What I Learned Writing The Infinite Machine

Transcript

[Music] hello everyone i'm camila russo the author of the infinite machine and the founder of the defiant a content platform focusing on decentralized finance thank you so much edcon for having me so as i mentioned i'm the author of the infinite machine the first book on the history of ethereum and today i'm going to tell you some of the lessons i learned in the two-year process that was writing this book so as with any big project the first step in actually writing a book is deciding to do it and you know this was end of 2017 there had just been a

bull market um or a big crypto boom and i had been covering this space for a bloomberg news throughout that whole year i had briefly covered i you know written about bitcoin in 2013 but it was really that year that i started focusing on on crypto so i had the idea of writing the first book on the history of ethereum and there were many reasons why i shouldn't have written the book there had been other journalists covering the space for longer than i had i didn't have the technical knowledge to understand the inner workings of ethereum i had never even talked to vitalik but still i really knew this was a great

opportunity to tell a big story and i knew it was i was able to do it i was one of the few as for my credentials you know i was one of the few journalists at a big mainstream um financial organization covering crypto the space was so new that it wasn't like there were tons of like veteran journalists um covering it anyways and i had learned about financial markets and how to use a bloomberg terminal so i thought you know i can figure out um how ethereum works and finally nobody had done it so why shouldn't i so i made the jump i contacted an agent i worked on my

pitch i sent it out to a bunch of publishers and then one day i get this email um from my agent in all caps saying that one of the editors at harpercollins liked my book proposal and so you know i think vitalik had maybe a similar moment uh obviously with a much bigger result than just a book when he had gone in this world bitcoin tour you know following the different teams building around bitcoin um and he had come up with an idea for a

generalized smart contracts platform and pitched it to to master coin and colored coins but you know these teams said that they they didn't want to spend time building it out vitalik thought you know why shouldn't i do it so he said screw it i'll do it myself um and i think that's just a great like motor to have in life screw it i'll do it myself so when i was first researching the book one of the first when i was when i was first researching the book one of the first things that struck me was how vitalik at 19 years old with no

college degree or even work experience other than writing articles about bitcoin had convinced people from all over the world to join him in building ethereum with the vague idea that they'd get crypto at some point but there was no salary no equity stake no contracts nothing it was you know this poker player from romania a former hedge fund manager an entrepreneur in toronto a mathematician in colorado hackers designers marketers people who literally dropped everything broke up with girlfriends gave away pets left jobs um just you know to go build ethereum and here many of them in the house in miami when oops sorry in the

house in miami when the project first started um and they were all there from all walks of life different experiences and they were there because they were excited about the idea that vitalik laid out in this white paper they were able to temporarily forget about their differences and you know just rally around this this new concept um so sure later they fought some party ways most of them aren't part of ethereum today but it was this power of an idea to move people what really got ethereum

started so another lesson is that heroes are you know the most important part of stories um if you know you want to tell a story like i wanted to tell it which was in this kind of novel type of way um i wanted it to be a non-fiction book that really read like fiction with uh with characters and uh and a plot and colorful situations so it was important to find a hero for to drive action and so people could relate to what was going on rather than

just be a list of um events and facts that happen so vitalik is obviously an important part of the ethereum history and it was it's a new he's an important part of the book and here he is on the day that the ethereum mainnet launched um for a moment i thought what if i tell the ethereum story entirely through vitalik so that it's kind of like a biography but also a way to tell the story of the second biggest cryptocurrency and others have done this too successfully for example

with the story of tesla with the story of facebook but when you zoom out from from that picture that this is the very same room on the very same day the day that the ethereum mainnet launched and you can see there were many other people in the room so in this case i realized one hero isn't enough if i had focused on just vitalik many pieces of the ethereum history would have been missing because so many other people were key so i ended up using not one hero but many different heroes to tell the

ethereum story okay so when when i was a reporter at bloomberg i lived by market charts it's what i did all day every day i looked at charts and used them to tell stories and to kind of decipher what was going on in the world but an important lesson i learned with infinite machine is that tarts well they're nice because they seem so concrete and irrefutable they're not the full picture so here's a little anecdote on the day i went to quit my job at

bloomberg in early 2019 one of my colleagues there in the markets live team you know i i was part of this blog that it told real life markets like real time market commentary um and most of the people in the team were like very senior reporters and former like asset managers and one of my colleagues a die hard crypto skeptic um like many at bloomberg asked me how my book was going and he pulled up the ether chart and it wasn't a pretty picture um so this is what ether was doing in 2019 it had taken a huge dive

it had gone to double digits um i think end of 2018. it really looked like ethereum was dying um and so he said if this is what ethan's doing after you said you're writing a book about it don't ever write a book about me um so yeah i was a little bit you know passive aggressive or i don't know but um i left it off um and i've been asked this question of you know during the bull market i was mostly writing writing the book or i wrote most of the book during the bull market but you know as the price of eth was

slumping i was following the ethereum community around uh going to hackathons going to their to conferences um i you know went to prague uh japan um [Music] toronto denver uh san francisco um buenos aires i i really kind of did my best to immerse myself in the community and and watch what was actually going on and what i saw in these hackathons and conferences and meetups is that all of the activity is that

activity and growth just had kept accelerating since the boom days and i was seeing more and more concrete progress happening on ethereum than ever before even with the the price going down so of course i wasn't faced by my colleagues comment or others or i wasn't concerned with the ether chart and just like watching the actual activity and all the building that was happening in the ethereum community made me keep my enthusiasm for the book i was writing throughout the entire process so the lesson here is you know you need to actually sometimes be in

the trenches to um to find out really what's going on and not just you know look at charts um from [Music] from your bloomberg terminal and then finally a lesson from from this process is that the toughest part really wasn't the research the interviews getting the right sources crafting the outline writing out 300 pages and then editing them editing them over and over again that was super tough

but what kept me awake at night was the idea of letting this go you know my book had been living in my computer and read by myself my editor um and you know family members i could count with one hand and suddenly it was about to be released to the world and able to be read by anyone and criticized by anyone and teared up you know taken apart and it was really terrifying um i really you know it was hard for me to to sleep in the nights leading up to to the lunch and i

think for ethereans it must have been similar i guess leading up to the launch of the network they had been working on ethereum for over a year and when the network went live suddenly anyone could start building on it but also trying to poke holes on it uh figuring out ways to attack it and hack it and of course um they tried with uh the shanghai attacks uh when the network um you know underwent attacks for for over a month and hackers had to scramble to repel them um of course the dao is the big um

example um not obviously it wasn't hacked to ethereum itself but like to the biggest project at the time but ethereum withstood all the attacks um and booms and busts so far as for the book i'm lucky that it doesn't need to hold hundreds of millions in smart in smart contracts uh luring potential attackers but it does hold a wealth of stories i hope um that people can appreciate um they can they can't hack the book but you know they can criticize it and tear it apart

um but you know i've learned to be okay with that um now the book is for everyone to to read and to to make their their own opinions it's not in my hands anymore um this has been the hardest lesson to learn but so far i couldn't be happier with with the outcome and the reception so far so yeah writing this book was the scariest thing i've ever done in my life but also the most rewarding um thank you all ethereans for welcoming me into your community it's been you know really a pleasure to

to to research to talk with so many of you to learn about your colorful idealistic crazy culture and yeah i really hope that you enjoy my take on on ethereum's history um thanks again etcon for for having me and go get your copy