 Hey, everyone. Welcome to Let's Talk Bitcoin Live. This is a special edition of LTV. We're going to be talking about Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, the hard fork, consensus, and immutability. Your three hosts for today, myself, Andreas Santonopoulos, we have Stephanie Murphy. Hello. Slightly delayed, because of technical difficulties, we will soon have Adam Levine joining us in just a few minutes. Later on in the show, we have three esteemed guests from the Ethereum community, who will be able to give us different perspectives. Martin Koppelman, Anthony Diorio, and Charles Hoskinson will be joining us in about 25 minutes. We're going to have a lively debate and discussion about Ethereum versus Ethereum Classic. Stephanie, have you been watching all of this drama in Ethereum? What are your thoughts? Well, I've had some personal stuff going on, and I've had enough drama in my life, so I haven't been following it very closely. It's kind of hard to ignore. It's also hard to completely keep up with, because there's just so much happening. But from my basic understanding, there was a hard fork of the Ethereum blockchain. Now there's Ethereum Classic, which is the original Ethereum, and ETH, which is the forked version. There's now two chains that are competing against each other. The reason for the hard fork was to undo the damage from the DAO failure that we've talked about a couple of times on the show so far. How close am I, Andreas? Do you want to give a bird's-eye view? Yeah, that's exactly what has happened. The international symbol for fork is this one. Also, on Vulcan, it means something different. This means that both forks live long and prosper. So what I saw was on July 20th, in the morning, I believe, of July 20th, Ethereum executed a hard fork. This had been planned for maybe three weeks in advance after a previous attempt to do a soft fork. A hard fork was executed. The hard fork, basically what it did, is it reconfigured the majority of Ethereum clients, nodes, and miners, to sweep the balance of all contracts that were related to the DAO. The parents DAO, all of the children DAOs, the extra balance and the attacker DAO, or multiple DAOs that had been compromised by the attacker. All of that, the white hat DAO that had tried to siphon from the attacker's DAO, but then had its own fund siphon from the white hat DAO, all of that got swept into a new contract, which I call the refund DAO. The refund DAO, a very, very simple contract, its only purpose is to refund the DAO tokens. For disclosure, I had 40 US dollars, or 400 DAO tokens, or approximate value in the DAO, so that I could participate. I executed a refund on the refund DAO on the post-hard fork chain, and got my 4 Ether back. This all happened July 20th, and now the expectation was that since the vast majority, more than 90% of the hashing power was committed to going forward with the hard fork and refunding the DAO, that chain would dominate. That didn't quite play out. Within a couple of days, it became evident that some miners were holdouts, they were continuing to mine the old chain, quite deliberately so, and we saw something very interesting. The hash rate on the old chain started rising as more miners committed hashing power to the old chain, or the traditional chain, or classic, as it became known. I think three days into it, one of the exchanges decided, after seeing a lot of activity in a secondary market, mostly over-the-counter trading of this Ethereum classic, I decided to list it. Ethereum classic was listed on Polonius, I believe on July 23rd, several other exchanges joined in, and more hashing power got added. As of yesterday, Ethereum classic, or ETC, had about a third, 28.5% of the hashing power of Ethereum post-hard fork, Ethereum HF, or ETH, and about 30% of the value. The value tracked really close to the actual hash rate, and there was furious activity. In fact, at some point yesterday, we saw a huge rise of classic, a big drop in Ethereum, and the volume of trading in both chains was very, very high, unusually high. I never seen anything like it in Ethereum, and at some point, Ethereum classic's trading volume was higher than the Ethereum chain's volume. So that's what happened yesterday, and today we saw a bit of a reversal. I can look at the statistics now, but we saw Ethereum classic drop a bit today, and Ethereum rise. So as of now, in the last 24 hours, classic is now down 22%, and Ethereum is up 13%. So that trend has reversed, and here we are. So that's interesting, it appears they're kind of duking it out against each other, these two competing chains, but meanwhile, there's a lot of companies like I know Anthony with the Jack's Wallet, for example, that have to decide what to do about this with their software that uses Ethereum, or with their apps for Ethereum. Not necessarily, well, yes, in some cases, yes. Well, also exchanges, too, that have to decide what, like for instance, Coinbase just added Ethereum, I guess, right, just recently. And every exchange that trades Ethereum has to make a decision about this, too. So I can imagine it's confusing not just for the users, but also for businesses that are trying to come to a decision about what to do about this. Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk a bit about what it means to have two forks, two different chains that have a common ancestor. So up to a specific block, the two chains are identical, right? The fork happened on July 20th. Every transaction, every block, everything before July 20th is identical. The two systems diverge on July 20th, and what's the primary difference? In fact, the one way to test and know which chain you're on, and you can even write a contract that can determine which chain it's on, is to check the DAO contract. If the DAO contract still has a balance, you're on the old chain. If the DAO contract has no balance, or the refund now has a balance, then you're on the new chain. And so you can actually write a contract that can execute only on one chain or only on the other chain. But for the most part, most contracts are on both chains. They execute on both chains. Everyone who had coins that were on the original Ethereum chain up to July 20th, in the evening of July 20th, had coins on both chains, and this is where things get a bit complicated. So did you actually have any ether at all, Stephanie? No, I have zero ether. I never had any DAO tokens. I've not gotten involved at all. So I've just been watching this from the outside. I like your full disclosure there. And I'm glad you got that 40 bucks back of DAO. Yeah, four ether. And I also, to further the disclosure, I also sold my ether and my ether classic after the fork. I don't actually hold any ether or classic at the moment. The risk averse here. I do not like 30 plus percent per day volatility. Thank you very much. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think for you, correct me if I'm wrong, but the reason you got interested in it in the first place was to play with it and to try writing contracts and to try using Ethereum, so you were not doing it as an investment. No, I did write my own split contract and tried to execute that with mixed success. It didn't work the first couple of times I tried it. So I had the experience of trying to write a contract that understands which chain it's on and splits appropriately. What is a split contract? So here's the thing, and this is where things get really complicated. If you have Ethereum before July 20th and after July 20th, you have Ethereum and you have a classic and it's in the same address effectively. It's the balance corresponds to the same address or the same contract address. Now, if you then try to move it, right? Let's say you run a client and you're running a client on the new Ethereum chain and you make a transaction to send your ether from one address A to address B. Now, if you're running this on the new chain, you would expect that your ether on the new chain would move to address B, and your Ethereum classic on the old chain would remain in address A. But that's not exactly what happens. A lot of clients, whether deliberately or inadvertently, are basically relaying transactions, and because the transactions look identical, whether you're on the old chain or the new chain, you have what's known as a replay. So if you make a transaction to move Ethereum from A to B on the new chain, and that transaction is replayed, then guess what? Your Ethereum classic moves from address A to address B on the old chain too. So it seems like it becomes quite difficult to isolate the effects from the two chains. Yeah. Oh my gosh, I'm so confused. But you explained it fine, Andreas. It takes some work to understand how this all goes down. And yeah, I mean, I've seen a lot of people posting online that they were really confused. Like, if they're getting a refund, are they getting a refund of ETH or ETC or they didn't know what was going on? Well, if you're getting a refund, you're using the refund DAO, and that only exists on the new chain because it's the result of the hard fork sweeping all of the ether. In the classic chain, the DAO attacker has the $50-some million worth of classic ether, and they get to keep it. In the new chain, the money got swept into the refund DAO, and DAO token holders are able to withdraw and get a refund on their DAO, and so they get a refund in ETH. That ETH does not exist on the old chain also as ETC, because in the old chain, the attacker has it. So, yes, it's a bit confusing. But if you just had normal ether on the chain before July 20th, after July 20th, you have the same amount, say, you had 10 ether before, now you have 10 ether on the new chain, and 10 classic on the old chain. But the problem is, if you try to do transactions on either chain, those transactions usually get replayed, so what happens on one chain gets mirrored on the other. And this is where a split contract comes in. So with a split contract, what you do is you create a break, so that you force your ether to move to a different address than your classic, so that you can control the two independently without having this replay effect. So you essentially split the control. And the way you do that is a contract that knows which chain it's on, and does a different thing if it's on the classic chain, and a different thing if it's on the new chain. And by splitting that effect on one transaction, from that moment on, those coins on the old and new chain follow different paths and have a different future. So that allows you then to exert control over one chain or another without having a replay risk. Okay. Well, we have our three guests here. How about we bring them in? Yeah, let's bring them in. All right, fantastic. Let me bring in first Mr. Martin Kobelman here. Let's see. Martin, you're with us. If you unmute, hey. Can you hear us here? Hey, Amy. Welcome to the show. Thanks, thanks for having me. Thank you for joining us. Our next guest, Mr. Anthony Diorio. Anthony, you are live and in the show. I'm unmuted now. Hey, guys. Glad to be here. Welcome, Anthony. Good to see you again. And last but not least, Mr. Charles Hoskinson. Hi, guys. Great to hear it from you. Charles, thank you so much for joining us. I understand it's quite late where you are. Thanks for taking the time to do this at 2 o'clock in the morning. Yeah, I'm right now in Osaka, Japan. So let's try to get it wrapped up by like 4 a.m. or something like that. We'll try. We'll definitely try. Wow, that's dedication. Well, I got a life-size Mario here with me, so we should be OK. Oh, yeah, very good. Yeah, everything's OK when you get Mario. So should we say? Yeah, go ahead. No, you go ahead, Stephanie. Should we say, so we meant to sort of structure this as a debate, a friendly debate, but just people with different points of view about Ethereum Classic versus ETH versus the two kind of coexisting together. And we have one person that's representing sort of each viewpoint. And, yeah, and Andreas is going to be the moderator asking questions, and then we'll sort of give everybody a chance to respond. Is that right? Yeah, I think that's a good approach. Why don't we start with Martin? Martin, if I understand it correctly, you are supporting the hard fork and the evolution of Ethereum into the new chain where the DAO got refunded. Very good, and you see that as the way forward. Can you tell us a bit about your perspective? Yeah, so my perspective is there are two big questions that we might discuss today. So the one question is, was the fork the right decision? And the other question is, now given that there is a fork, should we have one community, or should we divide the community? And, yeah, my opinion is, so on the fork decision, I have been pro the fork, but I'm not kind of super extreme pro the fork. I mean, I see the arguments for both sides. I can totally make the argument for the fork. I think it was just a pragmatical thing to do, just a way to move forward to concentrate again on actually building stuff instead of having years, maybe spending years with this attack and an attacker owning 15% of all Ethereum. So let's topic one. And topic two, in my opinion, is now that we have the fork, should we have two communities or one? And I see, at this point, huge benefits of having one community. So Ethereum is about network effects. It's about having all those depths that nicely work together because they are on the same singleton. They are on the same world computer, the Ethereum network. And currently, we only have those network effects if they are on the same chain. Maybe in four or five years, we can have kind of depths that work across chains. But I think, at this point, it's way better to concentrate on one chain. Very good. So that's the pro Ethereum, pro single community perspective. I'll go to the other extreme first. Charles, it seems that you are the guest who believes that classic Ethereum, as it was, pro immutability, if you like, is your position. Is that correct? Well, I'm kind of in an interesting position because I was one of the founders of the Ethereum project. And what initially attracted me to Ethereum was the social contract of having this world computer where the code is basically law. It runs as written. And a lot of people were really excited about that kind of a prospect. If you look at Ethereum as a system, it's a terribly inefficient computer. It's a very expensive computer. And it's probably the most expensive ever built relative to its peers. And there's certainly better models to do distributed computing with. So the saving grace of the system has always been that you can write code that regardless of who it's inconvenient to or the consequences of that code, you have a safe place where you're able to run that code without fear of censorship. So that was the initial social contract. That's what I signed up for. Obviously, I left the Ethereum community about June of 2014. And I went on to do other things. But when the fork occurred, it really got me angry. And it got a lot of other people in the community angry. And the people who created Ethereum Classic, I think what they were first trying to do was at least a protest, saying that you can't quite do this to the community. You can't quite just change the social contract and say, this is pragmatism. This has never been done in Bitcoin. You have to accept that not everybody's going to go along with your vision. And you are now effectively walking away from a meaningful percentage of your community. So I think from my view, from the time I've spent in the Ethereum Classic community, the viewpoint that most of them enjoy, but not all of them. Actually, there's a lot of new people entering the space, especially from the Bitcoin world, who are attracted to this fanatical loyalty to immutability. Charles, let me ask you, just before the hard fork was executed, there were some attempts to gauge the interest of the community. Now, I will say that in my eyes, those attempts were not very robust. The voting that did happen was in a few selected forms where not everybody had access, not everybody knew how to vote, and there wasn't really enough time. A lot of this happened under enormous pressure. Do you think that these votes or the sentiment that was shown on places like Reddit and CarbonVote, I think it was called, do you think those represented the mix of opinions? Because at the time, it was looking somewhere between 80, 20, and 90, 10 pro four. Do you think that was misrepresentative? Well, it's hard to say. I mean, you have empirical data based upon the hash rate participation and the market value of Ethereum Classic that there's certainly a community that did not accept it. The second thing is that a vacuous vote where there's no value or risk behind the vote is not, in my view, as strong as doing something like an assurance contract that's a proof of burn to a new chain, for example. There were other options to try to gauge community support and participation than just a single vote. And the other thing is that I think the debate has been misconstrued a bit. And the Ethereum side, a lot of people say, oh, it's anti-fork versus pro-fork. And everybody in the Ethereum Classic community is against forks in all cases. I think it's more of what was the social contract of Ethereum. And if you want to change that social contract, what is the proper course of action to do that? I think a single vote where there's no stake behind it and no cost behind that vote is probably not the best way of doing it. You need to do something a bit more extreme, like advocate some sort of threshold proof of burn smart contract or something like that. Because at the very least then you guarantee 100% of the people in the new chain agree with exactly what you said. And they've actually put money on the line, value on the line, as opposed to just saying, hey, let's just do an opinion poll and see where people sit. And then just push through a change, which may or may not be representative of the will of the community. I think everyone in the Ethereum community agrees that we need better tools for governance. I mean, it was just, there was time pressure. So we tried within weeks everything that was possible and was not only vote, it was not only this carbon vote. There was a different voting mechanism. There was voting mechanism for minors. There had been forum discussions. Totally insane. That's perfect, but it was just as good as we got it there. Well, so Martin, the end result of that right now is that if you look at the minor vote and you look at that 10 days after the fork, the actual result was at some point yesterday was closer to 70-30 in terms of the hashing rate. But before we go on to a back and forth debate on that issue, I would like to bring in Anthony. Anthony, you said you were comfortable with both chains coexisting and you see a possibility of having this kind of multi-coin, multi-Etherian world. You're muted. We can't hear you. Or your microphone stopped working. There we go, no? Anthony? No, we can't hear you. Unfortunately, your microphone isn't working. Fantastic. This is live show. You're now muted. Now you're unmuted, still not working. Maybe you should unplug and re-plug your microphone. I'll try and bring Adam back in. He's now online again. This is fantastic. Live radio folks, aren't they? Live video, radio, TV. No, Anthony, I think you may have to shut down and restart your hangouts session. Sorry about that. We do not seem to have audio with you. Hey, at least we're creating our own conversation and having a meaningful discussion here. Live TV nowadays consists of Anderson Cooper reading things from Twitter. So we're doing a bit better than that. Yeah, so governance is a big part of this, right? There is really no perfect way to get everybody's opinion to count. Is that what you were saying, Martin, just before I interrupted you? No, I mean, yeah, I just think I agree here with Charles that we could have better tools, and we will have better tools soon. So tools like this, this, this, this, this, tools like where you could actually put something at stake. Prediction markets, I mean, I'm building prediction markets in three years. I think they can be a great tool for governance. But again, there was big time pressure. And I think overall there was a wide variety of votes and getting sentiments of the community. And I think so 80%, 90% of the existing community agreed to do the fork. And the other ones were against it. But I think even most of them are now still joining ETH, so from the existing developer community and from the existing projects, way more than 90% have clearly stated that they will stick to ETH. Yes, but that doesn't cost anything to make that statement on Reddit. But if you look at people who are putting their money behind their mouth, whether it's by committing mining equipment or by buying the currency, ETC, it's more like a 70-30. So which is more representative of stake in this particular case as to the decision? The answer I heard from the community is it's all evil Bitcoin maximalists trying to destroy your party. No, I would not see it that way. So I mean, first, you indeed need only spend a few million US dollar to get the price at the level where it is. And I would say regarding the hash rate, the hash rate will follow the price. So if the price is 30% of ETH, miners are just economical, so the difficulty will also go up to 30%. So yes, you can influence the miners with buying ETC. Clearly, however, I'm not looking at short-term price swings. I'm in for the long game and for building stuff and that will happen on ETH as far as I can see. Well, I think it's a bit premature to say, oh, well, ETH is always going to be the dominant platform for people to build things. The other issue is that you have made Ethereum effectively toxic in the long term for miners. You guys are going to prove to stake. There is no place for miners to live long term in that ecosystem. And from my conversations with the people in Ethereum Classic, especially some of the mining pools that are starting to make commitments to exclusively mining ETC, they like the prospect of leaving Ethereum on a proof of work-based system or something along those lines. So I think it's too early to tell when one chain is just a few weeks old effectively where the developer community is going to move. The other thing that hasn't been mentioned here that should be is rootstock. Rootstock is coming. There's a lot of momentum. The Bitcoin space is very excited about it. And there's probably going to be some effort to start talking about cross deployment, much like we do with PhoneGap. You use PhoneGap to deploy on multiple ecosystems. So I think a lot of people are going to start building tools to actually deploy on rootstock as well as Ethereum. It would make no sense to just omit Ethereum Classic, especially if these systems are fairly similar to each other as they are right now. So I think it's, number one, way too early to tell where the developer community is going to be long-term, especially considering how small it is. Number two, if Ethereum Classic chooses a mining-centric road map, there's a built-in constituency there that won't go away. And number three, there still is an open philosophical question if Ethereum Classic is going to stay the same as Ethereum or if it's going to diverge. And there's a lot of right now internal debate in the Ethereum Classic slack about what the road map needs to look like. That's a really good point. And I'd like to jump in briefly here and ask a follow-up question. We still have some minor technical problems with Anthony. I'm trying to bring him into the discussion as soon as possible. And Adam has rejoined us. Hi, Adam. Hey, everybody. Adam. Hello. So Charles, I actually had a quick question for you. So we've seen Ethereum forked before. This is not the first fork of Ethereum to come out. There's one that comes to mind prominently called EXP. I think it's called EXPANCE. And they also were an ideological fork at the very beginning when Ethereum announced that they were going to do a pre-mine as part of the funding for the launch of the chain and the technology. So what's different about ETC compared to EXP that makes this chain viable while the earlier one wasn't? That's a very good question. If I had to gamble and take a guess, because it's all speculation, right? I think the speculation would be that people put money behind a social contract. When the Ether sale was done, there was an enormous amount of advertising about a paradigm of what Ethereum was. Now, some people obviously participated in that crowd sale from perhaps a speculation standpoint. But most people, I'd like to believe at least, had some ideological alignment with the crowd sale. And so as a consequence, I'd say that some subset of the people living in the Ethereum ecosystem really do take this Coda's law paradigm very seriously. Furthermore, there's two years of training wheels that have been put there. Gavin Wood was going around talking about illegality and inventing new words on the fly. There was a lot of meetup groups that this was really the core ideology that they were pushing through. So when you start conquering with these things, it doesn't sit well with a lot of people. Whereas things like the pre-mine, that's kind of a different notion. If you didn't like that social contract, you wouldn't have put money into Ethereum or supported it to begin with. So maybe a fork would happen, maybe not. It's hard to say. But that's my kind of armchair initial speculative guess about why this is more successful than other attempts. But I could be wrong. Can I hang on that? Oh, I heard now. Hang on. Yes, let's bring Antony in. I think it's working. Antony, third time lucky. All right, it's working now. Thanks, Andreas. I think disclosures need to be done first. Ethereum founder as well. Hold Ether. I haven't split yet, so I still hold the classic. Large Dow holder as well. And if we talk about the fork first, for me, this is not a do-over. We don't get a second chance on this. It wasn't beta. This wasn't a test. This was live. Now perhaps it should have been tested. Perhaps there should have been a lot more done prior. I took a gamble in it. It wasn't a substantial, it was a large amount, but it wasn't a large percentage of my Ether holdings. This is a great experiment, I thought. I thought it was premature to actually put it in the way that it was done. But I think that we needed this experiment, and that's what it was. And when it didn't go the way that people thought it would, and I think that I said, well, I guess I'm losing out on that thing that I was planning on doing. I'm losing out on that investment. And hopefully things get learned and we move on. That was my position. Of course, when it actually was consensus seemed to say, let's do it. I'm also a business person. And we have to think, well, am I going to take this hard stance? And no, I've always been about softer stances. It's not about pure decentralization for me or about pure leadership. It's a mixture of both. And it's going to take time and things to mean to be done in stages. We can't go too extreme on the things, and that's what I think the Dow did. But I never would say I'm a pure decentralist, even though my brand is called Decentral. It's about taking baby steps, about doing things slowly. It's about using both sides to come together and learn from both. And I think with the chain, having two different groups and two different communities, my call is just to stop the polarization and just see the benefits of having two chains. Is there benefits for us that we can learn could one be more sandbite? There's got to be benefits. And as a business owner, I have to also look at both sides. And it's not about, people say you have to pick one side or the other, and I just don't believe that. I really don't. I think that if I had to say one thing, immutability to me is something that's very dear to me. Consensus, democracy is something that needs to be worked on. To me, immutability should be at the forefront. But I see both sides, and I think we've got to listen to both sides. And we have to see for us and for the building of products, I want simplicity. It's very difficult to be introducing this stuff to the masses, which is where we want to take this. When every day it's getting more and more complex. And as a wallet operator, I have to say, well, do we institute ETC? Does that, will our other guys be mad? Do we have to now have a split contract and give people choices and redevelop our whole way and look and feel to do this like we did with the Dow? We were getting very into the Dow. We were starting to develop voting mechanisms and side of jacks to do this. And we learned from that because I think we jumped the gun. Now with the ETC, let's see how this plays out. But I'm not gonna be forced to go one side or the other. And I have to make a choice. We're gonna do what our customers want. We're gonna do it hopefully in a way where we're learning for both sides. And I think the toxic terms that are getting used all the time need to be changed. That this was a, words like theft. And if this was a theft, the year of siding with thieves, that doesn't help. And I think there needs to just be a lot more understanding. We're so new in this, that collaboration, cooperation, getting our main ideas, which is we're all into this technology. It's experimental. We need to grow it. And how do we most efficiently grow it and get rid of this sideshow that I've been seeing and just push this idea forward so that we all have choice and we all have freedom using this technology. And the ability to make the choices that we want without having to take either side. You know, one of the risks that I've discovered, Anthony, is if you have a nuanced position, people accuse you of sitting on the fence and they throw rockets you from both sides of the fence. Yeah, but you get comfortable with that position, right? There are simple answers to complex problems and those answers are wrong. And there are self-righteous and un-nuanced positions you can take. This is X, this is how it is. There is no other way. And those positions are usually wrong or short-sighted. I'm certainly comfortable with nuance, especially in an early stage situation like this. But here's a question. You talked about complexity. Having two chains running in parallel, that certainly creates a lot of complexity, especially of the user interface with the idea of splitting and replay. One of the comments I made is the not putting in replay defenses was a mistake. It created even more uncertainty than necessary and not putting in some mechanism to clearly be able to identify which singleton you're running on. You know, a constant contract that exists only on one chain and doesn't exist on the other. That would have made a huge difference. So where do we go from here? Martin's position is that it's better to just have one and to converge the network effect on that one. Martin, that's your position, but practically speaking, you can't force anyone to abandon ETC and it doesn't look likely that it is going to be abandoned. Yeah, so you're right about the replay attacks. I think that even now people are either side or saying, well, we're not going to do something to fix what the other guy should be doing or we're not going to do something the other guy should be fixing that. I think that's a pretty horrible statement as well. Where do we go from here? We're going to see who wins out. The companies yesterday, many of the app companies in the space in Ethereum came out and said we're supporting it 100%. We're supporting it 100%. I guess we'll be able to see now even from that that what power do they have and are people in this for those apps that are coming out or are people into this for the mining and the price and that's going to be an interesting test that's going to emerge I think as well is what's the power of that going to be? We saw the price increase because of that. Could that be a short term thing? I don't know. I think for me, I'm going to make decisions and speaking from a business owner who's a blockchain company. I'm not an Ethereum company. I'm not a Bitcoin company. We're supporting Bitcoin. We're supporting Ethereum. We've got Dash coming in next week. I'm going to support them all and let people make their choices and that's what I'd like the people to do and if one keeps going strong, the other whittles away. Okay, that's fine. We're going to support what our customers want. We're going to do it in a way that explains things very clearly as to why we're taking certain positions that we're going to take and that's just going to have to be what's accepted and if we lose customers with that, so be it if we gain customers, that's fine. I think we need to be open and as transparent as possible and set our values and set where we're thinking and where we're going and that's the best that we can do as a business and that's what we're going to do. It seems to me, and I'm going to direct this question to Charles from your perspective, it seems to me that coins don't die. The history of all of the cryptocurrencies we've seen, 7,800, 1,000 plus have launched. The only cryptocurrencies that have actually died are the ones where the chain stopped working and usually that was because of either a difficulty bomb or a 51% attack that crashed the difficulty retargeting or some other problem like that that caused the chain to stop, to grind to a halt but as long as the chain is going, that currency has value. Maybe it's just a few pennies but it still has value. So some people have suggested that the only way to fix this is to attack ETC. I think that's a terrible idea but what do you have to say about that? The old chains never die, they just fork away. Yes, that should be a t-shirt. I think there was some initial conversation about doing it like a 51% attack or de-dossing certain people and there may have been some of that with Bitcoin Classic if I recall properly but the reality is that it's just talk until someone does it and then we kind of evoke the old evolutionary Darwinism of cryptocurrencies where we see what defenses they actually have within their community and what's really amazing to me is how resilient some of these systems tend to be. I mean if we look at the history of Bitcoin, Bitcoin itself has gone through some really terrible times. There was a particular flaw that had to be fixed which allowed billions of Bitcoins to be created. There were some forks that occurred along the way and there's certainly a lot of security problems that circular learner and others discovered where they very quietly fixed them as some bug fix. So I think that if somebody wants to attack ETC they're just going to do it. If the Dow hacker wants to liquidate all his or her coins they're gonna do it. Just like if Satoshi wants to liquidate his coins he's gonna do it and we just move on and the strength of the ecosystem is the strength of the community. So if they're unified behind an ideology and they're unified behind a vision and a roadmap and they believe really firmly in it they'll walk through broken glass to get it done as the Bitcoin community has done over the last few years. So that's really I think the great first challenge of ETC is that it's not gonna in my view be killed from the outside it's either gonna survive or be killed based upon whether the community and ETC unifies behind something. Right now it's fragmented and it's only unified behind anger over this fork. They felt like they weren't consented and they're just really pissed off and it doesn't help when Mihai says Ethereum troll cave or something like that and it doesn't help when Vitalik posts things like well even if ETC wins I'm never gonna work on it. These are divisive statements and I've made some myself. Yeah speaking about that and I'm gonna switch to you Martin the point you made also is the network effect really relates more to the community and the developers and the applications that are built than anything else. What we saw was a few months ago a lot of people in Ethereum were saying we have no governance problems, we have no scale problems, come here Bitcoiners, escape from the vitriol and nastiness of the RBTC, our Bitcoin split. Last week we saw for the first time moderators within the Ethereum Reddit censoring posts about doing a 51% attack on a classic saying those kinds of attacks should not be promoted within Ethereum. At the same time we've seen a split and there is a whole Ethereum classic Reddit and the community is now pretty much in the same position fortunately not yet as much vitriol as a protracted two year battle over block sizes created in Bitcoin. Are you worried about censorship, community forking, attacks, personal attacks, vitriol and these things emerging in the Ethereum community? Little bit of course, but regarding to those statements of Vitalik for example sticking clearly to ETH I think it's just a rational thing to do. So essentially cryptocurrencies are coordination games. So if you get enough people to coordinate on something, if you build a big enough community then it has value. Otherwise it has not, so it's not, I mean of course technology is a big point of it but community is even bigger. So otherwise all those Bitcoin clones were just as good as Bitcoin. Of course they are not because they don't have the community. So and that's what happened in the last days that the existing ETH community is resuring each other that they stick together as a community and that they go forward as a community and that was the reason why yesterday all over Reddit you saw this, we stick to ETH and I think again at this point it makes a lot of sense. We saw that all over the Ethereum Reddit. We did not see that all over the Ethereum classic Reddit. Right, because they're just aren't too much developers that do it for classics, I mean that's how simple it is. And Martin, in 2012 before seeing the white paper everything was Bitcoin, for me Bitcoin, Bitcoin and Ethereum opened its eyes for me so much more beyond that, for me to have made a statement or something about Bitcoin at that time saying I'm all Bitcoin, I'm only working on Bitcoin would never have opened my eyes or my doors to new things emerging and that's maybe what some of these decisive positions actually might lead to in the future where there's just it closes off things to make that just a statement like that I think you can say yes that's against ETC if that's what they're referencing but are they referencing other technologies too? I'm very excited as you mentioned about rootstock and excited about other things coming out. It's to me it doesn't seem like a common sense for me to make a statement like that there will be nothing else and that's all I will only do this. Okay I think that's not what most did but I think there needs to be a balance between diversity and bundling things together. So if you have too much diversities and none of the projects get a certain scale that if you have no diversities it's also and I would say currently ETC and ETH are too close together to justify the split of the community. If, Charles you just mentioned, if for example ETC would decide to stick to proof of work or kind of differentiate itself bigger from Ethereum then I would welcome that actually but currently at this point when you have two or the same thing then I would say better stick to one. But with all due respect how can we work together when one side is saying things like pump and dump, troll cave, these guys are just supporters of E. I mean going both ways though too though. I mean going both ways. But I mean somebody has to be the bigger man and I think there's valuable value to having people come together and say listen they're probably not gonna go away. There's around a $200 million market cap. There's a sizable mining support base and with all due respect to developers they're coming. I'm hiring three full time developers myself and I have many cryptographers and good developers working for me. Take a look at our GitHub repo, look at ScoreX, look at our RS coin implementation in Haskell. We will have developers within our space very soon. We already have a lot of volunteer developers within our Slack. There's 500 people in the Slack and it's grown like wildfire. And a lot of people who are entering Ethereum Classic are coming actually from the Bitcoin space or from other old coins. Oh that's great. So if you build a new community coming from people coming from the Bitcoin space, awesome, awesome. But I think those who stick to Ethereum I think most will or those who are building stuff on Ethereum, most will continue to build stuff on Ethereum. Both sides should be trying to take a better stand and say when you're hearing those things that are the garbage, are the noise, seeing here right now. It's a position Ethereum always used to take. When we were dealing with others, when we started surging, we would start getting these call outs and we would never respond to anything like that. We would always in the communities of the red X, we would always be very civil. This is until recently, very civil, very, we're not like that, we're not gonna do that. So both sides can start pushing aside when that stuff happens, that toxic stuff. If you could each say as a leader in your sides, we don't accept that, we don't agree with that. We have our differences of opinions but that's not what we're about. That's not the community that we wanna have ETC or ETH start looking like. And I think that's what I find very disturbing is seeing that change that's happening and that was never the case with Ethereum in my opinion. Well, I mean, that's because you didn't have a quarter of a billion dollars, sorry, a quarter of a billion dollars at stake or more and when you have stake, you have contention and when you have contention, outcomes, the vitriol and the trolls, that's almost inevitable. Leaders let them get a certain stance that we're just not gonna put up with that. I think that's a great idea and it's admirable from my experience even though I've had many people in the Bitcoin space during the scaling debates from both sides of the aisle call for a civility call for a reduction in personal attacks and vitriol and all of that. The end result is the trolls don't really go away. Part of that is just a matter of growing up and you will have a certain percentage of that. I've got a follow up question for all three of you. Not many people know this, especially outside of the Ethereum developer space. Ethereum has a difficulty bomb and that difficulty bomb was set in place in order to push the system into proof of stake within a year or so. So let me first explain what that is for our audience and then let me get questions because this means, this has some very important implications for the road forward. So in Bitcoin, the difficulty is retargeted every two weeks so that one value stays constant and that is the block issuance time of 10 minutes. Ethereum doesn't quite do that. There's a 15 seconds block issuance timing, but over time the difficulty inflates on purpose so as to make it less and less and less profitable to mine with proof of work. With the idea that about a year out, it becomes untenable to sustain proof of work and at that point a hard fork will be necessary and that hard fork can go one of two ways. It can either diffuse the difficulty bomb and reset the difficulty for a proof of work to continue, postponing proof of stake forever or postponing it temporarily or that hard fork will switch the system to proof of stake. Either way, within a year, both Ethereum and Ethereum Classic must do another hard fork each. So where do we end up? Ethereum Lite, Ethereum Zero, Ethereum Classic, Ethereum New. Are we going to split into eight? Ethereum A, Ethereum A? Right. What happens next? Martin, do you want to take the difficulty bomb on the Ethereum side? Right, so I don't know yet. I mean, it depends on whether or not the proof of stake is at that point. So the goal is clearly to switch to proof of stake. Whether or not we are ready in a year or I think it's a little bit more than a year, that's open. I mean, I just don't know. It's likely or it's quite likely that there will be a period of having both, having a mixture of proof of stake and proof of work. But clearly, the long-term goal is to switch to proof of stake as early as possible. And this difficulty bomb was, I mean, that was, it's not really necessary to do the switch, but it was kind of seeing the Bitcoin world and well, then kind of we realized it would be good to put ourselves under pressure, kind of. So to not say, well, we just will get along. So to kind of have a point where we need to have, do something at least. So to at least have some kind of progress. Okay, so Charles, from your perspective, Ethereum Classic also has the difficulty bomb, of course, but it has an even a different problem, which is that 14% of Classic is in the hands of the, potentially in the hands of the DAO attacker. Do you anticipate going to proof of stake? Do you anticipate forking to diffuse the difficulty bomb? Is that completely up in the air? You mentioned discussion about this on the Ethereum Classic Slack. Right, well, I mean, there's some house cleaning that needs to be done, like we need to do something to resolve the replay attack. There was a lack of foresight, hard fork. So that needs to be taken care of. And then there's also the question of the difficulty bomb. You know, there is a, at IOH case side, we do have a proof of stake algorithm. We're just finishing formalization of with security proofs based on the GKL-15 model, so we'll be publishing that mid-August. So we could certainly advocate that, but we still need to do some peer review once it's published to see if it's viable or not. And I'm not sure where Casper's at. I get very scared of protocols, especially consensus algorithms that are designed in an ad hoc manner. So I would advocate for removal of the difficulty bomb and a transition to a hybrid algorithm that uses both proof of work and proof of stake. There's a really good one that came out of VCU, just recently, it was published July 22nd, and it's based on the GKL model, which is kind of the gold standard for making these things secure. But it's a good question. And the problem is I'm not a leader in the Ethereum classic community. I'm just a follower, I joined. I don't speak for the community. I have my own personal opinions and we'll hire some developers to try to move us in a particular direction. But if we don't reach social consensus, it's gonna be very difficult for Ethereum classic to coalesce around a particular vision or roadmap. So that's the first great challenge to see whether Ethereum classic survives or not. Going back to my prior statement of, will an outside attack kill Ethereum classic? Probably not. If it's gonna die, it's gonna die as a result of the difficulty bomb debate as well as some of the other house cleaning. But it's a good opportunity. So I'll go ahead. Every community is going to have its governance tested going forward because of this difficulty bomb. Anthony, from your perspective, working as you said as a blockchain company that's doing development in this space, whether you support Ethereum classic or not within your Jack's wallet or other platforms you're building, what does this mean for the level of complexity and the user interface and the difficulty of developing applications as the platforms may fragment even further? So we're developing hardware that is hopefully gonna be including mining. I think the POS is gonna take much longer than we think. I think this may be another good case for the two change where perhaps the ETC does negate the bomb and decide to go on the proof of work path. Perhaps Ethereum decides to go on the POS. Perhaps that's another reason to have them. I think the reason of it, and I think it was put in place for a good reason, which was again trying to negate the centralization of mining that we've seen in Bitcoin along with other things that were done like GPU mining, the potential for other where the big changes, things like that. That's the reason why the bomb was put in place. It does question me about, I see it differently for working on the platform and doing good for the platform itself if changes potentially be made. My whole thing with the non fork was not doing it since an app caused an issue and that's always been my stance and that you're not gonna change things because change a protocol that has not had an issue because of a faulty app. That's my stance. So perhaps this could be another place of why there might be a good reason to have two change going forward. Perhaps there's some testing sandboxing, things that can potentially be done on one side or another that will enable benefits of both to come together and form a much stronger system down the road. All right, I think we've covered all of the questions I had. I don't know if Stephanie has any other questions. All right, we're going to... Nope, go ahead, Andreas. Thank you, Stephanie. Adam, you're back. Maybe you have some questions for us. We were getting to the point of almost wrapping up but we just talked about the difficulty bomb. Yeah, I actually do have a couple of questions. I apologize for continuing to drop out here. My technology is really failing me today. If we've already asked this, then stop me. But Martin, you're building a prediction market, a prediction type application and that is in a lot of parts of the world legally contentious. So one of the things that, so like there's been kind of two sides to the immutability argument and one of them has been about kind of the censoring of things that are now possible but that might not be legally sort of permissible in the current environment. So given that you're in support of the ETH chain, can you kind of talk to us about any concerns you have about that or if you don't have concerns, why? Oh, I don't have concerns. And I think that's, in my opinion, one of the big misconceptions is, I mean, I, of course, I understand the argument. You say, well, you've forked once, then can you fork for things like censoring a prediction market? And you have to understand how difficult it is to fork or how difficult, I mean, so it's not like three or four people are saying, okay, let's do it or you could put three or four people under pressure and then they do it. You really have to convince the whole community, so, or at least 80, 90%, you really have to convince 80, 90% of the community that that is the right thing. So I think kind of a false negative will never happen. So there will be a lot of cases where there is clear theft and it will be not reverted and you might think that is unfair, but what will really not happen is that there is something that should not be reverted and that will be reverted. I see no chance that 80, 90% of the community would agree to that. So I think that an important kind of point in this is who is considered the community because that's kind of a contentious issue. And when I've talked to some friends who work at Consensus, you know, the response has been we voted on this and everybody, you know, everybody had their opinion heard. There was a period of time when this happened and my response to that was I hold a lot of ether, not a lot of ether, but I hold ether and I didn't vote. Like I wasn't aware that there was a vote going on so I feel like I'm pretty plugged in and I don't feel like that was something, and so that's one side of it. And then the other side of it is that I don't think that my vote even really matters. I think the votes that matter are the exchanges and then the mining pools. And so if you look at it from that perspective, then sure, maybe you got 80 or 90% of the people on board with that, but that also means, and this is a conversation we had on the show a couple of weeks ago, so with Bitcoin, if you wanted to undo this in the way that it's been undone, you would have to unroll all of the transactions and so it would be very inconvenient for the entire network. And so because of that, you have the type of protection that you're talking about where you say, well, 80 or 90% of people aren't gonna agree to that and so it's not, you know, you're never gonna see something like that happen. But I would argue that in Bitcoin, a lot of that is because it would be a painful, really inconvenient experience for everybody because everything has to be rolled back. Well, sorry, am I wrong? Well, so actually, actually, I have, so there has been very active discussions to roll back the Bitfinex hack and it actually, it would not have been so difficult. So what you need to do is you need to, I mean, you need to get within 12 or 24 hours more than 50% of the miners to agree on that and then you kind of double spend the single transaction, the Bitfinex, and then you replay just all other transactions. So in the end, after 24 hours, you have a, so kind of, you can, for 24 hours, the network is kind of DDoS, so no transactions are possible because you have to first to replay all transactions so far, but after 24 hours, you are in a state that is exactly the same so it's not like all the, if someone spends money on exchange that would all be double spent, that's not the case, and you have a state, then that is exactly the same except this Bitfinex thing. I disagree, sorry Martin, I disagree with your analysis there. In order to do that, first of all, 50% attack would not be sufficient because if you did say a 55% attack, you would have to replay 144 blocks in the time it takes for the other part of the chain to do 144 blocks. So you would actually, it would take you three days to replay one days of transactions to the point where you exceeded the original chain. That is, if you were able to sustain a 55 to 60% attack for three days, meanwhile, you would have to during this time expend 500 megawatts of electricity continuously at full cost with zero reward because presumably all of these miners have already received the reward for that one day, and therefore when replaying it, they're not getting any extra reward. Now it's costing them 500 megawatts of electricity or approximately 10% of their monthly bill in order to do all of this, that's for the miners replaying the 55 to 60% attack. If you were able to actually get 60% of the miners to waste 10% of their monthly electricity budget, and this is why thermodynamically guaranteed proof of work is much harder to do. 100% of the block is a lot of blocks. Super easy get them to do that. I mean, it's 12.5 bitcoin per block. So in the heck, modern 100,000 bitcoins are stolen. So if you pay 5,000 of those bitcoins, that's way more than you can totally cover those. Right, of course, if I'm the attacker, I'm going to give 20% of my bitcoin to the other 40% of the mining hashing power as a direct reward by spending it in fees and double spent transactions that burn enormous fees which are a direct incentive to the other 40% of the miners or more if I can get them through bribery. Maybe I only want to get 10 cents on the dollar for my theft. I'm willing to burn 90% of that money in fees. It's not as easy as you make it sound, Martin. It goes into a game theoretical situation where there will be more contention. And if you drag this out, because of course the attacker is going to be bribing the rest of the miners, it's not going to take three days. So you're going to DDoS the entire network for a week, maybe longer. The costs really do ramp up very quickly. Okay, so I come back to my initial point. You actually need 80, 90% of the community or maybe 95% and then it works. And that's how it was done in Ethereum. Right, yeah. And you would not get that in bitcoin. It's a very different attitude. It's possible, but I'm just, I mean, I'm saying it's not kind of, it's not too much a technical difference. It's maybe a community difference. But also in bitcoin, if you get 90% of the community to agree on a hat or on kind of reverting a transaction, you can do it. Yes, for about a day. Of course, UTXO gets really complicated once you start spending it and touching other transactions. Actually, it's even simpler with the UTXO model because kind of you have this one, unspent transaction output and everything behind this transaction output is invalid while in Ethereum, you kind of have mixing by default. So if you put in one ether to another account, it's kind of by default mixed. So actually the fungibility in Ethereum is higher. So from that perspective, it's more difficult than Ethereum. And it was kind of just lucky that the coins were locked in this 30-day thing. So if they wouldn't have been locked then in Ethereum, all you could do is roll back all transactions, but there would have not been an option to kind of only target this transaction. Okay, we did go on a bit of a tangent there. Adam, back to you with your question. So that was actually quite an educational, I think. So maybe I'm wrong here. Maybe there isn't the type of specificity that I thought that you could achieve in censoring transactions with... So anyways, my primary concern is that if you don't have to roll back everything, then it's not inconvenient for the entire network. And so it's much easier to pick out the group of specific people, whether they be exchanges or they be mining pools, that you can actually pressure in order to do that. And I'm just... So anyways, I guess you've... No, Adam, we lost you again. I think we noticed that he was saying basically if it is easier to do, you may see it getting utilized more often. I think that's the point that he's trying to make. Because it's easier to do. I would say it's not easier to do. So I'm gonna disagree a bit with Adam there, and maybe you can all chime in here. This, if you're a lawyer and you wanna take a case to court, you want the perfect defendant, right? Or the perfect plaintiff who is clearly aggrieved where morally everybody's on your side. I mean, come on, this was a DAO attack that affected 25,000 investors. The attacker is bad, bad person, and must have all of their money taken from them. Morally, ethically, in terms of narrative and story, this was the perfect candidate to promote this kind of reversal. And yet, even if you were able to get approximately an 80, 20 split in the initial fork, eventually it swung back and now you have a hold out in the form of ethereum classic, we couldn't even do it with a perfect candidate. How could you possibly do it when you're talking about censoring a prediction market or something like that? I mean, it doesn't worry me at all. It doesn't worry me at all. And actually, I mean, on the prediction market, so usually, as soon as you'll speak longer than our, with someone about prediction markets and this topic of assassination markets will come up. And I feel kind of good that if there's a big agreement in the community to censor that market, then let's do it. So I think blockchain is kind of empowering people and empowering communities and if the community wants to do something. We can get rid of the censorship proof part of the foundation website as well then now if that's the way it is. Immutability, unstoppable apps, censorship proof, all those things that what it was standing for that would definitely be cutting into that if that was the approach. We're gonna have six wolves and four sheep voting on what's for dinner. I'm sorry, there are certain principles that ought to be immutable and people do take these things very seriously. This is the debate between you and Andreas exposed. It's really, really expensive and hard to try to do even simple rollbacks with Bitcoin. And that's good. This is one of the reasons why Bitcoin is so incredibly valuable and why the community is so strong and has been able to endure so much pain and conflict. And I argue that a large chunk of the value of these systems come from either explicitly stated or unspoken social contract that they advocate. So if you say, let's build a community that's censorship resistant and it is neutral to the code that's written, you have to stick by that. You have to advocate that. And if you come in and say, well, sometimes we can censor, sometimes we can reverse things, sometimes we can give people their money back. It's an extreme simple rule. If the very big majority of the community agrees to something to change something or to revert something. Well, I want people to burn to a new chain and have an 80% or 90% threshold and all the money it bleeps and you go to a new chain. That way 100% of the people agreed who are in the new chain. They actually destroyed their. That's kind of what we did. I mean, we are now in a new chain. No, you guys didn't do that. You just did a basically a hard fork. Yeah, that is creating a new chain, so. Now you have the replay attack as a result. You know, it's a different situation. You did a poll to justify something you wanted to do. And that's okay. And the poll came out to be right for you guys and you went and forked it. And now resistance is forming. Who knows where it's going to go, but this is not healthy for the ecosystem. And another thing that concerns me is I was in Lviv in Ukraine with Vlad. I think it was last year, yeah, Bip. And he shows us roadmap. And there's like five hard forks you guys have in the roadmap. And so this is a simple, and Andreas is right, morally justified, oh my God, if you could invent a better scenario for justifying forking the protocol, you can't get one. And it should be non-controversial, yet it is. And now you're walking into proof of stake and scalability improvements and improvements to the EVM and so forth. And there doesn't seem to me to be an appreciation for the process of this or understanding that you're leaving some of your community behind every time you make a step and fork the protocol. It seems to be almost like trust us, we know what's best, we'll figure it out. And I think that is currently exactly what makes the value of Ethereum. So we have this conservative system Bitcoin and that's great, absolutely great. And we have this less conservative system Ethereum that is willing to make changes and that is willing to make change and go forward even if this would mean you lose part of the community. So just one second there because in addition to what you just said, Martin, one of the propositions as Charles pointed out is that we have at least in theory, we have the possibility of something like rootstock implementing Ethereum type virtual machines but with the immutability and resistance to hard forks that you have seen demonstrated in the Bitcoin community. So in the end, this is simply a matter of finding the best fit for a chain that is strongly immutable versus a chain that is driven more rapidly, perhaps has a higher rate of innovation and change through a simple consensus mechanism and majority voting mechanism. It's not just classic that offers that option really. Yeah, go ahead Martin. No, I mean, so again, if there is a separation that is kind of big enough on Ethereum, I'm totally in favor of what those guys and rootstock are doing, so of course. So I mean, rootstock is kind of a different world than Ethereum is. You're taking your money in Bitcoin, which lives in one trust model and social contract and you're handing it over to a federated network and that network is gonna have the benefits of efficiency and it's gonna have a lot of other things like perhaps faster transaction times, et cetera, et cetera. There's a beautiful things you can do once you enter a federation land from decentralization land and that's effectively a control layer and that has a philosophy behind it. You can have it be anonymous, you can put a legal topology into it, you can do a lot of cool things once you enter a control layer overlay model and you can have multiple versions corresponding to different social contracts and different use cases. But it's important to point out that the trust guarantees in the social contract of Bitcoin doesn't necessarily follow as you move into the overlay protocol. So I will disagree a little bit saying that rootstock offers the same value proposition as Bitcoin. I think it offers a different value proposition, in some cases a superior one, but it is not exactly the same. If you want an immutable network, you're gonna have to sit with Ethereum Classic and to a lesser extent with Ethereum. Right, so I think the points you're making, Charles, and to explain to the less technical audience what you're saying is the really special thing about any type of native asset within the primary layer of the consensus network is that every action on that native asset is validated through the consensus mechanism. Well, that's the Bitcoin transaction. If you make an overlay network through merged mining, as I believe the current proposal for rootstock, you're not validating the consensus layer of Bitcoin, which has the enormous investments in electricity and mining hardware, is not validating the EVM stack of the additional layer, at least not with its full power of the consensus mechanism. Ethereum is, Ethereum Classic is, so it's a slightly different approach. Right, and in some cases it's a superior approach because you can put in a regulatory model like automated tax compliance and other things into that system, and then you can have consumer choice where they can decide which control layer they want to go to and you can instantiate multiple versions. And that I think is kind of the government friendly way of moving for some applications. So it's just important to point that out. I think what we've discovered is that no one on this panel is a maximalist of any kind. Everybody has the ability to coexist with multiple other chains. I'd like to go back to Anthony who's playing the role of the pragmatist here. You're looking at this discussion evolving, potentially some options between a chain that is dominated by a majority consensus approach may move a bit faster and a chain that is more conservative and more strongly immutable. How does that affect your decisions in what you develop for and how do you look at what the market is telling you? So what we've decided to do, especially after the DAO situation, we realized we jumped the gun and started doing a lot of work on DAO integrations and we've learned from that and we're now gonna continue on with our development paths is basically what we're gonna do. The things that we've had, even before ETC came about, we have a certain path that we've lined up. We're gonna keep looking to see what's going on. People are asking us, I've got ether in my account, how do I get my ETC? We're directing them to services and places where they can then move it out of Jax and split it and bring them back into Jax if they want and keep their ETC somewhere else. That's how we're helping out our customers right now. We're letting them knowing that we're still just re-evaluating things and we're going to allow ourselves to make our decisions and we're going to then back up those decisions and carry things out. So we've got our short-term dev schedule, we're gonna keep going out of that and then we'll see if this comes into play a little bit more of what we're gonna decide to do, but we're not taking a hard stance on anything one way or the other. All right, let's wrap things up and go into any final statements, I think we've come for an hour and a half. Martin, why don't you- I had a question for you, but I'm not sure of your time. Sure, go ahead. So, I mean, I guess this argument, you should not do a hard fork for things that run on top of the blockchain and only if there's a protocol back in the blockchain like it was in Bitcoin. I mean, it was pretty obvious you needed to do a hard fork at that point. So, but now let's assume we get something on top of Bitcoin like lightning network. And let's assume now 10% of all Bitcoins are in there or maybe 20% or maybe 50% or maybe 80%. So, let's say 60% of all Bitcoins would be in lightning network contracts and then it turns out there's a buck in those contracts. I think it's clearly, you can let, so you have two options, you let the community die or you fork and you kind of rescue it. So, all right, I mean, if you have a different opinion, please go ahead. Yeah, I mean, that's a really good point. And so the question is, would we go and put 15% of all of Bitcoin into the very first version of lightning network within two weeks of creating it with a fully complete contract? I think not. It was a very bad decision, there's no question about it. So, I mean. Right, exactly. Well, at the very least, we can watch and learn from that decision. I think there is a certain value to the fact that the Bitcoin scripting language through its simplicity has a lower propensity to have unanticipated bugs. That's simply a fact. A stack-based, non-turing complete language will exhibit fewer bugs than a full-turing complete language. Different use cases, of course. So, I'm less worried about specific implementation of lightning network where the consensus rules are executed for every lightning network transaction on all of the channel state. I'm less worried we're gonna see a massive bug, but you're absolutely right. If 60% of the value of Bitcoin was in lightning network when we discovered a bug that destroyed that value, we would probably hard fork. And I think you'd see that happen. The same thing applies if there is a, if we find that ECDSA or SHA-256 or one of the core cryptographic algorithms, and guess what would happen if we did fork? 20, 30, 40% of the network would refuse to do so, and we would have a Bitcoin classic situation on our hands. It would be even stronger in the case of Bitcoin. And I think that's why it's been so difficult to arrive at a conclusion. All right, anyway, so that was my answer to your question, Martin. Let's do some final points. Charles. My hope for my participation in the Ethereum classic community is going to be basically trying to get them to coal as a route of social contract and get a reasonable route back to the place, attach some developers to it and view it as an experiment. It's really a great opportunity actually for everybody in the space. We're getting an answer of what happens when you have a split of community and you have a chance to follow kind of two different paths and A-B test ideas. That to me, from an academic standpoint, is tremendously valuable, and I'm going to try to pursue that. Furthermore, my hope is that we can kind of tone down moving forward the vitriol and the anger between both communities. I mean, people got their money back. The Dow hacker was refunded on the Ethereum mainnet and everybody got a bunch of free Ethereum classic. And it's an opportunity for us to kind of view it like open office and Libre office reset and go about our own way and try to accomplish something productive for everybody. And I hope that's what ends up happening. Furthermore, it's a great data point for Bitcoin itself. At some point, Bitcoin is gonna have to start making some hard decisions about its future and where it wants to go and what it wants to be. And it would be really nice if we can get some evidence from Ethereum classic and Ethereum over a long arc of what are the consequences of having these types of splits. And it ultimately I think will give us more confidence moving forward when we have to make those hard decisions. That's a great point, Charles. Anthony. We're gonna continue providing the products that the masses can use. That's really what my focus on. Everything's for developers right now. Our focus is to provide the interface for blockchain, whether it be Ether, whether it be other ones. And it's also to provide more robustness in what we call relay services or nodes basically that wallets use for push transactions, show balances, all those things. There's a lack of them out there and we're coming up with strategies on how we can improve the infrastructure and I think that involves collaboration. A lot of work, we're talking with the Mycelium guys, we're talking with the guys from Exodus and we're seeing how we can each come together and start helping each other out and not do the same things that like add redundancy to services and see how we can actually not, we can work on different projects and then bring those together that we can add strength to the different networks that we're gonna be working on in the future. So I really call for more collaboration, really call for less toxicity and just want to keep providing these, providing products and services that everybody's gonna use and enjoy and get this out to the masses. Last but not least, Charles. Sorry. Martin. Sorry. In court order. Martin. Do you want to go again? No. Yeah, so I'm honestly happy to see that most of the developers and the projects continue to build on each DH because again, I think we haven't even started to get the positive network effects of having one, I mean, we haven't even one depth that's really working on Ethereum and it gets interesting if there are multiple depths that interact with each other. And if we are at that stage, then in my opinion, we could think about different chains running the Ethereum virtual machine and how they could work nicely together. So that would be my roadmap. However, if Ethereum Classic is there, of course they should, I mean, they should do whatever they like that there's no question about that. But I would kind of suggest carefully it would be, in my opinion, more valuable if they differentiate them further. So for example, saying we will stick to proof of work and that would otherwise, I don't see too much value if two things are too close together and then I would see the loss of network effect would be bigger than the value of having diversity. Well, thank you all for participating. This has been a special edition of Let's Talk Bitcoin, LTV Live, specifically talking about Ethereum versus Ethereum Classic, the concepts of consensus and immutability. I'd like to thank our three special guests today, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Tiorio, Martin Koppelman. Thank you so much for participating in this special edition of LTV. And also our host, Stephanie Murphy. And Andreas, thank you so much. You did a great job. And Adam, the discussion. And Adam, who unfortunately had some connectivity issues and wasn't able to moderate, but came in with some great questions, especially towards the end. That's all I wanted to say. And put this all together, yeah. Yes, thanks everybody. See you soon. Bye-bye everyone. Thanks everyone, bye-bye.