Remember When Ethereum Almost Ended? w/ Hudson Jameson

Transcript

[Music] thank you hello and welcome back to the strangewater podcast thank you for tuning in for another fantastic episode I want to take a moment to reflect on the current situation with curve founder Michael igeroff the CRV token and the kerf finance hack when I logged off for the weekend last Friday all was quiet in the small corner of the internet that we call defy and at the center sat the Beating Heart of decentralized Finance 2.0 curve Finance and then over the weekend

disaster struck first it was huge losses out of the most promising most engaged protocols or pools for those protocols jpeg metronome alchemex and then the big one the CRV eat pool now the other pools were huge numbers but they didn't have the dramatic implications of the CRV pool because not only did that pool represent a huge amount of money but it was also the crucial piece in the complex contraption that Michael had set up

long story short on Friday Michael had a huge but well-managed debt position against his personal CRV stash by Monday he had the same debt but with the entire system that he had built to support it crumbling at the time of recording we don't actually know how this is going to resolve maybe Michael will pull a rabbit out of his hat fix everything and maybe even make a profit or maybe the CRV token begins a death spiral that leaves people wondering is curve Finance even worth saving but right now in this moment all we have is this claustrophobic

impending sense of Doom in a community that is invisible anguish over the possible Extinction of one of its crown jewels fortunately or not this is not the first time that the ethereum community has experienced one of these existential questions in fact when you rank it up there I'm hardly convinced that this will be remembered in the long drawn out history of ethereum and so I figured that this was the perfect moment to reflect on some truly existential moments for ethereum moments where there were real doubts on people's minds

will ethereum even exist after this with a topic like this we need a special guest someone who not only remembers these moments but was in the room responding to them Hudson Jameson Hudson does a great job of giving us his background so I'll leave it to him but suffice to say for anyone that is grateful for the ethereum that we have today we all owe Hudson and the people around him a huge debt of gratitude and if you don't believe me yet well you will in about 60 minutes

one more thing before we begin please do not take Financial advice from this or any podcast ethereum will change the world one day but you can easily lose all of your money all of it between now and then all right too much intro let's bring on Hudson Hudson thank you so much for joining me welcome to the Pod hi uh you're welcome I'm here I'm loving it already it's only been 30 seconds I'm I'm so down let's do it awesome man well um let's see you and I have been like I think met about six months ago now which uh feels like in this uh well sorry we met in real life

six months ago now which feels like six years ago now but um for just kind of like the audience and um for myself again because I love to hear it would you like kind of before we even get to who you are today can you talk a little uh uh who you were pre-crypto what like drove you and then how you found the world computer sure so basically before I got into ethereum specifically I grew up very interested in computers and Technology I went to college at the University of North Texas and Denton Texas for computer science and initially what I was going for because like since middle school I messed around with you know network engineering stuff hacking stuff uh like backtrack Linux and War driving uh you

know setups so I was going to be like a network engineer or you know a penetration tester or something like that but uh the summer of my freshman year was 2011 and I forgot how I found it but I found out about Bitcoin so um it was very interesting to me having like a censorship resistant currency and software uh so I started mining it from uh my room which was this uh this guy like this weird realtor who just had a room open that I needed it was like 200 a month and I was like okay and it was it was kind of a dump but uh it was it was good enough yeah a free electricity though so you know um I I mind uh with some CPUs in there and that was kind of my intro to

cryptocurrency um throughout College um me and and one professor in particular were kind of messing with crypto I got into Dart coin which is now called Dash it was one of the earlier privacy coins although it doesn't really tout itself as a privacy coin as much now um and then finally as I was graduating college in 2014 I found out about ethereum and participated in the pre-sale uh and then got more heavily involved in 2015 and beyond great so um so much of your like story or if not your reputation comes out of your time at ethereum so we'll save that for a moment and just hover around this like special moment when you're like I was the same as you man like I was enthusiastic about computers that's why

I majored in computer science and I never really knew what I wanted to do with it I just knew that like it was the first time in my life I enjoyed homework um but like I I started in 2009 I graduated in 2013. like I read the Bitcoin white paper back then and I remember thinking like internet money like cool I guess like I you know I play video games I kind of get it um and then I put it down until I heard Hayden Adams on a Bloomberg podcast in 2021 and so my question for you is like what in that moment did you when you saw the Bitcoin white paper like why what magic did you see there that like just uh for people like me like was missed I think

one of the big things I saw I guess I should I guess either credit or or add additional detail to say that I was kind of going through one of those College libertarian phases uh where I'm just like figuring out politics and I only grew up in a conservative town so it was like oh cool and so a lot of those ideals were reflected in there um not not to completely Bachelor libertarianism of course but more to say that at the time I you know was more looking for something that had a lot more personal freedoms and also the idea of something that yeah censorship resistance is something that from day one I was really really interested in because there's so much bad things going wrong in the world because of you know

governments and people in power restricting access to information so you know to me this was just a really novel idea um and once I got latched on to that because you know I was into uh you know security I was into getting into topics of cryptography fully dove into like the math part of it and just all kind of culminated into something I got very obsessed with from 2011 until today yeah man and I I get it like I I just feel so fortunate to um have like entered this space in 2021 after like I really consider like a lot of ethereum to be de-risked like post uh merge and like post

um like a lot of really important things that have happened but like for you to like get the bug and like just to start to like feel the um the power back then is like you know not a lot of people did it right and like the people that did do it you're usually doing it because they were buying drugs and then like kind of got lucky with what was dust at the time uh so man I I don't know I I don't really have a follow-up question to this other than uh I'm impressed oh thanks yeah no I uh surprisingly although I was in college I did not use a crypto for drugs uh but I I did know people who were starting to do that so it was kind of yeah that was like one of the first use cases I guess in one of the more like

well-known ones at the time so I don't really fault you know that that kind of did help bring about cryptocurrency to a wider audience yeah for sure and I I think like one of like the coolest things or conclusions that I've come to from doing this show is to be clear I've only hosted um like westerners that are like Western into their blood right but I think for us like there's something about this technology that like we need to get over the hurdle of like it doesn't really work yet and then think like okay here's the possibilities and like you know every single day of development Things become more concrete but just like thinking back to the Dow days right like literally we're talking about like

lockers that owned eth that had like a drill in it that could be rented you know like it's it's a Madness man and I just um I do believe that like for whatever not Financial advice we're not going to talk about this there's still a ton of risk in it but no hold on I wanna I wanna show all my coins I thought I was here to show all my investments to your whole audience anyway um so okay so let's go like to this moment where like 2014-ish um first of all like at what point did you start to interact with like ethereum was it like post white paper was it like our were you kind of in talking to vitalik before he even knew what it was like how how was the first time you touched um what would become ethereum

sure so I was just wrapping up my college degree so that was kind of ending um I was still somewhat involved in Dart coin but it was changing its name to Dash and that's what a lot of changes happen to it so I decided to kind of back off as did a lot of people in the community and so uh I uh did see the white paper somewhere I might have been on bitcoin talk and um I read it and it immediately clicked uh the part that clicked for me was like oh I understood deeply that like for Bitcoin it was like you know decentralized money or value on a chat on a blockchain and this is like oh let's just do that but for programs and I was like oh I had not heard of anything like that with the exception of like colored coins and uh like what what

was you know what is now called Omni protocol um like that those were the only ones that were close to that and they didn't always do a lot there was a few other things basically there was nothing that was like holistic and like very focused on that so to me immediately clicked I heard about the pre-sale and I participated I have a funny story about that actually um so you know back then one Bitcoin was like six hundred dollars and I had a handful I didn't have like hundreds of Bitcoin or anything um but I I would say that um I was on the website to buy pre-sale ether and what you do is you get a Bitcoin address generated that's cryptographically tied to the ethereum address that would be made for you in

Genesis and you got the little you know Genesis file to have your address ready so you send whatever amount of Bitcoin you want and that equals to that amount of ether for the time you bought it so I was going to send half a Bitcoin which would have given me a thousand ether but I accidentally sent a whole Bitcoin and I got two thousand either and I was kicking myself like oh my gosh I just didn't double accidentally um so uh at the time which by the way all that ethers has long gone the initial 2000 but uh but I I was gonna say that yeah it was really funny the mistake literally doubled my ether allocation to if I would have held it you know wild numbers now yeah I know I mean and I think that um I think that's like kind of every I'm so

happy for you that your story is a positive one like we all have this story where it's the first moment that we realize like the true power and the true danger of blockchain I'll tell you what mine was again I joined in 2021 I Bridge funds over to arbitrum and I sent money to alchemics to try that out alchemics is not an arbitrary and you know that I I I went we don't need to talk about numbers here it was an embarrassing amount um but like yeah you know it's stupid tax right like that's the only way to learn how any of this stuff works so like I'm not upset about it in the scheme of things but like that is the moment like every one of us has that

moment where um our money's gone forever and that that's the first moment we've become like true crypto people and I'm just happy for you that it turned out to be a trade yeah absolutely uh the uh yeah the trade I mean yeah this is like the positive side of what of that kind of story for sure uh yeah I think that like yeah my I really didn't get super involved like into ethereum day to day until 2015. uh because I was starting 2014 I started work at USAA which is a uh entrance and Banking Company for U.S military members but they have a very large I.T presence because they don't have physical locations because you know militaries

around the world so a lot of it's focused on the mobile app or you know on other pieces I was there and got hired to do Mainframe development uh within the insurance department so not the most fun thing but while I was there I was an absolute Menace uh bothering my you know bosses and whoever else would listen And The Innovation people about the you know blockchain so there's actually five or six patents that I helped ride at USAA back in 2015 on blockchain before any other bank was you know doing anything and tusa's credit they were doing some Integrations with coinbase and some other stuff at the time but it was kind of here and there but I bugged them enough and a few people believed in me enough that they moved me from the

insurance area in 2015 to The Innovation lab and I was the lead blockchain developer there early blockchain I guess researcher whatever so we I had a small team like four people one of them was actually Joseph Delong from Sushi swap in the now Asteria um and uh it was really funny like he's told the story but we were there and like he was early Dogecoin and a few other things um but he I was doing research on all the chains like literally anything that was out there there were early versions of tendermint and so I met early Cosmos people I met Joe Lubin early from consensus and all this other stuff and uh Joe wasn't like uh I was telling Joe about it he was just not convinced about

ethereum like he wouldn't be convinced for like another you know six to 12 months but um one of the coolest stories from that era to kind of wrap this you know early period up and and what really got me into it at the end of 2015 was Devcon one in London so by then I'm daily on ethereum I've been helping do like a documentation effort for free I'm moderating the subreddit I think about that time uh I'm just every day nothing but ethereum when I'm not at work I'm at home doing ethereum like four to eight hours a day so yeah completely obsessed at that point and just know this is going to be a big deal so uh Devcon one in London's coming up and I've been just gotten married I just got a house I

didn't really have disposable income to fly to London uh so I was just like man this like literally I've just had a feeling this could be life-changing so I called my dad and I was like I never asked my dad for like anything hardly he's super nice but like I just never really had to and I was just like hey this is incredibly important to me like this is what I'm obsessed with now could I get you know some money to just cheap fly to London stay at a hostel and he said sure you've never asked me for anything so shout out to my dad uh for for helping me with that one and flew to London uh stayed at a hostel with like not 10 other people in the room it was a nice hostel though shout out wombats hostel uh and the first day I went to

Devcon it was pretty chaotic as far as like the organizational aspect like there wasn't enough volunteers the badges weren't set up so I kind of just asked if I could help and started giving out Badges and then I met people from the ethereum foundation a consensus who were helping and throughout that time I did nothing but volunteer pretty much I just like you know worth the T-shirt Booth I made sure speakers were where they needed to be I was the time keeper for vitalik during his talk um all kinds of things helped like with the AV I called the venue and it was too loud like there's random stuff and I wasn't even you know like paid or assigned to be a volunteer this was the first time many people have met me um and a lot of good came from that I met a lot of early ethereum people

um it literally was like I was on cloud nine like all of these people who I had read like dozens of papers about like Vlad zamfir uh and vitalik and Jeff vilke and like diving into Geth and just reading all their comments all day they were all there and like talking to me it was literally surreal so um after I worked really hard I connected uh during and after with Ming Chan who was the executive director for the ethereum foundation and I sent this like long email that was like here are all the things I thought went right with the conference and here's what I thought went wrong and how it could be better next year and they were like oh no one else did anything like this and then we kept in touch and soon after she uh offered to get me a job at the

foundation uh which literally was one of my dreams at the time I was like oh if I could just do anything it'd be to work there so um base so in 2016 in the summer I left um uh USA to go work there and after that I've just been yeah doing a lot ever since with ethereum nice awesome man that's that's incredible and I think uh a testament to how our industry Works um that you know I I remember when I was like onboarding myself first of all this industry is possible to onboard yourself incredible that is not possible and whatever in most other Industries uh but second like I just so vividly like remember the first time I was like you

know two or three months into ethereum research like understanding and for me when I entered the space it was just when we were starting to see like Arboretum launch and just understanding like what l2s would allow for ethereum and all this stuff and I remember like going back to the top the um the debt like the first Devcon that ethereum was uh so I guess that's on one and then also um vitalik's like kind of like initial pitch of ethereum to the Bitcoin conference and I just remember seeing like like it's all out there man like they're telling us what they're gonna build and like yeah it's like implicit but like there's an implicit call that says like this is what we're gonna build if you

can help like get your ass over here and like start helping and um you know that means like very different things for very different people but like for for you what that started meaning is like no one can figure out how to get a [ __ ] badge and like what that ended with is like I we need to like kind of fast forward just through the exposition here but like you leaving the ethereum foundation like as like one of like the like names and the Champions and like one of the people that built it into like what it is today so um you know I just again I think for everyone aspiring to like kind of figure out their place in this industry like the reason I work so hard to like get people to tell their stories is like so everyone can learn like this is the only

way in like you got to get interested you got to learn and then you just like roll up your sleeves yeah it's so much it's much more accessible than just about any other you know place out there including technical places that you can jump into because people are offering educational materials and I mean it used to be sparse it used to be very sparse and hard to keep up and learn with everything um and now it's still kind of hard to keep up with everything because there's so much going on but at the same time there's also more niches for people to dive into like if you just want to do governance stuff in your non-technical like people can do that you can do economic elements you can do any number of use cases and apps like it's just grown so much and that idea of openness

that people carry on the projects that have that you know in their DNA just like ethereum did and our ethereum aligned in that like do the best yeah and I think like we one day right like we're not at institution level yet despite like the way we understand what institutions are right but like one day JP Morgan will have like the regulatory cover they need to get involved right and like one day Quorum will or wait sorry it's Onyx now all right Onyx will become a roll-up like that's just like how the economics work and like the whole point of what we're doing here and so like I don't I don't really know if like oh it's always going to be the decentralized transparent open projects

that win or whatever but like the point of ethereum is like we all get to play all of us like you get to play against JP Morgan like that's never been possible before yeah yeah no it's it's really neat I hope it does keep that as well and one thing I do like though that's promising you say you came in you know during a lot of the l2s rising up and like becoming actual things people could could play with I feel like many of the l2s are at least trying to you know to actually do um like what ethereum's done as far as the openness and stuff some of them are masquerading as it but then other ones are truly like no you know we're we're aligned with ethereum we're here to complement ethereum and not to compete and and that's very promising yeah

there's a lot of like rent seeking and a lot of just like um like Trend chasing and dollar chasing and uh you know for better for worse like our industry is uh you know it's the majority of our industry is that stuff and so that's just something we all have to reconcile with and like it's kind of funny between people like you and me and like really hard and embarrassing between people like me and my mom yeah oh I would say though I would say so shout out to my mom because she since 2011 has been listening to me talk to me about this show listen for hours and be like okay I kind of get this and you know that she wasn't necessarily raised and you know all the technology growing up or anything but like even today she'll like listen to all my she's gonna

listen to this interview probably she's listened to all my talks uh gives me like feedback because she's a speaker and like okay you should have done this differently but you did this good so so yeah having support is also really good just that's a life thing yeah I know and and uh yeah before I'll stop this before we get to esoteric but like the problem with like what social media has done to us is like we think that we're connected when we're really alone and so like what you're queuing off on is like okay there's like a real difference between like a real difference between your mom and you like a real difference between like the you and I have like met in multiple cities across this country and developed something versus like the people in private discords that you know versus like your friends on crypto X

for sure cryptox oh gosh I hate that uh like do we say like CX like oh did you learn that from CX CX oh no yeah I don't even know what to say yeah uh so um okay I don't know how to do this um elegantly so I'm just gonna use like the knowledge that I have to like to to get us to where I want to go like so we are uh we're recording here on Tuesday August 1st I will be releasing this on uh Thursday in two days and like what we are sitting in is like the like molten hot like crappiness that is like this curve situation and so um like one of the reasons I'm so excited to be talking to you in this

moment is because like well like the history of ethereum is these moments and like as as understanding like what is existential what to do in existential moments like and really just um well there's a lot there's a lot lot going on here and so uh let's we'll do this chronologically and kind of get to where we are today but one of like so so again I don't know how to get here elegantly so I'll just ask like Hudson what happened when you first started at the ethereum foundation sure so when I first started the ethereum foundation I immediately went into put out the fires mode for the next six years uh pretty much so so what I mean by that is you know I played a lot of roles and wore a lot of hats at the ethereum

foundation initially I was there for devops which I was the devops lead with um Jamie Pitts from when I got there until when I left in 2021 I also co-ran devcons two three and four did internal like org security stuff and then also was kind of the incident response person both for ethereum foundation specific things but also War rooms and you know incident response channels and organization when there was an ethereum incident uh or a major ecosystem incident basically so I'd be the line of communication like the ethereum Foundation Twitter like wouldn't be like oh this happened it would be me basically on Twitter saying this happened and posting it on Reddit and

Twitter and Facebook and whatever else so as I was doing that I kind of had to quickly grow into that role I was in my early 20s so that was kind of a lot to be to be put under especially for like multi-millions to then multi-billions dollars Network um that was neat you know being protected so like a lot of these I think I was involved in every major ethereum incident uh especially the on-chain ones from 20 I'd say 2016 until 2021. since then I've been doing off and on a few different things like if there's a war room happening for dapps and trouble then I would handle it but then not as much for the protocol stuff Graham said we haven't had many major protocol incidents since even 2020 wow so now you

gotta knock on wood yeah I have a wood here thankfully um so yeah the biggest one I think though or the one that's like most probably known earlier on was the Shanghai attacks in the Dow um the Dow was first so the dad when the Dow happened that was my first week at the ethereum foundation so I was there more of a fly on the wall more than any active participant you can go to Reddit and Twitter and see some of my very early thoughts and like putting my opinion out there and stuff like that and there's that history but I didn't actually like do anything myself for or you know any of that response yeah so let me just for the audience's sake let me uh try to give a summary of what the Dow was and then we'll have somebody who

was actually there tell me how wrong I am but um so essentially like before we like the kind of origin of the idea Dao um was kind of what we think of Dallas today but um originally like the entire the ethereum community it was small enough it was energized and focused enough that it wasn't the idea wasn't everything should be a Dao it's there is one Dao and that one Dao is like the coordination mechanism by which you know we we fund projects we that's why it's basically like the government of ethereum community it's very interesting that you label it like that because that means that there are pieces of History forgotten this actually had nothing to do with the entire Community this was a

specific project by slackit no no sorry fair enough uh like I mean when I say the entire ethereum uh Community I mean that like my much more colloquially like oh gotcha so everyone participated that is a good that is absolutely accurate yeah yeah so like again this was not an official ethereum project it didn't come from the foundation but like probably everyone who had East sent some um and so basically the this the Dao was funded with I think about 15 of all ethereum and uh turns out that um there was a vulnerability in the Dao and we don't need to get in the details but like two key things one an attacker was able to drain all of the eth out of the

Dow and uh we you know we knew at that time that we were going to move to proof of stake So Not only was that like financially disastrous that had like actual existential implications on ethereum and then two the weird thing that happened here was that you couldn't directly drain the Dow you could drain the Dow to a subcontract that would drain it to you 30 days later and so that created this literally like 30-day Doomsday Clock on basically like everything on totally everything so um Hudson would you kind of like one correct anything I said but then two take us home with um with kind of with the result and what chains came out of

that but like would you just like keep in mind like you weren't a principal agent in this you were an uh Observer but like what did you take away and like what life lessons and like ethereum lessons like do you now know came from this experience sure um so yes I I think here's the thing was fairly accurate um the only things that I would say would be different are uh when the yeah when the exploit was exploited from the Dao uh there was actually these really cool there's a group called the white hat group and they were semi-anonymous like most people know who most of them were today but they were a group of people who would every time the Dow hacker would send a transaction they would send a

counter one and so it was really a back and forth where a portion of the funds would be stuck forever basically back and forth back and forth another portion was in that 30-day lock period um the amount that could effectively be gained by the hacker or things like that would be about I think it was 15 of the circulating Supply um one thing I'd say though at the time and I there's actually interestingly enough a Reddit comment where I asked Vlad and vitalik at the time is this existentially terrible for for proof of stake and they said no it wouldn't be enough for at least back then and I actually did confirm that in the last two years that even today's proof of stake would not have been affected by it but

the biggest effect honestly would be the fact that you know there'd be so many people basically almost everyone in the ecosystem was participating this was the only thing to put money into besides random little ponzis and the boards for like the the I guess the stewards or whatever they called them at the time for that dap uh were all like OG ethereum people like Founders ethereum Foundation people consensus people like they're everyone was involved in it so it's kind of not a thing where it was like you know oh it'd be something like if uniswap had a bug and then everything got drained like that it was bigger than that even like it was bigger than because it was the only thing at the time everyone put money in there so more so than like you know philosophical

things about immutability and things what I learned from that and what ended up happening was we did do uh we did decide as a community to uh like not roll back the chain have a like a we kind of did surgery on it more or less because it wasn't truly a rollback technically but you can and think of it that way I suppose but but we we put the funds in a multi-seg that then people could automatically get their funds back including this their stake in the Dow Etc um and so people actually profited from that to an extent like I got more money out of it because there was a contract to convert Dow tokens to Ether um and so that's how it ended people are saying like oh the ethereum foundation

made a decision so so some of the biggest you know things that happened behind the scenes that people don't know about there was a lot of back and forth in the foundation about what to do but at the end of the day every Dev team in the foundation to this day is autonomous from the management of the foundation Ming Chan anyone in operations anyone in non-technical leadership did not ever give guidance on what to do in fact uh the Geth team internally secretly went back and forth on what they wanted to do they were super torn it was super stressful the Miss team which was the graphic client at the time had a pop-up when you opened it this was like a the first desktop ethereum wall this was before metamask um you would open it and it said hi a hard Fork could be coming do you want to

stay on the old fork or the new fork and it would like randomize the yes and no buttons so like they really did a lot to be like we want this to be a choice but at the end of the day and people will cite the whatever token vote that that was the deciding factor that was referenced you know in places I don't think that was the deciding factor it was really a lot of people getting a lot of community sentiment and then ultimately saying here's the choice we have uh once it happened um there was a chain split the way that um proof of work mining worked at the time when a hard Fork happens uh everybody who's on the new version of the software goes to the continuing continuating chain and if you stay if miners stay you know mining the old

chain then it goes and that's the you know old chain so this is the only fork in ethereum's history that truly made a chain that lives today that is not the ever original ethereum chain and it's called ethereum classic and the main takeaway just to wrap this up from all this I actually am glad this happened I don't know if I would have been for or against it I was kind of on the fence myself but I don't think that a coin should live and die by philosophy alone because there's been so many other coins since then and even before then that had a major attack where they say we're not doing anything and then the coin dies so the fact that we knew hey this is the first year of ethereum's Life uh they we kind of picked practicality over dogma and I know that like this was a one-time

thing we're never gonna do it again and people are like well it sets a precedent but like we haven't done it again and we've had opportunities and huge discussions including the uh second parity multi-sig hack that happened years later where a ton of people wanted to you know revert it and we didn't because it was just like nope we we early on I think Andrea sensanopoulos worded it like this and said you know the Dow hack was ethereum was a baby learning how to walk and the baby hit its head on the table like it's not going to do that again because it learned and it's getting older and it's not going to do that but it was just like it was an infant so like ethereum was in its infancy we can make mistakes that aren't going to be you know existentially awful for the network yeah

and that first of all um thank you like I mean first like thank you for just like finishing out the story but also like giving us like a peek behind the scenes I mean I guess it's like six years later now so it's not no I mean yeah it's still pretty cool though I kind of like it no for sure and for me as someone who wasn't there and especially Not only was I not there I wasn't participating like you were even and you were just participating as an observer as your first week but you were there right for me like I don't think about this stuff in moral terms like I you know like I don't think is it good that it happened is it bad that it happened like it happened right and it's part of the history and like when I look

back at this I I see like two major lessons like one is like ethereum classic is like it's like the Sixers whatever somewhere between the top 20 largest coins by a market cap right and like essentially what it is is like the oldest like untouched version of ethereum with this hacker running around with a massive amount of eth like you know and and we can talk about like there's a whole interesting conversation about like the reason that this happened and that like a bunch of people decided to run these like out of date minority clients that created ethereum classic was so that like exchanges couldn't like sell it you know or make fees off it like so that's

one lesson and just um you know if if our let's say 15th largest coin is like the decaying remnants of an old hack like we all need to think about more what we're doing here but two I like the lesson of the Dow hack is like who owns ethereum right and like that to to make it relevant right like the thing that's existential about curve right now maybe is that like the tokens have this voting power that like if they're like distributed through the market because of some liquidation thing the question is like what does this mean for the future of the protocol and like what we learn and like a lot of people don't talk about from the Dow

hack is that the owners of the ethereum protocol are the people like literally I am one of them I know Hudson you are one of them the people that are running physical computers that are like hey I'm gonna update this software or I'm not gonna update this software and um you know I think like from there like you it's just like really important to actually understand how ethereum Works before you like incredibly say like this is going to change everything I completely agree and there's a lot of people there are so many good actors excuse me there are so many good actors um that started ethereum well actually no there actually was very few good

actors that started ethereum almost all of the co-founders are not good people except for like vitalik and uh mihai and a few others so anyways um but but I would say that because the metallic held on and kept going with it and then brought in other people who have you know been steadfast leaders and not leaders because they were elected and not leaders because you know they were assigned it necessarily it was more just like there was a gap and they decided to fill it and if they didn't do a good job people would speak up about it and then someone else would go do it and that was much easier to do in the early days than now but um there's very few people I know that were like really strong leaders or very big names back in the old days that still aren't that are like completely

gone from ethereum right like there's been a lot of turnover but like some of the largest voices uh especially with it and like the core developers and a lot of the protocol all and like client Dev and networking and research people are still here and so that's kind of a testament to how comfortable uh and and like safe the uh ecosystem is for those types of roles and also a really good thing for ethereum because you have those morals and those values and that like kind of attitude the care like kind of Carefree or like you know less intense you know just like understanding pragmatism I guess like having fun and being pragmatic rather than making this a religion or making this you know more

than what it is I mean what you're saying about like having ethereum classic being in the top 20 is because at the end of the day we're working on hyper hyper capitalistic money machines like we have to because that's how you get censorship resistance but beyond needing that like I I'm just kind of glad not everyone is completely enamored by greed and money and ethereum yeah well um I have some like pretty strong like thoughts and thesis on on this but we'll save it to the end so um in a conversation we have about like the purpose and the future of ethereum but let's uh let's kind of continue through like the fun stories so um I think we can talk all day about the Dow like there's so much more there than

the 10 minutes we just uh went through it but um with like your experience and especially your experience as a watcher and more of a bystander there like with all that in mind and everything you learned like let's move on to the next one like the next core moment in ethereum history and so that is the Shanghai attacks and so um you know I I'm why don't I again try to tell the the master what happened and then uh feel free to correct and then um kind of finish it off for us but um this is name the Shanghai attacks because um basically the entire ethereum team tiny at the time was at Shanghai for Devcon two or three two right and and

again there's an Incredible video of vitalik telling this story on like a zoom call so I'll make sure to link that in the show notes but as he says he has like woken up in the middle of the night uh by like all these famous people that you've heard to like go in this tiny room with all the founders and it turns out that there was a like incredibly massive it's called a denial of service attack but essentially somebody was spamming ethereum Network so much that it like ethereum was completely unusable by like legitimate people and I think back at the time that essentially meant like people couldn't send youth back and forth to each other maybe two exchanges but um today what that would mean is like you can't get your transaction in to

like stop to top up your debt position to do a liquidation or you can't um buy a like a token that just like dipped down because of like a crazy like huge Market cell like ethereum is inaccessible to you because this attacker is just saying like nah and so um I'll I'll like essentially what this boils down to is like defcon's crazy um they think they get you think you you get it fixed and um basically it turns into like a two to three month game of cat and mouse where it's patches new attacks patches new attacks patches new attacks um until finally like the the the last vulnerability like seems to be

patched and then as far as I know the attacker just kind of went away yeah no that was a good summary I'd say the two or three months was two or three months was more figuring out how to fix the damage they only attacked for two or three days during Defcon um but oh my gosh that was the that might have been the most chaotic time in my life was Devcon too because and this is highlighted in lorshin's book so I can kind of talk about it now but Ming Chan turned out not to be a great leader and was um not doing good organizing the conference so it turned me and my spouse lilit were two of the main organizers along with only one or two other people in China where we don't speak Chinese and handling all this so it was just

super chaotic stuff not done till the last minute I wasn't sleeping so the night before day one I'm asleep and I wake up uh I think it's like three in the morning like I wake up because um someone George Hallen who was the communications person for the ethereum foundation called me and he said hey the Network's under attack wake up everyone uh and meet you know and like somewhere like it was like the second floor hallway but there was like a side area with some chairs kind of like just like a meat area so I get up and I get dressed and um I call like a bunch of people I call a few Courthouse that are across the street at another hotel where like the Hilton or something and uh I I get them

and I'm like hey come over to the hotel come to the second floor and so um I then go down to the front desk just panicked and I'm like there's an emergency uh with the technical stuff we're doing for the conference and uh I need to get in touch with these people and so I I say a name and they're like we don't have that person in the system and then I think oh my God they're they're using an anonymous name when they talk to me in the community they're actually booked here on their legal name so like I'm trying to like figure out what their legal name is or if like part of it's real and I do that for a little bit and get a few more people and so we all go up and I'd say there's like at Max 20 25 people in this hallway by the

time it's all over at first was only about 10. so I get there and Martin swinde who's now prolific as a guest developer and someone who's helped with the tax before or prevented tax before uh he is like that's this is his first week at the foundation although he's been doing a lot of stuff before so it's not like he's you know at the state where he knows Geth inside and out yet um vitalik's sitting there Peter um uh like from the guest team is there Felix I think and a few other people um and we're all trying to figure out what happened and so just as like a two-set in summary yes it was a Dos attack uh there were only three clients so there was a Geth uh there was parody uh which was from Gavin Woods uh Team

when he left the ethereum foundation and then there was also um ethereum Java which was a separate team that hardly no one used that client so when the when the attacks came in um the death client couldn't handle the load that was coming into the nodes because of mispriced op codes but parody was able to stay up but like no one was using parody hardly because it had just been released and especially not miners so miners were having to very quickly switch out Geth nodes for other types of nodes the good news is we were in China and the majority of hash power was in Asia at the time and so in the middle of the night suddenly uh spark or uh eth fans pool which then became spark pool

was there with us they were literally sitting beside me in vitalik and saying what can we do to help and and then we also got in touch with the American um you know mining pools that were awake and because you know it was the middle of the night China so it was daytime in the U.S uh I'm pretty sure so yeah we get everyone together we say Okay miners do these steps they do the steps and then finally the transactions can't go through because the gas limit is so low they can't they can't submit contracts and transactions that are large enough to slow it down anymore so then we're fine so then uh it's like 7 A.M and it's going to start in an hour so I run down to get ready the first person of the day to talk is vitalik so we're down there and we're giving an

intro and like 10 seconds before we're like oh crap metallic's not here to give the intro he runs in he runs uh he runs up on stage and I'm trying to think exactly of what he said but I think he said like we have a patch or something like that because like Geth had built a patch in like less than two hours for their client to fix this and everyone like stood up and cheered and stuff because people had started hearing that there was something going on um so the conference went on next night I get woken up again in the middle of the night I call everyone again we go down another vulnerability is exploited that now hurts both clients but doesn't completely take them offline but it's still a big deal so we work on that we get that the miners still have their

previous thing happening like their previous resolutions so uh we fix that again for the time being and then uh that's kind of the whole story there I literally ran myself ragged between dealing with Devcon and then dealing with this I hack so are the attacks and it got fixed later through a series of smaller hard Forks that like cleaned up the damage man incredible and and I think it's so it's so easy to hear that story before you're an ethereum and just say like okay so there's like a Dos attack and like a couple of guys like didn't sleep that well for two nights in China and like 20s but like to to really like live and breathe and like to have

your home base be the evm I mean it you know it it really is existential like this whole thing literally the point of ethereum is that it can't be DDOS right like that no matter what happens now in 12 seconds every 12 seconds there's going to be a block and that block is gonna have open space for you if you can pay for it right and um yeah so I mean I don't need to explain to everyone like why this is a big deal but just to kind of like cut to the hearts of the matter like what can you just like reflect on what it felt like to like to now go through this event this time as a leader um and really like feel the the existential risk to ethereum and like

the true threat to um you know something that we're really not experiencing today at all but like truly like is eth gonna survive if we don't pull this out like what was that like it was pretty scary the Dow hack in particular like right as I was joining the EF I kind of thought it might be over like I thought you know depending on what happens I didn't have all the details but for a day I was like maybe this is over maybe ethereum won't last for these Dallas hacks you know I didn't think I I think it's one of those things where there's so much going on and I'm running a whole conference on on ethereum you know in four hours and this is going on and people need to be organized I wasn't as worried because I couldn't be like there

wasn't room there wasn't room to feel like this could be the end of ethereum or anything and also part of me was also like we were still small enough but getting big enough that I think part of me was like if we need to do a restart I guess we can we already did the DOW and we're still young was like part of it but I of course I didn't want to do that there was a time when like that thought would be eclipsed over the years of like okay now it really can't happen but uh the number one thing that I learned from that and I think the reason so people have commented on like how during the emergency situations and War rooms for other stuff how I can be so calm I kind of got out of my nerves out back then um but also whenever

I'm in that situation the number one thing I think about is like no matter what happens to ethereum I'm still Hudson I still have my friends my family like there's no one harming me physically everyone who's in this war room with me we're all humans we're all fine we're gonna be hopefully taken care of or at least I know that you know I'll still have supported things to do so it's kind of like a you know this isn't the the only thing and this isn't like the most important thing even like if ethereum is your most important thing that's unhealthy so like to me it's like yes this is one of the top things in my life that's important I've literally been obsessed with it since it came out but like it's still not you know people and it's still not that so that that

helps somehow where with like putting things in perspective where I can then focus and be like okay now that I have that out of the way I don't have nervousness or fear to you know clamor up what the next steps need to be yeah man that's amazing and I think that you are a better human than me because like I don't I don't know if I'm able to dissociate like myself enough from like my personal [ __ ] to like really just think about like humans and like I can see you doing that I can totally see you doing that you can do it I appreciate it I mean I think that um I think like that's why I love talking to you and people like you and like me that are like adults and like have experienced the world outside of ethereum and understand that like

this this is the most important thing I'm working on and yet like if it was gone tomorrow like well you know my identity is not gone and like part of that is like about like appropriately sizing your Investments like and I say that because as you said earlier our industry is driven by hyper capitalism and greed and like again like I said 90 the vast majority of our industry is not like the true core builders that like are pushing this forward so I mean I just I I find it so important to like make people think about the the money aspect in a dirty way as much as possible um because like we've attended like the whole technology forces you not to but

anyway I I uh I was talking to um mutual friend who got uh pretty severely like hit in the uh hacks um in the last couple days and here I'm just pulling it up so I can read it directly what he said to me is I'm actually in a good state of mind my mood is Opera operative as usual and you know like I couldn't stop thinking of that when you just explained to me like what you were your experience of the Dow hacks are where it's like get like I get it I get it taking a step back in the moment I get it talking about it now like it's huge it's huge it's huge but like in the moment like none of that matters like you are looking at this like small scrawny Ukrainian kid in front of you and like asking like what

do you need like how can I help and like you know I think that's what it means to be a like an operator and a leader and like how the world happens oh well yeah I think I think that's right for a lot of the people who you know jump into this kind of stuff and a lot of people because especially if you come from the outside don't feel like they can jump into this stuff or like they may be fit for it but just are worried about taking that diet but everyone's usually pretty nice especially if like you know you intro yourself even if you're Annon and you know just say here's my skill set for this so yeah like we said earlier it's a lot more welcoming and you mentioned you know you'll still have your you know um like you'll still have your ID or

your what person or um personality and stuff like that but the issue is once World coin takes over we won't have that if ethereum breaks yeah but you'll have like 30 coin or whatever yeah I'll have third out 30 world so I'll have all this world in my wallet yeah um I guess I did not I should have faced this better so um let's just fast forward to at least from my perspective what the most recent existential risk is but I'm very curious to see if you perceive it is the same one which is FTX um and like for me that's I real I think that you can make an argument that there might have been an existential risk in the black Thursday or Tuesday or

whatever it was around March but like honestly the world was an existential threat in that moment so like I don't really think ethereum gets like special you know like whatever and nothing happened so like it is what it is um but for me like FTX it was that right and we I still don't understand how the um Financial impact alone wasn't like so much bigger like we still have the FTX hacker we still like I still don't understand how Solana is alive when we found out that it was essentially like a like hottier Factory for the bankman free it's like and and most importantly it was the first person that American politicians decided to embrace and he turned out to

be the worst of us and I think that we deserve every single thing we're getting from Gary Gensler and I think he's right honestly I think he's right for most things not on technicals I don't really know about that stuff but on Vibes and so um first question to you do you agree or would you say that there was another existential risk we should be talking about um and secondly uh whatever you choose like what uh why are you choosing this as the existential threat so it's funny because FTX is like I honestly it was very entertaining that day not like everyone lost money and I'm happy about that but more of like the memes and keeping up and it was like it was like a rush of like

information and all this stuff culminating and you know like an avalanche falling uh like so like all that to say like I was very in tune with that however I don't really know much about defy at the end of the day I don't participate in defy a lot so because D5 is one of the main use cases of ethereum and I've been mostly in the protocol Dev side or like governance or Community I didn't feel it was that big of a risk I felt like you know FTX could go under and that may set us back up to six months which is looking like that might be what it is but like the markets are entirely irrational ethereum classic has been like uh double spent on four times and it's in the top 20. we have coins

from Clear you know shysters and people were like they clearly inflate the numbers and no one can call them out like Tron and Richard Hart and Steph finally he's you know someone getting taken care of but it's a slow process so all of that to say like I've kind of turn myself off to anything that's like oh no this major bad person that has to do with the capital or coin volume or coin price involved is going to kill crypto because like to me way back then when crypto like was 50 cents or a dollar for per ether you know we didn't really care about any of that and that same Vibe is there for the people who are still building from back then and a lot of them a lot of those that have

come on and have been like lived by that philosophy so and it's really I mean it kind of feels weird to say because like yes people do make a life-changing amount of money and then they lose it through you know incidents like that and that is still really awful and sad and there's good people people I know devs protocol devs that like lost a ton of money because of FTX so that part that's awful it shouldn't happen um and at the same time is it you know a threat to ethereum as a poll you know idea concept you know being around I don't think so I think that I I can't see an and so many things would have to happen for the price to crash so greatly and I I mean I the thing I would be

fearing about the most is uh the potential for some type of regulatory or legal hindrance on the ethereum network from like a like a validator perspective like making it so that the validator set has to like all move to a certain country or all leave a certain country or things like that or that someone finds a bug in ethereum or in you know some type of thing to allow for uh you know a complete attack on the proof of stake Network these things I find very unlikely because of the price and a lot of other things but if ethereum even went down to I don't know I I don't know the economics of it so don't quote me on this but I'm guessing if it you know went down to 500 bucks per coin or even

less because I mean even in the last three years it was down to what like 400 or 180 per coin so like we can we can do a lot of shifts and it's still operate the same defy isn't the gonna be the most important use case in hundred years potentially Hudson I feel like I feel like we coordinated on this and like I got you like because like okay so look like I I agree with you that like when first of all existential is the wrong word I said earlier that post merge like I think that ethereum is dearest I think like exactly what you're saying is that SBF was a risk be from regulatory standpoint I think like the path to it's illegal to run the computer program GIF it is paved with FTX and SBF and Alameda

right but so I I love that you took me like to where I want to go which is essentially like I don't believe that like the purpose of ethereum is defy or finance and I think that that is like an incredibly provocative like scary thing to hear for uh a lot of people on CX or like within a lot of the communities that um you know really captured a lot of the energy through the Lost cycle and so like in our last few minutes here like I would love just an opportunity to kind of pitch you my like narrative idea of of what's Happening Here so pre Preamble over okay so look like I am becoming so more and more convinced every single day that Defy is exactly

the same as nfts from the standpoint of like when we look at nfts now it is so clear that that was like a [ __ ] bubble that like we're not like the purpose of this technology is not to like create like addresses within the evm that we like out off chain tie to photos that we sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars like like none of this like really at least like that real but like what we got out of this like incredible narrative bubble was like these like really really important Primitives that like within the evm or within like business or systems design that like we will see over and over and over again

and so like when I look at D5 I am like becoming more and more convinced that like it's the same thing and that like I kind of think that it you know in five years when we look back like CVX will look like a mutant ape or whatever right and like par that is like really comes out of like I have a tribe background like I've done real Finance like this isn't how any of this works at all right and like I just fully believe in a world where again we've talked about JP Morgan and Onyx like they already have a like a side chain or sorry a uh all L1 today that is doing literally billions of dollars in repo transactions every single day today

right like I believe that as soon as they have a regulatory framework like they're just gonna come in with 10 times the TV all that D5 has and just say hey just play on our toys like don't [ __ ] around with any of those curved stuff like just what come do your stable swaps here right and so I think that like defy was important and that it taught us like a lot of interesting things about liquidity and locking and like all this stuff but like I think it's gonna go away and so that brings up like well what then what are we doing here what's the purpose of ethereum and like my kind of like thing is like I think the point of ethereum is not trustless Finance it's trustless compute like the whole

point is to have this like uh credibly neutral perfect Computing space and like in order to get decentralized we had to make it as shitty and slow as possible but like what the magic of ZK is what the magic of Roll-Ups with the magic of Oracles of data availability of dank sharding what all this is is like how do we take all of modern Computing and get it into that UVM space and so like I'm just so confident that uh that that is like the basis of um you know the next narrative bubble will be about ethereum adjacent compute and um you know blah blah I'm going on and on now so I'll let you react yeah no that that sounds great I I completely agree with that

um I would say yeah defy isn't uh the main use case but it is a use case and it is going to kind of go away when I don't know enough like I'm speaking unintelligently on this but I would say these money Legos once they get high enough once you build the Legos high enough it kind of topples because like in the real world you don't have like nine protocols on top of each other to do very risky things and yeah I mean like you could do the gambling stuff but it's not like the whole world and like my mom and you know playing people all over are going to do that so that's that's yeah I agree completely and then lastly the general purpose Computing yeah that that is the number one invention the censorship resistant distributed decentralized you know uh

general purpose Computing even as slow as it is and you know as it's going to ossify and just be more of a proving layer for these other systems and l2s and uh chains and stuff then yeah that's that's kind of where we're heading and it's okay to kind of pivot from what we initially imagined in 2015 which is like everything's on ethereum like it's okay to Pivot because we still have the initial goals in mind and it does align yeah no and like one of my favorite games to play is like how do you describe uh ethereum in the most reductive way possible and like I just I stole mine from Vitality right I think I heard him describing dank sharding um in some talk and he's just like when this is all done it's basically like ethereum is just the bulletin board where you put

something up in 30 days later it falls off right and so like you know I think that's like really what why the more you know the more you realize like well what does that enable and like how that truly changes everything um but like I don't know I mean I guess that's like the challenge that we're dealing with is like this is so abstract and it's so on the bleeding edge of the like most bleeding edge like technology that's ever been created and like you get into number theory for this elliptic cryptography it's yeah oh I I'd say the last thing just to close out I feel like my definition of mainstream on ethereum

hasn't changed since the beginning just about and what it is is I don't believe that ethereum will be mainstream until I'm using it and I don't know I'm using it like I'm on the computer like an hour I'm on my phone and there's some kind of weird background micro transaction I might have set up years ago but like you know it's being used and it's has all its benefits but like I'm not having to do all the stuff yeah dude exactly like what I try to tell people like people tell all the time like how do you know there's not going to be another chain or like why isn't it not just like stripe or something and I'm like you guys you guys you're wrong this is about computer science right and what you should think of ethereum as is HTTP it's just that you get to own part of it and like

here's the thing about HTTP like all it is is like sending messages but like through it like we have like building on the layers and everything like we're able to do this like real-time recording well like you're in Texas I'm in Los Angeles and we'll be able to distribute it to like you know literally unlimited amount of people like when I think of ethereum it's like in the end game it'll be like okay yes like there's these letters that you sometimes see eth like I don't know but like you don't actually have to know what the [ __ ] any of it means like you care about applications yep yeah absolutely cool man I won't take up any more of your time I really appreciate it man like my mind is

um it's just racing so uh before I let you go would you just share uh like any socials or uh where can people find you anything you want to shout out perfect yeah so um you can find me on social media on X that's I wish it'll call it's on Twitter at hudsonjamison I also have hudsonjamison.com but I haven't updated it in a while and then yeah I think that's just oh I guess I'll shout out one more thing I work at polygon as the VP of governance and community and my governance team and I are doing a polygon online governance hackathon it's really not even a polygon thing though we're like working with people from around the ecosystem to come up with governance problems and if you don't know how to code it all this is for you like you come in here you get you pick

one of our ideas or you bring your own and then it's a hackathon but just with ideas and you know giving a presentation on the answer there might be some small technical components for certain ones if you want but uh the most accessible hackathon to help widely in the ecosystem system is something we're setting up uh soon so be on the lookout on my Twitter for that that's awesome and I'll make sure to boost it as well and I'm just like a huge fan of like creating space and opportunity and like encouragement for people that aren't like ready or able or have any desire to actually touch code or on chain so um thank you for that no problem thank you so much for having me yeah I mean it's always an honor and I hope to talk to you soon all right bye thank you