The Future of ETC

hi everybody charles hoskinson here from warm sunny colorado time to talk a little bit about the future not the one with flying cars but the future of etc and i'll use a gentle little blue people like blue it's more of a turquoise i don't know i'll use a little bit of white there and then i'll put a little asterisk and say possible okay so we're going to pursue three different threads at the same time i recently read the comical post from a joint statement from cooperative and etc labs where they said that there's no information and the status is unknown for our ecips we said wednesday we kept saying wednesday they never actually want to say that we said wednesday or we're planning on wednesday they just said they didn't say anything there's no details we have a scientific paper a 30 minute video a demo on the attack on monday and a full technical description on wednesday so if given that we just came back and we're re-tooling and scaling back into the ecosystem that's pretty good but okay okay so just in case anybody forgets the ecips will be available on let's look at our calendar here and you see that wednesday the 26 okay the 26th and apparently dex is saying we don't want to follow the ecip process i guess writing an ecip is not following the ecip process there's some strange shenanigans going on here guys okay we'll call this the discussion track today we were also bashed a bit by the pure guard guys in in general and the founders showed up and didn't want to even talk about his own community but who knows it's exactly what we expected i tweeted right when we came back that the personal attacks are going to come and people are going to bash the hell out of us because whenever you want to change something it's hard stuff and that's okay so we're going to have a discussion there's two ecips one for treasury and one for the checkpoints now this is an open transparent collaborative process we will submit these both to the official ecip github and we will open up dedicated repos where other people can comment on them and we won't censor anybody we'll make sure that those repos are open and transparent and everybody can see them and everybody's free to talk and comment there and have a discussion there i don't know who's in control of the ecip repo as it is and i'm not sure what that conversation is going to look like there which is why we're opening a second set of repos specifically to have this conversation because we think it's very important that it be open transparent and fair to the community and what i've witnessed the last week has been anything but so this will continue on and basically the goal here is iteration the goal here is education the goal here is competition we want people to understand it we want people to improve it and we want people to propose competing ideas for example this pearl guard thing couldn't be proposed i completely opened to talking about it and understanding it i actually don't know much about the product at all it might be the world's best solution i've been treated like dirt by their community for some reason and they say i'm attacking them and i'm against them i've never once made any statements about them or opposed them or anything like that but apparently it's a big conspiracy to take these guys down i would love for them be in this process and discuss it through the ecip process and contrast it to the pros and cons of the checkpoint solution that we're proposing so that competition will force iteration and it will of course educate us that's the point of an open process not a troll storm on discord all right so that thread will run and run and run and i expect this thread to take probably one to two months before there is some sort of broad consensus around an idea i think it's irresponsible to publish a mandate to the community or some joint statement of the community about how these are our timelines and this is going to hit the test net on this month and so forth this is a deep philosophical discussion as much as it is a technological discussion because if you are going to use a checkpoint or another external consensus system you are taking security from an external system and injecting that in this is changing the values and this is changing the principles of etc okay we say code is law you can't reverse transactions the it is as it is lex lara but then somehow some way we can just publish timelines on when solutions are coming or test debts are coming change the consensus algorithm do all kinds of things and then publish a joint statement about that i thought we were the value ecosystem i thought we were the principal's ecosystem it seems counterproductive to give people false hope that any timeline is going to be adhered to until an etc has followed a process an open transparent process where everybody has their say they learn from each other they have competing ideas and then we iterate our own ideas to make them more palatable for wherever the values and principles of the ecosystem sit i believe this will take one to two months that's usually how long it takes to get people to a point where they actually understand what's going on and they don't make a panicked knee-jerk reaction and that's a process we're happy to help shepherd and we would like everybody to participate in it second there's the mantis client okay now that team is working insanely hard to start resurrecting things and start developing and catch up now i told them i want this done in november so we're going to see if we can do that we're working real real hard to have that down in november sometime in september we're going to have a restart the weekly meetings if you may remember when we were in the ecosystem years ago we had weekly development updates that showed what we had done that week what we were working on the progress we were making and these were broadcast live no editing people could see them as they were and the developers would talk to the product manager and we'd be able to get some clarity and certainty where everything was going and people could literally watch for a year and a half the construction of mantis start to finish from the birth of a new product all the way to a completely finished product that worked with a theater ethereum classic okay so weekly meetings and so we'll restart that sometime in september with the team that's dedicated for mantis and my hope my stretch goal is november for that client to be fully caught up ready to go with a gui we actually have a beautiful wallet that we've constructed called luna for that client and we think people a lot it's built with react okay so that's the next thread and then finally we have another thread so there's the ecip process and this is to get everybody educated on what our options are both on the short-term solution borrowing consensus from somebody else and what is required for use in utility in 2021 and beyond the mantis client is a reflection of that and it gives people a third choice a third option and the first client really built from the ground up specifically for etc and our hope is to get that in market as quickly as we can okay and then the third part is how do we reach consensus okay and that's you the community so option one is vote with your client if you switch from the other clients to mantis mantis will include the code for the ecips that we deploy and if enough people switch a super majority it's pretty evident that that is the majority decision of the ecosystem which case fork and the other chain survives okay but it's clearly in the minority option two is where we build some sort of voting contract okay so maybe you don't want to switch to mantis you the other clients but you would like to you'd like to at least express your support or lack thereof and then there's a question of well you can vote with hash power you can vote with stake these are kind of two straw man arguments for voting okay option three and this is the contentious option is where we do a proof of burn and basically a proof of burn would say that you have chain a and chain b and what you do is you destroy a token in chain a to get a token in chain b on a one to one exchange okay that's kind of like voting but that's voting in the same magnitude as resending your citizenship and setting your passport on fire you've left ecosystem a for ecosystem b we actually have a beautiful proof of burn protocol that we've developed there's actually a nice paper for this and we've fully implemented this protocol and we've already tested it on the etc test that and the bitcoin test net and demonstrated destruction redemption of tokens okay so this is a secure mechanism and it's something that can be done okay so these two the hope would be one chain because even if a chain opposed it if there was enough consent in that system then the other chain would be so small and delisted and not mined it would die off very quickly and even if it lived it would live as a simulacrum of the primary chain and it would probably preserve the etc name and brand this option is contentious and there are two chains kind of the wrapper two chains right okay so these are different options that exist and why are we going to this magnitude because you guys are getting railroaded if you believe the statements that are coming out of labs they're saying things we're going to change the consensus protocol this is not a small deal and you do not do this for 51 attack mitigation you are fundamentally changing the people who are in control of the system and the social contract behind control of the system when you change the consensus algorithm this is not a 51 attack mitigation for example the choice between asic resistance and an asic friendly algorithm that says you with your cpu or your gpu on your laptop or your home computer have a voice asic friendly means you must go buy something and hope that that's something is plentiful and available i waited a year for my butterfly labs bitcoin asic and i got it when it was worthless and it was filled with dust because somebody had been mining with it waited one year for that okay it's a whole different ball game it's a whole different discussion and there's trade-offs there's ups and downs in both of that when you talk about borrowing consensus from another system an external system whether it be obft nodes or be parallel guard or whatever the hell this is not a minor deal you're basically saying this chain does not have enough internal support to keep it secure we need to borrow security from somebody else what is the social contract behind that what's the philosophy of behind how does that actually in any way shape or form go with the principles of code is law we need to discuss that and that's a process and that process takes time there's a lot of effort that goes into it there are winners and losers in that process there are people make money in that process the entire point of the treasury conversation is not about a treasury it's about road map it's about saying what is etc going to do what is it going to be about where is it going to go how are we going to win what is going to drive use and utility for the system adoption for the system and who will be funded enough to do it and how do we make sure that those people aren't beholden to special interests if they're paid by the system itself there is no external party they work for you the community if they're paid by a company no matter how well intended that company is they don't work for you the community they work for that company and where you the community and that company are aligned great where you're not aligned they will default to that company f-sharp is never going to disagree with microsoft even though they're an open source foundation because they know who feeds them all right and this is just the reality of all open source software and there's a litany of examples of co-opted projects by rich benefactors and anybody who ignores that is either working for those benefactors or they're just being dishonest or naive life is about the golden rule and let's make sure that the gold comes from a pure source that represents your interests so this ecip process is the most significant in the history of ethereum classic and it carries very significant consequences about it now from our side we're in the education phase in the iteration phase okay we're not even at the point where it makes sense for competitors we're just getting started we're just publishing our ecips and then we'll put them all together and we hope a good conversation will form a conversation that allows the ecosystem to make deep philosophical discussions and decisions about where do they want to go what do they want to do this process is going to be very time intensive and of course we're not getting paid for that we're not getting paid for updating the mantis client we're not getting paid for any of the work we're currently doing and to the allegations that well this is all just about a cash grab for iohk if we had a treasury system even a reasonable one with a three-way split our income would be about gross income two to three million dollars per year depending on the token price cost to service the team for that would probably be about one and a half million so we're not making an enormous amount of profit on that meanwhile with cardano i just set up a 10 million dollar investment fund it would take a decade around a decade of working on etc just to make enough money to cover what i just invested in cardona this has nothing to do with the money this has to do with sustainability people who do work need to be paid to do the work whether it's us or someone else and for four years now the people who've been doing the work are either uncompensated under compensated or beholden to a single interest or ideology that doesn't seem to have the ability to broadcast a non-copy-paste roadmap that will produce use and utility i've been very nice when we came in our organization has been very nice when we came in we said let's have a conversation we really did and we said if you don't the treasury call us let's sit down and talk about it we're writing ecips what do you have in mind there was no dialogue there was no attempt for dialogue instead they said welcome back and the very next day go to cointelegraph and say the ecosystem is against it which was a lie the leadership was not against it because there is no leadership just self-appointed leaders then published a blog post before any conversation has happened about it we were given thursday to present we showed up and presented the day before opposition already formed even before we had a chance to propose anything at all and said it was against the values and principles of etc whatever the hell those are but evidently changing who's in control of the consensus algorithm is on the table and has nothing to do with the values and principles of the ecosystem borrowing security from an external actor is on the table but it has nothing to do with the values and principles of the ecosystem it's business as usual it's it's just going to be a great day for everybody trust us we'll get it done i can take the hits it's fine i get criticized every single day it's it's fun sometimes i got a pretty thick skin at this point but what i don't appreciate is are people claiming that they speak for the best interest of a community when they clearly are not at the end of the day i would like to see three things just three things etc to be secure and people have faith that it's gonna be here for a long time it's a permanent piece of infrastructure number two i'd like to see empowerment of independent voices that are not beholden to special interests and do not have a situation where they're gonna they feel they have to support something or else they lose their job or their revenue stream and number three i'd like to see etc actually solve real problems not be a copy-paste coin of ethereum and every time ethereum does something decide whether they're going to adopt that or not but actually have its own roadmap in its direction and vision and demonstrate why code is law is a great idea for that vision we have to ask ourselves today are we actually accomplishing that in the ecosystem i did not want to cause any contention which is why we bowed out we said look we'll do what we need to do we financed let's talk etc we finance community managers we made sure that the social channels were okay and fair and open we built the mantis client it was not a cheap process over a million and a half just on the development side and more money on all the other things that we did we also invested an enormous amount of time going to conferences advocating for the ecosystem and so forth and when the time came for choosing are we going to have treasury funding or no treasury funding and allow complete decentralization and allow complete non-curation of the ecosystem the ecosystem because it was mostly beholden to etc dev decided to do no treasury and we said fine we could cause a hard fork let's not do it let's walk away and let the ecosystem demonstrate that it can find its independence it can find its security and it can find its sustainability years later we're now here on the back of 251 percent attacks the custodians of this ecosystem are basically telling you we now have to make to save the ecosystem dramatic changes in the way that things are running but trust us we got this figured out and we're gonna have it on a test net in a few months three to six months it's all done and we'll move on and 2021 will be different but they still haven't answered what's the actual road map how will you be different from ethereum especially after ethereum pivots to f2 where are you going to get developers from where are you going to get use and utility from why should someone choose your chain to build their dap launch their token as opposed to the 500 other options that they have including bitcoin which by the way has stronger values and principles it's because it's been around longer and it's been tested more than anyone else okay and it actually is getting smart contracts that's happening they're going to be one of the biggest competitors in the space for everybody pretty soon as slow as they are they're finding a way to get it done and they haven't answered that we show up we say let's have the conversation before we have any opportunity to have the conversation they try to shut it down we show up this week they tell us to go to a meeting at six a.m five a.