ETC Principles & Philosophy with Donald McIntyre

0:03hello and welcome to ethereum classic community calls chat that happens on the ethereum classic discord server every tuesday usually at 1500 hours utc the content of these calls is decided by the etc community if you'd like to contribute you can join us on discord at ethereumclassic.org 0:22discord and you'll find us in the community course channel if you'd like to help spread the good word of classic make sure you comment on this video like it subscribe share and hit the notification bell to 0:38etc ethereum classic community call number 16 on the 8th of march 2022. 0:52this week we have a bit of a different thing we're going to take a break from the usual show 3 discussion and focus on the reason that we're all here and that is uh the ethereum classic principles and philosophy and this week we're joined by guest uh donald mcintyre who needs no introduction 1:12but uh for the listeners that are new to this show uh maybe donald you could uh say hello give us a bit of an introduction and uh thanks for joining us by the way to talk about principles and philosophy here in classic i'm donald 1:31mcintyre um founder of etherplan and um before i was an entrepreneur in the fintech industry and before that i was a private banker financial consultant at wall 1:49street firms in the 90s and now i work at the data science firm and i dedicate many hours per day volunteering for ethereum classic as well hard work and output uh you're a real workhorse 2:08in terms of uh providing content and uh thoughtful discussion in the ethereum classic community so thanks for that thank you thank you little presentation um that we will be uh following along and this will be recorded if you're listening on youtube and 2:27you should be able to see the video so uh i think donald's gonna share his screen now and he will begin his presentation more or less in 50 minutes i have to leave for another meeting so i prepared a presentation that i'm i'm gonna go over very quickly and then we can open it for questions you also had an outline with 2:47some questions so shall we do that okay stream 3:06now yes i got you very good okay so this presentation is about hearing classic principles and philosophy and i'm the founder of ether plan and what i said before what i wanted to talk about is the distinction 3:26between philosophy and principles first so philosophy is the study of fundamental questions such as about existence reason logic knowledge values mind behavior aesthetics and virtue in general no it's it's more or less like a science before 2 000 years 3:46ago 2500 years ago any kind of study was called philosophy now now many branches have have separated like specific disciplines like physics chemistry biology history politics etc those 4:03things have have like turn into their specific philosophies and they're called sciences but philosophy is is more or less like your observation and questioning uh about reality and stuff like that and um and then principles are basically like 4:24propositions lists of propositions and values that are guides for behavior so philosophy is like thinking about reality and principles are like conclusions okay i should do this and usually principles are short lists or or very 4:44focused and constant condensated concepts so it's they're easier to follow on a daily basis and have them in your mind what comes to mind for example is the ten commandments you know after many years moses of guiding his 5:02community to to the promised land he came up he went to the mount talked to god and he received the commandments and they were 10 and very easy to follow and easy to understand now um okay so so in terms of ethereum classic in particular the the the philosophy the thinking 5:21of of how these technologies should work and and [Music] evolve um started many years ago in the late 70s and 80s with the cyberpunks they were the persons that not only started to think about these things but also build the concrete technologies 5:39that are key parts of bitcoin and ethereum classic today and their main goals um their way of thinking was that the internet was going to provide this freedom for people to communicate and interact but at the same time also for bad things like surveillance 5:58and control political control and stuff like that so they wanted to build tools to guarantee their privacy so they could interact inside these this this world that they would create inside the internet with privacy hard money so 6:16they could even do commerce and stuff like that smart contracts so they could so they could have like these automated agents that would provide some services without depending on corporations and governments and stuff like that and their overarching goal was trust minimization the 6:34the cypherpunk from there the cypherpunk uh who wrote most and put all these ways of thinking and philosophies in in writing in black and white was an example and i always recommend four of his essays now that contain a 6:53lot of the information that we use today to think about um how to behave and and how to manage these systems and to think about principles as well uh one is big gold that explains that is basically the connection the original connection between gold 7:12or scarcity in the real world in the physical world and gold or scarcity in the digital world that's why he called it bit gold and when you when you read his blog post that's it about the blog post about the bit gold there's a lot of information there about philosophy trusted 7:31third parties are security holes this is basically the the [Music] the the essay where he explains why trust minimization is important because of the biases when when you deposit trust in in third parties that trust tends 7:51to be abused and also when building systems engineers and computer scientists tend to always put some centralized point in their systems either because they're lazy or or or because it's too much work to to to 8:09actually decentralize all the parts or because they did they just couldn't invent the systems to to create this decentralization then then he wrote shelling out the origins of money that explains all the fundament fundamentals about money for me is the definitive explanation 8:28of what is money i think it this essay alone should earn a nobel prize in economics in my opinion and then he wrote much later in 2017 the the previous things he wrote them between uh in the 90s and early 2000s and then in [Music] in 8:472017 he wrote money blockchains and social scalability that it was after the invention of bitcoin and and everybody was talking about the blockchain etc um so he made the distinction of why proof of 9:04work is not scalable computationally but that must be the cost so it is scalable socially scalable social scalability means that anybody in the world can access this technology without any restrictions that is full scalability in terms of uh 9:24the social layer but to be able to to accomplish this and really reduce the uh trusted third parties and the risk of third parties it was entirely necessary to make it computationally unscalable no so so 9:43i recommend people to google these and and to read them it's part of the philosophy it's part of the research is part of the thinking about these things and nixon will really put them all on in black and white on in his essays from there there's a set of essays also or papers or 10:00documents that are specific here in classic so ethereum classic the history of cyberpunks and everything that nick saba wrote and all other cyberpunks as well is the history here in classic ethereum classic in my opinion is a is a cypherpunk uh product it's a cyberpunk philosophy 10:21outcome or result and when when there was the crisis of the dao that the ethereum and ethereum classic split in 26 um the the people who decided the heroes in my opinion who decided to preserve the original 10:39chain which is theorem classic and immutable um felt the need to to write their reasons why they did this um so they they wrote uh four documents that i think are the foundational conditional documents and later there was another document that i'm going to mention now the first one was the declaration 10:58of independence which is similar to the declaration of the independence of the united states in 1776 it's a list of grievances and it also talks about philosophy and principles then a crypto decentralized manifesto talks about the attitude and the way of thinking 11:17and the world view of decentralization of these systems and then cody's law and the just the quest for justice is is an explanation to um it's an explanation to the concept of what is co what does code code is law means now because 11:37many people was was thinking that it was the real law but here it clarifies that code is lost inside the blockchain it's just a metaphor for physical law for example that you cannot change uh and then historia wrote um who's the host of this call uh 11:56he wrote um let's keep it here classic classic i think that he introduced many concepts and and mapped all this philosophy and and things that were written before to the current situation of ethereum classic and i think it is a classic and a foundational um 12:15document and one of the most important concepts that he wrote here is that the the protocol design software coding and the operation of the of the blockchain and future changes are downstream of philosophy and principles this 12:34means that we have a philosophy a world view we said that we we have a list of principles to behave on a daily basis and then after that we can think about design and construction of the system and how it operates i think that is a brilliant brilliant concept and i think 12:52that from all these things you can you can you can like condensate or create a set of very easy to think principles to guide our behavior on a daily basis and and for the future and for future changes and stuff like that and to distinguish what is good what 13:11is bad what is what is functional with the with the philosophy and what is not punctual with a functional with the philosophy so i this i wrote in 2017 or 18 i don't remember it's a set of principles um [Music] and 13:30i just wanted to mimic the the commandments because i guess that it's easy for people to remember 10 things so i wrote trust minimization immutability fungibility finality censorship resistance permissionlessness auditability reconcilability least authority and backward compatibility so i 13:49wrote i wrote about this and i did a few videos and i'm going to just go over them very fast trust minimization means to reduce the reliance on prosecutor parties for entering processing and finalizing transactions and smart contracts trusted third parties are security holes because 14:10they hold our money and wealth they hold our personal data manage everything on centralized servers they can be hacked and they tend to abuse their position traditional trusted third parties are amongst others banks credit card companies tech companies certification authorities corporations and governments 14:28um blockchains have trusted their parties as well this is very important to understand developers miners validators node operators and all kinds of participants as stakeholders for example as a volunteer i am a little bit of a trusted third party because i give opinion and i and i try to influence influence 14:47the direction of future changes for example investors are also a little bit of trusted third parties because depending on their size they can also influence um the community or the future operation of the of the a little bit the thing is that this is incredibly minimized 15:07the influence even of a minor or a developer or node operator it's incredibly minimized because of how the blockchain is replicated and decentralized so right here however blockchains are trust minimized because they have no central authority data is distributed among 15:25many nodes globally cryptographic components protect property and agreements the consensus mechanism prevents tampering the coordination problem to put everybody together to do a controversial change for example prevents community collusion and in any case ultimately 15:44communities can split if they don't like what's going on which is what happened between between ethereum and ethereum classic now ethereum is a fork of the original chain and a theorem classic it's the original chain so what problems does trust me minimization solve it minimizes central control and authority of blockchain network 16:03significantly reduces vulnerability to single points of failure reduces trusted third-party costs reduces trust trusted third-party restrictions and expands access to larger populations worldwide this is the social scalability concept immutability 16:22means accounts balances and smart contracts cannot be modified except by holders of corresponding private keys by entering transactions according to protocol rules this is important the blockchain pushes responsibility to the individual if you have the secret key or the private key you have control if you don't have it you 16:41do not have control immutability is really about the integrity of property and agreements property and agreements are represented by accounts balances and smart contracts or or these decentralized programs now which can have the rules of agreements between people and businesses the phrase corresponding private keys means 17:01that there should not be any alternative way of modifying accounts balances and smart contracts that includes but it's not limited to hard forks changes of state ad hoc transactions back doors or or third-party account precincts when you have when there's an account when there's property when there's a smart 17:20contract when there's a dow whatever is inside the blockchain only people with the private keys can participate and modify the states of those objects not the community or any other third party that that's the essence of emitability fungibility 17:39the native tokens must all be the same and interchangeable globally the native token as a generally accepted medium of exchange significantly helps uh the underlying economics of the blockchain this it is an important component of the price system due to its common acceptance ability 17:57to communicate to communicate price information ease of use and reduce mental uh cost the fungibility of the native token is very important and the fact that it's native is also very important the native token like etc in the ethereum classic blockchain is the one that is issued to pay 18:17for proof of work of the miners and then is the one that is used to pay for um fees for transactions to be included so it is it has a key economic function and has intrinsic value just because it's used for 18:35those things then then it can it can get intrinsic value just by being used for many other things externally you know but that's that's the core inside the blockchain finality means that transactions and executed smart contract code cannot be reversed once entered processed and finalized 18:51according to protocol rules helps the free and continuous circulation of capital globally this is a key economic concept that is also held by by fungibility uh the flow of capital when when when uh when 19:11you have a a currency system that um when there is a transaction and it's used for payment and the and the economic agents know that this that that is final then they can get on with their lives and continue the chain of activities of life you know and 19:30that includes economic transactions uh so so the fluidity and and flow of economics is is is um is is the almost benefited by by finality it's not only a security thing it's it's a it's a thing about continuity 19:49of human activity human action when a censorship resistance as long as they are complying with protocol rules transaction smart contract cannot be prevented from being entered processed and finalized censorship resistance is about what happens inside the blockchain no transactions as long as they're correctly 20:08formed and smart contracts they should be accepted processed executed and nobody nothing should stop that permissionlessness as long as they are compliant with protocol rules anyone from any place in the world can create accounts enter transactions and smart contracts and participate in the 20:27network as a competent developer miner validator node operator user any other prescribed participant or stakeholder this is very similar to censorship resistance but it's about not not stopping people uh permissionless is similar to censorship but it's really not about it's not about stopping transactions 20:47and activity inside the blockchain it's more something in the social layer not stopping people from participating for example the other day metamask when they restricted access to ethereum by venezuelan users that's a gross open horrible 21:06violation of permissionlessness auditability transaction and smart contract history must be analyzable and reconcilable by anyone or by holders of corresponding private keys this is this is a key also auditability is about the 21:24availability of information for verification purposes so one of the great things about blockchains is that they are transparent and anybody can go and audit bitcoin and ethereum classic and check whether the the supply is correct um that's you can check smart contract code verify that it doesn't have back doors 21:44or bugs or stuff like that you can you can see accounts when you send a transaction you can immediately go and see whether the transaction is accepted that's exactly opposite of banking systems banking systems are black boxes and we don't know whether banks are good 22:03or broke uh we don't know if if you have many things the transaction can take days to process especially glo diamonds international transaction key reconcilability transaction smart contract history must match mathematically 22:22to the latest latest and all future states according to protocol rules this is in response a little bit to the dao hard port there was an argument at the time um that that even though the the the hacker had 3.6 million ether and 22:42then suddenly in block 1 million 120 0001 he had zero it didn't mean it was a violation of immutability because it was a change forward of the state but it did not violate the past history of transactions so it was a total fallacy so 23:02reconcilability means that everything to the past and to the future must match mathematically to the transactions being entered into the network according to protocol rules not manually manual changes of state it 23:19also invalidates another argument that says that for example when this was a change entered when parity lost control of a multi-sig wallet in 2017 with i don't know must be worth a billion dollars or something like that and they said okay we lost control because 23:39there was a bug and and for some reason now we cannot send transactions to it but i can i can prove to the community that i have the private keys so the community should do a manual modification of the of the state of the chain again and return my money but now that that is not 23:57acceptable the only way for transactions to be processed is if they are entered into the blockchain and they're formed correctly not manually even if you have proof of property outside of the blockchain beast authority developers miners validators node operators users and all other 24:16prescribed participants and stakeholders must limit their participation this is a purely social thing practicing only the functions of their roles in accordance with protocol rules and these common principles this is just a principle that we have to adjust to how what 24:34what is the idea of decentralized idea of ethereum classic and that when we do from doing proposals to our activities in the community to running nodes or mining it has to be according to the philosophy you know and the protocol rules um 24:55to ensure social scalability blockchain companies need to focus on network functionality fixing bugs enhancing security and new features all legal ethical or or moral considerations need to be set aside a result of blockchain between the private parties to 25:16that then there's something special here which is the permissionless fallacy um because the blockchain if you're in glasgow is permissionless that does not mean anything may be done indeed anything that does not follow blockchain principles must be rejected so 25:35that that's an important thing because the fact that it's permissionless and we want to be open and anybody in the world can participate that does not mean that you can participate and do whatever you want and change and introduce a change or something that that goes against the whole the 25:54whole idea of ethereum classic so it's absolutely legitimate to reject those things and come and i think that that's absolutely natural especially in decentralized systems and the the last one is backward compatibility uh accounts balances and smart 26:14contracts must be able to be managed and executed and work as originally formed and designed forever when implementing fixes changes future upgrades to the network the functionality and execution of past accounts and smart contract code inside the blockchain must not break and work as 26:32originally designed through time for eternity this is a very important principle thank you awesome presentation and uh i hope the 26:51audience can learn some of the um i guess the the rationale for why ethereum classic is what it is and where it came from from that and i guess it all stems from this original incident of the dao and that really was the sort of defining moment that not just created the theorem classic but also sort 27:11of separated out the ideas that made the classic um and filtered out the uh the participants in the ethereum ecosystem that were not on board with those principles yeah and i think that what what you said is interesting because there's this like 27:30quasi-theological interpretation of the existence of etc and and what caused its origin one one um one uh way of describing it can be okay there 27:48was the dao they did the the community did the reversal uh and that's when the theorem classic was origin and that was the cause of the existence of ethereum classic i say that that's not the event that produced if you're 28:07in class for me uh the founder of ethereum classic is vitalik he thought about it in 2013 he did all the steps and everything to get money and get the team to build it in 2014 and it was launched in 2015 and that's the theorem classic uh 28:25the event of 2016 created ethereum in my opinion but again it's more or less like discussing the trinity uh in christianity it's a never-ending question it's a good way of putting it and i think uh a lot of a lot of um people would agree and 28:42on reflection you're probably right but uh i guess a lot of the original people that were involved in creating ethereum were not aware of that themselves or at least they they didn't buy into it as as much as they should have i 29:01guess no they're totally fully convinced that they are the original chain and the ethereum community and all that yeah um i guess the unfortunate thing was that they convinced uh well they they pretended that cody's law was was the thing they were following 29:20and it turned out they weren't that was just a a convenient marketing gimmick apparently it was it was a giant bait and switch but nonetheless the theorem classic was created so we've got to give them props for that and in 29:39a way i think um it's probably the best way that it could have happened because this kind of leads into another sort of topic which which is uh the sort of immaculate conception that ethereum classic is in that uh there is no leader there is no satoshi i mean if if italic did not do the hard fork then ethereum 29:58would still be one chain and it would still have a foundation and it would still be somewhat centralized by that foundation so the split itself made ethereum classic even more decentralized yes i think that um um it was a big community and evidently it was 30:17mixed in terms of philosophy and definitely the separation um made ethereum classic community in that sense more more focused on its principles and more pure no because all the people that um 30:36were in a way imposters or they didn't know really what they were doing uh they went with ethereum and um today ethereum is a totally subjectively managed um whereas ethereum classic is i would say together 30:55with bitcoin maybe one of the most pure original cypherpunk projects in the in the industry i agree with that for sure um and it's one of the few that has like explicitly pitched itself as that like there's not many blockchains that even 31:15really care about decentralization that much it's more of just an annoying thing than than the end goal yeah that that's that's also very interesting because um everybody is going in one direction when you see when you see the whole industry and and the noise and try to separate 31:35signal from noise try to figure out what's going on i mean there's like 20 blockchains no you have ethereum is still a theorem one but to try to win the race to go to proof of stake and 31:55be more scalable it was eos tazos polkadot uh icp solana avax i don't know there's neo tron there's so many and it's like incredible because the great great 32:13majority of people are going in that direction scalability and innovation and we need to i mean um we need to focus on innovation this depends on innovation and scalability uh and and the only project that i see that is going in exactly the opposite direction and saying no we 32:32are going to sacrifice scalability and we're going to stay um and our focus is going to be security and immutability is it here classic and um and i would say of course a bitcoin bitcoin as well but in the in the sector of smart contract blockchains 32:53yes um ethereum classic is is totally going in the other direction even even other proof of work on contract blockchains like cadena they talk about sharding and fragmentation and scalability all the time uh so so even if they they're staying with proof of work it's more or less 33:13like a like um excuse to make believe that they are they are following nakamoto consensus or something like that but but they're totally focused on like the others and scalability and sacrificing security for that sort 33:32of um misdirection going here in the industry where people don't really understand why blockchains exist in the first place and what problem they're there to solve and i guess this kind of leads in to the next sort of question of like what is it exactly that ethereum 33:50classic and bitcoin and all the properly decentralized blockchains what is the point of them what are they actually trying to achieve in the grand scheme of things do you think questions that i saw for this call was what is decentralization 34:12so before answering before answering the the questions what do they what do they solve um i think that decentralization was very well described by by nick sabo in that essay that i pointed out trusted third party security holes so a 34:31centralized system is basically you have many components for example a nation a nation has a from the top down you have the federal central government and then you can have provinces or states and within each province or state you have municipalities and 34:50the three levels all depend though they they they are governed by the level above you know municipalities have to comply with state or provincial laws and rules and then provincial provinces and states they have to comply with federal um [Music] 35:10rules and laws and those systems not only they may start they may start in theory in a certain way with balance of power and checks and balance and stuff like that but unavoidably or inexorably uh they they tend to centralization now we 35:29have humans we have a natural bias to follow something above or a leading point focal point and and the federal government in all these organizations or the national government tends to accumulate more power sucking power from the states and the states tend to suck power from the 35:48municipalities and and then the municipalities have power from the individual and families so in the end everything becomes centralized um decentralization means it puts the the this thing the other way around individuals and families and 36:06communities at the municipal level they they um they are the only level player i would say and they don't have anything above uh as a focal point to follow or that they have to comply with they 36:24just um participate in their in their communities because they they they want to and and and and they just follow whatever are the local rules of the local community and if they don't like them they go to another community etcetera what i'm describing is mainly 36:45systems in computer science so it's a one layer system and um and and there's no higher layers that provide guidance or rules or or and for that they have to provide permission and stuff like that and they and they become more centralized and more 37:04restrictive and they leave people out it's decentralized system is a system where you participate and you can go participate and leave and there's no higher authority that is coordinating the behavior of any of the participants um this 37:22was was practically impossible like i guess it was impossible between proof of work but proof of the thing is systems that are like this how how do how do everybody achieve consensus about the current state of the system how do everybody achieve consensus about the the single 37:40set of rules it's it how to produce information accept new information into the system well there had to be a way because if you if you do away with a with um with a coordinating point that was a central government or or the leading administrative point uh 38:00you need to replace it with something that creates this consensus if not it turns into chaos that's another thing blockchains are strictly rule-based systems they're not the law of the jungle that anybody can do whatever they want they are very strict sets of rules the thing is that we all agree with those 38:19rules and achieve consensus based on a signal which is proof of work now is somebody at some point in the network creates a block and that is the signal within the noise and when everybody receives a copy of the block they know that that's the correct block and the latest state of the system based 38:38on the information of the proof of work because it's very unlikely that anybody else could do that same proof of work um so so that's i don't know my my thought about the difference between centralization decentralization so what do these systems achieve when they achieve what 38:58i just described for the first time i think in computer science a global network of machines run by people who speak different languages belong to different religions different cultures and different nations regardless of whether those nations are at war or 39:18at peace or where they are geographically these machines every 15 seconds in the case of etc they agree exactly on the state of the network with no risk of centralization and no director or 39:36admin or president or king that is telling them which is the correct state um so that solves the problem an example described that the trusted third party tend to abuse their position and tend to abuse our property and agreements and money and stuff 39:55like that so i think that is the blockchain that broke that that the problem that blockchain solved the they solved they provided a way to be able to coordinate without central central focal 40:13points right it's uh it's this contrast between top-down uh authoritarianism order versus bottom-up emergent order and market forces belief 40:31are able to come to much higher levels of coordination because they can be dynamic and they can adjust to change and because they're completely voluntary they can they can make decisions in a way that if every individual participates in um and benefits from transactions because they're 40:50voluntary overall the system can be much more uh efficient as opposed to ossified top-down approaches exactly top-down approaches they can capture you if you cannot escape the system no so so that that happens with nations for example 41:08if you if you live in uruguay or the united states or ukrainian or or afghanistan it's very costly to move from nation to nation if you don't like what's going on in in where where we live in nigeria in nigeria for example it's not that okay i'm 41:28gonna switch now i'm gonna click this this app this button and i'm gonna move to another nation it's very costly you have all your social your your affections your business everything is like uh very difficult to move outside of where other communities where you are in 41:47blockchains that that is removed so now this this this uh decentralization is really possible because um they kind of capture you're very difficult to capture in that sense also you mentioned another thing that's very interesting you mentioned the the concept of markets i 42:05think different i think blockchains are perfect for markets and like i said before blockchains are very strict very strict protocols with rules with very strict rules that are enforced with technologies that are practically impossible to break you know so markets are the same markets are not the law of the 42:25jungle people think free market because it has a term free means uh that is the law of the jungle and whoever is stronger wins markets are that can only exist are an abstraction or an invention by humans they can only exist only 42:45when you have very well evolved institutions and rules and law and those are followed very strictly for example to list your your your company in the new york stock exchange you have to go through a whole protocol to 43:04list your your your shares and also daily trading have to respect a certain very strict protocol if not they kick you out um so markets uh are also very strong sets of rules and the stronger the rules are and 43:21the this is like paradoxical the freer the more free participants are the more free right price donation and participation and supply and demand it's it's uh basically the concept of rule is law if you know sorry the rule of 43:40law if you know what other people are going to be done and are limited by it means you can act in a more uh confident way knowing that they are limited in their actions as well as long as you're all playing the same game to the same standard which goes out the window when when you have top-down authorities that can just abuse the law so you don't have rule 43:59of law in the normal system but with cody's law you can actually achieve that yes and the more strict is the law and it is followed the rule of law the more freedom is created especially in decentralized systems yeah so i think ultimately it's about creating 44:17freedom for individuals at the end of the day that's the ultimate goal of this this whole endeavor in my opinion yes i agree okay so i know you have to go in a few minutes so i wanted to uh open the floor up if anyone wanted to ask some questions from the audience yes 44:35i have 11 minutes just one question because we are having trouble 44:53times so any knowledge of how blockchain is used in contracts 45:15used for i don't know robotics or tanks or rockets or airplanes how does uh the global how 45:36does blockchain fit in this less secure world i i don't know i don't know if um militaries are using uh the blockchain i am convinced that 45:55a country like russia they already own bitcoin and it's just a secret um but uh so i would say that an immediate use case for her military um anywhere now we have the the current 46:14situation of russian ukraine but now i'm talking in general now i think that um just like money needs to be sound and and has to flow as freely as possible to to foment and enhance the economic process i guess that supply chains can be enhanced if the military have edc 46:33and bitcoin and they use smart contracts for the execution the supply chain would be much more certain i guess stuff like that but i don't know i don't know anything another interesting thing is that the internet was created by the military here in the united states precisely to make communications 46:53redundant and to avoid um interruptions in communication even if systems would be attacked or bombed and stuff like that no um because it's a decentralized system and and and ethereum classic is designed for 47:11that it's designed to to survive uh nuclear war because there's nodes that replicate the blockchain and accept transactions all over the world so if you if you're in a certain area that has war and and you get disconnected you can reconnect again in 47:31a permissionless way without asking anyone um and continue sending transactions and checking the blockchain um [Music] and and everything is replicated everywhere so if half the nodes fall because there's a nuclear war the other half can continue uh 47:49operating even though even though the others are out and when the others come online again they can reconnect very easily no because of proof of work many 48:19topics to cover in in this uh whole philosophy we we could go on for hours and uh i really hope you can join us again for another installment of this discussion donald in the future because uh we could really drill down at some some really uh interesting pathways absolutely 48:36yes you wrote there in the on the github page for this call an outline of topics so i would be very glad to to join again some other day in the future to to continue talking about those things i i won't do a prepared presentation and we just can start 48:55talking from the beginning there's uh we're on a kind of frontier really and given that there's well compared to ethereum there's not that many people interested in ethereum classic um we're 49:15in a very sort of uh interesting position to be able to explore these ideas uh and apply them in practice on a chain that actually cares about those ideas so i think it's really important for us to uh to really delve deep and see where we can go with this yeah like you wrote what we do on a daily basis with the theorem 49:35classic is downstream of philosophy and principles so the more we talk about principles and we think about them and we process them in our minds better um absolutely coming years whether 49:55or not we like it these principles are going to be coming very useful and the chains that don't have anchors to the philosophy are going to soon find that they are lost and they will succumb to centralization and failure eventually absolutely 50:14i think that there's two there's two themes that the chains that lost their way have one is scalability at all cost scalability oh because bitcoin is not scalable oh i have a great idea if i make one that is scalable i'm going to win uh the other one the other one is innovation 50:35bitcoin is very slow ethereum classic is very they go very slow they're very conservative so they don't innovate so if i'm faster innovating i'm going to win yeah all that stupid thinking totally misses the point that is exactly because they don't have principles they don't get it but the whole point is decentralization and 50:55trust minimization if you if you're going to innovate and scale by sacrificing that then you're missing the point you went in the wrong ridge absolutely the the whole sort of trade-off of using a 51:14blockchain is that you need to sacrifice those things in order to achieve something that is unique to the technology so like yeah go into aws what yeah i i was saying you could use uh other alternatives to blockchains like aws or other centralized 51:33solutions if if you're going to imitate what um the traditional systems do you know the many of these blockchains they introduce treasuries which 51:53is not an innovation uh voting which is not an innovation governance um and they make it even worse because the voting in a blockchain the only way to prevent cyber attacks and stock puppet attacks is by doing coin voting voting so they're doing versions of voting in the 52:12markets that are worse than the traditional ones transparent right because they suddenly come here and and there's someone with 12 million coins and so that means it's 12 million votes and they control everything 52:33um so it's funny i was going to say something about this thing of innovation i guess i wanted to clarify also the fact that ethereum plastic may go slower is more conservative [Music] or 52:51bitcoin the same because we prioritize security decentralization permissionlessness social scalability etc does not mean in any way that innovation and scalability doesn't exist the 53:09the only the only difference is that innovation and new features and upgrades are going to be done and scalability is going to be accomplished only and only if it meets the the very strict rules and principles of decentralization if not then 53:29you have to keep on waiting and trying to invent new things until you can make them that they don't minimize they don't reduce decentralization and security so innovation is totally welcome and upgrade that's why we upgrade every 53:48now and then and bitcoin had an upgrade recently and so innovation is welcome and also scaled but as long as it doesn't sacrifice fast minimization and security easily do that without even touching layer 54:06one you can have various different scaling solutions in layer two and yeah innovation on the contract layer is where all the innovations happening anyway really so that's the beauty of having an evm exactly do it outside outside of the secure environment of the blockchain the same thing with social issues like if there's a 54:26hack okay go and look look for the hacker and get his private key with the police or the fbi or the legal system and then recover the money but don't tamper with the blockchain internally so istora and brothel thank you very much for inviting me now now i have to go but thank you very much for organizing these 54:45all these calls every tuesday i enjoy them very much i love to participate and thanks again for inviting me today thank you very much for your contributions donald and it's always good to have you on cheers have a good week bye bye listening 55:06that donald uh last week also had a uh a youtube video uh his second in the series on a series of presentations that he's doing about the history of blockchain and uh episode 2 was released on wednesday you can find that on the ethereum classic website 55:24and links in this video as well i think he goes into uh a bit about what the app ecosystem on ethereum and various different types of smart contracts and stable coins and uh various different approaches to innovation which we're just talking about so uh i 55:43hope you guys enjoyed this discussion um if anyone wants to bring up some topics now is the time we are 55:51opening the floor up going 56:10to be planning to do these calls also on a live stream on youtube so this will hopefully solve a couple of problems one being that it's less work involved so we don't have to encode and upload the videos they're just automatically done for us and also it will open up um maybe 56:29some more community questions and participation from the youtube side of the ethereum classic community i know there's a lot of youtubers out there so it'd be interesting to get um them involved as well so we're gonna experiment with that this week and maybe next week this will be in the 56:46form of a live stream so uh we will keep you posted in the theme class discord if there is movement on that potential content to go into now with all 57:05this philosophy stuff so uh if you have any ideas for topics that you wanted to discuss in detail ideally not just char 3 although every topic is welcome but it's nice to get some uh some variety occasionally so i hope this has been a bit of a welcome change 57:24in the typical uh yeah charts rediscussion so hopefully we can keep it more varied in future maybe this is a good time to wrap things up unless anyone has anything to add so final 57:42caller for any comments or contributions everyone involved for joining us this week uh thank you brola for helping with the 58:01call and donald for joining us and uh we will see you all next week same time same place for ethereum classic community call number 17. 58:07see you next week bye

ETC Principles & Philosophy with Donald McIntyre

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