Nolympia

0:03IstoraHello and welcome to Ethereum Classic Community Call number 52. Today is Friday, May 15th, 2026. This community call is an open voice chat discussion about Ethereum Classic, and everyone is welcome. The call will be published on YouTube. We kindly ask that discussion stays focused on ideas rather than individuals, and let's keep things classy. You can find past episodes, transcripts, subscribe to the calendar, and more at cc.themclassic.org. It's been a big week, dare I say, historical for ETC. It'll be a bit of a special episode. And it feels like ETC is at a turning point. So we have some updates from the ETC Cooperative, but we're going to spend most of the time on this Olympia topic, and what comes next for ETC. Before I jump in, I just want to say a quick hello to everyone on the call, if you'd like to Say hi, please do. 1:03IAVHello, everyone. 1:06LunarHello, guys? 1:08justjinHi, what's going on, guys? 1:11IstoraHey, thanks for joining, and I think, yeah, we have some… New attendee this week, so… Let's, Let's talk. In a sec. So, first, first let's, talk about the pull requests corner. So, I opened a new pull request on the Ethereum Classic org repo about changing the Discord room. Basically, the original Reason for having this new Discord that the Olympia authors created was because there were too many bots on the old Discord. Now those bots don't appear to exist, and most of the discussion is still happening in the old Discord. So, like, I've been in the news Discord, and maybe some other people on this call can… Corroborate that there's very little conversation happening there. So I thought that in order to give new Come as the best opportunity to have A good discussion, that we should change back to the currently described legacy Discord server, and just call it the Discord server. And especially with recent… Events, which we'll get into this call, I think now make sense to just move things back to where things were. Anyone have any thoughts on this? Do you agree or disagree that we should… Update the website's default Discord server to the old Discord. 2:36LunarMakes sense. 2:40justjinYeah, make sure… 2:41IAVTo speak, we are signed on the petition, you know? 2:47IstoraCould you say that again? 2:48IAVWe are assigned the petition, you know, so… you know our opinion on this. 2:55IstoraOkay, well, good to have it on the record, and yeah, I mean… Let's see how, the Olympia authors, who are also maintainers. Or have, like, maintainer roles on the website respond to this, and hopefully… This can be a first step forward in the next chapter, But we'll see how things go with this. But this is basically like a line in the sand. Let's… Let's get this merged, then we can move on to the next thing. So, I have some updates from Diego. ETC Cooperative Core developer, about progress with the three clients that he's working on. And… There is a new version of Go Ethereum Classic released, which is now in testing. He's also updated the ETC plugin. And… very soon, I believe, that Nethermind will be supporting it will be possible to use the upstream Nethermind instead of the local fork. And he's syncing both and looking so… looking good so far. Welcome, Bess, who continues. And he's awaiting a fix upstream, and more feedback on that. And I think Diego will be able to join us in a future call. To elaborate on those updates. So, the main topic of today is Olympia, and as I alluded to, there's been some significant happenings. Particularly with the nulllympia.dev petition. And, essentially, Some large miners have signed the petition, and this is significant. And before I get into, like, a bit of a monologue that I've written about the history of Olympia and where things are probably going to go from here, I wanted to open the floor to… people on the call? so that I don't, like… bias this discussion. Does anyone have any opinions on What they think should happen next. in Ethereum Classic, and… how we should move forward, what the Olympia people should do, what we should do. given the news that basically 80% of the hash rate on Ethereum Classic through mining pools is signalled to be against Olympia. 5:29LunarThere's… Broadly speaking, my opinion is… You… we let the Olympia devs do what they like, it's clear. Initially, there was some… you know, it looked like they might pull off, like, a hostile takeover and get these changes pushed. In their minds, it's not hostile, but it's necessary developer funding. and changes to the underlying protocol. But my opinion is broadly, we should encourage them, if they feel like they have a very strong reason to change it, to run their own network. We should, you know, be nice and friendly to them. It is difficult, given that, you know, we… it seems like we've convinced many people that, that this would be… this is the correct chain. But we'll see. We should try to be nice to them. We should try to be nice to them. Let's not try to, like, dogpile. You know, everyone has already signed, like, the petition already. Against Olympia, so we should… at this point, like, they are the underdogs, so let's, let's be kind to them. Alarm. And, that's… that's all. That's all for me. 6:46IstoraYeah, and I think that it shouldn't be discounted that at least they're trying to do stuff, and, like, any kind of contribution to ETC should at least be… seen in… in some positive light. Like… it's… like, I appreciate that… whilst I disagree with Olympia, like, on an intellectual level, I appreciate the efforts that have been made behind it, and substantial effort has gone behind it. So, like, I don't think we should forget that DLP authors. Probably, whilst we disagree with their methods. probably want the best for ETC, and I… Appreciate. Not exactly what they've done, but the effort that they put into it. So, I think we can… At least give them… The benefit of the doubt, in that sense. So that… that being said, I'm gonna, like… read this… short summary of the Olympia saga, that's happened in the last year, and if you guys want to jump in at any time, please do. But I just thought now would be a good… A good time to, sort of. Summarize everything that's happened in all the calls and all the… All the drama over the last year, basically. So… As a preface, I hope you'll forgive me, Astora, for taking this opportunity to do a bit of a monologue. Having been close to the center of the debate, it feels right to use the platform on this occasion to try to explain what's happened this year and where things are going, and to give listeners a summary of what's been quite a crazy ride. I'll be speaking from my own perspective. So here's a condensed summary of what's happened, as far as I understand it. About a year ago, Olympia was announced. The TLDR is that it's a proposal for Ethereum Classic to take transaction fees and root them into a Treasury contract. Similar proposals have been raised in ETC's past and subsequently withdrawn. So, from my perspective, it was a surprise to see the idea reintroduced. At first, I didn't really take it fully seriously. From its creation through today, however, the authors have consistently promoted it as a done deal, and the next Ethereum Classic hard fork. In November last year, Olympia was published as a draft ECIP, and things heated up. Serious misgivings emerged about the technical details of the proposal, and pushback at multiple levels, both technical and procedural, through the ECIP process, were largely ignored or censored. Community resources such as the Ethereumclassic.org website and the ECIP process itself came under strain as the disagreements played out. Earlier this year, despite clear lack of consensus, the Olympia authors continued to frame the proposal, both internally and externally, as the next hard fork for Ethereum Classic, leveraging trusted privileges at CoinMarketCap and other community social channels to do so. Even into this month, updates have continued to be pushed to the various Olympia promotion websites, making the attempt to drive Olympia through as the next hard fork as unmistakable. They appeared intent on pushing it forward, regardless of community opinion, and made no real attempt to gather consensus. A couple of months ago, in response to this, Olympia.dev was launched as a community consensus gathering tool to demonstrate opposition to the Olympia proposal. And it steadily gained signatures over time. In March 2026, the tone of the debate sharpened markedly following the launch of the petition. One of the Olympia authors, who also sits on the ETC Cooperative Board, indicated that the cooperative, along with the services it provided, could be wound down in response to an Olympia. The threats appeared credible. With a substantial proportion of ETC's public infrastructure and ongoing development potentially on the line, it's difficult not to read the situation as the network being held hostage to the outcome of the Olympia debate. Around the same time, the Olympia authors declined to engage with the debate or respond to community commentary. And have effectively remained silent for several months, still to this day. This week, two extremely important signatures were added to the nolimpia.dev petition, which essentially means game over for Olympia. On Tuesday this week, F2Pool and two miners signed noOlympia.dev, joining AMP pool. Together, they represent about 80% of ETC's hash rate. on a record… on record, opposing Olympia. As per trustpool.cc. This is a decisive shift in the practical reality for Olympia. If the proposal is pushed forward from here, the resulting chain would be a small minority chain. Anyone wishing to participate would have to actively opt in against trusted community members, ECIP editors, and roughly 80% of the active mining pool hash rate. That is not a credible path to a successful hard fork. Indeed, thanks to this week's new signatures, there's no longer any credible path for Olympia going forward. as a majority Ethereum Classic chain. On Wednesday, I joined the ETC GrantsDAO call. It was a wide-ranging discussion that's well worth a listen. You can find a link on the call notes. A line from that, call captured my position after Tuesday's events, being It's time for Olympia authors to come to the table, or step aside. Whatever happens from here, the immediate ask is straightforward. the Olympa authors should formally withdraw the proposal. A clean, explicit withdrawal comes with a contested status that has… A clean, explicit withdrawal closes the contested status that has stored so much else, and lets the community move on. For that reason, I posted a comment on the Olympia discussion thread on the 11th of May. Putting the petition on the record in that thread for the first time. And basically, I asked for explicit withdrawal of the proposal, referencing all the signers, or many of the the larger sign is on that proposal, on the nolympia.dev petition. So… Once Olympia is withdrawn, ETC remains permissionless, and that means the authors are welcome to do one of two things. Either re-engage with the wider conversation in good faith, or step back and let the rest of the community get on with building. Free from the assumption that Olympia will be the next hard fork, and free from being blocked or stalled on pull requests. So that's my… kind of position of bringing us where we are today. Are there any comments on that before I talk about what I think the next chapter's gonna be? Is it too harsh? 13:39LunarI, I'd say… 13:40IAVEverything. 13:41LunarI agree with it, broadly speaking. I agree with it, broadly speaking. I think it's a little bit too formal, maybe that's it. We have no official anything, that's like the good motto, no official anything. 13:52IstoraThis is my opinion, and I prefaced saying that, so I'm not… I'm not saying this is… Official anything, but this is my perspective, and… 14:02LunarRight off. 14:03IstoraHaving me close to the argument. This is just… the current situation, as far as I can tell. Hi, Evie, did you want to chime in there? 14:21IAVEverything has been said already, you know. Nothing to add. 14:29IstoraCool. Yeah, I think the time is… time is… right to move on, guys. We… We don't need to dwell on… the last year, we just need to move forward and go to the next chapter. So… The big question mark is basically ETC co-op funding, and the things that ETC co-op do right now, being wound down, most likely. So… There's a… there's a void that needs to be filled. And I'll continue with the… the monologue about, the next chapter. So… Olympi was misguided, but credit where it's due, its authors were genuinely trying to move ETC forward, which is more than most do. I strongly disagree with the methods, but I at least commend the effort. With the Olympia path now closed, the question of what replaces it is wide open. Having had a hand in stopping Olympia, I feel a corresponding responsibility to shape what replaces it. And that's exactly what I intend to do. A rough sketch of where we are. Actively working on. is as follows. In the immediate term, the threat to dissolve the ETC cooperative has to be taken seriously, and even setting aside that the runway of ETC co-op is limited. Alternatives need to be in place either way, so the immediate focus is continuity. It's worth noting that Olympia was never going to address this short-term need in any case. ETC's current transaction fee volume is far too low for a base fee treasury to meaningful… meaningfully cover ongoing operational costs. And to that end, we're in the process of launching a new initiative that will be made public in the coming weeks. This initiative will cover the services currently provided by ETC Co-op. As it winds down, core development, client diversity, public infrastructure, including wallets, RPC, and dashboards. And we will secure funding so that critical services continue running smoothly into the next chapter. In short, we're setting up a backstop so that whatever happens to the ETZ Cooperative, the network and its essential services will continue uninterrupted. Once continuity is secured, attention turns to renewing the parts of the ecosystem that have been showing where. And to contributing meaningfully to the protocol roadmap. that has been on hold during the Olympia debate. That includes redesigning the Ethereumclassic.org website, contributing to ECIPs, including 1120, and an upcoming hard fork bundling the EIPs discussed on recent calls. Beyond that, we have a number of ideas, as you'll soon see in future calls, and the pathways will emerge over time. A bigger announcement about this new initiative is likely to appear on the next call, so stay tuned. A note on conflicts of interest. There is an obvious tension when the same people facilitating the community call are also building infrastructure, raising grants, and launching a brand around ETC. For that reason, this work will not be talked about much on the call, apart from material announcements of actual useful products, or things that genuinely matter to the wider community. The call is not going to turn into a bullhorn for promoting any particular project. Any material updates relating to the work will be discussed up front, and the call itself will continue to run with the same neutral curation it's always been. Every effort will be made to avoid central points of failure, and reproducibility will be the default in every step. For all the difficulty of the past year. This is a genuinely exciting moment for Ethereum Classic. The community is united. And showed that it can hold the line when it matters. The path ahead has cleared. There's new energy behind building what comes next. And we're looking forward to going on this journey together in the next chapter of Ethereum Classic. So… The next chapter of this room classic will be… Decided by you guys, basically. Currently, it's a… a greenfield. of potential. We have some basic ideas of where things are going. We think that eventually things should aim towards ossification at some point. But in the meantime, there are some fundamentals that need to be maintained, And… Midwifed into existence. Until ETC becomes self-sustainable. And I hope this call becomes a… a continued… Heartbeat and pulse for the community to contribute to that vision. And I hope we can move past this Last year of contentious debates. And ideally, even the Olympia authors can… continue their contributions to Ethereum Classic. that's the olive branch I wish to… to give them, and… I hope they'll take it And that's basically what I have for this call. I don't know if there's any other… Topics that people want to bring up or comment on this, but… Because so much has happened in the last week, it's been… Difficult to, sort of. Recalibrate what's gonna happen, and that's probably gonna take some time, but… Now we have some, like, concrete… changes. Ahead. It's gonna be interesting to see what happens. 20:12justjinIs Diego gonna join the call? 20:16IstoraI think… This week, I don't believe he is. I think next week he might. Next couple weeks he might. 20:24justjinYeah, cause I was wondering what he's gonna do, like. 20:28IstoraYes. 20:29justjinCause he's, like, the main, maintainer, I guess, of, the network. 20:37IstoraYeah, I can say from my side that I believe that Diego is going to continue working on ETC. 20:46justjinRight, but he has to, you know… he's doing other stuff as well then, I guess, right? Or… 20:54IstoraI can't speak on his behalf. And maybe there are things happening in the background, but part of this initiative that I'm talking about. 21:01justjinYeah, exactly. 21:02Istorawill be… Yeah, yeah. Look, there's… there is funding available for ETC, especially for super critical stuff, so I'm confident that… Maintenance of core essential services will continue. 21:27LunarI will say one thing, if developers are looking for stuff to do on ETC, like, it seems to me like the obvious thing is to get some of the DeFi stuff on there. It's like the DeFi that we currently have is very basic, you know, there's a Uniswap clone, but not much of that. Even just, like, simple cloning, like, people know how to deploy. like, more complex DeFi things at scale, like a lending pool would be great, you know, if you want to lend ETC against, like, a US dollar stablecoin. That would be… that's actually very useful. And, and I don't think we currently have that, I could be mistaken, but… But even that's, like… 22:08IAVThat would require license and all that regulatory bullshit, you know? 22:16LunarNo, no, no, I mean, you can have a die. Die, for example. Is… is that… Algorithmic, if you don't… if you don't want to have, like, a, like a, like a real statement one, you can just have an algorithmic one. 22:27IAVSo you mean he was… 22:28Lunarreally simple. 22:28IAVIt is a token of the dollar. 22:33LunarYeah, yeah, you would have, you would have some sort of synthetic token. But, but my point is, like, there's a bunch of, even if you don't like, okay, lending against dollars or whatever, there's a bunch of, like, really simple DeFi stuff that, That's… that's, like, low-hanging fruit that would be easy to do. Easy to, to just… it would just be, like, git clone, and then… 22:54IAVWhen it comes to operating with currencies, it's not that easy. It always comes on paper, bureaucratic, you know. regulations… 23:07LunarI agree, I agree. If we're, if we're talking about, if we're talking about, like, Forex or something like that, yeah. But, but I guess just DeFi in general, DeFi in general, there's still, there's still a lot of stuff that simply isn't deployed on, on ETC. 23:23IAVThere is not so much activity recently. I agree. 23:36IstoraI think it's also a lot easier now with coding agents to do this kind of stuff, even if there's not, like, one-to-one compatibility. with… minor AI tweaks, like deploying systems. It's really not a barrier to entry anymore. You don't even need to be a developer. To start doing this. Do you have, like, a short list of DeFi projects, Luna, that you think… People should take a look at for cloning? 24:12LunarI, I could get that, but for me, the main thing is, the one thing that I really use, that I use ETH for is still, like, this, this landing thing. So, that would be, you know, that's like a, that's like a personal use case that's, like, that's actually quite useful. 24:32IstoraHow does that work? 24:33LunarSo, if I, you know, I don't want to sell my crypto crap. if I'm… if I'm paying for… if I'm paying for hamburgers or whatever. So it's like, you know, I borrow… I borrow on Aave, or I borrow… I borrow some stablecoins, or whatever, and then I use that on my credit card. That way… that way I keep the crypto. So it's just like you're taking leverage on the crypto. It's just useful if you don't want to sell. Like, spiritually, I don't even want to sell. I'll just take loans out against it, right? 25:01IAVBut if the price goes down, you pay more on the… 25:06LunarThen I'd be a forced seller, yeah. Yeah, then it would be… And I mean, I've had that experience before, you know, it's not a good appealing. So I'd say, yeah, I mean, sort of like an Aave clone, that's… that is definitely missing. on… And then the other stuff, I guess, I guess we can look at that, we can make a list. 25:42IstoraYeah, I think, for a lot of these DeFi things, there needs to be base… asset. like, having just ETC, you need, like, some other… pair with it. So, either a stablecoin or some kind of real-world asset. Or some synthetic… Algorithmic stablecoin, for example. 26:05LunarAnd we have, I think… was it, was it Cody or someone? They did deploy, like, the USC, the USC stablecoin? 26:13IstoraYeah, I think that was, I think that was Chris Mercer. I think there's a couple… I think there's a couple of stablecoins out there. 26:23LunarYeah, so I'm not sure how that works… that works exactly, but, But that's like a start, right? 26:32IstoraThere's also just bridged assets. So, multi-chain was one of them, I think, but that was… That didn't turn out well. 26:45LunarYou know what's, there are, like, bridges in general, like bridges, or, what's it called, like… Yeah, I guess, or swap aggregators, I think they call them, but it's very difficult to bridge onto ETC. Like, there's, you know. I've had this… I had to use a centralized crypto exchange for, like, the first time in my life when I started using ETC, because the other… like, the other bridges just don't exist, so it's like, if we could get… if we get, like, maybe, you know, some listings somewhere on, you know, maybe ThorChain or something, but we'll see. Or even just, like, making our own, start making our own bridges. 27:24IstoraYeah, I believe there were some bridge projects previously funded by ETC Grantsdale. but… I think one of them… rug pulled? Maybe? And one of them just didn't deliver. Or something, so the… I think that required, like, some different… Way of thinking with regards to grants. And maybe having a performance-based thing, as opposed to… up front. But it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. I see we have a new joiner this week. Lefty, are you… Did you want to say hello? I think you're on mute. Okay. 28:46LunarHe's in… 28:47IstoraYeah, I… I can see. 28:48LunarOh, my… So, I think if you chat, we can relay your messages, too. 28:58IstoraYeah, if you're in the chat. If you're in the chat and you want to bring something up, just let us know. I guess then we should start thinking about… What the next hard fork should be. For Sim Classic? 29:34LunarWell, why, why, why are we, why are we assuming that? Why are we assuming that? That would be my, my perspective. It's like, we have nothing else to do, we have nothing else to do, well, we can just do nothing, right? We can just, like, sit down and, like, you know, continue, like, talking about the weather or something, like… There's no need, but it's like… 30:01IstoraI guess it'd be good to… Thrash out this 1559 debate. Because… Like, I appreciate that… There's differing opinions on this, and… It goes into a wider ossification debate that there's still different opinions about. So… I think it's worth talking about. Luna, I guess, especially, you have… Beliefs about what kind of Upgrades are acceptable and which ones are not. And I think we talked before about, like. If there's, like, serious critical bugs, for example, then it's okay to do a hard fork. Like, what's… what's your… 30:52LunarYeah, let me just address quickly what Livey is saying in the chat. So he, he mentioned, when I was speaking about stability, like, stable token, I guess I just mean, when I say stable token, I guess I just mean, like, you know, being able to short dollars on-chain is a nice thing. Or being able to show up short other current… or other, you know, you can define stable in terms of anything you want. You can say gold is, like, the stable denomination, but in my prac… you know, in life, I need dollars to pay… to put on my credit card, or whatever. So I'm shorting dollars against cryptos. And then, then to, to answer your question. Yeah, my perspective is, if you have any changes, like, If you have any changes to the protocol, that risks, like, you know, there's this, like, if you want to say, like, it's a social contract. If you're adding any changes to the protocol, then you risk changing the social contract, sort of, like, arbitrarily. And, you know, maybe if the changes are really small, then no one cares about that. But even, you know, Right, like, moving from proof of work to proof of stake? created a lot of, like, miners that were, like, that bought all this equipment that are not kind of pissed off, and then the ETC community recruited from that to join the ETC community afterward. And so, like, whenever you create these sort of, like, political changes, you know, some spirits leave, and, like, they find… they form a new empire. And so that's why, that's why I think, you know, if you want longevity, if you want ETC to last, it's like… So, you know, it's like, what, what, be, be very careful about, about doing, like, doing changes to, to the underlying, to the underlying protocol. 32:41IstoraI agree. But I think it'd be useful for us to go into more detail about what kinds of changes are possible, and which ones might affect Certain parties over others. Like… 32:55LunarI… I guess if you were to say specifically, I'd say, If, if you're… if you're doing bug fixes, or, like, stuff like that, of that nature, that's fine. If there is, Yeah, I guess my understanding, I sort of… I agree with Don McIntyre when he said. when he said, like, in his view, like, ETC is basically complete, I sort of… I think that as well. From my understanding, like, you know. like, all the smart contracts sort of work. They work as expected. It's compatible with all the EVM things, and now we're just waiting, we're just, like, sitting around waiting for, like, the rest of the market to realize that we're right. So… Hmm. But, that's sort of, like, that's sort of my perspective, I don't know. I realize, by the way, I realized, by the way, coming into the community, I came into the community a few months ago, and, like, you guys have been here for 10 years, but I'm, like, telling you, like, the shit they're doing in ETH is, like, terrible. We can just… we can just wait, and, like, we'll eventually overtake ETH. So I… saying that as… to you guys who have waited for, like, 10 years is probably, like, you know, it's probably… you guys are probably gonna sit here, like, thinking, like, damn, we gotta wait another 10 years or something. Like, I'm telling you. 34:22IstoraNot at all. 34:23LunarNot at all. I see an ETH, it's like, they're going crazy, they're gonna destroy everything themselves, like, we don't… We don't have to do anything. 34:32IstoraNo, it's definitely good to have, new… new, like, sets of opinions here, and it's, like, what you're describing is actually not… New, and many… Including Donald, had this opinion, as you mentioned. And it's like a… it's definitely a legit, perspective, and the debate is ongoing about… what types of upgrades ETC should. Try to implement. But let's… Let's take a few. So, in terms of bug fixes, I think everyone can agree that, like, it's okay to do a hard fork if… The alternative is failure of the network. Some kind of quantum attack, some kind of denial-of-service thing. That would destroy the network if it wasn't fixed. It's probably okay. Then you have, like, this other category of upgrades that is purely non… You could say it's, like, neutral in terms of how it affects the… The stance of parties in the network. So, like, if you add another… Pre-compute for a crypto algorithm. Maybe this enables a new type of Layer 2 technology? And that's it. Like, it has no other effect. What would you think about that kind of upgrade? 36:05LunarI mean, I would say that's fine, but it's like the dangerous thing… the dangerous thing is, like. all of the… no one cares about any of the upgrades that are… that are sort of, like, small and not damaging. Like, it's… it's… they have… they have very little significance. The upgrades that are, like, small and not damaging have very little significance, and it's the, so, maybe something more damaging would be something like… You know, there's a gas limit and increasing, like, the gas limit per block 5 times or something, you could say. Well, some of the value, you know, that's good for minors, but that's gonna be terrible for For the, token holders or something like that, because they gain value from, like, from basically having, like, a limited, space, or something like that. It's like, the small, the small, the small changes, like, you're adding a pre-compute for a specific function, it's like, you know, fine. Sort of, no one's gonna care about that, but then it always opens up to, okay, well, why not add, like, a pre-compute for bigger functions, or why not, why not just, like. you know, increase the… increase the gas limit 5X, and then… and then by then, it's just like, you've sort of lost… lost all the, all the principles. So I'd say, like, keeping up with the EVM standard, but at this point, you know, the EVM standard is already, like, pretty standard. Like, it's pretty… it's pretty fixed, you know, we're not exactly equivalent to any of the EV chains, but it's like… We're equivalent to the standard, right? We follow the… we follow the same standard, so… 37:41IstoraHere's an interesting, proposition, and this is, like, Donald was supportive of this, somewhat controversially, I'd say, but… He wanted to make the gas block limit fixed. And introduce that as a hard fork. or maybe a soft fork, I think it would have to be a hard fork, to… Have a fixed limit of the gas. per block. Would you support that? 38:09LunarIs that what Donald said? I'm not sure what the gas currently is, I'm not sure how it exactly works. I would say whatever's going on, whatever's going on right now is fine, I'll have to, I'll have to dig into that. 38:22IstoraSo right now, basically… the gas can be voted on by miners, arbitrarily. There's no upper limit. There's… there's like a… a small low limit, I think. But practically, miners are just keeping it at the default, which is 8 million. So, in theory, miners could decide tomorrow to turn the gas limit to 100 million gas. And it would take a while, but it could… it would eventually get there. So, that's the current state of things. And here we can separate the argument into two camps, right? We could say, it's good to ossify now. and not change the protocol, but that means the miners can change the gas price to anything. Or you could say that, actually, we need to change the protocol to make it more fixed. So I think this is a good example In order to get to the bottom of what your position is on what kind of ossification ETC should have. Like, is it more important to never change the protocol, or is it more important to move towards a more static protocol? 39:24LunarI'd say, I'd say right now. I'd say right now, my position is more like, we should… it's more important to move to a more static protocol, not necessarily no more changes, you know, right now, but moving to a more static thing. And it's hard to say, because I do think there'll be more and more all the people from the ETH community, or as ETC, like. Gets, gets adopted more and more. as the ETH community goes crazier and crazier, I do think more and more people will come to, will come to this community. And so we have to see, like, exactly, exactly what… what happens there, what, what challenges are being faced. But… but my understanding is basically everything is going to work, everything's going to work fine. And so… Oh, yeah. 40:12IstoraIn the case of the block gas limit static upgrade, where we fix it in the codebase to 8 million, for example. That would represent a material difference in the social contract, as you mentioned before, which I thought was the most important thing to maintain. 40:31LunarRight, right, sorry. 40:32IstoraIt also closes the door to future optionality, in terms of changing the gas limit. Let's say, in 100 years, technologically, there's no reason to have an 8 million gas limit, because everyone's watch can easily process 100 times that. Like, the point of the gas limit is to allow that flexibility, so… It's… There's no obvious answer to what the correct gas limit is, which is why it's, it's votable. 40:57IAVI think the market will settle itself. So, it's better not to change the core principles. 41:10IstoraYeah, I'm actually agreeing that we should not change The… we should not do a static gas limit, because the… Like, the existing market-based. mechanism is designed specifically for that flexibility. Even though it's less static, it gives miners the ability to change aspects of the protocol. Without implementing a hard fork. 41:32IAVYes, let's keep the free market. It will settle itself, for sure. 41:41LunarI agree, I basically agree. And we could say, if you want to consider, like, other chains in this as well, you could say, if the gas on ETC ever gets too expensive. you could always, like, and you want to do some, like, I don't know, very expensive, like, DeFi crap or whatever, there's no problem doing that with the L2, like, ETC already has the world's best L2, it's called ETH. Right? Like, we don't normally think of that, but if, like, if you want to do, like, some fancy DeFi bullshit, like, the gas costs zero, there's no… you don't need to hold the ETH token for any of that crap. Like, you can just… you can just, you know, pay 50 cents to ETH or whatever, and… and they'll do all the crazy DeFi stuff. But whereas, like, I do think that the fundamental value will accrue to ETC because of its immutability, because of this, Because it's the one that, like, stuck to the principles, when everyone else. 42:33IstoraThat's funny. So in this case, would you say that the… Is it more important to have the static gas fee, the gas limit, or the static protocol? 42:47LunarI, I don't know enough about the, the, the way how the gas fee works right now, but I'd say, like, keep it as it is, like, don't, don't… You know, don't make unnecessary changes to the protocol, ever. player. Buh. 43:07IAVYeah. We don't need to… don't fix if it's not broken. 43:15IstoraAgreed. 43:16LunarRight, right. And have high standards for what, what, like, what exactly broken is. 43:27IstoraSo it seems like, with regards… Sorry, go ahead. 43:29IAVSorry. Aren't we the last proof-of-work blockchain network around? Except Bitcoin? 43:39IstoraWe are in the top 5. There's also Litecoin, and Monero, and Dogecoin, I believe, is still proof of work. 43:49IAVNope. 43:49IstoraBut we're the largest smart contracts. 43:51LunarSmart contract, smart contract, proof of work, yeah. 43:54IAVBut none of them is an Ethereum virtual machine, right? 44:00IstoraCorrect. 44:01LunarYep. 44:02IAVOkay. And Solana is proof of stake. 44:09IstoraYep. 44:10IAVOkay, okay. 44:12IstoraYou could almost say it's proof of authority. 44:17IAVI see. That's strange, so many speakers out there, they should be captured by now. 44:27IstoraMaybe they already are. 44:29IAVWell, maybe they haven't. 44:31IstoraYeah, I'd make a good argument to say that, actually. Any of the chains where the majority, or even one-third of the staking is done through custodial-based staking, it's already captured. Because the ultimate authority over that stake is… wherever those… Custodians happen to be… like, legally… Based. And whoever is in charge of that legal system owns, fundamentally, that chain. 45:11IAVIs it true that Ethereum is able to blacklist anyone now? Any address? 45:20LunarNo, no, that's… but I do think… I do think that's… that's… they'll end up doing something like that in the future. There's a bunch of… if you're… if you're running a DeFi protocol. There's a bunch of, like, compliance tools that are already built into, like, most major DeFi protocols. So it's like, they're… it's on the UI level, it's on the UI level. 45:44IstoraYeah, there's a number, actually, of levels where this can happen. There's a… a website called mevwatch.info. And that demonstrates that already, like, about One-third of the… Validated blocks are… being censored, basically. Essentially, like. A third of validators are not… are not approving OFAC… blocks. So that's directly because they are… probably… within a jurisdiction that doesn't allow those kind of transactions, and that ties exactly back into that argument I was just making. So, we have demonstrable proof, basically, that In a way, those chains are already Captured. There's also, as you say, Luna in the front-end clients, there's censorship there. I wouldn't really call that, like. Protocol censorship, it's more… 46:43LunarIt's not the worst thing ever. It's not the worst thing. 46:46IstoraYeah. 46:47IAVWe should then pay attention to networks like Monero, They are directed into private, Transactions and all that anonymity. I think that's a good direction for cryptographic. sector. 47:07IstoraYeah, totally. I think that the privacy piece is a strong It's an essential pillar of the sovereignty piece as well. And I think that… on both Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, there will be these zero-knowledge protocols that come up and provide that service. Eventually. Eventually. The technology is available, it's just… Deploying and adoption, really. So… Luckily, Ethereum Classic can already basically support this. And then, of course, we can't forget that the… the censorship of… having a… a central foundation. That actually can effectively blacklist addresses that they disagree with. has already happened with Ethereum, and that's why Ethereum Classic exists, so… in a way. Yes, they are able to blacklist specific addresses. 48:12IAVIndeed. I understand. 48:16LunarAnd, and I think, I think they're just gonna, they're just gonna repeat that? They're just gonna do it again? Did you, do you guys, did you see what happened with Abe and the Kelta Hag? They, they formed this group, it's called DeFi United. It's basically like all the DeFi protocols coming together. And in this case, specifically, they're sharing funds to restore funds to Aave, but you could see something like this. you could see something like this, start to emerge, where it's basically just, like, a government structure, and, like, you know, the DeFi apps are the government, and they just, like, print more tokens or whatever, whenever there's an exploit, or they just, like, immediately, like, freeze your account if there's, you know, some sort of dispute. Like, basically, they're centralizing all the risk, all these supposedly, like, independent DeFi apps, they're becoming centralized, and they're just, like, putting all of this risk into, like, this one organization. 49:14IstoraSo I'm woefully uninformed about the RSF incident. Luna, could you… 49:21LunarYeah, summarize what happened? But basically, yeah, basically, There was… it looks like, it looks like it was some North Koreans, they deposited a bunch… a bunch of RS ETH that was maybe back, unback, and withdrew a bunch of ETH from Aave. But basically, what happened is. Aave, for all its users, ran out of ETH. They needed… they needed loans to get back into… they needed ETH loans to get back into functioning, and so this whole… this major protocol, billions of dollars of TVL, is just, like, locked up. For days and days and days, which is, like, for a relatively small attack, for a relatively small attack, it was, like, It was a $300 million attack, but it shaved off, you know, tens of billions from Aave. And it's just like… And their solution to that was, we're gonna, we're gonna create more systemic risk, we're gonna, we're gonna… We're gonna put all the risk into, like, this centralized organization. It's gonna call… it's gonna be called DeFi United. And it was basically… it was functioning like a bailout. Which, you know, it's not as bad as, like, the banking bailouts of 2008 or something like that, where… Where, like, it's explicitly the government, because this was all done by, like, donations, by charity from different groups. But it's just, like, you see… you see, like, the tentacles starting to form, you know? So… Basically, they've started, like, an official DeFi group, it's called DeFi United, and it's just basically, like. the DeFi government, no. Or, or it'll become one. 50:56IstoraWas this a protocol on L1 Ethereum, or, like, a L2? smart contracts. 51:02LunarOh, yeah. So, this was, this was Aave, it was deployed on, it was deployed on L1 Ethereum, and a bunch of L2s as well. I, maybe I, I should, I should say, so Lighty, Lighty says in the chat, so it's like, So it's, like, stable to USD, but that brings backing issue. But you could, Lighty, in response to that, I can say, like, you could, you could use… You could use, an algorithmic stablecoin, or something like that. You need to get, like, the price from an oracle. And so maybe, maybe, but it'll be, it'll be centralized to some level. You could use, like, Chainlink or something like that. But yeah, there's, there's algorithmic stablecoins you could use, if you don't like, if you don't like having it backed. Exactly. And then Lefty says, TBH, that's exactly why I joined ETC as a hobby miner, when Ethereum went to, proof of stake, and I learned about the original chain. Those, those are the comments from the chat. 52:19IstoraThanks for that. It kind of, It relates to how we strategize. not necessarily promoting ETC, but, like, thinking about where the new ETC People might come from. like, as you mentioned, there's probably gonna be a lot of F Refugees? if things… don't go so well on Ethereum Mainnet. But I also think there's… there's a growing… Global market of people. maybe from developing countries as well, that are new to the crypto space in general. So, I wonder how ETC can position itself. And without any marketing budget, capture interest. 53:11LunarThere's going to be, Right now, there's a bunch of no-coiners in the world, like, people that don't have much crypto, that are just getting into it, that were late for the… they were late in the train for, like, 10 years or something. And now they see the currencies collapsing, but they also see, like, oh, all these cryptos are really expensive, and I don't have too much. And so, like, that's… that's always gonna be, like, if you're looking to recruit, like, numbers for, like, a revolutionary force or whatever, like, it's, like, it's, you know, it's… it's these… it's the poor, right? It's the poor that you can always recruit from the disenfranchised in some way. And so, that's something that every cryptocurrency will have to deal with, that every social structure has to deal with. So… I mean, you could say the BCH fork in BTC was something like this, too. But, But yeah, so that's always, like, people that don't have a lot of crypto, that are no corners, that are just getting into it. 54:10IstoraHow would you research… how did you come to find out about ETC, and how do you think people are typically Finding out. 54:19Lunarit was… it was always in the back of my mind, it was always in the back of my mind, like, I know, I know, you know, there's this chain, ETC, it was… it's the original Ethereum, I knew the history, but I… I was… everyone was using Ethereum, and I was just, like, going along. with the crowd. And I always knew, like, okay, if you read into the history, this isn't the actual Ethereum, but then you look at the price chart, and it's like, and it's always, like, down forever against the ETH. So I'm like, okay, everyone uses this one, it's going down forever, maybe I should just, like, stay along with the crowd. It wasn't until they actually, like, started taxing me, or, like, treating me poorly. That, that I, I switched, that I switched, that I decided, you know what, I'm gonna, I'm gonna move to, to a different chain, so… It was… like, I think in terms of… in terms of, like, knowledge, like, people always know, like, there's this… there's this other chain you can move to, but… but it's just… it's risky for them. I think if… if the price starts going up, like, people are gonna move, and that'll cause other people to move, and it could be… it could be, like, an exponential. Thing, and it's also, like, the Ethereum community, like, creating enemies, making mistakes, that sort of thing, like, exiling people. It's going to… is going to cause… is going to cause, more recruits. 55:42IstoraCool, well, we are nearing the hour. If there's any other topics people want to bring up before we wrap things, then please do so now. Okay, well, I want to say thank you for everyone for joining once again. It's been a… Productive call. Good to spread ideas and brainstorm. Thank you for joining, and the next call will be in two weeks' time, same time, same place. So, hopefully see you next week. And… till then, take care. Stay classy. See you next time.

Nolympia

Key Points Discussed

Preamble

Today’s Agenda

Pull Request Corner

ethereumclassic.org

ETC Cooperative Development Update

Olympia Update

The Next Chapter

AI Summary

Pull Request Corner and Cooperative Update

Reaction to the Nolympia Turning Point

Olympia Recap and the Ask

The Next Chapter and a New Initiative

DeFi, Stablecoins, and Bridges as a Build Target

Capture of Other Chains and Recruiting the Next Wave

Action Items

Full Transcript