EPF5 Office Hours Week 1 with Tim Beiko

all right I think we got 33 people in here so we'll go ahead and get started um this is being recorded uh just for FYI um yeah so thanks for being here everybody Welcome to the first office hours of the fifth cohort of the protocol Fellowship uh today's office hours is going to be a bit different maybe than some of the other ones um we have Tim boo here who is the uh coordinator of the AL devs um calls on uh I guess just the execution layer all cevs um every other Thursday and he is going to give us uh a bit of a presentation around um ethereum governance and how all of the decisions get made how hard Forks are decided and and all that sort of good stuff so uh I'm going to go ahead and pass it off to Mario Mario can maybe give Tim a a a nicer introduction than me um and then we'll pass it off to Tim to to give us this presentation and then we'll have some time for a Q&A at the end so Mario yeah uh hey everyone uh thank you so much for joining today um hello Tim and and all the Fells uh welcome to the first office hours I want to repeat that it's uh the Hulk of restoring Anders kicking it out with a special guest so um as Josh said Tim uh Tim coordinating the the ACD uh helping to coordinate the hard fors the cor development is a uh the best person to uh learn about the the corpor system from uh uh during the after the presentation there will be space for questions so I um uh ca am sorry CA so is it better now yeah that's way better that's better yeah I'm sorry my mic was setting so uh yeah Tim is the best person to talk about the uh overview of the of the core uh ecosystem of the core protocol ecosystem of all these teams I understand when you are now just diving into ethereum when you're looking through these different clients the different layers it might be AIT bit confusing and um I believe that Tim has the best overview of what is happening in the core protocol on on all of these layers and uh he's the one who keeps the uh pushing the discussion further so I believe very inspiring person and please uh during his presentation if you have any questions uh write them down remember them and you can ask him anything uh after the after the presentation is over so uh I hope we will have some interesting questions and keep the discussion going afterwards yeah so again Tim thank you so much for joining um yeah are are you with us yes I am can can you hear me yeah all good yeah you're all clear yeah sorry about my mic again um yeah I guess the stage is yours thank you so much again for being here and yeah we are looking forward to learn something from you many people eager to dive into ethereum yeah one thing I wanted to mention is that Tim is actually our colleague from protocol support of ethereum foundation and as a protocol supporter he's also a big supporter of this program he's actually the the other manager of this program uh uh uh a part of me and Josh he's uh uh he's been he's been um supporting the EPF so yeah glad to have you here team again yeah um well thanks for having me everyone um okay let me see if I can share my screen here um Okay can people see can people still see my screen yes so good okay awesome uh I cannot see the the the video anymore so um I'll just run through this um but yeah um so my name is stimo um like Maro said I'm part of the protocol support team at the EF what I do as a day job is run the aev's calls and so um I want to spend some time today talking about like how ethereum governance Works um both in theory and practice so like how it's like defined and then how it actually happens um because because given you're all part of EPF I think like the most important thing to walk through is just like what this the Engineering Process uh kind of look like when you want to work on an ethereum Network upgrade um and then I'll end with like a few notes on like what actually are cevs um some other like resources I'll share the these slides in the chat uh after and then uh I'm hoping to leave a fair amount of time for Q&A uh at the end um and yeah because I can't see anyone I guess I'll just run through the slides and do questions all at the end if there's something really unclear feel free to just jump in and stop me as I'm as I'm speaking um okay um so I guess to to kick this off like how to think about just ethereum governance uh at like the you know most most simple level um how it's organized so you can think of it as as three different stages where um we have eips or ethereum Improvement proposals which are basically the the specification format that we use to propose changes to the ethereum protocol um so the first EIP EIP 1 basically explains how all of this works so it tells you you know like if you want to write an EIP here's how you have to do it um and sort of outlines kind of how people approach this specification process and then when they do they sort of um you know end up with an EIP that tracks a set of changes to the protocol so the one I have on the screen now is EIP 1559 which will was a a pretty uh big change from a few years ago to ethereum um and so if you go to like ethereum.org e559 you can see the entire sort of set of changes that the CIP proposed um and then the way ethereum is specified um is that there is like a common specification uh for all of the protocol rules so we have two main places where this distract um ethereum consensus specs ethereum execution specs we also have the yellow paper but that tends to be out of date but so in these three places you sort of have the set of all of the current protocol rules um on the execution layer on the consensus layer and then the yellow paper is also just for the execution layer and so when an EIP is accepted what it's effectively saying is it's like a diff that you apply on top of these specs and some of the eips are literally written that way where like um the EIP itself only contains like the sort of rationale and motivation for the change but then the actual technical changes are are literally a diff on top of of one of these specs I'm going to stop you for a second um are you changing slides oh have you changed okay we're not seeing the slides change okay that that happened yeah maybe going into presentation mode might be helpful okay uh how do I do that oh I was in presentation mode by the way yeah you were sharing the other screen the the slide screen on the presentation screen okay so okay let me try something real quick sorry about that other window yeah yeah um yeah it's just annoying because I can't I can't pre-share the present like as soon as I click on the presentation I lose you need to open the presentation and then choose the uh choose the window the presentation but then I can't I can't open um once it's open I can't come back here Bally um okay let me just share my entire screen um see if this works um and we'll we'll try it that way um okay can you see slides moving now yeah that's better good Okay Okay cool so H okay so sorry about that so you missed this but basically three things eips protocol specs um so E1 e559 there's the El spec CL spec yellow paper um and then uh once we actually have a spec for ethereum uh the way that it gets actually used in practice is through these production client implementation so um these teams come to consensus on what the spec should be but then there's you know about 10 teams that actually write production software that uh effectively is what we call an ethereum node and that gets used um to like run this protocol in practice and so you can think of like you know the the the simplest kind of uh mental model for like how ethereum governance works or how ethereum gets upgraded is there's a new EIP that comes in it gets applied to the specs and then it gets implemented in clients and then it goes live um in practice it's like a bit more complicated than this so this is like a diagram that I uh had for like an internal dock about uh six nine months ago trying to wrap my head around what the actual process is like more than um you know like these this just like specification so um what I want to do now is just kind of run through like a case study with uh going through this and seeing like how it actually happened in practice um and this will give you like a better feel for like how do you go from this clean model to like how do you actually ship a hard fork and specifically like um what does it involveed from like an engineering side and the core development side um which is you know what you'd end up working on if you join a C team full-time and then one caveat I'll put on this is that um I've tried to bias the talk in like a more technical perspective so um obviously like a lot of these changes can have both like technical complexity but also like social or political complexity so say we want to like change the issuance curve on ethereum um you know it's a oneline change in the spec it's it's quite trivial to do um but obviously it has huge implications and