Ethereum's Values and Ethos Alignment: Pre-Merge to Now | Devcon SEA

[Music] test test okay we're good all right hey everyone uh my name is Phil no I'm the project manager of the ethereum consensus client written in typescript called loadstar I work at chains saafe and here we have a bunch of probably familiar faces in the community here um and thank you for coming to today's session ethereum's uh values and Ethos alignment so I'll give um everybody an opportunity just to introduce themselves and just tell us a little bit about what you're working on and like what got you interested in ethereum so we'll just go in order I guess yeah okay Hey so uh my name is Peter I've been on the go ethereum team for almost 10 years now so I'm one of the Boomers in this uh ecosystem and um I guess just to answer the question what got me interested in this whole thing it was mostly decentralized autonomous self-organizing systems so I was always fascinated about having computer systems that just self assemble and do something without too much intervention my name is nixo I came to ethereum like I came to working full-time in ethereum through staking I was a Staker um I'm now transitioning to working at the ethereum foundation um but the thing that brought me uh in love with ethereum was the self- sovereignty and that was like very clear when I onboarded as a Staker that um ethereum very much espoused a self- sovereign identity hey my name is Mark and I'm a contributor to the optimism collect Ive we're focused on scaling ethereum through layer twos building free software um the reason why I became interested in ethereum is because I really became disillusioned with the world I was pretty frustrated with you know a lot of Institutions that I thought were kind of falling behind they're still built on fax machines I was kind of like hey civilization we should be able to do better than this and I started learning about Bitcoin and kind of got into the sound money idea because I was worried about how much debt there was in the world and then I saw the Dow and I was like oh wow this is really cool like ethereum could be like a platform for these institutions of the future and then I fell down the rabbit hole and I couldn't stop thinking about a theum and just wanted to build and you know scal it to the world yeah my name is Ahmed barar I work on the nethermind execution client um so three year around three years ago I probably started looking into cryptocurrency in general and uh I started doing my own research and then um the more I dove deep the more I was pilled by ethereum um about Financial Freedom about censorship resistance and then um the the the the the way I became a cordev was I got inspired by Peter because I kept seeing him tweeting on Twitter and this made me think oh being a cev must be like the Pinnacle of of like technical knowledge in in this space and yeah this is this is why I'm here now so thank you Peter all right sounds like we already have a little bit of alignment already that's a good start but now to the hard questions um this is let's really see here like what people say we don't know each other's answers we didn't like rehearse this befor hand but if you were to describe ethereum in a sentence how would you how would you describe it anyone first ethereum is incredibly neutral new Financial Paradigm so when I was thinking about this I was trying to come up with like a catch phrase like something really really simple so I've got three of them one is unbank the banked you know this is like a classic one people don't really say this one anymore but it was really popular maybe like I don't know three or four years ago um another one is you know know your counterparty right like I think um there's this idea of hardness Josh Stark I believe at the ethereum foundation is talking about this I think that this is a really important property of eum where you know you kind of have this property of when you're interacting with someone on the blockchain you know the way that they're going to respond so this um Assurance is really really important and it der risks certain types of interactions and I think that's like a huge value proposition of ethereum and then the last one is shine light on power structures so you know today there's a lot of Walled Gardens in the world and it's really opaque the way that the decisionmaking for these walled Gardens works so a huge value prop to me about ethereum is that the power structures can be legible on chain and I think that we should strive to move more and more power structures on chain so that the users can see the power structures and opt into the power structures that they want to so that we don't just have these opaque walled Gardens that people have no say in that was longer than a [Laughter] sentence I'll allow it yeah I would say uncompromising censorship resistant permissionless and decentralized World computer focus on uncompromising I think for me the most important thing would be flat decentralized power structures in short what do you mean by flat by flat I mean I would like not to have power structures at all I would like like to not see hierarchical our structures is no one going to say like code is law maybe no we all know what happened there okay well you know that's some you know good uh interesting uh perspectives on theing I feel like we still have you know some alignment here on like you know what we're trying to build ethereum for um I feel like a lot of the times what makes ethereum different and what makes us very special is because of some of the values that a lot of the contributors whether core contributors or dap developers or infrastructure Builders um the reason why we're here is because we do have some alignment on what we're trying to build here and the properties of what this stack needs to be viable to the true vision of why we're here which I would assume is the web three values decentralization accountability trans um transparency and such but if I were to ask you what is like an uh one property or the most important or existential threat um to ethereum if this value disappeared what value would that be what would make you rage quit and exit the ecosystem because we've lost that property I think when you like talk about some of these properties you end up like tangentially kind of talking about the other ones and so I'm going to say credible neutrality but that like that also refers to decentralization and censorship resistance and without those things credible neutrality is those things like you were talking about flat power structures and if my my problem with the traditional Financial structure our our traditional economic system really is that some people have uh incumbent power that other people the people who are newer to the um system can't grab at and I think that if we don't maintain incredible neutrality ethereum could be more dystopian than the system that we're in currently like if somebody can control ethereum if somebody has outsized influence in ethereum the um ability to track uh people's Financial transactions in the way that ethereum allows could make ethereum more dystopian than our current system I think that's a really good point about how if ethereum is captured whether it's its governance or just like the validator set um it could be more dystopian um just due to the lack of privacy being built into the base layer so yeah I would definitely want to rage quit if old money overtook ethereum's governance old money or uh new power structures that are crypto native and taking over the system either one that's a very good point there's definitely some of those that we have to worry about too I think for me uh I would say that the most important value is equal access or equal opportunity of access so essentially what I would like to see is on all the different layers of ethereum whether it's L1 L2 platform D layer whatever ever that anybody who figures that they would like to do something on it they just can without um somebody being able to either prioritize or deprioritize them and um maybe we can go into that a bit later but in short um yeah so when you look at all the properties that are mentioned in in this uh panel uh I feel like always it comes back to decentralization because if we lose decentralization we can't guarantee censorship resistance we can't guarantee permissionless access we can't be even if for example uh people working on ethereum stop being credibly natural um the decentralization of ethereum could render them out of the protocol if they wish to if the protocol is actually decentralized but decentralization is a very broad word because you have have decentralization geographically you have decentralization in the number of validators solo sers infrastructure so like decentralization needs to be applied on all aspects not a single one of them I would definitely like to challenge the community into trying to use the word decentralization less so that we can hone in on more in on the specific thing that needs to be decentralized because because when someone says XYZ is centralized it doesn't really convey much information we should be talking about the very specific things that are centralized because systems are made up of many parts and really a system is only as decentralized as its least decentralized component so it's not really useful if you're just saying XYZ that's centralized we need to be more specific so that we can share mental models and not just argue past each other in a religious way is there something that you're thinking of that would potentially have a reason to be centralized as more effective um if it was more centralized like is is there something that you're thinking of oh yeah there's I mean every time that you decentralize something it's a cost and you need to make sure that the cost of that decentralization is worth the benefit right so literally decentralizing every single thing in the world civilization would probably fall apart so I think sometimes um it's good to have decision making that's centralized um other times it is better to to like design by committee it kind of depends on what you're optimizing for and like the type of decision that's being made um um that's one I mean you know I don't want to get into a whole debate about single sequencers versus BAS rollups because that's like another one did what so the question wise are you also interested in what would break ethereum in my opinion and what are the problems there or should we get there a bit later uh we we can we can talk about that now if you like so I guess um one very interesting thing is um that um so what are the the values most important values and what we could lose I think one of the things that um uh that could pose the biggest threat to these values is uh and I'm guessing this is going on coin desk is democracy which is a kind of a steep thing to say and uh what I'm trying to get at is I think uh in any democratic system basically it's a popularity contest where you have a very big push from the biggest group of the majority which in general is probably nice for the overall system but it might not be nice for individual parts so I think it's a one very important value that I would like to highlight is that I think it's important to have these Democratic Values not just top down rather at at all the levels of the system so that it's not like U the problem is that if you just go top down then we can turn ethereum into this super nice Financial chain because that's what probably impacts the most people but I'm not sure that that's the best overall direction for the network yeah and uh also like what Mark mentioned there are obviously tradeoffs we're all probably familiar with things like the blockchain trilemma where you uh can only have two or three properties um and a lot of the times we have to have these debates about like where does ethereum sort of prioritize its its values because it's not easy to necessarily give up some decentralization for more scalability so like going into like the future of ethereum especially when you're thinking about the endgame of ethereum we have choices that we have to make and I'm curious like what is more important to you um so there is this um sort of argument about whether chain performance is more important than the distribution of power when you are trying to get maximum scalability out of something the natural thing to do is to centralize things but perhaps ethereum is maybe better than other blockchains at trying to balance this so I'm kind of curious like is chain performance or distribution of power um more important or are they balanced I think that's probably something we'd all agree on that primarily we would like to see distribution of power at least me personally I would gladly sacrifice any performance for it because usually if you give the power out it it's not coming back so the it's basically oneway Street and I think that's why it's all these discussions around decentralization where making certain aspects faster is problematic because it once you made it fast it's very hard to undo it it's very hard to argue that well we don't want a fast thing so I think it's that's why I would probably always choose decentralization we're building a really cool piece of technology um and it's trying to address like an age-old problem which is centralization in our economic system um and we're what we're the conclusions that we're kind of coming to or the problems that we're running into is that as we solve centralization issues we kind of find that we just push those centralization issues further and further down the stack um and so people start complaining because they're already using the system and they're like let's just stop there let's be okay with that level of centralization but the thing is without without decentralization this whole thing is pointless and we should just move back to centralized systems um and so there's no there's no point to ethereum if it's centralized and we shouldn't give up on the idea of decentralization just because we keep encountering these problems because this is an age-old problem that is really really difficult to solve and it's not like we're going to build something in 10 years that just is perfect and solves issues that people have been dealing with for centuries was that the subtext for beam chain I know definitely distribution of power is more important than scalability I think there's some problems with just going on for sheer scalability because you don't really know when you've gone too far and have allowed the system to become capturable so if we just keep you know increasing Hardware requirements and increasing Hardware requirements we will pass the Threshold at some point without realizing it and an adversary will be ready to strike and they will strike and we won't be ready to react and they can capture the network so we always have to be very mindful of this sort of attack I do think that as a community we have the opportunity to push the boundaries of science and engineering and solve really hard problems to make sure that the power structures stay distributed while scaling there's some really cool opportunities with say new signature aggregation schemes that you know the researchers can like basically research and kind of invent and we have the opportunity to bring these to production for the first time and really you know develop Cutting Edge systems that weren't possible before and this is why I want to contribute to ethereum I want to be part of this well like I already said um I think what the cevs and researchers are working towards is always keeping the distribution of power while maximizing as much as possible what can be done uh without compromising um the problem is there is some voices in the industry that are pushing to compromise but I think that we as a community as a whole uh are pushing against that in a very well Manner and yeah it it's it's going well the value of ethereum will go down if we start compromising uh just to give one specific example and I apologize in advance for picking on the project is uh for example uh Lio if you have let's your are stake or whether it's decentralized centralized company project doesn't matter and it's big enough then it can be a very very um good uh Network player or ecosystem player so it doesn't they don't have to be at all malicious no single bad intent yet still every time when there's a protocol update being discussed a research Direction you always have to keep in mind that you have that single big player and they probably won't won't but may want to have a say in it and and these are those structures which once they evolve it's kind of hard to get rid of and it's very very hard to tell whether something is malicious not malicious maybe just doing the best for the investors it's it gets murky yeah that's uh definitely something to to think about and a lot of the times when we're developing these systems it's really hard to simulate all the potential side effects all the second third degree effects that come from protocol upgrades as an example like we've learned a lot um from the development of the beacon chain and learning more about me as you probably all saw like there was a presentation about the beam chain which aims to fix some of these things that we've learned with the beacon chain um but yeah it's it's also Mark it's really interesting to hear from you as well as a consumer of things like blobs um you know there is a lot of debate happening about whether or not we need to increase the blob Target Max sizes as well so that we can better support systems like yours and other l2s but that comes at a cost of potentially some Raspberry Pi Staker um which I'm sure nisso is advocating for as well no no no I don't believe that we should optimiz for raspberry piie stakers I think that they're very cool hobbyists and I love what they're doing but like the meme on Twitter is like everybody saying like oh we need to let people steak on a potato in the in that in the Atlantic but I think there are there it makes sense to have minimum Hardware requirements that like approximately equal what you would make in like maybe six months in rewards okay well what about the people who may have difficulty getting access to consist or even excess upload bandwidth like how how do you deal with something like that like are we forgetting about these people I guess it's the problem is that once you start looking at like at it at bandwidth and things like that unfortunately the world is not really equally distributed so I think it's very very important to make the system as distributed as possible but there's always this trade-off that you also mentioned that if you try to aim to make the validators run on a smartwatch that's very nice but is there a value of having 7 billion validators probably not on the other hand if you do have 7 billion validators that kind of really really constrains the other side of the equation of who stores the state and you kind of give rise to these much more centralized operators so ideally you want to maximize decentralization but not at the cost of centralizing something else basically I am excited to see a lot more conversation about um about making sure that we have client devs in different locations though because I think there's a big blind spot when it comes to bandwidth because a lot of the world struggles with bandwidth and I'm not even talking about like like developing countries I'm talking about like little towns in highly developed Nations like Berlin like Berlin yes promote Germany I've heard and so I think that like increasing the number of developers that we have in regions like that or in in like um South America Africa Asia um is really important because client devs run super optimized versions of their clients on great Hardware or like in the cloud and they don't necessarily know what the situation is for like home stakers at some point I think that we should as we hit these bottlenecks with bandwidth we should you know dream bigger and think about improving the infrastructure itself for the entire internet because if the bandwidth is going to be the bottleneck it's going to be really difficult to solve that at the software level once we get to a certain point right now there's a lot more optimizations that we can make but why can't we go out and do physical things too I think that could be a really promising path forward ooh an ethereum starlink Network that sounds awesome yes yes let's take down the ISP oligopolies yeah exactly exactly these are the sorts of things that make me really excited about being in the ethereum community for the next decade plus um I think we already have some solutions to the bandwidth problems and I think that um probably scaling the blobs before these Solutions are implemented would be detrimental to home stakers and Solo stakers in a lot of places um but the Solutions are out there we can turn them on work on them and then we can scale the blobs to support all the all the l2s so as an L2 I have the incentive to ask L1 for more blobs and you know it's unclear if I have considered the full consequences of this and this is just the incentives at play so I am a little bit worried because I know that there's a bunch more l2s coming online that might have a bunch of usage and we're already close to the blob Target so I do think it's really important for l2s to kind of prove that it's safe and I think that the base team actually did a really good job of this they made a bunch of long documents to kind of explain you know why it's safe to increase the blob Target and with without this actual you know these actual numbers the data that shows that it's safe um you know it's really hard to make decisions I think another thing that will make it easier to make decisions is if we had the kind of minimum Hardware requirements published someplace people usually say that the minimum Hardware requirements are you know a consumer grade laptop I know at this point um nodes the databases are getting pretty big you know you probably need an nvme or at least a solid state drive but I for one would love it if the community was able to come together and literally make a list that said the these are the specific Hardware requirements that are required and then we were able to observe dashboards and see the resource usage of all the different clients and then we would be able to have conversations about improvements or or eips hard forks and basically how they would impact the resource usage against the stated requirements 2 terabyte SSD 16 terabyte or 16 gigabyte RAM four core uh CPU make it dat it it's going it's going to be four terabytes soon well it w't it won't it won't we recommend four terabytes but I think two terabyt is a good Target um so uh just to check on that we already agreed that we're going to drop premerge history uh after 6 months of course with enough uh solutions to hold the history uh like we have already portal we have uh aan files I don't want to go technical but we have solutions to keep keep the history safe and available and accessible for everyone in a decentralized manner um but yeah so we are not going to raise the bar for the hard drives No was very interesting that uh you know like part of the reason why I wanted to have Mark on this panel is because we wanted to have a little bit better coordination between L1 and L2 um as you mentioned like you know the base team has been coming to some of the or all core Dev calls and you know showing us some metrics and being and trying to uh convince us that it is safe to raise the The Blob Target and Max um but I'm really you know curious is is this working for us like is like is it nice to actually have somebody um who's outside of like L1 uh being able to you know contribute and and tell us how we should go about doing things is that um something that we would love to see more of do we want to see more uh arbitrum uh optimism um Advocates I guess coming to our all core Dev calls will that help I think that's a very interesting question and it's it's very very hard to answer it because on one end if you I mean on one end we are always low on Manpower I mean everything is always low on Manpower so you need the ideas you need the people to come in and help that's simply the fact and if you have somebody who's actually using the system for something they have these feedback loops to actually be able to provide the numbers now the flip side of the coin is that every problem has multiple Solutions and whenever a business entity will come with the solving the problem they will always solve the problem in a way that they prefers somehow their um thing so I think the it's super valuable to have the outside contributions but the challenge is how to make sure that they they are actually aligned with the values and just to make sure that the solutions they present there aren't better Alternatives so actually basically what this boils down to is that the more external contributors actually trying to help and the more different ecosystems or different businesses they are operating if they get you get enough people together then you will have enough friction and enough uh push and pull so that the really the truly good common Solutions rise up and not one or the other that one might prefer I think that this question is a lot of political philosophy to be honest kind of how you feel about capitalism whether you think competition is good um you know we don't want the core development process to be captured and if there are you know businesses that are coming in they definitely have some incentive to try to capture the process for their own profit so we always need to be mindful of that the way that I always think about this is you want to have a distribution of power where the vested interests of each group are at odds and I think just being very transparent about vested interests is really important because I think that saying there are no vested interests isn't very honest I think it's just the nature of business people have different preferences different goals and I think it's more about making those vested interests transparent in balancing the power between them I guess one more thing to maybe even more emphasize your point is that it's not just it doesn't just boil down to vested interests I think it also boils down to Simply Human Relationships so if somebody let's say I'm working on the GU theme somebody comes with a poor request and if it's an internal pull request I'm like hm okay I need to review that if it's very wild I'm like okay why did they want to do that what's there might be a good idea whereas if somebody externally tries to come with a poor request I'm super skeptical I'm like nah not really I don't know so there you need much much more convincing from the outside and I think that's also something that we need to take care of is to try to be as objective as possible and to keep these personal preferences outside of work right is it is also safe to say here that everybody is pretty much like on board here with the sort of L2 Centric road map this is like sort of the best way forward for us um and because that kind of goes into like a little bit of a question of like okay well what is L2 what should l2s be responsible for and what should L1 be responsible for there's there might be some differing opinions on like how much we should push on on L1 and sort of push the rest to L2 like um is there would anybody here consider the L2 as like an experimental layer for L1 at all on a very general level I think that um the L2 road map is is um great as long as to tie into this um there's enough competition between them um because if there's not enough competition and like one of them becomes the deao way to interact with ethereum then it it leads to a centralization issue there but I think as long as we have enough competition between them I I am fully on board with L2 road map so what you're saying is we need an L2 diversity page and switch away from base no I think that if l2s are built in a certain way in an uncompromising way or uh of decentralization and permissionless and censorship resistance then it doesn't matter which L2 you're on because you can always transact on it or transact on another it's just an extension of the main protocol at that point and this was the like I think this is the end game for this should be the end game for l2s to reach a point where even if everyone is on the L2 it's not a compromise on any of these things because it's just an extension of the same values and same um like properties of the main protocol which is ethereum I'm definitely a fan of the L2 scaling road map you know obviously working on an L2 but um something that I do think that is really important is that you know as the ethereum community we continue to put pressure on all of the l2s to you know decentralize their power more so what does this mean you know becoming stage one becoming stage two and you know I feel like a lot of the community thought that it would be easier for rollups to get to stage one and stage two it's actually really really hard and you know we're still working on it and ideally we can build free software that allows anybody to spin up a stage to roll up permissionless that to me is the vision about the L2 scaling road map um I also you know sometimes times feel this um interesting relationship with L1 because often l2s are asking L1 devs to you know work harder work faster so that we can have these features um I'll always remember this moment um in Bogata when um Marius actually came up to me and said something like hey you know I'm staying up late working on 4844 why are you not stage two already and you know really stuck with me I think it is important to pressure the l2s into you know continuing to level up so yeah I know that l2b is kind of removing stage zero so I think that's a step in the right direction and maybe one point I would like to make is that very often um Twitter likes to criticize EF or theum ecosystem for his direction of this why aren't you sharding L1 why do you go down the L2 Road and I think it's very very important to realize that they are the flip sides of the exactly same coin so the end game is to have multiple shards that can more or less atomically communicate with each other now the L1 road map attempt originally was to split up the main net and then try to fix communication or sorry the other way uh the L one was that that uh we try to split it slowly but keep it communicating with each other whereas the L2 road map was that okay we do this hard splits and then try to somehow fix the communication but the end goal is exactly the same so it doesn't really matter which path we go down on however the L2 might be simpler from a technical perspective in that you have multiple semi-independent components that can evolve whereas going down L L1 path would have meant always tweaking this monolith so it's simply a bit faster and a bit riskier also as a project manager like one of the worst things that you could also hear about is like hey guys mayet is down that's like the worst sentence any one of us can can hear and I can understand like being conservative when it comes to you know pushing things like EIP um especially ones that are potentially consensus breaking if we don't do it right um so do you feel like we shouldn't be taking these risks at L1 like you know Mark says like there are definitely complaints that there not necessarily saying you but in general that L1 moves too slow um we're slow for a reason and really like we don't want to bring down Main net so is it is like layer 2 a better place for us us to test things like ethereum object format or or any other sort of like like account abstraction stuff like before we actually get to L1 yeah I mean I think that's a great idea but we do need to remember that it is still real money if these are production networks um I think you know having Frontier sort of layer to test Nets with the new features um building end to end applications that integrate deeply into the new features is a really good way to make progress um I think for l2s I think a lot about the go to market and kind of the product because we're trying to onboard the users and be you know much closer to the users than L1 so I think more about l2's um you know benefiting from improving the product rather than adopting the eips at this point because I think that there's so many lwh hanging fruits in just better user experience and the our ability to onboard new people um we can do it much more effectively by putting effort into improving the products built on top of the protocol rather than adding features to the protocol itself yes I think I kind of agree there that the problem is that yes in theory you can experiment on L2 a lot but in practice let's say you do account abstraction on some L2 it's very nice everybody likes it then you have a lot of companies spend a number of years building something out and then it turns out well this wasn't the best solution so we're going with a different account abstraction but what happens with all those people who's invested three years of their life in it and I think from that perspective evolving the evm I would go from L1 towards L2 where you have the guarantees of backwards compatibility with regard to scaling stuff go wild I mean try everything and basically there are no implications if um hits the fan so if it base stes to do Mega gas per second and all of a sudden everything comes crashing down well the worst Ario is it stops it becomes slow it becomes expensive but there's no other bad side effect whereas if they start doing start experimenting with the evm and they start doing things that are impossible elsewhere then that's a very nasty vendor lock in situation okay just looking at the time we have like about 2 minutes left um should probably wrap this up up but before we wrap it up there is one question that I have for all of you guys just so we can get a little bit about what you're thinking here do you have a North star or a mission statement for ethereum like what is our endgame here I think that wraps around to the first question I'm going with credible credible neutrality which encompasses all those other things decentralization and I I'll go with uncompromising yeah Unstoppable open systems flat power structures I'm not budging sorry that's okay I got I got no my mind except uh eth to the moon so uh thanks everyone for coming to uh this panel I think we will start answering some questions a little bit of Q&A for you guys I think we got about 10 minutes to do that okay so if you guys haven't already there's a QR code behind here um if you go to that and you scroll down um you should be able to find a uh beercat or link or something like that it says uh join live Q&A so please feel free to ask your questions upvote the ones you want to get asked and I'll uh try to get them here with our panelists so the first one here that we actually have is other than Finance what is the most exciting use case of a resilient decentralized World computer in your opinion I struggle with this one and I'll give an answer that's not like totally fan fangirling over ethereum um because in every case of there being um a promise to connect a provider directly with consumer there always ends up being middlemen who like shove their way in I read uh a really good expose on only fans on Reuters um where like the whole promise was to to uh directly con uh connect uh sex sex workers with consumers and within this platform they had essentially recreated the uh pimps they had recreated pimps like um and it wasn't directly clear so I actually I'm very excited by the idea of connecting um consumers with uh protocols permissionless in ways that like are governed by code but I am very wary of the the idea that we can prevent these middlemen from coming in so I think that um we have to be very uh critical of any exciting use cases that come in I think for me the most exciting would be the platform itself so Finance is kind of super boring to me and what I really like for me what's kind of important is that anybody can dream up their little constructive project and be able to to deploy it and interact with the people and it just I think this freedom to just do what ever is um is the single most important property one use case that I think is really important is just um you know like some sort of open and Unstoppable um social network or kind of like news information aggregation site um where people have the right to just kind of like speak their mind publish different ideas in kind of an open way where it's difficult to you know fully censor anyone and applications can be built on top of this with like their own filtering mechanisms and um their own censorship mechanisms and but like the base layer kind of has to be open to allow people to kind of say whatever they want and this sort of model um can kind of be like a checks and balances on any sort of Walled Garden or um incumbent power structure that you know becomes too powerful in the world I I have I'm so excited about the idea like forecaster came online and the idea of pulling being able to pull your data from one um front end to another really really excites me because I can't tell you how many people I've met who like got kicked out of Facebook and lost all their photos because for some reason they were storing all of their stuff on Facebook um but with that comes an a really important um feature of needing to um have Cil resistance because in recent months we've seen a huge drop off from from forecaster because Bots have been onboarded and there was a lot of incentivization uh to be on farcaster and so like it's gone downhill but like that is also a really exciting thing because social media rules so much of our life and like impacts our behavior and is used to manipulate the way that we interact with each other and we've seen it has a lot of influence in doing so totally sometimes I wonder if the algorithm is thinking for me I will say from my perspective one of the biggest centralizing points that we should try to work out and and figure out how to get off of is GitHub I'll give you an example very quickly of just one of our developers who um was actually flagged at one point for spam and his account disappeared overnight so all of the PRS all the contributions everything his entire history and comments all the context that we had to his work was gone overnight I've been kicked off of GitHub three times oh congratulations but I I got it back every time I don't think it's a contest though but I mean just just finishing up here like they could basically just cancel you and that is one of my biggest worries is that we're so reliant on the system like GitHub which is a United States entity so it's uh it's kind of concerning that um somebody can just be wiped off the face of the digital Earth that easily totally I mean getting wiped off of GitHub that could have catastrophic consequences for someone's life that's like you know many people's resumee is their work that they did on GitHub and you know if they're an admin to to a project that is like a you know a blockchain project where there's real money being stored on the system it could like be a way to cut off the developers from being able to roll out a new release and upgrade the blockchain so that is definitely a big problem I feel like we should muscle through the rest of these questions like one person per per question maybe because I don't want to like spend too much time on one question okay yeah next question I'm guessing this one is for Peter do you still consider gu 52% majority a big risk for ethereum stability okay I don't really want to waste too much time on it I would like to challenged as statistics as far as I'm aware nether mind has the majority validators nowadays so I think it's kind of mood we just yeah uh I I don't think it's that relevant at current time would love to see people using bezo Aragon and wrath as well all right next question Peter you're popular today uh Peter spoke of democratic values on ethereum everyone having an equal say but doesn't this risk designed by committee should everyone have a say in how gu is built uh actually I was uh making the exact opposite point I don't want everyone to have an equal say I would like everyone to have an equal opportunity to contribute to ethereum but I don't think everybody having an so I would like everybody who works on the same level have an equal say in things but I would not like people operating on different levels to have a say in in layers which are they are not familiar in for example I'm an L1 Dev I have opinions about what base could do but I don't really feel confident about giving them pointers that do it like this do it like that that they probably know better flat structures aren't truly flat structures they're just the ultimate meritocracy they're messy but they're the ultimate meritocracy all right next question which aspects of ethereum has a greater centralization risk than others right now Builders the foundation good take yeah Rel layers epbs yeah definitely the meev supply chain yeah the block production pipeline is uh pretty ripe for capture uh today we're even starting to see relays and block Builders vertically align which is a little bit concerning too okay next question is what is wrong with staking eth on Raspberry Pi when you can literally run hundreds of validators on a single rpy device recently verified by projects such as web 3 Pi nothing there's nothing wrong with staking on Raspberry Pi and I super encourage uh the people who are who are experimenting on that to experiment more and but I I do think it's a little ridiculous to um like expect all of the core devs to to tailor towards a Raspberry Pi I think it comes on both sides like the people who are hobbyists who are working in raspberry pies should be trying to optimize their systems to work with cordev and cordev should be working with them but like I'm so sick of the Twitter meme of like the potato in the Atlantic uh do you see centralization risk in development of the core protocol with ef being a bottleneck oh hot uh I don't think EF is a bottleneck I think EF researchers are turning out specs that are somwhat impossible to keep up with so bottom leg definitely not um centralization risk okay that's not a 10sec answer sorry all right thank you everyone for your time uh thank our panelists for coming and uh spending some time with us today and uh have the rest of good have a good Devcon thank you thank you very much thank you thank you