# The Beginning of Ethereum | Christoph Jentzsch - Speakers: Christoph Jentzsch - Channel: [Berlin Ethereum Meetup](https://streameth.org/berlin-ethereum-meetup) - Date: 2024-10-07 - Duration: 29:02 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-jgPO8PoNbHs - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgPO8PoNbHs ## Description Join us on Meetup to keep track of our events in Berlin: https://www.meetup.com/berlin-ethereu... See you at the next one! --- Apply to speak at our future meetups: https://forms.gle/5y9Y5ywZC7pSEqpV9 --- Twitter: @BerlinMeetup ## Transcript yeah so after we talked about luo and nosis let's get back to ethereum no pun intended I love nosis and lots of cool stuff you have buil and you're using as well um so there's a lot to be said I'm just I think you know Florian clut is speaking after me he's just getting fired up and I'm just this four band basically preparing for what is to come uh but I will not get too spicy I just want to get a bit of um at the beginning what actually happened and what was the spirit and mindset back at the time maybe I've lost some of it so I just want to try to bring it back so I started at ethereum actually 10 years ago so this was this month when I wrote Gavin I would like to join eum foundation so he hired me and I started to work as a tester but let's so I have seen a lot during those years you can ask me any question if you want and it really started first of all we were all bitcoiners let's start where it really was so V Gavin Jeffrey me I got into Bitcoin 2013 we loved it and it was just that he mean you know the story that he could not build ethereum on bitcoin he looked to master coin he went to all those people and then he decided to do it it on his own he wrote the ethereum white paper which I highly recommend for everyone to read it's still like a prophetic message from the past because almost everything in there got fulfilled he predicted I think everything except of nfts but he got nft he got like the Dow ens Unis SW kind of stuff all the things you can already read in this white paper but let's start with the technical part and people we should appreciate also from the past some people which you may not remember anymore or have a bad um maybe even a bad naming one of the guys is Stefan tual he was one of the uh he was the chief communication officer of ethereum people hated him after the da now we get to that but he was actually a guy who started all those meetups so his b you could say his legacy it's also this and many many other meetups around the world because he said let's he traveled around the world started those meetups found someone and paid them to get it going and so a lot of those ethereum meetups came because of Stefan toal he created a lot of the community then let's get to gav Wood Gavin wood wrote this masterpiece and this is just a very short snippet of it called the yellow paper and vitalik I would dare to say he's not in the room was not capable of building ethereum I'm meaning is not in a negative way I highly respect him he was a coder he was very young I think 18 or 19 or so he was totally brilliant in understanding cryptography the whole concept he did build a Bitcoin client so yes you could have built a python ethereum implementation which is more of like a research implementation which could not run at scale but Gavin was really capable of taking this white paper and writing an actual specification this was total new in the in the blockchain space Bitcoin didn't have a specification but now ethereum got a specification which really nailed it a very every detail was written in there how the etherum vir Machine Works the up codes this is just a little piece how those different up codes work and so when I joined ethereum so my background was I was a theoretical physicist at the time working at my PhD I was pretty decent at uh coding in C++ and so when I talked to him he gave me all the tasks which needs to be done I just tried to CP the most difficult one which was testing the etherum Bri machine across different clients for implementations so my task there and I still existing I don't know if they still use those tests I guess not because they're too old but I wrote thousands and thousands and thousands of tests testing all of those evm up codes and state changes and block changes and so on it was really fun because I was fairly independent you could just pick the like go to Gavin or Jeffrey or v l and say what they did wrong this doesn't work this doesn't work specification doesn't work you you implemented it differently this is mostly what I did but the etherum yellow paper was brilliant this is still has to stand out so based on this Jeffrey wilker developed a go eum client v l the Pyon client G the C++ client um do you know the story why we use the go client not the C++ client maybe a little Side Story that's maybe the actual reason why we have PKA do today so what happened go theum was built by Jeffrey and we wanted to launch and we have planned a security order we did it by a company called de shja vu in Seattle I was there and since Gavin want to build in some more features he said let's first order the go client and then let's order the C++ client and Pyon we don't need to order because it's crap and like doesn't really work anyway so let's just go with those two clients and then we can launch but the the community really want to launch they needed also some some like money actually the foundation was running out of money so decided let's go with go ethereum because this is audited already and then we can audit C++ and just release it couple of months later even though it was totally fine and would did work but etherum started the foundation said this is the tested client use it everybody used it and didn't change so that's why everybody used go ethereum we um Gavin was pretty pissed about it and in the end actually when the foundation that tried to um reduce costs he actually they decided to kill the C++ team and this was basically start of East core which later on become parity which is today po I think this really hurt ethereum a lot because I really think Gavin was a p encoder and cryptographer and he basically set the tone in terms of after him and many other layer ones started because he was the first of us where we left and started their own one if you want and so many others came later and the good sides about having different layer ones and there bad sides about it I sometimes compared maybe to the Linux distribution like yes Apple did win the desktop War Linux didn't win Linux has tons of different distributions which are all fun I like Linux but it's not mainstream so this was a problem which happened at that time but let's get back one step I got too much into the history so when ethereum started we did not just wanted to create another blockchain the idea was a platform for decentralized applications have any of one you saw this before this was kind of the tech world map yeah so the idea was just to this this has a lot in it actually one each circle is a user each user has a browser in his browser there should be three protocols swarm for file storage whisper for messaging and the evm or based on the blockchain for smart contract execution and all the code of of the app would be in the local storage HTML CSS JavaScript so the idea was to have a true peer-to-peer Network that apps are truly decentralized with without any server infrastructure so let's give you an example how this would work for a simple let say chess application you want to play a game of chess so you would say the SM contract would have the logic of the chess game who did win the game so and they could say whoever wins the game gets don't know 10 EA so swarm would store for example the nice web app interface HTML code CSS JavaScript and so on would be sort on Swarm when they make some moves in the chess game they would just give signed messages to each other which would then be used in the end to prove who did win the game so this would mean you would have a fully decentralized chess game nobody controls it runs forever maybe from the guy who did win the game 5% goes to gas cost and running some stuff and you would have an actual desized application everything was done in De mind so that's why running a server was kind of forbidden like building an application which had server server back end you don't do this so running application without the end user running a full node big noo so this was not how it was designed so this is how we thought about it all the time and the evm part or the ethereum chain was just one part of it so unfortunately whisper was too hardcore it was super super dark but not performant so it didn't really work as we wish for swarm is still existing but I think IP ipfs became big at the time so people thought let's just use ipfs and fire coin that you and benett did a great job at that so but this was the vision and so the idea was then to have different user interfaces for the same app because now if the data is on Swarm or let's say ipfs you can message each other um everybody has access to the blockchain you can have different interfaces and so we started we and this is fabian's work together with his team um the M browser the Miss browser was a generic interface for all smart contracts so if you have a dow like contract you would have some read data some right to contract and you would have your wallet in there you could just execute transactions and interact directly with the chain and I still miss that missed browser I really hope someone is funding it and get re get rebuilt because this would give you an access having your own browser just using web 3 Technologies without any server infrastructure in between so this was M browser and this was how we thought about it creating a new internet so then my part let's know this one more um slide from this Tech road map how we saw like internet Hardware clients swarm R for evm desentized applications Miss brow sitting on top of it so this was the text stack we envisioned back then and then many different people could build different interfaces for the same applications so then there was a project oh well before I get to this project um so what would be the requirements for being called let's say a de so the app would run totally client side we focus a lot on peer-to-peer networks because whis was swarm and of course the blockchain would be a peer-to-peer Network how many of those app users out there are running a pure peer-to-peer Network to run the application maybe some using the nosis validator which is great and then you can do something like that but really not many so then we thought that's at least one aik client those of you who know my past I worked at slockit and we had developed an we called it incubed an ultra light client where at least you can verify all the transaction messages in the state so that is like full node there are light clients and ethereum was built to be light client friendly meaning you could have the um block header you would have the like mirle roots in there you would have all the things you need Blossom filters and others so you can actually build light clients I really do not know why light cins did not take off so we I'm really missing them because if you would have light cines then such things as like you cannot imagine but when meta master was first presented at death one I really thought this is a scam like they would not just run a note how do you do this they would just tell people how much money they have on their account it's like 100% Reliance on their RPC provider it's just totally not what we all have built here so there was total opposition at Defcon one and such a centralized piece of like metamask and this was today we speak about our full non custodia mamas or the good guys they are like they are actually using it this is a total opposite of how we thought about it and this this shirt was deathcon one Defcon zero in 2015 so 2016 was presented m mask this was absolutely not what we thought we thought they at least have a light CL built in I talked with the metam mask team why don't you have a light CLI in it I still don't get it but they don't do it but well no light line so m m was big no-go at the beginning so then it needs to continue to operate when creators are gone we were deeply fascinated by Satoshi Nakamoto and the idea was at some point etherum Foundation would just dissolve and E would continue I think it will still happen maybe in 20 or 30 years depending on spending that etherum Foundation someday will be go away and ethereum will just run without it but the same would be true that's what we always promised you can now build applications which inherit the same characteristics as Bitcoin meaning you can just launch it and go away this was the idea how many apps are out there where the creators are still around and just or have not gone into anonymity and just go away not too many but this was the idea you can just go away of course for self custody stable incentives built in into smart contracts of long-term operations incentives like paying for swamp fees and other stuff the consequences would be you could have several user interface for the same application something we always dreamed of we kind of have this today man you can use uniswap for example through the uniswap UI or through other uis censorship resistant independent of leadership no single point of failure so this was the idea how it should work and running forever in this mindset I was part of the project which you I think maybe no comes later the Dow but this basically was the team I found this old picture this was stepcon Z 20 14 yes 2014 in Berlin yeah so great time if you want have any question who this is you can ask me so this was basically a team who built ethereum in the beginning so then the da of course I have to speak a little bit about it um but first the good thing then the bad thing thing so the good thing is we really tried to follow the stuff I just talked to you the Dow versus smart contract this which was not updatable nobody did govern it not even us we just wrote a code um the Dow did not even have a user interface you thought why should we build one that was missed so people as you know invested something like $150 million from about 20,000 wallets really nice distribution almost no big railes in there um using the M browser because this was the only available and some people still used exchanges so they could also put their money in so there are lots of people and I still had to help some there a not they used actually a nosis actually there was not back then you didn't have nosis War I think was already there so they M browser as a default had a one out of one NOS the save so they didn't see even their coins in their actually externally own account because it's hidden in some one out of one NOS the safe that there was no interface for this left so it was really messy but a lot of people did this and some people even ask for why the name the da because we did not give it a name we said we are not allowed to we have no authority to do so so there needs to be a proposal by the da and they need to decide on their name so until this this was just a working title why was there no cap on the da because that someone feared a whale could come in and buy a large percentage of it and would not be decentralized anymore so a cap was decided against because of decentralization so slock it how much money did you make with s da anybody knows zero zero % of tokens go to slock it nothing this was because would be totally like a scam yeah thank you floran so so this was how we thought about this and then there was even a sticker back at the time it's called appcoin free so if you build a real application it needs to be appcoin free so the sticker was only given to some so this was the minds that we built we I know that was a code there was a buck in the contract and because of all the things I just explained we couldn't do anything except of the hard fork and of course this is now a long story if anybody any question I'm very happy to answer them I answered them many times for many books and authors and three books written about it some movies made about it so if you any questions sure I can answer them but it's not a topic of today I really first want to focus on the mindset we had back then and some people still have it but many people really have just lost it and you have applications which just don't follow those principles anymore even though we have now the power to create applications with the same nice good characteristics Bitcoin being censorship resistant running forever Creator can leave you don't need any server on the back end no single point of failure pure peer-to-peer Network there's a lot of stuff out there but not a lot of them are using it so some success yes um the market cap is nice maybe um you have I really like ens I really like unisab I really like the defi stuff which has come out of it there really some cool stuff out there there are some users um I didn't really get all this nft stuff fun game I was not really much into it um but then what what did I do afterwards so I did build a venture Studio we have about five companies we created all building on top of ethereum um so I'm still very much active at least in this ethereum ecosystem um one of them because we said there are no users that's not fully true so we have built um a company called tokenizer where we tokenize German gmbh shares so this leaves us with nice things like this I just open this browser so this is for example the cap table of our gmbh fully tokenize it on chain on esos scan you can interact with it for example using I would say the esa scan UI is kind of a little bit what a Mis browser was so it kind of can interact with smart contracts so there are users we have almost I think 85 companies signed up now gmbh which are Distributing their shares via tokens and our platform is completely non-custodial we don't touch the money we don't touch the tokens so they all have non-custodial wallets so this is an example and what I'm most proud of most of our customers are not coming from the crypto web 3 space they are they're doing dog food they're doing like building cars like e-cards and stuff like this and they are using onchain stuff almost without noticing using the nice tooling which does exist so we using no safe for them we're using privy as an embedded wallet to get into this for those people who don't know yet how to create their wallet so I think infrastructure Wise It's actually everything is there gas prices are super low as well so that's good for us because we have built on AUM but we also using noses for the crowd investing feature mainly also for gas prices because the nice monium integration and other things so it is important that we have all this stuff so now I talked a lot about I think there is a lot of good stuff so ethereum has been great and I'm just now just a warmup for floran he will tell you what is not so great I'm really looking forward to it um I'm yeah floran is a good friend and he has a good AG I'm looking forward to what he will speak about but if you have any questions to me let me know thanks so much for this little walk down memory lane questions yes yeah thanks for the talk it was like a fresh uh wind like coming in the room I think the when you when you are on Twitter these days I think the you get get the impression that everything that you just told us is like the wrong way of doing things and that like we just need to build for I don't know the mass consumer and there like it was mentioned several times like nobody cares about decentralization and so on and so forth so I wonder uh how you feel about that it depends um for example if you build core infrastructure this is a protocol this should be fully decentralized as described for example the to organized app is still a web app hosted on the server so we have not reached this level of decentralization but we have at least full non-custodial platform that they can technically use their tokens they can use EOS scan maybe a future Miss version or whatever to use this so it always should be possible that without the web app things can continue and there are many who are actually following this the problem is there's so much distraction and there's so much stuff I I mean I'm not fing all of this anymore so it depends on who you follow on Twitter of course and on social media there is some good stuff but it's I mean I let this part to floran that just has been a massive extreme disallas worth billions but this money has been used to fund a lot of bad stuff also good stuff like the eum foundation is still doing good stuff and not I'm not speaking eum foundation in particular and speaking more of like how much billions like 4 billion to AOS what did we get from that like what is left $4 billion the V Foundation had about 18 billion so what is left pretty decent stuff so and if you have more good teams having better funding they could build really nice stuff of course you need sometimes token economics to fund yourself and token economics or launching a token is not always a bad idea there are some good reasons for doing so just I actually think the SEC and all the stuff which happened after the Dow um had even though many icos are really bad this just we stop doing icos and just going the VC route has not really helped at all so I still think we need this Ico style funding mechanism to have those actual decentralized protocols just Founders are very afraid of regulatory issues and stuff like this that's just how it is so I'm still optimistic I'm always optimistic um but there's lots of work to do and need to remind ourselves what we actually built in the first place and I still think we need it a lot in the next decade to come you see which state the world is and if we lose privacy if we lose our access to funds we are basically building Plan B that's kind of how I feel like if the system starts to fall apart and like sometimes feel like this um we have a plan B but we should be a bit better at building it out yeah yeah I agree thank you thank you I mean I I just want to add to this that I mean exactly what you're saying and what you're showing this was our right we were there building out the idea of doing everything perfect and the M browser was exactly start on this idea let's do everything we centralized the idea was that we will host the DF with SW there was only W as a DF maybe one other or two others so they will then Ser hosted or ship with the whole thing um but the idea is really like uh so this is my kind of experience with the whole processes we tried it the full way it kind of failed too early too early also yeah uh lots of things were not there yet in place and what I believe now is we have to we have to see decentralization is a goal but um build like basically being able to compromise on a more soft version of that you know just like you have website just have a website first let them access it and then over time it needs to be set up in such a way that it can decentralize um but the problem is is there an incentive to do so I do believe I do believe it is when people start to discover the benefits of denization without coming for it in the first place and I mean this is what I'm working on right now I mean like why do you know but the benefit Prof right because what people care is profile right the people don't care about decentralization until you need them you need need it so meaning in case of tokenize it so sometimes people ask us why do you need a blockchain for use database and so on the reason is if we are gone your cap table is still functional so and you can still operate it so that's that's the super important part otherwise I would not trust the startup with my cap table so this is a real strong reason but of course you only need it once we are gone as long as we are there you can use this nice web app but if you're not there anymore yes use EOS scan it's good enough maybe so yeah I think we have a long way to go I'm optimistic but I see there's no big and Center for some people to move into this direction so let's see if he can still get there I believe he do and and I think it's about like getting them in letting them use web3 without knowing they're using web3 and then over time discover why is that actually useful or you can you can now receive things you can now send things you can actually monetize better maybe than what you could monetize before I mean I have a plan I'm let's see but the real plan would be to get United again and this defragmentation in the space has also hurt a lot I think so that's just a problem we have uh hello I was thinking that what you described at the beginning is basically a political act and now you go to many ethereum Hons and you see that people are doing it for fun so sort that they play around they have is fun as bounties it's fun yeah but they're highly a political you can say so uh sort of um what other differences you would highlight cultural within this younger Crow coming into ethereum uh also you can always compare with Bitcoin that it's much more Elder Duds and the different cultural Vibe between the sort ethereum freshman and your generation if you can say so it's totally we had a lot of fun but we were maybe Brave or maybe called naive because we didn't have the experience of what can go wrong yet so today of course things can go wrong they're not as naive I would still say the young people coming to ethereum learn the fundamentals learn how to do a smart contract learn what really can do and continue to dream big if you look at the Defcon one presentations I recommend you to do so big Visions like we change identity we we wanted to build the universal share Network totally getting rid of uber and Airbnb in two years time or so like we had those super big Visions we wanted to connect all iot devices using eum they they can pay each other and we started building this out and sometimes you go back to the nice something don't want to put anything bad in it but the big Visions are sometimes strong let's go to really tream really big this gets people excited and this gets them to fund it to get behind it and to use it and something which is that big which needs a blockchain to justify it's existence because if it's so big it cannot should never be controlled by one person so then you get into this like we thought about creating a complete new Financial system this was Utopia like the books we read back then we shared was like sci-fi stuff complete Utopia and we really thought we would be there in five or 10 years if we succeed so let's get back to this really big dreams and just build it out dare to do what's necessary and I think people will follow yeah okay I have a I have a last question as well um for such a good ending okay gete sorry to make it better I mean um it's crazy how this reminds me of the check check check yeah that's yeah um how this reminds me of kind of the beginning of the internet as well I think the beginning of the inter the mission the vision was also very very big and then it ended up not really in the picture of the initial crors and so this is in in a sense actually very very similar as well so you were saying you're very positive uh what makes you so positive because like actually what I can see I can see little of a change in the gaming space I guess I think the gaming space started very very badly with nft games and now there's kind of a move back to putting everything back on chain you know kind of the idea of having front ends for the same game stage something exciting again all of a sudden so that's the change I can see kind of moving back a little bit is it also what you seeing that's where you're positive or is it so you know this gner hype cycle and maybe has been used so many times but I always feel we are the bottom so meaning the the one of the biggest benefits of what we have been built is interoperability between applications so that one smart contract can call another maybe it needs to be rediscovered let's say those those gaming apps and those def defi applications but they they can call each other and just do stuff and now may maybe this is just a silent hope if AI really becomes big the AI agents that's the only way they can operate if this is good or bad let's see um I don't know um maybe I'm just optimistic because I have a I have kids I always think my kids will figure it out they're smarter than me and let's see if the Next Generation learns from our mistakes and just goes back to what was good and sometimes it's just when as a physicist you would say it's always swinging it's always waves so if you go too far in One Direction we hit something breaks something feel this is not good enough we go into another Direction often we overshoot um but long term I hope you approximately hit in the long limit hit the right thing yeah okay thank you so much race of sunshine optimism and inspiration first off