I attended the conference for the first time when it was held in Nashville last July. Both events were rumored to have around 35,000 attendees. These are huge numbers, and it certainly felt very full in the Expo hall and main stage on the two full days of the event. The venue coped well with those numbers though, as the conference center was just a part of a huge overall complex. The Venetian is the largest resort in the USA, with over 7000 rooms and suites, and is also one of the largest globally.
I did not know what to expect from Nashville heading into last year, but the city was not what I expected. The main thoroughfare, Broadway, was packed with blaring bars and bachelorette parties. Both for the city and the conference, at times it was a brash circus and I felt that it might as well be in Vegas. Indeed Vegas was a good match and the conference will return to The Venetian in 2026.
What was Las Vegas like?
This was my third visit to Las Vegas, and the first two trips were 15+ years ago. Much of the Strip was pretty similar to my earlier trips, but one stunning addition was The Sphere. Beyond the external display there is a huge hemispheric screen in the interior which showed “Postcard from Earth”. Think an IMAX screen, but 10x larger and better. It is the largest and highest resolution screen in the world, with 16K resolution. There are 167,000 speakers, haptic feedback on most of the 17,600 seats, with wind, temperate changes and scents. It is incredibly immersive and well worth the trip.
I also took the opportunity to attend some magic shows and to eat at Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen.
There was talk about how Las Vegas had become a rip-off in the post-Covid years and did not offer the same value which it once did. I was there while it was Memorial Day weekend and it still felt like pretty good value to me, coming from Canada.
Las Vegas is like an amusement park for adults – a hedonistic paradise – and is an awful lot of fun for a few days with numerous dopamine hits available, but it gets old fairly quickly and I think two or three days is sufficient for most people.
What was the conference like?
The conference was pretty similar to the previous year but I enjoyed it less than in Nashville. I had hoped that the strong focus on politicians as headline speakers was something which would have been tied to the 2024 US elections, not as an ongoing primary focus. The 2024 event had Donald Trump and RFK Jr, along with many other state and federal elected officials. The 2025 event had Eric and Donald Trump Jr, JD Vance and Nigel Farage, but also many other members of the house and senate and state officials.
It all feels rather nasty and boot-licking, driven more by shallow number-go-up thinking than by empowering individuals to control their own destiny. It’s all rather empty and sad to my perspective.
While one of the many main stage sessions with politicians was happening, there was an amusing session happening on the Genesis stage where all the speakers were spitting fire on the topic of “Are Bitcoiners Becoming Sycophants of the State?” You can guess what the panelists answers were, and they were not stated politely.
I was quite disgusted to see that Freedom Law School were making an appearance in the Expo hall for consecutive years. They offer their “go straight to jail” services, peddling the fiction that US Income Tax is something which is optional. Not tax avoidance through jurisdictional arbitrage, but just “you don’t have to leave the US – just don’t pay” delusion. Unsurprisingly, the top Google hits for them are for one of their customers who was sentenced to 33 months in prison for tax evasion. That the organizers are fine to have them back is very disappointing.
It was quite clear that we have entered a new phase on the regulatory front, as Justin Sun made a rare appearance on US soil.
On a more positive note, Peter Schiff was in attendance, both speaking and at the Euro Pacific Asset Management stand where I was able to speak with him and thank him for the education on precious metals which I had through his public appearances years ago. That ultimately led me to blockchain and crypto. That was an unexpected treat.
Also, the fabulous Daniel Batten interviewed John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman. I was lucky enough to persuade Daniel to be a headline speaker at my POW Summit 2024 event last year in Frankfurt. He presents excellent data on the environmental benefits of POW mining with extreme patience, and has made significant impact fighting FUD over several years, as a climate technology investor and educator.
John Perkins was another important individual in my own journey. In his whistleblower account published twenty years ago he detailed how the World Bank and International Monetary Fund implement economic colonialism over developing nations through extortionate loans and “Structural Adjustments”. He is starting to understand how Bitcoin can be used as a tool outside of that malevolent influence. It was great to see him speak and to hear his perspective.
More to the environmental story, the famous Skull of Satoshi artwork was on display in the Expo hall. This was commissioned by the misguided and now abandoned “Change The Code” campaign waged by Greenpeace USA with 5γγ«M funding from Chris Larsen of Ripple. It was meant to be horrifying but was quickly adopted as a beloved meme by Bitcoiners. Now that the campaign has failed, the artwork was donated to the Bitcoin Conference by Ripple, in a cynical looking attempt at an olive branch.
The Expo hall was full, with exhibitors showing mainly same kind of projects as in prior years. Mining solutions, exchanges, payments, lending against Bitcoin. No much that was particularly exciting.
The Open Source stage was off in the back of beyond, not connected to the main expo hall or to the industry hall, but off away with other meeting rooms. That was a downgrade from 2024 and indeed it did feel that progress and excitement had slowed about what else is possible with Bitcoin other than simple payments and store of value. Bitcoin layering projects (usually building on BitVM) are still progressing, with some announcements soon after the event, but were not the “hot new things” of 2024.
Overall, this felt like a regression from the 2024 to me, with politicians, podcasters and influencers and shallow rhetoric overwhelming the builders and project work. As in 2024, Max Kaiser and Michael Saylor were headline speakers and not saying anything very insightful or useful. Just performing in front of the fans.
Michael Saylor’s talk looked entirely AI generated, with 21 different shallow talking points and AI generated images. He spoke second-to-last, before Ross Ulbricht, who closed the event. Seeing rafts of people walking out of the main hall after Saylor finished when Ross was about to speak was entirely indicative of that audience and deeply disappointing to see.
I guess it’s not too surprising given how mainstream things have become, but was pretty sad. I heard somewhere that likely 50% of the audience for each conference was brand-new, so they are missing 10-15 years worth of context. Ross was arrested in late 2013 for running a dark market called Silk Road in the very early days of Bitcoin. Many people say that Silk Road was the first killer app for Bitcoin. He was recently released from prison with his sentence commuted by the president.
In his talk he spoke about having been in a time-capsule. He has missed pretty much the entirety of Bitcoin’s development. It was great to see him free, and a credit to the conference for giving him that closing talk.
I went to Litecoin Summit on my final day, where it was announced that a BitVM-based project called LitVM would be building on top of LTC, which was pretty exciting. BitcoinOS are the tech team.
Would I go to Bitcoin Conference again? Back to Vegas in 2026?
I am not sure that I would. It’s a spectacle, that is for sure, and Las Vegas is a fun destination, but the conference itself left me feeling rather icky and dejected about the state of the Bitcoin community. It felt that the kind of Bitcoin technical renaissance which seemed so close in 2024 was further away and still might never happen. The high priests were back and number go up was the focus.
Last week, Isabella Santos released an 11 minute video entitled “Ethereum – How a Lie Became Worth Billions”, which has had a good number of views and retweets. I watched it and am sorry to say that it contains a large number of inaccuracies and bad assumptions. I made some notes in a Telegram group and it turned into an essay, which I’ve saved here from posterity and future reference.
(For anybody who does not already know, I am the Executive Director of the non-profit supporting Ethereum Classic, and I organize the POW Summit conference. I’ve spent years of my life on both sides of the fence (Ethereum Foundation/ConsenSys and the Ethereum Classic) and I’m a Bitcoiner too. ETC is POW forever, and is one of the primary POW ecosystems – #4 of daily mining rewards – ahead of LTC and BCH. I know the key Ethereum people personally and had a front row view of the launch and or the DAO hack.)
I’ll watch through it all again and make some notes here.
Ethereum tattoes, not a cult, “investing” – Welcome to memes. You could say this about anything. People like affinity groups.
Vitalik Buterin – net worth was zero now 1γγ«.5B. So we hate money now, do we? Having known Vitalik for 10 years I can assure you that he is one of the least money-motivated people who I have ever met. I don’t believe he even owns a house or a car. He just nomads around the world like a cat backpack and a laptop. He is very humble and generous with his time. You can disagree with his values. You can say that Ethereum is stupid and useless, but presenting him as a pantomime baddy who created Ethereum to get rich is just not credible.
“Wall street wants a slice of it” – What, like they do Bitcoin?
“Founding of Ethereum based on a gigantic sham. Biggest lie every told in investor history. People don’t want you to know about” So here comes the over-the-top rhetoric. Ethereum did a crowdsale of a big chunk of premine. Everyone knows this. They knew it at the time. Everyone has known ever since. There was no deception here. People could decide of their own free will whether or not to spend some of their BTC to fund development of the first ever smart contract platform. The funds did not go into Vitalik’s pocket. They went to fund the Ethereum Foundation which has funded development of the protocol in numerous ways for a decade. People who chose to participate in the crowdsale made huge profits for the risk they took in that investment. 1000 ETH per BTC is a 50x relative gain over holding BTC over those last 9 years.
Ethereum and Bitcoin are not the same. That is another key thing to understand. Bitcoin is money. Ethereum is more like a financial application platform. Presenting BTC vs ETH as a zero sum game is not a useful way to think about this stuff. Ethereum is not trying to be Bitcoin. Ethereum does not have to “lose” for Bitcoin to “win” and visa versa.
“Vitalik Buterin thought he could do it even better?” – scrunched up face. No, because he wasn’t building another Bitcoin. He was the editor of Bitcoin Magazine and was deeply involved in Bitcoin. He wanted a smart contract platform (as did huge numbers of other people) so that we could try building a whole range of decentralized applications, not just money. Adding that functionality to Bitcoin had already been ruled out (would not make sense), so this turned into launching a new platform. Building on Mastercoin had also been considered.
“Internet of money should not cost 5 cents per transaction”. No, it really shouldn’t. Lightning still has not solved that. No Bitcoin L2s have solved that, though I have high hopes with BitVM enabling trust-minimized bridges to a plethora of Bitcoin L2s.
“What would Bitcoin’s launch have looked like if it was launched the same way as Vitalik’s approach”? This is not a useful question to ask, because it implies that Ethereum should have been launched the same way as Bitcoin, which was not feasible. It was a one-off. A virgin birth, cannot be replicated. As has been shown by the fact that Ethereum and many other smart contract platforms have been in-progress for nearly a decade and are still under heavy work, a “virgin birth” was not possible for these platforms. They needed funding, which is why they were launched the way they were – crowdsale/ico. You can argue that lots of these did not deliver value for money for the investors and did not build anything much. No way at all you can argue that for Ethereum. It actually delivered huge value for the investors and built the foundation for the whole of the rest of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Without Ethereum you would have had little other than Bitcoin ever created. Huge amounts of cryptographic and crypto-economic research would never have happened. We would never have had DEXes or ZKP research or rollups or .....
“Contacted a former Goldman Sachs employee”. So Joe Lubin was one of eight founders who ended up forming around mailing lists and prior Bitcoin connections. Vitalik did not contact Joe. He came a couple of months after other founders. Unlike Vitalik, 19, and others in their early 20s, Joe actually had some business experience, and he also provided some funding to move the project along before the crowd-sale (as did Anthony Di Iorio), which happened 8-9 months after the white paper. Many people were working unpaid for all of those months. Those people were compensated after the fact with ETH tokens, and those loans repaid at the same time. Joe’s work at Goldman Sachs was likely a contributing factor to his later involvement in Bitcoin and then Ethereum (seeing how the sausage was made and being revolted). Saying “X used to work for Y” to discredit them is pretty weak sauce. Joe could have retired and sat on a beach forever at that point (and had been living in Jamaica) but instead choose to dedicate another decade of his time and money into helping the Ethereum ecosystem grow by essentially blowing his whole ETH stack on funding project teams at ConsenSys).
“World Computer” – yes, that was the goal. It’s easy to be skeptical of such a lofty goal, but that was the earnest intent, yes. Not for “pitching for money” but because that was the whole purpose of a Turing-complete blockchain. There was no deceit. That was the shared goal.
“What if I create the tokens and sell those to investors?” It was not a new thought. Ethereum was not the first ICO. There were a couple of them already happened. It was an obvious thing to do.
WRT – Company and raising money and SEC, etc. Fuck the SEC. Honestly. They have done nothing to protect investors and have done huge harm to all of us. Trying to paint Vitalik as a demon for attempting (and likely succeeding now, it seems) to route around the SEC to let people voluntarily invest into the first attempt at building a smart contract platform was a noble thing, not a nefarious thing. The investors were not harmed. They made out like bandits. It was a win-win. So fuck the SEC and fuck the thought that there was anything “bad” here. Again, the funds went to a foundation, not to Vitalik personally. It was a collective enterprise. Where on Bitcoin, Satoshi did everything, you cannot drop Vitalik in there and pretend it is the same.
“Registered shares in a company” again. Fuck that.
“Takes in 18γγ«M in investment before anybody has there hands on the product.” That isn’t actually true, because the crowdsale happened around 9 months after the white paper was written, and there were already technical specifications and multiple working software clients, and an active testnet. It was just under a year later that the mainnet launched, but pretending that it was just magic money for nothing is plain untrue. In the 2017 ICO phase there were many teams who delivered nothing but a white paper prior to fund raising, but that absolutely was not the case for Ethereum.
“If he ran out of ‘Bitcoin’ to sell, he would just make more out of thin air”. That is untrue. The terms of the sale were clear upfront. However many ETH for BTC ratio, and the sale ran for a fixed amount of time. The ultimate supply of ETH depended on the sales, but it was not some reactive thing where more was being “printed” on the fly.
“He would be basically printing money” – that is how presales work, yes. It is a market where investors are deciding if they want to invest in something which is completely new, with huge potential and also huge risk. It’s easy to look back 9 years later (especially if you were not there) and think the ETH was a sure thing. It wasn’t at all. Even after the mainnet launch the price was very low for a year or two. The EF nearly ran out of money in 2015, only just after the launch. Vitalik and the EF were not making out like bandits in those early days. Far from it. More like a very edgy startup.
“He sets up a company called BtcSuisse”. No, he didn’t.
BtcSuisse were a Swiss Bitcoin Exchange/company who helped with the crowdsale.
Look closely under her text at 7.03. That says EthSuisse, not BtcSuisse.
EthSuisse was a for-profit company which existed prior to the creation of the Ethereum Foundation, while there was still internal debate about how the corporate structure should work, and whether or not is should be for profit or as a non-profit. It only existed for a few months prior to the “Red Wedding” in which Charles Hoskinson got kicked out of Ethereum. The decision was taken there in May 2014 to create the Ethereum Foundation and that everything would be done through that non-profit.
“Would later add functionality to allow people to make their own versions of money” No. The ability to create tokens with programmable behavior was fundamental to the platform. It’s Turing Complete, so you can program anything you like. It’s the whole point. That was not some nefarious thing which was sneaked in there. One example was that Ethereum has not go any built-in support for multisigs. That was done intentionally, so as not to constrain the design space. There are numerous multisigs now – like Safe – which are a layer above the L1 platform itself. Launching tokens was something which was around long before Ethereum. See Bitshares for a key example.
“Not without taking a cut, of course”. Well that is deceptive too. It’s just gas fees to pay for transactions.
“The DAO”: “ok can you guys stop trading”. So that happened in an emergency situation, and some exchanges stopped trading ETH voluntarily until the dust settled. It’s not too dissimilar to situations where Bitcoin needed emergency fixes and the devs coordinated with miners. Again, it’s not nefarious.
“Push a proposal to centrally change the ledger”. So this is a really key point which people get wrong all the time, and I am likely one of people in the world closest to this from both sides. I worked at the EF at the time, and then I’ve worked on ETC on the other side for 5 years.
I can tell you with complete certainty that this “Vitalik is a dictator who pushed this to save his friends and investors” is completely untrue. The less comfortable reality is that the majority of the Ethereum community was in favor of the change (maybe around 80% of so). Vitalik stayed very neutral and did not speak out in favor of the hard fork at all. Others did, like Gavin Wood, but the EF as a whole just presented options to end-users, and the users chose what to do. Nobody knew what was going to happen ahead of the activation block. It could have gone either way.
Ultimately there were irreconcilable differences of option in the two camps, with a minority (ETC) seeing ETH as Bitcoin with smart contracts, and wanting it to be hard money and of course you do not change the ledger (this was my immediate reaction), but a large group seeing ETH as a decentralized application platform, and $ETH as oil for the engine, not as money. Seeing this as a bug in the platform which there was an opportunity to fix (though an ugly fix). And thinking “fuck you, hacker! You think we are so rigid that we will just let you steal all that money which was intended to fund ecosystem development. Well guess what. Fuck you”.
Ethereum community is not Bitcoin community. The platforms were and are not apples-for-apples. So this was not Vitalik being a dictator – it was just the community expressing their wishes, and it really was that strong a consensus. Ultimately, decision making boils down to what software people choose to run. And it was the forked chain most chose. Which was sad to me, but also empowering to everyone, because ETC was the first ever minority chain which survived after a chain-split. It had always been assumed that it was a zero-sum game and the losing chain would die, but that did not happen here. There were miners who chose to continue mining the original chain and that acquired a market price when Poloniex listed it, and that became ETC. That was wonderful. If showed that people could not be compelled by a majority against their will. Unlike the real world where you have to live under whoever wins the elections, for blockchains you can split the universe and have both outcomes in parallel. Be involved in the one you see value in. Or both!
“choosing between investors or decentralization, he would keep investors happy” – again, this is trying to personalize this onto Vitalik, but it was not his choice. It was the community, and both outcomes happened.
“A few years later he would get rid of the concept of mining entirely. Act like it never happened”. So transition to POS was part of the white paper in 2013. This was not a surprise to anybody, and again was something which most people in the Ethereum community saw as a positive and were happy to see FINALLY come to fruition in 2022.
I don’t see POS as a positive for Ethereum myself, and likely many others here do not either, but there was no slight of hand here. If anything, the POS fans were the ones who had a rightful gripe, because they’d been expecting that to drop as early as 2015. It came to feel like a long con! ETC have been delighted to scoop up a large chunk of those Ethash miners after The Merge, gaining a 10x in our hash rate and stepping out of the minority hash position which was so insecure.
“Given in direct proportion to the number of ‘Bitcoin’ somebody holds”. Again, not exactly true. Choosing to stake Ethereum is opt-in, not automatic, and you are doing work just like mining is doing work. You need 32 ETH locked up (high opportunity cost) and if you are staking yourself you need a decent computer and especially really good connectivity. If you hit issues then your stake starts getting slashed, cutting deeply into your yield. Many stakers end up using custodial services rather than giving themselves another job with this, which undercuts the whole intention. But yeah – one of many of the issues with various POS protocols. I don’t think they are a great solution. They’re likely fine for L2s, but not suitable for non-State L1 money, imho
“More power you have over the network itself”. Also, not true. There is certainly a rich-getting-richer dynamic in Ethereum’s POS, but that is not giving “more power over the network”. Certain other POS chains (and DAOs) have on-chain governance, where decision making is done with coin votes (or with delegates). Polkadot is one such example, where protocol changes are voted on-chain and automatically activated. Cardano too, I think.
That is horrible, IMHO. You lose the “division of powers” dynamic in Bitcoin (and ETC) between users/holders, miners and developers. Whales can force protocol changes. That cannot directly happen in Ethereum POS. Sure, you can have soft power and persuasion and so on, but ultimately you need to persuade developers to make the changes and then end-users to voluntarily update their nodes to accept those changes.
Ethereum POS centralizes the wealth, but whales do not intrinsically have any more power than other with regards to the protocol. Not anymore than any rich people have the ability to steer results anyway (which is too much!)
“Technically be the defacto central authority” ... no
“That would an accurate description of how Ethereum launched” ... no, it wouldn’t.
Also, Ethereum launched nearly ten years ago. Lots has changed in the whole of the cryptocurrency ecosystem over that period. Funds have been bought and sold numerous times over. The number of whales who have HODL-ed for ten years will be close to zero, I am sure. Ethereum, given its market cap and liquidity, has been traded to such an extent that the original distributions are not likely representative any more. I recall Vitalik saying at some point recently that he had less than 0.5% of ETH and had never had more than 1% at any point. If he’s rich it’s because Ethereum delivered in spades. His degree of control over Ethereum is always overstated. From the earliest days there were like 30-40 people who were very active on delivering from within the group which became the EF, and later hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of other project teams building on Ethereum.
“Ethereum is confusing”. Yes, it is, and that is sad.
“Does not want to be money”. Correct. Though some people have tried to make that a thing with “Ultrasound money” meme.
“Does not want to be a software platform either, because it is slower and less efficient than more centralized services” So that is dead wrong. Absolutely 180 degrees off. Ethereum absolutely wants to be that. It’s the whole point. And yes, it is much slower and less efficient, and that is the intentional tradeoff versus AWS, or even compared to Solana or whatever. It’s just like Bitcoin’s decentralization/throughput tradeoff. It’s easy to say “this is slower so it is useless”. Well, d’uh. Of course coming to global consensus on some compute is slower than any centralized service. And yeah, the UX will suck, but the tradeoff is that you have censorship resistance.
That value prop for Ethereum was obviously weakened by the DAO Fork, and is weaker for POS, but it’s still a major value for Ethereum. Better than the VC chains with their vanity metrics.
I would argue that ETC is stronger again on this score, following the Bitcoin pattern very closely, with POW and smart contracts and a history of non-intervention.
“Hasn’t achieved decentralization either” showing the number of nodes running on AWS. That issue is sadly the case for most blockchains. Sad number of people running their own nodes and sad number of the ones who are, doing so on rented hardware. But decentralization is many faceted, and it’s easy to shoot holes in other things too – like mining pool decentralization, use of non-custodial wallets (especially Lightning) and on and on.
“Not sure what Ethereum is at this point” I’ve felt the same too myself, and felt sad about that, because there was a much clearer vision in 2014/2015 but I guess that happens in many projects as they get more mature and mainstream and lose some of their rebel essence. See Bitcoin ETF cheering, for another example. Fuck the regulators and fuck paper Bitcoin.
“Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again” ... so yeah, he’s not wrong in that, though I would argue it happened many years ago and has got worse and worse. I don’t think that ship can be course-corrected. Ethereum is a more merge-with-the-mainstream project than it is non-State money.
“What has Ethereum accomplished? Well it’s made Vitalik extremely rich” – again, this is a cheap attack, implying that was the goal. What Ethereum has actually accomplished is to enable everything which Bitcoin itself could not do, due to its lack of programmability. And did people build scams and waste people’s time with bullshit? Absolutely, but that is the nature of truly censorship resistant platforms. People can do anything and you cannot stop them. That is the nature of the beast. So don’t participate in anything which you don’t see value in.
I always find it odd that people who claim to be about human freedom, libertarian values, cypherpunk origins, etc, would seek to constrain other people’s choices when they don’t agree with the other people’s opinions or preferences. In that case, for example, popping up a bunch of headlines about scams seems to imply that the answer is more regulation, or .... I don’t know, what? Arresting Vitalik? Banning Ethereum?
99.999% of cryptos are worse off than holding Bitcoin. Maybe true, but that was their choice. All asset holders on the planet over the last 15 years holding traditional assets are maybe worse off than if they held Bitcoin. Should those be banned too?
“Can it be a world computer and do we even need that?” – well, it’s an experiment, isn’t it, just as Bitcoin is an experiment and everything which humans do is an experiment. We don’t know what the outcome of any of these projects will be, but we are all our trying our best to build things which make things “better”, in whatever our own frames of reference are. Any of these things might fail, and Bitcoin is not unique in that.
Bitcoin is money, yes. Ethereum is not money, no, it’s an application platform.
Earlier this week I made a guest appearance on the third episode of the “Early Days of Ethereum” series which Kieren James-Lubin, Victor Wong and James Hormuzdiar, the Co-Founders of BlockApps have been making in the past month or two.
We spoke for about 80 minutes and it was a delight to reminisce about these happy days. I absolutely loved the earlier videos and wrote a long blog post with links to posts, videos and other notes on topics which came to mind for me while I was watching them, and the guys where good enough to invite me on for the third episode. We ran out of time before even getting on to talking about the genesis of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (late 2016 and 2017), so it looks like I’ll be back for a fourth episode at some stage soon.
Here are the Ethereum Foundation People and Ethereum Foundation Timeline pages from my blog which I refer to in the video, which I put together in late 2017 while trying to work out “What on earth was happening at the Foundation when Ming was hired in 2015 which made that look like a good option?”
This video from DEVCON0 (held in Berlin in November 2014 is a particular gem. It has short clips of just about everybody who was involved in Ethereum in that first year introducing themselves. From my “People” page I have shortcuts to the right timestamps for them all, but the whole video is pretty short and well worth a watch. Gav provides some contemporary big picture context at the start, ahead of the introductions.
Below are some links and screenshots of articles and web pages related to The DAO, which also has its own Wikipedia page, and to some of the points we talked about in the video. I would recommend Laura Shin’s book at the canonical best information on this whole saga. There is also a detailed timeline on the ETC community website.
January 7th 2016 – DEVCON1: Slock.it – Christoph Jentzsch (but the conference was actually November 2015), with Stephan Tual with the assist for the remote-power-enable teapot. I believe that this stage, the DAO plan was still constrained to Slock.it’s own business plan, not “The DAO” generalization which came later.
July 15th 2016 – To fork or not to fork, by Jeff Wilcke, Ethereum Foundation, announcing the Geth release containing the hard-fork, enabled by default (as was also the case for Parity), controversially following the result of a very short-notice, low-participation coin vote to determine that default. Mist used a modal dialog to force end-users to explicitly choose. Some in the ETC community think this default tipped the scales and was a betrayal of neutrality by the EF, but I honestly don’t think it made any real difference. You would have had to be a complete moron to be unaware of the controversy around the hard fork and run the new code by accident.
August 1st 2016 – The accidental beginning of the “100% ETH” purity pledge meme which drove the communities even further apart, as it became socially unacceptable to be associated with Ethereum Classic.
October 30th 2018 – Ethereum Special Projects announces 15,000 ETC donation to Ethereum Classic Cooperative, by Virgil Griffith. We miss you, Virgil. He is currently serving a five year prison sentence for sanctions violation for a trip he took to North Korea for a blockchain conference. Virgil was a big bridge builder between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, and is indirectly the reason for me being in my current role at the ETC Cooperative. He invited my predecessor, Anthony Lusardi, to speak at EDCON in May 2018 (where I met him), and Anthony invited Virgil and myself to ETC Summit in September 2018. I started my role in January 2019.
September 25th 2019, a long twitter thread from me explaining the birth of ETC and what ETC is about in response to a question. Click on this, and scroll down from the top:
So keep your eyes on ETC. We were never just a protest coin.
Expect ETC to become a really serious option for "Ethereum family" deployment in the coming months.
Kieren James-Lubin, Victor Wong and James Hormuzdiar, the Co-Founders of BlockApps, have produced two videos in the last month or so reminiscing on the early days of Ethereum. The videos have been a delight for me to watch. While their journey overlaps with my own, I am learning some things which I did not already know. Their vantage point was slightly different to my own. Recording this history before it is forgotten is very important!
I spent several months in late 2017 and early 2018 putting together my own records of people involved in the Ethereum project in its early days, pre-Ethereum Foundation, and everybody within the EF to that stage, together with a timeline of links to blogs, photos and videos that I could find:
This was the most canonical information there was on the history of Ethereum at the time of writing, but that content was obsoleted by the later publication of three separate books covering that history.
… with Laura’s “The Cryptopians” getting closest to the truth, IMHO. That book has been optioned for a potential future dramatization.
There was also a book on ConsenSys which was a fun read, covering some of the same events as the Ethereum books, but with a focus on the internal dynamics of ConsenSys in its early days:
As I was watching these new videos from Kieren, Victor and James, lots of thoughts and comments came to mind for me. They were too verbose to capture as comments in LinkedIn and Twitter, so I’ve recorded them here for posterity.
So I donβt think that Roman Mandeleil was ever part of the Ethereum Foundation, but ethereumj was certainly a very important codebase in those early days. Hereβs a video I made in June 2015 of Jarrad Hopeβs ethereumj-android fork running on my Galaxy S6. This client was embedded within their “Syng” product (later renamed to “Status”), aiming to be a decentralized WeChat equivalent “everything app” for hosting Ethereum applications. Check out Status.im.
The Ruby client was built by Jan Xie of Cryptape and the Python client was built by Heiko Hess of Brainbot. Both Cryptape and Brainbot were launch members of the EEA.
“I think it was called Ethercamp”. This was Victor talking about the early Java client. That software was called ethereumj and was built by Roman Mandeleil and his team. Their company was called Ether.Camp, and as well as that client software they also had a browser-based editor called Ethereum Studio which was quite popular at the time. That ended up being part of the Microsoft BAAS offering. Ether.Camp also did a surprising collaboration with Santander called CashEth, which was announced at DEVCON2 in September 2016. Notoriously they also ran a hackathon which was seemingly gamed but the payouts still happened. Roman disappeared off the face of the earth not much later with many people thinking that he exit scammed. He’s still around on Facebook. Still alive but completely out of the blockchain ecosystem, it seems.
As the guys said, Microsoft were much more interested in the Java code than they were in BlockApps, but, to my understanding, Roman just shot himself in the foot on this opportunity, not being very interested for whatever reason.
Slock.it and the DAO – So the order of actions here got slightly garbled, I think, with the idea of Slock.it happening way earlier than any thought of a DAO. They announced the DAO at DEVCON1 because they genuinely wanted to put control in the hands of users rather than just run an ICO of their own. Even at the time of DEVCON1, I don’t think that DAO was intended to be for anything and everything. I think it was still single-purpose, to drip-feed funds to Slock.it as they delivered milestones. I need to drag Christoph Jentzsch in for the facts on that π
Aside – Slock.it was likely inspired by an earlier project by John Gerryts called Airlock, which was launched in a hackathon. John and his partner on this project, Alex Leverington, did an interview with Stephan Tual, later a co-Founder of Slock.it.
“Has ETC hard-forked since?” – So yes, absolutely it has. In general ETC is tracking ETH changes, but without the DAO hard fork, still using POW indefinitely and with fixed monetary supply. Hard forks are not problematic in themselves – they are the means for upgrading the protocol. The issue is with contentious hard-forks which lead to chain splits. There have been no such further chain-splits on ETC, though technically any hard-fork results in a chain split – except that nobody cares about the “old side” and block production ceases. Somebody could still be mining Frontier if they wanted!
Mentioning Tyler Smith of BHP Billiton – Lovely guy. Don’t forget his earlier personal project, announced at DEVCON1 – “Free My Vunk” – an incredibly early NFT / gamefi proposal.
Victor as a guide in Shanghai for DEVCON2. Absolutely he was, and for me too! Both Victor and I were living in Vancouver at the time, but the first time I met him IRL was at the airport in Vancouver ready to board the flight to Shanghai. We also met Tim Coulter there, the founder of Truffle, who had flown up from Seattle to connect to the same flight. We ate together in Vancouver, then met on the other side of the flight in Shanghai. Victor helped me find a Chinese SIM card. I was planning on taking the high speed train but Victor seemed to know what he was doing so I jumped on the ConsenSys coach following his lead instead.
Matt Spoke enterprise group – So I don’t this is quite right. Matthew Spoke was certainly a leader within this earlier group of companies using Ethereum, but the Slack for that group was actually hosted by the Ethereum Foundation. Taylor Gerring was on there, Vitalik Buterin, George Hallam, Christian Reitweissner and myself. As well as Matt’s Nuco, you had Clearmatics, AMIS and a few others which I do not remember. I have some memory of Vitalik later saying that he had essentially dumped all the people who had asked him about enterprise uses of Ethereum in a new Slack and ran away! Maybe that was in Cryptopians? It sounds about right.
The Ethereum Foundation later come to the conclusion that enterprise uses of Ethereum were really outside of their mandate, and they did not want to dedicate any time to that, so ditched that group not so long after DEVCON2.
Matt held an enterprise get-together at the hotel venue for DEVCON2 and I attended that event as well, but I don’t think anybody else from the EF went. I tried to drag Taylor along, who had given talks on enterprise before (like this at DEVCON1 below), but he was not really interested in coming.
From what I remember, the initial proto-EEA group was actually formed around ConsenSys and their connections – Jeremy Miller doing lots of driving – with an initial intention of having a very small and active group (maybe only around 6 companies?), but then got this other larger group “merged” in ahead of launch, bloating up to 30 launch members.
John Wolpert was at DEVCON2 as well, along with Brian Behlendorf, but that at a time where IBM were still viewed somewhat as “the enemy”, but with the possibility of a grand union, if the C++ relicensing had worked out, alas. IBM’s timeline was oriented around a 1.0 launch of their blockchain offering not being later than R3’s launch of Corda, which was still several months away. There was a narrow window of opportunity for IBM to have built their 1.0 stack on top of Ethereum technology – dropping Fabric. There could have quite a different landscape if that had happened. With that option fading, the EEA came to life as a pragmatic alternative.
When was Quorum launched? So that was after DEVCON2 and before the launch of the EEA in February 2017. That was a collaboration between JPM and Jeff Wilcke, lead of the Geth team. Funnily enough, I don’t think Jeff even discussed this with Ming Chan, the Executive Director of the EF, ahead of time! There are large chunks of The Cryptopians dedicated to the saga of Ming Chan, so I will say no more here.
Quorum was (and still is) a permissioned fork of Geth which added private transactions and had an initial consensus mechanism using smart contract logic. Jeff has said that experimenting with that consensus mechanism was his main interest in the project. Samer Falah of JPM was very keen to meet me in Shanghai at DEVCON2 and I could not really understand why he was so keen to talk. Well, it was because they had been working on Quorum for months and were just about to launch it, but he could not say so at the time!
Quorum was indeed demoed at the EEA launch event. From what I remember there were intended to be two demos, both with combined efforts from two member companies. Maybe one financial and one supply chain? The Quorum demo was meant to include Tendermint consensus, but the Cosmos team got busy and never did the work. The longer-term consequence of that was that AMIS, another member company developed their Istanbul consensus instead, and that made it into Quorum and later into the EEA standard, which certainly did not make the Cosmos team happy, as they considered it inferior to Tendermint. Could have been a different timeline there!
There were two major pre-EEA meetings (one, I think in December 2016 which I dialed into) and the second was in January 2017 and brought together a lot of people, as the guys mentioned, maybe 30-40 people first at JPM offices and then at Microsoft offices. I went to Brooklyn for that, staying in an Airbnb organized by Kirk Dameron, staying with Shahan Khatchadourian and Joseph Chow.
At the JPM office during that trip, Shahan and Amber Baldet showed Vitalik our technical plans for Enterprise Ethereum.
That January meeting was also where I first met Preston Byrne, who had made a snarky comment in Reddit about Monax not having been invited to the meetings, despite building the first permissioned Ethereum client, and Andrew Keys invited him.
Vitalik was scheduled to be part of the EEA launch event on 28th February 2017, but then that was back-pedalled to just a video appearance, and then within the video he did not mention the EEA at all but talked in generalities about enterprise uses of Ethereum.
That was almost certainly under the influence of Ming Chan, the Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation who was very strongly opposed to the creation of the EEA, which she saw as an attack on the EF and on Ethereum. She just hated Joe Lubin and ConsenSys too. That whole drama is covered well in Laura’s book. It was ongoing until her departure from that role in January 2018.
I posted a tweet-thread a year later on the one year anniversary of the launch event.
This blog post is massively longer than I originally intended, but there we are.
There have been rumblings for years about the BSV project’s plans related to “court orders”.
The Bitcoin (BSV) Association dropped a bombshell on 5th October 2022, announcing their Digital Asset Recovery Process and releasing the Blacklist Manager. This is the closest that we have seen to on-chain censorship for any blockchain, and the censorship is just the first step. The second step is reassignment of assets to other owners with no private keys required.
The Blacklist Manager is described as “A required add-on to the Bitcoin SV node software to ensure that miners comply with court orders”.
Furthermore, “A miner who does not install Blacklist Manager risks being out of consensus with other nodes on frozen UTXOs. This could lead to their blocks being orphaned by the rest of the network if they are spending these frozen UTXOs.”
What is the context?
Craig Wright has been claiming for years that Bitcoin can be moved without private keys and that developers have a fiduciary duty to reassign stolen coins if they are ordered to do by courts. The developers have the power to do that, he argues, and so they must do so. Until this software was released it was unclear how such an out-of-left-field assertion was even possible.
It seems likely that these “court order” moves within the BSV ecosystem are directly related to Craig Wright’s claim that 110,000K bitcoins were stolen from him on or around 5th February 2020 in the notorious “Pineapple Hack”. He wants those coins to be recognized as his property and for them to be reassigned to him.
(Incidentally – he claims ownership of the infamous “1Feex” address which received funds from the Mt Gox hack in 2011. So the funds his claims were stolen from him were themselves previously stolen goods. What about the property rights of their original owners?)
Such reassignment obviously requires changes to the BSV software, because blockchain transactions always require private keys to move funds. These releases from the Bitcoin (BSV) Association and nChain appear to be the changes to support such actions.
Notice below published in the Financial Times on 30th June 2022, with an deadline on “competing claims” to these coins which expired at the end of September 2022.
Here are the stages in the workflow, with Step 4 being where the miners “choose” to prioritize orders from the Blacklist over the existing “longest chain” Nakamoto Consensus which has been the consensus mechanism for Bitcoin since the very first mined block. The Blacklist Manager is in control of which transactions miners can or cannot mine.
In the final phase of the Digital Asset Recovery Process (not yet implemented it seems, but explained in the video), the miners would also receive orders from the Notary to reassign assets and the miners would follow their orders on that as well as on the freezes.
It is unclear exactly how that asset reassignment would work, but conversations on Twitter point to that likely being either forcing of an invalid transaction by the miners or by addition of a new transaction type which could transfer funds with no need for private keys. Both of these options would constitute a soft fork or hard fork and would be a change of consensus.
How would forcing an invalid transaction work? Wouldn’t the other full nodes reject it? No. There are very few full nodes in BSV except those run by the miners, because they are too expensive to run. The only exception are a small number of infrastructure providers, but many of those will hit the same kind of scale issues which Blockchair hit causing their nodes to crash. In the explanation of that event, they explained:
"But the reality is that 99.99% or so of Bitcoin SV transactions are junk, so despite being the biggest Bitcoin-like blockchain with most transactions, Bitcoin SV constitutes only 0.3% of our visitor numbers and there are very few API clients using Bitcoin SV (0.2% of all API requests most of which are free API calls for the stats). Unfortunately, this doesn't cover all these costs. So that's why we can't run more than 2 nodes, and even these two nodes will get stuck at some point because we'll go bankrupt buying all these disks to store the junk data. But we're trying our best :)"
It is somewhat unclear from the Blacklist Manager Technical Manual whether miners can connect to multiple Notaries in parallel or only to a single notary.
Assuming a multiple-notary scenario it would be impossible for miners would stay in consensus unless they were all following the exact same list of notaries. All the miners must move in lockstep to avoid orphaning.
Lockstep, why?
Here is an example of the lockstep issue, first tweeted shortly after the initial release of this article.
Miner A and Miner B (majority hash together) are connected to Notary X and Y.
Miner C (minority hash) is only connected to Notary X.
Notary Y issues a freeze command and “baddie” tries to move those funds.
Miner C does not receive that particular freeze order and mines a block moving those funds.
Any blocks generated by Miner C containing those “baddy transactions” will be orphaned by miners A and B.
This can happen repeatedly to Miner C and he does not even know why he is being orphaned.
Miner C is losing money every time this happens.
The only way to avoid this scenario is for all miners to follow exactly the same notaries as the majority hash miners.
Court orders might be mutual incompatible between countries too, meaning that some legal orders must be ignored. A simple example here would be enforcement of sanctions, as highlighted by the recent Tornado Cash OFAC situation. If there was a Notary for OFAC enforcement for the US issuing digital court orders for sanctions against Russia and a Notary in Russian issuing digital court orders for sanctions against the USA, how does that resolve? Are we going to end up with USA-chain? BSV not usable in China?
As part of the Blacklist Manager Technical Manual there is a glossary which includes their definition of “Legal Terms” which is, frankly, incredible. This is either terribly sloppy work or is willfully broad, leaving huge grey zones as to what is or is not acceptable to be enforced for freezes or asset reassignments.
Could the Tulip Trust Ltd’s legal notice be interpreted as a “Court Order?” Yes.
Could a meeting of a bunch of lawyers employed by TTL be interpreted as a “Law Court?” Yes.
The miners will do what they are told
Everyone who runs the BSV Node software is doing so under the licensing agreement which accompanies the source code and binary releases of that software.
The licensing for that software changed from an open source license to a proprietary license on 2nd May 2019, when the MIT license put in place by Satoshi in the very first release of the Bitcoin source code had a raft of restrictions added to it which mean it no longer meets the Open Source Definition as maintained by the Open Source Initiative non-profit, failing on nearly every point, with the exception of the source code being available.
—————— 2 - The Software, and any software that is derived from the Software or parts thereof, can only be used on the Bitcoin SV blockchains. The Bitcoin SV blockchains are defined, for purposes of this license, as the Bitcoin blockchain containing block height #556767 with the hash "000000000000000001d956714215d96ffc00e0afda4cd0a96c96f8d802b1662b" and that contains the longest persistent chain of blocks accepted by this Software and which are valid under the rules set forth in the Bitcoin white paper (S. Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, posted online October 2008) and the latest version of this Software available in this repository or another repository designated by Bitcoin Association, as well as the test blockchains that contain the longest persistent chains of blocks accepted by this Software and which are valid under the rules set forth in the Bitcoin whitepaper (S. Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, posted online October 2008) and the latest version of this Software available in this repository, or another repository designated by Bitcoin Association
——————
You can only use the software on the BSV fork of the Bitcoin blockchain and you are also compelled to run the latest version of the software. There are no alternative implementations of the BSV client software, so you are taking whatever changes the maintainers want to make and there is nothing you can do about it. Those changes can include major changes to functionality (like the Blacklist Manager).
The freezing code was added to BSVNode in the 1.0.9 version released in October 2021 so will already be being used by all node operators.
OPINION – Why do this? What is the endgame?
So this is all pretty undesirable in the opinion of the author, but what is the big deal? If the only outcome is that the BSV community is so compliant that it allows Craig Wright to reassign Mt Gox coins to himself which he claims were stolen then what is the harm? It it just further proof of cult-like behaviour which won’t surprise anybody outside of that bubble. Right? Wrong.
Tulip Trust Ltd issued legal notice to BTC and BCH developers too at the same time, and will no doubt use a “successful” implementation on BSV to prove that this is possible and that BTC and BCH developers are willfully obstructing legal due process and “law and order” if they do not do the same. Even beyond Bitcoin-family chains, any such precedence puts all blockchain projects and their developers at legal risk
The cover story is of BSV being a “legally friendly” blockchain which protects victims of crime. The reality is a horrific backdoor in the protocol which presents terrible danger of abuse to end-users and goes against the whole “immutable ledger” basis of blockchain.
It is obviously important for blockchain projects to comply to legal requirements in the jurisdictions which they operate, but tools for these purposes are better implemented at a higher level in the stack – not by dangerous intervention on the ledger itself. That approach introduces a subjective mechanism into a system which is very intentionally objective and tamper-resistant.
Law enforcement already have incredible tools to do their job, in the form of an immutable ledger and powerful chain-analysis tools.
The playbook here is very similar to the backdoors proposed in encryption in the 1990s onwards. Backdoors to encryption were largely beaten off because of the risks which they represented to all participants.
In the author’s opinion the same fight is required to halt “solutions” which seek to censor or blacklist transactions on blockchains, let alone to reassign coin ownership.
These blockchain backdoors can and will be abused and are ultimately not in the public interest.
“ASIC resistance” is a myth. The author rejects that myth as do many other individuals within the ETC ecosystem.
This position statement seeks to foster confidence that decisions around ETC mining are not being guided by an easily disprovable myth, but by the application of science, measurement and facts – not subjective personal beliefs.
The Ethereum Classic project “inherited” both philosophy and implementation decisions from the Ethereum project which are in conflict with the “Immutable, Decentralized, Unstoppable” philosophy and ethos of ETC.
The first break which ETC made against such inheritance was with Monetary Policy, where the lack of a fixed cap on supply in Ethereum, while not problematic for the ETH2 (“World Computer”) project, was a huge problem for ETC (“Bitcoin with state and smart contracts”). That project needs a “hard money” basis.
Getting to human consensus on the Monetary Policy change was hard, because the change was in conflict with Immutability doctrine. Changing consensus rules in any way is very problematic to some people.
Monetary policy was seen as something where there was very broad consensus that the inherited lack of monetary policy was a major problem for ETC. Breaking immutability in that way so that immutability could be preserved with respect to monetary policy on a multi-decade basis moving forward was seen as a worthwhile tradeoff.
“ASIC resistance” is another instance of a “bad inheritance” which could be fixed so that ETC ecosystem participants can have multi-decade certainty around mining as well as monetary policy.
“She stated that ASIC resistance was, indeed, a ‘myth’ and a ‘fallacy’, adding that Proof-of-Work required "some form of ASIC to do the work. Text summary of the interview above by coinbarters.com.
“An important thing to clarify here is when you say “ASIC resistance”, those people who are for “ASIC resistance” are not against something called ASIC. They are against something which is a custom hardware which is more efficient to the hardware available to the masses, or general hardware. So, I do believe ASIC resistance in that way is futile, because there will be some custom hardware always. If you have a coin which is worth mining then somebody will find a more efficient way of mining it, whether it is ASICs or some other way, which gives them equal advantage that ASIC cannot. For example, maybe I live in a country where I have good connection to the government and can get almost free electicity. Now, I am maybe 1000x more efficient than someone, without buying any ASICs. If you are against ASICs in that way, you are just against competition”
– Nishant Sharma, Head of International PR and Community Relations, Bitmain.
“I think ASIC resistance is more of a philosophy than a practical approach you can implement. If you look at things: GPUs are ASICs. CPUs are ASICs and the blockchain processes we make are ASICs. Fundamentally the philosophy behind “ASIC resistance” has been to make things products memory hard. And so, what you end up doing, is you are buying GPUs primarily to be “ASIC resistant”. You pay a lot for memory and inherently the hash rate is a lot slower. Philosophies around “ASIC resistance” are that it is widely available. You can go to AMD or NVIDIA to buy those products. But fundamentally it is not a good mining solution. You can see that in today’s world and very shortly that GPUs are not profitable and we see that as technology moves along the GPUs will be dwarfed by ASICs.”
UPDATE – We have a room assigned! H.3244 on Sunday 2nd February between 14.30 and 15.30. That is upstairs in the H building which has the info centre, T-shirts and some of the rooms for the talks. Look for the BoF signs pointing in the right way.
I am proposing a blockchain “Birds of a Feather” session at FOSDEM 2020.
Who is with me?
There was a similar session at FOSDEM 2018, and while I missed FOSDEM 2019, I understand that one was held there too.
FOSDEM is a unique “neutral ground” from the horrors of blockchain tribalism. I have spent a lot of time in the last two years working to build bridges between different factions of the blockchain ecosystem, particularly within Ethereum, but also across the whole space.
We all have so more more in common than we have differences, especially when it comes to the “foot soldiers” who are actually working on blockchain technology rather than the products or “coins” which incorporate that technology.
UPDATE – We have a room assigned! H.3244 on Sunday 2nd February between 11.30 and 12.30. That is upstairs in the H building which has the info centre, T-shirts and some of the rooms for the talks. Look for the BoF signs pointing in the right way.
I reached out to Nicole Faerber, the CTO of Purism, a week or so back to ask whether there was a Birds of a Feather session organized at FOSDEM 2020 around the Purism Librem 5 device, and she said no, so I volunteered to organize one.
As per the Purism website,“The Librem 5 represents the opportunity for you to take back control and protect your private information, your digital life through free and open source software, open governance, and transparency. The Librem 5 is a phone built on PureOS, a fully free, ethical and open-source operating system that is not based on Android or iOS (learn more about why this is important).”
Devices are being shipped to developers and the multi-year process from conception to first release is coming to a climax.
There will be various Purism people at FOSDEM, who can give us an update on the State of The Union, demonstrate actual devices and take part in some Q&A.
We won’t have an assigned room until I get to the campus and can book one. When that happens I will update this blog post accordingly.
