What's Happening with ETC? – Bob Summerwill

check-check alright ladies and gentlemen we're gonna jump into our next talk it is my distinct honor to welcome Bob Summer wheel back for his second eat Denver this is really important I think it's the fact that we have etc' here and other block chains as well is really implementing of where I think the crypto space needs to be you'll notice there was a market division between how I say in the Bitcoin world they they handled some pretty fundamental differences with with the cash split and big blocks and turned into a nasty civil war and this ecosystem where we're learning from one another and you know we're taking different approaches but this is open source stuff and open collaboration so there was nobody nobody nobody better than Bob to tell us about what's going on right now so please welcome thank you and the same for Ken before you run away so Ken wrote a brilliant article in 2018 called the irrational insanity of crypto tribalism which was inspiring for me where you know pointing out that the complete insanity of of the fact that you have you know hundreds or thousands of perhaps the most altruistic well-intentioned people trying to build a new and better world squabbling over you know small differences you know it's like Catholics and Protestants you know a little difference and right will burn you at the stake it is and in some ways it's maybe even worse in some way so anyway let's try and work on that so hi I am Bob some will oh my word where's the screen gone okay there we go so yeah I'm Bob soil I'm the executive director of the etherium classic cooperative we are a public charity supporting the etherium classic ecosystem helping to steward the protocol together with ATC labs and volunteers and other community members and I was previously at the etherion foundation I work for consensus I helped to set up the Enterprise aetherium Alliance I've worked with in hyper ledger I'm a community ambassador for crypto chicks I like and want all the good things to happen so what's happening with a very emphatic well a common misperception that there is around a theorem classic is that to aetherium came into existence at the time of the down fork but the truth is that there are always two theorems are always two different visions one of which was Bitcoin with smart contracts you know basically that you have a mutable unstoppable programmable money with the view of ether being money primarily and that the security immutability and the integrity of the ledger trumps everything else you know that that scalability l1 is not a primary goal the goal is to have a you know a multi-decade long immutable ledger the second vision was world computer really where you're viewing it more as an application platform ether not primarily viewed as money but as viewed as fuel for running a machine and scalability is definitely an aim both of those projects were actually happening within the etherion project up until 2016 but the fact is that those goals are mutually irreconcilable so at the time of the dow fork that came to you know came to the surface where and i saw this firsthand i was working at the foundation at the time and you would have people who've been working together for two years say you think we should intervene what you think we shouldn't just complete you know miss you know could not believe that somebody would have that difference of opinion but the fact is if if your goal was Bitcoin with smart contracts then obviously you don't intervene if your goal is to build a world computer well it's just a bobbitt bug in the application platform of course you fix it so both of these projects you know have their own merits but they can't exist within a single chain instance so what is it there in classic well aetherium classic is a theorem technology but with Bitcoin philosophy you know with nearly all of those aims in common and the difference really being around statefulness and the fact that you have a churring machine deterministic turing machine bounded by gas which is more commonly stated as smart contracts or churring complete which isn't exactly correct but anyway so you know what why should anyone care about if their own classic you know if you've got aetherium well why on earth would you would you care about etc' well the situation that we're in right now is is quite unique which is that you know the the proposition that you have with e.t.c in 20 20 years is almost like you could go back in a magic time machine to 2016 and say you know can we get all of the good stuff can we get all of the good technology you know the improved developer tools that the frameworks the maturity they're all of the l2 technology you know state channels optimistic roll-ups l2 privacy but none of the bad things happened you know you're off in a time warp and you're following an alternate universe where the dow fork never happened and the dow hacker never acted with the funds anyway you didn't have all of the I see I I co mania or the chain blow and you didn't have the crypto chitti's kid sees chain blow so the situation you have with et Cie now you know very imminently what we'll have in this pending pair of hard Forks is is complete binary compatibility with with a theorem so if you have an existing smart contract you can just deploy to et Cie trivially that wasn't the case over the past few years it was the case that if you chose to build a DAP on et Cie you were doing it for ideological reasons it was practically harder and horrible and painful and that really is not the case anymore and it will really really not be the case in a few months so what you have is you have the alternative of a platform that you can actually you know full sync on a commodity laptop you haven't got the in fuehrer addiction and you have a hard money native token so I think etc' is a fantastic platform for defy programmable money slow cadence kind of applications if you're looking for throughput don't look here so what what's been happening in 2019 well you know the the seminal thing that we had was the Atlantis hard fork which happened in September 2019 where we had forked in Byzantium opcodes so there hadn't been major updates to the ECC protocol you know for quite a while at that point after the Dow split you had had the introduction of the monetary policy you'd had the disabling of the difficulty bomb and that was about it so what happened there is you know we had a massive catch up in September you know and that was that was a real you know a real hard slog to get to consensus on that to get that movement but we did it and we in in the process you know we we learned to collaborate we learned to you know how how to bring frenemies together to move forward for the aligned you know goals that we had and then we followed that up with the Garza in January 29 sorry January of this year in 2020 and Agartha brought Constantinople opcodes so with Constantinople you're very very close to the F chain at that point you know so an example there is the addition of create two so you can have counterfactual instantiation of Chait stanols state channels so just this week I signed a signed a statement of work with next so we are going to have connects to state channels on et Cie within the next month or so because we can because that stuff has been enabled and I think that's going to be the first of many many l2 scaling mechanisms privacy mechanisms and other technologies which can now trivially choose to build on et Cie as well and then in June well we hope it's June like block numbers seem very hard to predict for some reason but it looks like it's going to be tuned where we're gonna have the that land hard fork and that is bringing Istanbul opcodes the the main difference that you have is we're not going to do the 1884 gas free pricings which broke the Aragon smart contracts but everything else is coming and we screwed up the spec a little bit so there's actually a Phoenix hard fork as well so it's gonna be as at land plus Phoenix activating it the same block in a similar way that Constantinople was actually Constantinople and Petersburg but nobody cares about that in real life like it doesn't make any difference the fact that the thing was logically split into two hard Forks it don't make a difference to normal people so by June we will be in this position where you will literally be able to compile exactly the same bike code and deploy to et Cie you know switching between ET C and F will be as simple as switching between F and Galli or other test nets other things that the co-operative specifically has done recently so we joined the enterprise aetherium alliance myself and yaws are spending time with in the technical spec working group within the testing working group working on that specification for what Enterprise aetherium Alliance looks like which is very aligned with what the ECE IPs look like you know the e IPS defining the etherion protocol the EC IP is defining the et Cie protocol and the specification process that you have for the EI awful load of overlap between those you know they're different flavors of the same kind of thing and the way that I'd express that is is if you think in say operating systems terms you know back in the day you had UNIX and then there were many different flavors of Unix and then you had you had Linux arising so now all of the different Linux distros and the BSD distros and Mac OS and iOS and TV us and watch OS all of these have got a level of basic compatibility which is defined by something called the POSIX standard and to my mind that's really what you're gonna have in aetherium you know to my mind aetherium has always been a protocol specification specific chain instances of that are specific instances you know there's not just two or theory um's there's actually about 40 or 50 public EVM chains which are compatible to varying degrees and all of these enterprise use cases so you know at the time we were starting the EA you had people you know attacking me and others for doing that going oh you guys are selling out to the bank's look you have you're corrupting the vision well know that the fact is if you look at something like Linux all the web you end up with a specification and standard which meets all of those use cases you know you have real value from having that kind of basic interoperability and that doesn't mean that they're all gonna be identical you're going to have different flavors but you you can have a large degree of portability between these different things and you see this in other tanks you know many many chains right now are using solidity or using the EVM in some form you know that you have got a degree of compatibility between these that really you know we have this emerging kind of the smart contract de facto standard kind of flavor thing going on so you know we got involved with EE a and we joined hyper ledger - and we've been spending a lot of time on hyper ledger bazoo so with hyper ledger buzzer you have a an apache license code base which can meet all of these public and private needs and dtc as well now and and we signed a contract with Masari to get higher quality investor information better quality data and information on what's happening with UTC you know I've been maintaining this this conflict of interest statement personally what you really have with Masari is an equivalent for the legal entities but also for the network is really saying you know you need and want high quality information on what's going on on the token session on the token issuance on the governance you know you really want to have real transparency about how things work and where the money is and where the incentives are because that's your best defense against scams is transparency we've got etc' nodes as well now which is an etc' equivalent of ether nodes for having visibility into you know like the market share of particular clients and versions enabled and really you know the dashboards as well for helping us through the hard fork so that's been really useful we've got blocked scout so we've got blocked Scout instances for each of the etherium chains and EDC core have expedition as well so we've got two great block explorers now when not so long ago you know we were really struggling there we've got ether cluster you know thanks to my colleague oz there so yaz has basically done an open source alternative to in furor so you know you can run a a cluster of EVM nodes be those aetherium be those etcb those whatever we in the co-operative are running you know some public endpoints based on those which are being used by a number of wallets but unlike in führer we don't plan to scale that to any large degree you know we're not gonna scale that up to infinity we've got the software available if other people want to run other clusters they can but really you don't even need clusters if I just go forward there was this announcement the other day from that node and this was awesome bap node just added et Cie I don't know that anyone even asked them to they just did it it was awesome I had a post-it note on my desk to talk to them I haven't even had time they just did it so damn node for anyone that doesn't know is you know it's it's like this the etherium computer idea which SLOC at first we're looking at doing in 2016 and then ether node were we're looking to do in 2018 and 2019 didn't quite happen you know just just the idea of having you know having a dedicated hardware node at home that runs your you know that runs your node and you'll connect to your node because you know what you have on et Cie is you don't have the massive blow where it's you know it almost impossible to to do a full sync from Genesis that doesn't happened on et Cie and we really don't want it to happen the coop also funded the Viper team to add EVM versioning which they were missing so then that that means that then you can use viper for et Cie as well but when we are aligned on protocol you don't even need that anyway you know it will just work anyway but that was a useful feature and we want to support the viper team we love the viper team the other thing ongoing here is EVM LLVM which Isaac had just spoken about I think that's an incredibly important initiative that Alan Lee here is is working on is really saying what you have with the soul C compiler is something that was just sort of like made up basically you know LLVM is a mature stacked tech stack with 20 years worth of investment in it which is powering the entirety of objective-c Swift rust and the primary C++ compiler clang you know you have something which has got decades of investment from universities from Apple you know from other major companies so what's being built with with Sol Sol L from second state is an alternate solidity compiler built on that technology so we're going to have an alternative and then evm LLVM is an alternate back-end which targets a VM for that and viper have expressed in their intent to rebuild viper on top of this stack as well and i think what we can have in not very many years is a wealth of different smart contract options where you can you can write these alternate front ends and take advantage of all that same Kochan and then you know we can build all kinds of tooling around that so that's great the cooperative are also supporting you know research into potential switching to kick out 256 so we're going to support implementation work around the asteroid test net to really like build the thing out right experiment through implementation and and get to a position where we've got something that we can look at we can look at the transition pieces but just to be very clear because people always get this wrong this is not you know a thing that is necessarily going to happen it is a proposal it's is entirely feasible that we will spend months and months and months looking at all of this and then go yeah no we're not going to switch that's entirely feasible but you know we follow the process of science we have hypotheses we do experiments we try and falsify our premises and you know doing research work which never comes to life is not a bad thing so yeah ask me anything myself and yeah zaheer all weekend also each see coronate see labs people are around you know come and hang out shout at us on twitter descends and vigorous debate are welcome in ECC that's something that people on the etherium side may sometimes look into et Cie and go oh my god what is going on Donald is saying summer will you are banned from sharing my articles you're a Canadian crypto communist you know we have we have these rigorous debates and then we get past them but I think having that tolerance for strong criticism is an incredible strength of etc' and it's something I think etherium sometimes suffers from a lot is everyone is so nice and sometimes that's not a good thing there are elephants in the room and they are good to point out so anyway yeah I'm open for Q&A so the question was do I think the Dow hacker will ever move his coins I think it's exceedingly unlikely that he will try and exit the value I think it's possible that they may be moved around but I think that you know those those accounts are going to be the most blacklisted tracked things in the world any movements is going to be like instantly spotted any kind of exchange is going to say no and block it I'm sure you can Dex things around I think that there's a possibility that things will get dext around a bit of a crazy idea I had it at some point late last year which may or may not make sense is as we start to build funding dowels on etc' so for example I think it would be awesome if we had a Moloch tale on et Cie a test net is called Mordor so having Moloch on Mordor like it just have to has to happen for the memes alone but you know I think I think we should have a Moloch day we should have Eragon downs we should have you know we do have a community fund but we don't really have a lot of mechanism around that I think we're at the point where down was kind of work and having that kind of community fund for a dare would make sense and I had a bit of a crazy idea last year do you think if I did a coin desk article appealing to the DAO hacker hey you seem to have done this for ideological reasons would you like to give the money back into a community fund on et Cie they might just happen possibly I don't think that's maybe not a wise legal idea though no I am NOT the demo hacker we are all the DAO hacker so the question was any put any thought on on just deploying die on et Cie I think that should happen I think all the staples joint coins should deploy on et Cie as well in the same way as they're starting to deploy on other chains you know I think I think all of those things should happen and they would be easy to do now and we're also getting to a point where our interchain technology you know that interrupt technology is working really well now so there is an intention and plan for an e th e TC bridge don't by directional bridge imminently one of those for rootstock as well and also bitcoin - et Cie you know I think we're gonna see these hops between all the chains and with that being the case well you can either do wrapped native from another but better yet is just deployment of these stable coins you know on multiple chains there's no reason you know you say you see tether you know tether was all on Omni and now it's on on the and and aetherium so yes absolutely we should so so the question well although the the the statement was et Cie has a fixed cap et Cie does not have a fixed cap yet there is a proposal from me no fixed supply so money that's the monetary policy so there was that there was a mullet there was a change in monetary policy which happened in 2017 which was changing the emissions schedule for blocks so etc' has fixed amount of e.t.c you know if a theory has got a fixed you know fixed inflation that you have you know ongoing issuance there is there is et Cie has got a supply cap of the amount of et Cie that who will ever be that does not exist on etherium etherium has had repeated changes of block rewards correct so so the question is well the statement was saying that the BT that the BTC model is that block rewards are going to fade down to nothing over a century and that feat a fee market will arise to you know to account for that that is also the e.

t.c model yes BTC you know that you really you have you have limited capacity and that becomes valuable and and really the the model is likely to happen I think this is completely true is you're not gonna have a lot of dat's on layer one I think most apps are going to end up on layer twos or on specific DAP chains really that that that layer one is likely to become you know a settlement layer like registry ish a place for anchoring sorry so terry has just said we will be finished with the the die bridge to et Cie in March excellent James so so James's question or statement was saying there's a lot of work on a theorem to do with stateless clients you know where would I see that fitting in I think I think the work on stateless clients is is is very very interesting I think that Alexie's work on on turbo gas you know the basically not not using a Patricia Merkle tree but alternate data structures which have got better performance I think that's awesome I would love to see ECC support on turbo graphx as well he said he's open to that it's just someone's got to do the work and fund it you know as to where all of that stuff is going to go you know I think that's an open question you know there's obviously a real need for work on sustainability and that is a common need for 4f1 and et Cie teri so teri points out that labs are working on that and funding out with the Lac C so that's awesome this is one of the things that I really love about that the phase that we're in in this blockchain journey is stuff is just happening you can't keep track of it all like there's no way that you can keep it all in your head like I remember when I was first actively you know really involved on the etherium side in 2015 essentially everyone in the world was on the read the subreddit you knew all of the people all of the projects you could keep them all in your head you know you've got like state of adapt here you go there's about 40 of them or whatever and you would know them you you can't even keep track of the names of everything let alone know what they are or the status so I mean I guess this is the joy of permissionless innovation and over this whole ecosystem is that if you get things right you're just building these layers and stuff you know people can build on top of them you don't have to ask permission you don't have to talk to them even they just go and do stuff and it's great sorry I didn't hear any of that like do you ever worry about the classic part of the name and how that might denote old and like for instance for people who are not aware of the newer hard forks bringing Istanbul and things like that people who know about the dow fork and yet have questioned whether there are smart contracts on etc' when so like the first thing they think of is the classic part and they don't think about what they're saying right so so the question was do I ever worry about you know having classic in the name and that it implies like old and useless or people don't know or assume that things are not happening no I don't I think things like being here and talking you know that the the approach that we're gonna have certainly at the co-op is is you know just a completely grassroots show up talk do things you know we're not we're not out shilling we're not out sponsoring we're not out like pushing you know the story is really going to be well hey look we're here and the the idea that etc' is a is a protest coin with no developers is and here we are so I don't I don't worry about that messaging at all no as long as we don't end up like Coke Classic well no no Coke Classic was good wasn't it it was New Coke that was the screw-up no I think that's it anything else no thank you everyone [Music] you