WBD251 Audio Transcription

Bitcoin Vs Ethereum with Samson Mow & Vitalik Buterin

Interview date: Thursday 13th August 2020

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Samson Mow from Blockstream and Ethereal creator Vitalik Buterin. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

During this debate Chief Strategy Officer at Blockstream, Samson Mow, and Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin traded blows on Twitter. I asked them to come on the show and discuss the philosophical differences between Ethereum vs Bitcoin.

“It comes down to what you think money is, and money is really a zero sum game. We’re not going to walk around in a world with thousands or tens of thousands of monies.”

— Samson Mow

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack:  Okay, welcome Samson, welcome Vitalik. How are you both? Vitalik first, how are you man?

Vitalik Buterin: I've been good, thank you.

Peter McCormack: Are you well, Samson?

Samson Mow: Not too bad. Excited to have this chat!

Peter McCormack: Yes, this is very exciting. Okay, so firstly, obviously Vitalik, I have a Bitcoin show, but this is more about Bitcoin alongside Ethereum and the reason I'm happy to do it is because there are people wrapping Bitcoin on Ethereum. I have used Stablecoins and Ethereum, and there's like warfare at the moment. So I think it's a discussion worth having. I've got a bunch of questions, some of them, you're both aware of and some of them, you're not. 

The way I'm going to do it, is I've got a stopwatch here and I'm going to try and keep it so that when I put a question now, I'll direct it to one of you and I'll say try and keep it to two to three minutes. If I think you've going on, I'll try and slow you down and I'll give each of you a chance to reply. The really important thing Vitalik, because you wouldn't have listened to many of my shows, is that my show is directed to people who aren't the most technical. 

So ideally, I want you to keep answers to people that really don't understand the complexities of the systems. So try and explain it in a way so they will understand it because I do get people coming to me when I talk to them about Bitcoin and they're like, "What about Ethereum?" And really, I can't give good technical explanation. So that's one of the things we're going to try and keep you too. We'll try and not do any interrupting and definitely try and just give each other a fair time. 

I am a Bitcoiner, so anyone listening, I am a Bitcoiner. I don't hold Ethereum. I held it in the past, I've made money on Ethereum, but my show for the last year to 18 months has been Bitcoin only. I wouldn't say I'm a maxi, but I wouldn't say I'm far off. I will try to be as objective and fair as possible. I am happy to criticize Bitcoin as well. So does that all sound okay?

Samson Mow: Sure!

Vitalik Buterin: Okay to me!

Peter McCormack: Okay, so I'm going to start with you Vitalik. I'm going to put it to you first and this question is going to go to you. Vitalik, why do you think there is this open warfare now between Bitcoin and Ethereum? I know it's been going on for a long time, but why do you think it exists?

Vitalik Buterin: I think there has been this broader fragmentation of the crypto space over maybe the past 10 years or so. If you remember what was then called the Bitcoin space back in 2010 to 2013, the Bitcoin space then was very diverse in a lot of ways. If you're remember on Bitcointalk, you could... If you go on say, the politics and societies section, you would have capitalist and you would have socialists and you would have people debating each other, there are more pure Bitcoin people, there would be what were then called altcoiners and there were in all sorts of these different viewpoints, and even in terms of how much of the medium of exchange aspect versus the store of value aspect, matters in Bitcoin. 

Up until around the end of 2013, and I think there was definitely this feeling of harmony in the crypto space, but it definitely masked to these differences that I think we didn't even realize existed at the time. Then around 2014 or so, things started diverging. So the Ethereum sale happened and I think the Ethereum project launching and the sale was probably the first big non-Bitcoin assets to gain anywhere close to the level of interest in the crypto community that it did. So it convinced a lot of people that for better or for worse, cryptocurrencies, other than Bitcoin, are not a toy anymore. 

Around the same time, we started seeing Bitcoin having its big block versus small block split and that would later lead into its own holy war. So I guess, there have always been these differences in values within the space and I definitely feel like, seeing myself in 2013, I definitely overestimated the extent to which the entire space shares my values. So for example, back when I wrote... My first post where I firmly took the anti-maximalist position, this was a post in 2013, I wrote called in defence of alternate cryptocurrencies. 

Remember that it was refuting Daniel Krawisz and when I wrote that, I felt a genuine surprise that there were people who did not think like myself, where I thought that, if you're in favour of Bitcoin, you should be in favour of crypto as a whole and the team is not Bitcoin, the team is crypto. That was my mentality back then and Bitcoin and Litecoin and Peercoin and these new things coming in are marching together as allies. I would later see that Daniel Krawisz for example, did not see it that way. 

A lot of other people did not see it that way too and I'm sure that's true from a lot of different sides of this fragmentation as well. I guess since then, you just have different groups of people in the crypto space that have these and have somewhat different visions of what crypto is fundamentally about in certain ways.

Peter McCormack: Samson, what about you? Why do you think this war is going on between Bitcoin and Ethereum people?

Samson Mow: So I wouldn't qualify it exactly as a war. It's more that Bitcoiners just have a disdain for Ethereum and other pointless shit coins. It comes down to what you think money is, and money is really a zero sum game. We're not going to walk around in a world with thousands or tens of thousands of monies down the road. Even in the fiat world, we have reserve currencies and you have source of value like gold. There's only going to be a handful if that exist a couple hundred years down the road. 

So it's either Bitcoin or it's not going to be anything else. I think that's why there is this divide, but it's not really a warfare, it's just critiquing. If you look at Pierre Rochard's thing, it's more like he's trying to help Ethereum by talking about supply and the ability to audit the supply. So moreover, I think the disdain towards Ethereum has more to do with how it's marketing itself. If you remember Peter, when we first talked for the very, very first time, when you first started your show, we talked about Bcash and I said, "There's nothing wrong with Bcash as technology. 

The problem is how it's marketed to people" and Ethereum is marketed as many things, it's a World Computer, it's a Code is Law, Unstoppable Code and all that and I have to give credit to Vitalik, Vitalik is an excellent marketer, probably better than Justin Sun and ultimately, it's the promises that it's making. Is it able to deliver on those promises? I think it's not and that's what Bitcoiners are critiquing.

Peter McCormack: I'm going to put two points to that, Samson, then I'll pass it back to Vitalik. So you talked about money, is it not a good idea, therefore, to have Ethereum because we have competition for Bitcoin, therefore it hopefully would improve Bitcoin because there is a challenger? 

Secondly, when you talk about how it markets itself, if we're trying to be fair here, there are many people when Bitcoin first existed, believed it was peer-to-peer cash, and now it's a store of value and some will argue different points, but it does appear that Bitcoin has changed its narrative at some point. Also, what is wrong with a pivot? What is wrong with something you start out with one kind of project and it becomes something else. So I'll let you answer those questions, then I'll put it to Vitalik.

Samson Mow: Well I think Bitcoin is still peer-to-peer cash. It's just some people like Roger have a very poor understanding of what cash is. Cash is something that you have and it's a bare thing. But I think he conflates cash with taking a few dollars to buy coffee and therefore it should be cheap and easy because I can carry a few dollars in my wallet. But when you scale that up to millions and millions of dollars, you have to transport pallets of paper money, and that requires security, logistics and a ton of things. 

So Bitcoin is cash, but it's cash that will function when you need to transport massive amounts of it, not just a couple of dollars worth. To your second question, why is it not okay to pivot? I think it's okay to pivot and evolve, but there needs to be a healthy disclaimer on the thing and saying, this is experimental. But I think a lot of the Ethereum people are saying, Ethereum is money now and whatnot and now it's competing with Bitcoin, but even myself, I'm not sure what Ethereum is or what it does or what it competes with. Is it a World Computer or is it money?

Peter McCormack: So Vitalik, what is Ethereum?

Vitalik Buterin: I think Ethereum is lots of things and I think you should expect Ethereum to be lots of things. So one of the analogy is that I would use it as if look at something like C++. It's a highly, general purpose tool, it's a programming language, you can use it to build games, you can use it to build different applications, you can use it to build Bitcoin and Ethereum clients and so on and so forth. I definitely don't think Ethereum is anywhere close to being as generic as C++. I think there are values in terms of decentralization and of permissionlessness and of all of these things that we care about, that Ethereum is more uniquely suitable to, but at the same time, it's definitely more in that direction than say Bitcoin, which is much more application specific. 

Ethereum definitely has always been the, for example, Asian platform for financial applications. Right now, we talk about DeFi and if you look at the original Ethereum whitepaper, it never used the word DeFi, but you see the whitepaper talking about financial contracts and contracts for difference. In March 2014, wrote that blog post on Stablecoins and options and so on and so forth. So that aspect of it has always been there. The aspect of using Etherium for non-financial applications has always been there and of domain names, probably being one of the first and the very early examples, I think I cited domain names in the whitepaper, but even if I did, that was definitely...

Domain names are this very early proof that says blockchains are useful for things other than money and that's a desire to generalize one of the big factors that motivated to the goal of opening things up all the way to Asian programming language. So you have this really general purpose platform and people are going to do lots of things with it and now, if we try to zoom in to this question of, what is ETH, the asset? First of all, ETH, the asset and how people think about ETH, the asset is definitely something that can pivot. I definitely did not initiate the whole ethos money thing. 

The Ethereum Foundation did not initiate the ethos money thing. That's something that really did come from the outside. The way that I look at it is there is this symbiotic relationship between Ethereum the platform and ETH, the asset. So for example, if the Ethereum the platform is not secure, then ETH, the asset can't maintain a value. If ETH, the asset can't have a price, then attacking Ethereum the blockchain is going to be very, very easy. 

If there's a lot of usage of Ethereum the blockchain, that creates transaction fees, which contributes to the price of ETH, the asset. If you have ETH, the asset having value that provides what we call economic bandwidth, that you can use that if, and say, lock it up in smart contracts and use it as collateral for things which also helps usage.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so is ETH, the asset money?

Vitalik Buterin: It depends on what your definition of money is and personally, I'm a fan of what rationalists call a taboo in words, which is this idea that if people argue over the definition of words too much, you should try to get everyone to express their points without using that word and try to ban the word from the conversation. I think the word "money" does combine together a lot of different concepts. So for example, people talk about unit of account, medium of exchange and store of value. 

For unit of account, ETH is not that, Bitcoin is not that either. For medium of exchange, Bitcoin gets used for that and ETH gets used for that sometimes. So for example, a few months ago, actually, I used ETH to pay for a dinner at a restaurant when I was at a hackathon in London. So those kinds of things happened. There's a lot of things that charge an ETH. ETH as store of value, that's definitely something that people do use ETH for. There's also this ETH as Gas use case, that basically ETH is the medium of exchange that is used for transaction fees and with...

Peter McCormack: Okay, so what we're saying is when we talk about Bitcoin, we talk about it as a store of value and a medium of exchange and you're saying essentially, Ethereum can be the same. Okay, I accept that argument. But you are also talking about the fact that it can be used as like Gas, which is a way to fuel applications. 

Okay, so I understand your points there. For me, trying to keep things simple, trying to think about the way I'd be down the pub with my friends and they're like, "Pete, what's this Ethereum thing?" If I said "It's money", in their mind it's a medium of exchange and they can use it to pay for something. Okay, I accept your points there. Samson, you shook your head. What is the point you want to make or a question you want to throw it back at Vitalik?

Samson Mow: I think Vitalik said Bitcoin is not a unit of account, but Bitcoin is a unit of account. So you have Satoshis and that is unit account of the Lightning network and Bitcoin is evolving in all three fronts at the same time as money. So it is a store of value already, it's becoming a medium of exchange and it is unit of account. It's just the unit of account is not big enough for day-to-day things yet, the Satoshi level.

Peter McCormack: Sorry, I was going to say, I would argue against that because I still... Whenever I'm using Bitcoin, I'm always doing the exchange rate conversion in my head to know... Like I've got a game of poker tonight and I know I've got to do the conversion in my head to figure out what each hand is worth even though we're playing in Bitcoin. For me, unit of account means it's naturally used as the currency.

Vitalik Buterin: Right, yeah and I think that's the standard economic definition of a unit of account. It's something that prices are set in, something that contracts are made in., i's like just having a unit, like Tesla has a unit as well and Tesla isn't money.

Samson Mow: Yeah, but if you look at Lightning tippers are playing with it, they're using sats to tip. People are using sats to denominate a lot of things these days, it's just a matter of time. But I agree that it's not usable for a poker game probably.

Peter McCormack: All right, so listen, let's get into some of the meats or some of the other things. I've got a couple of interesting questions for you both to begin with. Okay, Vitalik, this is a challenging question for you. Do you ever feel like Ethereum has become a much more challenging project or idea than you originally envisaged and potentially, you've bitten off more than you can chew and it gets to the point where there's no turning back? Do you ever feel like that?

Vitalik Buterin: I definitely freely admit that for example, Ethereum 2.0 is much harder than we expected to implement from a technical perspective. I definitely don't think that we discovered any fundamental flaws that make it impossible and I think it will be finished, it's just a matter of time and it's actually been progressing quite quickly lately. 

From an application perspective and points of view, I feel like Ethereum's use in different sectors is something that can rise and fall almost independently. So if Ethereum tries to get into one space and it turns out it's actually not useful for that space, then fine, those applications will not go anywhere. Meanwhile, the other sectors will keep going.

Peter McCormack: So what is the roadmap looking like for the delivery of Ethereum 2.0? I know it's been going on for quite some time and there's been a lot of delays, I'm aware of it, but what's it looking like now for delivery?

Vitalik Buterin: Yeah, so one of the exciting pieces of news from about two weeks ago was the launch of this Medalla Testnet, that's the largest multi-client testnet of Ethereum 2.0 and at phase zero. So this is the phase that introduces the basic scale folding and introduces the proof of state parts. It does not yet include sharding, sharding starts in phase one. But for sharding for example, the spec is very close to finished. So it's just a matter of waiting for implementers to feel like they've done enough on the phase zero side and to move on to phase one. So I think people are estimating a couple of years to fully finish out the roadmap at this point.

Peter McCormack: That's a long time, right?

Vitalik Buterin: It is. Though, on the other hand, it's a less time than the amount of time that we have already spent getting to this point.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've noticed in the last week following all the discussions, I don't really spend a lot of time looking DeFi as such, but I noticed that there was a big rise in the price of transactions on the Ethereum network. Does ETH 2.0 solve this?

Vitalik Buterin: It does. So transaction fees are basically a supply and demands thing. If the supply is how much space there is in a block, the demand is how many people want to send transactions. So now, if you increase the supply, then the price will fall, that's standard economics 101 and you can actually verify this experimentally. I wrote this ETH research post, when you look at specific moments where miners bumped up the Ethereum gas a little bit previously, and it made transaction fees go down by roughly the same amounts around the same time and ETH 2.0 plans to increase transaction and capacity by maybe a factor of about a hundred. 

In other technology, that's likely going to come much sooner than ETH 2.0, is our preferred layer two scaling technique, which is rollups. So, we have ZK rollups, we're going to get optimistic rollups soon and those can scale up to about 3,000 transactions a second or so. I think either of those techniques are definitely going to make transaction fees much cheaper again.

Samson Mow: I have a question. I thought your preferred method of scaling was your version of Lightning. What was it called again? Raiden?

Vitalik Buterin: Well there's state channels and then there's plasma, those are two separate techniques.

Samson Mow: What is Raiden?

Vitalik Buterin: Raiden is basically a Lightning network clone.

Samson Mow: Okay, well I thought that was your preferred thing and didn't they raise a ton of money to deliver that by selling it too?

Vitalik Buterin: They did, yeah. I don't think Raiden was ever anointed as Ethereum's preferred champion in any sense. I think Ethereum has always been fairly pluralist in terms of pushing multiple champions at the same time.

Samson Mow: So what is ETH 2.0? Is that a proof of stake chain or is it just another proof of work chain that continues on?

Vitalik Buterin: ETH 2.0 Is a sharded proof of stake chain.

Peter McCormack: Well, we're going into the world of, I don't know what the hell you're talking about. I don't even know what sharding is. The reason this stuff's important is because most people don't understand this stuff. They'll see you guys arguing it out on Twitter and there's other people who can jump into discussions and join them. But most of the times, someone like me, I've got no idea what you're talking about. 

So I want to keep this a bit bit simpler today. We can get into the juicy stuff that maybe you want to ask towards the end. Okay listen, Samson, with regards to Bitcoiners, do you think we are ever too harsh in our criticism, too protective of a single use of a blockchain and don't give enough fair opportunity for other people to actually explore other ideas?

Samson Mow: No, that's not the case at all. The whole idea with Bitcoin is it's supposed to be immutable, not changeable. So if the foundation is shifting all the time and changing or breaking or getting hacked, then it's impossible to build anything on it. That's why the foundation of a house has to be stable. The whole reason that Bitcoin is staying wrapped to be using Ethereum is because it is stable and reliable. That's why people... It seems to be Ethereans prefer using Wrapped Bitcoin to Ether to do their DeFi stuff. I don't think...

Peter McCormack: I think they do both. I think they do both in fairness.

Samson Mow: Well they do both, but it's growing as they're bragging about... They're saying, "We have so much Bitcoin and Ethereum now", but the point is it needs to be stable and immutable for that. So you can build a lot of things on top of Bitcoin, but you can't just shift the rule set around and say, "Okay, fees are too high, we should do something because it's not nice to people." We just don't care, Bitcoin is elemental, it doesn't have feelings or anything and it cannot be easily changed, it just is the way it is and you either choose to use it or you don't, but you're free to build anything on top of it. So you can have the Lightning network, you can have the Liquid network or whatever you want. You can even take it and wrap it and use it on Ethereum. But the base layer is not is not changeable.

Peter McCormack: So Vitalik, I put out a tweet today regarding DeFi. Actually, I'll go back a step. I use Bitcoin, so I'm a Bitcoiner and I use it as a saving's technology personally, so I hold Bitcoin to save. With regards to my company, let's refer to my two podcasts as a media business, over 50% of my assets now are in Bitcoin. I have it in Bitcoin just because I'm fearful of what's going to happen to the pound locally and I also transact in Bitcoin, so I invoice some people in Bitcoin and I pay people in Bitcoin, and I do that because I trust it. 

I implicitly trust the value will hold pretty well, and I trust the security of the network. One of the things that stood out for me on Ethereum, which gives me a little less trust in it, so the thing I said about DeFi, it just seems like a big game, it doesn't seem serious. Also, I get a little bit scared about the hacks I see in Ethereum. It feels like people can... Again, remember, I'm not technical, but they can hack smart contracts or smart contracts can be broken and there seems to be a lot of times where I hear about $10 million, $20 million, $50 million getting locked in a smart contract forever. I've also heard about rollbacks and such. So would you say that's fair criticism of Ethereum? Can you see why maybe I trust Bitcoin over it?

Vitalik Buterin: I think that's the important thing with Ethereum, is that Ethereum is freedom. It's a platform where people can go and build things and if you have a platform that respects freedom, then sometimes people will use their freedom to do stupid things. So you're going to see some smart contracts that are written at a much lower standard of quality than say I would be okay with, and there's nothing that Ethereum, as a network, can do to stop that. 

So you have applications that sometimes do crazy things on chain, but at the same time, if you are a user of one of the applications that doesn't do crazy things, then you can just peacefully continue doing your not crazy and productive things and not really worry about those other things that are happening. Look from the point of view of say someone who just uses Ethereum because they want to hold Stablecoins, like someone who just wants to hold Dai. 

The fact that some other unrelated application somewhere in a corner breaks does not change Dai at all, it doesn't really cause harm to Dai. Dai is just Dai, and you can keep moving Dai around. So basically, the fact that there exists specific things on Ethereum that sometimes go crazy, it's the equivalent say of Mt. Gox getting hacked. You can imagine someone say, "Mt. Gox gets hacked, therefore Bitcoin is totally unreliable," but the reality is that if you did not put your Bitcoins into Mt. Gox, then you, as a Bitcoiner, can just keep Bitcoining along as though that situation didn't happen.

Peter McCormack: I don't think that's a fair comparison between Ethereum and Mt. Gox, but I understand the point you're making, but I think that's slightly different. Well Samson, you should get it. You'll do a better job than me, I know this.

Samson Mow: Well first, I take issue with the Ethereum is freedom statement that Vitalik just made. I don't think Ethereum is freedom at all, I think Bitcoin is freedom. If you look at things from the perspective of the DAO hack, technically he just followed the rules and took money from the system, and then you guys rolled it back. From the perspective of that guy, you might call him a hacker, was that freedom? 

What about the people that disagreed with the decision to roll back, the people that maintained the original chain and called it ETC? I don't think that's freedom for them either. What you have here is a very centralized system that's run by a small cartel of people that can dictate changes, and that's not really the definition of freedom at all, that's the definition of serfdom.

Peter McCormack: Vitalik, do regret the roll back of the DAO hack?

Vitalik Buterin: I think, all in all, it was a necessary event at that time. I definitely don't think that this argument that we did one thing once, and therefore that somehow taints the Ethereum ecosystem forever, is correct at all. If you look at how Ethereum governance worked in general in 2016 versus in 2020, there's a lot of different signs that just show 2016 was a much smaller community of very few participants, much more concentrated participants. 

I think the Ethereum Foundation was basically running both of the Ethereum clients, maybe Parity was just starting around that time and so there were much fewer people that needed to agree in making a decision, and there was generally a broader consensus that this is a fairly new system, and there are things that you can do in new systems that you can't do in established systems. 

But if you fast forward, say even two years into the future, if you remember the Parity wallet, this was a big Multisig wallet that got written with bad code and it got hacked, and I think it was $450,000 Ether that got stuck and there was this big debate, where Parity and other people tried really, really hard to push through another one of the estate intervention forks to make that basically reverse the effects of the hack and get the coins out, and all of those estate intervention fork attempts failed. 

So I think that made it really clear that the DAO was not this eternally binding precedent that people sometimes make it out to be, and if you fast forward to 2020, there's a lot of signs that the ecosystem has become much more diffuse. If you even look at, say the Ethereum Gas limit, the most recent rise of the Gas limit, which is similar to the Bitcoin block size, it rose from $10 million to $12.5 million. 

That was just completely initiated by mining pools and miners, without any involvement from this core dev cabal that people talk about. I think that whole situation just clearly proves that there isn't this one single tightly coordinated group that controls the protocol. You even saw these very public disagreements and voices, like Twitter, about that situation.

Peter McCormack: So Samson, let's try to imagine back in the very early days of Bitcoin, back in say 2010. Say an inflation bug was found and someone was able to inflate Bitcoin by another $20 million and secure it themselves. Could you not see a scenario perhaps where people, back in the early days of Bitcoin, said, "Look, this is useless. We're here early, let's roll it back. There's a hacker." Could you not see a scenario where that maybe would happen there as well?

Samson Mow: Well there was a bug that Satoshi rolled back. I think that's two years after, but that was the infancy and there's a key difference here, which is Bitcoin was created in a virgin birth. There was no pre-sale, no token minting, Satoshi didn't enrich himself from it and this was the first of its kind, so it was like Satoshi invented an airplane. 

But I would hold Ethereum to a different standard, which is the airplane has been invented and you've made something that looks like an airplane, but I don't think it flies, but you're just still shifting the sands around under the feet of the people, which is the reversal of the DAO. But I think you still have it. You're still tweaking parts of the system. You've rolled back the, what do you call them, the Ice Ages or whatever, because you were supposed to have went to proof of stake by now.

I think that's the whole point of the Ice Ages, that you just shift them forward, so you're still playing games and adjusting the system on the fly and given that your whole origin story, Vitalik, is that you were upset because Blizzard nerfed your warlock, because they wanted to adjust the game balance, shouldn't you be against that kind of a change? So basically, you live long enough to become the villain, you live long enough to become the guy that's nerfing the warlock

Peter McCormack: See I'm trying to be fair, as fair as I can be Samson, and as somebody who listens and takes a lot of my advice or opinions from people in the Bitcoin community, I find less strength in this one. 

The DAO, I understand why people criticize it, but I could see a scenario where something similar would happen in Bitcoin and people would be okay with it and I don't find the adding of the fact that there was a pre-mine as a reason, because we don't know if Satoshi will suddenly appear one day with all of his Bitcoin and his rollback would have saved him. Do you understand why I'm still trying to be objective and find a little bit less strength in that as an issue?

Samson Mow: Sure. But you can then focus on the failure to transition proof of stake. That just keeps getting pushed forward. What's the point of having a rule, if the rule is completely mutable? That's like saying, "I'm going to stop drinking and I'll just stop drinking next month."

Peter McCormack: Vitalik, can you expand that rule just... Sorry Vitalik, just so people understand, explain what the rule is, and explain why it's been rolled back.

Vitalik Buterin: Right, so the Ice Age is basically a rule that says that there is this exponentially growing time bomb inside of the Ethereum protocol. Basically what happens is, that the mining difficulty starts going up slowly over time, but then that number in the protocol increases and it has a very tiny or no effect for the first one or two years, but then after about two years, basically this number starts blowing up to the point where it just makes the Ethereum Blockchain really slow and eventually comes close to stopping it. 

So the intention of the Ice Age was basically a technique to force the proof of state transition, but I think it is important to understand the nuances behind the technique. I think the goal of the technique was basically to avoid a situation where, if there is the proof of stake switch, then if someone tries to continue the proof of work chain, basically if there wasn't an Ice Age, there would be this default pressure, where basically, if someone tried to make a lot of noise before it to stop the proof of stake transition from happening, then the proof of work chain would be this default. 

It would not be the fork, and so people would be more inclined to stay with it. Whereas, since there is an Ice Age, it's a more fair choice, because the proof of work chain, by itself, is guaranteed to blow up every two years. So if there is this split between for proof of work and proof of stake, the proof of stake side has to have a hard fork, but the proof of work side has to also have a hard fork. So it's more of a fair choice between the two, instead of this status quo bias toward proof of work before.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Samson Mow: Does it really matter? Because you guys hard fork all the time, so it doesn't really matter. You can change the rule set every time you hard fork.

Peter McCormack: Well the question I was going to ask Vitalik, is if the Ice Age isn't enforceable now, why don't you just get rid of it? It sounds like, to me, it's something that has no purpose.

Vitalik Buterin: People have definitely suggested that, and I think in practice, it's definitely looking like it'll need maybe one more increase, quite probably, or just proof of stake is definitely on the horizon now in a way that it wasn't say 4 or 5 years ago. So maybe if we took our knowledge now and we took that knowledge back to 2015 or 2016, I'm sure we would have done the Ice Age thing very differently. But I guess at this point, the change is relatively close to the horizon, and so it just makes less sense they're going to look around in that aspect.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what it does, it reminds me of the debt ceiling. It exists for a reason, but you can get around it. Okay, I've got a couple of other interesting questions for you. I'm going to flip a couple of things to you. Firstly, it's just a very simple question, Vitalik, do you see this as a world of Bitcoin and Ethereum? Or Bitcoin or Ethereum?

Vitalik Buterin: I think it's very likely that we're going to see both Bitcoin and Ethereum get quite prosperous going forward into the future.

Peter McCormack: Are you interested in both projects? Are you still interested in Bitcoin?

Vitalik Buterin: The most honesty and revealing way of asking that question is, if I hold Bitcoins, and yes, I do. I have a few hundred of them, and it's definitely considerably less than what I have in ETH, but I still hold some Bitcoin and the Ethereum Foundation still holds some Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: And, Samson, same to you. Bitcoin and Ethereum? Or Bitcoin or Ethereum?

Samson Mow: It's only Bitcoin and I don't hold any ETH. I think most Bitcoiners don't hold any ETH.

Peter McCormack: Actually, I found a half an ETH.

Samson Mow: Well, I have one Litecoin that Charlie gave me too, but it's more for sentimental purposes. It goes back to the whole thing, that Bitcoiners want sound money, they want something foundational and Ethereum is just not that. It's just shifting all the time, the goalposts are moving and you don't even know the supply. Should we talk a little about that?

Peter McCormack: Well that's on my list, we're going to come to the supply. Well Samson, why do we care? If we live in a world of freedom, we care about freedom, why should we care if a bunch of people want to build in Ethereum and enjoy Ethereum? Why don't we just focus on Bitcoin and forget about it, just ignore it? What harm is it doing to us?

Samson Mow: Well, functionally, I think most people building on Bitcoin just focus on building on Bitcoin, and then we just kind of entertain ourselves with what Ethereum is doing.

Peter McCormack: I don't think that's entirely fair, because I know myself, I think we give them a lot of criticism, we give them a very harsh time, but should we just ignore and get on with our own thing? Are they harming anyone? Should we care?

Samson Mow: I think they are harming a lot of people. A lot of people are losing money on DeFi and everything. I don't feel there's enough disclaimer being put on a lot of these project and I think Vitalik himself has endorsed a lot of these projects. I think he's stopped now recently, but a few years ago, he was still putting his name on various ICO projects and saying, "This is really cool" and I think for most the Ethereum people, they always say, "Everything is cool," and that just baits in the noobs. 

I don't think institutions or sophisticated investors are harmed because they can do the research and they can run the numbers. But I think a lot of retail people or uneducated investors will be harmed by what the Ethereum people are doing.

Vitalik Buterin: I feel like...

Peter McCormack: Would you say that's... Sorry, let me tee that up. Would you say that's fair, that there needs to be a little bit more warning? Because one of the things, where it seems to be there's a bit of a conflict, is between immutability and smart contracts. There seems to be a lot of potential problems with smart contracts that cause a conflict with immutability, because once the mistake happens, you lose. If anything, is Ethereum still considered perhaps in a Beta stage?

Vitalik Buterin: I guess there's a few points there. I feel like I don't want to go through all of them. As far as smart contracts versus immutability, I don't think it's a matter of smart contracts, I think it's more a matter of concentration of resources into applications. If you'll remember when, I think it was a year or two ago, some major exchange got hacked and there was some noise on Twitter about it. 

I think it was either CZ or someone else considering organizing some mining pools to do a 51% attack to recover those funds, basically arguing that you would get more money back from the 51% attack and you could potentially use some of that to compensate whoever the 51% attack harmed and it would be net better for everyone and that ended up, of course, not happening.

Peter McCormack: Well that was more of a thought experiment, because I discussed that with Adam Back and Brian Bishop and we went into the detail, and it was a very, very difficult thing to do in the time required. I think that was more of a thought experiment.

Vitalik Buterin: Right, that's fair. But I would say, the thing that you have to understand about the DAO, going back to it a bit, is that DAO is a very special set of coincidental circumstances that may well never happen again. What happened in the DAO was there was a hack and that hack involved a lot of money, and the hack just happens to be a hack in such a way that the money was frozen solid in one address for 35 days before it could be moved again. 

Those are a very perfect storm set of conditions that make something like the DAO fork both attractive and feasible example events. If a hacker had gotten those coins out immediately, the DAO fork probably would not have happened, because we would have thought that reverting multiple days of history would have been an unacceptable violation of the chain's ability, and doing a 51% attack to reverse the Mt. Gox stuff, for example, is not viable. 

For that reason, it was also not viable because no one really knew where the theft came from, so you do have to take into account that very unique set of circumstances that made that situation even possible. So I think in the long-term, I definitely expect no pressures to intervene as a result of attacks through continue existing, though I do think that the social contracts against doing that sort of thing is growing stronger and stronger by the year. Great, now I forgot what the other points that you raised were!

Peter McCormack: I've forgotten as well! Okay, I'll try a couple of different interesting questions. Samson, do you think Bitcoiners have any blind spots? And then, are there are any fair criticisms that come from the Ethereum community about Bitcoin?

Samson Mow: I think you could criticize and say that Bitcoin is bad at moving fast and breaking things, but I don't think that's for a lack of people trying, I think it's just the way it works. People can't move fast and break things on Bitcoin and most of the developers don't. I can also...

Peter McCormack: I think that sounds like a reverse criticism of Ethereum? So for example, let me think it. I'll think of a fair criticism of Bitcoin perhaps. We can be very critical perhaps these two. A lot of people say, "It's taking a long time." I think you could possibly label the same criticism at Lightning. Lightning has taken quite a long time, that's one I would put out there.

Samson Mow: Yeah, you could say that. You could always say, "Things take a long time." At Blockstream, we've been working on simplicity, and that's taken a long time too. But the plan is to make it work right the first time, because it is supposed to be foundational there. Bitcoin is supposed to be the foundation of a new world order in finance, and you can't have things that break all the time. 

It's just the ethos of Bitcoin development, which is build it right the first time, and that means things take time. Lightning is actually quite fast, I would say. We started having public stores in 2018 and it's grown a lot since then.

Peter McCormack: Vitalik, what about the Ethereum? Do you think there's any solid and well founded criticisms of Ethereum, which come from Bitcoiners?

Vitalik Buterin: I think there is definitely a subset of people in the Ethereum community that are not careful enough about a lot of things and DeFi is one example. I would definitely push back against this idea that say the Ethereum leadership has been actively pushing that forward. 

So even the projects that I advised at the very beginning, things like Augur or prediction markets, but since then, in 2017, I was the one who publicly called it out and said, "Hey, we're at a half a trillion dollars and do we actually deserve it?" And it turns out that, as the market proved over the next one and a half years, no, we didn't deserve it. There's been a lot of this DeFi craziness that I've been trying my best to push back against.

Peter McCormack: Have you really? I don't think I've really seen enough of that from you, in fairness. Look, I've been fair with Samson and I pushed back on him, I don't feel like I've seen a lot from you. I think, yes, you talk about Auger, prediction markets seem interesting, but I think the bigger criticism was the OMG advisory role you did. I still don't know what the hell OMG did.

Samson Mow: I'll say one nice thing about an Ethereum person. So Vlad Zamfir, he's actually said it a few times, that we should be careful and cautious and not make people lose money, so I'll give him credit for that, but I don't see Vitalik saying that.

Peter McCormack: So one item I feel like you...

Vitalik Buterin: So one concrete example, I think the recent interview I gave on BankWest, they asked some questions about my concerns about yield farming, and I talked for like 15 minutes about my concerns about yield farming. They asked for criticisms of Ethereum culture and I gave some criticisms of Ethereum culture. So I definitely recommend listening to that BankWest interview. It's not the one from yesterday, it's the one that's an hour and a half long from, I think about a month before. So it has happened.

Peter McCormack: So back to the question, fair criticisms of Ethereum from the Bitcoin side? You talked about developers being maybe a little bit reckless. Anything else?

Vitalik Buterin: So culture, this is the point that I made on the BankWest podcast about a month ago. Basically, I think one of the great strengths that Bitcoin has presented itself as this holistic philosophy that combines together ideas about the world and economics and politics and finance, together with a clear picture of what Bitcoin, the Blockchain, and what BTC, the asset, are going to do about it. 

Now we have these ideas around Austrian economics, concerns about money printing, concerns about governments having power over money, concerns about governments having power over the payments layer, and here is Bitcoin, this basic asset and payment system, that is not vulnerable to control by governments in the same way. 

If you look at Ethereum, on the other hand, it definitely doesn't have that same unified narrative and now there is aspects of this that are strengths, and having ideological diversity definitely has value, but at the same time, it does create a community that sometimes has a bit more of a not knowing what it stands for at certain times. That's something that I think a lot of people are definitely trying to move past and that get a clearer picture for, but it's definitely not a journey that we're anywhere close to fully figuring out yet.

Peter McCormack: Do you think it's a proper narrative, trying to be too many things? Bitcoin is pretty simple, right?

Vitalik Buterin: Right.

Peter McCormack: It is the ability to transfer value. That's pretty much it now, and there's a number of different things you can do and you can timelock or you can multisig, but really it's just about storing and sending value. But it seems like Ethereum is trying to do so many things. It's trying to be so many things to so many people that, that causes a lot of... 

For me, as a non-technical person, it seems to cause a lot of problems down the lines because it's a very complex system. It's very difficult to keep it decentralized. This decentralizing, I'm just going to throw in there, the way I've got my head around it, it feels like Bitcoiners are always trying directionally to maintain or become more decentralized. It feels like Ethereum compromises decentralization, and actually directionally, is becoming more centralized because of the volume of things they're trying to do.

Vitalik Buterin: Interesting.

Samson Mow: If I were to say what the ideology of Ethereum is, it's let's try everything and see what sticks. That's the impression that I get.

Vitalik Buterin: I think that's fair. I think there are definitely common ideological points. So the idea that we don't want to have a world that has these political and institutional choke points that limit people's ability to interact and cooperate with each other and Bitcoin tries to mitigate that in the financial sphere. Ethereum tries to mitigate that both in the money sphere and also in a lot of these other spheres where people are building these applications in. This is this idea of social scalability and cooperating across trust boundaries and these things, but once you get into the specifics, there's definitely a bigger element of let's try everything. 

Another way of describing this, this is a quote that I gave a few years ago, " Bitcoin people think Bitcoin is 80% complete. Ethereum people think Ethereum is 40% complete." I think right now, maybe it's not 40%, maybe it's around 60%, but in general, there definitely is a broader acceptance in the Ethereum community that there are steps in the journey that haven't been taken yet and solidifying on a set of applications is one of those steps, so there's been a lot of progress toward that. ETH 2.0, proof of stake, sharding, layer two scaling, both of those are steps toward that.

Peter McCormack: I do know I can add something in there, Vitalik. So I mentioned this on Twitter the other day. Every time, when somebody says about Bitcoin, "If Bitcoin succeeds," I don't use that language anymore. I think it has succeeded. I think it is an alpha project now. It's that people are just building on blah, blah, blah. But I still consider Ethereum an experiment, and the reason I do, is the amount of times I see some kind of error or some kind of hack and money lost or what happened. 

I just see it's still very much almost like a science project. Whereas, I think Bitcoin has now delivered, it's very trustworthy. Do you have any personal envy towards a very solid philosophy or shared philosophy of Bitcoiners? I know I'm throwing a lot in here. Do you also therefore feel a lot of responsibility for that? And maybe the fact that everyone looks to you, that leaves a lot of responsibility in your hands.

Vitalik Buterin: Yeah, and I think so. Probably all three of us can agree that Ethereum sees itself as a project that's significantly earlier along its journey to reaching its final form.

Peter McCormack: Well I'll just throw something in there. I think some people coming in buying Ethereum won't know the difference between that and Bitcoin. I think you have to be embedded in the community to have that.

Samson Mow: Well Vitalik, you just said, "It's 60% complete." You just contradicted yourself here?

Vitalik Buterin: Why?

Samson Mow: And the fact that you're moving from ETH 1.0 to ETH 2.0...

Vitalik Buterin: What's the contradiction?

Peter McCormack: Hold on Samson we'll come back to that. Can we stick to my questions? I don't want them to be lost and then Samson, I'll come back to you. So do you have that envy of that shared, firm, quite simple ideology of Bitcoin? And do you feel like a lot of responsibility to try and guide and create that for Ethereum? Or are you happy for Ethereum to just be this big open thing?

Vitalik Buterin: I definitely personally want Ethereum to enough solidify overtime and I've definitely kind of said those kinds of things. If you even look at the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap, there is a kind of path towards solidifying on kind of one specific final form, both economically and technologically. I think there's definitely a lot of people in the Ethereum community and including the core dev community that agree with that direction. 

There's definitely also people who think that Ethereum the base layer, should be agile forever, but like my impression is definitely that kind of the desire to move toward some kind of ossification is definitely something that's strong. Do I feel a kind of responsibility to do what I can to make sure that that transition happens smoothly? I would say yeah, definitely.

Peter McCormack: Thank you. Samson, sorry, you had a question then when I stopped you.

Samson Mow: I was just commenting that Ethereum is not 60%, just because you're moving from version 1.0 To version 2.0, which is not even out there yet. So by definition, it should be less than 50%.

Vitalik Buterin: But version 2.0 Is already, like a very large parts of it are complete. We have the Medalla testnet, we have the phase one spec and we have implementations of the merge process and so forth.

Samson Mow: So what happens to the miners? When you guys shift over to 2.0, do they just go bankrupt or they move through...

Vitalik Buterin: They switch to mining, switch to mining Filecoins, switch to being a zero knowledge proof mining nodes for ZK roll-ups or potentially they sell their computers back to gamers and gamers can finally be happy.

Samson Mow: And then what about the people holding ETH right now? Is there a new currency? Is it going to be ETH 2?

Vitalik Buterin: No, ETH is ETH. Basically the way the merge process is going to work is that the ETH 2.0 state, I know all of the ETH 1.0 State, all of the ETH 1.0 Accounts and contracts, so there are going to be kind of transplanted into the ETH 2.0 System and so there's going to just continue to be one asset.

Peter McCormack: So Vitalik, can Ethereum fail?

Vitalik Buterin: Absolutely. Of course I think Bitcoin can fail too.

Peter McCormack: Okay so I'll put it both on you, how does Bitcoin fail? What would be catastrophic for Bitcoin and similar for Ethereum? How does Ethereum fail and does it become a scenario where you yourself have to actually look at it and go, "Okay, I don't think this works." I don't understand what success is for Ethereum. So for Bitcoin, I know doing what it does now, is a success. If it just gets stronger and tougher and more secure, it just becomes a better version of what it is now, but it is success for me already. Is Ethereum successful now, or is it heading towards a successful state? Sorry, there's a broad range of questions there for you.

Vitalik Buterin: I think I definitely feel like Ethereum is heading towards success. So one kind of metric of success that I think is good to think about is, are you seeing people actually use the thing in context outside of the community, which has already and enthusiastic about it because it is the community of that thing. So in Bitcoin, for example, I know there's a bunch of people in places like Venezuela and Palestine and in Africa and so forth that like actually just use and derive value from it. 

You could be like say they want to work remotely and get kind of Western level wages and they then get that money back to their families, which I think is great. I know there's people using ETH for that sort of thing as well though, on a bit of a smaller scale and I've actually, even this year started to see more examples of this. So for example, a few months ago, while I was browsing the Slate Star Codex subreddit, this is the pseudo-rationalist community on the internet and I saw one of them just kind of casually mention, or even include a link to a prediction market on Omen. So just like randomly out there in the wild people are starting to kind of get excited about say Ethereum prediction markets. 

So like, to me, success is definitely a kind of taking those kind of early successes and kind of scaling them out and you're like basically getting to the point where you have large numbers of users who do not see themselves as kind of "Ethereans" as any kind of identity, but just using Ethereum applications because they find them useful. 

I definitely freely admit that Ethereum is at an earlier stage than Bitcoin, in terms of reaching a lot of those aspirations and especially kind of outside of the kind of blockchain as cryptocurrency or in a sphere and in the end of watching as application sphere, but it definitely feels to me to be moving in the right direction.

Peter McCormack: I think people listening to this, some people are probably more on Ethereum's side may feel like I'm focusing a lot more of the questions at Ethereum. I think the reason being is I think there are more questions around Ethereum, but I will try and flip it back to Bitcoin sometimes. Samson, where do you see catastrophic failures that can happen for Bitcoin? What worries you about Bitcoin?

Samson Mow: I think I don't really worry much about catastrophic failures. I think we have a very robust group of developers working on it, scrutinizing the code, making sure nothing is vulnerable to an attack or is broken in terms of being able to run a node, like anybody in the world can run a Bitcoin node, so it's not an attack vector where a nation state can shut down the network. We even have Blockstream satellites that rebroadcast the chain and you can sync from zero.

So you can place a node in the middle of the desert with no internet and sync up and transact. I don't see the same for Ethereum. I think Infura is a large part of the source of truth for what Ethereum actually is, what the state is and if someone were to shut down Infura, that would be catastrophic for Ethereum as it's very difficult to run an Ethereum node. I'm from the exchange space, I have a lot of friends still running exchanges, and they're always complaining about how difficult it is to keep their Ethereum node in sync. It's a mission critical thing that's always at risk of failure.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so we'll come back to that. We'll come back to nodes. So Vitalik, is Samson right about having nothing to fear catastrophic about Bitcoin, or is there anything that you look at and you think maybe we have blind spots?

Vitalik Buterin: So the things that I tend to worry about, one is that there was always this kind of black swan risk of technical failure. What if the NSA comes out with their quantum computer out of the blue and just steals a whole bunch of coins before you can do anything about it, political failure, so like what if governments banned Bitcoin and then kind of commandeer the mining pools and use that to just do what I call, a 51% spawn camping attack and just keep attacking the chain over and over again, until it becomes a non-viable. Meanwhile, the prices are lower because like the thing's banned and there's a crisis of confidence.

Samson Mow: Vitalik, you have a quantum computer, would you use it to attack Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: Come on Samson, we don't need to do that now. Come on! I know what you're doing there. Come on, let's be fair. So Vitalik, what it seems like to me, they're the things you've explained the potential black swan risks to Bitcoin or the risks that exists to both, but are there any unique risks that you think Bitcoin has that Ethereum doesn't?

Vitalik Buterin: I think the main one is just that Bitcoin doesn't have, what I call sufficient functionality escape velocity. So basically kind of sufficient functionality to serve as a trustless base layer for a lot of different applications. As a result of this, there's the possibility that people will just over time find Bitcoin less and less interesting and other platforms more interesting.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so I don't buy that last one, but the other two, I certainly think it exists, but I think they exist for both. I don't buy the last one because I think... I've got my 250th episode come out tomorrow and I asked a bunch of previous guests to do a little minute on Bitcoin and one of the people who left a comment, Jeremy Welch, he said, one of the best things about Bitcoin is it's boring and the reason that's great, because it has to do one job pretty much and do it really well. 

So we don't buy that last one. I understand what you're saying, I think that's more of a developer thing. Perhaps developers will find it more interesting, I don't need my money to be interesting. I need it to be safe.

Vitalik Buterin: So there are concrete consequences to what kind of Bitcoin not having functionality escape velocity. So one example of this is that the Ethereum chain can trustlessly verify the Bitcoin chain, but the Bitcoin chain cannot trustlessly verify the Ethereum chain. So there exists, this smart contract called BTC relay...

Peter McCormack: Why does it need to?

Samson Mow: Well, who can then verify the Ethereum chain?

Peter McCormack: Hold on Samson, we'll come back to that. Why does it need to?

Vitalik Buterin: So just there exists a smart contract called BTC relay that exists on Ethereum and it's basically just verifies Bitcoin block headers and Bitcoin doesn't have the ability to do the same to Ethereum because Bitcoin doesn't have this kind of property that I call rich stateful and this ability to have kind of computer programs with memory. Now, in terms of what that gives you, I think like one of the main things just is the ability to create trustless board bridges. 

So if Bitcoin and Ethereum both have the ability to verify each other, that you actually could create these kind of wraps Bitcoin on Ethereum tokens in such a way that these wrappers did not have to depend on a central party to run the multisig and instead the wrappers would be secure as long as the blockchains are secure. 

But now all of these different wrappers, they all have, whether it's Liquid or whether it's a kind of WBTC or any of these other BTCs on Ethereum, they have these centralized operators and potentially those operators are noticing a single points of failure and if they really wanted to, or they got coerced into a stealing those coins, they could steal those coins. I think that kind of really puts a kind of dampener on a people's ability and willingness to are really use these schemes and trust them.

Peter McCormack: That's freedom man, we talked about that earlier. Okay, so let's go to the nodes thing. So Vitalik, let's just say, after this, I'm like, "Vitalik had a point, I'm going to get myself some Ethereum" and I'm really like known and respected for my knowledge with Bitcoin nodes and having set up quite a few of them. If I wanted to set up an Ethereum node here in my office, would I realistically be able to do it?

Vitalik Buterin: Yeah, you can. I have the Nethermind node on my laptop quite a few times.

Peter McCormack: Hold on but you are Vitalik Buterin, you're the guy who created Ethereum. I wonder about me, I'm a technical moron. Can I...

Vitalik Buterin: Yeah you can, the install instructions are very simple. As far as I can tell, they're not really more complicated than for like BitcoinD or something like that. You go to a website, you install the thing and you run the thing.

Peter McCormack: How long does it take to sync?

Vitalik Buterin: I think a Nethermind fast sync is somewhere around 12 hours.

Peter McCormack: Well I'm going to have a go this week and I'm going to tell you how I got on.

Samson Mow: But this is example of dishonest marketing from the Ethereum folks, as that is not a full node by the definition, it's the changing the terminology. So you've called a full node, you've renamed it into an archival node, but for a Bitcoin there, that is a full node. You have to have the complete state and to sync that would require four terabytes of memory of space, and you would need to sync for about a month.

Vitalik Buterin: Okay, hold on. So a full node contains all of the information that's needed to recover any of the information that's in an archive node. So, if you have a full node, that means you have the current state, you have the full history, Whereas an archive node also has this additional information, which is basically a kind of quick index into all of the historical states and that's just information that almost all users don't really need. In fact, I think Bitcoin itself does like pruning, right? Like BitcoinD does history pruning. So it forgets a all old history or at least has a mode for that.

Samson Mow: Yeah, the equivalent of a prune node is your fast sync.

Vitalik Buterin: Right.

Samson Mow: So technically you shouldn't even fast sync your node when you set it up Peter.

Peter McCormack: So what's the difference? What are you actually saying here Samson? What has Vitalik explained here this version of the node, what will the difference be?

Samson Mow: I'm just saying that they're putting different terminologies on things to kind of soften the blow of changing it to a more trusted model. When you're thinking an Ethereum node, you're trusting the system largely, as only a few people in the world actually have an Ethereum full node, by definition of a Bitcoiner, which is probably Infura people and maybe the Ethereum Foundation. But the fact that in during supply gate, no one was able to actually...

Peter McCormack: We're coming to supply gate. Okay, so Vitalik, realistically, and honestly how many Ethereum full archive full nodes are there?

Vitalik Buterin: So first of all, I reject fully the characterization that fast thinking nodes are not full nodes, they provide exactly the same functionality, they're verifying all of the new blocks that are coming in and they let you access the end of the current state. They'll let you access to history.

Samson Mow: Did you see the article from Data Veteran, which is an attack vector on fast sync? So if there was a coordinated attack on the network for that two week period of fast syncing...

Vitalik Buterin: Wait, so that requires a 51% attack that's two weeks long, correct?

Samson Mow: Yeah, that's correct.

Vitalik Buterin: So if there's a 51% attack, that's two weeks long then realistically I think if Bitcoin or Ethereum, people would just needs to install like some kind of user activated soft fork or whatever that bans the attack, because like there's no way that people are actually going to accept a two week long attack chain.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that sounds fair. I'm going to ask Eric Wall about this because I think he'll give me the honest and I'll check with Udi because I can't figure out the truth between the two of them. Okay, let's talk about supply gate. Okay, as far as I see at Vitalik, it's very easy with a Bitcoin node to see the supply of Bitcoin, very, very easy to, and it never changes, like everybody sees the same supply. It seems that because Ethereum is a little bit more complicated, the ability to go and see the full supply is very difficult. It seems to be that there's like this range that it falls within. Is that true?

Vitalik Buterin: I think theoretically it's completely possible and not that hard to add into nodes, the functionality of keeping track of the total supply, because all that you would do is you would just figure out what the total sum of all of the balances in this state tree and then whenever there is an update, like whenever you get a new block, you would just see what all the new balances are and you would kind of subtract and add and like you would be able to do it. 

There isn't anything kind of fundamental to Ethereum that makes it not possible to keep track of the Ethereum total supply? The thing that's different is basically that people in the Ethereum community just haven't bothered to write that convenience function into into their code yet and that's something that is changing over the last few days, obviously.

Peter McCormack: Is that fair to Samson? Are we over-exaggerating in the point on this supply thing, because it's a chance to just kind of throw a punch Ethereum or is this a valid, very concerning thing?

Samson Mow: I think it's a valid, concerning thing, depending on what you think Ethereum is. If it's just a utility token that doesn't need to have value and you just use it to run your smart contracts or your DeFi apps or whatever, then yeah, it doesn't matter. Just crank it out, inflate the supply if you want. 

But if you want to treat Ethereum as money, then you need to be able to validate and everyone has to be able to run a full archival node and run that script against it, or even better, have it built into the client so that you can automatically see the supply because the whole point of having a cryptocurrency is that you have an auditable supply and most cryptocurrencies get that off the bat. Bitcoin, Lightcoin, Monero, you can easily audit the supply of them at any given point and anybody can do that.

Peter McCormack: That does seem fair to me Vitalik. It does seem that is a bit of a limitation and a bit of a flaw with Ethereum. For me as an external person, that is off putting to me.

Vitalik Buterin: Right, but like the important thing is that this is not a fundamental issue with Ethereum, this is just something that Ethereum clients have not yet bothered to implement and can implement quite easily if they want to.

Peter McCormack: Okay, is happening then?

Vitalik Buterin: So I know Nethermind already has written the scripts and someone has aready implemented a script. So I think the question is, how easy they'll make it and I'm not sure and I'm sure if people really demand it, they'll just add it in as a convenience function. 

But I think the other point here though, is that this definitely is being a kind of blown up on Twitter as though, "Oh my God, we don't know the Ethereum supply", kind of as though there is some possibility that someone somehow kind of snuck 25 million coins into the protocol and I think like it's important to clarify that that's not true at all, because first of all, people know what the Ethereum supply is to within a fairly small range, like the supply is about 112.1 million. That's kind of the result that all these...

Peter McCormack: What's the range? Are we talking about, like less than 1%?

Vitalik Buterin: It's a less than 0.1%, I think.

Peter McCormack: So you don't know?

Vitalik Buterin: Well part of the reason, like I can't just like give a number down to the last digit is because Ethereum just pushes out a new block every 14 seconds and so it just keeps changing. We could always just like run those scripts again, but the last time the scripts were run were a couple of days ago and every day about 13,000 new ETH gets issued. So you have to be realistic about how many digits of precision you can expect.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what it sounds like to me, I understand why the Bitcoiners are concerned about this because it's so important to be able to verify the supply, it's so important that they can be accurate about this. But it sounds to me like this is just another one of the Ethereum things where it's just not as good as Bitcoin because it's just trying to do too many things. Just trying to have quick blocks, it's trying to do so many things. This is just... It's like Ethereum is just a little bit raggedy around the edges. Does that make sense?

Vitalik Buterin: I can see that. I think like Ethereum nodes definitely have more protocol rules to validate, aside from auditing the supply, you can audit whether or not each individual contract was hacked, whether or not each individual ECDSA signature is valid and so on and so forth. 

The fact is that the clients are auditing all of those rules and there definitely is some complexity to those rules, but like realistically, it's a combination of like, one, there definitely being like more rules altogether, like more moving parts of Ethereum that people care about and the thing I'll admit to is that there's a less of this ideological emphasis on the supply in particular. Also, the other aspect of this is that Etherean people don't really care about the lack of a kind of magic number equivalent to a 21 million.

Peter McCormack: Samson if we don't like Ethereum and we don't want to use it and we don't, why should we care if they don't care about the supply, it doesn't affect us.

Samson Mow: Okay, so I think it's more about Bitcoiners wanting to help provide that disclaimer to people. It's not that they really care deep down about the survival of Ethereum, yhey're just trying to provide that disclaimer to the world that this thing does not purport to do what it says it does. It's not even about knowing an exact "magic number" like 21 million, it's about knowing the number, "what is your number of your supply?" 

I think you made some excuses there about, "Well, we moved on, we calculated it for an older block", but what if you set a block in the future in, let's say two weeks time, can you guys all run a script for that block in the future and spit out the output? Will we see a consensus of the actual supply? Bitcoiners have said that they're happy to do that and I think some of them are organizing, None Your Business is putting together a group to do exactly that.

Vitalik Buterin: Well instead of block numbers, lets talk about timestamps, for example, what is going to be the future amount of Bitcoin at say, New Year, exactly the end of this year, say San Francisco time. That's something that does have a bit of uncertainty because Bitcoin has a bit of uncertainty and it's block time and Ethereum also...

Peter McCormack: Hold on, we don't care about... Sorry, I know I am technically incompetent, but I know if you know the block, you should know the supply of that block.

Vitalik Buterin: But why do we care about the block number, right? That's a bit of an arbitrary choice. So why shouldn't we care about the time?

Peter McCormack: Because if you know the block, you know the supply on that block, then you can verify there's been no inflation. Even I get that...

Vitalik Buterin: In Ethereum, the statistic would be that if you know the block number, plus the number of uncles and a couple of other statistics about those uncles, then you know what the supply is.

Peter McCormack: Sorry what are the uncles?

Samson Mow: What about the aunts?

Vitalik Buterin: So the uncle is basically... This is the idea that if a block doesn't make it into the Ethereum chain, that block also can be kind of re-included to the chain later and it still gets most of the reward that otherwise would have gotten. The mechanism was basically included as a kind of anti-centralization measure, basically trying to reduce the advantage that like extremely well connected mining pools have over other mining pools and the existence of these uncle rewards is the thing that kind of makes the formula for issuance a bit more complicated than just a function of the blog number.

Peter McCormack: Okay. Hold on, sorry Samson, just give me a second, I'm just trying to understand. Okay, every time a Bitcoin block is added, I know when we started was 50 Bitcoins and then it was 25, then 12.5, I know that. But there Ethereum blocks that don't get added but the supply still exists? Are you saying...

Vitalik Buterin: Basically if an Ethereum block does not become added directly into the chain, the blocks header can still be inputted into the chain a bit later and that block still gets most of its reward.

Peter McCormack: Okay, this is the kind of thing I should know, but I just don't know. I know Bitcoin will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins, Ethereum, does it have a fixed number or does it have an ongoing inflation? I think it has ongoing inflation, does it?

Vitalik Buterin: It has ongoing inflation. You can definitely provide a number which has a cap on the amount of inflation that's going to happen per year, I think it's like about five million currently with the proof of work chain and it's going to be a bit less than 2 million when we switch to proof of stake.

Peter McCormack: So you are basically saying with the Ethereum blockchain and knowing the uncles, if we had a certain timestamp, you would be able to get a confirmed agree supply, and everybody could agree on that supply from their node.

Vitalik Buterin: Everyone could agree on some future supply. If they agree on some future hypothetical scenario involving how many blocks and how many uncles are produced. Whereas with Bitcoin, everyone can agree on the supply of stage or on a future supply if they agree on how many blocks will be produced in the future.

Peter McCormack: So this is where this stuff's mad, right? I always consider myself a creative, not a technical person. So this is a little to understand here and new people coming in, it's like, there's a lot of complexity behind this stuff, which is really hard to get your head around. Okay, let me ask you about...

Samson Mow: Wait, this is how Ethereum thrives. They make things overly complex so that there is no absolute truth, "It's complicated, you have to calculate this and that and the aunt and the nephew and the cousin and that's why we can't do it. But look at the other stuff that we're doing."

Vitalik Buterin: Are you actually saying that Ethereum's complexity as an obscurification strategy? Cause I'm pretty sure no Etherean would agree with that.

Samson Mow: How many pages is your white paper?

Vitalik Buterin: I forget and it's definitely somewhere between 5 and 10,000 words.

Peter McCormack: I don't buy the idea that is an obscurification strategy, I just buy it as it's a mistake. I think the complexity is a mistake.

Samson Mow: I think it's a very clever obscurification strategy.

Vitalik Buterin: Hmm, like if you actually spent time in say ETH 2.0 Development communities, you will see a lot of really hard work going into making the protocol as simple as possible. If you even go into the GitHub hub history of the ETH 2.0 Spec for phase zero, you can see it's slowly getting reduced from, I think it was about 2,600 lines of code, to like about 1,600 lines of code. People spent a lot of time working hard on coming up with simplifications as much as they can.

Peter McCormack: I don't buy it.

Samson Mow: Why does every Ethereum subsystem have its own token. Raiden has its own token, I don't know, stake pools, they have their own token too. It's just the layering complexity on top of complexity in my view.

Vitalik Buterin: That's just an [crosstalk] of how they design themselves.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I personally don't buy it that there are people sat there saying "Let's make this really complicated so we can get away with shit." I don't buy that.

Samson Mow: Have you seen the design diagram for ETH 2.0? It's like a...

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I don't think they've done it on purpose. I just think the ambition is too high. I think one of the problems that, and I think Bitcoin has as well, but I think Ethereum people really miss, is UX and just somebody who stands over the project and says, "We need to simplify this! We need to make this easier to use because no, one's going to understand this!" I think Ethereum's biggest problem is that the blockchains themselves, even Bitcoin is complicated. I think Ethereum is too complicated to go mainstream with most of the ideas I've seen.

Samson Mow: I actually disagree with that. I think Ethereum is really good at UI. They abstract a lot of things to their retail target so that they just open a page in a web browser, but at the sacrifice of decentralization and censorship resistance. So instead of saying, "Run a full node," it's like, "Connect to this website", which connects to Infura, but when they market the thing, they make it very complex. I think those diagrams are emblematic of their efforts to stay complex.

Peter McCormack: I don't know, I don't buy it. So Vitalik, let me ask you about this Infura thing. Let's be honest about it, how reliant is Ethereum on Infura?

Vitalik Buterin: So I think first of all, the Ethereum network is not reliant on Infura. If Infura died tomorrow, the Ethereum network would keep going and everyone who does have either an Ethereum full node or an Ethereum Light node would still continue kind of functioning normally. Ethereum applications would definitely get significantly harder to use, though at the same time, it is possible to use Ethereum applications without relying on Infura.

I think in MetaMask it's possible to kind of switch the endpoint to a local node, and there is such a thing as an Ethereum Light clients, where you can run Geth light, and as some of the other implementations have light modes too, which also do the same kind of block header verification that Bitcoin does and actually like in Ethereum, we even tried really hard to make light clients more powerful. 

So for example, Ethereum has this concept called a state tree where instead of just committing to transactions, we commit to account balances and so given the header of a block, given this kind of small piece of data, that's at the top of a block, you can create a very short proof that cryptographically proves that, what is the balance of a particular account. 

These are definitely things that we can try to do better and there's very active efforts at trying to do better at this. There's a lot of ongoing efforts that are trying to create a more decentralized back-end for, and if something like MetaMask, for example, but if you want to, you could definitely hook it up to your full node or even your light node.

Samson Mow: I have a friend that runs a crypto exchange and he said, "If Infura gets hacked, Ethereum is dead, because that's the source of truth for everybody."

Vitalik Buterin: Yeah, I don't know. I've definitely sent a lot of payments out of my Nethermind node.

Peter McCormack: You should know that.

Samson Mow: So do you have a full Archival Node?

Vitalik Buterin: I do not have an Archival Node. I have a full Nethermind node.

Peter McCormack: This sounds to me like...You haven't really convinced me on this one Vitalik, but it's so complicated, it kind of goes a bit over my head. So I'm going to move on from that because I'm conscious we've done nearly an hour and a half and I think that's very healthy.

Samson Mow: Let's talk about what the right price of a transaction is!

Peter McCormack: Well, so I think there can be hypocrisy here... Okay, so I think Bitcoiners accept higher transactions a little bit more within the Bitcoin blockchain because of what it is we're doing with Bitcoin. Whereas, like the Ethereum... You did say that time Vitalik that you want to keep on the 5 cents, we've seen the some fees at $40. But I just see the reality that both blockchains have a supply and demand thing going on and I think this is got to a place where you...I guess it's the usage of the Ethereum blockchain filled out quicker than you expected? I've explained that really badly. I know what I'm trying to say. Does that make sense?

Vitalik Buterin: That's definitely true. When I made that comment about how kind of the internet of money should not cost 5 cents a transaction, that was definitely a kind of a comment about the whole space and it was definitely intended in large part also as a comment on what Ethereum is doing, and the fact that Ethereum needs to focus on its own scale and challenges as well and in theory, it actually kind of has accomplished this. 

So for example, if you look at Loopring or zkSync, these are the two zkRollups, the kind of layer two, that already exists on the Ethereum main net. The amount of money that it costs, or the transaction fee that it costs to send something inside one of them is even now on the order of something like 1 to 3 cents. So, it is definitely... 

Scalability is something that we deeply care about and the way that I sometimes think and talk about it is that, Bitcoin people definitely do care more about improving the accessibility or reading the chain, whereas Ethereum people care about improving the accessibility of, not just reading to the chain, but also writing to the chain and kind of how both are important. That's why we're doing some of the scalability things that we're doing, but there definitely has been a lot of progress and I know even on the Bitcoin side, there has been progress. So with the Lightning network on the pushing transaction fees that the users experience down.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's the same thing...

Samson Mow: But you're comparing apples to oranges though. Loopring and, what was the other thing you said? Those are like off chain solutions. So you're comparing that to... That's basically like a Lightning network or a Liquid network, but when you say 5 cents, do you mean on chain? On the Ethereum main chain that it should be 5 cents?

Vitalik Buterin: My original quote said the internet of money should not cost more than 5 cents a transaction and the amount of money clearly refers to, kind of this abstract concept of being able to send payments in a decentralized way. I don't think it refers to the base layer.

Samson Mow: What's wrong with the free market determining the price of a transaction? Why does it need to be set?

Vitalik Buterin: I'm not saying... Like I think saying that you want a particular outcome is not an attempt to control the free market. If you say, "I think humanity should go to Mars", that's not an attempt to coerce the free market into going to Mars when the market doesn't want to go to Mars, it's just part of the market.

Samson Mow: Right, but that is very anti-free market saying it should not cost that much. That's a Soviet type economic planning. That's a central planning agency that sets the levels of production, wages and prices of goods. Whereas I think most Bitcoiners are a very free market and capitalist, which is... Transactions will cost what they cost.

Peter McCormack: Isn't that same with Ethereum?

Vitalik Buterin: Bitcoin has a very preset parameter for the cost of reading the chain and of the block size, right? Whereas in Ethereum, you have miners and miners can kind of vote the block size up or down and I think you can definitely kind of go both ways on the central planning thing.

Peter McCormack: So when I saw the prices on the Ethereum blockchain transaction fees, some people paying like $40 and $30 and averaging like $7 and I saw a criticism from Bitcoiners this week. I kind of felt like, well, but we're free market people right? And that, if the free market has determined that's the price of the transaction, we should just celebrate it, that's what it is. The worst thing would be that it was enforced. Yes, Ethereum was meant to do something different, but really that's just, I guess a sign of success. It depends whether you call it success, but that's a sign of success.

Vitalik Buterin: I definitely want to kind of press on this philosophical point further. Being pro-free market is definitely not at all incompatible with having preferences or about what outcome is the free market will lead to. Even people who are free market and a lot of the time they're free market because they think that the free market will lead to certain outcomes better than certain other systems do. For example, if you have a free market in food, and the food price.... 

Or say even in housing, I know the free market in housing is totally not free, but even if it was, and that leads to prices being high, it's still a totally legitimate thing to express unhappiness about, say the price of housing being too high and being in favour of say, new technology that'll make it easier to build more housing. That kind of critique of outcomes and desire to build solutions that try to create better outcomes, is like completely a part of the free market process, it's not a contradiction of it.

Samson Mow: But as the creator of Ethereum, when you go and say it shouldn't cost that much, do you think that's kind of an implicit promise to your customers or users that you're going to keep the cost of a transaction low so they can execute their smart contracts?

Peter McCormack: That sounds to me like a desired outcome.

Vitalik Buterin: I interpret it as a goal, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that's why in here it is.

Samson Mow: So you're okay with central planning to achieve that goal?

Vitalik Buterin: What kind of central planning are we talking about here?

Samson Mow: I don't know, increasing the block size?

Vitalik Buterin: So that's definitely not central planning. The block size was increased by miners and it happened without my permission, as I mentioned. So if we talk about like ETH 2.0, maybe you can say that ETH 2.0 protocol was centrally planned, but then like every protocol is centrally planned at the beginning, that's not something that anyone has kind of managed to escape. 

In the long run, like as I said, I'm definitely expecting the ETH 2.0 protocol to kind of solidify much more. After ETH 2.0, we need the transaction fees to drop further than... And more development of layer two protocols, which is totally a free market operation. I think we're going to end up being a big... The main part of that.

Samson Mow: But if you can hard fork all the time, it's easy just to write it off and say, "Well, it's essentially planned at the beginning" because there is a beginning for every hard fork. Where you can't say that with Bitcoin, because the beginning was when Satoshi first launched the client.

Vitalik Buterin: Bitcoin has definitely had soft forks and even a lot of hard forks since then.

Samson Mow: Bitcoin has soft forks, but that's different from a hard fork where you loosen the rule set.

Vitalik Buterin: Well Bitcoin has technically had one hard fork as well. It was that one in 2013 that removed the 5,000 database updates rule, but that's a... I don't actually think soft forks and hard forks are that different and I think they're both changes to the rule set.

Peter McCormack: Well, hold on, hold on. Again, this is one of the things even I know, especially in Bitcoin, a hard fork is a lot more dangerous because you can create two coins. I know that that is dangerous because...

Vitalik Buterin: Right, so a user activated soft fork can technically do the same thing.

Peter McCormack: Can it? I didn't even know this. I've learned something new today. Well listen, we've done an hour and a half. I know we could go on forever and I think this has been a healthy start. We could do it again another time. I think we've covered a lot. Anything we didn't cover Samson that you wish we had?

Samson Mow: We didn't talk about the mountain man thing...

Peter McCormack: Oh yes, come on the mountain man. Let's close it out on the mountain man. Come on Vitalik, lay it down for us!

Vitalik Buterin: So basically, I think this kind of goes into some of the kind of differences between the Bitcoin and Ethereum community in terms of kind of how we view the concept of trust. So I kind of interpret the Bitcoin community as having this kind of very extreme and binary view of a trustlessness that we sometimes... Where basically we say, either you verify something personally, or if you don't verify as something personally, then you know, it is this other kind of binary category that is trusting people and trusting people means you no longer have security. 

I think the Ethereum community, is more that, yes, minimizing trust assumptions is important, but it's a much more kind of fluid thing and there are trust assumptions that are inevitable in any cryptocurrency. So for example, most people haven't audited the code themselves. So there are different kind... Like one example of that kind of different trust model is what I call a kind of one-of-one versus N-over-two event versus one event. So one-of-one means that, you have to trust a very specific central actor to act correctly and if they don't act correctly, then you're screwed. 

So Infura for example, one-of-one, PayPal, one-of-one, and so on and so forth. One-of-N basically says that there was a large set of different participants, and as long as even one of them stays honest, then you're fine and one kind of recent example of this is this discussion that was kind of between me and James Press, where we talked about Roll-ups and, zkRollups specifically. He made the point that he thought that zkRollups, were kind of basically the same as Infura, and the reason is that, in order to run a node on a zkRollup, you have to have a fairly big amount of computing power. 

If you, as a user are just a light client and you don't have that computing power, then if the system kind of... If that zkRollup stops working, and if just every full node of the zkRollup disappears, then in order for you to withdraw, you have to go and buy up that computer power and spin up your own full node. My counter argument basically is that realistically, if you have a zkRollup and you have an ecosystem and you have an ecosystem of hundreds of participants, you only need one out of those hundreds of participants, to be honest in order for you to go talk to them and be able to withdraw. 

So the assumption that 1 actor out of 200 actors is going to keep on being honest, even though it technically is a trust assumption, it's a much, much weaker and much more reasonable trust assumption than the trust assumption that say, Infura and specifically Infura is going to be honest. A lot of Ethereum scaling arguments, I think, tends to implicitly rely on these kind of one-of-N paradigms and I get the impression that Bitcoin people tend to kind of just dump all of that into this category that says trust. But you know, in the Ethereum view it's definitely that one-of-N and a one-of-one, are these two very different things that need to be viewed very differently.

Peter McCormack: Well, I've no idea what you were talking about. I tried my hardest to follow then. But Samson do you want to throw anything in reply to that?

Samson Mow: Well I think he's saying it's okay to trust a group of people and for that purpose, you could just trust the Liquid Federation. But I think...

Vitalik Buterin: The Liquid Federation is like N out of two event, not one event. So the difference is, is your model, there are 200 people, at least one of them has to be honest or is your model there are 200 people and 100 of them have to be honest. I'm saying those two are very, very different and trusting that 1 out of 200 will be honest is like basically fine, but trusting that a 100 out of 200 will be honest, well you have to think much more and you have to be really careful. What kinds of people are those 200 and so forth?

Samson Mow: Well I think the key here is that Bitcoiners want to be able to run their own node. It's not about being a mountain man, it's about freedom, independence, and self sovereignty. It's not expected that everyone in the world will run their own node. It'd be good for their own benefit, but the key is that there is an option for people that have those same values. Bitcoiners have no master, it's not a mountain man, it's a free man or freeholder. 

That's from the middle English period Peter and that's someone that has no master, they have their own land and they're not a serf. I think the Ethereum model is just promoting serfdom. You're a serf of Infura, you have to trust them or trust someone else that has enough money to run a node. You're not your own person or your own man. So I think that sort of independence is critical to have a more egalitarian society. What Bitcoin does is it promotes alliances to be made between equals and you cannot be an equal if you cannot verify the supply yourself.

Vitalik Buterin: I definitely don't think that's true. I think the model is definitely not that, you know, everyone kind of bows down to the god Infura. I think the model was more... Like the analogy that I use is herd immunity. The facts that in the Ethereum ecosystem, there are thousands of people were running nodes means that if there is an invalid block, then that invalid... 

That fact is going to get caught by one of them and if it gets caught by one of them, then yes, you personally can then kind of go in verify that block. So the fact that there... Look there definitely is that kind of more of this emphasis of relying on the existence of kind of at least one person out there who's going to point out flaws, but herd immunity is definitely not a kind of hierarchical and vertical concept. I think it's fully compatible with the egalitarianism.

Samson Mow: What you've said is true. You can run a node and validate and identify invalid blocks. But the problem I see is that Ethereum people don't even do that. Just for taking yourself as an example for the supply gates stuff, your retort to Peter was, "Go check CoinMarketCap." You posted a screenshot of CoinMarketCap. You didn't check your node.

Vitalik Buterin: Well that was back when I wasn't even sure what his point was. My point was, here, there is a bunch of sources that tell you what the supply is basically and after that, of course, a bunch of people ran scripts and a bunch of people were able to calculate the ETH supply to something that's much more exact. 

Now if any of those people were dishonest, like say if a whole bunch of them said, "you know, the Ethereum supply is 156 million", and then other people said, "Oh no, the supply is 112 million", then you know, there would have been much more kind of confusion. I think in those circumstances, a lot more people would have actually downloaded a node and you had to verify the code and tried to run the thing themselves, right? So it's a kind of verification... Like verification is not... By yourself does not have to be a first resort to be effective. Like if it's a second resort, then that's fine too.

Peter McCormack: Sorry Samson, but it sounds to me, the way I interpret this Vitalik, and excuse me if this is wrong, but it sounds to me that within Ethereum, I think you make compromises or you move your own goalposts because of the change in nature of the Ethereum, because you are becoming more centralized because of the demand on the system, because so much happens. So it sounds to me like you move your own goalposts and you compromise yourself a little bit. That's what it feels like it's happening and you post rationalize it.

Vitalik Buterin: I think in this particular work... In this particular case, it's not about Ethereum changing. I think it's about the facts that full nodes in Ethereum are somewhat more difficult to run than in Bitcoin and this kind of convenience function doesn't exist in Ethereum clients and so forth. I think there definitely are differences between how the two communities you trust...

I don't think it's a matter of moving goalposts because I think the goalposts have been in that place all along. I think Ethereum people all along have known that, if there is some situation that requires verification that anyone can go and verify, but kind of in normal circumstances, people are content to know that there's a lot of people that are checking on any individual block.

Samson Mow: But if I'm to paraphrase what you said, essentially your message is if the approximate range was off, then you would have known and would have downloaded a node, a full node and run it. But the question is, how do you know if the approximate range is right or wrong? I just know...

Vitalik Buterin: Whether or not this is the agreement. If some people had the answer, you know, 106 million... First of all, clearly at least one person would have answered honestly, because there's different ways to calculate the total supply. There's a lot of different people running those different clients and so the chance that, literally all of them would've been wrong and literally all of them would've been wrong in the exact same way is astronomically tiny.

Samson Mow: But if you look at Leon the Fact Checker's post he listed off...

Peter McCormack: I love Leon the Fact Checker! Where's that guy come from?

Samson Mow: I don't know, but he listed off like a six or seven different sources of truth. Two of them were the script and they were all different.

Vitalik Buterin: So they were different and so more people started running scripts and so they ended up kind of actually converging on a number, right?

Peter McCormack: Has Leon, the Fact Checker becoming your nemesis?

Vitalik Buterin: I don't know, that guy is kind of crazy and I don't really care about him much anymore.

Peter McCormack: He's always there.

Samson Mow: So why don't we do this. Why don't we set a block height in the future and everyone will output what their findings of their supply. Bitcoin people will run theirs and then Ethereum people will do theirs.

Peter McCormack: You all for that Vitalik?

Vitalik Buterin: I'm definitely happy to do that.

Peter McCormack: The gauntlet is laid down. Listen, this was great. We could go on forever, but we're going into areas I don't understand. So if I don't understand it, I'm losing interest because I like to keep it in my little simple terms and for what my listeners listen out for. Vitalik, it's great to finally meet you. We'll make a Bitcoin show one day, cause everyone has views about Ethereum, but I'd like to make a Bitcoin show. Samson, always good to see you. Nothing changed here for me, Vitalik, I still don't have an interest in Ethereum.

Not cause you haven't put good arguments and I don't dislike Ethereum as much as everyone else, it's just, I have one use for money, which Bitcoin solves for me right now. There's nothing in Ethereum for me. That's not to say if I had to use a stable coin, I wouldn't, if I had to, and it was on a Ethereum, I would use it. For me, I think what's really missing in Ethereum is like a strong philosophical backbone. 

That's what it feels like is missing for me, a strong philosophical backbone and I think that's what Bitcoin has and this is why we just don't have yield farming and yams and this bullshit and that bullshit or existed on Bitcoin because it's very simple. It's focused on one thing, which is what I like about it. But perhaps that's what people love about Ethereum. Perhaps Ethereum is just Ready Player One, it's a big game. I don't know.

Vitalik Buterin: That's fair to some extent and I also think that, it's totally... Like if you personally say you don't trust the ETH 2.0 transition and you just kind of set the whole thing out and then you kind of come back and look three years later and see how things have stabilized, I think that's another thing that's totally fair as well.

Peter McCormack: Well I'll keep looking at it, but I appreciate you both coming on. I'm definitely out of my depth for like 40% of this, but it's always fun to listen along. We are going to put this out on Sunday as a bonus. We'll stay in touch and I'm sure I'll speak to you both soon. Thanks for coming on!

Samson Mow: Okay, thanks!

Vitalik Buterin: Thank you!