The Early Days of Ethereum | Bob Summerwill - STRATO

We have uh the head of ecosystem at Strato, Bob um speaking about the early days of Ethereum, Bob Summer will sorry. Thank you.

Hello everybody. Can you hear me?

Is anything going? Yeah, there we go. Okay, great. So,

early days of Ethereum um is a project that's been a long time in the making. Um I used to work at the Ethereum Foundation uh back in 2016 and consensus worked on Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. I've been working on uh Ethereum Classic for the last six years and I'm now working for for Strato who uh launched at DevCon 1 in 2015. Um in 2017, I started gathering information on really the Ethereum Foundation and the history of Ethereum prior to the foundation. Really trying to understand, you know, what had happened back there.

There really wasn't any canonical history at that point. It was before any of the books had been written. There was kind of a an intentional veil of uh lack of information at that point as well because the early days have been rather messy, lots of conflict. So, it's like don't talk about that, right? We're conflict averse in Ethereum, so we don't talk about the bad things.

Anyway, I I went digging in. This was uh a very early video which I think is actually one of my absolute favorites. You got the volume? No. Okay, let's go back.

You ready? We got volume. No. Yes. No volume.

We're going to have a sad presentation if we've got no video capability here. It begins as an ideal the promises, our magicians, the brothers, the trouble, any arrive at any builders, a few more rebels, and of course, we still have the soldiers are coming to the end.

So, that was released in March 2014. Would anyone who doesn't already know the answer like to make a guess at who the voiceover was? It was Charles Hoskinson. There we go. Uh because the truth is many Ethereum was the work of many hands from the very earliest days.

Many of whose contributions are are kind of forgotten beyond Charles even. So I mean what we have here so early days of f.org is is the website. Um here I've so far identified over 200 people who were involved in uh in building Ethereum in those first few years. Um I have constructed epochs here.

So white paper uh to Red Wedding. Red Wedding was where Charles and Amir Shetrit were offed. Um, and we had the transition to uh the Ethereum Foundation, the Stiffung Ethereum there and FDEV was the the group that uh did a lot of the development work. The um the other thing that you see happening where are we? Yes.

In this stiff tongue period, you also had the crowd sale. So you had people who were hired, you know, you actually had employees for the EF um the Ming dynasty with Mingchan as the executive director and then we came through into the infinite garden and then this final phase that I called wartime CEO really with Tomas, but then there's no Tomas anymore. So I don't know if we're still in that. We're start we're certainly not in the the infinite garden anymore. Um, I'll just show you a couple of other very early videos.

We ready on the volume. I'm the Ethereum.

Hi, I'm Charles. I'm developer of the Ethereum project and I'm a mathematician computer. I first heard of Bitcoin back when I was in high school in March of 2011. So I didn't even appreciate it fully at first. I saw this revolutionary cryptographic technology, but I was never really sure just how effective it would be in the real world.

And it was at that time that the Bitcoin price went up to 100 and the community got much larger and I realized at that point Bitcoin is going to be much larger than ever. unique chance.

Leave it there.

Another key figure um another key figure is was Gavin Wood. So Gav um Gav was the CTO. He built the first Ethereum client, the C++ client. Um he wrote the Yellow Paper, which is the spec. Um, but he was out of the door by the end of 2015, but a key figure early on.

Let's have a bit of gav. Uh, yeah. Wow. I thought it was going to be about five or 10 people around a table at a pub like the Ethereum.

Yeah, I was a bit wrong there, wasn't it?

Five or 10 people.

Um, yeah. So, I'm going to tell you a little bit about Ethereum. I'm gonna go off on a little bit. I'm not going to Alex where he went about how it's going to revolutionize altcoin creation. I'm going to move more for the kind of what it what it will mean maybe for society.

A bit of a think about this over the past week or two sort of revelation.

So that there Ethereum's purpose is to give life to the experiments that will change society in the 21st century. That was another Charlesism. Um the white paper was in November 2013. You had the sort of the launch in January 2014. But there was another key event in Toronto in April uh 2014 where Ethereum, the Ethereum company was the headline sponsor of a Bitcoin conference.

So that was Gavin Wood and Joe Luben. That's Taylor Garing there and Richard Sto. Jason Colby in the middle. They apparently had a thousand t-shirts that they gave away. Some people have piles of those still.

Spoke to William Mugy yesterday and he said he has four.

Three magic. There you go. Um there was a hackathon there that was a lot of fun. Um I'm just going to leave that. just just one other kind of key character early on um was Stefan Tu who was sort of head of communications community.

Also famously part of the the SLocket team that wrote the DAO and all of the disaster that came out of that. This is when he was still at the EF though.

My name is Stefan. I'm the CCO for Ethereum. My background is in IT startups and development. My role at Ethereum is to bring together entrepreneurs, developers, and investors to build decentralized applications on our platform. Let me cut it short there.

Um, another key event in 2018 was DevCon 0ero. So, Devcon Zero was the first Ethereum conference, but it was not a public conference. It happened at the Berlin offices. Um, and something that is super amazing on the artifacts here.

I'm going to call each one of you up and I just want to give you don't don't be don't be scared. I just want to give you a uh a quick opportunity to introduce yourself so that later on communication.

So in this video the majority of the people who were there you know 30 or 40 people came up and introduced themselves. So not obviously not going to go through a lot of this but uh

but this is just great to see some of them. They're so young.

Yeah. So um I came on the project back in February to try and model the system and help ensure that it will work in a stable way. So different.

Anyway, you can watch these at your leisure. Um I'm very short of time, so I'm just going to quickly um point you to the website. So it's early days of ethereum uh.org here. um as well as like tons of individual um info, we've also got like a timeline of videos and articles all through this time.

And then finally, we've got this series of conversations. So, every two weeks now, we are releasing interviews with people who are around in these in these early days. Uh, I'd also point you to the Museum of Ethereum, uh, which is something I've been working on for months, uh, having a lot of this material and there are some other bits and pieces. And also, you've got hands-on laptops that you can run 2016 era uh, Mist Wallet. Uh, and I actually extended the Homestead chain.

I mined it back to life, resurrected it. So what you're running on there is contemporary hardware, contemporary binaries on the original chain protocol. Anyway, so 5 seconds to go. Um, so yeah, this is some of the things you'll see in the museum as you come in. Um, it's a lot of fun.

And yeah, this is early days of Ethereum and Strato.NExus. uh the the project I work on with tokenized gold and silver. Uh thank you