1559 Strikes Back

0:01Istora MandiriHello, and welcome to Ethereum Classic Community Call number 43. Today is the 5th of December 2025. As usual, please remember, we're going to post this call on YouTube, so let's be excellent to each other. This week, we'll be continuing the discussion about implementing EIP1559, compatible mechanism for Ethereum Classic. In our previous call, the Olympia authors agreed to dive a bit deeper into ECIP113, Olympia's proposed governance system. Before we dive into this topic, I just wanted to start by mentioning that a pull request for ECIP 1120 has been created. 1120 is authored by myself, Estora, and ETC developer Diego. 1120 outlines a vision for a minimally complex 1559-like implementation that returns all the fees to miners with a simple algorithmic, protocol-native mechanism. More on this ECIP in perhaps a future call. Since we've already agreed to have this call focused on 1113, let's make the best use of the time and talk about that. So, yeah, we have on the call We'd have gotten. Would you like to say hello? 1:09WedergartenYeah, hello. It's been a while. I'm glad to be back on one of these calls. I would be glad to contribute my thoughts to this discussion. I'm not, I wouldn't say that I'm technical in the sense of the chain itself, in terms of the… you know, in terms of implementations, but I am able to generally understand what EIPs mean and how they might affect the decentralized finance sector on a given chain. So, I feel like I might have some valuable things to say on that. 1:43Istora MandiriAwesome. And you've been around with the ETC ecosystem for a number of years, I guess, and have been on previous calls, so it's good to have you back. 1:53WedergartenThank you, and thank you for continuing to host these. It's a pleasure to have you. 1:58Istora MandiriAbsolutely. Yeah, I think it's going to be increasingly important in the coming Months, and next year specifically, because of this, This debate that's unfolding about 1559, And I guess just to bring you up to speed, and others listening, that, so far we've had one proposal in the form of the Olympia set of proposals, which is, Basically, implementing 1559 by redirecting the base fee to a Treasury system. And the idea of this call was hopefully to get more in-depth about how that Treasury system is going to be governed. And, we were hoping to get the author of that proposal, Chris Murtha, on the call. I believe he was supposed to join, but maybe he'll join a bit later, as he did last time. But in the meantime, I guess… I can… Put my thoughts forward, and maybe we can discuss between us two about, The pros and cons of this approach. 3:02WedergartenI didn't listen to the last, call. Could you please resume, like, what Chris Mercer shared last time, just generally? What his, you know, what he had to say, and how he felt about other people? In regards to his own proposal? 3:19Istora MandiriYeah, let me just pull up the, There's an AI-generated summary, if I can find the community call… I think. Yeah, so this is Community Hall 42. The key takeaways are, we discussed 1459, And four options were considered, including, for the distribution mechanism, like smoothing over blocks. So, just for… an overview. 1559 adds this new type of transaction called Type 2 transaction, which allows end users To… instead of doing an auction for the gas price, the gas fee that they'd be paying for transactions, which can be difficult to figure out. Like, often people are overpaying. So instead of that, 1559 introduces this base fee algorithmic system, which allows you to more predictably price your transactions, and this provides better user experience. And the result of that is that there's a base fee where transaction They're all priced the same, basically. And that fee would normally go to miners in the current system, but for technical reasons. They cannot go to miners in the same block. On Ethereum Classic. Full. there's some game theory problems with giving it to miners directly in the same block. So, Olympia, on Ethereum, they burn it. On a Zoom Classic, we can't do that, because it affects the… emission curve. If we burn things, it messes with the economics. And also, in my opinion, we want to incentivize miners as much as possible, so burning that would kind of reduce the security budget, when we could, in fact, be returning that to miners, and making it more, increasingly incentive to mine Ethereum platform. So, Ethereum… sorry, Olympia, which is Chris Merc's set of proposals, ECIP111 to 11115, suggests that… These funds are redirected to a Treasury with an on-chain voting mechanism. And that would basically be a DAO that has proposals and… funds projects. So the, those fees would be used not to fund mining, but to fund development in the ecosystem. Another approach is an algorithmic return to miners, over the course of a number of blocks. So that sidesteps the issue with returning all the funds to the miners in the same block by kind of dividing up the base fee and giving it to miners over, let's say, 100 blocks in the future. And basically, we were getting near the end of that previous call into… the details of the Olympia governance system, which, in my opinion, are kind of important to get, like, a good understanding of before we determine whether or not Olympia itself is feasible. So, unless there's, like, at least one decent proposal for a governance system that can bootstrap this… New Dow? It's going to be difficult to figure out how we can actually deploy that in a protocol-neutral and sufficiently decentralized way. 6:43WedergartenI think it's interesting, how you talk about, the governance system, because it's quite, it does quite present a few num… a number of challenges Because… We're talking about, having a centralized way of giving funds out, but at the same time, you know, we also want to… it's centralized in the sense that the funds are being pulled centrally, and so, you know, things on-chain can be centralized in a sense. But, what makes things decentralized is how you delegate the power over that, that fund. And so, there's… there is a lot of possibilities that, you know, you could look into, but, you know. Right now, from what I can tell, it's quite unspecified and still very up for debate, at the minimum, this specific part of those proposals. And when I look into it, there's a few options. The main option would be to give power to all ETC holders, like giving a vote specifically to depending on, you know, how much ETC you have, you can use that to vote. Or it could be by the miners, for example. There's quite a few options, and so it would be important that before anything like this, like, actually gets implemented, that these are properly, debated through, because whatever system, if there is a governance system. That does, end up being implemented for this. You would have to consider All of the implications of what system you're implementing, and what the alternatives might have… might offer, and obviously the alternative of not having a governance system and not having a central fund in response to that as sort of, a comparison. You need to look at every single… at all the details before you come, to… to a conclusion. But, the general… I… I understand why, Christopher Mercer has brought up this, This proposal and his, his positioning in regards to the co-op no longer kind of existing, or it exists on a lower… low-power mode, but there's… there isn't really that branch of the outreach anymore. It's really just a small entity now. And the kind of wanting or the willingness to kind of replace that, or find a way to kind of move the protocol forward, but I do… I continue to always say that I believe in the free market and in free market principles, and if there's really a demand and a need for changes to the protocol. and it requires funding for developers, then I think that Ethereum Classic, if we don't implement bureaucracy, then no matter what, if we do manage to find a solution through the free market, it will be the most efficient and the most cost-efficient. And it will be, from a member of the community or members of the community that have been around for a long time, and it will… it would be a collective effort that would require collective participation instead of, basically what is being proposed through the ECIP11 and ECI… through ECIP114, is effectively taxing transactions. I know that that is up for debate, and I will… I will, I will concede that, but from my perspective, as someone, as a user of ETC, and as someone who, likes to build on ETC, and who sees a big future, a long-term future in ETC, Those… when users make transactions, they expect that when whatever fees that they're paying goes directly to the miners. in order to secure the blockchain to make sure that that transaction is as legitimate as it is. They do not want to have to contribute to a central treasury. And no matter how you might want to frame it, if we make Type 2 transactions automatically contribute to a Treasury. there is some deviation of funds that could be going to minors. You could be saying that, oh, well, the funds would either be burned. Well, there is funds that either could be… that could either not exist or go to minors. and that… those funds are instead going to a pool that now has to have a whole new set of bureaucracy sort of implemented in order to manage that. And I don't see why, miners or Ethereum Classic users Would see this as a beneficial system, especially when they've, in the past, rejected very similar proposals and very similar systems that would effectively have a governance system or some kind of central funding system that is… that uses taxes specifically on transactions to, to fund it. So. Personally, I don't support these proposals, but I would like to, at least, at the minimum, allow for further discussion, and really get to fully understand the proposals in their full depth, and then put them up against whatever, say, alternative proposal, you might say. And I think, Astora, you put up a proposal. I wouldn't say it's sort of a counter-proposal, but it's more a… another path forward that we could take. I don't know if you would agree with that, but would you say that it's sort of a different… a different approach to the same kind of problem, or at least to the problem of Type 2 transactions? 12:13Istora MandiriYeah, exactly. The, the goal of, 1120, is to figure out what's, like, the bare minimum complexity. that we can possibly find a path to in order to support this new Type 2 transaction, and that is without any additional, like, contracts, or without any additional state, on-chain. So it's like… Yeah, there's… We can probably go into more of the technical details on a later call, but yeah, the general approach is that we wanted to find something that Doesn't add complexity, and it's something that is pretty… Easy to explain relative to more complex systems. And I just wanted to make a few comments on your last piece. So yeah, I agree that Further discussion is definitely necessary. And I just hope we can have this discussion without feeling like either side of the debate is necessarily rushing or trying to push or announce things before they're actually decided. I think that might poison the discussion if we kind of pressure ourselves into going one path or another because of, like, external things happening, in… in the social side, and really we should focus on what's technically best for Ethereum Classic. It is indeed true that similar systems have been rejected in the past. There were two Treasury proposals in the past that were rejected. One of them more recently, that might be in memory was in 2020, I believe. And that was a large debate, and a large… Cool. Of arguments against the idea of a protocol-aired treasury. Which Olympia also is. Miners won't see it as being beneficial is absolutely correct, and I just don't see how miners would vote for a Treasury proposal that takes away Funds that would otherwise be going to them. It is a kind of tax. In that, compared to the current system, all of those transaction fees are going to the miners directly. And it is kind of changing the contract. It's kind of… I wouldn't say it's a rug pull, necessarily, but it is kind of like, hey, the miners have agreed that they're mining this chain, and they're expecting all these transactions to go to them in the future. The future, sort of, security of the chain will eventually rely more on transaction fees, and miners have kind of made this investment in hardware. And it would be quite a difficult sell, I think, to get them to mine a chain that undermines that investment. I think the free market is definitely the way to go. And the way I'd like to see things move forward with these kind of DAOs is deploy one, right? See if it works. Get funding. It doesn't have to be a lot, just show that the process works. And then if you've proven that it works, and that, you know, these DAOs can actually achieve what they're claiming to, then we can think about integrating one in the protocol. But so far, I haven't seen one that's actually Successful, gets engagement, and isn't gameable in a way that would make it secure enough to put into the protocol like that. So… Yeah, those are my thoughts on what you just said. 15:34WedergartenWell, I'll pick up quickly, and I want to let Justin Jay pick in, because I saw him turn off his… turn on his microphone earlier, if he's interested, but I just wanted to add quickly that I agree with what you're saying, and what you said regarding the free market is correct, because what is trying to be implemented through, ECIP 111, 1111, and 1114? is effectively a… a centralized, or at least not a centralized, but a treasury system that, that will… that is supposed to be decentralized. But, the… the… what makes something decentralized is… who, is voluntary participation. And, you know, people can… participate in Bitcoin, people can participate in Ethereum Classic, or they can choose another chain. That's what makes it decentralized. But if, for whatever reason, Ethereum Classic is an important blockchain in the future, and people are sort of forced to use it because it is advantageous over other mechanisms, they will inherently be forced to use a blockchain that has this system. And so, if this system, for whatever reason. is detrimental and doesn't position Ethereum Classic in the same way in the future, because people are looking for a real free market proponent. As sort of a real blockchain that has real long-term, sustainable you know, using proof of work, using smart contracts, that is the original Ethereum. If this is something that people want, they may feel that that might be poisoned by having a treasury on-chain. But, I counter that in saying that if anybody who believes that a treasury, some kind of central fund… funding that, specifically for protocol. is not necessarily a bad idea, but it should be done using smart contracts on-chain. Anybody is allowed to go and do that. I could decide to do that. anybody, the people who are making Olympia could decide to do that, or anybody else in the world could decide that tomorrow they're gonna build a, you know, what they're talking about, a governance system on-chain, where they are actively seeking for people who are… have a collective interest in funding what… whatever it is that these ECIPs are proposing to fix. And so, if there are… if… we need these solutions to, say, fund further ETC development at the core level, or whatever it is that they need the funding for. There will be free market proponents that will come into the game, and that… and it's not difficult for them to kind come together and collectively pay for that. That's what Ethereum Classic is designed to do, and so it's kind of strange for us to kind of mediate away from that to kind of a more traditional Kind of bureaucratic, kind of. way of funding things, when instead we could allow the free market to decide what is best for the chain, and that will ultimately lead to the best outcome for both the users, the miners, and the people who have a long-term investment in Ethereum Classic, so… I would like to let Justin Jay pitch in, but just generally, it's better to keep ETC OG, and I really… I really think that we could lose some of our status if we allow for a treasury system on ETC. I like… I prefer to be a little blunt sometimes, but that's… that's how I feel. Justin Jay, are you there? 19:23JustjinYeah, what's going on, guys? 19:26Istora MandiriJust in. 19:28JustjinHello? 19:30Istora MandiriHey, I can hear you. 19:31JustjinHello? Oh, hi. 19:34Istora MandiriHey, how's it going? 19:35JustjinYeah, it's going alright. I've been listening to you guys, and like, I haven't, reviewed the whole ECIP set, but like, I got a gist of everything, because I've been kind of busy doing other stuff, but Yeah, I think, I don't know, my suggestion with that would be probably the clients somehow, but then, like, the funds should probably, yeah, stay with the miners, like, you know, for now, yeah. 20:02Istora MandiriRight. 20:02JustjinI don't know exactly… I don't know exactly, how the process, like, technically it would be, handled, but then, my, my concern is with, just a… the way… the way the… this… this ECIP is being handled is just kind of… it's kind of odd, and the… the… what… what is being suggested? For the ECIP, I guess, so… Does that make sense? 20:33Istora MandiriYeah, could you, just for the listeners, Justin, could you, introduce yourself a little bit, and explain how your, your role in ETC. 20:43JustjinOh, okay. 20:44Istora MandiriAnd then also. 20:45JustjinA role in EDC, I don't really have a role. I don't really have a role in EDC, I just, yeah, I've been… I've been in, with EDC for a bit, maybe since 20… yeah, 2017, 2016, around there, but then I only got active on social media after… After maybe, yeah, 17, 18, whatever, but… yeah, just, I follow… 21:09Istora MandiriYou've been helping… You've been helping with the Discord, right? 21:14JustjinYes, I have. Just trying to do my best to, keep everything organized, but yeah, it kind of gets out of hand sometimes, and yeah, it's just, maybe it's a personnel thing, but it is what it is, you know, we just push forward, that's it. 21:30Istora MandiriYeah, your contributions are much appreciated. 21:34JustjinOh, thank you, bud, yeah, sure. 21:37Istora MandiriYou mentioned that you… you feel that the ECIP is being handled, in a strange way, or something like that? Could you elaborate? 21:45JustjinYeah, it's just… Yeah, well… It should be more of, like, a discussion topic, not like a forced, okay, we're gonna be moving to this kind of thing, and I've seen some ads, and then… I have this system I made that it just picks up, like, the news and stuff, and then it just, like, what it reads is just weird, like, it's, Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't mean to… yeah. 22:16Istora MandiriTotally, I totally agree, and… it's one of the main concerns I have with how this Ethiopia has been marketed, is that it's been announced as if it's a done deal, as if it's definitely happening, as if we're implementing this Olympia system, Announcements have been made on certain websites, like CoinMarketCap, And, and it's like… This kind of undermines the whole process that's supposed to exist in order to gain consensus. And if… it really risks creating, like. bad outcomes if we do not all come to the same page, and kind of disregard each other's ideas about how things should be going, because… Yeah, you really need everyone to be in agreement. For these hardwalks to be clean. 23:09JustjinFor sure, yeah, like, it just… there should be more unity, but, like, I've been in ETC for a bit, I know how it is, but it just… yeah, it is what it is, right? 23:20Istora MandiriYeah, it is indeed. Yeah, so thank you for, joining the call, and yeah, it's great to have, the voices of our contributors heard, so thank you. 23:31JustjinNo, thank you guys. You guys have been doing a lot. I've been trying to keep up with you guys, but, you know, I'm not, I guess, technically advanced as you guys, but yeah, do my best. 23:42Istora MandiriIt is a complicated topic, and that does create some barriers, but… it doesn't… prevent people from… from getting their voices across, so I'm glad you did decide to. 23:55JustjinOh, for sure. 23:57Istora MandiriJust to pick up on a thread that Whitaker mentioned before, and I wanted to reinforce that, which is the… first, the idea that the free market, should be the way we do this, and launching DAOs. The issue is actually not that there's no funding. In fact, only a couple years ago, Bitmain committed 10 million US dollars of ETC, which is still sitting in a multi-sig contract. So the issue is not the funding itself, it's how those funds are distributed. And, in fact, the Olympia proposal is not going to be getting that much in terms of funding because of the base fee being quite low at the moment. We're talking, like, 50K US dollars per year, at least currently. So there's no, like… Critical funding operations that it can be achieving in the next, let's say, short term. So that's one thing, and that means there's competition, there's… there's time to create the best possible DAO, if that's what you want to do, to distribute funds on-chain first, and then… basically tried to petition Bitmain to get some funding in order to prove that your DAO is good enough, at least for that. And I think the bar for having it as a protocol level should be much higher than that. Secondly, let's just talk about the problem. That you alluded to where they got them with governance. And here's a super simple example. Right now, there's not a ton of people. actively involved in ETC. Let's say this DAO was launched next year, as was planned by Christmas's proposal. And it's initially bootstrapped with some kind of voting proposal, some kind of voting system. Now, it wouldn't be a coin vote, let's say it's a… some kind of reputation system, and let's say it's a perfect reputation system imaginable. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say that only good actors, to start off with, are given this. Ability to vote on proposals and… importantly, upgrade the DAO code itself, because that's part of the proposal. There needs to be a way to upgrade the governance system itself. And let's say in… Three years' time, there's even fewer people. And a handful of those people decide, okay, we need to upgrade the DAO, and we're gonna turn it into a multisig. And we're gonna basically own the Dow forever, going forward. Now, that's something that's totally possible in the paradigm of what's been proposed in Olympia? And it's something that is obviously not compatible with the decentralized requirements for Ethereum Classic. And there's no proposal, there's no talk about how that kind of scenario can be prevented. And in fact, I think that kind of scenario is unpreventable. In a… a simple… Like, the issue is how you seed the original holders. And you can't really do an ICO, you can't do a presale. You're gonna have to figure out how to… Ensure that, not just at the start, but on an ongoing process, you… Do not. end up in a situation where a handful of people effectively control the ability to upgrade the DAO. And that's something I've not seen an answer to yet, and I was hoping that in this call we could get more into detail on that with regards to 1113. But yeah, those questions remain unanswered, and until they are answered, I don't think we can look at this as a serious proposal, to be honest. 27:37JustjinYeah, I agree. 27:45WedergartenI'm just gonna say, that… there's… I'm gonna play maybe not devil's advocate, but, Chris Mercer's advocate, and say that if he was here, he may join, he would counter that by saying that it wouldn't be just, like, a few people, managing it, and he would… he would probably say something like, it would be a governance system that incorporates everyone down probably to the token holder. But, you know, it is an interesting discussion to have about governance, because, for example, if you had… so, as you had your example of just having, you know, only the fair actors. vote on it. That's not, like, a realistic system, and even if it was, you're right, it would pro… there's a real chance that it could devolve into the future, and just opening that door and the possibility to that is bad. But, then if you… if you take it to the… to a more… to the more realistic scenario of the fact that you're taxing, effectively, miners, and you're taxing coin hold… any participants that use the transaction network on ETC, the more transactions they do, the more they get taxed, and the more, and the miners, effectively, the more they mine, the more they get taxed. It's… it's kind of… it's not that they get taxed more. by their mining, but it's just that the overall amount of tax does increase if they're mining more, and that does create additional contributions, to the… to the Treasury. But what's interesting is that if you were to implement the system where it would be all token holders, it would be very difficult to have, everybody part, like, a very good quorum and a very good representation from Everybody around the chain, because people aren't necessarily going to go and vote with their wallet, and you would have to have a new system to be able to vote with, tokens that you already have in your wallet. That doesn't involve any transactions, such as moving the tokens, so that's a whole new, like, question. How do you sign for those transactions, track which ETC have been have been used, like, what if I vote for something, and then I move the ETC to another wallet on the same proposal the next day? You have to… there's all these questions that begin… you open a whole new box of questions. when you do that, and then… and then you consider, well, okay, maybe then we don't want to have every ETC holder be a participant, then you have to decide. Well, who do we give priority on voting? Do we give it to the miners? Well, is that such a great idea? Because then there's no representation from the users of the chain, from the DeFi users, or from the people that are just transacting. Between each other. and there's no representation from other proponents, such as entities, it's just the miners. And then vice versa, if you make it some kind of on-chain DAO where people sort of buy into it, and then they kind of have control over it, which, you know, this sounds terrible, but that's as an alternative to, like, giving every coin holder, veto power. If you were to make it so that people are effectively buying into it, and then that's how they gain control, well, that creates sort of a whole new box of problems where, people who have tokens, who are paying the taxes, are not having any representation, and at the same time, there's sort of a group of elites who are making all the decisions because maybe they bought in early and they have more power. basically, what I'm trying to say is that if you were to implement EIP111 through 1114, you would have to answer a whole lot of questions, and so far, every question that I put forward, and I know other people have put forward, has been answered in sort of, like, a chat GPT little matrix box, where there's, like, the small question, and then, like, you know, like a… like a 10-word answer to, like, the solution to all of it, and then if you ask further questions, you know, you're just some kind of mad hater man, so… That's my experience so far with these EIPs. So, you know, I wouldn't… I wouldn't, you know, go around saying, oh, we should take this seriously or say that seriously. I would say that it's more that we need to educate everybody who has a say on these things about the details of each proposal, and if there's missing parts to the proposal, such as, aka the governance I've been asking for a while. You know, and it's interesting because we hear that these things are moving to Mordor testnet, like, that's what the announcements are. Right. But there's no… there's no information anywhere about what's, being published, or what, like, where exactly it is, and there's no… and that would… you would obviously think that they must be putting, like, the Olympia DAO on Mordor so that they could do the testing of the governance, but there's, like, there's no… information about the governance anywhere. So, there's a few missing points that I would personally like to see filled, and then we can have a real full discussion about, you know, what would this actually mean, in the future. But so far, what I… what I see is, if this is truly, you know, the way that I… that… from what I understand it. is going to be implemented on Type 2 transactions, then it does sort of implement a tax on miners, and it does implement a bit of a tax on users of the chain, so… Ultimately, it's not going to be, generally beneficial and seen as a free market move for ETC. So, I hope that we can have, like, further discussions, and in the next call, we can have, you know, many more people. I think that the more people, and the more people in the discussions, and the more recorded discussions that we have, the more we can just show how people feel about this proposal. If they think it's good, then we can really get a good tally. You know, we don't have to vote, you know, on a Dow, but we could do an informal vote, you know, just to get an idea of how people feel, and… Some people might be feared… feel free to call out that vote as being, you know, a scummy, but we can organize, and we can talk about these things, and that's what I think we should focus on. In the coming months, and I appreciate Astora for, you know, I think it's the third month in a row now that we have a call, and I'm glad that we're getting back into it, and I'm here and ready to do whatever is necessary to, so that we can continue having these discussions regularly. 34:30JustjinYeah, for sure. Yeah, I'm… well, if… Yeah, I'm trying to make, something for the, like, I guess, ETC, but it's taken a bit, because, yeah, my, my technical skills. But it's coming along. 34:51Istora MandiriOh, yeah? Would you… what's the nature of that? 34:55JustjinSorry? Oh, of my project? 35:00Istora MandiriYeah. 35:02JustjinOh, okay, well, it's, it's a… Okay, I'll give you some… it's gonna be… it's gonna be… there's gonna be NFT, but then, obviously, I'm not gonna do… It's not gonna be like the ones that happened before, I guess, or whatever, hopefully. And it's just… it's something to make community, I guess, right? To gather community and stuff like that, for me, anyways. And, it has, it's gonna have some AI stuff in there, so it might be, interesting. 35:40Istora MandiriYeah, gotta have the AI these days. 35:43JustjinYeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's amazing, like, I wish, I hope everybody that comes into ETC knows about AI. That'd be awesome. 35:56Istora MandiriRight. I was just on a… the… the call with Cody, before this call, there's, like, a one hour before, we have the green room, if you'd like to join us next time for an offline chat, but he was mentioning about his efforts with the new client that is in a work in progress, which is a Scala-based Ethereum Classic client. And he's basically… used exclusively agentic coding to build this thing, to upgrade it from where it was a few years ago, and it's now syncing with Ethereum, Ethereum Classic Mainnet. So, it's amazing what we can do with these tools, and it's… 36:32JustjinHmm. 36:33Istora MandiriIt really… 36:34JustjinWow. 36:34Istora MandiriIt gives a lot of hope for Ethereum Classic, and projects that don't have necessarily tons of developers. We actually won't need them anymore in the future, because we can get agents to do a lot of this, I guess, monkey work that would previously require a lot of time and coding. So… 36:51JustjinYeah, the maintenance, yeah. 36:52Istora MandiriYeah, it's actually really good for Ethereum Classic. 36:56JustjinYes. Yeah, and I didn't know, I didn't know, Cody Burns's, was that, his client, the Fukui, or something like that? Is that the one you're talking about? Yeah, I didn't know that was a… yeah, that has AI integrated in there? Or, sorry, was it made… 37:16Istora MandiriHe used AI to build it. 37:19JustjinWow. 37:21Istora MandiriYep. 37:21JustjinWow, it can… it can do that? That's pretty neat. Oh, yeah. Well, I'm sure he… I'm sure he put his input in there as well, right? Because I don't think… yeah. 37:31Istora MandiriYeah, yeah. 37:31JustjinUnless he's using a pretty good tiered, AI… Yeah. 37:36Istora MandiriSo, definitely the. 37:37JustjinOh, that's true. 37:38Istora Mandiriand directing what needs to be done, it still is specialist knowledge that Cody has, so it's not like anyone. 37:46JustjinYeah, for sure. 37:47Istora MandiriBut it definitely saved him a lot of time. 37:50JustjinYeah, for sure. 37:51Istora MandiriAnd yeah, wow. Looking into, if you're interested in AI coding, take a look at, Claude Code, which is, like, the CLI coding editor, which is really powerful. 38:03JustjinYeah, yeah, but then, like, I don't like those, CLI editors, because that's… I don't know, I don't use those, because apparently you can change over your whole… Yeah, give yourself and all that. 38:15Istora MandiriYou need to take precautions. You need to take precautions. 38:17JustjinYeah. 38:18Istora MandiriBut it's… it's close. 38:19JustjinYeah, I never use it. 38:22Istora MandiriYeah. 38:23JustjinYeah. 38:23Istora MandiriOkay. 38:24JustjinInteresting, yeah, that's… that's awesome. 38:27Istora MandiriYeah, and I agree with Wieder Garten about getting more people involved, and also getting some kind of voting mechanism set up, even if it's just, like, a list of active participants and their opinions, because it's really difficult to judge Where the community's at, at any given… time on any particular topic, based on, like, who's watching videos or liking tweets. So it'd be great if we could somehow put together some, like, informal voting system, just to get a… I kind of… Check of where the wind is blowing on some of these topics. And… and yeah, The idea of doing, like, all token holders voting on stuff is probably not gonna work, not least because there's too many people, and… I don't think Ethereum Classic can actually handle, like, every single token folder, every single holder voting on every single proposal, so there needed to be some kind of, like, representative system, or something like that. Like, it's just not… I don't think you can scale to give everyone representation in that way. And if you're not doing that… I mean, even if you… did a simple coin vote, it's still not, like, a fair representation of everyone. Like, why should some whale that's just bought a bunch of ETC have more decision-making power than some, like, less wealthy, but… A thousand times more involved. guy that doesn't even hold ETC, for example, or perhaps holds a tiny amount. Like, surely… It should be representation. Based on something other than just the amount of ETC you hold. And that's kind of what's… I guess being alluded to in 1113, but there's no concrete proposals, and yeah. We really need to, you know. Show that at least one version of this is possible before moving forward, and definitely before announcing all this stuff. I did, like, at the end of the… the last call, I believe November… Earlier in November. Chris made a… another… set of commits to the Olympia. ECIPs? And it was kind of like a checkpoint, and I made a comment in response to that that hasn't been responded to yet, so I thought I could just mention my questions at the end of this call. And… Maybe if you have comments, we can talk about them. Or maybe wrap up after, but… I had, like, 5… questions, I think need answering, before we can really I said… agree to move forward with Olympia. Like, I think they're pretty important. So, question one is, do you agree that a bootstrap governance and voting rights distribution system must be clearly defined in ECIP 1113? Question 2 is, do you agree that validating such a system requires real-world testnet deployment? Question 3 is, do you agree that 111 depends on 1112, which depends on 1113, and that these three ECIPs are interdependent? Question 4. Do you agree that 111 should not be deployed unless 1113 is approved and viable? And then finally, for the next call, I asked if he could propose some potential anti-civil or fare distribution systems. For example, one of the mechanisms that was mentioned in the ECIP in 113 was POAP-based voting. But I'm not sure that's relevant, because… unless there's any real-world events that Ethereum Classic participants are going to, who is the authority for that is one question, and which events are we talking about is another. So those are my five questions, and they remain unanswered, and I'm hoping that in order to progress the discussion on Olympia, we can get those questions answered. 42:31WedergartenI appreciate, all the work that's been done, in the GitHub discussion. There's been lots of discussion there, and it's… it's a very, plain, open, like, long-form discussion about, basically different ECIPs, so it's a good place for people to go and put into words, things that, you might say on a call like this. And I just took a look at the questions at your post, and I think that these are very basic, very straightforward questions regarding what the implementation is going to look like. And ultimately, from my perspective. if these questions can't be answered, like, in a… even in a minimal, technical, specific way, like, I don't see how someone could then you know, without even being able to answer those questions, be able to implement all of the things that, you know, they're talking about, that have, you know, yet to be specified. It seems more like, you know, these are things that are being pushed to be done, but there's still a lot of lack of actual implementation specification. And… as I said earlier, these things are supposed to be moving to Mordor testnets, so, I'm, you know, I'm yet… I'm still… I've still asked… I actually asked that months ago, like, where's… can you send me, like, where's the implementation, like, information about this? But, I'm… I'm a… I'm a very bad person to the person who made, Olympia, so I'm not, I'm not gonna get those questions answered anytime soon, but I hope others can pursue, those similar questions, like the ones that you put forward, and I'm personally… I'll do what I can to, you know, step back from… from the discussion and really just interject when I feel that it has some kind of effect on the DeFi space and the potential future of Ethereum Classic, and specifically how it fits into today's world. But I was gonna ask you, Istora, Can you please tell me a little bit more about the proposal that you have for countering it? So, how exactly do you plan to send back to the miners without inside the same block? Like, is this still kind of up for debate and still figuring it out, or have you… or is there a previous implementation that you're referring to, or is this a, like, a brand new implementation, and where's the progress on that? 45:03Istora MandiriYeah, so, as I mentioned, there's an open pull request for 11120. In that PR is also a link to a research site, which is ECIP1120.dev. There's a lot more explanation in the current working rationale and current research tasks that are ongoing. There are some things that need to be finalized that will depend on, like, client resource constraints and that kind of stuff, but we more or less have a really good idea of what needs to be done. And the… the mechanism for… Distributing fees back to miners. It's known as a… A backwards-looking, stateless fee distribution. So this was originally proposed by Diego, the maintainer of, of cool guess. And there is actually an implementation already in VESU, so… You can find the link of that within that documentation site. That was done a couple years ago. Essentially, all that's happening, and we still need to figure out these exact variables, but over the course of Let's say… 50 blocks? A block gets mined, and the base fee, instead of being given to that individual miner, is simply split up over the next 50 blocks and distributed equally to all the future miners. It's actually done by looking backwards, so… There's technical reasons why it's done like this. It basically makes reorgs easier. Instead of having an accumulated value, you just look at the previous blocks, and then take a distribution from those blocks. So… The other question is, do we have this as a linear Distribution, or do we have some kind of decay curve? But these are research questions that we'll hopefully have answered in the coming months. But basically, it's… it's a really quite simple implementation. that makes it compatible with Xero and Classic without burning the fees, we return it to minus. And some pretty good academic research, That's gone into this mechanism. So… It seems like this is the most simple approach, and… It's… it's not that complicated to spec out. Currently, this PR has been blocked. By Chris Mercer. I made a pull request, and he's claiming that it can't be published until we actually have all the values. But these are kind of ongoing research tasks that might take a few months, so… hopefully we can at least get the work-in-progress version up on the ETC ECIP website. But until… One of the other… ECIP maintainers, approves it, then it will just remain on that ECIP1120.dev website, which you can also follow for updates. And there's also an article on there, under… Why not Olympia? And out there. I outline a number of arguments that we've Partly covered in this call, and more, about why I think that having this, this proposal isn't… is not the right path forward for Ethereum Classic. I'm happy to answer any other questions you might have about 1120. That's… I have… I have some more time. 48:44WedergartenYeah, sorry, I'm just scrolling through the, the ECIP that you made, just to see, like, what has been… Written, and also, why it's been not rejected, but been held back. I'm just curious, two things. First, has, has the ECIPs for 111 been a past, like, have they been approved past this stage already? In the sense, I think, I'm pretty sure… It's kind of hard to tell. Would you be able to tell me that? 49:17Istora MandiriThose original… sorry, the Olympia set? 49:20WedergartenYeah. 49:21Istora MandiriThe issue is… the issue is not that… they're being, like, progressed through the ETIP process. Like, as we've already discussed, the Olympia set already has many missing variables. Nonetheless, like. In the spirit of, like, open discussion, those proposals have been allowed to be published on the website, and they're in draft, which is one stage ahead of work in progress. And the ECIP1120 is only a work in progress, but the issue is that it's been blocked from even being published. 49:55WedergartenRight, but my… but I guess my question then would be, what… In what way is your proposal less technically defined than the Olympia, set of proposals, because from what I understand, from what I read, it's, at a minimum, it's the same, if not yours has a little bit more, like, specific detail as how it's going to be done. Olympia has a lot more open-ended questions than questions that would have just sending back to the miners, which is effectively a continuation of what we have today, just a little bit with a more spicy process. But yeah, like, like, what's the difference in the technical specifications? Why would yours be not allowed, but the others be allowed? 50:44Istora MandiriYeah, I submitted it with the assumption that it would be approved, because I don't see why it wouldn't be. I don't think there's any requirement to ensure that everything is finalized, especially when it's a work in progress? Like, isn't that the point of a work in progress? You still have things that you need to finalize. But, I guess Chris Mercer, the author of Olympia, set of proposals, feels like the… This is a requirement. So… We'll see. 51:18WedergartenSo, I'm just curious, so this is for the ECIPs. Basically, this just goes to the website, and you see, like, what's, what's our drafts and which are implemented. so it doesn't… it's… it's more just to see, like, what's been proposed and what's been defined as completed. And so I assume that, and I… and as you said, as you assume that it would be approved, as I understand it, that it would be… basically, like, a draft EIP in the same… it would be… once it would be approved, it would effectively be in the same, range as the, Olympia set, is that correct? 52:02Istora MandiriIt would actually be one stage less mature than Olympia. So, the… the process is WIP, work in progress, then draft. Then, I believe it's Final Call. And then it's approved, and then after that it gets, like… Implemented, and then… Adulted into the protocol. So really, this is… at this stage, it's saying, like, here's an idea, let's… let's make people aware that this is a thing, and if people want to help contribute it and move it into draft status, when it's ready, we can… we can do that. So it's more of, like, a signalling thing, as opposed to any… Like, by approving it in work in progress, it's by no means saying, like, this is gonna happen. It's really just, like, Listing it on the website. 52:52WedergartenSo I just want to, also confirm, so that's… so this is for the ECIP's website, but if any changes that would be made to the chain would be made effectively through… through the… through a change to the client by effectively changing what the, the, the pointed… The next upgrade, correct? 53:15Istora MandiriYeah, so once an ECIP moves from Final call to accept it, then the client maintainers can implement this, like. A future block would be agreed upon to be an activation block, and… If all things go well, then basically the… The new code would start… Being implemented after… start being activated after that particular block. And… there's… there's a whole, kind of… if you're more… if you're interested in the process, you can check out ECIP1000, which explains in detail about how Different stages are reached, and how things are progressed. And… Yeah, it requires rough consensus to move from To become a natural thing in the clients, shall we say. And the ECIP process is more… Whilst it is a formal… Way of coming to an agreement about what the protocol should How it should behave. it still relies on other things. It's not, like, an ultimate authority. Because… what if clients don't implement it? What if miners don't mind that chain? Like, it's only really… A way for developers to say, this is what we think should happen. And it's up to miners and implementers and users to actually make that happen. 54:50WedergartenSo, I'm just asking because if, like, for example, your proposal or for the Olympia set of proposals were to move forward to the point where they're being published to the client, at what point do the miners get, like, to decide what they accept and what they don't? I assume it's not… when they… even if they upgrade the client, they can change it. It's… the decision point is whether or not they upgrade the client, is that correct? 55:16Istora MandiriYeah, well, ideally, and… in most… In a functional system, like. it would not be the case that a client is updated to code that miners are not mining. Like, something has to go really wrong for client… for miners to be, like. rejecting… like, not upgrading. Like, that's a DAO level, that's an Ethereum Classic chain split level problem, because then you will have two clients out there. And miners, if there's a lot of them that don't want to upgrade, that will cause a chain split. So, really, we never want to reach that point. And this… A rough consensus mechanism where everyone's on board and everyone agrees to do it is basically the best way we've figured out as to avoid that situation. So, yes, it's true that miners ultimately get the veto by not upgrading their client. But hopefully that never happens, basically. 56:16WedergartenSo, I'm… I'm curious then, because the client is… is also under the same organization as Ethereum Classic. It's all… it's all under the same… it's the same ECIPs, like, CoreGeeth is right there, and I… and I assume CoreGeeth, is still the… the leading client, right? 56:37Istora MandiriYeah, I believe that that's the most, commonly used one. 56:43WedergartenRight, so, I'm just asking because is the access different between repositories within the Ethereum Classic organization, or would the same people who have the ability to change ECIPs be able to, you know, kind of push something through into the core geek? Like, is it more protected? Like, what's the deal there? 57:07Istora MandiriWell, it's kind of separated out. So, the Ethereum Classic GitHub org is kind of like a community thing. In reality, Cody is the main admin of that. He has the ability to add and remove people from the various groups in there. So… He's a good, kind of, caretaker, and has been fair about who gets to edit stuff, and… The whole process kind of relies on neutral… Administration. separate, and this is for historical reasons, I believe, there's an ET Labs core slash call guest. Repo, which is where the… The code for the most popular client is. And I'm not sure exactly who owns that repo, but Diego is… Publishing to the… And I think it's good that these are separated, because it kind of creates checks and balances. And… Same goes for the, like, the domain name is owned by different people. 58:08Wedergartenwho do you think… like, it shows who the contributors are to, that repo, but I… like, how do people get access to that? I guess it… if I see… I see it's through pull requests. But I assume that there's either a set of people that have been approved, but it's strange, because GitHub doesn't tell you anything about these things, so that's… that's, for me a little bit of a transparency question that I would like to kind of see kind of changed over the next year or two for Ethereum Classic, is to really see who has those, those roles over the client, especially since we're using something like GitHub, which is sort of a central place, because that's where all the clients are maintained, and where all the releases are pushed. So, it does have, you know, I understand that we do have, like, a rough consensus mechanism, but it would be the path of least resistance for someone who would want to push something through. If they had the right people, if they had the right approvers, they could theoretically get something to push the corgiz, but I did not know that… that the releases were made on a separate, one from the one under Ethereum Classic, and that Ethereum Classic one is just a fork of the one under ETC Labs Core. But yeah, I would love to know, like, who… who's running that. 59:31Istora MandiriYeah, I believe… I… I don't think this is hidden information, you can probably… I mean… I'm pretty sure Bob Samuel would know the answer to those questions, and I can ask him if you like. You're right that this… it would be great if this was documented, but… 59:50WedergartenI'm not getting paid to answer those kind of questions anymore, though, so… good luck. 59:55Istora MandiriOh, he's… I mean, the other thing is that these things can change over time, and it's difficult to figure out. But the… The… the fact that they are open source projects is a massive, like… Even if those repositories were compromised and pushed out malicious versions, it would not be, like. The… a game-over scenario, because the community would just say, hey, like, these have been taken over, and they… they're clearly malicious, so please don't use these, and here's the alternative fork. uploaded to either a different repo on GitHub, or even a completely different platform like GitLab. So, there's not really that much incentive to take over these things. I mean, there's some advantage, and it could be used maliciously in the short term, but it doesn't provide any, like. serious long-term threat to the protocol, I think. Because they are easily replaceable. 1:00:56WedergartenSo, with your personal experience, would you say that a chain takeover would be near to impossible? with, but by basically just having permissions that other people don't, and not really, like. getting consensus from the community, and just kind of trying to push it through. Like, would you say that that's effectively impossible because the client has been replicated so many times that, you know, at the moment people start noticing that there's a change here, and that it's screwing people's clients, and they're going to an upgrade that people didn't approve? that they're gonna just use another fork of the client. Is that what you're saying? 1:01:34Istora MandiriExactly. And that's… that's why the rough consensus part is really important. If there's… If there's, like, a new version that comes out, and… Miners, they're gonna be checking whether they should upgrade or not, they're gonna check different news feeds and social media, and if there's, like, significant, like. call-outs against it, then they're gonna then be more… asking questions and, like, investigating what's going on here and who can I trust. And the default option, most of the time, is to do nothing. So, in order to push a malicious change, then they really need everyone else to be quiet, and not do anything about it. And even if, like, the apparent majority are on board, if a significant majority are against it, it's almost certainly going to create a chain split, as you can see with Ethereal Classic. So… The risk of a chain split is enough to prevent that kind of malicious acting. 1:02:32WedergartenBecause it destroys value for both sides. I think it's interesting the way you put it, but now that I think of it, the reason why people would… the incentive for minors to change… to upgrade their client is so that just in case… in the case that all the other clients have been upgraded, and, like, the majority of clients have been upgraded, and they are, like, the last 1 or 5%, they will be basically on an uncle chain that no longer… whether… whatever earnings that they have, will no longer you know, reward them. So, it kind of… it kind of makes this… this effect where if people want to, make changes to the chain, then they have to have everybody on board, or else, anybody who installs that client will effectively be kind of punished for not being on board with everybody else. It's kind of… it's not a direct slashing system, but it's more of, like, an indirect slashing, similar to how Ethereum runs today, and I… I don't know if that's by design, or if that's, you know, by coincidence, but it does end up, creating this effect where people are not going to want to install a client that has been… that has been poorly marketed, that isn't something that everybody's talking about. People would rather stay on the client until they know that everybody's moving to the other client, and then when they know that everybody's moving to the other client, then they have a very good incentive to do so, because if they don't, they lose out on their mining rewards. Is that correct? Or will they still… 1:04:08Istora MandiriYou, you hit the nail on the head, and it's, it really is this… one of the topics I wanted to maybe introduce into this discussion was, about signaling, and how… Like… In Bitcoin, for example, there's this idea of a user-activated soft fork, or hard fork, whereby if a certain number of people have upgraded, then it gets activated, but only if that certain threshold is reached, and otherwise, everyone just defaults to the existing thing. So that's… Kind of similar to what you're talking about, but in a more formalized way. So that might be another useful thing for such contentious, potentially, hard thoughts, could be. you know, figured out whether they're receiving enough support to implement. 1:05:03WedergartenWell, I think it's just good to know that there's checks and balances to these things, and it's a very natural as I said, I don't know if it's by design, but it just… it just ends up working out because of how, you know, the client replication system works, and how people will get punished if they don't upgrade their client, and if the client is not a good upgrade, then they will be slashed effectively for that. But, I think… how long do these calls usually go? I think we're probably getting to the longer end of these now. 1:05:37Istora MandiriYeah, that is a good, good call, and I think we should wrap up. It's getting quite late. I'm in, I'm in, Far East time zone, so it's almost… Almost past my bedtime. So, yeah, thank you for joining the call. It's been, a lot better having participants. I originally started the call, and it was just me on my own for 10 minutes, so I'm glad that you, that some people turned up. 1:06:04WedergartenIt's my pleasure for hosting, dude. 1:06:06Istora Mandirithis patient. Yeah, of course. And, yeah, let's… Let's do it again. For now, let's wrap things up, and yeah, I'll, post this on YouTube. So… Yeah, thanks everyone for listening and attending, and we'll see you at the next Ethereum Classic Community Call. Thanks, bye-bye. Very good, cool.

1559 Strikes Back

💬 Pre-Call Chat

Reference Materials

AI Summary

Key takeaways

Brainstorm topics

EIP1559 Implementation Options for Ethereum Classic

Olympia Governance System Concerns

Free Market vs. Treasury Approach

ECIP 1120 Technical Details

ECIP Process and Client Implementation

AI Development in ETC

Action items

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