Early Days of Ethereum
The first episode of the Early Days of Ethereum video series, independently produced by Victor Wong, Kieren James-Lubin and Jim Hormuzdiar, the co-Founders of BlockApps.
Transcript
[0:00 - 0:12] Kieren: Ready. So we’re on. Thanks. So my name is Kieren James-Lubin. I’m joined by Jim or James Hormuzdiar and Victor Wong.
[0:13 - 0:29] Kieren: We are old friends. We also run a company together called BlockApps, which has been in operation for quite some time. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about today. We’re actually taking the topic up of what Ethereum was like in the early days.
[0:30 - 0:44] Kieren: So we’ve all had both an insider and an outsider perspective on Ethereum and enjoyed the really crazy and wild ride that has been in the last approximately decade in the blockchain space.
[0:45 - 0:57] Kieren: And sometimes we forget all of the interesting things that happened. And so we wanted to kind of get in front of a camera and get it all down for posterity.
[0:57 - 1:12] Kieren: And here we are. So with that said, I’ll kind of take the lead on the discussion, but we’re not trying to be formal here, trying to make it conversational. This is a first of a, you know, Kieren-produced podcast of sorts.
[1:13 - 1:28] Kieren: I’ve been on a bunch of them. I don’t think I’ve ever led one, so we’re going to find out how it goes. All righty. So let’s start out with the question, when were you first aware of Bitcoin and blockchain in particular?
[1:28 - 1:46] Kieren: I’ll give my answer to start, and there’s still a kicking myself aspect to it. So I became aware, I’m going to say 2010, possibly 2011, so this would have been my senior year in undergrad, of Bitcoin.
[1:46 - 1:57] Kieren: And I distinctly remember it being $3, down from a recent peak of $14 or $15. I thought it was interesting and, you know, looked into it a little bit.
[1:57 - 2:16] Kieren: I didn’t really get the idea of decentralization at the time. I just imagined it as some sort of digital money solution. You know, if you asked me then, I probably couldn’t have drawn a difference between it and, you know, a digital banking or a pay field type provider, that sort of thing.
[2:16 - 2:27] Kieren: And they might have bought a little of it, but not nearly enough, of course. So, that said, let me hand the question over to Jim.
[2:28 - 2:29] Kieren: When were you first aware of Bitcoin?
[2:30 - 2:42] Jim: Aware is different than, like, interested. In fact, like, I don’t know. I was, like, I came from an academic background. So, I’d been hearing about it probably since when you had been hearing about it. But I was, like, a little bit too above all that.
[2:42 - 2:57] Jim: Like, oh, that’s, like, a money thing. I’m not interested in that money world. So really, no, like the interest came from when you reached out to Steve, who is an old friend of mine and that Kieran had been following his blog.
[2:58 - 3:12] Jim: And Steve called me up and he’s like, this guy Kieran just called me up. And you have to go look at this Ethereum thing. And so at first I was like, you know, I’m not interested in all this fake money thing.
[3:13 - 3:26] Jim: And I went and I read the white paper. and by the end of the white paper I was hooked in. I was like, this isn’t just about like banking or something. This is about incentivization on the internet and that drew me in.
[3:27 - 3:44] Jim: And at that point there was enough ambiguous stuff being discussed. I wanted to just dig in and see how it worked. So that’s when I started trying to write code that would connect to one of the peers and see how they… At the time it was a testnet.
[3:44 - 3:52] Jim: And that’s when I started to understand the background of it and got really pulled into there. So, I don’t know. Let me pass it on to Victor.
[3:52 - 4:09] Kieren: Yeah, Jim, we’ll pick that up. I’m trying to a little bit stay chronological. So, you know, 2010, 2011 sounds like same time frame for you. I think we’ll pull back in a question or two right to that era, and we’ll talk in more detail.
[4:10 - 4:27] Kieren: But let’s hold on it for just a moment. Vic, do you want to take it? Yeah, I think I became aware of it around the same time as you. I was doing one of my startups in Beijing at the time, and I felt really disconnected from North America.
[4:27 - 4:45] Kieren: So I became sort of an early fan of podcasts. And one of the big podcast networks was this thing called Twit that was like all technical podcasts. And one of the podcasts I really loved was this podcast, Security Now, which went really deep into these kind of like security technical kind of things.
[4:45 - 5:00] Kieren: And he did like a couple episodes of Bitcoin. And I was like, you know, really, really fascinated by it. But mostly from a technical angle, like and even to the point where I downloaded the Bitcoin client and ran it, didn’t get any Bitcoin.
[5:00 - 5:15] Kieren: Or if I did, I didn’t notice. I think the rewards were like 50 at the time or something like this. But the strange thing was that a year or two later, I started to notice other Chinese startups.
[5:15 - 5:28] Kieren: There’d be like groups of computers in like part of their office. And I was like, what are those for? And they’re like, oh, we’re mining Bitcoin. And I was like, oh, like, why are you mining Bitcoin? And they’re like, oh, well, you know, we can like transfer money.
[5:28 - 5:39] Kieren: and like it’s basically free internet magic money. And I was like, I honestly was kind of repelled by that. Like that kind of seemed like too nutty even for me at the time.
[5:40 - 5:42] Jim: Did we all hate it before we liked it?
[5:43 - 6:05] Kieren: I never hated it. I was sort of just like not that interested, I guess. You know, I think, you know, from the East Coast, the attitude towards stiff financial stuff is probably more favorable. I think Jimmy had long since been out in California doing like, after your physics days.
[6:07 - 6:13] Jim: You’re not telling me that there were other grad students who kind of, like, I guess I didn’t hate it. I just felt I was too good for it.
[6:14 - 6:31] Kieren: I didn’t hate it, but I think I found the, like, like everyone talked about, So I was fascinated, the technical aspect, like I said, like, you know, and it got me to read the white paper and even like download the software.
[6:31 - 6:44] Kieren: But I think the part that kind of turned me off about it was like when you talk to some of the early people that I would ask, like, who were saying Bitcoin mining rigs, they’re like, they were like kind of fanatical.
[6:44 - 7:07] Kieren: Like there was that crypto anarchist sort of flavor to the early days that kind of turned me off, I would say. Yeah, Jim, I would say the people in academia that were pretty successful on a classic track and were going to get a good postdoc and a good assistant professorship and all that sort of thing mostly ignored crypto.
[7:08 - 7:34] Kieren: Some of them weighed in on it. but, yeah, I think it’s sort of, it was too fringe to attract, like, the classically most successful, in some sense, people at that time, whereas, you know, fighting against, not fighting against, but you’re sort of fighting for jobs, like in math or physics or something, it’s just, like, the most horsepower wins from an intellectual perspective and, I guess, the hardest working horsepower.
[7:34 - 7:52] Kieren: very few of those people got interested in crypto blockchain. A few cryptographers certainly did, and probably actually more established ones, as far as compared to younger ones, like folks like Dan Benet, et cetera.
[7:52 - 8:03] Kieren: But, yeah, I think – I don’t know that I was too good for it, but that, one, I didn’t grasp right away that it was revolutionary.
[8:04 - 8:19] Kieren: And I didn’t see anyone near me leaning into it for a while, I guess. Yeah, I would describe my view of it in the early days was sketchy because most of the use cases that like I thought the technology was fascinating.
[8:19 - 8:24] Kieren: But whenever I would ask about, you know, I’m a product guy. So I would always ask, like, what’s the use case?
[8:24 - 8:25] : Why would you use it?
[8:25 - 8:36] Kieren: And people would describe, you know, things to circumvent existing laws. like the big one in China that I remember is like oh I can transfer money and bypass foreign exchange rules
[8:36 - 8:37] : and stuff and I was like
[8:37 - 8:43] Kieren: is that legal? no one would mention anything afterwards basically
[8:43 - 8:50] Jim: I got over feeling too good for it I’ll tell you that
[8:50 - 9:13] Kieren: yeah we all did I want to touch on the other big thing that sticks out in my memory from the early blockchain era is, and we’ve kind of gone through this kind of cycle a couple times, was Mt. Gox. So Mt. Gox was that first big price run up.
[9:13 - 9:29] Kieren: I believe Bitcoin went from like 30 bucks to 1,200 bucks in a pretty short time frame. And as we’ve seen in the last couple, you know, crypto, you could call them asset bubbles if you were a cynical person.
[9:31 - 9:41] Kieren: To some extent, consumer interest tracks with the price, and people are getting excited about price momentum. Articles get circulated, all that sort of thing.
[9:41 - 10:00] Kieren: More people come in, and it goes all the way up. And then seemingly, invariably, the bubble bursts, and someone is fleeced at the top. You know, and, you know, whether it’s outright theft or merely collapsing asset values or some mix thereof, everyone’s hurt on the other side.
[10:01 - 10:13] Kieren: And sort of crypto is somehow this way of surviving all of this. The protocols themselves seem to be quite sound. But I guess the question is, do you guys remember Mt.
[10:13 - 10:24] Kieren: Gox distinctly? I feel like everyone, lots of people I knew who were not quite crypto savvy in the industry, et cetera, were suddenly paying attention when Mt. Gox was happening.
[10:24 - 10:31] Jim: It was a hot topic that I was just getting into things. What year was it? Was it 2015, 2014? 2014 probably, right?
[10:32 - 10:33] Kieren: I think Gox was 13.
[10:33 - 11:04] Jim: Let me check. Yeah. Okay, 13. Yeah, okay. So that was a little before, but that was still the topic that everybody was talking about at the time. I was new enough to it that it was still I was observing it as a third party it was interesting to me I think I spent a little time to understand the newspaper coverage like usual was terrible about it, they didn’t explain what was going on, so I spent a little time to understand that
[11:04 - 11:12] Jim: yes there was a problem, but no it had nothing to do with blockchain I think you’re right.
[11:12 - 11:29] Kieren: So the run-up was actually end of 13 into the beginning of 14. It looks like. Okay, so it officially shuttered February 2014. And the 1200 that I remember was like November 2013, it looks like.
[11:29 - 11:33] Kieren: When did the HAC happen? December. I think right here.
[11:33 - 11:34] Jim: Okay, okay. Yeah.
[11:34 - 12:04] Kieren: It happened right there, yeah. so yeah interesting times for sure because i think about monk docks and oh what was i’m blanking right now what was the name of that you know um dark web marketplace that used silk road silk road yeah like i think it’s um those were kind of intertwined in those early days right so i remember like even going on to silk road just to check what it was about. And I was kind of shocked
[12:04 - 12:21] Kieren: with what I saw listed there. Like, you know, lots of listed stuff was listed there. Wow. You know, I think I never did that. I think I never actually navigated to Silk Road. Just heard about it. I had a Mt. Gox account.
[12:21 - 12:32] Kieren: And some others. There was a period where, like, Dwala was doing crypto stuff. And then I think they stopped. And I believe they’re still around as, like, a payment API company.
[12:33 - 12:58] Kieren: but I’m going to use them and some others. I remember the Silk Road arrests and the Mt. Gox hacks came relatively within the same time frame of each other, and that was like the sort of like, you know, as you mentioned, like the first kind of iteration of like, oh, you know, all crypto and blockchain is dead now, and then it just keeps coming back, right?
[12:59 - 13:00] Kieren: Yeah, it sure does.
[13:00 - 13:33] Jim: there’s a little bit of bias in the news on how they cover problems in crypto versus problems in the traditional world if there’s fraud and it happens to happen on the blockchain then that means that the blockchain is a corrupt place and if there’s fraud and it happens in traditional banking that means that it might mean that we need a little more regulation or something but that was a bad person so it’s always much more tied into The price of Bitcoin can drop quite a bit when something like this happens.
[13:34 - 13:41] Jim: But you don’t see E-crashing because somebody commits fraud somewhere. I mean, I guess fraud’s big enough, but…
[13:43 - 13:46] Kieren: Yeah, I agreed. Just to segway quickly.
[13:46 - 13:47] Jim: It does happen sometimes.
[13:49 - 13:59] Kieren: Segwaying quickly, can you guys go into how you met, because you guys met first, and then we can do the whole how we all met. Yeah, Jim, do I want to start, or do you want to start?
[13:59 - 14:33] Jim: Uh, I’ll start and I’ll pass it over. I, uh, actually, so I had, uh, uh, back in the 90s, I was not Canadian and, uh, in the aughts, I was, uh, in the startup world and I’d done a couple startups and I was ending one of my startups and I had, uh, two sons who were in the, our local school in California was a Mandarin immersion school. And I, um, uh, at, at this time, it was just a coincidence that both my wife and I had ended jobs.
[14:33 - 14:46] Jim: And we said, hey, let’s just be crazy right now. And let’s take this to its extension. Let’s go to China and actually put them in a school there. So I called around some various friends.
[14:46 - 14:52] Jim: And one of the friends I called was a VC who had just funded a startup of Victor’s in Beijing.
[14:53 - 15:10] Kieren: And he said I going to get you in touch with these guys So in fact let me pass it over to you right now and you can explain Well yeah and so the VC you know who we still friends with Herb G like he kind of came up to me and he explicitly said like oh, I have this brilliant CTO and he says he wants to come to China.
[15:10 - 15:22] Kieren: I’m not sure how serious he is. So, you know, don’t put all your eggs in this basket. But then we started talking that summer and you weren’t like traveling the country.
[15:22 - 15:24] Kieren: So you were like in a different place.
[15:24 - 15:30] Jim: Another advantage of us both being jobless at the time is that we got in a car and started just driving around the country.
[15:31 - 15:49] Kieren: And I remember like, you know, like we were kind of talking over the summer and I was like, you know, seeing how serious you were about coming. And and at one point you said, OK, look, if you can get my kids into a Chinese school in Beijing, I will come and take the job to Beijing.
[15:49 - 16:17] Kieren: and I went to the school that my kids went to which and said like you know can you make space for um you know two foreign kids this international program they said yes if you can but the kids have to be here the first day of school and first day of school was two weeks from that conversation so I called Jim up and said look I can do it you know I can guarantee a place for them but you have to be here on this day.
[16:18 - 16:23] Kieren: And to my shock, he actually said yes. And he packed up his house. We packed
[16:23 - 16:42] Jim: everything in the house. I think we had 12 days to be in school and we probably had to have the house packed within like, I don’t know, less than a week. So that was a crazy week. But Victor was a great help in…
[16:42 - 16:55] Jim: We were going to a country we’d never been to before, didn’t know much about. Victor had also moved to Asia a few years earlier, and so he had sort of scoped out everything, and he knew where the good schools were, he knew where the good apartment buildings were, helped us out tremendously.
[16:56 - 16:57] Jim: It was a great experience.
[16:58 - 17:09] Kieren: It was an exciting time to be in China. It was right around the first Olympics, you know, like it was right around the Beijing Olympics, and so it was a really exciting time. But yeah, you wound up staying for about 18 months, right, in total?
[17:10 - 17:14] Jim: A little less, but yeah, it was over a year. Yeah, and then we
[17:14 - 17:22] Kieren: just kept in touch from there. We loved working together. What year did you arrive? What was this rough time to your group?
[17:23 - 17:33] Jim: Who were you asking? Because it was different for you. Oh, 2011. 2011 is that summer. We’re driving all over the country. 2011, September, August. I can’t remember.
[17:33 - 17:35] Jim: We were in Beijing.
[17:36 - 17:36] Kieren: Gotcha.
[17:37 - 17:38] : Very cool.
[17:38 - 17:44] Kieren: And so then you’re back end of 2012 or early 2013,
[17:44 - 17:50] Jim: something like that. Yeah, we were back at, when did we come back? I guess we were back in the
[17:50 - 18:19] Kieren: country in 2013. But like January. Let me, I’ll segue, I’m trying to keep it slightly chronological to keep everything in my mind here consistent. So I was in grad school at Berkeley between 2012 and really 2015, I got to start working on Ethereum kind of purely by accident.
[18:20 - 18:35] Kieren: Maybe not purely by accident, but basically I had passed my qualifying exam, I’m going to say spring 2014 or maybe May, April or May 2014.
[18:35 - 19:07] Kieren: So for those who are not aware of how a PhD program works, qualifying exam is like one of the last things you need to do before you just do the research and produce the thesis. So sometimes it’s a coursework requirement. Sometimes you need to, you know, translate a work from like an academic work from one language to another to show proficiency. I think most of them have dropped those requirements at this point. And so, you know, it’s a whole bunch of study, intense prep at Berkeley. It’s a three-hour oral exam with a
[19:07 - 19:38] Kieren: couple people from your department and one from an external department and then they give you a pass or not i got a pass thankfully it was a i don’t know that it was it was everyone feels bad after their qualifying exam except the people who are really good right like and you know so while i passed it i it was like you know didn’t feel great at least the rest of that day um when do you find out the result like immediately oh you do okay you put you in the hall and they tell you Okay, that’s good.
[19:38 - 19:40] Kieren: So you’re just, like, very nervous.
[19:40 - 19:51] Jim: I don’t know what it was like for you, but for me it was just, like, three guys I knew. And I was nervous, too, but it wasn’t like they had to go and, like, you know, like calculate numbers or something. They just kind of come out and they’re like, yeah, yeah.
[19:52 - 20:29] Kieren: Yeah, exactly. No, it was like that, right? Yeah, it’s oral. It’s subjective in a sense. But, you know, you’ve got, like, several of the world’s foremost experts, you know, in some subjects so they’re able to assess whether you understand it enough or not to proceed with research. So the qualifying exam led to, you know, I needed like a short break from math. I was in mathematical physics and I had almost taken a job working for sort of a data science company that
[20:29 - 20:40] Kieren: was taking, I can’t quite remember, something having to do with, like, Nielsen TV ratings and doing something with the data and maybe selling it back to networks.
[20:40 - 20:55] Kieren: I can’t remember at this time. But, you know, it seemed like an okay thing. I also wanted to go back to New York for the summer. I’m from New York. And, you know, as with many New Yorkers, it took some time to adapt to the California culture, and I didn’t fully do it.
[20:55 - 21:03] Kieren: I still, you know, I’m prone sometimes to bash the Bay Area, but I still kind of like it there.
[21:03 - 21:04] Jim: But anyway, I like that, by the way.
[21:05 - 21:19] Kieren: Yes, yes, Jim’s there. I’m in the state of New York at the moment. But, yeah, but, you know, I need a little break, basically. And it ended up being possible to work on the Ethereum project.
[21:19 - 21:36] Kieren: But so somehow my, you know, I guess I’ll go into this somehow. My dad, Joe Lubin, got attached to the projects basically because he was always tracking Bitcoin and blockchain for a long time.
[21:38 - 21:50] Kieren: He had a CS background plus the financial background and ran a hedge fund for a number of years. And so I was just kind of always watching technological innovations in financial services.
[21:52 - 22:07] Kieren: And I guess always had a little bit of the, you know, blockchain philosophical character in that, you know, let’s say pro-freedom, a little bit of a libertarian streak kind of thing.
[22:07 - 22:48] Kieren: and i believe he happened to just be visiting our families. He’s from Toronto. A lot of blockchain people in Toronto for one reason or another and he went, I believe, to, it might have been a Bitcoin meetup at that time or it might have been the first Ethereum meetup but this would have been January, February 2014, I believe and Vitalik was speaking there And, you know, like everyone around that time where you see Vitalik speak about something, you got really excited, right?
[22:48 - 23:00] Kieren: And so he actually got ready to start helping out the project right away. He actually thought for a time that he might be a software developer for the project. And, you know, it didn’t turn out that way.
[23:00 - 23:15] Kieren: We can go into it a little bit later. But he started working on it, again, let’s take February, March. 2014. And so he just sent me the white paper like right after, maybe right before my qualifying exam.
[23:15 - 23:27] Kieren: I got a chance to read it. And it was pretty cool and interesting and new. And that’s sort of the first time I grasped the potential of technology that caused me to go back and read the Bitcoin white paper, etc.
[23:27 - 24:01] Kieren: And it was sort of exciting enough to work on for that summer, basically. So that’s how I got into it. and subsequently, you know, Jim alluded to this earlier, I started to work with the project and reached out to Steve Shue, a great friend of ours, kind of, I don’t know, not quite famously brilliant, definitely brilliant, somewhat famous, super cool guy, and had been a longtime reader of Steve’s blog.
[24:01 - 24:17] Kieren: He’s one of the few really excellent general communicators who’s a super technical guy. But most people who are really technical in communication have a hard time distilling it for at least kind of a mass market audience.
[24:18 - 24:33] Kieren: But Steve is actually good at that, but with nuanced coverage of technical topics. So anyway, caught up with Steve, and that takes us to Steve forwarding on the Ethereum white paper to Jim.
[24:34 - 24:46] Kieren: And I believe I was – the first time I spoke to Steve, I was in New York, but was just about to go back to the Bay Area. So that takes us to maybe June, July 2014.
[24:48 - 25:01] Kieren: And maybe I came back in August or something like that. And it turned out that Jim was there in Hayward, and we got to meet up, what did you do, August 2014, September, something like that?
[25:01 - 25:11] Jim: Oh, it was around then because also, ironically, I was driving across the country that summer, too, and it was right after I came back.
[25:11 - 25:19] Kieren: That’s part of it. Life changes are related to some cross-country trip. As you’re soul searching, you do a literal search.
[25:20 - 25:26] Jim: I was in Montana, and then I was back in the Bay Area, and then we talked.
[25:27 - 25:37] Kieren: Yeah, okay. How was Montana, by the way? Maybe we shouldn’t go. Montana, oddly crypto-friendly. Yeah, makes sense.
[25:37 - 25:57] Kieren: Big sky country, right? Big sky country. Okay, so let me see here. I have a couple other 2014 anecdotes that you guys may not even know that much about, but maybe we should jump ahead to 2015 and go back.
[25:58 - 26:14] Kieren: Just before we go past 2014. So I moved back from China in 2014. And so me and Jim were talking about like, oh, now that I was back, what kind of project could we do together?
[26:14 - 26:27] Kieren: So while you had started that conversation, me and Jim were like thinking about, okay, you know, like maybe we could work on a startup together. And at some point you forwarded me the paper as well. So like I think – so that’s kind of how I got into it as well.
[26:30 - 26:50] Kieren: I want to give – yeah, I don’t want to speak the whole time, but I have some info here that I forget if I told you guys at length. Okay, don’t worry. In 2014, so basically I did work on the Ethereum project through a bunch of 2014.
[26:52 - 27:08] Kieren: As far as tech projects go, it was much more global, a little more European. But you had Canada, I had a bunch of people in Zug, Switzerland, a little bit in Israel in the early days.
[27:09 - 27:21] Kieren: We worked out of an office, my dad and I, and a guy named Stephen Naraoff, who is now kind of famous.
[27:21 - 27:33] Kieren: Actually, if you Google the name, you know, it’s definitely an interesting and colorful story that I’ll go into a little bit. And a guy named Jonathan, whose last name I couldn’t find when I was writing this down.
[27:33 - 27:52] Kieren: But Jonathan’s a good guy. and I don’t know if they kind of parted ways at some point or, you know, how that all happened. So we’re working in this office in Times Square and, you know, really trying to find kind of different ways to advance the project, meeting with lots of people.
[27:54 - 28:20] Kieren: So, you know, that’s when I met Steve Hsu, who introduced me to Jim, basically just kind of calling up whoever might be interested. But part of the plans that the Ethereum folks had was, you know, they acknowledged that there would be a need for kind of ongoing peer research and then in addition to more like focused R&D to build the network out.
[28:20 - 28:38] Kieren: And so Vitalik at some point penned an article about, you know, 10 hard problems in cryptocurrency or something of that nature in which – and I think it was – if we went back now, it would look both, you know, very insightful and a little bit dated.
[28:38 - 28:54] Kieren: I’m sure some of them have been solved and some of them may not need to be solved because something else emerged. but basically foresaw the need for privacy above and beyond pseudonymity, for instance.
[28:55 - 29:18] Kieren: And many things of that transition from proof of work to proof of mistake, or just like energy efficient blockchains, which people were talking about at that time. But my position in academia at that time seemed to be helpful as the the blockchain people were just so different from the academia people, despite both of them being really smart groups of people.
[29:20 - 29:30] Kieren: Blockchain people were not worried about doing things through the proper channels and approval and writing it up the right way and all that sort of thing.
[29:30 - 29:43] Kieren: Something about academia makes you fearful of being wrong. because you’re wrong enough in public there are kind of consequences for it.
[29:44 - 30:12] Kieren: I would say the tech attitude in general is like getting something out there, get it to work basically, but get it out and then iterate. Blockchain people had that in an extreme and I would say also Ethereum was much more like that than the Bitcoin culture The Bitcoin culture was like a bunch of practicing but academic cryptographers who never wanted to change anything.
[30:15 - 30:37] Kieren: And the Ethereum people were more like have like the software and computer science engineering attitude of like, let’s get out there. Let’s let’s tinker with it. Let’s kind of see what happens. And those are good arguments for both, especially when we’re talking about like a system that custodies, well, not custodies, but, you know, that records a lot of high-value ownership interests and allows them to be transferred.
[30:39 - 30:54] Kieren: But all that is to say it was useful for the Ethereum Foundation to have sort of someone who is actively in academia to kind of work with and coordinate everything. So we agreed to work on a body called the Cryptocurrency Research Group.
[30:55 - 31:14] Kieren: and that was composed of sort of myself, Vitalik, and our friend Aaron Wright. He’s since gone on to a number of Web3 projects, but at the time was a practicing attorney, but also a professor at Cardozo Law School.
[31:14 - 31:48] Kieren: And he came to that Times Square office, which was, you know, not the greatest of offices, I would say, and just sort of really leaned in on Ethereum and kind of helped structure everything so that, you know, it would be kind of the most robust, not just technology, but they actually did kind of a quite good job in figuring out how to set things up that other projects since, you know, certainly did not do as good a job, I’ll say.
[31:48 - 32:07] Kieren: So, you know, it was funny times. And in 2014, I also got to go to Zug. For those who don’t know, the Ethereum Foundation was one of the first to be headquartered in Switzerland.
[32:07 - 32:18] Kieren: And it was kind of it’s become a very popular choice for crypto foundations, because I guess the Ethereum Foundation sort of blazed the path.
[32:19 - 32:31] Kieren: And the funny thing about Switzerland is that the kind of local authorities also just seem like business people, like they want to land the future tax revenue and employment.
[32:31 - 32:46] Kieren: And so you can kind of, one, Switzerland is split into some number of cantons, which are like states, a little smaller than U.S. states, of course. And so you can kind of go from canton to canton and try to get the best offer.
[32:47 - 33:00] Kieren: And offer really means like, you know, tax treatment, any kind of grants, you’re just like, you know, and helping get fast answers around legal questions.
[33:00 - 33:15] Kieren: You know, one of the tough things with the United States is that sometimes you don’t know what’s allowed. And the Swiss environment, they were fairly clear, you know, about what they wanted for the special tax treatment and, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
[33:15 - 33:31] Kieren: So we went out and visited Zug, I don’t know, mid-late summer 2014, and I got to meet all of the founders of Ethereum at that time.
[33:32 - 33:38] Kieren: I believe there were kind of eight in total. And, you know, so I think –
[33:38 - 33:41] Jim: Those numbers changed over time, though, yeah?
[33:41 - 33:58] Kieren: Those numbers changed, yes. So, well, but yeah, I think so. I don’t exactly know how all of it happened, but, you know, Vitalik, there’s always a global project. Right. So Vitalik would kind of go around the world and evangelize, get people excited, and they would want to work with the project.
[33:58 - 34:10] Kieren: and so a bunch of folks got attached to it and obviously it worked, right?
[34:10 - 34:20] Kieren: But if he were to do it again, I bet he would be a little bit more careful about adding folks to it because eight is just like too many.
[34:20 - 34:33] Kieren: Like if you went to a U.S. venture capitalist with a slide that says eight co-founders and they’re not all currently running billion-dollar companies, you’d be just laughed out of the room.
[34:33 - 34:48] Kieren: And yet it worked, right? It actually functioned. And so kind of the way it broke apart was that there were like the technical element, technical guys.
[34:48 - 35:05] Kieren: So I think, I don’t quite know how this happened, But pretty early on, like Gavin Wood, Jeff Wilkie started building out versions of Ethereum, the C++ and Go clients.
[35:05 - 35:16] Kieren: Specifically, we’re going to the clients soon because there’s good stories there. Vitalik was building the Python client. They were all working together on technical documentation.
[35:16 - 35:29] Kieren: And the reason that people were building multiple clients was that there was the perception that Bitcoin was controlled and centralized because there’s only really one definitive client, Bitcoin D.
[35:29 - 35:44] Kieren: Right. And so there was this kind of huge replication of technical efforts, like each of them eventually got their own teams. There were JavaScript clients. You know, there’s many of them kind of came out later.
[35:46 - 35:59] Kieren: And I’d say the project, so the project had sort of tech folks and business folks, like any tech project, didn’t really have a nominal CEO at any time.
[35:59 - 36:16] Kieren: It was closest to being Charles Hoskinson. So I think at the time I went to Zouk, the leadership looked like, on the business side, Charles is the CEO.
[36:17 - 36:37] Kieren: Amir Chitrit, who is in Israel, he kind of did business development. He’s a funny guy. I still see him every once in a while. Joe, my dad, and Anthony DiIorio as the other business guys who probably had the most operating experience.
[36:38 - 36:48] Kieren: And then the tech side was Vitalik, Jeff, Gavin, and then Mihai had sort of done corporate setup.
[36:49 - 37:19] Kieren: I believe Mihai worked with Vitalik on Bitcoin Magazine. So Vitalik Very interesting character Where most of the time your technical geniuses Are not good communicators And he was sort of A journalist running Bitcoin Magazine writing a lot of the articles Good if he started it Or kind of joined it And you know he would I think he kind of crowdfunded The articles a little bit
[37:19 - 37:34] Kieren: Like for you know if I can get a pledge of one Bitcoin, I’ll write an article about X, you know. And at the time, Bitcoin was inexpensive. But, you know, those values went up, and I think it actually ended up being a good funding mechanism.
[37:34 - 37:47] Kieren: You know, the articles he wrote in the future, and it led him to kind of have a sort of impartial thought leader position in addition to his really strong technical ability and the ideas he was generating, et cetera.
[37:47 - 37:58] Kieren: And I know he had joined a bunch of projects early on and helped work with them. Like, I think MasterCoin was maybe the first colored coin project.
[37:58 - 38:10] Kieren: He did some work on that. So anyway, so those were the eight at the time. And there was a meeting for everyone to kind of get on the same page.
[38:10 - 38:24] Kieren: You know, remote project, there was a Slack. People were maybe working a little bit at cross purposes. There’s lots of infighting. People are stressed. They’re trying to deliver on this, like, awesome concept that Vitalik put out there.
[38:24 - 38:38] Kieren: And then everyone kind of tried to grab ownership of. Like, was there a reason to have all these different clients? You know, in the end, empirically, it worked, right? But a little bit of it was a I want, you know, Ethereum to be mine sort of thing.
[38:39 - 38:52] Kieren: And I saw this in the room when we were visiting there. Basically, it was quite dramatic, the trip.
[38:53 - 39:05] Kieren: So basically on this trip, everyone went outside at some point, and people were kind of a little bit sick. The tech people were sick of what the business people were doing to some extent.
[39:06 - 39:16] Kieren: There’s always this tension. It’s probably especially early in the company where the tech people are like, what do I need you, business guy, for? Like, we’re going to make this thing, and it’s, like, going to get out there.
[39:17 - 39:30] Kieren: And the business people, you know, have to go raise the money, find sales, find partnerships, et cetera. And it’s subjective stuff that the tech people don’t like or sometimes understand.
[39:31 - 39:49] Kieren: And more or less this happened, you know, people were uncomfortable with kind of promises that Charles was making and just the accusations. I don’t really even, you know, I know Charles some, but I don’t even really know what was going on at that time.
[39:50 - 40:05] Kieren: But there was this general sense of frustration with him. He also seems to be in some ways executing well on like an effective smart business strategy, but maybe over-promising what’s possible to the point of freaking people out.
[40:05 - 40:17] Kieren: And we kind of seen later, you know, I think some of the stuff with Cardano was probably at least aggressive, I would say. But, you know, the jury was not out at that time in my eyes, right?
[40:19 - 40:29] Kieren: And Amir also was in Target because I think people just thought he wasn’t doing enough, it sounded like. And so they were both jettisoned from the project in Zug.
[40:30 - 40:45] Kieren: And I was like, they were like out on the terrace. They had like a nice sort of loft that they rented that was like the Ethereum dev house in Zug. And so I’m like watching this happen and, you know, it was kind of quite crazy.
[40:46 - 40:59] Kieren: And then actually they instated two more co-founders, so to speak, right then who kind of jumped on board the project and helped out. It was like a fun and kind of crazy trip.
[40:59 - 41:11] Kieren: Otherwise, you know, we went out in Zurich. Some people got in trouble with the cops. I won’t add more detail to that. But Zurich’s a funny place where in the U.S. we’re not used to people drinking on the street.
[41:11 - 41:21] Kieren: And in Zurich, everyone drinks on the street and a few people are in the bars. You know, it was a strange experience. We went on some hikes, you know, to a very nice part of the world, Switzerland.
[41:21 - 41:34] Kieren: But plenty of drama, you know, in the early days. I remember having a funny conversation with Mihai about, like, he had this book about, like, swarm behavior. And, you know, he learned I had a mathematical background.
[41:34 - 41:46] Kieren: We’re talking about, like, the mathematics of swarms and all that sort of thing. But, yeah, it felt nascent, intense, but disorganized.
[41:47 - 41:59] Kieren: They were also grappling with the decision on initially they wanted to have a nonprofit protocol and a for-profit. They called it a crypto Google at the time to sort of monetize the nonprofit protocol.
[41:59 - 42:11] Kieren: And plenty of blockchain companies have gone and done that sort of thing subsequently. But that was also decided at that meeting that they would be all not for profit.
[42:11 - 42:25] Kieren: Yeah. And people didn’t like it. You know, some folks started talking about brain drain. It was a mix. Some people liked it. Some didn’t. Sort of the threat being like, if you don’t do this for profit, like I’m going to leave this project kind of thing.
[42:25 - 42:40] Kieren: I think everyone sort of went off and did start their own businesses. So, you know, it is what it is. But anyways, let me pause and see if you got to tell this whole story, you know, to you guys at any point.
[42:40 - 42:52] Kieren: I think you told parts of it, not the entire thing. But yes, I didn’t realize the sort of Game of Thrones aspect happened in all of that period, short period of time.
[42:52 - 43:03] Kieren: You know, that like I knew that all that had happened behind the scenes. I think it was all like I think it was going on continually, but it came to a head all in this one meeting.
[43:03 - 43:14] Kieren: So the funny memory. We said Bitcoin Suisse was getting off the ground at that time. And we met with a guy named Nicholas, I believe, who maybe was the CEO or one of the founders.
[43:15 - 43:26] Kieren: I just Googled it. It says founder. There’s a different CEO now. But he made this funny. He’s a nice guy. and I think something happened there. I’m not quite sure. He made this funny comment. We were in an elevator.
[43:27 - 43:42] Kieren: This shows the difference between the American and Swiss Attitude. We were in an elevator and it was one of the ones where it’s kind of hand-operated and you do it yourself. The door could easily close on you and I was like, wow, we’d never have this in the US because we’re so litigious.
[43:43 - 43:48] Kieren: And he said, well, yeah, Swiss Attitude, natural selection. Anyways.
[43:50 - 43:55] Jim: I know, sometimes I think things get grandfathered in. Like some of those subway platforms in New York are pretty terrifying too.
[43:56 - 44:00] Kieren: They are, certainly, yeah. It could just be that it’s older there, right?
[44:01 - 44:01] : That makes sense.
[44:02 - 44:12] Kieren: But, yes, I think the big, other than some Zug, you know, basically what we saw, or let me see, there was growing momentum around the project.
[44:13 - 44:25] Kieren: Lots of people all over the world kind of working on it. Stuff was probably not tightly papered. papered. There’s no employment agreements probably at that time. It was like, but there was really intense excitement.
[44:26 - 44:48] Kieren: I think the belief that everyone was going to be mega successful out of it one way or another. It’s been kind of interesting to watch. Jim, do you want to talk about getting into it? I alluded to all the different clients of Ethereum and the reason why there was more than one.
[44:49 - 44:52] Kieren: Do you want to tell your report of that part now?
[44:53 - 45:10] Jim: Well, this part of the story, you know, when you were doing all that stuff I was too busy driving around the country But I came back You come back a little later like two three months later right Yeah right at the end of the summer right when you were coming back I think And that’s when I got really interested in it.
[45:10 - 45:25] Jim: I remember, like, the whole culture. So I got fascinated with the technology when I read the white paper. That’s when I realized this was something big. And I wanted to immerse myself into the world a little bit, but it was a foreign culture to me.
[45:25 - 45:42] Jim: Like we decided to, so Natasha, my wife and I, we decided just to see what this world was like. We’d try buying a little Bitcoin. And I remember we sort of, we looked a little bit at the various ways to do it.
[45:42 - 46:01] Jim: And the way we decided on was to meet someone in a coffee shop in the middle of Berkeley. And we got there and he was totally the stereotype. The dude was walking around with, like, the five-toed shoes, and we kind of, like, it all felt very salacious.
[46:01 - 46:07] Jim: We walked in with this packet of money in our hands, and we had to, like, meet this guy, and he spent most of the time, like –
[46:07 - 46:16] Kieren: Do you remember – did he use, like, local bitcoins? That was popular. I don’t know if it’s still in existence. Local bitcoins. Okay, gotcha. Sorry, go ahead, Jim.
[46:16 - 46:36] Jim: Yeah, he spent most of the time there railing against the government and how much he hated the U.S. government and all the things they – and all the terrible things they were doing. And we kind of, like, transferred the envelope over to him, and then we pulled up a computer or our phones or something, and we were, like, watching for six blocks to come by.
[46:36 - 46:40] Jim: And finally it went through, and we were finally Bitcoin owners.
[46:42 - 46:46] Kieren: Wait, did you hang out with him for an hour? or he
[46:46 - 47:04] Jim: because I think we did wait for the maybe after three he said to us like you’re welcome to stay here if you want but I find that after three it probably won’t revert or something so maybe oh I remember what it was we went out and sat in the car for another 30 minutes just in case we had to run back in again
[47:04 - 47:07] Kieren: that’s really funny
[47:07 - 47:17] Jim: yeah oh man that was our introduction to Bitcoin And then around this time, you and I started hanging up a lot.
[47:17 - 47:28] Jim: We were meeting regularly, and I was working – I had started working on the Haskell client, and I brought you in on that, and we were – we’d have, like, these coding sessions at your place.
[47:29 - 47:40] Kieren: Yeah, man. Okay, so we’ve gone to – so that’s fall 2014, right, when we started coding, or even, like – yeah.
[47:40 - 47:40] Jim: Yeah, fall 2014.
[47:42 - 47:42] : Yeah.
[47:42 - 48:09] Jim: and I was sort of laughing when you’re talking about the over promising like I was immediately fascinated by Ethereum but I also remember like trying to understand what it was at the beginning and some of some of the material out there was great but some of it was just very vague and and overbroad like I would like go to these YouTube videos and people would be like Ethereum is a new way of life it’s going to take over as a second internet and we are going to rebuild the Internet from beginning to end.
[48:10 - 48:21] Jim: And I was like, what are they talking about? And so the only way I was going to really understand this stuff, I thought, was to literally just start, like, writing code. And so, you know, you can’t hide what’s happening.
[48:21 - 48:35] Jim: Once you have, like, so I talked about the white paper, but Gavin Wood had put up a yellow paper at the same time, which talked about the technical details of the innards. And so I started looking through that and implementing that in my favorite language, Haskell.
[48:35 - 48:53] Jim: and bit by bit putting the whole EVM in Haskell code. So that’s what most of the end of the year was like until I think in December I was – so I’m from the East Coast myself.
[48:54 - 49:05] Jim: And we flew – sorry. We flew out to New York, and I met – you introduced me. You were there at the time too. You introduced me to Joe Lubin.
[49:06 - 49:28] Jim: And actually, I think before that, too, you had set up phone calls where I talked to Vitalik and Joe directly, too. So, and just more and more with the fact that we had had a working client, that we were sort of following very closely all the changes in the testnet era before things were solidified.
[49:28 - 49:37] Jim: We just got pulled more and more into that world. and I think like one of the big things sorry
[49:37 - 49:43] Kieren: we’ve been you know assuming an expert audience can you define the term client for everybody
[49:43 - 50:09] Jim: oh so it’s the software that blockchain runs on the thing about usual software is that you know like if I’m just like going to run a video game or something I just get a computer and I put the software on it and that’s my running project in a blockchain blockchain is a distributed thing, so you have to create a piece of software that can be run from anywhere in the world on multiple computers simultaneously.
[50:09 - 50:21] Jim: So you’re building sort of a world computer of chained nodes, they call them. And so we were building one of these nodes that could connect to the existing test network net at the time.
[50:22 - 50:35] Kieren: Yeah, gotcha. Perfect. Putting us in the client’s arms race, if you will. That was the point I was trying to make. I want to talk real quickly about some other things from that summer.
[50:37 - 50:44] Kieren: You guys participated in the crowd sale, did you not? That’s why you bought the Bitcoin the first time? Or did you buy it sort of first?
[50:45 - 50:46] Jim: Yeah, it took an amount.
[50:46 - 51:00] Kieren: Gotcha. So from our side, we ended up, mostly my dad, but obviously with help from the Ethereum people. They coded up a site to do the crowd sale.
[51:00 - 51:21] Kieren: So Ethereum was one of the first, maybe the first, to pioneer basically, you know, a kind of pre-funding event, if you will, where they sold the token Ether in exchange for Bitcoin to the users.
[51:21 - 51:46] Kieren: Basically an ICO, right? It was essentially an ICO. There was no name for it then. But I remember the price varied a little bit over the course of the sale, but it was like one Bitcoin to 2,000 Ether, which meant you made pretty good returns if you participated in the crowd sale and sold at the right time or still holding.
[51:48 - 52:14] Kieren: But the way it worked, it was complicated. So Ethereum itself made ICOs pretty easy. And for Bitcoin, it was basically, I think the Ethereum Foundation had to set up an address for you to send the Bitcoin to, and so that they could mint the Ether and the Genesis block for you.
[52:14 - 52:25] Kieren: And you also, but the foundation, like, you know, rightfully in decentralization terms, did not want to just hold everybody’s keys, right?
[52:25 - 52:38] Kieren: So you had to sort of generate your own keys, and the website did this and download them. And there’s these huge warnings like, you must download this file. If you lose this file, you will lose access to your funds.
[52:38 - 52:50] Kieren: And so some of the Ethereum folks coded it up, and there was some – I think they generated unique addresses for each funding event for traceability’s sake.
[52:50 - 53:01] Kieren: I’m not quite sure if they did that. Maybe there was just one Exodus address or all that sort of thing. But actually, no, there must have been just one. So we were a little bit the help desk.
[53:01 - 53:18] Kieren: Sometimes people would try to find it wouldn’t work, try to purchase Ether. And there were interesting goings on. There was like a fake Twitter account that emerged with the E and the U in Ethereum transposed.
[53:18 - 53:30] Kieren: So it looked just like Ethereum. And they had assembled, you know, 25,000 followers or something, no doubt bots that whatever hacker controlled or maybe you pay for those.
[53:30 - 54:03] Kieren: And they were offering special deals on Ether. So it went live. So this is something that’s been going on for 10 years now. I’ve heard new crypto projects when they start to get popular people start selling their tokens over Twitter even before those tokens are issued now so they’ve gotten more sophisticated but yeah so I remember reaching out to a friend of mine who was working at Twitter at the time and helping escalate the ticket because a big theft could
[54:03 - 54:36] Kieren: occur and I believed it not Jonathan configured one of the block explorers, maybe it was blockchain.info, I can’t remember, so that every time money hit a certain address, a noise would play. So we were in this room and we were in the room all day because it’s like we’re in help desk mode and we just hear the things come in and there was a schedule over like 14 days you could fund at no monetary consequence
[54:36 - 54:46] Kieren: And then the price started to go up over the course of, I believe, a 42-day sale. So all in all, I think 7,000 unique purchasers, something like that.
[54:47 - 55:02] Kieren: But it was quite an affair, right? It’s definitely more streamlined now. And to clear the way to do all of this, they got a legal opinion that they’re selling software, in essence, to people.
[55:02 - 55:12] Kieren: from a reputable law firm. And all that made it to the terms and conditions. It was a big rush to get it all done.
[55:13 - 55:27] Kieren: And then, so I think that raised, do any of you remember, it was like 22 million bucks at the time? Yeah, it was in Bitcoin. So I think it was like 20 million. Well, I remember vaguely that it was- At the time of the sale, it was 22 million.
[55:28 - 55:43] Kieren: Yeah, I think it was the biggest crowdfunding event ever or something. Yeah, I believe that’s right. It’s either one or two ever at that time and it’s since been surpassed by tons many of which were done on Ethereum.
[55:43 - 56:15] Kieren: Yeah, exactly. But yeah, I think at the time it was around or over 20 million. Yeah, that’s right. And interestingly, in the course of the sale and maybe a little bit having to do with the sale, the price of Bitcoin starts to go down. So I believe it’s 600 or so at the start of the sale. And it’s just, it’s kind of, we notice it dropping kind of continually, I guess. And maybe at the end of it, it’s like
[56:15 - 56:30] Kieren: high fours, low fives, and, you know, it’s foreshadowing. It’ll kind of go on to drop from there. But yeah, okay. So do you guys remember the experience of the funding site and all that sort of thing.
[56:31 - 56:34] Kieren: I think we were not speaking about that specific detail at that time.
[56:38 - 56:42] Jim: I remember the sites. I remember the clock on it, but I don’t remember too much else about it.
[56:43 - 56:58] Kieren: Yeah. Okay, so the crowd sale is, like, not a huge part of your memory. It’s a huge part of mine, I guess, because we were, like, dealing with all of the issues. But, Vic, were you – You were just getting kind of interested at this time, right?
[56:58 - 57:11] Kieren: Yeah, exactly. Jim basically, when he was going to buy this Bitcoin, he was like, oh, I’m going to buy this Bitcoin to participate in the crowd sale.
[57:11 - 57:24] Kieren: Do you want to participate? And I was like, you know, I’m going to feel like a real idiot if I don’t do anything. So I just, it was just some, yeah, we were just going to say like some nominal amount that we did.
[57:24 - 57:35] Kieren: And, you know, of course, it’s probably turned into the best investment I ever made. But, like, yeah, we have pulled our resources together because it was so hard. It wasn’t easy, right?
[57:35 - 57:49] Kieren: You’re, like, generating this, scroll forward speed phrases, you know, this, that, and the other. It just was mind-bogglingly complicated, you know. But, like, I think the biggest problem with the step was getting actual Bitcoin.
[57:50 - 58:06] Kieren: Like, you know, I mean, Jim was in the Bay Area, right? the part of IT and all exact things. I was in Vancouver and it wasn’t Vancouver was an early Bitcoin adopter but it was still really really hard to find anyone who would be willing to sell you Bitcoin.
[58:09 - 58:10] Kieren: Yeah.
[58:11 - 58:13] : That’s very interesting.
[58:15 - 58:26] Kieren: Yes. In any case the okay so the sale happens and now the project is funded and it’s really funded.
[58:28 - 58:41] Kieren: I suppose there are plenty of mega VC investments at that time, but the bubble years in 2020, 2021 were not heard of at this time.
[58:42 - 58:53] Kieren: Series A investments were still between $3 and $10 million. Salary is probably a little lower than they are now back then. this was a lot of money.
[58:53 - 59:13] Kieren: And so the Ethereum folks then kind of it was very technically driven. They kicked in all of their technical dreams, so to speak. So Jim’s point about the really big claims they really were in a sense trying to create a whole new internet.
[59:14 - 59:27] Kieren: A couple examples. So not just the proliferation of clients, right? they’re going to make a browser, the MIST browser. They’re going to make a peer-to-peer messaging system called Whisper.
[59:28 - 59:43] Kieren: They’re going to make a decentralized file storage system. They chose to make a virtual machine like Java, and we always thought that JavaScript was the better analogy because it kind of won on the internet.
[59:43 - 59:54] Kieren: Has anyone ever seen an applet in the last 15, 20 years? but they made multiple languages that would compile to the EVM and you know there’s some benefits to that.
[59:55 - 1:00:11] Kieren: It’s definitely evolved over time. I don’t know. Do you have a more specific memory of, like, they were making a lot of stuff? Can you get into the experience of trying to make something compatible with what they were doing at that time?
[1:00:12 - 1:00:26] Jim: Well, once I found the yellow paper, it wasn’t as difficult because that centered me around the blockchain part of it. But it was that earlier marketing material that was very confusing to me because they would talk about, you know, you would have these videos like what is Ethereum?
[1:00:27 - 1:00:37] Jim: And then it would just go off onto all these things like you mentioned, a browser, a messaging system. And I think there was even some talk in there about replacing TCP IP or something.
[1:00:37 - 1:01:00] Jim: I can’t remember. Some of these things actually came into being. Some of these didn’t. And so I think my learning process was like first realizing what blockchain was, but then like digging a little deeper and being confused that I didn’t really know what was happening because I thought this was going to be a blockchain project, and then they were talking about writing browsers.
[1:01:01 - 1:01:12] Jim: And then realizing when I saw the yellow paper that, yeah, this is the core of what Ethereum is. That other stuff is sort of like pipe dream stuff that may or may not come to being. But, yeah.
[1:01:13 - 1:01:22] Jim: So that’s how it went. And then once I got the concrete testnet work, then I understood what was going on.
[1:01:24 - 1:01:35] Kieren: Gotcha. Yeah, yeah. It was wild. So, and I’m struggling to remember the timing on all of this.
[1:01:35 - 1:01:59] Kieren: Actually, no, I’ll go to kind of CryptoEconomicon first. and then so now we’re going into January or so 2015 so a couple times Vitalik visits the Bay Area a bunch did you remember, we went to a couple meetups with Vitalik, did we not?
[1:02:01 - 1:02:01] Kieren: he was
[1:02:01 - 1:02:16] Jim: super casual, I remember it’s funny because now he’s famous but in those days we would just sort of hang out with him after the meetings and he would kind of like go and bum a couch to sleep on in the night.
[1:02:16 - 1:02:22] Jim: One time we like drove him to somebody that he found a couch to sleep on. Just fun, casual times.
[1:02:23 - 1:02:36] Kieren: Yeah, there was, I think he, so he won the Teal Fellowship, so there were like beds there, and I have a memory of, I think we drove, there was a meetup in like the South Bay, and like you drove him into the city or something like that.
[1:02:36 - 1:02:54] Kieren: There was a crypto castle in SF at that time that we occasionally visited. Zal couldn’t hang out there. You know, it was – I imagine he still, you know, really has his little need for creature comforts.
[1:02:54 - 1:03:03] Kieren: I’m sure he could procure whatever he likes. But, you know, it was funny times for sure. He’s probably put some really nice couches nowadays. Really nice couches.
[1:03:03 - 1:03:04] Jim: I would hope.
[1:03:05 - 1:03:22] Kieren: Yeah. But so I can’t even remember quite how we got the idea, but we were talking about, for whatever reason, a bunch of people were going to be in the Bay Area late January 2015.
[1:03:22 - 1:03:54] Kieren: and we decided to and I had also, so through Steve through Ben Lorica, who was a great guy who was at the time sort of the, I think he was head of data science but also really the kind of head of content for O’Reilly’s conferences and that sort of thing we booked a conference at Fort Mason and I had a co-host named Lorne Lance, also running a crypto startup these days, I believe.
[1:03:54 - 1:04:07] Kieren: Also a great guy. And we – so given that the conference was on the calendar and we knew a bunch of people, in part for the conference, but I think something else was going on too, would be in the Bay Area at that time.
[1:04:07 - 1:04:18] Kieren: We decided to run kind of a parallel technical conference that week, which we named the verbose Crypto Economicon.
[1:04:18 - 1:04:45] Kieren: on. I think the term crypto economics either was invented or popularized by Vitalik. There’s also this guy named Vlad, I don’t know quite how to pronounce his last name, who’s working a lot with Vitalik on proof of stake and other things and went on to start his own, I think, fairly successful crypto project, the name of which is currently escaping me. Well, he was on proof of stake for a long time, right? Like, then he…
[1:04:45 - 1:04:51] Kieren: He did. Yeah, but I think he… Yeah, I think he did it for the foundation for a while, but then started his own thing sometime later.
[1:04:54 - 1:04:54] : Funny guy.
[1:04:54 - 1:05:13] Kieren: He would say, like, crypto economics. Is it crypto or is it economics? And it certainly never really stuck, but that was the theme of the conference. So, we had, like, two academic track days and a business track day, I believe, and we had a bunch of speakers…
[1:05:13 - 1:05:30] Kieren: one of whom spoke at the O’Reilly meeting and then would also speak at Crypto Economicon. The building we did it in, it was co-hosted with a company called Coinify, which I don’t believe exists anymore.
[1:05:31 - 1:05:46] Kieren: A nice guy named Tom Ding. But I guess Tom Ding had some good plug-ins for capital and access with the Chinese government. Do you remember the details around who owned that building?
[1:05:47 - 1:05:58] Kieren: I think it was some construction conglomerate. I remember him going, like, what does this have to do with construction? It didn’t have anything to do with Tuck at all.
[1:05:58 - 1:06:06] Kieren: Like, it was just, that’s the thing I remember most about it. So, yeah, so in this, sorry, Gertrude.
[1:06:07 - 1:06:12] Jim: I should say I should point out that you guys met each other at this conference, too. We met each other.
[1:06:12 - 1:06:24] Kieren: We had already been having conversations online, I think, because you guys would get together and we’d chat sometimes. But we’d never actually met each other in person until that conference.
[1:06:25 - 1:06:35] Kieren: Yeah, it was like a month or two or three in, I think, at that time. Yeah. And it was like a cast of characters.
[1:06:35 - 1:06:50] Kieren: Like the O’Reilly conference is a little more shiny corporate. Yeah, I don’t know, 300, 400 attendees, something like that. Pretty successful. The crypto economics conference was great, but kind of crazy.
[1:06:50 - 1:07:03] Kieren: There was a guy whose name is escaping me in these, like, smart guy, very tight bike shorts. And he kept, like, raising his hand. And, you know, I think he had, like, a defense background.
[1:07:05 - 1:07:16] Kieren: I’m trying to – IBM had a big speaking slot. At the time, they were promoting Ethereum plus some other technologies as, like, the key to their IoT stack.
[1:07:18 - 1:07:36] Kieren: I’m trying to even remember who all was on it. Okay, I actually looked this up. So the participants, like, it was a very small group of people, like, I think 20, 25. But among that group of people was, so, yeah, Vladivit Proof of Stake was there.
[1:07:37 - 1:07:48] Kieren: Vitalik was there. So, you know, Gavin was there who was working on Ethereum but later went on to do PokéDoc. Dominic, who went to do, you know, Internet Computer, was there. I think Jaquan was there.
[1:07:48 - 1:07:49] Jim: Jaquan was there.
[1:07:50 - 1:08:02] Kieren: Who, you know, went off to do Cosmos. Like, a bunch of Bitcoin Core devs were there. You know, it was just a crazy group of people to be like.
[1:08:03 - 1:08:16] Kieren: Like, if you looked at the amount of talent, like, I know people are talking about the PayPal mafia. That was like the crypto mafia, right? Like it was like everyone who went off, you know, almost everyone in that room went off to do a pretty successful project.
[1:08:17 - 1:08:28] Kieren: And but they were like, I remember being in that room and kind of like we started talking and I was really starting on my journey about learning about Ethereum.
[1:08:28 - 1:08:39] Kieren: And I was just completely baffled. Like I spent probably 90% of the time on Wikipedia, like trying to figure out like, what does the Byzantine General’s problem have to do with technology?
[1:08:41 - 1:08:54] Kieren: Why are they talking about this? You know, like, or, you know, like snarks, what are snarks? Like, you know, I remember like, look at like trying to madly keep up with these things. But it was just being in that room was exciting.
[1:08:54 - 1:09:11] Kieren: Like you could, it was the first time that I ever totally clicked in that what they were trying to do was a new kind of computing platform. And that like, you know, because it always got overshadowed by the financial money crypto aspect of it.
[1:09:11 - 1:09:19] Kieren: Right. But you could in that room, it was very different. It was just like everyone was really focused on like, OK, how do we build this world computer?
[1:09:19 - 1:09:20] : right so like
[1:09:20 - 1:09:25] Kieren: and yeah like I mean the talent level was off the chart in that room
[1:09:25 - 1:09:28] : like it’s just amazing yeah
[1:09:28 - 1:09:50] Kieren: Vicki should tell the Robin Hanson story for the context of the listener if we forget any Robin Hanson is a really smart guy kind of famous sort of quite technical economist George Mason or something like that Good Twitter policy. You should follow him.
[1:09:51 - 1:10:01] Kieren: Well, he invented prediction markets, basically. Yeah, pretty much. He’s the father of prediction markets. So, you know, and to be clear, Robin Hanson is way smarter than I’ll ever be.
[1:10:01 - 1:10:08] Kieren: But, like, so I was in that conference madly, you know, in Wikipedia for the three days ahead of O’Reilly.
[1:10:09 - 1:10:13] Jim: We ourselves were all pretty new to blockchain. Yeah, that’s true.
[1:10:13 - 1:10:26] Kieren: And people were going really, really deep into these conceptual things. But after those three days was the O’Reilly Conference.
[1:10:27 - 1:10:42] Kieren: And at one point in the O’Reilly Conference, they had a lunch where everyone sat around these big tables and kind of a networking part of it. And I remember Robin was like one of the panelists on some panel about blockchain.
[1:10:42 - 1:11:12] Kieren: and he was asking me like oh you know what do I do and what what was I here for and we had a conversation and I just kind of summarized a few things that I’d learned over the past three days and so we had this conversation and I said you know it’s not really about money it’s about you know building this world computer and all these things and he basically got on stage and reiterated a bunch of things I told him during lunch and everyone was like how did Robin become I’m a blockchain expert.
[1:11:13 - 1:11:20] Kieren: Like, he’s really on the cutting edge of where this technology is, you know. But it was just amazing, you know.
[1:11:23 - 1:11:23] : Yes.
[1:11:24 - 1:11:36] Kieren: Yeah. It was, yeah, there’s quite a room of people. We had some other, we had, so Robin’s also a bit of a futurist. We had another kind of, quote, futurist guy named Steve Omohundro.
[1:11:36 - 1:11:49] Kieren: I don’t know how to pronounce it. He’s a super smart guy as well. And I’ve not really spoken to him in a long time. but it was, I think there was this, you know, an energy in the air that was quite palpable.
[1:11:50 - 1:12:05] Kieren: And so it kind of, I don’t know, did this, it was a big thing that convinced us to start our company, I would say. I think the thing that kind of convinced us was like, it was like being in two rooms, right?
[1:12:05 - 1:12:22] Kieren: There was Cryptonomicon where it was like, everyone was talking about this new kind of computing platform and all the things it could do. And then there was the O’Reilly conference where you had a bunch of big bankers, you know, like Reid Hoffman was there and people, and they were talking about money, like this was about money.
[1:12:22 - 1:12:38] Kieren: And like it was clear that they didn’t know what was really going on in the other room, like that, you know, something much, much bigger was happening. And I think that convinced us like, oh, we could build a bridge between these two worlds.
[1:12:38 - 1:12:52] Kieren: Yeah, I remember that distinctly. It was such a funny time. Big headliners at the O’Reilly conference. Reid Hoffman, I think Balaji spoke.
[1:12:52 - 1:13:26] Kieren: Yeah, something like that. Bill Janeway I believe and some others Okay I want to shift gears to the client race which we hit on But at this point, I got really into it. So I was never, I learned in school enough how to program software, but was not a, you know, professional quality software developer. And I kind of learned enough of that quickly on the job with Jim. So as Jim alluded to, we would meet up at my
[1:13:26 - 1:13:37] Kieren: Berkeley apartment. I think first we were meeting at one on Telegraph, just north of Ashby.
[1:13:38 - 1:13:52] Kieren: Yeah, just right by the Oakland border. And then later we met at a different one, very close to campus, like Bancroft and Telegraph. And, you know, so it was an open source project.
[1:13:54 - 1:14:05] Kieren: And there was the, because lots of people were making their own versions of it, there was sort of a, like I said, a fight for the definition of it, which is in the end settled by the yellow paper.
[1:14:06 - 1:14:20] Kieren: But, you know, can you talk a little bit about that time where we’re just coding really hard, you and I, and just like trying to keep pace with the spec, et cetera?
[1:14:20 - 1:14:53] Jim: well yeah i mean uh it was fun and frustrating at the same time because um i think that the ethereum foundation was trying pretty hard to put the specs out there but still things were changing faster than like the yellow paper could could keep up to things so i would just uh like have something to the point where it was connecting and communicating and running running the virtual machine. And then like, uh, next day I’d come in and it completely wouldn’t work. And, uh, maybe,
[1:14:53 - 1:15:14] Jim: maybe a few weeks later, like the yellow paper would be updated to explain why. But in the meantime, the only way that I could sort of figure stuff out was to just go and get one of the other clients and read how in the world are they getting this thing to work? And there was one point when they added encryption to the connect to the connection that essentially changed the protocol completely. I connected and nothing was working anymore.
[1:15:14 - 1:15:18] Jim: I had to just dig in. Yeah, that was…
[1:15:18 - 1:15:34] Kieren: You had repressed that memory. So, mostly Jim figured all of this out, but the Ethereum people put, for the technical audience, kind of the equivalent of something like SSL into the product.
[1:15:35 - 1:16:01] Kieren: So, they put end-to-end encryption in and there’s a complex like handshake and then like a session was created between peers and yada yada and so it’s really hard to implement stuff like that because all of the mess you’re getting back is encrypted so you have to get it totally perfect and then it makes sense but if you don’t get it perfect nothing makes sense and you don’t know why I was just
[1:16:01 - 1:16:16] Jim: irrational about it like I was like I didn’t care whether this was good or bad for the product I was actually genuinely confused, too, because you have, like, this open network that anyone can connect to, but you want to encrypt everything that’s going on.
[1:16:16 - 1:16:26] Jim: It took me a while to figure out why that actually happened. I was asking around in various, like, DM services. I don’t remember where I used to go and talk to people.
[1:16:27 - 1:16:29] Jim: And I found the person who asked.
[1:16:29 - 1:16:40] Kieren: There were giant Skype threads, I remember, at the time. Oh, my God. It was like huge, like, this was like, I think we weren’t even using Slack yet. It was like there was tons of Skype.
[1:16:40 - 1:17:00] Kieren: Slack was just getting popular at this time. Ethereum had a Slack. Consensus had a Slack. We can get a consensus story a little bit. And the, but, yeah, we had a Skype thread for some reason, you know, like just because it was the thing that people used for a threaded discussion group.
[1:17:00 - 1:17:04] Kieren: WhatsApp maybe wasn’t popular, not for this purpose, you know.
[1:17:05 - 1:17:16] Jim: I dug around a while to figure out why in the world encryption had even been added to this. And I kept getting sort of like, oh, we want to make sure that this information is private.
[1:17:16 - 1:17:28] Jim: And I was like, it doesn’t make sense. I can connect anywhere and see this stuff. Finally found one of the people that had implemented it. And the idea wasn’t crazy. It had nothing to do with, I mean, I guess it had something to do with encryption.
[1:17:29 - 1:17:43] Jim: But their thought process was that it was more about identity. They wanted – once you join, you wanted to have essentially like a cert that verified that you are who you say you are. And they wanted that there for the various extensions that they were putting in.
[1:17:43 - 1:18:02] Jim: And so, okay, that wasn’t crazy. It was very annoying to me to spend a week of my life trying to implement this. But the other thing that’s kind of funny is that, and maybe, Kieran, you know more from talking to people over the summer, but there was sort of a distrust in standards.
[1:18:04 - 1:18:23] Jim: And so, like, I think, like, the thing a usual software engineer would do is be to actually get SSL and implement it with that. or to take, like, I don’t know, hash algorithms that had, like, a corporate sample of approval and put that in.
[1:18:23 - 1:18:43] Jim: But they always wanted to sort of, like, put things a little bit outside of there because I think they feared maybe truthfully of backdoors in all of these things. And so I essentially had to go and get a lot of nonstandard encryption algorithms and paste them together into an SSL-like thing.
[1:18:45 - 1:18:59] Kieren: Yeah, I can add a little bit on that. I would say the building blocks were at least semi-standard. They used the same elliptic curve as Bitcoin for the actual signatures and transferring the money and all that.
[1:19:01 - 1:19:13] Kieren: The algorithms that went into the reinvention of SSL, like I think the building blocks were just normal stuff. They didn’t invent hashing algorithms or signing algorithms and all that sort of thing.
[1:19:13 - 1:19:18] Kieren: But the composition is something you have to be quite careful about. They weren’t just inventing encryption.
[1:19:19 - 1:19:26] Jim: So they were taking things that were approved of, but they weren’t taking things that were the standards. Exactly.
[1:19:26 - 1:19:41] Kieren: That’s right. And I think it did have to do a little bit with backdoor fear. But also, I remember a comment one time like, you know, TCP has never been proven to be able to be the backbone of a peer-to-peer network.
[1:19:41 - 1:19:55] Kieren: And there was some like, like I think BitTorrent, you know, maybe it was UDP or something and plus something proprietary on top. There was the belief that the existing protocols were insufficient.
[1:19:55 - 1:20:10] Kieren: and it might be right. It also might be just like, going back to the point, like they had a lot of money at this point. Like they wanted to rebuild everything. So I think it’s probably some mix of those things.
[1:20:11 - 1:20:24] Jim: I mean, for instance, the hashing algorithm that they chose to use in the early days was, they were calling it SHA-3. But SHA-3 hadn’t been finalized at that point in time.
[1:20:24 - 1:20:39] Jim: So they were sort of like taking the proposal. And so I went and got the code in the Haskell code base that did the proposed SHA-3 at that point in time.
[1:20:40 - 1:20:50] Jim: And then one day I kind of like went into the, I think like the C++ client and looked around, and they started calling it Ketchik. And I was like, what’s going on here?
[1:20:50 - 1:21:10] Jim: Why did they change the algorithm? But it was still connecting to what I had there. So I was a little bit confused, and I found out later what had happened was there had been a last-minute change in SHA-3, and the Ethereum team felt that this was a government backdoor that was being put in there, and they refused to put that change in.
[1:21:10 - 1:21:22] Jim: And so they stuck with the original proposal, which was called Ketchik, which is something that I had already implemented there, but they aren’t technically SHA-3 anymore.
[1:21:22 - 1:21:22] Jim: so
[1:21:22 - 1:21:26] Kieren: yeah okay I have a vague memory
[1:21:26 - 1:21:30] Jim: I’m not saying it was a government vector I don’t know one or the other but that was their belief
[1:21:30 - 1:21:52] Kieren: can you talk a little bit about okay you’re talking to Roman some at this time who’s Roman you know what was going on I also remember like the issue of sync and I want you to say it but I’ll prompt you if need be.
[1:21:53 - 1:22:10] Jim: Oh, well, I remember SyncSpeed was… Okay, so… Yeah. Yeah. You know, there were kind of like two tiers of software developers in the original sort of test net.
[1:22:10 - 1:22:31] Jim: There were like those who were around from the beginning. I was not in that group, you know, again, driving around country. but so and that included I guess Python which was Vitalik’s C++ and Geff were first year was there another first year I’m trying to remember
[1:22:31 - 1:22:46] Kieren: I think those were the three like foundation less sponsored ones was in the original group but then it got kind of Pulled out, perhaps?
[1:22:46 - 1:22:54] Kieren: Pulled out, yeah. Okay. Roman might have worked for the foundation for a bit. Yeah, gotcha.
[1:22:54 - 1:23:11] Jim: I think he’s a little mysterious to me because I first thought he was part of the foundation, but then I found out later he had been someone who came in a little bit later, and then maybe there was some, I don’t know, again, maybe you know more than I do, Kieren, but there was maybe some arguing there or something, and so they weren’t really communicating with him as much.
[1:23:12 - 1:23:21] Jim: Don’t know if I got that right. but so yeah so Roman was the Java client what was Roman’s last name?
[1:23:22 - 1:23:37] Kieren: Mandelay I don’t know how to pronounce it M-A-N-D-E-L E-I-L something like that it was Roman who did Java Gavin was doing C++ and Jeff was doing Go
[1:23:37 - 1:23:38] : I think
[1:23:38 - 1:23:51] Jim: but Roman and I were the later guys and I did the Haskell client And Roman may or may not have been in the Ethereum Foundation. I was not in the Ethereum Foundation, but I met with those guys a number of times.
[1:23:55 - 1:24:06] Jim: But the thing that everybody, I guess what you were alluding to, I’m not sure what precisely the story I was looking for, but it was SyncSpeed was the thing that everybody would compete against.
[1:24:06 - 1:24:22] Jim: And I remember going to various meetups, and Roman would always kind of run up to me, And he’s like, how long does it take you to sync up to a million blocks in the test net now? And so there was always, like, this competitiveness around sync speed, which is an important thing.
[1:24:22 - 1:24:29] Jim: But, you know, there are other things, too. And so everybody was just rushing to get sync speed faster and faster at that point in time.
[1:24:30 - 1:24:43] Kieren: Yeah, the thing I wanted to capture is, like, in some ways, one that seemed like a little juvenile at the time. But it was also genius. Like, you’ve got a lot of technical energy all focused around this one thing, Ethereum.
[1:24:44 - 1:24:57] Kieren: Like, these people probably could have, like, tried to make their own Ethereum-like blockchain or Bitcoin-like blockchain or all that sort of thing. But, you know, it was sort of open source, may the best get merged sort of, you know, attitude.
[1:24:57 - 1:25:28] Kieren: And that it probably made for a better product at the end of the day. that was kind of the main point that like yeah it was it felt like you know nerdy kids playing with things but like it kind of worked you know I also remember like they you know they flooded the test nets with like giant blocks of data at some point you know there was a lot of I felt like the you know people were
[1:25:28 - 1:25:53] Kieren: treating it like this was like a spacecraft launch. You had to really stress test it because it’s going to be the new world computer. And so in some ways, while the development was far more incremental than like a Bitcoin, there was still very stringent and perhaps unrealistic scenario testing that was going on before the launch.
[1:25:54 - 1:26:25] Kieren: I think one thing that’s kind of interesting about it also is that It was very meritocratic, right? And, like, there was all this competition going on. But even though like you know Gavin was technically CTO and you know Vitalik is obvious Vitalik But like they didn win Like the one that won was Jeff Go client You could imagine in any other scenario they could have just put their foot down and said no, we’re going to go with Python or no, we’re going to go with C++.
[1:26:25 - 1:26:30] Kieren: But they went with the one that actually performed the best and was doing the best.
[1:26:31 - 1:26:41] Jim: It was a surprise to me. I was always treating C++ as the reference client. And Gavin was sort of more of a spokesman over there at the time.
[1:26:42 - 1:26:54] Jim: Jeff was sort of quieter. And at the last minute, I think there was some discussion about they needed to go through a security audit.
[1:26:55 - 1:27:07] Jim: And the story I heard, I don’t know if it’s true or not, is that they chose to do Geth first, thinking that C++ would be the last thing, and they would put that out there. But he kind of quietly went through that.
[1:27:08 - 1:27:19] Jim: And honestly, I don’t know, maybe I’ll step on toes saying this, but, like, from using all of these clients, the Geth was the most stable at the time. I would always, like, I would start it and it would run.
[1:27:19 - 1:27:28] Jim: C++ was changing a lot, and so often I would start it, and, oh, it’s not working today. I think that plus the security audit pushed it over, and people used that one a lot.
[1:27:30 - 1:27:41] Kieren: Yeah, yeah, I have a similar memory. And, of course, Gavin went on later to create Parity, the Rust version, which I think got pretty popular.
[1:27:41 - 1:27:54] Kieren: I’m not quite sure where it stands today. So talking about security, I want to hone in on the theme of the shifting launch date.
[1:27:54 - 1:28:07] Kieren: Do you remember our Victor, too? So, you know, we had started to work on kind of a company related to all this, and we’re getting worried because they kept adding more stuff, basically.
[1:28:09 - 1:28:14] Kieren: Can you kind of go into our, you know, anything you remember from that time?
[1:28:14 - 1:28:28] Jim: It would have continued except for a bit of unluck that in a way was lucky, is what ended up happening is Bitcoin crashed at that time. And it really put the fire under everybody’s feet.
[1:28:28 - 1:28:43] Jim: that they had to get this thing out immediately because their holdings were in Bitcoin. And so I think if that hadn’t happened, there wouldn’t have been the pressure to push it out right then and there, and they might have just kept adding and modifying indefinitely after that.
[1:28:45 - 1:29:01] Kieren: So I believe the foundation was paying people sort of denominated in the fiat currency, but with Bitcoin. So, you know, if it’s X number of thousand euro or USD per month, the Bitcoin amount would vary.
[1:29:02 - 1:29:14] Kieren: And yes, to that end, everyone, I remember in that room in Zug, you know, there was discussion of like, well, what if Bitcoin goes to 10,000? Because that would be really high at that time.
[1:29:14 - 1:29:27] Kieren: Like we shouldn’t convert it. And they ended up being right. You know, I think the prudent move would have been at least some diversification in the Treasury.
[1:29:28 - 1:29:45] Kieren: I believe they kept it all in Bitcoin and paid it out, I think, in Bitcoin. But again, you know, the amount would vary. And of course, some bills just had to be in euro or whatever, Swiss francs or USD.
[1:29:45 - 1:29:56] Kieren: And so there was no avoiding the fact that Runway was shrinking from, you know, having brought in the roughly 22 million, ramping up big dev teams, a lot of redundancy.
[1:29:56 - 1:30:08] Kieren: So I think three full dev teams for the clients, maybe half a dev team for Python, because it was kind of just metallic working out how it all works. It was not going to be as fast as the others because it was Python.
[1:30:10 - 1:30:21] Kieren: Then it was, I think they started paying the JavaScript people later. There’s development of the MIS browser. There’s, you know, the libraries and tooling started getting going.
[1:30:21 - 1:30:40] Kieren: They were doing a lot, and almost all of it was technical. Not too much had a business development focus. And, yeah, then the price drops, and suddenly what had gone, I believe they had forecast a 2016 launch timeline.
[1:30:40 - 1:30:51] Kieren: and it got moved up to maybe July 2015. So we’re sitting there in March. We’re like, oh, you’re telling us the thing is going to launch in 2016.
[1:30:51 - 1:31:03] Kieren: Like, should we be doing this? And then it moves up. And it was great that it moved up. Jim, do you recall, do you remember how you predicted roughly when it would launch?
[1:31:05 - 1:31:06] Jim: No, I’m not sure what you were referring to.
[1:31:06 - 1:31:20] Kieren: I think you plotted a commit graph where like it was like commits by day in the Ethereum repo I don’t remember this
[1:31:20 - 1:31:24] Jim: but okay I don’t doubt I did it yeah and so like the
[1:31:24 - 1:31:36] Kieren: July date called a couple was after the deadline had been moved a couple times so basically they’re running out of money they move the deadline the launch date way up right and
[1:31:36 - 1:31:43] Jim: I don’t remember this, but I remember thinking very heavily about how it had been changing very quickly, and then it slowed down, and I was happy.
[1:31:44 - 1:32:00] Kieren: And I will say, that 2016 date happened after a series of changing dates. Because we were like, hey, we want to launch this company, but we were still connected to hopefully the LiveNet at the time.
[1:32:00 - 1:32:12] Kieren: And so we were trying to time our thing, and they were changing dates all the time, too. And so I think the 2016 date was like the sort of last one before they kind of changed their mind and refocused.
[1:32:12 - 1:32:23] Kieren: There were many eras, which everyone has copied since. There’s like, this is the Serenity. What were all the names? Serenity after it launched. There’s like Metropolis. Serenity.
[1:32:23 - 1:32:23] Kieren: Serenity.
[1:32:24 - 1:32:24] Jim: You know.
[1:32:25 - 1:32:47] Kieren: They were like epochs where like there would be testing of the software. And they intended to stay in testnet for quite a long time. That’s the upshot. And I think they ended up, like, crediting some of the testnet mined Ether, like, 1 to 10 or 10 to 1 against real Ether, so 10% of the value for the people who mined on the testnet.
[1:32:47 - 1:33:02] Kieren: So they made it kind of progressively more real, but it really was fortuitous that there was that price crash because we might never have seen – it might have never seen the light of day. So many of the – I think you didn’t even elucidate, like, all of the projects.
[1:33:02 - 1:33:12] Kieren: There was a Raspberry Pi claim. I forgot about the Raspberry Pi claim. There were so many projects. We were like, what is going on here?
[1:33:14 - 1:33:27] Kieren: They built, okay, so there were many different, I think I said, there was Serpent, which was the Python-like language that compiled EVM. There’s Solidity, which won.
[1:33:29 - 1:33:39] Kieren: C++ lost, but Solidity won. And Solidity was kind of put together by Gavin. It’s sort of a C, JavaScript-looking language.
[1:33:41 - 1:33:44] Kieren: There was another one. LL. Yeah, LL.
[1:33:45 - 1:33:48] Jim: LL was like a list-like language. Yeah, it was like list-like.
[1:33:49 - 1:33:57] Kieren: To some extent, it let the developers just be free to do things that developers always want to do, like build peer-to-peer messaging systems, write compilers, you know.
[1:33:58 - 1:34:01] Jim: It was like, but it works. Exactly, yeah.
[1:34:02 - 1:34:15] Kieren: Yeah, that was funny. Okay, let’s go to, because we can get close to wrapping up here, and if there’s interest, we could do another one of these, because there’s lots after the launch.
[1:34:16 - 1:34:26] Kieren: Let’s go to kind of right before the launch. Okay, so as we’re talking about the launch run-up, a bunch of interesting things happened.
[1:34:26 - 1:34:50] Kieren: One, we had started to some extent working as part of ConsenSys, so we kind of joined the company and they function sort of as an incubator basically for us and plenty of other firms concepts some of which stayed in house some of which also spun out Brooklyn was awesome too
[1:34:50 - 1:34:59] Jim: I had never been to Williamsburg or Bushwick and it was sort of moving in various locations there so I used to love coming and hanging out at the offices
[1:34:59 - 1:35:09] Kieren: It was, yeah, it was, Contestas got the famous office on Bogart, but first was at an office by the water in Williamsburg. In Greenport.
[1:35:10 - 1:35:15] Kieren: It was in Greenport. I remember getting completely lost at one point in finding it.
[1:35:16 - 1:35:31] Jim: Yeah, Williamsburg is great. I remember, like, sitting there one day, and all of a sudden, everybody came screaming in, and they were filming an episode of Girls Outside. And so I ran outside and watched them film an episode of Girls or part of an episode of Girls, not the whole episode.
[1:35:31 - 1:35:31] Jim: No.
[1:35:32 - 1:35:33] : Wow.
[1:35:33 - 1:35:48] Kieren: Yeah, that was – okay, so that’s early – wasn’t that March, April? Yeah, I think it was April, May kind of thing. Well, we moved into the Bogart office just before the launch of Ethereum.
[1:35:48 - 1:35:56] Kieren: In fact, one of the reasons we moved into that office a little bit earlier was that we’d have enough space to do a bigger hackathon.
[1:35:57 - 1:35:57] : Right.
[1:35:58 - 1:36:10] Kieren: Right. Okay. Yeah, I do remember that. So, you know, so we’re frantically building the software. We’re starting to work with people from within ConsenSys.
[1:36:10 - 1:36:21] Kieren: So we had some folks join the project, some of whom have gone on to big blockchain success. Should we tell the Tim story?
[1:36:22 - 1:36:35] Kieren: Well, yeah. I mean, Tim, the founder of Truffle, helped us kind of build our first blockchain explorer. I mean, he was a brilliant developer back then and still remains a brilliant developer.
[1:36:35 - 1:37:08] Kieren: Aaron I think helped us who went on to build MetaMask we had lots of conversations with him about how to create our Rust API and how it would work I met up a couple times at my place in Berkeley with Aaron also, it was funny, these folks would just come by and now they’re different levels of a big deal I feel like you should tell the hard hitting version of the Tibbs story Just a little bit, because it was funny in retrospect, right?
[1:37:08 - 1:37:19] Kieren: Well, I think the thing is that we were really focused on, at the time, I think the first idea that we had with BlockApps was that we would create like a REST API.
[1:37:21 - 1:37:33] Kieren: And we, you know, I come from sort of a lean startup background. Like we really wanted to push deadlines. And at the time, people were more in an exploration mode.
[1:37:33 - 1:37:45] Kieren: They were trying to do different things. And I was kind of ratcheting up the pressure to kind of present this at some, I don’t know if it was a conference or some meetup in a particular night.
[1:37:45 - 1:37:58] Kieren: And, you know, as I kind of ratcheted up the pressure to do that, people were like, you know, I think I want to kind of pursue my other interests instead of like working in this high pressure environment.
[1:37:59 - 1:38:10] Kieren: And, you know, like a lot of early consensus was like that. Like it was like different working styles and different methodologies. But in the end, it was kind of amazing. Like, you know, the people who did stuff.
[1:38:12 - 1:38:32] Kieren: Yeah, I would say lots of really smart people and a lot of flow between projects. It was amorphous at the beginning. There was a lot of excitement, but it was also hard to, like, get someone who was assigned to your team to, like, do the thing you expected.
[1:38:33 - 1:38:42] Kieren: Well, that’s the thing is that there weren’t team assignments, right? Like there weren’t the teams. I mean, we had – They were suggested, you know.
[1:38:42 - 1:38:42] Jim: Exactly.
[1:38:43 - 1:38:58] Kieren: But, you know, people were just flowing in and out, which is great for creativity, but it was hard when you were trying to make a deadline because, you know, when you’re trying to make a deadline, there’s always sort of not great things you have to do, right?
[1:38:58 - 1:39:00] Kieren: Like you’ve got to work really long hours and that kind of stuff.
[1:39:01 - 1:39:02] : Yeah.
[1:39:02 - 1:39:13] Kieren: And let me see. I felt – so we kind of looked and saw, you know, in our early approach, some success at API companies.
[1:39:13 - 1:39:41] Kieren: Like Chain.com was at the time touting a big list of customers that used their API. They then pivoted to a couple other things a more enterprise outlook and then they kind of a little bit pivoted back and then were eventually bought by sort of bought by Stellar I believe So there’s some precedent for like, okay, let’s have an API, let’s make this really easy for people to use, and this being the Ethereum network itself.
[1:39:42 - 1:40:00] Kieren: And I think we found pretty strong resistance to this idea. Oh, yeah. Do you want to talk more about this? So I think while you guys were working on the client, what I was trying to do was build, you know, like smart contract based applications.
[1:40:00 - 1:40:12] Kieren: Right. And it was really like you described some of the tooling. Right. Which was missed and like for front ends. And, you know, the languages were constantly changing.
[1:40:12 - 1:40:26] Kieren: Like a lot of this seemed to be an afterthought. Like, OK, we’re going to solve that later on down the puzzle. But it was impossible to build an application, share it around, just get something running quickly, you know.
[1:40:27 - 1:40:44] Kieren: And so we like, you know, my background was like web and mobile startups. And like the first thing you look for is a REST API. And I thought like, OK, if we’re ever going to get this ecosystem to really work, we need to have something like that so people can build these applications on.
[1:40:44 - 1:40:53] Kieren: you know, we couldn’t cobble together all these tools. But yeah, we got a lot of resistance to it because… It was like we were speaking Martian to people.
[1:40:54 - 1:41:02] Jim: Like, these were people that they had no, like, interest in, like, anything that sounded a little bit corporate-y, so…
[1:41:02 - 1:41:16] Kieren: Well, it wasn’t even corporate-y. It was more like, like, you know, like… There was a general suspicion of servers. I remember the phrase, like, yeah, I don’t know if I want to work anything on anything that involves any servers.
[1:41:16 - 1:41:47] Kieren: I remember at the time, you know, like a peer-to-peer network, it’s like every peer is both a client and a server. Like, you know, it’s sort of kind of intrinsic, you know. Yeah, there was a lot of belief in the time that effectively everyone would run a node, and like, you know, like at some point you’d run a node in your browser or run a node on your phone, and I’m like, look, I ran a mobile application company. I know how big these clients are.
[1:41:47 - 1:42:00] Kieren: I don’t want my fur flow. Things are going to get very hot. Exactly, like burning my ass, sitting in my pocket, trying to mine ether. It was just very strange, these kind of conversations.
[1:42:01 - 1:42:01] : Yeah.
[1:42:04 - 1:42:15] Kieren: Concurrently, more aligned with our perspective, Consensus grew an enterprise team, which focused sort of on advising big corporates on blockchain and then implementing it for them.
[1:42:16 - 1:42:28] Kieren: And we kind of worked with them on go-to-market even before the launch of Ethereum, more after. So we kind of hold on that discussion, maybe for a subsequent episode.
[1:42:29 - 1:42:45] Kieren: But, okay, what about – do you guys have any specific memories of the hackathons we did? So the first hackathon we did was in Greenpoint. And we basically, it was sort of internal to consensus people.
[1:42:45 - 1:43:04] Kieren: And I think it was mostly interns that can’t participate in. We had a very crude version of our API working. And it was really, you know, like, I think over a 48-hour period, no one could build any.
[1:43:04 - 1:43:15] Kieren: basically. It was like… But I think the premise that people were coming up with to use our API to build stuff, we could see some potential in it.
[1:43:16 - 1:43:27] Kieren: People were doing interesting things like incentivizing location-based scavenger hunts and other kinds of things. We found that interesting enough that…
[1:43:27 - 1:43:40] Kieren: I think that was in May, June of 2015 by that time. Then we figured out that there was, you know, the launch would probably happen in August of that year.
[1:43:40 - 1:43:58] Kieren: And we were like, okay, let’s take up all the input we got from that hackathon and do like a real hackathon. Like, you know, a bunch of participants get a bunch of people involved and, you know, try and get all the people from ConsenSys, but people outside ConsenSys involved.
[1:43:58 - 1:44:09] Kieren: And we were kind of like targeting that day. So we were like furiously trying to make our product more stable and work and take all the input we got from that first one into the second one.
[1:44:09 - 1:44:21] Kieren: When we didn’t know exact, I think the plan was to do it on the day of the launch of Ethereum. But we didn’t know the exact date yet. So we were just furiously trying to. Was it right before or right after?
[1:44:21 - 1:44:34] Kieren: I can’t remember. I think it was right after. Yeah, I think it was like two days after or something like that. But, you know, it was in that same timing of the launch, basically.
[1:44:34 - 1:44:38] Kieren: So, you know, as far as I’m aware, that was like the first Ethereum hackathon.
[1:44:39 - 1:44:44] Jim: I remember maybe it was the second or third one we met the Crane Brothers. Oh, yeah.
[1:44:44 - 1:44:44] Kieren: Yeah, that’s right.
[1:44:45 - 1:44:46] : Yeah.
[1:44:47 - 1:44:57] Kieren: I think that was the one right after the launch. Yeah, that was later. They won, didn’t they? They didn’t win at the launch. They won.
[1:44:57 - 1:45:05] Kieren: So that hackathon where we met them was actually the first consensus conference hackathon.
[1:45:09 - 1:45:10] : I don’t think that’s true.
[1:45:10 - 1:45:22] Kieren: I think that one was later. I think they were already, yeah. You’re right. You’re right. I think they came to the first. You’re right. I think they came to that very first hackathon. Yeah. So I think, or at least John did.
[1:45:22 - 1:45:42] Kieren: Well, maybe. Yeah. They came to the second one, the first one right after the launch. Right. this is funny, this is another foreshadowing for a future episode, but yes, the IBM, they’ve been circling this whole time, and they do appear in the next episode if it comes at the Consensus Hackathon.
[1:45:44 - 1:45:55] Kieren: I remember us furiously, and just the uncertainty of the launch, I remember we had many, many conversations, like, is this thing ever going to launch?
[1:45:55 - 1:46:15] Kieren: We weren’t sure if it would happen. Yeah. Do you remember? Okay, let’s talk quickly about the mining that we did. And this is all for the company, you know, but do you recall what we did at that time?
[1:46:15 - 1:46:35] Kieren: Yeah, I totally remember. So I remember, well, at some point up to the launch, we realized, okay, if we were going to help businesses or other groups build applications on Ethereum, we would need Ether to be able to pay for gas for those transactions.
[1:46:35 - 1:46:52] Kieren: and so we’re like well where are we going to get this ether from and you know I think the first thing that happened was you guys were like oh we need to build a mining rig right oh hand that over to you Jim I think that was Kieren and I drove
[1:46:52 - 1:46:58] Jim: up to Fry’s and picked up a bunch of components we did and you know
[1:46:58 - 1:47:14] Kieren: we were kind of ready for it because we I believe we had you had helped me build just like a workstation or two before. Basically, like the compile times on my laptop were double or quadruple what they were on the workstation.
[1:47:14 - 1:47:27] Kieren: So it’s made a big productivity difference. We went back and, yeah, I think so I moved closer to campus at that time. We took a couple different shots at mining.
[1:47:27 - 1:47:38] Kieren: But, you know, I think mine exploded. The power supply blew up. The graphics card was actually okay.
[1:47:39 - 1:47:41] Kieren: Something happened to yours. I can’t remember.
[1:47:42 - 1:47:57] Jim: But we got it going eventually. But the part that was funny I remember is that we spent, like, two or three days building these machines, getting it up, putting the software on, getting it running, hitting some problems. And it started, like, Ether started to dribble in at that point in time.
[1:47:57 - 1:48:06] Jim: So we’re like, oh, this is awesome. And then we called up Victor, and he’s like, yeah, in the last half hour, I just, like, spun up a few machines at Amazon, and I’m getting as much ether as you guys are.
[1:48:07 - 1:48:23] Kieren: Well, it was more than a few machines. So, like, I remember watching you guys build this and, like, thinking, like, oh, like, this is going to launch any day now, right? Like, so, like, I said, like, can someone give me an image of the Go client?
[1:48:23 - 1:48:36] Kieren: And I took that image and I just played on Amazon and bought a bunch of spot instances. And at some point, I was running and I just bought as many spot instances as were available.
[1:48:37 - 1:48:52] Kieren: Whatever met my price, I bought. And this was before mining was even known that this was something that happened. So I could still get it pretty cheap. And the blockchain itself was small enough that you could sync up pretty fast if you were starting.
[1:48:52 - 1:48:57] Jim: None of this is stuff you could do today. In fact, none of this is stuff you could do. No, exactly. And it stopped being effective.
[1:48:58 - 1:49:10] Kieren: Like, I mean, I remember at the point of the launch, you guys were saying, yeah, we got our first Ether. And I was like, do you see this graph? Like, you know, this is the total mining power of the Ethereum network.
[1:49:11 - 1:49:22] Kieren: That large wedge, which was like 25%, is me. I stopped mining on it. God, we should have cranked it up just like another couple weeks longer.
[1:49:22 - 1:49:34] Kieren: I know. Well, I think by the time, you know, three days had passed, I passed like several thousand dollars. Like our AWS bill was like, yeah, it’s super expensive at the time.
[1:49:34 - 1:49:52] Kieren: It’s super expensive at the time. And like, I was like, oh, wow, like this is good. But yeah, we should I should have ran it like, you know, a month basically. And then it was it was pretty amazing because like, yes, I, you know, I’m not a DevOps guy, But I was, like, running hundreds of machines at a time, and it was just amazing.
[1:49:53 - 1:50:04] Kieren: One thing I struggle to remember, how did they communicate that the network was ready to launch? Was it, like, Twitter, email?
[1:50:04 - 1:50:15] Kieren: How did we even know? Like, we knew we kind of knew. I think it was like we knew from the commits that it was close. This is why I brought it up before. They’re like, okay, they’re slowing down. They’re getting ready, you know, but.
[1:50:15 - 1:50:27] Jim: I don’t remember how they communicated it, but we were pretty involved in consensus at those days, and everybody was talking about it. And there were, like, multiple groups there that were getting ready to spin up lots of mining.
[1:50:28 - 1:50:30] Jim: So there was no missing it at the time.
[1:50:31 - 1:50:32] : Yeah. Yeah.
[1:50:34 - 1:50:46] Kieren: Sorry, like I said, I think there was, but, like, I think they had announced the date, but there was still a lot of uncertainty whether they would meet that date or not, right? And it turned out they did. That did turn out to be the day.
[1:50:46 - 1:51:02] Kieren: Everyone was gearing up, but we were also getting ready. It might not happen that day. It might be a couple of days later. It could be a couple of months later. We just weren’t sure. Those were some times, for sure.
[1:51:05 - 1:51:17] Kieren: I think this is a good wrapping point for this first episode. Hopefully, we’ll see if we get any feedback from the Internet at large on whether we should keep going down this path.
[1:51:19 - 1:51:29] Kieren: Quite the journey already. Lots of interesting things I’ve even remembered in the course of our couple hours here. Thanks, guys.
[1:51:30 - 1:51:51] Kieren: It does feel like we should keep going with the story, but we’ll see. Let’s leave it as a cliffhanger. All of the excitement to come. Any final words? I’ve been You know, it’s funny, even if you look at the beginning, you see the same patterns now where there’s this like huge amount of inflow.
[1:51:51 - 1:52:03] Kieren: And then, you know, what seemed at the time like tons of hype, but now it’s like a trickle of hype. And what seems like tons of capital, but now would be considered a trickle of capital.
[1:52:03 - 1:52:15] Kieren: And then like a kind of overconfidence and then, you know, a tightening. but then, you know, real technical stuff gets done in the tightening. It’s funny how that pattern has played out so many times now.
[1:52:16 - 1:52:22] Jim: Yeah, exactly. We’ll tell you about the time we saw Vitalik threw his shirt at someone.
[1:52:23 - 1:52:34] Kieren: Oh, that’s a good story. Yes, the Vitalik shirt story is a good one. All righty, let’s end it here. Thanks, guys. You know, we’re doing this recording on a Sunday.
[1:52:34 - 1:52:39] Kieren: Hope it entertains and informs the wider world. and we’ll see you next time.