Bailout?

hi everybody this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado although in these corona days i really haven't traveled much every now and then wyoming montana fun to get to the countryside go fishing things like that so i saw an article right before i was going to leave the office go home get somebody says ethereum classics leadership says they don't need charles hoskinson's bailout from our good friend michael kapilkov is actually a fun journalist at at cointelegraph but he specializes in these types of articles i was never aware of a bailout to begin with it's fun when you read these things i had a great conversation today with a lot of people in the etc leadership over discord and there's going to be a meeting on thursday to discuss with the community some options but you see the reality is that everybody comes to the table with some different ideas and my belief is that if etc is to be successful as a project it needs to innovate and the reality is that innovation comes from the availability of resources eos has billions of dollars at its disposal tazos has 600 million dollars at its disposal through public disclosures and a lot of people in the game have hundreds of millions and there's this fantasy among some people in the etc community that because etc has immutability it's going to be like field of dreams and everyone is just going to show up and build on that infrastructure the problem is that etc suffers from all of the design problems and experiments that were conducted by vitalik when he first created ethereum it was his first cryptocurrency there were a lot of protocol issues that now with ethereum two they're trying to address and correct and they haven't really been able to address and correct them fully with f1 so it's one thing when you're bitcoin and you have a very simple model and you never want to get more than that model small blocks no smart contracts these types of things and you tell everybody innovate layer 2 but the base layer is going to be very simple if that's the way you're going to do it that's fine but you can't be in a bizarre halfway house between the platforms of the future the cardanos and the tasos and the algorithms and the avalanches and so forth and the immutable simplistic platforms the litecoins and the bitcoins you can't live in that uncomfortable medium you have to pick one side or the other and because ethereum was always destined to push into the direction of innovation you have to have an innovation plan and innovation costs time effort and money that's just a fact no matter how passionate people are you're just not going to get the research you're not going to get the passion and you're not going to get the subsidies required for use in utility without funding now the traditional model that came out of industry was the ico ethereum classic never did that it was an airdrop so the only other option available to that ecosystem is a treasury system and i mentioned this as early as 2017 and we wrote a proposal for it at that time the community was not really that interested in it but now it's a different time and a lot of people are taking a step back and saying even if a short-term solution is created for resolving these 51 attacks what incentive do people have to build in this ecosystem when they have hundreds of options including bitcoin itself as microsoft has chosen which will eventually have some way of having ethereum styles marked contracts because of rootstock and other projects can you argue that bitcoin has violated the principles of immutability can you argue that bitcoin somehow is going to betray its principles and bail people out the core developers of that project were unwilling to propose a hard fork even after mount gawks occurred when they had millions of dollars of their own money in malcox and they'd rather take a loss millions of dollars themselves personally than even utter the concept of a roll back or a hard fork i'm sorry whether you love bitcoin or hate bitcoin its principles are unimpeachable in that respect so you're just not going to compete if all you have is your value proposition is integrity you have to also provide use and utility and have the innovative road back necessary to get there so my proposal is pretty simple you need to stop the damage today and how you do that is by two factors one they need to embrace a checkpointing system with their proof of work system it's not a question of whether they should do it or not they need to do it to restore trust and credibility in the chain the only question is should it be within the system or merch mind or connected to an external system we have a great paper that we wrote recently that uses a vft protocol the piggyback with the proof of work protocol to prevent 51 attacks and provide some clarity on history it's a great stop gap solution for cryptocurrencies that aren't at the right scale to be able to harden themselves that's the first part you have to solve the bleeding and restore commercial confidence and faith to prevent further de-listings of the currency and to prevent exodus of people from the system second you have to provide guaranteed funding to the people maintaining the core infrastructure one of the leaders in this respect was zcash zcash provided treasury provisions through the inflation mechanism to pay for development if you really think about the logical absurdity of people who say that this is a bad idea but at the same time think it's a good idea to reward minors it's analogous to saying that we're going to have a government and everybody's a volunteer except for one department of the government maybe the department of education or the department of agriculture or the defense department but everybody else has to work for free but someone gets paid the reality is to make a great cryptocurrency you need to have a diversity of people and each and every one of them are necessary but not sufficient alone for the success of the system is mining a useless and pointless coin they can have all of them in the world and they can be paid all the tokens in the world but it means nothing if there's no exchange infrastructure and traders if the code is poorly maintained you're going to have lots of security problems and no ability to innovate bring new features and utility and if there are no developers who show up nobody actually building stuff for the platform why would anybody care about it so you need a diverse ecosystem and the single most important of that ecosystem are the core developers because they're the ones who ultimately decide the game that everyone's playing based on the code that they write in the protocols that they define so you need a treasury system to fund them the core developers of the system so that they have consistency in resources and they can go and build great things and we've seen the consequences when there's been erratic funding you can look to the history of open source projects like gnu pg for example where a lone core developer living off of donations had to tirelessly spend years of his life uncompensated or undercompensated to maintain a critical piece of infrastructure for email security or the same for the open ssl project and so forth and when they get it wrong we have blogs bugs like heartbleed for example this is the tragedy of commons of open source software development the vast majority of projects are volunteer chronically underfunded and are never able to master the resources required for the utility that they provide and for the first time ever we've built infrastructure that pays people to maintain it it is absurd to say that the only people who deserve compensation are the miners but not the developers and we're willing to debase the currency to pay one but not the other it's a logical inconsistency and every time it's happened we've seen companies gain undue influence over the space for example companies like block stream with bitcoin and the alternative is for fragmentation and new projects to form with ico mania and so forth the treasury system is the purest way of keeping people in one system working on one system incentivized to continue doing their passion and do so in a way that is ubiquitously beneficial to everyone i've always believed this and it's why i put it the products that i build it would be very simple within the next few months to build a zcash style treasury system for ethereum classic should there be community support i believe there's a meeting on thursday i'll write an ecip and propose that the three core entities are global for mantis and two other entities an ecosystem receive a distribution from it it's community's decision if they actually think this is a good idea or not and i'll leave it to them i'm not gonna lobby for it i'll write the proposal and let them decide if that's a good way to go now if there is funding available and this pushes through then here's what's going to happen we can field a very considerable development team as will others and this will allow ethereum classic to adopt modern technology and get off of vitalik's old road map and differentiate itself from the past become something new take a new direction attract new developers attract new innovations be able to become its own thing and as a consequence it can evolve to a point where it can have a much richer governance system and a much richer treasury system for example they could choose to adopt the voltaire treasury system that we're building for cardano or they can go on a different approach like tazos's method or dash's method doesn't particularly matter the debate alone will define the community and none of these things violate the principles of immunity immutability upon which ethereum classic was founded why because not once was a single transaction rolled back or history changed facts or facts george washington will always be president thomas jefferson will always be president might be inconvenient to certain people or might be problematic to others but facts are facts they were there they did exist similarly the history of etc shall always be the history etc none of these things are rollbacks rather these are continuations to a new era in the project so it's my belief that if there's the courage to innovate and the community really wants to take a step forward and provide some of that inflation that they're right now giving to minors in some cases the same miners willing to reorganize the chain and attack it and give that to developers instead and liberate them and give them the ability to innovate in short order ethereum classic will rise a phoenix and it'll become a great project and it'll have the potential to do things a bit differently and truly have a divergent road map from the one that vitalik created that they chose to walk away from now i have no idea why a journalist would say when no one in the ethereum classic community except for one self-proclaimed leader that the community has rejected this concept we haven't even fielded an ecip the first formal discussion is going to occur on thursday and at the end of the day it's not a bailout at the end of the day it's just a call to action for people to think carefully about the future of the projects that they're invested in and vote with their feet vote with their clients and make some decisions about where their values fall i always believe that people who do the work should be paid and whether the work be mining whether the work be writing code or whether the work be something else could be marketing for example evangelism they should get their fair reward for the things that they do the opportunity is on our shoulders to use the treasury of a cryptocurrency intelligently and every single case this has happened i have seen the communities become more collaborative the communities become smarter and ultimately more resilient and diverse this act alone would ensure that there are three independent entities independent teams all as core developers well funded for ethereum classic which is the exact opposite of a bailout that is in strengthening the ecosystem to a point where people can hold each other in check without fear of reprisal and act in a way that's in the best collaborative interest for the system as opposed to the dominance of a single entity that holds the ico funds or the beneficence and goodwill of a rich benefactor who mandates from above silently in their ivory tower how the ecosystem should work and people have to accept it because of the old golden rule he who has the gold makes the rules so you can read cointelegraph or you can listen to reality the reality is a decision has to be made and hasn't been made and if anyone claims to be in charge of a decentralized ecosystem both they're not and it isn't it's just that clear so i'll see everybody on thursday it's going to be an interesting meeting and i honestly do hope that ethereum classic's best days are ahead of it some of the best moments i've had in this space have been working on the mantis client the time i spent with alan mcsherry and alan verbner and that team and watching them week by week out in the open you can go to the ihk youtube channel and see each and every one of their presentations every week build the best ethereum client ever written which at its time worked with both ethereum as a full node and ethereum classic the only one that was ever built from the ethereum classic side that could do that i was very proud of that project and it would be great to see it resurrected and it'd be great to see it innovated we have some technology in our portfolio that can speed up ethereum classic by a factor of a hundred we have some technology in our portfolio that can make considerable improvements across the board that we've just been thinking about for example the nepa pals which would allow better cross-chain interoperability and incredibly nice like clients there's dozens of innovative improvements that could be brought to bear if there was a well-funded well-resourced team incentivized to do this both on the science and on the engineering side and it would allow ethereum classic to truly differentiate itself from ethereum and when aetherium pivots to ethereum two and fires its miners make the case that that should be the place the miners go instead of z cash or another cryptocurrency who would be opposed to that and who would be opposed to the resilience and independence that well-funded teams could have as far as i can see the only people who would be opposed to that are people who either live in the past and have romantic notions about human nature or people who benefit from the centralization of power in the golden rule otherwise it's senseless always been my opinion and i put a million and a half dollars on the table to have that opinion and the ecosystem disagreed with it back in 2017 and i said okay forge your own path ahead and now they're at a very big inflection point if they don't make good decisions soon there's a very strong possibility that exchange the listings will continue there'll be more exodus from the ecosystem and while ethereum classic will not die it won't grow it will stagnate and then become yet another one of the promising projects of the past like peercoin and nxt and so forth that at one time had great potential but no one really considers to have a future outside of being a historical anomaly i don't want to see that happen i think too many good people in too much good work has been invested into that ecosystem and it has with the pivot from f1 to f2 a legitimate chance to continue on the proof-of-work philosophy that ethereum started on for those who believe in that why not give that a shot but people have to be wise and sensible and understand that you can pay for more than just mining yacht to pay for different things and governance has come a very long way in the last 10 years much much more than anybody imagines so that's my statement about the bailout article from cointelegraph careful with what you read and careful with what you write especially when you're talking about truly decentralized ecosystems no one's in charge and everyone's in charge it's always been that way and it always should be that way take care