podcasts
Collection
Collection for podcasts • 511 items • Updated • 2
speaker stringclasses 2
values | text stringlengths 5 2.9k |
|---|---|
A | Today we have a bankless take talking about David's recent article, the unified architecture for Ethereum. Where does Ethereum fit in the world of many chains? We got bitcoin over there, we got Solana, we got Celestia, we've got other layer twos. What is Ethereum's future there? Also what functional escape velocity mea... |
B | David, I think you can see many things in this article. I think somebody else could rewrite this article from a perspective of their particular chain. And so it's one part like, hey, here's how I've come to the conclusion that I've come to about Ethereum. But the parts of this article are universal, so we can always pl... |
A | Why'd you write this article, David? |
B | Yeah, so I've had this article in my brain for, like, almost two years now, and it is kind of carrying forward a very early conversation, probably the earliest big conversation in the crypto space that I think really ever emerged, which is the bitcoin block size wars. Bitcoin block size wars were just. The wars were ju... |
A | Well, let's get to it. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. All right, David, let's start here. We got to go back all the way to 2015 through 2017, when something called the bitcoin block size wars was going on. These were formative days for me in crypto, as for you, but this... |
B | Yeah. Interestingly, I think the first ever podcast I ever listened to in the crypto space was Laura Shin moderating a debate between a big blocker and a small blocker. And I was like, somebody tell me how a blockchain works. |
A | You didn't understand any of it? |
B | I did not understand a damn thing that was going on. That was, like, my first introduction. |
A | Let me ask you, when you first heard that on unadulterated Virginia, whose side were you on? Were you like. |
B | I was. I was too early for any of that. I was. I was trying to understand anything. Like, the words were not going into the brain. It didn't. Did not compute. Did not compute. |
A | Do you know whose side I was probably default on or more receptive to? |
B | I'm gonna guess. Go. You were a big blocker. |
A | Yeah, it just sounded like I was like, big blocks. Yeah. Like, why have small blocks when you can have big blocks? It's just like. And the. This was bitcoin cash. You had sort of the argument for it, for blocks, and that's what that tribe and that fork sort of became. But it was just, they're like, we can do so much mo... |
B | I think that was my introduction to the space as well, arguing with my, my first podcast co host, who's a big bitcoiner. Uh, and I came into this space and just, like, immediately identified with ethereum. My arguments to him were, like, very big blocker arguments. Uh, and, and so, like, maybe we can go into and define... |
A | And you know why? Because gas fees on bitcoin were getting really expensive. Like, transaction fees were getting expensive at this time, and people were angry about it. |
B | Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so famously, there was always this, like, one satan, one sat per byte, or like, the lowest possible fee for bitcoin blocks, basically free. And then in 2015, 2016, they started to creep up. And then all of a sudden, people were like, oh, like, how are we going to scale bitcoin? How are we going to... |
A | Well, let's define what that means when you say users, right? Because users cast a very wide net. You could be a bitcoin user by just holding bitcoin. You could even be a bitcoin user in a way, by holding bitcoin on the exchange, right? That's not like the deepest use case, but like just holding bitcoin, uh, you know, ... |
B | Yeah, I would contend with one nuance of that, which is that you say slightly more advanced user, and a big blocker philosophy would actually make that a much more advanced user where a small block philosophy would be like, well, no, actually that same user that's holding BTC on binance or Coinbase, they could become t... |
A | To do because the node requirements are. |
B | Light, you can run those requirements are. |
A | Light node on it. |
B | That's where the hardware requirements are light. So your shitty PC from 1992 can actually become a bitcoin node. |
A | Oh, wow, you think so? |
B | 1992, I don't know, I just made that up. But the point is, if you desire to, if you are merely a bitcoin holder, but you also desire to become a validator of the network, which is different than ethereum. Validator. Validators. Just processing the bitcoin transactions self sovereignly and verifying them, verifying. It'... |
A | Yeah, you're democratizing that, right. Whereas the big block path, where it eventually leads, eventually is no one can run a node unless you have like state of the art compute. And maybe the end of that is like you're in a data center somewhere. And so, you know, no normal person is able to actually validate the block... |
B | Right? And so the, the small blockers would also point to the big blocker argument saying, like, if you just raise the block size of bitcoin from one to eight and allow for eight times more capacity, that's like, still not anywhere close to enough. Like, we eventually need infinity transactions in order to scale this t... |
A | It did really well at first. |
B | It did really well at first. And then it's been down. |
A | There was talk of, like, bitcoin cash flipping bitcoin and who is right? And eventually it kind of failed off. And, like, what is bitcoin today, no one talks about bitcoin cash. |
B | Yeah, but that was like a lesson in history, right? And so this whole small blocker, big blocker debate, I think like rings through the halls of crypto history and still persists to this day. Like, all layer ones exist somewhere on a continuum between small blocker and big blocker philosophy. And we don't really often,... |
A | Well, let me just. This wasn't in your article, so it's a brief side quest, but I think is important in terms of how that decision was effectively made. Like, what is the canonical bitcoin? Because an alternative bitcoin, bitcoin for, called bitcoin cash, actually had a lot of legitimacy in the early days, and some of ... |
B | Yeah, even a large supply of the bitcoin miners were more in favor of bitcoin cash, because if they did the calculus, they did the napkin math, and they determined that they could actually make more fees with bigger blocks. And so a lot of the hash power of bitcoin miners went over to bitcoin cash in support of bitcoin... |
A | So let's talk about modern day. So this is somewhat ancient history and crypto, David, it's almost like ten years ago that this happened. Okay, so like why most crypto people. |
B | Did not experience this. |
A | No. And they don't care. And like, whatever, it's bitcoin. I mean, we're talking about other networks now. It's nothing to do with ethereum, is it? Or nothing to do with Solana? So what does this look like in modern day? |
B | I think the easiest example to extrapolate into is the Solana versus Ethereum. Camp Solana is the big blockers. Ethereum, we're the small blockers. There's also other axes that have also emerged. So now this is not just like the only axie for viewing a chain, but this is like one of the original continuums that was a p... |
A | Yeah. Increase the size of the blocks, increase TPS transactions per second, fit more stuff like inside of the blocks that this layer one produces, right? |
B | The Ethereum camp says that this is a fundamental compromise on decentralization and credible neutrality, creating an enshrined set of winner and losers and ultimately produces the same set of socio financial stratifications that we're trying to get away from the world of treadfy. So instead we should focus on increasi... |
A | Yeah, it's interesting because Solon is, of course, not a fork of Ethereum. So it's a little bit different in that way, but it's a similar philosophy. Right. And so what compromises exactly on decentralization and credible neutrality? Do you think that Ethereum would say a big block chain like Solana is actually making... |
B | Yeah, I think this debate is even. Is even easier to see in Ethereum versus Solana than bitcoin versus bitcoin cash. Because even though bitcoin cash was eight times larger than bitcoin in this grand scheme of things, compared to, like, the monolithic layer ones that we have today, bitcoin cash is like a small block bl... |
A | And it's better engineered, right, because it's not just the totally bitcoin work, which was just, like, not meant for parallelization and, like, high TPS anyway. |
B | Bitcoin cash was just absolutely not optimized from an engineering standpoint to do anything that Solana is doing. So Solana is like, hey, let's let's engineer this from first principles, uh, which sets Solana off at, like, a much better position than, like, bitcoin cash ever would have, right? So, like, hey, let's bui... |
A | But how does this manifest into the charge that it's like, why not do that? You know, like Ethereum says, it's not decentralized enough. And one bit of difference between the bitcoin big blockers and small blockers is with Ethereum. With the move to proof of stake, anybody with a certain amount of heath can be a valida... |
B | To super, you can't produce blocks unless you have economies of scale. |
A | Okay, so does it come down essentially, to Ethereum, by constraining its block size, is basically making it such that, um, anybody with consumer hardware has the ability to run a, uh, a node that produces blocks to be a validator, essentially. Is that what it comes down to when you talk about decentralization? |
B | Yeah, Ethereum, you can, with consumer hardware, can both, both produce blocks and independently, in a self sovereign way, check the validity of other people's blocks. So you not, you aren't trusting any intermediary to tell you which block is correct or what transactions are correct. You are doing it yourself. And Sol... |
A | I mean, this is a point of detail here, because some people contend with, with that, right? Which is like, no, David, you can run a Solana non validating node from your home. Like, you totally, you totally can do that. It costs more. It's not, you can't run it necessarily on your, just like your standard MacBook pro, l... |
B | Yeah, I guess it's just a debate as to, like, how far away from end consumer verification we are willing to get. And, like, I think it's actually bandwidth that's the biggest bottleneck to, like. It's just stronger Solana decentralization. And bandwidth is just like, all right, what's the top of the world and how good ... |
A | You need some fiber, higher bandwidth, that kind of thing. |
B | Yeah, I think the actual hardware is. So you need good hardware and you need to be proximate to bandwidth. And so we've started to meaningfully constrain the possible validating set of humanity to Solana. |
A | I think it's just important to note, though, this is a sliding scale. Right, right. Like, you still, you still can't run a bitcoin node on like, you know, like hardware that's 15 years old. Uh, I would expect. Or maybe you can, but, like, you might do that actually. You can't run an ethereum node, non validating node o... |
B | Yeah, I think maybe to define it, like, with Ethereum. Ethereum wants to make it sufficiently easy to verify the Ethereum blockchain so that, like, you don't have to try to verify the Ethereum blockchain. The background processes of your typical consumer hardware can verify the Ethereum blockchain. So you don't have to... |
A | Some other analogies for, you know, block space. The complexity of the block space is expressivity. Like, you know, how much can you fit and express or programmability of a particular block? You know, a couple of analogies that people have used in the past is if bitcoin is kind of like a ledger or just an Excel spreads... |
B | Yeah, I really just want to dive into this last point. Block complexity. Block complexity, which is, do you have a virtual machine? Do you not have a virtual machine? How many opcodes do you have? Like, prior, this was the Ethereum like, introduction to the space is like, it was the first blockchain with a virtual mach... |
A | Put the term Turing complete turnkey very popular there, which is kind of like a nerdy turn just to say that you could do anything. You can program inside of the block, right? |
B | Yep. And so this, to bitcoin philosophy, adding a virtual machine inside of Ethereum was just like, how dare you? Like, deep sin. Don't do that. It's adding complexity to the blockchain, which reduces people's ability to verify the chain. So this is why bitcoiners, like, honestly, to this day don't like virtual machine... |
A | Like, there's problems with it, risk surface. |
B | Area, like all, all this kind of stuff. Uh, and so it actually is a reduction of the user ability to verify the validity of transactions themselves. And if you remember going back into like 2017, 2018, like, the Ethereum community was relentlessly bullied by the bitcoin community because you could never run an Ethereum... |
A | Like, you can run it now, but your change just started. In the future, this is going to just expand out of control and you can't you run a node. There's also a lot of schadenfreude after the Dow hack when they said, ha, see what happens when you make your blocks programmable? Somebody can hack a key contract and take a... |
B | Yeah. Interestingly, to this day, basically every single new layer, one blockchain, is a smart contract for virtual machine blockchain. Ever since ethereum, everyone's like, okay, we do smart contracts now except for Celestia. |
A | Except Celestia. |
B | Except Celestia. Yeah, that's super interesting. Okay, I want to get into this Vitalik article where this is where we go next called base layers and functionality escape velocity. And this is where I start to put in some more opinions into this article that are from me, my personal crypto investment thesis. And I think... |
A | Of course, it's a magazine show. |
B | Okay, both big blockers and small blockers are correct. It's not about who's right and who's wrong. They both have valid points. The point is to build a system that maximizes both of them. And so bitcoin as an architecture was not able to fit both big blockers and small blockers into its system. The bitcoin small block... |
A | Well, isn't he just re articulating what you just said, which is like small blocks that are expressive? Yeah, like this top right quadrant. He's just re expressing that. And this post was written in 2019 and I would say encapsulates the Ethereum design philosophy in general. Right there, there are, there are other peop... |
B | Yep, yep, that's exactly right. And it's also why Ethereum became Ethereum. And so, like, if you agree with this philosophy, you end up in the top right quadrant here, which is like the Ethereum quadrant. And so like, this ultimately gets into like what has emerged as the way that a lot of the core devs view the Ethere... |
A | So I guess one implication of that, and this is a term I think we learned back in like 2019, I would say, is economic density of the blocks on the layer one themselves, right? So if you have small blocks, but they collapse the transactions of an entire chain's worth or entire chain ecosystem's worth of economic activit... |
B | Yeah, it's actually been really interesting to see bitcoin discover data availability. This is what happened when ordinals Washington birthed on bitcoin. Ordinals basically created this idea of bitcoin as a data availability layer, and you could just inscribe jpegs to it and we could have fun with that. Babylon is a bi... |
A | Layer one bm as well, which makes actually some kind of poor man's optimistic roll up happen on bitcoin, which is kind of neat. |
B | And so bitcoin, Ethereum and Celestia are all like leveraging their own layer ones as a data availability layer to build more or less the same ecosystem on top of them, which I think is like super interesting that, like, we have three different types of layer ones, and they all want to build, more or less, what is the ... |
A | But doesn't all of this point to kind of the convergence aspect of all of this, which is like, bitcoin is going to converge on Ethereum strategy? And also, if you go to the far big blocker like side of the equation, there's no reason Solana can't have, hypothetically, layer twos that settle down to Solana. |
B | I'm not sure about that, actually. |
A | Why? Why don't you think that's possible? |
B | Well, because the whole big blocker philosophy is like, if you need a second layer, you've. You've effed up on your first layer. Like, this is actually like, what I think what anatolian myrrh like almost exclude. Like that is their narrative. A second layer is emblematic of failures of the first layer. And so Solana, o... |
A | Do you think that's true? Just because there are certain Anatolia or myrrt kind of like, want that? Do you truly don't see a layer two network kind of like emerging on top of. On top of Solana? Because there's no technical reason why it's not possible. And if Solana is, like, permissionless. |
B | No, no. Okay, so, like, the whole idea of, like, it's difficult for users at the layer one to verify the blockchain, a user can be another blockchain. And so if Solana, if you make it a difficult to verify blockchain, layer twos also have that difficulty of keeping up with the Solana chain and actually being a part of ... |
A | Why verify more difficult? |
B | Just because the technical capacity of the layer two has to also keep up and verify the state of the Solana. |
A | Layer one, the speed at which. |
B | And so if you have an optimistic roll up on Solana, like you could, it's probably going to be easier to do a ZK. But you have an optimistic roll up on Solana, like, you need to be doing computation and you need to be doing a lot of computation, both on the layer two and the layer one, in order to even produce the fraud... |
A | I wouldn't mind, like, vetting that. I bet that there's some sort of like Solana's answer to layer two. But, but let's take that aside. I think, I think you're right. From a narrative perspective, definitely the Solana big blocker motif is like, why have layer twos? Layer twos are dumb. Bit like the monolithic chain is... |
B | Yeah, I actually want to put a pin in that, because I think we're going to get to that exact point. But I want to start there with talking about the cosmos vision. We're talking about, like, Celestia, bitcoin, Solana, Ethereum. What about Cosmos? Why aren't we talking about Cosmos? Cosmos. The way that Cosmos people ex... |
A | Yeah, I would say it feels really sovereign. Like. Like for base, they have the ability to deploy their chain. They can take all the revenue, whatever. They just have to pay some sort of defense fee to Ethereum. |
B | And it's the right maintain point that base is actually not perfectly sovereign. And so in the same way that there's a trade off landscape between functionality, escape velocity that Vitalik defined, I think there's also a sovereignty escape velocity kind of phenomenon where, like, layer twos do make some sacrifices to... |
A | To see that trade off. Right. I guess maybe a contrast point is what's the difference between being an app as a smart contract on top of Ethereum or on top of Solana? And what level of sovereignty do you have there versus being your own chain? And I'm just thinking through this in my head, but it seems very much like b... |
B | For that irregular state transition. |
A | A regular state transaction like transition can actually happen, and that's a breach of sovereignty anyway, I guess that's a contrast point. So you'd say you have more sovereignty as your own chain than an individual smart contract deployed on top of layer one. |
B | Yeah. And I think one day there will be a uni chain, and that will be an application that is looking to seek more sovereignty for itself and become a chain. We're not there yet. There's a bunch of hurdles that we need to get through in the ethereum ecosystem to get there. But you can see how the desire for sovereignty ... |
A | It seems very clear to me that, like, between Ethereum and Celestia and all of the layer twos, they have totally co opted the idea of cosmos. It's just like. Like, so you have complete sovereignty of chains. You just have, like, this root of, like, trust, right? Which is really interesting. You say in your article that... |
B | I actually don't think it's true. Okay, I want to take it. Why? |
A | Because we've done entire episodes on how Ethereum has a massive fragmentation problem in its layer twos and the steps that, like, solutions that are coming online to sort of, like, fix this fragmentation problem. So in, like, maybe it's not as fragmented as cosmos, but then Cosmos has IBC as well, right? So, like, yea... |
B | So, yeah, Ethereum gets critiqued for being fragmented. But ironically, Ethereum is the only network that's out there that's actually stitching together chains through cryptographic proofs. So, like, by contrast, the many layer one space is complete and total fragmentation, whereas the Ethereum, layer two space is frag... |
A | I want to go back to the comment earlier, because you say, you say another thing. The third thing that you say layer twos get from this unbreakable val as a layer two is a unit of account eth being sort of like money. If you have a trustless bridge in your layer two thats backed by Zk proofs or validity proofs, you ess... |
B | So what were those numbers for the base chain? They made $673,000 and then they paid $2,500 in a one day window on. |
A | One particular day when markets are heating up. So, like, again, this is just like, not a trendline you can extrapolate and just be like, oh, yeah. That this profit margin is going to exist forever. Like, but all those things aside. Yes. |
B | Yeah. Okay, so what happens when the costs of producing a chain is $2,500 a day and that same chain is generating $700,000, $600,000 of revenue? What, what do you think happens? |
A | I think we're getting a lot more chains. |
B | We get, you get a whole lot more layer, too. Get a ton more. And so this isn't some sort of, like, hey, going to have layer twos because of sovereignty? No, we're going to have layer twos because it's profitable as hell. |
A | Good business model. |
B | It's a good business model. And when we have many, many, many layer twos that are all independent sovereign chains, except for the cryptographic proofs that provide strong settlement insurances between the layer two and the layer one, those are all ETH monetary networks. This is like, if we, visa is a monetary network ... |
End of preview. Expand in Data Studio
README.md exists but content is empty.
- Downloads last month
- 7