# How To Destroy A Network: Offboarding The Mainstream by Laurence Day | Devcon SEA

- Speakers: [Laurence Day](https://streameth.org/speakers/laurence-day)
- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 24:02
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-axoRHSVU9KU
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axoRHSVU9KU

## Description

Crafting Ethereum into a setting (both technically and reputationally) where The Institutions feel comfortable participating in it at scale has been the life work of hundreds of people over the last nine years. And yet, for our success, many feel that the victory has come at a cost too heavy to bear: our losing focus as to why we built the global computer in the first place. If you feel the same way, join me for a brief exploration of what would need to happen for us to cut the cord.

Speaker(s): Laurence Day
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: Cypherpunk & Privacy
Keywords: Network State, Privacy, Anonymity, Digital Sovereignty, value

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Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
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## Transcript

[Music] the room's half empty now I'll make sure it's fully empty by the time I'm done I I I once again find myself staring at the lights and I cannot see how many of you are so if you're in the back and you want to leave you can I won't know I find myself quite anxious for the first time giving a talk mostly because I'm sober for doing this but also because I have turned 36 today and I found out yesterday that I will be 43 by the time the consensus layer gets upgraded so I'm having a bit of an ethereum midlife crisis this is not a technical talk um it's kind of the amuse Bush between some really interesting stuff on ZK and everything else this is more of it's a culture talk uh the are we the baddies like what have we created should we be aware of things coming down the pipe and I'm not the only one who helped contribute to this which is good because these two are both more int ENT than me uh Josh Cincinnati the president of the interchain foundation and Paul Dylan Enis uh I think one's watching and the other one's asleep hi everyone thanks for your for your help and so I've been watching some talks I've been walking around I've been speaking to people Devcon it's my first Devon and it's been really exciting to kind of like watch the energy and like what people are working on it's probably going to get a little bit frothy in all of crypto for the next couple of months or like four years we have no idea yet and so I I think it behooves us to maybe just CAU ourselves a bit and go like we spent so long like 10 years getting to where we are now we finally have like the Biddle fund we finally have like PayPal and every other company are launching stable coins and so on and so forth and like was this what we wanted when we built ethereum not that my opinion matters I don't think um I work on a credit facilitation protocol it it like it's everything for everyone what would need to happen for everyone to go ethereum has failed uh bit of a dumer talk but we'll make some jokes out of it while we go I don't want ethereum to fail it's my like the work of like my life I I I love doing it but it does seem funny that you know we when like you first get into ethereum if you're in it for the tech that you go like oh here's the you know the global computer this this godhead and like and like black rocks in let's go wag me um not that that's a bad thing I just sometimes find myself going little bit of a paradox uh when I work in ethereum and so I'm trying to talk about a couple of things some of them are like probably likely some of them are quite outlandish just rate them like how funny would it be if they happen How likely are they to happen like what would the impact be Downstream and yes like I said this is not going to be a professional talk so I guess the first one is like what happens if one of our home Brewers fails Lido or rocket pool or anything of the sort because when we I mean who was around for the merge I imagine most people in the in the room right I was sitting at like midnight 2 a.m. watching it happen and I I popped a bottle and and this was meant to be the whole like yes it's it's no longer an Asic thing we are we own our own network it's you know we we've taken some control back in like a smaller scale the way I phrased is you know from The Savage mining rigs to the noble home Staker but 32 e is the validator stake and I can't AFF for that so it feels like it's Out Of Reach so we've seen these like Solutions come in to fill the Gap so you have like you know rocket pool now with its mini pools that you can do like for eth which is great that's more in reach but what if what if something goes wrong you know what what if staked eth or wrapped eth like something goes wkey and you know vitalic was uh speaking I think two or three days ago about how you know we find we want to start driving back down to like one e as a state like that's great that we should get there we probably won't or if we do it'll be 40 but until it happen like if something goes wrong in the interim then the likely net impact is that we see like the exchanges that currently have like a large minority of the network just like aggregate more and that becomes dangerous we're in a sunny uplet we think everything's going to be a little bit better regulatory wise hopefully we'll get some clarity but that might flip on a dime uh pretty soon and then we end up like with a strangle hold in reach and or we end up you know with like Larry f ends up in control of everything and we've just created ecoin likely I I don't like these things have been around for years now I don't think anything's going to happen I realize I have a reputation for saying these things and they do so I'm sorry uh don't laugh too much please I I don't want to be here next year be like that's this was the turning point if something did happen given that you know like I think Lio has what 27.7% that's quite an autistic thing to I think and then say the percentage um I think etherian would remain safe at its core and but it wouldn't be fun you know like we we've watched years and years of getting dunked on for proof of stake and at works and this would have kind of proved the point that we can't be trusted to kind of guard our own assets or our Network this is what happens when you introduce programmability you get it wrong um tether getting sanctioned would probably be another one like staple coins are such a weird thing because they're now like it's everything and nothing like it's the most boring use case for crypto and also I think like probably one of the most important i' I've spoken about this in uh Paris last year uh I think it was saying that you know like the soft power in ethereum now belongs to stable coin issuers that's where the liquidity goes we pair everything off against tether Circle and so on and you know to a to a less degree uh Ry die and so on sorry usds now or back um and is very easy to imagine a situation where like you finally I mean I don't know how much tether has like the US bond market now where things get a bit hostile as actually like no we consider you kind of like we're no longer sympatico with you holding this much collateral and just making it difficult to to redeem um what happens then like no one's getting we're not getting oact at scale for ever having tether in our wallets but like what if you kind of like grip onto something like make it harder and like I don't think this is going to happen as well but like it's it's nice to kind of as a what if I think there's one that I'll talk about later which I think is probably more like likely and that will become a bit contentious like but yeah if tether's sanctioned if now Pao finally gets like you know sent to GMO that's it we're done like we are back to 2016 it's over um we we talk about how like you know if there's going to be a us Regulatory Compliance stable coin it would be Circle whereas tethers you know please maintain the peg no matter how illegal it may be thank you sir um I don't think this would be great but like yeah bitf next would have like a wonderful time out of it you know like the te the truth is finally Unleashed going that was it um or I think then I think this is the most likely one that's going to happen and I I I think weirdly enough like the beam chain stuff might factor into this um depending on like how things go maybe Lio fails maybe rocket pool fails maybe tether is sanctioned something happens like yeah devops comes back and actually goes right this time I'm coming for the EF wallet and that I did mention the other day that like I started on ethereum the day that that happened that the parity wallet was bricked and a bunch of people thought I'd like told on myself this is my announcement that I am de 199 um actually hear Gavin wood coming down the corridor something happens and we need to wind things back um this is going to be less hands up who was around for the Dow hard Fork enough all of you could have your hands up I wouldn't know I I can't see anything um it would be extremely hard I think to coordinate that now like we we voted on it back in the day and it was like what 5% of all ether that was around like voted for the fork to happen and that was like basically nothing like no Quorum but we were like what other option do we have um you you should read the cryptops by Laur Shin if you want like a deep dive into some of this stuff it's very good um I don't think we could do this again and more important like in a way that's not centralized this comes back to like you know what if you end like relying on coinbase or Kraken or like whatever to facilitate the fork um and it does seem that we have accepted as Canon that this is not happening anymore like the fact that EIP 999 is just there like no one's going to be upgrading the contract code to like return the funds to parity or make them accessible again we finished with hard Forks but what if it is not for me to sit here and Doctor Strange to the various ways that we could finally like have a Schism but I think it's probably more likely than not in the medium term and back in the day it was an ideological thing it was very much like no so this is what ethereum was meant to be and that became ethereum classic we have the ethereum that we use now which one crowned by the social layer not happening now it's wherever Circle and tether go and that's that's interesting like and what happens if they go to different places because if you remember like when eth P at the merge like that was meant to be the the fated like this is the version that exists that collapsed and like pulse chain was another one shout out Richard Hart wherever you are um I I do consider this inevitable and it could be something really minor that just gets like blown out of all proportion and like becomes like our uh um Martin Luther moment like the on the door it could be eof B code implementation it could be the beam chain um it could be anything I I think ethereum would like this room with half in size we'd have smaller devc cons based on like which camp we fell into uh but I think we'd be fine uh like I mean pson you arranged the first devc cons like after the Fork didn't you yeah that was really difficult do you want to do it again [Laughter] no um yeah like we we made plenty of jokes about East p and a bunch of people like got really into like doing some like interesting arbs and you started seeing things like oh RV's deployment there has collapsed and that was very funny but no one was ever like tying any value to it now that but like a meaningful stable coin is on each chain and that gets weird quick is my ticket working yeah yes base level privacy I want this I think most people want this we've just listened to a talk about like you know pys and using zero knowledge um I think Aztec connect should still be around you know like it it got sunsetted um its final one was like January this year uh that it's it stopped running at sequencer um I wanted to come back more importantly I want it to be in ethereum I think we want the optionality of being able to obfuscate things um The Who and the what so you know coinbase have just come out with their their schema for confidential erc20 that uses fully homomorphic encryption to be like okay we can hide The Who and we can hide the how much I think that's cool um and I think that's going to get Scaled up more like now into kind of like Zachy type looking things but plus plus the evm for programmability um I think when you're talking about like hedge funds and what have you uh or or like just large entities that are trying to do stuff on chain like seven years ago I was doing something with like hyperledger trying to do reinsurance at a bank and like that didn't go anywhere but that was the kind of thing it was like well know how much can you hide on chain like amounts or what have you um which was fun but like you don't want all of that to be public and I think it would probably make it really interesting for some institutions to bring more stuff onto ethereum because they could kind of like access some stuff like you know debt um issuance or what have you but some stuff they just kind of want to move in Shadows and this works really well and you've ever audited a contract or tried to analyze something that's gone wrong and then you're like oh I don't actually I can't read any logs I don't know like what the call data was I can't I don't know what's happened and so I think this would be fine right up until the moment where like you do have a quarter of a billion dollar hack that like leaves black rock out to dry and then we're like oh actually it turns out this sucks we don't like this anymore even though if it's like postao like repair of damage um I think confidentially lc20 um is going to be one of a line of like you know we we've seen erc20 R the reversible version uh kind of no one's ever really done anything with it I think this is going to be in the same kind of schema interesting stuff because ec20 is what it is but we're never getting base level privacy in ethereum itself dog i' I'd like it I want it to happen I would like to have a zcash type thing where I could like write by my solidity contracts but this is because of who I am not because like I'm the wider Network a better ethereum I really didn't know how that was going to go salana is like it's it's lame and cliche to dunk on mert and to and all of the others for like salana will shut down like we're done salana is good um but what happens if like over the next four eight 10 years you know by the time that the beam chain happens uh the this wow I I can do off the cuff what happens if it still is appealing to retail and the institutions that are trying to Target them say you know fantastic this is what you know this is where we're going to go and we just end up kind of spinning our Wheels because like what if Bitcoin l2s work you know kadano becomes it's like layer for for that and plutus becomes the language that we all get good at there are other languages than plutus I'm showing my age here um does that pop our tires like we work now ethereum is Top Dog for this kind of thing but we might not always be we can't presume that we're always going to be like the successful network with the L2 situation um everyone saw this post right two days ago and I was like oh post or real thing and then I I finished my slides and I was like fantastic I'm done I'm going for a drink and then Justin went on stage and was like the beam chain I'm like oh okay right now I had to Read All About It um what if another network does this first unlikely I think that likely that something like this would happen but like what if we get a better ethereum I think this is going to happen and I think it's going to happen before I turn 50 uh Bitcoin was Top Dog and it was like it was the thing we had and until it wasn't right and then ethereum turned up and like ethereum might not always be it's I'm quoting Tim Clancy here by the way the grand Network godhead unto itself the Fountain of a glorious future might not always be um it's a skill issue if that happens um like we we'd see they would would be completely on us like not an attack Factor this isn't like a bad thing it's just like our experiment has failed and can you imagine bankless for the next two years I love the bankless guys I actually enjoy them but can you imagine um what happens if we become Cosmos um and I say this would love to some of the cosmos devs I know um the fact that we are responsible for ethereum is both the best thing about it and the worst because we are pretty stupid on aggregate we all are I am you are and yeah have you ever read the cosmos governance forums not not great like what if that spread to ethereum uh everyone listens and respects vitalic he guides us through his thought leadership which he's getting better at what what what happens when he leaves who takes over you know who who at the EF becomes like the new God it but we need someone to focus on it's it seems weird because that's like not how ethereum should be but people want to look up to people to take over the Reigns and I don't think we really have viable candidates for that yet this like Cosmos focuses on being multi-chain whereas ethereum's rollup Centric uh map is like we we have like May th000 l2s Bloom um I think we're less likely to kind of fall into this Chasm because we have main net to defend um but yeah if that did happen like you could just imagine bickering of like you know how do you do X how do you y we're going to start seeing it over the next years like you know as the pilling starts the phase of the beam chain it's going to happen that like we're going to start quibbling over stuff some will get implemented some will change in Spec and then we'll just argue for years that's not a bad thing because this is slow it has to be slow we can't move fast and break things when it comes to ethereum itself and it would be really frustrating to watch I have three minutes left I think coming back to like what happens if we kind of just get muddled in ourselves is because we're human it's very easy to scop ourselves or be intentionally scoped if ethereum becomes a trillion dollar Network it's worth doing a fiveyear longc con to just kind of like muddle the uh was it who was it was it mean that did the whole am I am I a Kev yeah um to just kind of like infiltrate to kind of like muddy the waters to run the CIA Handbook of you know just like make everything by committee run it back take all extremes it's I wouldn't like to see happen but I think it could I think we're like vulnerable to it I've got two minutes left I hadn't timed this I just wrote them and said like I'll turn up but I think it's really important to like say again Devcon and all of the ethereum conferences are wonderful and it's really nice to see everyone here people old and new I think it behooves Us in the next few years as things start getting frothy to just be aware of things that are coming down the pipes that might be a risk to ethereum and it feels like to everyone sitting here like maybe if I I'm not Justin Drake it feels like I don't have much impact on ethereum but you do uh as we've seen with the Bankok traffic you're not stuck in traffic you are traffic All of You Are ethereum I Am you are you are not Hudson but that's the point is that it is a Global Network of us you know this is part of the drive towards the home staking with like our control our Network our decision and we're getting there and I think you should be proud of the things that like we have built as a collective and in Leo of doing any cringing happy birthday singing I would like you to just pull out your phones and just tweet I am ethereum that would be nice I think just to kind of like sigh up a little moment timed that pretty well one minute to go thank you [Applause] everyone thank you so much Laurence it was I would have bet $10,000 that was up there and I would have made Bank okay it was it's a really fun presentation so no wonder there's a very fun uh Q&A as well for sure so first one is is it vegan I hate all of you okay next one should be fun doc all your alts right now for attendees only yeah just like two of us here on stage nobody else would know buy me a drink laser God I can't engage with these questions I'm not optimizing putting catg girl Cent on chain I am 36 please stop okay so this is a bit more serious one y okay etherum is a te technocracy that so far hasn't been heavily influenced by Black Rock Etc I think that's true um I I think you know we find kind of the blobs that stand apart and ethereum foundation and kind of like the people that we would consider like that we would Mark as being ethereum are do stand apart from like the institutions that like we talk to and engage with um you you're seeing that like we start almost like violently rejecting at the social layer even the perception of conflicts of interest we saw this recently with Igan layer which I was actually I think this is fine is but I can see why that ended up unraveling the way it did I think we're fine um I don't know like again it could be that we start like oh it's not going to happen all of Visa starts settling on chain then they have like a motivated interest to be like we now want control if you haven't watched Mr Robot go watch the coin scene I think that's quite telling okay um next question there's actually two questions a bit connected to each other vitalic leaves and for some reason you're in charge of anointing the next thought leader go to your head who do you think takes over and there's one that asks uh would you want it to be you would you replace vitalic if asked to serve anyone who has to tell someone that they're a king is no King right I I I think it wouldn't be like I would would choose absolutely not a terrifying idea who would take over I'd like to see some of the people at the consensus layer I think kick up but I'm not going to name anyone and I think that's also weird because we we end up kind of like saying it's the it's the technical good communicators which are diamonds that show up but like they're normally quiet because they're just getting stuff done like balic still quite quite uncomfortable I think like being the face of ethereum like he's great at doing it and he talks so much but like I wouldn't want to be him I I respect him and I do not envy him um I don't know it's Hudson that's it congrats you're in [Applause] charge okay uh wait SEC sorry I'm viewing from my phone does ethereum need a new Champion particularly for privacy we have champions for privacy on chain JT Riley um everyone working at Aztec everyone that's worked in ZK proofs they're around you just maybe know or don't know who they are right like they exist already all right you seem to believe that there is a room for institutions and addon Seer funks both isn't that very argument for success in network hardness yes I I've argued before in talks that I I think like it's fine for us to have these two worlds but they will inevitably start clashing I think as you know kind of ethereum is in its in and of itself inherently political um assets become money become power and there will start to be arguments about like who is in control Paul uh Dylan Anis has given some really interesting talks about regen versus Degen culture and these kind of like clicks that like Regens were in the minority for a while because that's what everyone was doing was just pumping things on like in crypto um say bye the bue for Jonathan how to get accepted to West Ham three ether please everyone okay how about how do you see privacy going forward I get your resistance on L1 but what about l2s would this facilitate crime I liked as Tech connect I want to use dark fi when it comes out I think that they're all fantastic I think it's it's so hard like I can argue both ways quite easily about the the how and the why you wouldn't want privacy on chain especially when it comes to like arbitrary programmability because like every contract becomes a tornado um and and that's really tricky but at the same time it's very much like I want to do these things because like I have want to exert myself sovereignty and we have a few still a few seconds do you see a c between pragmatic Vision versus cyberfunk ethos I don't know how to answer this I I don't know what a pragmatic vision for ethereum looks like because I can only stand here and speak with my biases and I like to think that I'm a cipher Punk but maybe I'm a bad one um I I don't know like what practice looked like is is it is it single slot finality is it like more value on the chain is it more stable coins I couldn't tell you