Opportunities for Collaboration: ETH1x and Ethereum Classic by Terry Culver (Devcon5)

so in 2006 I was asked by the government of Bolivia to help decolonize the education system using ICT s or information and communication technologies is the volume okay the you see the the government of Bolivia had been going through a revolution Evo Morales the first indigenous president came into power after months of protests and riots after years of stagnant economic growth and decades of minority rule the population of the country is majority indigenous and at the time the population was among the poorest in the world and yet the government didn't reflect or represent the majority of the population in the country with AVO this completely changed and our task was to eliminate all of the references of Spanish culture and history from the education system this was meant to institutionalize somehow the new political era this meant that we reviewed all the curricula we reviewed all the textbooks it was a big job and very quickly we realized that it wasn't going to work the teachers and students protested schools were completely ill-equipped to deal with this transformational change and instead of achieving the political objective we ended up politicizing the education system and the technology that we were using to implement it this is a photograph from the inauguration of Evo Morales and I tell this story because I think it's it's an object lesson in how radical political politics can discord technological innovation you know it creates a Frankenstein it creates unexpected results it places a political agenda above the needs of the people that the program is meant to help and this is a lesson that I've learned many times over the course in my career I had worked primarily as a adviser to government's on economic and education policy projects in the developing world for the United Nations for the Harvard Institute for International Development for several countries directly including Kenya Rwanda Namibia Ghana Ethiopia India and of course Bolivia and in the course of that work my colleagues and I were often impeded by certain structural issues over which we had no influence and in 2015 I started looking at blockchain as a potential way to deal with some of these systemic issues that eventually it could help in environments with weak institutions with the lack of access to the financial system with a lack of privacy a lack of identity or even a lack of economic independence so I come to blockchain not so much as a developer not at all in fact and not as an investor but really as a humanitarian as someone who based on my previous experience is looking for ways for this technology to help in parts of the world where other things have not and this brings us to the topic of of today which is opportunities for collaboration between a theory of 1 X and a theorem Casas which in case you don't know have a bit of a complicated history I'm here to say that you know let's leave aside the radical politics that have somehow characterized the relationship between these two chains in the past let's focus on technological innovation together I'm also here to say that the etherium classic community is wholeheartedly ready to be a full and constructive partner with the etherion community I invite you to work with us to collaborate and focus on this innovative technology together we're already starting to do this and I'll talk about some of the projects we have going on in a bit first I want to reiterate that we are committed to where with the etherion community we share history values DNA and increasingly technical functionality we're committed to the future of both aetherium and aetherium casa and while aetherium classic will remain as a proof-of-work chain there's ample opportunity for collaboration between the two we all know that etc' was established in response to the Dow hack and while this is important it's impossible to remain a viable blockchain if you're defined simply by what you're against you have to have your own identity you have to have your own vision for aetherium classic to survive and grow it has to evolve it has to collaborate it has to grow and so we're starting with our nearest sibling etherium to try to do that in my outreach to the etherion community so far I've met a number of really smart interesting creative people I've made new friends at the same time I've gotten a lot of questions healthy thoughtful tough questions and so what I'd like to do is help answer some of those questions and I'd like to tell you at least five things that I think you need to know about aetherium classic that will help you consider my invitation to collaborate with us we established etc' labs in 2008 after about a year of research and thinking we operate an accelerator in San Francisco and we have a dev team that maintains the blockchain our mission is essentially to build high quality technology to create communities of value and to fulfill the social promise of blockchain I'll talk a bit more about those in a minute the one question we consistently get or most often get is why are you doing this what's the motivation and to put it simply we have a deep and abiding commitment to the potential of aetherium classic and ethereal to these public park chains that are truly you know unique transformative and we'll have I think enormous impact in the future it's not really more than that uh you know most recently I was Dean of the a Dean at the Columbia School of International and public affairs a pretty comfortable and steady job I left that because I felt like this was an opportunity to shape how this technology will be implemented and how it will impact people's lives I've staked my career and my reputation on this mission so I'm in it and we're here to fulfill it I'd like to say we couldn't do this work without the partnership of the etherium Cossack cooperative Bob summer oil and gas Korea I think you're here somewhere you know thank you for your help your full partners in everything we're trying to do the first thing I'd like you to know about if you're in classic is that despite what you might read on Twitter it's growing by external measures the hash rate has grown you know about 40,000 percent since 2016 the community has reached about 15,000 members in Asia alone there's probably another 5,000 or more in the US and I think it's refreshing to see that these two key metrics show an increase at the same time that the market cap has declined since December 2017 this means that the growth is organic it means there's fundamental things about the blockchain that people are seeing beyond speculative investment it's also growing by internal measures our dev team is hard at work you know in et Cie was first established there were a few resources there were not a lot of developers to build or to share it took a while for the blockchain to really get itself organized to get the community to a point where it could actually innovate but more recently that's changed our roadmap consists of maintaining compatibility with aetherium in the past this was perhaps a default choice but now it's a strategic one so that we can be in a position to cooperate more fully in September we implemented the Atlantis hard fork which adopted the Byzantium changes from aetherium to aetherium classic we're well on our way to adopting the Agharta hard fork which will bring the Constantinople changes to aetherium classic and later in 2020 we'll do the same with Istanbul and so on at the same time I'm pleased to say that we're also pursuing several projects that we think are forward-looking in an innovative that will contribute to both ecosystems the second thing I'd like you to know about aetherium classic is that is that we're here to collaborate and contribute and I'm pleased to announce three partnerships that represent this commitment and the first is get coin get coin is deploying on a theorem classic in 2020 we will have a regular series of hackathons and bounties that will be available to both the etherium classic and etherion communities and as I understand it this is the first cross-chain deployment for get coins so a warm and hearty welcome to ethereal classic and for a theorem classic this is the first platform for crowdfunding developer projects and we feel like with get coin it's with a trusted partner in the right way another partnership that we're pleased to announce his swarm as of yesterday etc' labs and swarm will be working together to help develop their prototype and help implement their roadmap we've had a chance to spend a good deal of time with the team we're comfortable and excited about what they have planned and we'll be contributing both funding and developer resources to help them achieve it the third partnership that I'm pleased to share is that etc' labs and POC have announced and will launch while cob connect this is a managed infrastructure service that will help developers build on top of aetherium and aetherium classic it'll be available to both networks it will provide a single API with support for D apps and wallets and endpoints and it'll be free for the first two years there's also an enterprise you know a theorem Kasich needs this infrastructure in order to grow we can't really grow without it and we thought if we're building it anyway why not add on some extra and share it with the etherion community as a gesture of goodwill it really represents our an expression of our commitment to making sure that developers have what they need to build and I'd like to thank block and recognize Matt lamb who's here from block today for their cooperation with us in this we look forward to launching this in early 2020 and I hope you'll use it the third thing I'd like you to know about a theorem classic is we're committed to building high quality technology especially if it helps address fundamental long-term questions that we're all trying to answer one example of this is our collaboration on developing a prototype for a stateless client solution with Alexia Kunal I'll let Alexi talk about his work he can do that in much greater detail and much more accuracy than I ever can but we're really pleased to be associated with this project and I should say that this isn't about advancing a theorem Casas this is about working with leading developers who are answering the big questions this is something we're interested in we think it helps everybody and we think that this project fits squarely into one of those big questions a second project that were engaged in is looking at ways for aetherium classic to help address some of the scalability issues in ethereal and what we've done is started a research project to find a way to use it the Aryan classic as a short-term data availability layer for aetherium this grew out of a blog post from Vitalik over the summer on aetherium research and you know given etcs 14 second block time and lower gas fees this seems like a viable solution there's obviously some challenges but we think that it's a it's a promising start we'll start with five client support to reduce gas costs for ahead of verification but Phi client support and now is not enough on its own to solve the problem we have to think roughly about proof-of-work verification and what that means and and what we can do with that to prevent bloat in the network so please stay tuned for more news about this project as we develop it if you're interested in learning more or if you're interested in collaborating with us on it please let us know is being led by Isaac artist to artist who's a member of our core development team we're also supporting the EBM infrastructure with LLVM we aim to provide front-end support for programming languages beyond solidity and to provide LLVM base tooling for developers we're adding support for rust for C and C++ and we can add other languages as well this will enable the LLVM infrastructure to support via the e vm along with u özil and making a future you know foolproof change for developers the project is led by Allen leaf also from the et Cie vibes dev team and he's here at the conference so if you want to see a preview of the compiler or you want to learn more about it please talk to him and then the the last part of our commitment to building high quality technology is really the core dev team we're organized into three groups the the client team which works on the protocol and partnership with change safe the EVM team that works on LVM and other projects in partnership with second state and then the tooling team which has launched open RPC and the Jade suite of tools I should also mention that we partner with white bloc which develops you know a test net and a live sandbox for things before they go to Maine men the next thing I'd like you to know about aetherium classic is that we're committed to creating communities of value and by communities of value I mean creating value through financial and data independence the kind of which you can only derive from peer to peer censorship resistant trustless exchange we're also committed to communities of value that rely on the kind of and you can only get from a public walk chain one concrete example of this is the accelerator that we operated in San Francisco we've hosted more than 20 projects over the last year in our space there we provide equity investment we provide a business development tech development support in addition to that we've invested in over 30 projects and partners throughout the year and these are not etc' specific they may benefit etc' but more generally we're interested in helping the ecosystem grow and develop here's a sample of some of the projects I won't talk about all of them certainly I'll just highlight two so salvo operates a stable coin pegged to the Mexican peso that enables immigrants in the US to remit payments home to Mexico without the cost and time required with other payment services or original my which uses the blockchain to record notarize documents notarized signatures and voting outcomes in Brazil to reduce corruption if you want to learn more I can I can share this later and then the last thing I'd like to share about if you're in classic is we're committed to fulfilling the social promise of blockchain I think you know people define this in different ways we define it I think in in a unique way we think a lot about how the technology well it's important needs to fulfill a social and economic need it's the only way that it will see mass adoption and in thinking about that need we consider three fundamental transformations taking place in the globe today this is a map of the global distribution of the population by the year 2050 and that first - and it demonstrates the first transformation which is demographic by 2050 they'll be about nine point eight billion people on the planet the majority of those people will live in developing countries in Asia South Asia and Africa at the same time that concentration of population will coincide with mass urbanization so for the first time most people will live in a certain part of the world and they'll live in cities or on the edges the second transformation is financial most people in this part of the world will not participate at all in the formal economy they'll earn their living in the informal economy they probably won't have bank accounts they probably won't earn a paycheck or pay taxes in the way that many of us or at least some of us do today and the third transformation is digital I think you're probably all familiar with that and being here today is a testament to your recognition that the digital transformation taking place currently is going to continue and change the way people engage with each other and the world for us this all paints a picture of a world where the majority of the population will live in areas where the necessary infrastructure isn't in place where they won't make use of the current financial system as it's currently constructed and whether lead digital lives they may live in the edge of cities without regular electricity or plumbing they may not get a paycheck but they'll have a mobile phone to me this is an exceptional use case for blockchain and it's a long-term use case one that we should start building towards today and I hope we can start building towards that together to sum up I would just like to reiterate our commitment to collaborating with the etherion community we're here for the long-term we're sincere about this collaboration we mean it you know the the etherium community is to my mind one of the most creative and innovative communities in the world it's strong it's resilient look what you've built I think we have something to contribute and I think the community here has something to gain from our contributions please come and work with us get to know us and I hope that you can continue to welcome me and my colleagues from etherion classic into the Theorem community thank you