Here is the Twitter Spaces recording, which will be replaced with a YouTube video when we have that uploaded.

Transcript

[1:19] Bob: Can you hear me? Can you hear me?

[1:28] Jaime: Yes, I can. Excellent.

[1:30] Bob: Excellent.

[1:31] Jaime: Happy STRATO Spaces.

[1:50] Jaime: GM. What’s up guys?

[2:04] Kieren: How are you?

[2:05] Jaime: I’m good. First week of September. I’m not sure if it’s officially the first week of Fall, but nevertheless super excited for a new month. I know at STRATO we have a very exciting month ahead.

[2:29] Kieren: I think technically Fall starts on either 21st or 22nd, but spiritually it starts after Labor Day, of course. I don’t know if anyone has a white suit, but I actually sort of have a white suit, and you can no longer wear those already.

[2:55] Jaime: I might have to see that. White suit’s pretty nice.

[3:02] Kieren: I may have a photo. I think it’s been worn to two sort of summer weddings, and that’s the only time it’s been, but I could probably dig one up for you, Jaime.

[3:16] Jaime: Yeah. Texture, welcome!

[3:23] Kieren: We had him. We lost him.

[3:31] Jaime: Give it a few more minutes for some more folks to pile in. Yeah, spiritually fall is here along with football to the behest of our European counterparts.

[3:55] Kieren: By the way, for spaces resiliency, ChatGPT is recommending two co-hosts up front. Now, do we already have the two, or can you add another one?

[4:06] Jaime: Yeah, you and Bob are co-hosts.

[4:10] Kieren: Okay, it just appears as speaker to me. Maybe it appears as co-host to Bob on Bob’s side. Bob, are you a co-host successfully?

[4:18] Bob: It appears so.

[4:20] Kieren: I see it now. Okay, fantastic.

[4:36] Kieren: Very, very kind of cool August for those of us who spent some of it in New York. Like, August is supposed to be hot, and it mostly wasn’t. There’s supposed to be a sharp transition heading into the fall, but it feels like it kind of started early this year. I don’t know what’s going on.

[4:56] Jaime: Yeah, completely agree. A lot of long sleeves and sweatshirts during the night. A bit cooler

[5:09] Kieren: Texture!

[5:10] Texture: You guys are old. You’ve been around talking about the weather.

[5:14] Kieren: We’re waiting for you.

[5:16] Texture: Well, I’m here.

[5:18] Kieren: Even better.

[5:20] Jaime: Welcome.

[5:21] Texture: What’s up?

[5:23] Jaime: GM. Yeah, great to kick this off. I’ll hand the mic over to Bob, but I just want to pay my compliments to your PFP, Texture. It’s quite a good one.

[5:37] Texture: Thanks. Do you own a Texture Punk?

[5:40] Jaime: I do not, but I saw a few folks with them and obviously noticed yours. Might have to get one.

[5:51] Texture: It was a joke because I thought punks were ugly, so I made myself a better one. Then a friend asked me to make her one, and then somebody else asked me to make one. Then 30 people later, I was like, I should just fucking make a little thing where they can make their own. Then my buddy started a Discord, and 10,000 people showed up, and I was like, look.

[6:14] Jaime: That’s some good lore. That’s some great lore right there.

[6:20] Texture: I thought it was going to be me and my 100 friends.

[6:26] Bob: Accidental success. Fantastic.

[6:32] Jaime: Great stuff.

[6:33] Bob: Well, let’s get going, eh? Hi, Texture. How are you? It’s been a while.

[6:42] Texture: It’s been a long time.

[6:44] Bob: When I think of you, the first thing I think of is love.

[6:50] Texture: Aw

[6:51] Bob: Something I’ve spotted going through making my notes is your Medium is called Peace, Love, Revolution.

[7:01] Texture: Yes.

[7:03] Bob: What’s the story there?

[7:09] Texture: So, ypou know … I wouldn’t say a hippie. I didn’t dress like a hippie. I didn’t really hang out with hippies, but I took some psychedelics when I was a kid, and I had some experiences and drove my passion for doing good things and spreading love in the world.

I know people that probably follow me are like, what the fuck? He just calls people retards all day. Yeah, but I’m on Twitter. I don’t know. It’s full of retards.

So I started this group called Peace, Love, Human, because I was sitting in a shitty basement apartment in San Francisco, and I was watching the news, and I was seeing how religions got all fucked up, and I was like, what if there was a religion that didn’t have any beliefs? We just went out and did nice shit. So, for three years of my life, I was just homeless and had no job. Wandered the earth, setting up free hug events and other stuff just to make people smile because making people feel loved or making people happy was not a quantifiable metric, but making people smile was. So that was what I did for my early 20s. So that’s what I was doing, community building. I accidentally started a cult, and when I realized that it was a cult, I shut it down.

[8:29] Bob: Okay.

[8:31] Texture: But it helped me. It was my first foray into cult building, which obviously

[8:36] Bob: Right. Very useful.

[8:38] Texture: I took into my role in Ethereum, and I feel like the Ethereum cult is going pretty well.

[8:43] Bob: I seem to remember at some point you told me that you’ve probably hugged a thousand random people on the street.

[8:50] Texture: Oh, a thousand? A thousand in a day, probably 100,000 or more. Yeah. It was nice. It was good. I could waste this entire thing telling that story, but that’s probably not what people want to hear.

[9:12] Bob: I mean, I can see why Decentralized Dance Party also appealed to you on that score.

[9:18] Texture: Yeah. So DDP, Gary, the guy who runs that, he came and stayed at my apartment in Brooklyn, and we had this three-story loft in a warehouse, and we’d let people come crash, and he came through, and that’s how I met him. And I’ve done three or four of them. I was, what is it? It’s Tom. I was Tom. So Tom is like a rotator. I was Tom one time, so that was fun. I had to shave my beard. I had a mustache. I looked funny.

[9:55] Bob: I’ll drop some links on Twitter for that for anyone who hasn’t seen Decentralized Dance Party, or you can go and have a Google on your own. It’s quite exceptional.

[10:07] Texture: It’s funny. I didn’t really understand the decentralized thing at that point. I was not really involved, so he was kind of ahead of the curve on that with me.

[10:19] Bob: For sure. So yeah, that’s Gary Lachance, who was a fellow Vancouverite with me. He was, funnily enough, in a photo for the very first item I could find about Vancouver Decentral, the whole Decentral Toronto / Vancouver thing.

Gary was in that photo for the first one. Maybe well-known as well now for Dogeclaren. So there is the Doge-wrapped McLaren, which travels around many conferences where they can get financial support for that.

Yeah, Gary’s a great guy.

[11:04] Texture: He’s pretty fun.

[11:10] Bob: So tell me about the vision that you had, which was then the same as the white paper. Because on the Twitter thread, I was wrongly saying your mind was blown by the Ethereum white paper, where actually what happened was that you’d had a vision of this about a week before, and then the white paper landed on your lap. So what the hell was that about?

[11:40] Texture: Yeah. So what actually happened was I had a roommate for years ago, like years when I lived in New York, and he had tried to get me into Bitcoin when it was a dollar. And I said, this is like internet nerd money. I’m like a love revolutionary. I don’t give a shit about this. And then he kept bothering me about it for years, and then it hit $1,400, and I was kind of humble enough to be like, well, if other people think it’s worth something, I guess it is. But he had texted me and he said, listen, man, I want you to listen to this podcast. And it was the Let’s Talk Bitcoin podcast with Adam B. Levine and Andreas Antonopoulos.

And so I had given up working in tech because my arms had given out. I was a programmer and designer for a very long time. And I started making cannabis edibles in California because it seemed like an industry that was going to be pretty easy to get into, like the marketing, the production, everything was shit. And I was pretty good at it. So yeah, I had a girlfriend who was about four hours away, and I would go visit her on the weekends. And so I threw the Bitcoin podcast on. I ate one of my candies and, don’t drive stoned, kids. But yeah, on the way there, I was listening to the podcast, and my brain just kind of tuned in. And I had what I can only describe as a biblical vision.

I would say before that, I wouldn’t have understood what that meant. But just this massive data download into my head where I could basically see the future visually. I just saw the whole thing playing out in front of me. And I was like, oh shit, Bitcoin, I’m still not particularly fascinated by. But the blockchain idea has an amazing amount of potential. And I kind of saw how it could help people coordinate. And so it just kind of struck me so much that I was like, I got to go talk to Adam. I got to go meet the people who did this podcast.

Because at that time, it was the only Bitcoin podcast. And I thought anybody who wanted attention for what they were doing would probably contact them. So the buddy that had told me to listen to the podcast randomly came into town three days later. And I said, hey, man, I’ve been thinking a lot.

I listened to the podcast. I have a lot of ideas. I need to meet Adam. I need to meet. And he goes, well, actually, I’m flying out in a couple of days to go meet him. We have a meeting scheduled. He’s in Washington celebrating his birthday with his wife. And I said, no, no, no, no, we’re getting in my car right now. I’m driving. I’m driving us there. I’m going. I’m going to go talk to him.

And he’s like, what, really? And I’m like, yeah, fucking cancel your ticket. We’re getting in my car right now. So we drove like 20 hours or whatever to Washington State. I walked in pretty much. I don’t know what their meeting was about, but I pretty much just took Adam to the side and we ended up sitting in his hot tub on his balcony for like nine hours just talking.

And it was a really cool. It was a really cool discussion. And I said, what I want from you is I want you to tell me anybody you know who’s working on anything like this. And he said, well, do you know who Vitalik is? I said, man, I’m not in crypto. I’m not in Bitcoin.

I don’t know. I don’t know anybody. I don’t know anything. And he said, well, he just sent me this white paper a few days ago. I can like I can forward it to you. And can you guys still hear me?

[15:23] Bob: Yeah. Yeah.

[15:26] Texture: So then, yeah, so he forwarded me the white paper. I looked at it, you know, to me, it wasn’t as comprehensive as the vision that I had. But I thought, you know, this is kismet, you know, right?

What are the chances that all the stuff lined up like this? So I said, yeah, make the intro. And so we started a Skype group and, you know, Adam was there.

I remember Charles was there. Vitalik was there. I was there. It became the official Ethereum Skype group and just kind of grew from there. So, you know, it was like…

[16:00] Kieren: Was that ‘Water Cooler’?

[16:01] Texture: No, no, no. ‘Water Cooler’ is something I made later because people…

[16:04] Bob: That was later.

[16:05] Texture: Yeah. So that was just the literal like main Ethereum Skype channel that we used to communicate for the first, I don’t know, long time.

[16:18] Bob: Right.

[16:20] Texture: No, ‘Water Cooler’ was something I created later because… I actually don’t remember why. People were… I guess I was kind of like…

[16:27] Bob: I guess it’s off topic or whatever, probably. Off topic chatty thing.

[16:30] Texture: Maybe, but like I was kind of like the dude that everybody trusted. And so like whenever anybody wanted to talk to somebody, they would come talk to me, which is why I got so much information about what was going on all the time. But yeah, so I think it was just an extension of that. Like people talk to me all the time. Let me create a little place for us to shoot the shit.

[16:51] Bob: So when do you think you had that trip to Washington? When do you think that would have been?

[16:59] Texture: I’m horrible with the time and dates, especially during that time, when you’re like a free-flowing hippie dude. Yeah. But I would say it was the week after, the week, week and a half after Vitalik sent the white paper out to…

[17:17] Bob: Right, right

[17:18] Texture: His original group of people to get the feedback on.

[17:22] Bob: Yeah. So it might even have been during November still?

[17:27] Texture: Yeah. I mean, it was as early as you could get. I mean, just by happenstance, just by the timing, I was there. Basically, the moment we were coming together.

[17:38] Bob: Yeah. Yeah. It’s amazing. Because yeah, so I was able to find that the video of you and Vitalik at the Salon, which was beaming into the Vancouver Decentral there. And that was December the 15th, that was?

[17:58] Texture: Yeah.

[17:58] Bob: You did that one?

[18:00] Texture: Yeah. So we’ve been… Yeah. I mean, again, the timing, the timing, I don’t know. But yeah, obviously, by that time, we had been doing it for a minute.

[18:10] Bob: Yeah. I mean, the funny thing was looking at that, that’s before there was any code, any public code, at least. There wasn’t even any Python code from Vitalik published at that point.

Gav and Jeff were weeks away still.

[18:25] Texture: Yeah. And Jeff, to my understanding, just read the white paper and started coding it up on his own and said, hey, I’ve got this Go implementation.

[18:34] Bob: Yeah, pretty much. And the same for Gav. They were both at the very tail end of December, basically like a Christmas project kind of deal for the pair of them.

[18:45] Texture: Yeah. No, it was great. And I’ve been a developer my whole life since I was a kid. And since I quit coding, I wasn’t really sure where I fit in, you know. But I was really happy when all these other people got in. I guess maybe if I had dropped some code and gotten a lot more ETH, that would have been cool, but whatever.

[19:08] Bob: So, I mean, to you at that point, what was Ethereum? Like, what was this vision? And what were you thinking that that could unfold to be? You know, what was the kernel of that?

[19:27] Texture: Yeah. So, I mean, it’s so hard to remember those days. There’s so much on top of it now.

You know, I remember the general vibe was just a technology that would allow people to coordinate, to encode value. I mean, you know, like just at all dimensions, things that haven’t even come to fruition yet, things that people aren’t even thinking about, because so much of it has gone to scale, just like fundraising, fundraising locally, just coordinating anything. I mean, it was just the whole world, like just imagining every single system being replaced by this decentralized coordination structure that gives some 11-year-old kid in Bangalore could create the next technical development.

And, you know, I think that kind of platform is just something that seemed really empowering. So, you know, a lot of idealism, you know, obviously real life as it’s played out is a lot messier and a lot different from how we imagined it. But a lot of idealistic things, a lot of like very much just really coordination.

And that’s a really shitty description of the vision that I had because it was so deep and so multidimensional. And yeah, but yeah.

[21:02] Bob: “Social operating system” is something I’ve seen you say on a few occasions.

[21:06] Texture: Yeah, I mean, yeah, just there’s so many dimensions to it. But yeah, I mean, a social operating system for allowing people to encode their values or encode, yeah, literally their values, anything with value, creating incentive structures. Contracts that are enforced at the exact level that they were designed to. Which none of that sounds really technical and unsexy.

But to me, it was really about the impact, you know, what happens when you empower people to be able to create value in their local communities or encode value in ways they haven’t been able to. What happens when, you know, the equity in your company can be easily traded, you know, just all these things. What happens when you can do that to houses and local businesses and local communities?

[22:09] Bob: Yeah, I mean, I think in my own sort of thinking in those early days, it was an awful lot about empowerment and about, you know, giving people the ability to control their own destiny, right? Yeah. And something I repeatedly thought was like, if you think about the, what’s it called? The pyramid of needs? What’s it called? I forget the…

[22:34] Kieren: Maslow. The hierarchy.

[22:35] Bob: Yeah, Maslow’s, right? Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You know, I remember a number of times saying, you know, it’s frankly obscene given all the resources that we have in the world and how, you know, how much more there is than was in previous years. It’s obscene that people should be like worried about housing or education or healthcare or, you know, just these basic things, right? And how wonderful would it be if you could like yank up that base layer a little bit so that people are not like living in this fearful place of powerlessness, but instead can be like not worrying about that shit and not having to make these compromised bad decisions and everything. But just if you could do what you love, what a world that would be.

[23:33] Texture: Yeah. And I’m a lot less idealistic about it now after the last decade for a lot of reasons, but, you know, the marshmallow test is real and you can create really good technologies and really good user experiences and as many guardrails as you can for people. But at the end of the day, there’s motherfuckers that are going to eat the marshmallow before they even hear the rules, you know, and then they’ll do it again and again. So, you know, I think there’s a lot of…

It’s not that I think the problems are unsolvable, but they’re, you know, the idea that it’s something from above being imposed down, you know, despite the fact that the system seemed to be that way, I think a lot of it is just the level of complexity of modern life relative to the average intelligence is… It’s just, it’s a wide gap and there’s a lot of… I mean, I don’t know, I could talk about that for fucking 10 hours too, so.

[24:36] Bob: Yeah, well, I mean, something that I saw in those early days of Ethereum as well was a real kind of almost like allergic reaction to anything that looked like organization or hierarchy or structure, you know, just like this total flip to the opposite side, right? Everything’s got to be flat and open and, you know, everyone involved with everything. Which is just completely impractical for actually organizing or doing anything.

[25:08] Texture: Yeah.

[25:12] Bob: Yeah, it’s just nutty. So, but then it’s like, I realized it’s like hierarchy isn’t the problem, being trapped in a hierarchy where it’s to your detriment and you can’t get out is the problem.

[25:24] Texture: Yeah. Yeah, and a lot of, I think a lot of times what happens in that is smart people, you know, smart people aren’t really, they don’t really understand not smart people. And so what happens is we are born into a world where these preexisting hierarchies exist and they’ve, you know, to some degree or another, you know, kind of persisted through generation after generation.

And then we come in and we’re like, why am I at the bottom of this hierarchy? I’m smart. We’re all too smart for this. And then they try to like, you know, they try to create new systems assuming that everyone is approximately like them. And then, you know, I’ve been through so many, because again, coming through the hippie shit, I was in the Bay Area for a long time. You see so many people think that they’re the first person to ever think of flat hierarchies and how it’s going to be so much better.

And at the end of the day, man, like that’s fine if you want to talk all the fucking time and you want to argue and you want to get nothing done. But at the end of the day, you know, a hierarchy is an information structure and it’s also an accountability structure. And so as long as there’s accountability at the top and as long as the information is flowing correctly and as long as the outputs are, you know, optimal to some degree, then it’s the best you’re going to get.

And it doesn’t mean we can’t continually improve. Obviously life gets better and we have an obligation. You know, I think when you’re creating things, it’s not just the creating things.

And I think this is a big problem that still exists in crypto. People think if you build it, they will come. You can’t just build it.

You have to build it and then you have to make it a button, a single button. It has to be so simple your grandma can do it and not destroy her life. And so it is this kind of perpetual attempt to take these complex structures, simplify them so that everyone has access to them.

But through that simplification, not creating these kind of hells that no one can get out of. And I think, you know, just because of the rate of technological development and the nature of economic progress, our opportunities as people trapped in those systems is to build new systems. But ultimately we’re going to come face to face with the reality of why those systems were set up the way they were and understand that the best we can really hope for in most instances is an optimization of that.

We can try to make it simpler, more efficient, better and more adaptable. But those are a lot of dimensions that any one of them out of sync is going to create either more problems or the system itself will collapse, right? And, you know, if the system doesn’t exist then nobody gets anything.

[28:19] Bob: Yeah. I mean, I guess it’s a little bit analogous to sort of technical debt and things in code.

[28:25] Texture: Yep.

[28:25] Bob: Is if you’ve got code and you’re like, Jesus, look at this. It’s so much like complexity and these conditions. I don’t think we need any of that. Let’s just take all that out. But, you know, someone did that for a reason.

[28:39] Texture: Yeah.

[28:39] Bob: You may not know the reason, but, you know, it was done for a reason and, you know, you’re going to have some consequence if you do that, right? You can only be so simple without being, you know, too simplistic and then you miss out on that detail. I mean, I guess it’s like, you know, with sort of US legal stuff, you know, this “hot liquid might burn you” or whatever. You just know that some shit’s happened in the past, right? The reason that all of these things have happened is someone’s done something really fucking stupid.

[29:15] Texture: Yeah. And I, you know, after I became a father, I became really a huge proponent of the idea of if you think a stupid rule exists because the person who made it is stupid, you haven’t thought through the problem. It isn’t a bunch of people. Now, I’m not saying this has never existed, but it’s not like some nefarious guy at the top who wants to just ruin your life. It’s some fucking idiot who did some idiot shit. And then now you got to make a stupid rule, you know what I mean? And you got to enforce it with fire. Otherwise, you know, your kids end up dumping plates of food in their closet and you find it six months later. And so, you know, it’s just that at scale.

But you’re going to have to keep me on topic as much as you want to, because I am a meanderer.

[30:04] Bob: Yeah. On this human side, something I talked about during my “maple syrup peace phase” was neurodiversity and the fact that normies would not be involved in the early phases of such a project, right? It’s absolutely crazy to go and do what you did. It’s crazy what most people did.

Yeah. So how does that play out? The fact that in these frontier technologies, you don’t have “normal people”. Well, you do, but you have a lot of of us people who would not fall into that category. So how does that all play out? What do you think is happening there?

[30:56] Texture: I think it’s just the structure of how things have always occurred, right? So you have these kind of people on the front edge. And I was on the internet from, I remember reading when the HTML 2.0 spec was about to come out, right?

And so the early days of the internet, it was that. And so I was on the internet all day talking to people. And there was a technical barrier. And it’s just, you have these kind of neurodivergent people show up. So in the early days of crypto, it was a lot of people who were paranoid. A lot of autistic people and spattering of sociopaths who kind of could see that they could make money.

And so that has a profound effect on how things play out. But I think it seems the way that at least in capitalism, what happens is huge amounts of capital come in. And it just becomes this kind of probability matrix of throw as much energy at this thing as you can on the front end. And then whatever survives is gonna play out. But kind of if you look at something like Linux or open source technology in general, it’s like very autistic.

And autistic people have a very specific, I’ve noticed differentiation from the average person, which is they honestly believe that the terminal is the greatest interface of all time. It’s like they don’t grasp that most people need buttons. And so it’s like you look at Linux, Linux was kind of a fringe thing only tech people used. And then Google came in and at least had enough sense to hire some designers to turn it into something functional.

Steve Jobs did the same thing with OS X (now macOS). OS X was a previous Unix variant. And so you need those people. You need those people who come in who are on the edge, who are technical enough to be able to communicate with the technical people and understand. But they also need the clout, the money and the power to overrule those people. Because Linux had very horrible user interface and user experience for a long time, even when they had window managers.

And you have to understand, I was a designer. So I would go into these open source spaces and I’m going to tell you what, man, these people who for sure would not let you comment on their code and for sure not let you tell you how they were going to structure it or for sure not tell them what language they were going to use, have no fucking problem stepping outside of their own expertise and driving a designer insane. You know what I mean?

Very logical, unemotional, totally tapped out of any sense of what a normal person needs. And they just beat the designers into the ground. So you really need somebody who has power and the competence and the will and the desire and can put it all together. And I don’t think we really see that. You know what I mean? The wallets fucking suck.

I don’t know now, but a year ago, I clicked a button and emptied my hot wallet, right? And that shouldn’t be possible. How hard is it to throw up a fucking thing that says, hey, are you meaning to send every bit of this?

This is a lot of money. Why does it not just say, hey, it didn’t even say it in dollars. Do you know what I mean? It was obfuscating. There should have been a massive fucking pop-up that said you’re about to send $100,000 to somebody. Are you sure you want to do this? Or as soon as I clicked the button, knew what had happened. If there had been a fucking five-minute delay, but this isn’t happening, right? And there’d be the structure of the organizations or if the designers are having to argue with the tech people.

Whatever it is, it’s just grandma still can’t use this shit. It’s 10 years in. If I had the will and the energy, I could, you know what I mean?

Within six months, we could solve these problems. And I just don’t see it.

[35:25] Bob: I guess this is the reason why things like the ETFs are so appealing, right? “Can I just not deal with any of this shit at all? But I can just use my brokerage account I’ve already got?”

It’s just a thing that I buy or sell, right? And just, you know, it’s a proxy for it, but most people don’t care.

[35:47] Texture: Yeah, but that reduces it to an investment vehicle, right? It does.

[35:51] Bob: It does.

[35:52] Bob: And maybe for- It does.

[35:53] Bob: And then that’s really a failure, as you say, on delivery of the holistic platform that you do need something which is absolutely better, right? It’s just like a product question, really, right? It’s saying, unless the product that you are offering is absolutely better than something existing or is cheaper or gives you some other benefits or whatever, then normal people are not going to use it.

[36:29] Texture: Correct.

[36:29] Bob: It doesn’t matter what your world view is behind that. You’ve given them something that’s worse than what they have, so they don’t care.

[36:39] Texture: Yeah, and so I think exchanges and things like that kind of acting as a buffer, it’s a step. Ultimately, how are these things going to be used? The end user is probably not going to know what they’re using on the backend any more than the average person knows what processor is in their phone. So …

[37:06] Bob: No, I mean, I guess the hope is it’s like a layering thing, right? That in the same way as you’ve got those DeFi primitives, that you’re going to layer this whatever social recovery or buffered amounts or whatever, or insurance for fuck-ups or all this sort of stuff, right? You should be able to put together a stack of things that have an equivalent kind of characteristic and experience to existing things, but without that strong dependence on a single legal entity that’s got that customer service provider kind of pattern rather than just it being raw, dangerous as you experienced there.

[37:50] Texture: Yeah, and I mean, to this day, I feel anxious all the time because I hold crypto, you know? Me, I feel anxious all the time.

[38:01] Bob: Yeah. You know what I mean?

[38:03] Bob: I think we all do.

[38:05] Texture: So it’s like, that’s not an experience that the average person wants. The average person wants to put their money in a bank account. The average person wants to click a button and if something goes wrong to be able to reverse it. You know, we haven’t really addressed any of that. Again, it’s a failure because the people who are in charge think like anyone can do what they’re doing and it’s not that big of a deal. And like, all you have to do is do this and like blah, blah, blah.

It’s like, no, all they have to do is click a button. You’ve done it. That’s your metric for success. Click one button and not worry about anything. You just know the thing is going to happen. And if it doesn’t, it’ll get fixed.

[38:45] Bob: Yeah, yeah. So I mean, when I was looking through sort of different phases of this period that I’ve been covering in the early days of Ethereum sort of website there, I was noticing, so in January and February 2014, there’s just such a flood of people that came in. I mean, there were a fair chunk in December, but that just really accelerated through January and February.

So I mean, how did that like play out? That you’ve just got like tons and tons of people, you know, rocking up and really like volunteering?

[39:33] Texture: It turned everything into “Game of Thrones”. Yeah, that’s what happened. It turned everything into “Game of Thrones”.

So like I was there day one. I was doing, I was making sure like, you know, first thing I did was Vitalik posted this website that he made. It was piss yellow. He had stolen some other shit coins logo and just put Ethereum on it. And I was like, please don’t post this. Give me till tomorrow.

So I like spun up a logo, sent it to him. He was like, oh yeah, this is kind of what I was thinking. I was like, thank God. Please don’t put that out. Um, I don’t know if I made a website or, and then somebody submitted an image, but the image was like, like, and so just real quick, like what I used to do is I used to be like the dude who um, dev shops would call when they were six months behind on a project. They needed it done in three days.

(Bob - from what I can determine, it was Ryan Taylor who made the first website. He had previously been the web designer for Bitcoin Magazine from day one. As well as the evolution of the site, you can also see the evolution if the logo)

Right. So I was a designer, full stack developer. So my, my skill was I could take your idea and I could, I could make it look like it existed forever.

And you had $10 million in funding in 24 hours. Right. So that was my goal at that point.

Once I realized that that was a massive gap, I just inserted myself there. And I’m only telling the story to say, then when everybody flooded in, and especially when the Zug house happened, you had all these people kind of going behind other people’s backs and, um, trying to, um, push people out and take over their roles. And it was, it was just a very stressful, weird time because, um, you get, you just get a different type of person, right?

The type of people who show up and are just wanting to build the thing. Cause it’s cool. That’s the type of person.

But when they show up and they’re like, yeah, let’s fucking, uh, let’s make sure it’s us. Let’s make sure we’re the ones let’s like, fuck those people. Let’s not communicate with them. So there was a lot of like political maneuvering that was required to survive.

[41:39] Bob: Yeah. And I mean, I guess that Miami house was where that really like dug in, cause that was the first time that most people were physically in the same location out of that.

(Bob: check out Taylor Gerring’s photos from January 2014 to see the Miami house)

[41:51] Texture: So it was pretty fun. The weirdest part about that was meeting Charles and, um, you know, Charles, I, he might’ve been the first person who is doing kind of the thing that I just said, right? Like he just showed up and kind of inserted himself and was like, I’m going to be CEO.

And I’m like, he was just, he’s just a fucking liar though, man. He was like 24 or something.

[42:15] Bob:

25

[42:16] Texture: And he presented himself like he was 50 years old and he’d been in tech forever. And here’s the thing, man. I actually was probably the most, um, experienced in terms of, I’d lived in Silicon Valley. I’d worked in multiple startups, but like, despite my personality, um, on Twitter, or even if you meet me in person, like I’m pretty humble when I get into a group of people that I can tell have skills. So I kind of just sat back and didn’t try to insert myself. I didn’t try to like demand, you know, I’d be involved in this or that. I just tried to kind of be as helpful as I could.

Um, so, you know, when I, when I talked to, uh, uh, Charles for the first time, I was like, all right, you know, this is kind of weird. Like, but we’ll, we’ll see what’s up. So like literally the moment I met him in Miami, I shook his hand and I was like, Oh God, he’s a fucking sociopath. Like, okay, well maybe he’s our sociopath, you know, like every company has a sociopath.

Like maybe he’s like a well-regulated sociopath. And then when we got to the Miami house, I found out, no, no, he’s not a well-regulated sociopath. He’s a fucking compulsive liar, manipulative weirdo. Kieren, were you going to say something?

[43:37] Kieren: I was just going to say in Charles’ defense, uh, at that time he did look 50 years old.

[43:46] Texture: (Laughs) Bro, when I found out he was like fucking seven years younger than me, I was like, what the, why am I deferring to this kid? He’s like, what the hell? Um, so yeah, it was, it was weird, man.

And like in the Miami house, he just said some of the weirdest shit to me. Um, there was some thing from, I don’t know, I won’t go into too many details. I’ve, I’ve covered them and given interviews to people who have reported on it, but not under my name. So I guess to shield me from any sort of retribution. But it was weird, man. He just said some weird shit to me.

Like he showed me, I’ll tell this one because I’ve told it publicly a lot of times, but he was like, text her, come here. And I’m like, what’s up? And he’s like, check out this text message. And I’m like, okay. And I like just met the dude and he shows me this text message and it’s a chick. And she’s like, I want to suck your cock so bad.

Sorry for any children listening. Um, and, uh, I’m like, why the fuck is he showing me this? And he’s like, you know where I met her? I was like, no, he’s like, I met her on the front lines of Afghanistan. When I was working for DARPA.

I’m like, Jesus Christ, dude. Oh my God. Shut the fuck up.

And so I will say this because it’s something that bothers me. Like, for some reason, the media all says that the reason that Charles was kicked out was because he wanted to do business and not a nonprofit. And like, Charles got kicked out because he was a fucking weirdo sociopath who didn’t do anything like on above board and like, couldn’t be trusted.

He, he didn’t, he played games with everybody. Like I was not in his inner circle. Cause I, I did like, he would do, I call him sociopath test where like, they say something fucked up to see how you respond. They’ll ask you to do unreasonable things to see if you’ll do them. Um, and then the people that do them and do them without question end up being in his inner circle. They, they become the people we just continued on in his Cardano.

So like, you know, he, he, he just operates in such a way that he gets sycophants around him. He lies to them. He gets them into situations where they like loyal to him and they don’t question them. And then, you know, just weaves a whole reality around that, that isn’t real.

Um, and that’s, that, that’s my assessment of Charles. And he, he was, he was not kicked out because of business. And it was a cluster now. Yeah. I mean, no one else was kicked out. Let’s just say that.

I guess Amir left, but that’s another story.

[46:19] Bob: Well, Amir was kind of kicked out from what I saw based on the fact that people thought he wasn’t actually doing anything. He wasn’t really like pulling his weight or doing anything useful.

[46:30] Texture: I like, I liked Amir as a person. We haven’t talked to him in a few years. We’re still cool to this day, but yeah. I mean, what, what was his skillset? Yeah. I don’t know.

[46:41] Bob: There’s bizdev sort of stuff. He said he was, he was talking to people, potential investors sort of thing. Um, but, uh, yeah. Yeah.

And I mean, uh, in terms of Charles, it took me a lot of years to really understand Charles, shall we say.

[47:01] Texture: Yeah. You, you know, I defended you on that because I think you’re like a really sweet guy and I think I understand your perspective. So whether or not I like Charles, I’m going to come defend you.

[47:12] Kieren: Not to dig too much, but, um, Charles had a like buddy, assistant partner guy. Is his name Jeremy?

[47:24] Bob: Jeremy Wood

[47:26] Kieren: I’m trying, I’m remembering cause I actually thought he was, yeah. And there was more there, but, um, I, I’m just to Texture’s point, you know, um, maybe he was just naive or maybe you guys know more than I do, but that wasn’t sort of a strange dichotomy.

[47:38] Texture: Yeah. Again, I think it was just whoever would follow him around and not question him. Like that’s how you got to be his right hand man. The less questions you ask, the closer, better friend you are, the more you listen to his stupid stories. Didn’t call him on it. You know what I mean? Like I met this, “I was on the front lines of Afghanistan for DARPA and now I’m like”, shut the fuck up, Charles.

[48:01] Bob: With Jeremy Wood, he notably called him boy. “Come here, boy!”

[48:06] Texture: Well, I never saw that. I’m telling you, like, I remember some story about him, like playing games with people in the Zug house, like sending somebody’s sending somebody off who, who’s like a wife was there, a girlfriend and, and telling them that they had to go do this thing for him, uh, out of town. And then when that person had left, he then tried to convince one of the other dudes to like get with the dude’s wife.

Like just weird stuff, man. Like just things that they’re not, that they have not, why would you do that? You know what I mean? You have an opportunity of life. The answer is you’re a fucking idiot who lied yourself into a situation you shouldn’t be in. And you are a compulsive lying manipulator. I’m sure it makes him feel smarter or something. I don’t know. But like, it was just the, the stories that when he, when he was gone after the “Red Wedding”, I think everybody breathed a sigh of relief.

You know, the biggest problem for me was, um, after the fundraiser, after the red wedding, uh, Stephan, who I had introduced, or I had welcomed into the, the, the organization. And again, there was a lot of political stuff. If you went to Zug, you got, um, basically put up in the hierarchy.

So I ended up under Stephan. I couldn’t go to Zug cause my girlfriend was pregnant and I couldn’t leave to go to Zug for a month. Um, and, um, yeah, I don’t know. Stephan was, I don’t know, high energy, high anxiety, dude. It was a weird thing.

[49:44] Kieren: He was smoking the stereotypical amount of cigarettes at the time.

[49:49] Texture: The stereotypical amount. That dude lived, he had a vape that he puffed.

[49:56] Kieren: You’re right. It was a vape.

[49:58] Texture: It was a vape. And so I went, you know, with DEVON0, I went and spent a week with them in, um, the office in, in, uh, London. And dude, Stephan, if you weren’t having a fucking panic attack, Stephan couldn’t tell you were working.

It was crazy. And he would pace around this coworking space like nobody else was there. Just the whole place looked like a fucking rave, dude.

I think he got kicked out because he was trying to film a TV show and vaping too much. And he had bought like $50,000 worth of camera equipment because his dream was to start a TV show or something. On the Ethereum budget.

[50:47] Bob: Yeah, I heard that London location was pretty special.

[50:52] Texture: It was weird, man.

[50:57] Bob: Did you say you were never in Zug?

[51:00] Texture: I never, no, I never went. Um, I had, so my girlfriend at the time was pregnant. Um, I had spent a month in Panama with Eric Voorhees and his team, um, while she was pregnant. So honestly, in retrospect, uh, if I could go to Zug, you know, it’s hard to know how things would have played out because of the political stuff with my, my, I was not political. I didn’t have any strategy. I didn’t, I was not prepared for any of that shit.

Uh, my, I just tried to be like the most authentic, like trustworthy, “do what I say” person, good to everybody. Like that, that’s how I survived as long as I did. You know, I don’t really do politics. I really don’t, all of that stuff was really weird.

[51:47] Bob: I mean, all of this was prior to both the crowd sale and the formation of, uh, the Ethereum Foundation. Right. You know, so the “Red Wedding” was 3rd of June, uh, 2014, uh, the, where, you know, you have that, I guess that final, uh, decision of, of, of the Foundation happening, uh, versus the for-profit, uh, because you had, uh, you had people coming, notably Anthony Di Iorio coming to, uh, Zug at that point to sign papers.

Right. You know, it was, it was to do with that EthSuisse, uh, legal entity. And then it was like, yep, no, we’re not signing the papers, big mess. Uh, and then the Foundation, uh, was, was July that that was, uh, incorporated and you still have the crowd sale ongoing through July and August. So yeah, that was a hell of a long span of time.

[52:57] Texture: Yeah. We kept saying two weeks. I don’t know. That was a meme for a very long time. Two weeks, two weeks, two weeks.

[53:07] Bob: Well, the website that was up at the time of the Miami conference, uh, was showing a countdown to the 1st of February. That was when the sale was going to start.

[53:17] Texture: Yeah. And then, you know, I was with Vitalik when the sale was launched. Uh, we had hung out all day in San Francisco. We were in the Westfield Mall in the food court for, uh, uh, he needed wifi. Um, and he was just sitting there and he just looked up at me and he goes, oh, the crowdsale went live. Um, because that wasn’t planned.

I don’t know if Taylor talked to you about that?

[53:49] Bob: Uh, that was an accidental launch was it?

[53:51] Texture: It was an accident. I don’t know. You have to ask Taylor about that, but yeah, I guess he accidentally accidentally hit the button because, you know, it was legal. Like that’s what kept happening. They kept saying, we’re waiting on legal. We’re waiting on legal. We’re waiting on legal. We’re waiting like, fuck legal in retrospect. Right.

[54:11] Bob: So you and Kieren must have met each other a little bit.

[54:14] Texture: Yeah.

[54:15] Bob: Various times.

[54:15] Texture: Yeah. We’ve, we’ve actually hung out more probably in the last five years than we did back then. Um, yeah.

[54:27] Bob: And I guess that Kieren, you saw more of that sort of New York legal side of things?

[54:35] Kieren: Yeah. So, uh, okay. This is a good, good tie in point.

So, uh, and, and Bob, uh, at your request, of course, I was digging through the emails trying to piece together some pieces of the timeline, you know, yesterday, day before.

So I had, um, I think by March I was, um, talking with Vitalik and, um, you know, I was in academia at that time. And he kind of found it useful to bounce like protocol, economic modeling stuff off, you know, like I was like good at reading the white papers and understand what they were doing.

I could, you know, kind of code at that time. I can still kind of code today, but that’s sort of, we ended up talking about like, all the things should work at a, you know, theory protocol level more than an implementation level. And that kind of, I guess, and this was covered in the, in the “Red Wedding” time, there was like, we, you know, um, a discussion of the usage of funds that ended up like on a whiteboard or something.

(from Taylor Gerring’s photos)

“Ethereum was eventually decided to be an open source non-profit model. After this edict was made clear, we proceeded to sketch out how funds would be allocated. Compared with a lot of other projects, we were stunningly efficient with only ~$15M” – Taylor Gerring, Jun 4, 2022

[55:43] Kieren: And, uh, a lot of it was theoretically earmarked for a research group that meant to solve, you know, hard problems like scalability, um, in, in crypto that, you know, like in practice people have sort of solved today. Um, and not by any of the means we imagined exactly. Um, but, um, you know, they’ve been solved to some degree, at least, um, like with layer twos, for instance.

Scalability was very much anticipated as a problem and, you know, it took a couple of years, but, you know, we, we had like $55 fees on NFT transfers at some point. Um, so I think, um, Vitalik sort of like, uh, talk, we, we talked about this for a little bit and then he kind of like blessed me as like the representative who’s currently in academia. I started contacting people and trying to get them interested in Ethereum and then doing like research related to it in general, even like set a legal entity up, uh, for a separate research group, um, at some point.

And I’m trying to remember, so, uh, Texture, we mostly worked together just on the site basically. Like, uh, I guess you were like, you know, web designer at that time, but I’m trying to remember.

[57:05] Texture: Yeah, I was doing web design. We had talked about the CRG, Cryptocurrency Research Group, uh, and I was like, that’s cool. Let me build a website.

I remember throwing, you know, faces on it and then it just kind of puttered out, which, you know, it’s, you know, like, um, it would have, it would have been a like cool thing, fun thing. I don’t know. Um, but also, uh, there’s a story about Di Iorio, not anyways, I like, I didn’t know people were getting paid for a long time.

And, um, I was like living on my sister’s love seat in her one bedroom apartment with my daughter. Cause I was like fucking homeless, uh, and working on Ethereum as much as I could, uh, like multiple other jobs, uh, to, to try to make money. And, uh, I contact, or Di Iorio contacted me one day cause he was, you know, he was in the earlier days, like the primary contact, um, that I would talk to the most.

And he called me and he asked me for a favor. And, uh, I was like, yeah, man, no problem. And I said, Hey, by the way, if you, you know, like, listen, I’m in a bad spot right now. Is there any way I could get like back pay for 10 grand, which, you know, was not much. And this dude just says, oh no. And I was like, what the fuck?

Anyways, I talked to Vitalik, the way it goes back to the CRG, um, is, uh, the, the CRG was supposed to, to pay me $5,000. So you owe me $5,000, Kieren. I don’t know, uh, you know, given that it was so early, if you could just pay me an ETH, uh, relative to the price at that time, that’d be sick.

[58:54] Kieren: Exactly. 20 cents was the, uh, pre-sale price. Yeah. Something like that. So it’d be like, uh, quite the, quite the amount of ETH.

[59:04] Texture: Yeah. So just like 15,000 ETH and we’ll call it even. All right. All right.

[59:13] Bob: But yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, many, that was the case for many people through those months, you know, for some people that was nine, 10 months of, of unpaid contributions.

[59:29] Kieren: My, my memory is also that Anthony was the main force behind sort of actually not quite stopping, but delaying the funding to the, the CCRG. So like somehow we got it, some of it way later.

[59:46] Bob: Di Iorio, you mean?

[59:48] Kieren: Di Iorio. And it was like, not quite the original amount, but it was still some, but we were all like working on different things at that time. We ended up returning it, I think, but yeah, it was a strange, like the, the strange delay that happened, I guess, like right after the pre-sale. So before people are working, you know, uncompensated or largely uncompensated.

And then right after there was, I suppose like a big cash grab going on. So like, but maybe, Bob, you know, better than us. So there were a bunch of legal entities getting set up, like there was like the Berlin dev company. And then there was another one, like in each, everyone tried to like pull out as much of the pie as they could, but like, I don’t know. Yeah.

[1:00:42] Bob: Yeah, so, so Anthony Di Iorio, (not you), incorporated Ethereum Canada in February, actually, but it was about, it was just a few days before everyone went to Zug. So his thought, I guess, was everything was going to happen out of Toronto, but that didn’t happen. You had Ethereum Swiss got formed in Switzerland somewhere in April, I think.

You had Gav incorporating Ethereum DEV in Berlin. Jeff in Amsterdam, though, that took quite a few months, more legalities to it. And there was a, there was an Ethereum in London as well.

Most of those ETHDEV ones were kind of co-founded by Vitalik and Gav and Jeff and Mihai kind of group.

Yeah, it was only the Toronto one there where it was that I could see Anthony was a director. I don’t think he was ever a director on any of the other legal entities. They were basically the, you know, the dev people and or Mihai and Taylor. But yeah, when you’d had the crowd sale and the Stiftung had been formed and then were the recipients of those funds, there was a whole power grab of a mess of how those funds went out and, you know, how that was done.

And in Cryptopians, it talks about Gav maybe wanting to like grab all of the money straight into DEV, but then it’s like, that’s probably not legal and it’s probably not a good idea and Joe wanting to do it sort of a milestone based slow delivery, which I think what it sort of ended up being. But you did have this sort of weird situation where you’d say, “oh, do you work for the Ethereum Foundation?” But very few people actually work for the Ethereum Foundation. Most people were actually working as staff or contractors for these for-profit legal entities, which were sort of doing the work.

[1:03:02] Kieren: Yeah, I think, I guess they must have got it kind of like having now run a business for a long time, you got to set up sensible contracts and IP agreements and or, you know, sometimes that looks like an intercompany agreement. And then, you know, if you do it in the buttoned up way, there’s like a lot of headache associated with such things.

[1:03:25] Bob: I think it was a lot looser than that.

[1:03:28] Kieren: I have a strong memory, yes, of like a, let’s just put all the money in this other legal entity discussion going on, like during the whole Red Wedding week, you know, so. Yes, yes.

[1:03:44] Bob: And yes, the majority of those legal entities have since been shut down. That was something that Ming did over the course of her time was tidy up all of this like corporate mess that was maybe not really even required in the first place.

[1:04:06] Texture: Yeah, I mean. Go ahead.

[1:04:09] Kieren: Sorry. They could have just worked for the foundation, but I guess they didn’t want to be in Switzerland, which maybe was part of it.

[1:04:18] Bob: And I mean, yeah, well, this was another funny thing, right, with the spaceship was that there was an expectation at the start there that it was going to be a lot of development work happening in Switzerland as well. And then that never happened.

[1:04:35] Texture: Also, it kind of goes against the Charles was fired for wanting to make it corporate when every single person filed their own corporate legal entity in an attempt to divert the funds to their own personal power structure.

[1:04:53] Kieren: Yeah, I’ll add because I was in the room for some of this, Gavin immediately started talking about brain drain when there was to be no crypto Google. So I guess like they for a long time, they wanted to do hybrid for profit, nonprofit. And the protocol sits in the not for profit and the for profit tries to commercialize and yada, yada, yada.

And of course, in the end, everyone’s like the tokens were worth more than probably any equity would have ever been worth. But yeah, I think it’s definitely a mix of factors. I think it’s primarily what you said, but also, you know, like the I think while there’s just a grossness to Charles, I’m like, I guess, OK with being on record on, I think there was also a dev guy business guy divide that to your point on like the autists, right?

You know, not that they were great at business like Amir, Charles, but there was more of a like, what do you do? And some of what they did was like, try to set up deals with the Council of Zug and then do like other business developments, etc. That kind of was lost afterwards.

I’m not saying it was all that effective in their hands, but there was this like meaty commercialization gap. And so, yeah, to your point, everyone then started their own companies, ConsenSys being the most successful of them and kind of filling that business guy plus commercialization role from there on.

[1:06:35] Texture: You’re saying the guy with the most business experience did the best.

[1:06:41] Kieren: So it seems.

[1:06:43] Texture: What’s funny, when I met your dad in the Miami house, I just thought he was somebody’s dad. I mean, obviously, in retrospect, he was yours, but I didn’t know that he would go on to become Joe Lubin. You know, I just remember like shooting shit with him and talking to him about the thoughts and stuff.

He was real quiet and told me about his time making music videos in Jamaica or whatever.

[1:07:09] Kieren: Yeah, that was right after that. He also, for a time, he believed that he would be a software developer for Ethereum. And then I guess he realized like no one knew anything about business.

And he’d done a tour in corporate from the IT side and then run a hedge fund. So the most understood how things worked, I guess.

[1:07:32] Texture: Yeah, much better than everyone else. I knew how to exist in a fucking early stage startup because I’d been doing that for 10 years over and over. So my major contribution was not saying, have you guys ever heard of a four year vesting period?

I thought it a bunch and I was like, I don’t want to be here for four years. I’m not going to say that shit.

[1:08:00] Bob: Yeah, I mean, it’s something which I’ve seen people comment on a fair bit is, you know, the early contributor slice, which was 9.9% of the ether, which was shared between the people who did contribute over those of amulets, 10 months or so, is equal to the amount that the Ethereum Foundation received. So, you know, all of the developments of everything which happened after that July to the current date has had that same bucket. And, you know, that is not a typical kind of setup for, you know, long term success.

Talking about the best thing, you know, that as I look through a lot of these early people, you know, they did their part and they moved on.

[1:09:02] Bob: Yeah.

[1:09:02] Bob: But it would be nice if some people hung around some more.

[1:09:06] Texture: Yeah, I mean, I think to some degree, that’s why I’m still here in this space, that and the guilt of learning what people do with the things you create and feeling some sort of, like, responsibility to kind of try to nudge in a direction, you know, but balancing that with my desire to be anonymous to the most degree that I can was difficult.

[1:09:32] Bob: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, it was something which came up, I think, through sort of 2018, 2019 as well was the Foundation stiffing developers, essentially.

[1:09:47] Texture: Yeah, I don’t know. That didn’t happen to me, praise Vitalik.

[1:09:53] Bob: No, no. It’s all right for you early guys. But yeah, what else they have noted?

Yeah, something which you’ve spoken about a little bit on Twitter as well is sort of like purges and palace politics and so on. Can you speak a little bit to about, like, the nature of the Foundation and the opaque nature of it and these kind of palace politics that you have going on? Like, what’s happening there?

[1:10:25] Texture: You mean in the last 10 years?

[1:10:30] Bob: Right, right. I mean, because it’s quite a contrast, right? In your Coinbase article, you were speaking about the contrast, right, between your open, decentralized, collaborative space and the Foundation as an entity.

[1:10:46] Texture: Yeah, so I think that it’s difficult because if you look at, you know, this is my personal assessment, how I think about the situation. If you look at the early days and you take all that political shit seriously and you realize that Vitalik’s basically like an 18-year-old kid in the middle of this, like, I was underprepared for the political shit, but I wasn’t even like the center of it, you know, Vitalik had to be pushed into this weird situation where all of these sharks and snakes were around and where Charles is acting some type of way and then everyone else around him is vying for power and that’s a lot of stress, right? And so if I was thinking of it from Vitalik’s perspective, to me, my primary goal for myself would be to insulate myself from those political games to the greatest degree possible, right? And so, you know, in some ways, it’s kind of like the requirement to stay sane and the requirement to insulate yourself from people playing these games and trying to get to you is that you kind of have to anoint yourself king and do the thing that Charles did, which is surround yourself with people who are going to basically have a fealty to you, right?

They’re not there because they’re trying to manipulate you or get one over on you. They’re not there because, you know, they’re not playing games behind your back that you’re going to have to deal with. And I think that if you’re trying to focus on your goal, you know, in this kind of like foundational structure, I just assume that every decision that’s been made in the structure of the foundation is based on kind of two principles.

One is kind of the amorphous notion that like a decentralized project shouldn’t have a centralized control structure. And, you know, there’s really some sort of kind of suicide urge that I see in the way that they structure it. Like it could be an organization that exists for, you know, a thousand years if they organize it correctly, but they’re trying as hard as they can, it seems, to make it disappear.

And I think that that’s like incredibly misguided. I don’t think there’s any historical examples of anything like that happening. And I think that if the foundation disappeared tomorrow, then all those power game, you know, the power vacuum would just create fucking infinity of those power games until somebody stepped up and, you know, Ethereum becomes whatever the person who can kind of get that power position.

So I think that unfortunately, from my assessment, Vitalik’s need to keep himself sane and protected has not been done in such a way that the Ethereum Foundation necessarily serves the long term survival of Ethereum. Just like that’s a major concern for me. So I don’t, I don’t think a lot of people might criticize the way it’s structured for reasons like, but I understand, man, like I’m not Vitalik and I’ve had to deal with, you know, those power games and they drive you crazy, man.

They get in your way. They keep you from being able to focus on what you want to focus on. And I think not coming up through the traditional kind of like Silicon Valley group, you know, when you when you come up in that, you’re surrounded by people who have been in it and have survived for a long time.

And they understand how they understand how to support founders and they understand how to legally orchestrate these things. And I just don’t think that he had those people around him to protect him. You know, so I don’t know.

Kieran, you got something to say?

[1:14:56] Kieren: I was, you know, I wanted to compare Ethereum with Bitcoin, which I’ve, you know, seen some of the similar governance issues on Bitcoin, but it’s different. Like right now, it feels pretty technologically stagnant. At a time, I knew a bunch of the core devs.

We had like a funny meetup once at like a Berkeley restaurant and a couple of them showed up. And it’s, you know, Bitcoin technologically just doesn’t really change. But there was a time where people were kind of, it was a foundation and they were acting in a coordinated manner to popularize Bitcoin and so on.

And now it feels like those people are largely gone. There’s a lot of the work that adds functionality to Bitcoin uses Ethereum or an L2 or an EVM or what have you. And people are just kind of focused on the price act, pretty much.

And that’s been, I think, a benefit to Bitcoin. But I guess like, I think Satoshi kind of went through something similar. And, you know, I think he was starting to get pretty irritated from, there’s a good book covering his Bitcoin talk posts and, you know, how that started to feel over time.

And then obviously he disappeared when he disappeared. I’m just thinking like, is the Ethereum way better? I think like probably it is.

It’s not optimal for sure. Like later projects run much closer to Silicon Valley tech companies and like have the open source part where the open source forces but are pretty strongly governed so far as I can tell. But I think I also say like there’s probably some merit to the approach.

Like it was so decentralized that lots of people could come in and try to make it their own. And that there was a plus to that, too. And just the downside being the chaos.

I don’t know. What do you think about this question?

[1:16:59] Texture: Yeah, I mean, I think, can you hear me? My little thing is not showing. You’re good.

Okay. Yeah, no, I think, you know, as far as the foundation being set up in the beginning, it’s whatever. What it’s become is whatever, too, because they could change into a structure that supports Ethereum for the long term.

But yeah, I’m more focused on today. But I do think, you know, I always thank your dad every time I see him for all his work because I do think he’s filling a role. And if there is a power vacuum, you know, I think he will be standing around to at least mitigate it.

Without him, who knows. The thing about the Bitcoin thing you said is like, that’s what I’m concerned is going to happen to Ethereum as you get to a point where it just becomes this kind of like not coordinated thing where everybody’s arguing and nothing happens. And nobody can make a decision because at the end of the day, like groups don’t make decisions, you know, groups don’t create greatness.

Like that’s just that’s just not what happens. You know, like you have you have these kind of visionary geniuses and if they manage to like find the right idea and the right group and they’re supported and they have the time and energy to do it, then it moves forward. You can even look at like a more structured version like Apple, whereas, you know, Steve Jobs had set up a massive corporate structure and it still exists to this day and the vision is gone.

Right. So once once the kind of visionary is separated from the vision and once the, you know, it’s going to default back to the level of the organization. And if you’re if the goal of the Ethereum Foundation, as stated, is to make itself irrelevant, like, I mean, that’s so frustrating, like, man, we created this technology that could potentially allow you to, it could it could potentially allow this technology could potentially allow you to create entire governance systems and corporate structures or whatever that could persist on the blockchain indefinitely with all kinds of mechanisms. And like, what the fuck? Like, is that not what the Ethereum Foundation should be doing?

Should they not be like eating their own dog food? Should they not be doing what we said we were going to do? Should they not be funding that?

Like, I mean, how many esoteric scaling solutions can you can you invest in? Right.

[1:19:46] Bob: Yeah, I mean, I, from my perspective, I think the the change of leadership that there was this year with with Tomas coming in as a as a as a co-ED has made a world of difference, you know, that they have become more transparent than has been the case before. And I think that he as a Ethereum company CEO, because he’s the CEO of Nevermind as well, I think has given him that kind of like product holistic, getting shit done kind of perspective that hasn’t before. And he’s got the credibility of having been in the ecosystem as well.

Right. And having gone from, hey, we’re a we’re a, you know, we’re a little company doing an Ethereum client to, you know, a really large kind of player that do all kinds of things.

[1:20:45] Texture: Yeah.

[1:20:45] Bob: And I think there hasn’t been that before. You know, he is a CEO type.

[1:20:50] Texture: He, he was, I did a call with him. We talked for a bit and he seemed great. Asked a lot of questions and said he talked to over 100 people.

And I gave him some of my thoughts and criticisms. And I don’t know, I’ve seen a lot of the things that we talked about kind of playing out. So, you know, I hope I hope he can be a force that persists again.

You know, if you have the palace politics, there’s always the people like that. They’re always in danger.

[1:21:27] Bob: So there might be another coup.

[1:21:30] Texture: That’s what I’m saying. Like, you know, you could be the best guy with the best intentions, with the best ideas and you’re the guy to do it. And if if the power structure is designed around, you know, placating people who are only concerned about their place in the palace.

You know, it’s happened to me multiple times in my life. Uh, they kick you, they kick you out because you’re a threat to what they’re trying to accomplish in their minds. They don’t understand that, you know, if you allow the guy, the guy who’s doing this to to really create something that lasts and is bigger than you’re going to get a bigger piece of a bigger slice from a bigger pie.

But if you completely undermine everybody who’s trying to do that, then you’re going to end up with nothing.

[1:22:26] Kieren: You know, there’s a mechanism for a coup, I assume, like in practice, the foundation is like, you know, kind of doing whatever the people who work for it wants to do.

[1:22:45] Texture: But in the end, this dictatorship of Vitalik at the end of the day, like, yeah, so, yeah, the only mechanism I see is the people who have Vitalik’s ear get in his ear long enough that. You know, it’s not working, so to some degree, there might be a community capacity to be a louder voice consistently to ensure that, you know, there will be backlash if anything like that happens.

[1:23:21] Bob: Yeah, I make this the sick epoch that there’s been. So we have white paper to red webbing, where it’s essentially, you know, just no formal structures really, you know, emergent. Then you have the period of the Ethereum Foundation and FDev.

So that was July 2014 through February 2015. Then you have the interregnum, where you were whopped, which was between March 2015 and June 2015, where you had Kelly. Becker.

Kelly Becker, kind of, like, overseeing the installation of the new professional, in quotes, board that began the Ming dynasty, where she immediately knocked off all the other directors. And then she had her three years of tyranny. And then you had the infinite garden with Aya coming in, in another coup there.

In February 2018. And then it seems this last one was maybe not so much of a coup as an evolution, in that Aya’s still around as the president, but you have new executive leadership.

[1:24:48] Bob: Yeah.

[1:24:48] Bob: So, yeah, I don’t know what this period comes to be called.

[1:24:52] Texture: But it’s definitely better and more coherent. You know, I’m prescient a lot of the time. And, you know, I had my encounters with Aya that clued me into the fact that she was not really qualified or even coherently involved in a way that I would assume somebody in her position would be.

So I was, you know, I was applying pressure years ago, years and years ago. And yeah, five years ago, six years ago. So I think, you know, eventually the community kind of came around to what I’ve been saying this whole time, which is, wait, like she should be doing like there’s things that need to be done.

And we all see that they’re not being done. And what the fuck? And we can’t even, this woman doesn’t seem to care.

And she keeps talking about esoteric poetry and fucking infinite gardens. What is this shit? You know, like, fucking do your job.

Like, you know, for me, you know, I’ve talked about it before, but, you know, their website, the website was like the same website for three years. It was just an informational website. It was a brochure website.

And I just messaged her and said, hey, man, we need to update this website. I’ll do it for free. And she said, oh, yeah, I think we have a team working on that.

Let me get back to you. So I like kept in contact with her. Took her six months, six months to figure out who was working on the website, Bob.

I mean, like, are you fucking kidding me? Like, what are you doing? Are you sitting in at the beach, like sipping Mai Tais?

I legitimately don’t know what you’re doing because you clearly have no active. This is how this is what it should be. You should have an org chart.

You should fucking know the person to call. You know, you should actually know who’s building your website. So that was that was just an insane to me that you could be the ostensible.

Yeah, we’re running an organization and not even know who to contact to see who is building the website. And then it ultimately was Josh Stark. I messaged him, said, hey, man, I’d love to help.

I’ll do it for free. I can have it done in a week. He was like, no, I’m good.

I was like, what do you mean you’re good? You’re not doing it. Like nothing has happened.

It’s been six months. It’s not something that takes six months or a year. Anyway, it was like a year later.

They finally launched a year and a half later.

[1:27:23] Bob: So there was a longer tweet thread of me ranting a little bit. Well, it wasn’t very ranty. Actually, it was quite polite in late in late.

It was December 2017. And Hudson tweeted out something like, hey, what could the Ethereum be doing better? It was like that.

It’s like, ah, wow. Oh, my God. But my list was very simple.

It was like, yeah, the website shifts useless, doesn’t do anything. There’s no information, nothing of that. You know, nothing useful there.

Also, there’s no public information on the Ethereum Foundation. Like, you know, who are the board members? You know, how does voting work?

Who are advisors to the foundation? What teams are there? Who works on these teams?

There wasn’t even a grants program at that point either. It was just basically, you just had Ming and Vitalik. And she had hired on Jamie Pitts and Hudson.

So there was a little bit of extra help. But essentially, it was that thin little bit of overhead and a bunch of devs. And that was what there was.

So, and she couldn’t delegate either Ming. So just nothing got done. Like, really, just nothing got done at all.

[1:28:53] Texture: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know, in retrospect, if I had known that. I mean, I know you said she was a nightmare, but she did offer to hire me back into the Ethereum Foundation. But I didn’t feel, it was a time where I didn’t really feel like working.

I’d been a little burnt out from the previous few years. So yeah, you know, maybe if I’d have accepted that.

[1:29:19] Bob: She should have Minged you. Don’t worry, you wouldn’t have lasted long if she came back.

[1:29:24] Texture: Maybe, maybe, maybe, you know.

[1:29:26] Bob: Everyone got Minged.

[1:29:27] Texture: If she was like Stephan, then yeah, that high energy, like stress stuff. But I don’t know. I was a little bit more.

[1:29:35] Bob: But yeah, I mean, you know, so I think that was the problem. Like that you hadn’t got enough people to get anything done, you know, like what you talked about with Aya. That was a case in that earlier year as well, is that there wasn’t really no organizational structure and nothing really much was happening beyond the developers doing their development.

Oh, and they will do a DevCon now and then.

[1:29:58] Texture: Yeah. Well, you asked about the palace politics thing, and I just had a memory. You know, people, it’s much less now than it used to be.

To some degree, people still keep me in the loop when, you know, they know things. So I think maybe the biggest problem with the way that things are structured right now is that there’s nobody to give pushback. And there’s no dissenting voices.

And there’s like a very homogenous group of people, homogenous, whatever the word is, a group of people who aren’t going to step out of the party line for any reason because they’re going to be afraid of being pushed out. And I think that’s not necessarily good. Obviously, you can’t have people following you around who think their only job is to undermine anything you say.

But really, I mean, you need voices that will speak the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable, because, you know, decisions, they have outcomes. And having a bunch of people who see the world in the same way and aren’t really thinking of things holistically or from different perspectives, you know, it’s going to create issues.

[1:31:24] Bob: At the recent FCC in Cannes, there was a slide which Jerome had on there, which was talking about dissenting voices. And both myself and Greg Colvin were up there as Ethereum dissidents.

[1:31:43] Texture: I didn’t get it. It’s all right. Nobody remembers me.

Congrats, though.

[1:31:47] Bob: No, sorry. You’re not known enough. I don’t know.

[1:31:52] Texture: Oh, no.

[1:31:52] Bob: You’re not being loud enough.

[1:31:55] Texture: No, it’s all right. I only have the number of followers I do because of a couple of jokes I made, one of them being catch your pong side. I very much don’t mind being lost to history if it means I’m not on someone’s let’s rob the sky list.

[1:32:15] Bob: Well, I think that’s maybe a good kind of place to wrap up.

[1:32:20] Texture: Yeah, don’t.

[1:32:21] Bob: So I wish you all the very best and enjoy your life.

[1:32:29] Texture: Yeah. Well, Bob, thanks for having me on. If you want to have me on again, I’m more than happy to always give you my time.

Good to talk to you, Kieran.

[1:32:39] Kieren: A pleasure. It had been not too long, but yeah, great to chat again and we’ll do it again soon.

[1:32:48] Texture: Yeah, maybe so. Maybe we’ll see you soon. And then thanks for everybody who’s come to listen and yeah.

Don’t follow me.

[1:32:58] Bob: Okay. Thanks a lot. So, yeah, texture is I am texture on Twitter.

Have you got any other websites or anything, places that you’d like to point people?

[1:33:11] Texture: No, I’m not. No. Just have a nice night.

Have a nice day, wherever you’re at morning.

[1:33:21] Texture: Thanks so much. Okay, everyone. Cheers, everyone.

[1:33:24] Texture: Bye.

[1:33:25] Texture: Bye.