pluging in uh concrete uh sub protocols needed for your application uh but uh for uh we also going to to go deeper with the basic concepts of blockchain system for example if we are talking about a state so the question is uh What uh the state is about in a blockchain system why it's needed and what is a transaction and so

on and so we are going to answer these questions and to describe the Bic Concepts in the form of the functional code so getting some guarantees from the type system of the programing plan which we us disc col yeah um just to jump in uh what interested me most about the project if you're a service company and you build cryptocurrencies for people they're going to have business requirements which will map onto either existing research or onto new research that's required and so we needed a prototyping platform when we saw scorex we said wow this is something that's an extremely wellth thought out uh really

good approach it just needs more development effort more time to mature that was one of that was kind of the eat your own dog food for our end the other thing is that we talk a lot with academic Partners um people from Lancaster to VCU and to others and they always come to us and say there's a tremendous amount of interest in blockchain technology at our University but we we need some sort of pedagogical framework uh so that we can teach the class from that framework work or else what we're going to have to do is go to bitcoin download 100,000 lines of spaghetti code and shift our way through it and hope that we can kind of figure it out where 80% of the code is perhaps there to address real life edge cases but is not instructive in how a cryptocurrency is designed so having

4,000 lines of code in a highly modular framework where things are nicely separated into different layers is a really powerful thing from a from a teaching standpoint finally if you are a researcher and and let's say you're creating a new consensus algorithm or you're testing a new type of anonymity scheme you want everything to be except for the thing you're doing stable and predictable and you just want to focus on the thing you're doing so I just want to focus on the consensus Al I don't necessarily want to think too much about my transaction language or any of these things and so it's really nice to have that kind of modular Viewpoint when you're taking a white paper and you're talking about potential implementation paths so that was the you know initial starting point for uh for scorex from uh

my end and uh Alex has done an extraordinary job putting things together in a very short period of time Alex I think you started this last year in like September or something it was started actually in December 2014 but yeah it's been developed very slowly right three months because I had two projects to work on so right yeah now now we are developing f with four people in the team and we also have some additional results for example you can use an implementation of verion Merle Tre so authenticated skip releas

without using scort uh they residing in the separate uh framework uh which contains uh cryptography Primitives and some protocols implementation scull language and uh also we are going uh to try to build kind of version at key value database uh to use it in different blockchain systems internally so you can get from our observation an improvement of a constant factor and that could be very good by the way just by replacing uh some what general database with specialized one cool like

yes scorex SC sounds really interesting like I think two years back I I tried myself to have a stab at the Bitcoin code base and I think I I I I lost hope in a month or so uh cuz like it was it was hopelessly big and it was hopelessly complex and I wish like scorex was around at that time cuz you know 4,000 lines of code seems way more approachable than the 80 880,000 lines of code Bitcoin has uh so so perhaps it it it like I could I could try that I could try that experiment on scorex now and actually try to understand the cryptocurrency from a very fundamental protocol level so this is a project that that I I found really exciting uh you

know there's an old engineer adage which says that Perfection is achieved not when there's nothing left to add but when there's nothing left to take away and I think Da Vinci used to say that Simplicity is the ultimate elegant and it's very expensive it takes a lot of time and effort to try to figure out how to do things more concisely in in a much more understandable way than just you know writing a big monolith of code so uh that's that's one of the reasons why I wanted to work with Alex because very few people can do can write a full cryptocurrency uh or at least a reasonable approach to a cryptocurrency in just a few thousand lines of code that's not a common thing uh so I I recognize there was a hidden Brilliance there and it's been a heck of a lot of

fun watching the project mature over time uh there's still a lot more that needs to be done like for example we have to decide on a governance structure for scores moving forward you know it's right now an iohk project but people are already starting to use the code to launch cryptocurrencies for example waves uh has decided to use our codebase um to open source anybody can uh but that doesn't mean we endorse a particular project or not but as long as it's an iohk asset then that's kind of a problem so our hope is to pull it out kind of like what joyent did with node and put it into its own independent uh governance structure and uh make it a little bit more uh Community Driven than just a corporate sponsorship driven which is an ongoing conversation and if anybody has some good ideas I'd love to

hear them it uh it's going to be a joint effort yeah that governance topic is definitely one that we keep coming back to and I think that's one of the one of the big open unsolved problems in in the space that's affecting all kinds of projects among other things also it has been affecting kind of a project that you were involved in early on which is ethereum right has in going through uh a little bit of a crisis recently so you've now gotten involved again in some way specifically with your classic I think you're the most uh well-known person who sort of says okay I'm going to put some effort into that try to get that somewhere you

also wrote a very interesting post on on steamid of course we will have a link to that where you kind of talk very much in depth about your views uh in there so I just love to start this discussion by maybe taking a little bit of a a step back and and ask me to share a bit about when you originally got involved in etherium um how that was and what caused you to to depart at that time because in the steamate post you were referring to that as a as a philosophical division that happened at that time okay um so ethereum it's like

scorex or other projects kind of started as like an accident you know it's just a weekend passion or something and I didn't expect much to come of it uh so Anthony diorio and I were going to do some joint effort on an education project so at the time I was running a couple of things but the most prominent was the Bitcoin education project where I'd released a Muk called Bitcoin or how I stop learn to stop weing in love crypto I'm a big Peter Sellers fan uh for Doctor Strange Love but uh but anyway uh wanted to do some educational content for the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada and as many people are aware vitalic and Anthony live in the same city they both lived in Toronto and uh Anthony had been given an a very early draft of the ethereum white paper and

this time it was like a overlay protocol on Prime coin or something like that so Anthony said you know I I'd love for you to take a look at the paper and let me know what you think and I said sure So I read the paper and I said wow whoever wrote this is really smart and it's a really good idea it's going to require a little bit of retooling and reconfiguration you there's going to be some careful hands that are need to be involved but I think there's something viable here uh so uh they said well there's a couple of guys uh and there was four of them at the time who were talking regularly would you like to start attending those meetings and talk to them and I said sure So I did those guys were Amir chatre Mii Alisia Anthony and falic uh and there was two volunteer

developers who were really pushing things forward one of them used to handle I think it was OB skiren and we didn't know who he was but we knew that he worked for some cryptocurrency project and uh you know he uh you know might not be well received if he was working on something else and the other one was Gavin Uh Wood and his name I think was gav of York or something because he went to York so uh gav and Jeff and that was obscuring uh we found out later on it was Jeff wiie uh were writing code Jeff was doing go and Gavin was doing a C++ C++ implementation and uh Anthony and I were just trying to figure out like how the hell do we structure this thing is this going to be just a one-off project that gets released uh then we move on or are we

going to try to build a company or what are we going to do So eventually we decided hey let's just get everybody to go down to Miami because we've been invited to a conference there and this was around January of 2014 Mo Levan put on this big North American Bitcoin conference he let's just go there announce ethereum and see what kind of Interest we can get and I say that sounds fun so Anthony ran a beach house which was real generous and we all went down there and it was a standard Miami party beach house which was fun uh we had a lot of people there there's probably 20 30 people at every given moment and uh we went and did some presentations I did a debate with Dan larer and uh David Johnston uh and then vitalic went ahead and announced ethereum and uh both were very well

received falic especially uh he became a rock star overnight and all these people mobbed him and came on in we said okay we have something really special here so uh we realized that uh we needed to be a little bit smarter about launch strategy and we had to do something a bit more robust and uh stable and secure so I said well why don't we set up in a stable nice jurisdiction uh where we we have u a lot of ability to kind of grow without having to worry about a lot of bizarre legal edge cases or it's not a Banana Republic and we have to worry that the nation's going to change or something so after a lot of discussions we decided to base ourselves in Switzerland and zuk which is a wonderful Canton actually I believe I met Mahar

there uh and anyway I flew out there with a lot of other people and we did the initial legal work of getting it done at the same time we had an open question of what does a crowd sale mean from a US perspective so we retained a law firm and we asked them to write a letter of opinion what's called a more likely than not opinion on what exactly is The Ether sale from a US perspective so uh after getting those two things done there was an open question of how should the project be governed and managed moving forward uh because we had a good team because there there's a lot of hype and excitement there was like 50 meetup groups or something like that the yellow paper had been pushed out four or five proof of Concepts had been done the VC interest was getting really hot uh

and this was right around when blockstream was closing its round so there was this common notion that ethereum could be funded at the same level uh so we got a couple of offers and I started realizing wow we we're a real big project we're very bloated there's lots of people uh they're very passionate but maybe not necessarily the best people to stick around long term we need to centralize the project in Switzerland uh we should probably take a VC investment get a strong board of directors who have a lot of experience with things like software engineering and a lot of experience with project management to keep us on schedule and on track and make sure we don't make any stupid moves and then once that's done and the protocol's finished start an not for profit and have a crowd sale distribute the initial token set from

the not for-profit and then the uh for-profit company can kind of be the DAP developer build things on top of ethereum similar to what you're now seeing with augur and slockett all these other Ventures that have had proposals so that was my idea um obviously uh there were other ideas on how to run things and uh I was on the losing side so I left um and it was Mutual so uh they went on and raised $18 million from a stu thong and uh spent nearly all of it within a year and uh then released ethereum uh and uh all the founders most of them scattered and went to start other Ventures uh like uh escore and other things like that you know it is what it is the reality is when you start

an open source project and there's lots of people at the beginning who have different views and philosophies there's going to be divisions that eventually become apparent when the passion and excitement starts going down and you get into the nitty-gritty of running a company this is why there are very few companies that are successful when they have eight Founders usually it's two guys or a guy and a gal or three or something like that it's hard to point to the Silicon Valley success where they had a committee running the company so almost always some people get cut off and they go about their own Direction and that's fine uh you know I I decided to go do something else with my life and my life is great I love my life uh that said the social contract of ethereum which is I think the core behind the

division with ethereum classic and ethereum was initially this whole notion that code is law despite what Tim Swanson and others say uh the idea that when I write code just like in Bitcoin when I send a transaction it's just going to go whether it's good or bad whether it's convenient or inconvenient uh this is what we signed up for uh or else why are we going to the effort of building the world's most inefficient computer and why are we going to the effort to build the world's most expensive computer relative to its peers uh you want to have a guarantee that I have a decentralized network that doesn't care about the nature of the code that's running uh running it um now that's a little risky it's it's kind of out there on the edge but

that was really the point and that's what made the project to me so initially exciting and for the last two years that has been the Mantra of ethereum they've invented words they've done tons of videos uh and that didn't change despite the fact that we had differences about governance and how to spend money and who should be in charge and uh all that stuff which is reasonable uh we never differed on the core philosophy of the system until recently with the Dow attack and then all of a sudden the philosophy diverged where sometimes censorship's okay sometimes forking is okay to reverse things as long as you have some Community consensus which I like to call the six wolves and four sheep voting on what's for dinner Clause to put it

lightly so do you think there's a connection between what happened now around this Choice with the fork and what happened back then with the choices around should there be a crowd sale should one raise rece money should one try to have a more sort of proper structure and organization as opposed to sort of a a big a big uh kind of disorganized everyone's pulling or working together approach no I don't think so I think the the the case of when I left it was just a case that everybody was really young and they were all decentralized and siloed and uh people were kind of walking their own

book and they had their own ideas of where things needed to be and there was just too many people there was too many chefs and it was hard to decide what was for dinner um that's a slightly different situation with respect to the hard Fork uh this is an issue where there's clear governance there's the ethereum foundation and there's a strong Hal of personality around vitalik he's the leader got everybody a 60x so he's got a lot of stre cred uh and uh and and when that organization said let's go do this they have a lot of power to do that but what they I think failed to understand was that there is a world of difference between making a decision to upgrade optimize or change something for the better of the system and to change the social contract that a lot of people signed up for

regardless of how powerful you are or regardless of who you are some minority of your population will not agree with you to the extent where they will forcibly leave your system if you try to change the social contract and I think it's just a learning experience for them and it's something they have to now take very seriously moving into the future because their road map has has five I think hard Forks over the next two years so when I when I look at the ethereum Hard Fork um what's what Stand Out stands out to me is uh the this particular hard folk is in a sense uh it is it is a repudiation of uh let's say the code code is law Paradigm that most

of etherum community was subscribing to prior to that but it is also in a way a repudiation of some some Bitcoin principles let's say Bitcoin principles quote unquote for lack of a better word that all of us had been subscribing to like when Satoshi came out with with with Bitcoin and for the first few years of the existence of Bitcoin people were really worried that there was going to be a government clamp down and the there was going to be some kind of force that uh that puts pushes through some regulation in this system and the only way the community thought uh you could avoid that is to not have a center at all like like satosi

disappeared and then we didn't have a center in in the system where you could necessarily push through some kind of Blacklist or censorship or hard FOC or whatever right and for for many years this was kind of like Bitcoin has held true to True to this model now for the I think the reason the hard folk of ethereum is really interesting is is the first time we have we have a cryptocurrency in which uh which has a huge market cap and also you see that there is a a center inside that cryptocurrency there's there white alic and then there's this group of people the community and there are people who

have more important opinions in that community and you can see that as kind of a center and this hard for really pushed through the idea that there does exist a center definitively whereas before the heart folk you could have argued that there is no Center and uh and I I personally think that like for example many people in the ETC ethereum classic Community are actually rebelling against the affirmation that there is a center now do you do you think that is the problem with with the hard fork or the problem is just that immutability was broken I think it's a little bit of

everything I I mean the challenge with building a decentralized movement and and every cryptocurrency frankly goes through this even if it's small I mean Alex probably has some horse stories about next uh the reality is that there are camps and tribes and everybody has their own kind of ideas of how things should be and where things should be and usually there's a very few set of meta Concepts that are are unifying everybody and it reminds me of gangas Khan when he like unified the Mongol hordes he had very simple laws for the hordes to follow and every every tribe had to have them displayed and violating them was a death sentence outside of that you know you had a lot of freedom to kind of do what you want to do and that's that's kind of the

management model that cryptocurrencies generally have um ethereum is unique in that it has a center it's its Satoshi is still around and these are very bright very passionate very talented people and generally speaking their ideas are valid and good and from a technological standpoint are have been uh have been reasonable uh but yet the problem is that uh you don't sign up in a cryptocurrency to be governed or managed by a hierarchy and have a CEO at the top tell you what to do the whole point of having a decentralized system is that nobody's really in charge everybody has a couple of different voices and you know we kind of figure it out and Bitcoin saw this with Gavin and D

he was kind of the big guy after Satoshi left and he had an opinion of where Bitcoin should go and he was overruled in that opinion right whereas falic was able to pull it off so it's an interesting thought experiment to kind of think about where would have Bitcoin gone let's say if Gavin was successful and we had done that fork would there be a Bitcoin classic with the or with the original uh you know one megabyte block size and how much population would have been on both sides we're kind of seeing that experiment play itself out with uh with a theory um so you know that's that's kind of the the best non-answer that I can give to your to your question in general to me it's it's too hard to say what but I will point out one last thing that when

you lead you make decisions and every decision has a pro and a con for everybody it's always there's always referential and over time the cons accumulate and subtle anger builds uh and eventually some subset of the population just starts disliking you because of the way that you lead and so I think there is a meaningful subset of the population that has disliked uh the way the ethereum foundation has governed ethereum and they constitute some of ethereum classic there's Bitcoin maximalists who have come into etherum classic are very attracted to this code of law Paradigm and they like that it's making a commitment to be decentralized um and there's obviously other camps and

it's hard for me to say who thinks what and what is the dominant camp at something like that it's kind of a big sociological experiment Alex let's have your thoughts I'm the you so ethereum had for Edition now definitely has a very huge Center of power and U you know in Bitcoin developers are balanced with miners so we have centralization among miners but developers and miners balance each other and we don't have this in ethereum and even more uh eventually miners will be thrown away by switching to proof of stake uh so from my point of view it's

definitely the problem and here is ethereum plus hopefully go to have a balance between developers and miners right that's a good point I mean ethereum has decided to poison the chain and make it unminable at some point with the difficulty bomb and there's obviously going to be a subset of people particularly miners uh who think that's a bad way to go or people who think proof of work is an intrinsically Superior consensus mechanism than proof of stake um and you know the other thing that ethereum classic has proven is that service providers have a lot of power if you're an exchange you have a lot of power uh and people tended to underestimate that and uh poniac really showed that that was the case uh so it's

something that you have to understand even if you are the custodian or the official center of the ecosystem you're not quite as powerful as you think you are even if you have a lot of power today's magic word is Crossroads that's c r o SS r o a d s head over to let's talk bitcoin.com to sign in enter the magic word and claim your part of the listener reward I certainly understand the objection to the fork I think it's a very you're

certainly right that there has been this um this kind of advertising slogan or well advertising slogan with this kind of the the way ethereum has been communicated it was always yeah it's this world computer yeah uncensorable immutable uh you know a legal whatever um illegality or something like that yes um with an a yeah with an A and one L no two L um but at the same time it did seem like there was certainly a a very significant majority of of people in the etherum community were in favor of the hard Fork certainly

basic almost all of the application developer almost all of the main uh Developers um now it's it's certainly also true that most were not really consulted or there was not efficient way to consult people but but still I think it's it's very clear that the vast majority was uh was in favor of that um I'm gonna you on that I mean you guys have Robin Hansen on your show and remember the core thing about futar you have values and beliefs and these are separate so it's perfectly okay to have values say that I believe in this set of values and this is my idea but my belief

is that the world is going to go differently if the ethereum foundation which has all the money and all the developers wants to go in a certain way your belief is that's the direction you need to get behind even if that violates your values and if you're running a business and if you are looking for a population uh then you're just going to go with whatever is best for your bottom line or whatever is best uh for for highest probability of success so just because a developer or a minor or somebody moves to chain A over B does not necessarily infer that they believe in that chain and they believe in the values of that chain more it just is a indication of their belief in the success of that chain which is an entirely separate thing yeah no no I

accept that point I think I think you're correct around that that there essentially was a sort of um you know a congregation around that choice for whatever reason whether that was uh a belief that one would follow the majority or would believe that it was actually the right thing but what was what drove you to say okay I'm going to get involved again and I'm going to I'm going to try to support this particular project that has that has very little buyin from the existing ethereum Community why why come back well you know that's a good question so my interest is academic mostly you know the the reality is that there are plenty of things that I would do differently if I was in charge of the ethereum road

appap and they're going in a particular direction and uh you know I tend to come from the mathematical world as does Alex and a lot of the other people on my team so when we think about code is law the first thing that comes to mind is that code better probably be written really well because you know if you if you miswrite it there's serious consequences to it as we've seen so the focus that ethereum has been uh pushing is is developer accessibility so they created a programming language that looks a lot like JavaScript and it's not particularly easy to write High Assurance software in so one of the areas of Divergence in my thinking is we really need to have some sort of functional DSL that is uh is easy to write proofs with you know almost like Idris or something like that second I

would have built a verified compiler there's very few reasons in life that you'd want to go down that road unless you're Xavier ly or something like that you have the gallium group with you uh but uh in this particular case this is like a cookie cutter definition of why you would want to have something like that so there's a lot of little edge things that I'm really interested in doing and and I think smart contracts are going to be here to stay and frankly as a company that builds things for people it's worth my time and my company's money to build infrastructure in tools and put them up on the Shelf in case a client comes to me and they have some sort of requirement that needs this type of high Insurance code the fact that we would be able to potentially test that on a live network is a really

amazing thing uh so you know academically it's extremely worthwhile from a business uh standpoint it's worthwhile to just have that software there furthermore I don't really care about the split and half developers right now it's like saying you're a grain of sand on the beach and you know 90% of that grain of sand is against you like it's there's a beach we hav it to be gotten to the beach we just this grain right there's a very small relative to the uh to the cloud computing world uh population of developers currently in ethereum very small so I think there's plenty of time to differentiate in plenty of time to build a compelling uh dap experience within the ethereum classic world that is novel and different from the

experience presented for ethereum and the types of applications that will be deployed on that system will be intrinsically different than the types of applications that will be deployed upon ethereum furthermore ethereum has now opened itself up to competition which is extremely vicious when you have abandoned the cod's law and this is the platform that's always going to run it and now we're just another cloud computing platform now all of a sudden you have to contend with Juno and project Bletchley and all these other things that are coming out some of which have the backing of multi-billion dollar companies that have unfair advantages and uh let's never forget that the ethereum VM uh is extremely inefficient when compared to a Federated computation model so if if my goal is just to be a

world computer and and have a Federated trust model why in God's name would I want to put my money behind Rackspace and Amazon and Microsoft to have decades of experience in some of the best engineers in the world and just be really careful about the Tres pairings uh and pick enough of them that it's probably going to be okay because the jurisdictions are played against each other you know that that to me makes a lot more sense because I'm going to have an easier time with deployment it's going to be interoperable with existing infrastructure and existing applications that I have the cost is going to be considerably lower I'm probably going to have better tooling I'm probably going to be able to use languages standard languages like C and C++ as opposed to having to learn entirely new languages in an entirely new VM why would you want

to compete in that space it makes no sense to me I would rather be the cod's law guy because then basically we're the only option we have a monopoly in that space and we can grow and see how big that philosophy is and yet certainly over time we can work at making the system more efficient probably via interoperability with these other systems Alex yes guys uh going down to the philosophical problems to purely technical ones so we already have two kinds of ethereum going to be happen so that is ethereum and root stock maybe you know uh the Project based on ethereum from Ser Daman learner and uh I think eventually we can have three kinds of ethereum that is

root stock ethereum bailout Edition and ethereum classic so baout Edition will be on proof of stake with somewhat shutting scheme and so on so on and ethereum classic will be more conservative with proof of work and maybe some conservative fixes in the core and uh yeah we will have a lot of options around the general idea of the centralized computer that's nice from my point of view let's take a short break to talk about Jax Jax is a multi-coin wallet created by the people at the central now in the past if he had a whole bunch of cryptocurrencies it was a pain to handle

them you either had to leave them on an exchange which was insecure or you had to have all these different wallets which was a hassle fortunately now with Jacks those medieval days of darkness misery and suffering are over Jack supports multiple cryptocurrencies and new ones are being added but it's not just storing cryptocurrencies you can do with Jacks but you can also exchange them directly from with inside the wallet thanks to shape shift integration and since there's only one seed Jax makes it super easy to back up and sync to the other devices Jax works with Windows Mac OS Linux Android iOS and has browser extensions for Firefox

and chrome so go to ja.io that's jx. to download the wallet and get started today we'd like to thank Jax for their support of epicenter let's now focus on ethereum classic right like okay the past is the past but let's let's let's focus the rest of the talk on kind of uh the the future and when I look at ethereum Classic um I tend to see that there are like lots of challenges around around this cryptocurrency so let me let me let me think of some things I see and then uh then perhaps you could add other things that you see so for instance one of the big challenges is um what happens

with governance and this is very important because the the money supply schedule of original unfolded ethereum was not defined ever like how many coins are we going to have maximum what what is going was what is it going to behave like Etc now you could argue that in the folked version of ethereum that is being Le led by the ethereum foundation they're still the same team right uh and and they can exercise their influence in coming up with a with a monetary Supply schedule but on the classic side now the classic Community now faces a unique kind of problem uh they don't have a monetary Supply schedule like like Bitcoin mhm

and uh they don't have a center or or or defined leadership or defined defined governance today and they have basically two parts of the community that want completely different things from the money supply schedule so the miners want want a lot of coins to be created in the future future because they earn that as Revenue the users want less number of coins to be created in the future because more coins creates inflation for them so the the needs of the users and miners are opposed to each other they but they are in in a system that doesn't have a defined schedule and uh doesn't even have a defined governance structure

how will ethereum classic ever recover from this that's a great question um it reminds me almost like Bitcoin in the early days you know wasn't defined governance structure sometimes the founder was there sometimes he wasn't uh and uh you know everybody was kind of just doing their own thing yet Bitcoin has evolved so there are four things that need to happen for ethereum plastic to stabilize and be successful outside of Market manipulation and other things that are occurring perhaps with the Dow hacker coins and other things like that um so number one you need a social contract so there's a meta contract like code is law but there's still some hard decisions that have to be made about exactly what this movement stands for for and there'll be some filtering unfortunately okay number two after you

have a social contract you need a development road map and the development road map worries not only about the technology okay whether we're going to stay on proof of work or proof of stake or do a hybrid or we're going to use proof of proof of work to reduce transaction validation times or whatever the hell okay there's a lot of stuff that you have to carefully think about uh in the development road map but it also has to interpret the social contract the community has signed and then makes explicit code stat ments about that namely the governance structure as well as uh the money supply the monetary policy of the cryptocurrency and then finally you need to have people who are responsible for executing that either on a volunteer or permanent basis and you need to make decisions about how much centralization

those people have okay so right now the community doesn't look like it wants to accept another Foundation or at least one that's hierarchal and powerful and domineering and controlling lucky for us there's a lot of good ideas from some ideas in the dash community and perhaps the Monero Community there's ideas bitshares came up with there's ideas Robin Hansen came up with uh Ralph Merkel The Lovable Merkel has come up with certainly some great ideas so there's plenty of great ideas about how do we run the Ship Without necessarily having a captain and uh and get that done and uh you know all of these things together then there's a question of how many resources are actually going to be available to get it done so that's the funding question now if you don't have those four things a social contract a reasonable development road map a

governance structure and money to get it done you're not a good cryptocurrency you're not a stable cryptocurrency and uh that is the great challenge of ethereum classic and if you're a person on the outside looking at ethereum Classic asking questions about whether it's going to survive or not uh really you you have to examine What's the progress on those types of things and I think over time we will see a leadership structure in a decentralized way like we've seen with Bitcoin evolve and I think we will see some form of a governance structure evolve now um if that occurs I would feel very comfortable now to get to a specific answer about your question uh about proof of work and the money supply I think miners are reasonable the thing

about a minor is they run a business and it's not necessarily about the coinbase award that's coming in it's about predictability and consistency behind the income flow so they have to buy you know a pool of equipment X equipment and they have to run it for time y okay and then when they do that they have to make an assumption about how many coins they're going to get and how much value those coins have and then they can do a calculation and say is this a profitable divver or not profitable so the minor cares much more about what is that window going to look like than rather let's create an unlimited money supply and kill the currency so that we can get short-term gain so I think it's easy to get them to the table and have a conversation especially considering that

the other side ethereum is planning on firing all of them it's let's never forget that uh you know it's basically saying to these guys hey when we do Casper you're gone uh so they they're either going to go to Litecoin or somewhere else they can't go to bitcoin because it's not an Asic uh P it's a GPU so that that discussion has to be had and it will be had uh and some decisions will be made not everybody's going to agree some people will leave some people will be really excited about the certainty and start coming in and as long as you're growing as long as you have a positive ecosystem you're leaving a legacy that does good things for for people I think it's worth everybody's time uh if this is just a proposition to make a few insiders very wealthy it's not worth anybody's time so uh you know

from an outsider looking in you need to see those four things you need to see how the negotiations are going and if they actually solidify I think ethereum classic is going to be here for a very long time if they don't solidify regardless of how much money some people put in or what promises a mining pool makes you're really talking about an unstable short-term proposition for theing classic so I I I take it from the way you talk about this that it will be essential for etherum classic to to come up with its own agenda its own Community its own vision and say okay we're going to we're going to go in that direction which of course would imply right with different value different people that there would be much more of a Divergence

also of the code base in the future so that maybe some things one would still use from ethereum uh and and kind of leverage the development that's happening there but in in other things there will be uh more of a Divergence and then probably in in a few years if it turns out that way uh the two systems would actually look very different is is that how you see that playing out yeah I'd love to see that and and that's why it was so unfortunate that the ethereum foundation took such an harsh anti-c Viewpoint I if they just they let the damn passion Reed for a minute and think it through logically it's like saying wow if they diverge we have an AP test on Smart contracts we have a completely different and new ecosystem with a

different philosophy where we get to say what if what if we made this decision instead of that decision and now we get actual uh market price on the value of that uh so I I think it is reasonable prudent and frankly necessary for the survival of ethereum classic for it to diverge the question is where should it diverge should it tempt to be like a mass Market cryptocurrency that appeals to everybody and gets as many dat developers as possible um or should it try to eror on something that's not being focused on which is safety and correctness uh and I would like to see the latter more than the former because it seems like ethereum's road map is trying to be the former it's trying to be this universally accessible World computer for everybody where uh

sometimes uh you know you're going to screw up on writing things and that's okay we can figure it out on the back end so it's a good question though we did recently the podcast with yeah with Arthur bitman on tasos and and that was that was one of the things he talked about a lot which was that smart contracts you know it's high security software you have a lot of money at stay so writing it buree is is absolutely essential and that solidity uh is is not uh designed that way at all and that is really unsuitable for it it seems like you agree uh and I'm I'm curious here because because I've also asked this question to uh to some of the ethereum people

and and their point was kind of like well you know the tools are being developed with we developing functional testing tools or or it would be good to have other languages as well that might be more uh you know more functional more like uh ready for proofs and stuff uh built on top of the evm whereas I think Arthur's stance was more like the evm itself also is not suitable what's what's your point of you here do you think going in it that direction will uh will also mean making changes to the evm and maybe abandoning the evm completely yeah that's a that's an extremely good question and the answer is I don't know at the moment um what needs to happen is a systematic deconstruction of the evm

and a comparison of it to other projects that are trying to do things in a more formal and reasonable way and saying is there a path to optimizing and improving this uh that does not require us abandoning the design itself uh or is it just simply too far of a of a golf and we're going to have to go do something else and I'm not the most qualified person uh to make that statement what what I'll probably try to do is attach a university partner that has a very strong group kind of like inria or something like that in these things and just give them three to six months to write a survey and say all right well tell me um you know what could we do with the evm where could we take it um it's also important to point out that this is not an ethereum only challenge

you know one of the magical things about uh Tesla as a company is that they stake their future not on their own Brilliance and Innovation but in part on the Brilliance and innovation of the entire battery industry which has this enormous competitive pressure to uh to like make these guys last longer right so the advancements here give them cars with a longer range and they don't have to pay any money for that similarly there is a huge movement of people that are saying can we create uh uh tools compilers virtual machines these things that are more secure and give stronger guarantees and what we need to start thinking about is how do we connect that tital wave of investment and progress from everything

from Microsoft research to the guys doing comcert and others to ethereum and get that uh get that done that's what I'd like to do and if it means that changes have to be made to the evm I think it's reasonable to propose them ideally you want to maintain backward compatibility you know the other thing to to point out is that does not necessarily mean you break compatibility with the apps that have been written uh you know if I write uh you know uh hasle code there's actually a way to compile hasle to run in the Java virtual machine it's called frga right so similarly if I write solidity code I can create all kinds of tools to convert that to run on a completely different machine then ethereum runs and this is probably going to end up having to be done because

there's going to be Divergence with root stock and Divergence with other people that are starting with the evm and then kind of moving in a different direction uh so it's much more important about the Tooling in The Meta than it is about how the underlying virtual machine itself runs that's a more academic exercise um but I support some form of Divergence I support doing things like building verified compilers I love functional programming languages and I think that at the very least your standard library of smart contracts that people should use for their apps should be written that way with proofs uh and then maybe you can use other things to do prototyping but that's the direction I'd like to take it and a very methodical disciplined systematic Pro progress that connects academic partners and has an understanding that industry is wanting

to solve this problem as well and connect industry to it my two sense so from my observations um it is not enough to have much languages so it's much needed uh the problem also developers must be taught uh about uh the very specific execution model of the E and blockchains and uh well again from my observations uh people wrote javascripts uh JavaScript scripts uh yesterday I usually do not understand uh many difficulties and uh many security issues around this execution model so

it's better to write different uh kind of tutorials so instead of uh write things like oh that's very easy to to write a smart contract that's not true that's just not true it's it's very hard to write a Flawless smart contract and developers must be taught how to do that and uh unfortunately not much developers are able to write safe smart contacts even with best possible right that's extremely good point I mean we're not talking about a standard web application where you can

move fast and break things you're talking about an execution model where you know the the system is merciless if you make a mistake it's your mistake and uh let's be fair to ethereum I don't anticipate them continuing to fork for small mistakes that are made perhaps larger things like another DOW Event they'll Fork again but I don't think they're going to fork for $500,000 at risk or a million dollars at risk so it's buyer beware and I think it's it's false advertising to a certain extent to try to lure people in to develop smart contracts and say hey let's do all this cool stuff when the reality is that these are extremely difficult things to write correctly and um they require a lot of careful thought planning a lot of

careful testing and at some cases tools that don't even fully exist yet uh so that's just a caveat that many people need to understand which is why I I always advocated for let's start for something that's functional where we have very strong tooling that has evolved for a very long time and gradually work our way to accessibility instead of starting with accessibility and trying to gradually work our way towards security uh it just doesn't seem to work that way and by the way just as a just as a disclaimer um Alex actually wrote a proof for um the flp impossibility theorem so so he he tends to be on the the very formal side of the computer science world so so you always know there's a slight bias there just to

more sense for me so as a by the way yeah I'll pay in Bitcoin okay uh so as a concrete example you know of difficulty a developer usually uh doesn't think about so for example if you are messing with a $1 million lottery uh you can have problems so you are extracting random numers from blockchain and you have problems even with the miners replaying blocks and uh you can have roll back problems with any smart contact you are developing and you have bounded

execution with the gas model and so on so there are many security concerns about and uh uh someone needs to compile a list of high level and lowlevel problems and uh that's we have some work in this direction but much more is needed right um yeah just a great example of a lottery with a Randomness extractor if if a certain group of people don't like the result they could potentially have a portfolio of attacks to them that the app developer wasn't aware of that could change the result arbitrarily to benefit one or more parties uh so you have to have a pretty comprehensive

understanding of the evm and and the security guarantees of the consensus system to really understand how to write these contracts securely similarly to like if you're a Java developer it wouldn't be just good enough to understand how to write Java code you might have to understand how the Java virtual machine works and as a side note most people who do that go down that road end up creating their own programming language that compiles to the jvm like Martin urki did with Scola so it's kind of an interesting thing I guess it's it's like the Continuum hypothesis of programming if you get too close to it you either go crazy or invent a new field of math or something so one final question from me is um so I recently saw that uh the some some some ET Etc Community folks came up with this

Etc Declaration of Independence document right and I presume and I presume that the social contract of Etc will also be expressed in the English language eventually even though even though we dealing with code we'll have sort of a social contract that expresses the social contract in English uh my question to you would be who came up with this document Etc Declaration of Independence how did it work whether you will make an English language document of the social contract and if so how will you what is your threshold for consensus and how do you define it in in the ETC Community that's a very good question so it's first important to understand I'm

not a leader in the ETC Community I don't want to be one um I I was not directly involved in the construction of the Declaration so what happened is that a slack channel uh opened up and a lot of the guys who were putting in a lot of hours for ETC were invited to the channel and uh they were given a collaborative document and they tried over several iterations to create something that they felt was a representative sample of the um of the community uh so I took a look at the document but I didn't contribute to the document uh so they uh they went ahead and pushed it out and I'm glad that they did and it seems fairly reasonable the Declaration at least it's a starting point and what's nice is to see um whether people say that's a great thing or a terrible thing because we actually

learned something in both cases and only cases when there's kind of like no reception that you don't get a good enough signal signal now with respect to the language and localization it is important to understand that there needs to be a Chinese version at the very least because there's a large mining Community there and uh it's probably important to take a look at what is the core demographic of uh Etc at the moment so it' be nice to do a survey and see where people are from and what languages they speak and make sure that it's at least localized into the top three or top four or top five as for a conversation about it I think it's an iterative process so you release a declaration you have big discussion about it when you feel pretty comfortable you move on to the development roadmap you start making

concrete proposals that are acting on that declaration and then you're going to have a lot of back and forth about the particular proposals which is exposing potential problems in the Declaration itself and then you can kind of iterate and refine iterate and refine and eventually you get to something where you you have uh pretty good consensus or you have just massive Divergence and everything falls apart and the community dies um in the first case you have something like the Constitutional Convention in the second case uh the only way in my view to move forward if you want to move forward is an assurance proof of burn so how that works is that you create a smart contract you say okay uh we're going to set a certain block height either this thing's going to trigger or it's going to refund all your money and when you

put your money into it it's locked until that block height or until a certain threshold of the currency is reached and then if it reaches the threshold we destroy your money and it gives you a cryptographic receipt that you can use to redeem on a completely new network so then you at least know that 100% of people if the threshold is reached in the new network uh uh have agreed to the new social contract of the new network and that might be a reasonable Way Forward actually to do uh the migration to let's say proof of work proof of stake hybrid with diffusing the difficulty bomb and maybe adding Cool Tech like Spectre or something like that yeah so so that could be a path forward but I think it's too early in the process uh but you do bring up a very

valid point the other thing is there's ambiguity in English lawyers love that and uh it would be really cool to see if somebody actually took the time to create a l Bond version of The Declaration of Independence so then we have like an not ambiguous way of expressing what we want that potentially computers could understand but I mean that's that's the whole Bertrand Russell Turtles all the way down uh argument and you just you don't want to go down that road so so um yeah that's that's kind of my view on it uh it's too early to say and we'll iterate our way to something good I think yeah thanks so much for coming on guys unfortunately we the at the end of our shows uh but that was very interesting to learn a bit about iohk and learn more about ethereum classic it's I think it's it's great

that that you guys are you know working on this and see trying to make or making this into a a serious project uh I also have to declare you know personally I I I saw all my Etc as as soon as I was able to so should make that declaration not necessarily because I think the fork was the right thing to do it was purely that I I felt like where the community ends up the majority of the community is also where the value is going to be created but uh maybe I'll be proven wrong and and I'm certainly looking forward to seeing what comes out of the ETC community and and I very much much agree

with some of the directions that you want to pursue I think that's a very a good thing uh and and if those will be pursued in in ETC I think that would be that would be fantastic and great to see yeah I mean I'm really excited about the prospect of potentially taking scorex as a base and seeing if we could build a full Etc node with that it'd be really cool um we'll probably have to do with scorex 2 which is coming out soon but thank you so much for having us on I really do appreciate it means a lot to me I've been a fan of your show for since the beginning basically and you guys do some of the best work in the space uh and uh we really appreciate it no thanks so much that that means a lot to hear this so uh thanks and yeah

hopefully we'll have you on again at some point I think you guys are doing a lot of interesting work so I'm sure there will be lots of lots of occasions to make that happen abely thank you guys my pleasure uh and thanks so much for our listeners we are part of the let Bitcoin Network you can find this show and lots of other shows on LOF bitcoin.com and of course you can subscribe to this show on any of the podcast applications or get the videos on youtube.com/ epicenter Bitcoin and yeah we look forward to be back next [Music] [Music] week's