# F**k Off! What if we forked crypto?

- Channel: [ETHBerlin](https://streameth.org/ethberlin)
- Date: 2025-06-19
- Duration: 23:15
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/6854691590bd41297b296fc2

## Description

The basic core primitive of blockchain governance is the fork. This talk will challenge us with a thought experiment, “what if we forked crypto?”. The crypto industry has fallen prey to capture, mindless speculation and nihilistic triviality straying far from its cypherpunk origins — we have hit a dead end. It’s time to fork the entire industry.

## Transcript

Hello everyone. I left it kind of ambiguous, but I guess it's fuck off now. Okay, so yeah, my goal for this is to propose a kind of thought experiment to give us a little engaging idea of what we could do if we actually use the core principle of blockchain governance, the blockchain. So why would we want to do that? Well, I think crypto has kind of lost its way. The last talk, which was absolutely wonderful, discussed this well. But yeah, I think the ideals are kind of dead and dying. And actually, I think we just heard a really wonderful reconceptualization of them, which is very much what I'm kind of angling at as well. But I think it's fair to say that crypto has become kind of Wall Street, but worse. If anything, I think it's kind of amplified what was there before. When I first discovered crypto, I got really, really excited about the power and potential of it to disrupt and change systems that I thought were pretty bad and toxic. And if anything, we've kind of dialed it up to 11 or more. So it's time to fork off. But how? Now from a governance guy by background, I'm very excited by this kind of stuff. And actually, the fork was one of the things that got me really, really excited about crypto. Because you can't fork organizations, you can't fork institutions, you can't fork governments, but you can fork blockchain systems. And this is a genuinely novel and interesting kind of political and cultural practice. In fact, blockchains give us the ability to take the software fork, which is effectively just cut and paste, but now we can shift economies, communities and cultures with it. And we should use it. So I think it's a kind of profound act of philosophical rebellion and agency. In fact, I think it allows communities to break decisively when systems are corrupted. And some of them are pretty corrupted. Now, so there's a couple of ways of looking at this, a few bits of philosophy. So Isaiah Berlin's idea of kind of negative liberty, I'm riffing on that a little bit here. But we've got kind of freedom to get out of bad situations, freedom from coercion, freedom from capture, I think crypto is pretty captured, just freedom from bad vibes, like we don't really get this very much, we can just leave, right. And in fact, in crypto, we can just leave. But we also get the opposite of this, which is we can use this idea to define our culture, we can use freedom to curate to build a new identity. To the outside world, crypto has a kind of perception that is not great. I work in academic circles quite a lot. And I'm frequently confronted with the fact when I introduced myself as working in crypto, you can imagine what response I get quite a lot of the time. So forking, I think, is how I think we can recapture the industry. And, you know, it doesn't necessarily need to be a technological fork, what I'm kind of proposing is what I call an ontological fork, we can fork the meaning of what crypto is. Now, this is about maybe the third Heideggerian reference today, you can tell this is the philosophy track. But yeah, what I think we can do is we can negotiate a new authenticity of what crypto is, what got me excited about crypto was its authentic activist and sort of visceral and like a vitality around an ambition to change the world, which has kind of got lost into this kind of like techno capital machine that we've made. And in fact, Heidegger talks about how we get enframed into particular systems, and we are enframed in the protocol and we get lost in the kind of digital flim flams and, and elliptic curves that we like talking about, when in fact, what we're talking about is emancipatory technology. So I think what we can do is reframe, reframe crypto by reclaiming its essence, what we actually got excited about. And we can do that by negotiating meaning. And in fact, Paul talked earlier about the kind of VC industrial podcast complex, where you know, the narrative is actually captured by, by the feeds by podcasts. And we need to find a way to reclaim it back through discourse. Thomas Kuhn talked about paradigm shifts, like a radical change in our understanding of the world that you can kind of flip overnight into a different way of looking at everything. And that's kind of what I'm proposing, right, a new idea, a new framing for what crypto is. So I'm going to rattle through a few like elements of crypto if you like. And I want to hear from you. The word fork off, if you think we should fork it off, I'm proposing that we split crypto down the middle and pick out what we think should be in and what shouldn't be. Yeah, it's a kind of radical new consensus mechanism if you like. Bitcoin. Okay, not many, just one. Right? You can't get rid of Bitcoin, can you really? It's where it all started, right? So Bitcoin is crypto. That isn't going to change anytime soon, right? In fact, Bitcoin is what I consider the baseline of the base layer of the blockchain Agora. And in fact, it's the foundation of hard permissionlessness. The fact that Bitcoin is so permissionless, and is likely to stay that permissionless for a long, long time is exceptionally good news. I've been to conferences recently with suits who have a kind of reverence for Bitcoin. They love the ETF. They love the financial thing that they've just got to play with, and they're building new financial products out of it. They love it. And it's permissionless. Now that is profoundly important and interesting. So thank Satoshi for Bitcoin, because that's the base layer of everything. Ethereum? No one. That's not a surprise. Is that the ripple guy? The cypherpunk blockchain, I think, I think it's potentially even more cypherpunk than Bitcoin, in fact. I think it's got a more cypherpunk monetary policy, for example. But it's a maybe for me, because it's not a done deal. This is a socio-technical system that can change over time, and the institutions are coming. And I want to throw a warning out there of beware of institutionalization. We are changing them. They're getting used to permissionlessness, but they might want to change us back. In fact, they will do. We're going to start seeing a lot more of this. Fuck users that run local nodes. And I hope we see a lot more of this. Based Vitalik, you should sell your ETH. Now this happened after I proposed this talk, but this is it. This is what I'm talking about. He's telling them to fork off. And in fact, taking it a little bit a step further, Paul said he didn't like DeFi Punk. I'm looking forward to talking about why that is. But actually what this is, is an ontological fork. We have DeFi, now we have DeFi Punk. And that's because it integrates within it privacy technology and maintains permissionlessness. So meaning matters. And actually what this is, is what I call semantic governance. We're playing with the ideas of what meaning is and reframing what those concepts are and building a notion of identity around it. Crypto is ours. Crypto is what it is. So all I'm saying is we reclaim crypto and recapture crypto to the meaning that we want it to be. The other stuff can be Web3. That's a VC invented term. The other stuff, they can stick all the KYC gates they want into it, but it's not crypto. So let's continue. Solana. Oh, I was expecting a little bit more. Yes, well, maybe it's because, yes, I am an Ethereum trader now. I have recently moved over to Solana. It was a hard decision to make, I have to say. I was completely Solana blind for many, many years, didn't even look at it, wasn't even interested in it. But yes, I think it's an interesting sort of system. I think it's different in a few interesting ways. This last one, it's got values. You think Solana might not have values, but the values are things like this. Accelerate, ship or die. These values propagate throughout these things and actually starting to embody it within the socio-technical system. Solana moves faster than Ethereum, I can tell you that. And in fact, they kind of embody this technologically through this idea they call IBRL, increased bandwidth, reduced latency. They have an entirely different notion. I went to a conference recently and met the validators. The validators are people, they have personalities. I went to a validator roast where they took the piss out of each other. Very different. I laughed at Tolly a few years ago for saying, yeah, you should get on a Zoom call with your validator to understand them. Now I do it for a job. I found that completely alien and weird and it's different to Ethereum in interesting ways. And in fact, it makes trade-offs that Ethereum cannot and should not do. So Vitalik told that chap to fork off because he was saying we should break one second slot times. And what that means is that we lose solo validators and we lose decentralization. So actually I'm kind of making the argument here that market niche that is currently ending up in low latency, co-location, fiber optics, is trying to be the decentralized NASDAQ. And that means Ethereum doesn't need to be. It can maintain itself as a cypherpunk blockchain. Meme coins. Yeah, I was expecting a little bit more than that. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Meme coins. I'm down on this. If you would have asked me that a couple of years ago, I was absolutely infuriated by all this stuff, mainly because a lot of people get scammed. In fact, right now, meme coins are basically a retail meat grinder. It's a kind of sham, right? You see the one guy who's made a thousand XR and, you know, you know, bought Lambo with it or whatever. But the majority of people are getting just scammed by cabals, inner circle groups and snipers. And in fact, a lot of this is because we're locked into this idea of this exponential bonding curve that all of these launchpads use, which is really an effective system. But the reality of it is, this is now part of our cultural fabric, right? There was a point where Fartcoin was worth more than 99.9% of businesses on the planet. This is the reality that we live in now. It's not going anywhere. In fact, it is the base layer of the token economy. And in fact, Ethereum really missed it in this last couple of years. The fact that it didn't have this economic dynamic. We see what happens when you try and so, yeah, my argument is we shouldn't necessarily fork this out, but we should make it better. We need to build better, non-extractive, cabal-resistant approaches to launching tokens. This is a really important thing. And we shouldn't just let kind of really scammy, grimy projects run this stuff. We should think about this and bring our intelligence to it. VCs. Ooh, a bit more. There might be some in the room, maybe that's why there's a little bit. I'm not going to, like, I've got good friends who are VCs. And this is the primary dynamic of crypto, right? It's the primary funding dynamic. It's where we all get funded from. We have to. We have to go to the VCs. But why? We actually invented decentralised crowdfunding several years ago. Now, this is compounded further that the fact we don't really have venture capitalists that much. There's a handful of them on the planet. What we have is venture followers. The reality of it is there's half a dozen, dozen of these guys around the world that lead around and then the rest of them jump in like lemmings. And actually, if you really want to talk to a VC and really understand what's going on, this is the question. The rest of it's a sham, right? This is the question that you're answering. Can I flip this for six months for a $5 billion valuation? If you can't give them that as an answer, you ain't getting any money. And that's why we don't have any apps, right? So actually, what we do need is a fork of crypto that takes the agency of financing our own projects away from this market because it doesn't work. We don't have anything but new blockchains. And that needs to be fixed. So, do the ICOs. That's my advice. Not financial advice. Don't lock me up. KYC. That's more like it. Okay. So yes, KYC. Now, the previous talk did a wonderful job of going into this. But yes, blockchains have the ability to create permissionless systems. They also have the ability to create systems of absolute terror. You can create very high-fidelity, identity-based systems that put up digital walls that stop people going through them with perfect fidelity. Tim Berners-Lee was really worried about a future of the Internet that became a kind of balkanized system, where instead of a purely open global system that united everyone, it became a system that put up digital walls. And actually, crypto could create that system. Now, KYC itself is a kind of supranational, non-democratically accountable compliance regime. And it makes everyone in the world jump through hoops. Now, do you know who's really good at jumping through these hoops? Criminals. So, everyone in the world jumps through hoops and it doesn't actually stop any crime. Now, in fact, crypto can make this worse, but it's already really bad. The Coinbase hack recently is extremely dangerous. I did some basic calculations on this. 1% of their customers, which I think is low-balling it, is around $3 billion value of a list. All you need to do is go and find them and kidnap them. Now, actually, it could be way worse because one of the people that was on that list was the co-founder of Solana, just so happened to be one of the highest holders of Solana on Coinbase. It's very likely that was sorted by value. So, that could well be a $100 billion wrench list. So, it's very, very dangerous and people are going to get hurt. But crypto can take this to entirely new levels. Right now, I am not permitted to play tokenized Wiggly Worm. Now, at the moment, I can just spin up a VPN, right? If I want to play tokenized Wiggly Worm, I can do it. But not if we put this on the blockchain. And, in fact, if I need to scan my passport in order to play tokenized Wiggly Worm, they can ban me for life from it. So, the future of crypto is KYC, unless it's not in our fork, or worse, WorldCoin. And this is why you're my people. As you know, I'm probably not a big fan of this project and I'm really going to stick it through on Monday on my talk at Dapcon. But I'm just going to leave you with a kind of thought experiment. How would we go about forking an L2 out of Ethereum if it went evil? I'm going to leave that for you as a thought exercise. But it might happen, right? One of these things is that this, one of the things that I think Ann mentioned in the previous talk, that what happens if we create tools that can be used by the state to impinge power onto people? This creates the perfect high-fidelity rub button. You can de-platform, it's de-platforming as a service, and it can pass a power to people. Now, at the moment, it mainly serves big tech. And it allows big tech to manage its user base in a very high-fidelity fashion. Nice. But what happens when it's governments that are world apps? And that's the bit that worries me. So one day we might have to fork in anger, and I want us to think about it. Okay, so why do we need to do this? Why do we need to fix this? Well, the stakes are high. People are getting bundled into the back of vans today. And we are in a world where it's becoming increasingly necessary to think about permissionless systems. People are in the UK. As a frequent shit-poster on crypto Twitter, I worry about this quite a bit. People in my country get locked up for three years in jail for saying things online. At the same time, people flipping over cars and setting them on fire get a few months. So what if we don't fix crypto is really the question that plays on my mind a lot. I don't see that there's many credible alternatives for giving people the tools to be able to look after themselves if they have to. So just to finish off, some ideas for what we need to do. Basically, we've engaged in a light-hearted game of sort of consensus building here today about what goes in or out. But I think we need to get a little bit more robust with it. So we need better decision-making systems. We need to make tools that allow us to collect our intelligence, to think together, epistemic technologies. We need to figure out what is good and what is bad, what is truth and what isn't. People often talk about futarki. I think that's overly plutocratic. We need to find ways of funneling knowledge towards expertise in a meritocratic fashion. But we also need events like this. We need to be able to seize the means of production. I think I actually used those words on there, yes. But yes, we need to get better at communicating this, because I always come to events run by the Department of Decentralization and come back energized, because this is the values, this is what I come here for. But it's here. That's it. I don't see it anywhere else. So how do we propagate this outwards? We need to coordinate. It's always been about organization. People call me the Dow guy. I'm about organization. I like people getting together and doing stuff together. That's what excites me. Dows are just a tool. But we need to start thinking about forking. If you're involved in an L2 ecosystem and you can't fork the entire thing and get rid of everyone, then it's not really an open system. Can you fork the entire system, top to bottom, and run it yourself? Then it's a system that you can build your life on. Now whether you can do that on Ethereum anymore is an interesting question. Now we've got real-world assets everywhere, but certainly L2s and things like that we need to be able to fork out if necessary. Subsidiarity-based governance. I firmly believe that the world would become a better place if we followed the principles of subsidiarity, which is that power should flow down to the most local place possible. People should be empowered to take control of their local environment. That is true in Dows and it's true in the real world as well. In fact, if we crack it in Dows, we can crack it in the real world. Dark Dows. These were talked about like really nasty things. But there's absolutely no reason why we couldn't form a Dow in this room, use our governance tokens together, and start bossing some Dows around. I don't see why we shouldn't do it. And in fact, I think we should. So, the crypto fork. What's on the side of it that I think we should look into? I think it should be unapologetically permissionless. Thankfully, Bitcoin is there that sets the base layer for it, but it will come under attack. It should be open and ungated. These are the core principles of what this is about. We need to get crowdfunding back. It needs to be global crowdfunding. We don't need to be taking begging bowls up to suits to ask for our future. Privacy is the destination. A lot of privacy projects get stuck in trying to achieve it first and never get it done. Privacy is a destination. The important thing is to move. Decentralize everything. And bottom up social organization and culture formation. We need to get better at communicating our ideas. So, I think we need to reclaim crypto's soul. It was the thing that got many of us here excited about this. And it's really upsetting and even distressing to watch it get sort of eliminated through the market dynamics. We need to build up those fear. The amount of times that I've had people say, we don't want fair launches. They don't want fair launches because it screws up their pump and dump games. So, build systems that cut out the toxic parts of the market structure. Freedom is not a product. This is what it's all about. This is emancipatory technology. We should be liberating people and using these technologies to make people's lives better. And coordination is our weapon. And forking is how we fight. Thank you very much. So, we have a lot of questions and not a lot of time. First, Wes Ham sends his regards. Wes Ham. Isn't Solana the definition of a corrupted system after 18... We lost it. Insider that should move. Distribution systems centrally held tokens purchased... It could be. I mean, the distribution is pretty bad. It's pretty centralized in many ways. But I've been there a month. And honestly, I've seen more positive thinking there than I've seen for quite a long time in Ethereum. Ethereum has an idealist surface. The reality of it is really quite brutal. I've been trying to build on Ethereum for seven years now. And I've been screwed more times than I can possibly even articulate. It would take me two hours here to explain how many times I've been fucked over in the Ethereum ecosystem. So, honestly, it's all corrupted. These are brutal, open games. Which are hyper-techno-capital games. It invites these people. Pick your poison. Thank you very much. Give a big round of applause to Dr. Nick.