Remember When Ethereum Almost Ended w/ Hudson Jameson

**Speaker A:** Hello and welcome back to the Strange Water podcast. Thank you for tuning in for another fantastic episode. I want to take a moment to reflect on the current situation with Curve founder Michael Igoroff, the CRV token and the Curve Finance hack. When I logged off for the weekend last Friday, all was quiet in the small corner of the Internet that we call Defi. And at the center sat the beating heart of decentralized finance 2.0 curve finance. And then, over the weekend, disaster struck. First it was huge losses out of the most promising, most engaged protocols, or pools for those protocols, Jpegged, Metronome, Alchemax, and then the big one, the CRV ETH pool. Now, the other pools were huge numbers, but they didn't have the dramatic implications of the CRV pool. Because not only did that pool represent a huge amount of money, but it was also the crucial piece in the complex contraption that Michael had set up. Long story short, on Friday, Michael had a huge but well managed debt position against his personal CRV stash. By Monday, he had the same debt, but with the entire system that he had built to support it crumbling at the time of recording, we don't actually know how this is going to resolve. Maybe Michael will pull a rabbit out of his hat, fix everything, and maybe even make a profit. Or maybe the CRV token begins a death spiral that leaves people wondering, is Curve Finance even worth saving? But right now, in this moment, all we have is this claustrophobic, impending sense of doom in a community that is in visible anguish over the possible extinction of one of its crown jewels. Fortunately or not, this is not the first time that the Ethereum community has experienced one of these existential questions. In fact, when you rank it up there, I'm hardly convinced that this will be remembered in the long, drawn out history of Ethereum. And so I figured that this was the perfect moment to reflect on some truly existential moments for Ethereum. Moments where there were real doubts on people's minds. Will Ethereum even exist after this? With a topic like this, we need a special guest. Someone who not only remembers these moments, but was in the room responding to them. Hudson Jamison. Hudson does a great job of giving us his background, so I'll leave it to him. But suffice to say, for anyone that is grateful for the Ethereum that we have today, we all owe Hudson and the people around him a huge debt of gratitude. And if you don't believe me yet, well, you will in about 60 minutes. One more thing before we begin. Please do not take financial advice from this or any podcast. Ethereum will change the world one day. But you can easily lose all of your money, all of it, between now and then. All right, too much intro. Let's bring on Hudson. Hudson, thank you so much for joining me. Welcome to the pod. **Speaker B:** Hi. You're welcome. I'm here. I'm loving it already. It's only been 30 seconds. I'm so down. Let's do it. **Speaker A:** Awesome, man. Well, let's see. You and I have been like, I think met about six months ago now, which feels like in this. Well, sorry, we met in real life six months ago now, which feels like six years ago now, but for just kind of like the audience and for myself again, because I love to hear it. Would you like, kind of, before we even get to who you are today, can you talk a little about who you were pre crypto? What like drove you and then how you found the world Computer? **Speaker B:** Sure. So basically before I got into Ethereum specifically, I grew up very interested in computers and technology. I went to college at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas for computer science. And initially what I was going for because like since middle school I messed around with, you know, network engineering stuff, hacking stuff like backtrack, Linux and war driving, you know, setups. So I was going to be like a network engineer or, you know, a penetration tester or something like that. But the summer of my freshman year was 2011, and I forgot how I found it, but I found out about Bitcoin. So it was very interesting to me having like a censorship resistant currency and software. So I started mining it from my room, which was this, this guy, like this weird realtor who just had a room open that I needed and he was like 200amonth and I was like, okay. And it was, it was kind of a dump, but it was, it was good enough. Yeah, Free electricity though. So, you know, I, I mined with some CPUs in there. And that was kind of my intro to cryptocurrency throughout college. Me and one professor in particular were kind of messing with crypto. I got into Darkcoin, which is now called Dash. It was one of the earlier privacy coins, although it doesn't really tout itself as a privacy coin as much now and then finally, as I was graduating college in 2014, I found out about Ethereum and participated in the presale and then got more heavily involved in 2015 and beyond. **Speaker A:** Great. So so much of your like, story, or if not your reputation, comes out of your time at Etherium. So we'll Save that for a moment and just hover around this, like, special moment when you're like, I was the same as you, man. Like, I was enthusiastic about computers. That's why I majored in computer science. And I never really knew what I wanted to do with it. I just knew that, like, it was the first time in my life I enjoyed homework. But, like, I, I started in 2009. I graduated in 2013. Like, I read the bitcoin white paper back then, and I remember thinking, like, Internet money. Like, cool. I guess. Like, I, you know, I play video games. I kind of get it. And then I put it down until I heard Hayden Adams on a Bloomberg podcast in 2021. And so my question for you is, like, what, in that moment did you, when you saw the bitcoin white paper, like, why? What magic did you see there that, like, just for people like me, like, was missed? **Speaker B:** I think that one of the big things I saw, I guess I should, I guess, either credit or add additional detail to say that I was kind of going through one of those college libertarian phases where I'm just, like, figuring out politics. And I only grew up in a conservative town, so it was like, oh, cool. And so a lot of those ideals were reflected in there. Not to completely bash libertarianism, of course, but more to say that at the time, I, you know, was more looking for something that had a lot more personal freedoms. And also the idea of something that, yeah, censorship, resistance is something that from day one, I was really, really interested in because there's so much bad things going wrong in the world because of, you know, governments and people in power restricting access to information. So, you know, to me, this was just a really novel idea. Um, and once I got latched on to that, because, you know, I was into, you know, security. I was into getting into topics of cryptography, although I never fully dove into, like, the math part of just all kind of culminated into something I got very obsessed with from 2011 till today. **Speaker A:** Yeah, man. And I, I get it. Like, I, I, I just feel so fortunate to have, like, entered this space in 2021 after, like, I really consider, like, a lot of Ethereum to be de risk, like, post merge and, like, post, like, a lot of really important things that have happened. But, like, for you to, like, get the bug and, like, just to start to, like, feel the, the power back then is like, you know, not a lot of people did it, right? And, like, the people that did do it, you were usually doing it because they were buying drugs and then, like, kind of got lucky with what was dust at the time. So. Man, I, I don't know, I, I don't really have a follow up question to this other than I'm impressed. **Speaker B:** Oh, well, thanks. Yeah, no, I, surprisingly, although I was in college, I did not use crypto for drugs, but I, I didn't know people who were starting to do that. So it was kind of. Yeah, that was like one of the first use cases I guess, and one of the more like well known ones at the time. So I don't really fault, you know, that that kind of did help bring about cryptocurrency to a wider audience. **Speaker A:** Yeah, for sure. And I, I think like one of like the coolest things that or conclusions that I've come to from doing this show is to be clear, I've only hosted like Westerners that are like western into their blood. Right. But I think for us, like there's something about this technology that like we need to get over the hurdle of like it doesn't really work yet and then think like, okay, here's the possibilities and like, you know, every single day of development things become more concrete. But just like thinking back to the Dow days, right, like literally we're talking about like lockers that owned eth that had like a drill in it that could be rented, you know, like it's, it's madness, man. And I just, I do believe that like for whatever, not financial advice, we're not going to talk about this. There's still a ton of risk in it. **Speaker B:** But no, hold on. I want to, I want to shill all my coins. I thought I was here to shill all my investments to your whole audience. **Speaker A:** Anyway, so. Okay, so let's go like to this moment where like 2014 ish. First of all, like at what point did you start to interact with like Ethereum? Was it like post white paper? Was it like, were you kind of in talking to Vitalik before he even knew what it was? Like how, how was the first time you touched what would become Ethereum? **Speaker B:** Sure. So I was just wrapping up my college degree, so that was kind of ending. I was still somewhat involved in Dark Coin, but it changing its name to Dash. And that's when a lot of changes happened to it. So I decided to kind of back off, as did a lot of people in the community. And so I did see the white paper somewhere I might have been on Bitcoin talk and I read it and it immediately clicked. The part that clicked for me was like, oh. I understood deeply that like for Bitcoin, it was like, you know, decentralized money or value on a ch, on a blockchain. And this is like, oh, let's just do that but for programs. And I was like, oh, I had not heard of anything like that with the exception of like colored coins and like what was, you know, what is now called Omni Protocol. Like that. Those were the only ones that were close to that and they didn't always do a lot. There was a few other things. Basically there was nothing that was like holistic and like very focused on that. So it immediately clicked. I heard about the presale and I participated. I have a funny story about that actually. So, you know, back then one Bitcoin was like $600 and I had a handful. I didn't have like hundreds of bitcoin or anything. But I would say that I was on the website to buy pre sale ether and what you do is you get a bitcoin address generated that's cryptographically tied to the Ethereum address that would be made for you in Genesis. And you got the little Genesis file to have your address ready. So you send whatever amount of bitcoin you want and that equals to that amount of ether for the time you bought it. So I was going to send half a bitcoin, would have given me a thousand ether, but I accidentally sent a whole bitcoin and I got 2000 ether and I was kicking myself like, oh my gosh, I just sent double accidentally. So at the time, which by the way, all that ether has long gone, the initial 2000. But, but I was going to say that, yeah, it was really funny. The mistake literally doubled my ether allocation to if I would have held it, you know, wild numbers now. **Speaker A:** Yeah, no, I mean, and I think that, I think that's like kind of every. I'm so happy for you that your story is a positive one. Like we all have this story where it's the first moment that we realize like the true power and the true danger of blockchain. I'll tell you what mine was again. I joined in 2021. I bridged funds over to Arbitrum and I sent money to Alchemyx to try that out. Alchemyx is not on Arbitrum. And you know that I, I, I want to, we don't need to talk about numbers here. It was an embarrassing amount, but like, yeah, you know, it's stupid tax, right? Like that's the only way to learn how any of this stuff works. So like I'm not Upset about it in the scheme of things. But like that is the moment, like every one of us has that moment where our money's gone forever and that that's the first moment we've become like true crypto people. And I'm just happy for you that it turned out to be a trade. **Speaker B:** Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the trade. I mean, yeah, this is like the positive side of, of that kind of story for sure. Yeah, I think that like, yeah, my. I really didn't get super involved like into Ethereum day to day until 2015 because I was starting 2014. I started work at USA, which is a entrance and banking company for US military members. But they have a very large IT presence because they don't have physical locations because, you know, military is around the world. So a lot of it's focused on the mobile app or, you know, on other pieces. I was there and got hired to do mainframe development within the insurance department. So not the most fun thing. But while I was there I was an absolute menace, bothering my, you know, bosses and whoever else would listen and the innovation people about the, you know, blockchain. So there's actually five or six patents that I helped write at USAA back in 2015 on blockchain before any other bank was, you know, doing anything. And to USAA's credit, they were doing some integrations with Coinbase and some other stuff at the time. But it was kind of here and there. But I bugged them enough and a few people believed in me enough that they moved me from the insurance area in 2015 to the innovation lab. And I was the lead blockchain developer there. Early blockchain, I guess, researcher, whatever. So we. I had a small team, like four people. One of them was actually Joseph Del from Sushiswap and then now Asteria. And it was really funny. Like he's told the story, but we were there and like he was early Dogecoin and a few other things, but he. I was doing research on all the chains, like literally anything that was out there. There were early versions of Tendermint and so I met early Cosmos people. I met Joe Lubin early from Consensus and all this other stuff. And Joe wasn't like telling Joe about it. He was just not convinced about Ethereum. Like he wouldn't be convinced for like another, you know, six to 12 months. But one of the coolest stories from that era to kind of wrap this, you know, early period up and what really got me into it at the end of 2015 was Devcon 1 in London. So by then I'm daily on Ethereum. I've been helping do like a documentation effort for free. I'm moderating the subreddit. I think about that time, I'm just every day nothing but Ethereum. When I'm not at work, I'm at home doing Ethereum like four to eight hours a day. So yeah, completely obsessed at that point and just know this is going to be a big deal. So DEFCON 1 in London's coming up and I just got married, I just got a house. I didn't really have disposable income to fly to London. So I was just like, man, this, like literally. I just had a feeling this could be life changing. So I called my dad and I was like, I never asked my dad for like anything hardly. He's super nice but like, I've just never really had to. And I was just like, hey, this is incredibly important to me. Like, this is what I'm about obsessed with now. Could I get, you know, some money to just cheap fly to London, stay at a hostel? And he said, sure, you've never asked me for anything. So shout out to my dad for, for helping me with that one. And flew to London, stayed at a Hostel with like 10 other people in the room. It was a nice hostel though. Shout out. Wombats Hostel. And the first day I went to devcon, it was pretty chaotic as far as like the organizational aspect. Like there wasn't enough volunteers, the badges weren't set up. So I kind of just asked if I could help and started giving out bad badges. And then I met people from the Ethereum foundation and Consensys who were helping. And throughout that time I did nothing but volunteer pretty much. I just like, you know, worked the T shirt booth. I made sure speakers were where they needed to be. I was the timekeeper for Vitalik during his talk. All kinds of things helped, like with the av, I called the venue when it was too loud. Like there's just random stuff and I wasn't even, you know, like paid or assigned to be a volunteer. This is the first time many people have met me and a lot of good came from that. I met a lot of early Ethereum people. It literally was like I was on Cloud nine. Like all of these people who I had read like dozens of papers about, like Vlad Zamfir and Vitalik and Jeff Vilke and like diving into Geth and just reading all their comments all day. They were all there and like talking to me. It was literally surreal. So after I Worked really hard. I connected during and after with Ming Chan, who was the executive director for the Ethereum foundation. And I sent this like, long email that was like, here are all the things I thought went right with the conference and here's what I thought went wrong and how it can be better next year. And they were like, oh, no one else did anything like this. And then we kept in touch and soon after she offered to get me a job at the foundation, which literally was one of my dreams at the time. I was like, oh, if I could just do anything, it'd be to work there. So based. So in 2016, in the summer, I left USA to go work there. And after that I've just been, yeah, doing a lot ever since with Ethereum. **Speaker A:** Nice. Awesome, man. That's. That's incredible. And I think a testament to how our industry works that, you know, I, I remember when I was like, onboarding myself. First of all, this industry is possible to onboard yourself. Incredible. That is not possible in whatever, in most other industries. But second, like, I just so vividly like, remember the first time I was like, you know, two or three months into Ethereum research, like, understanding. And for me, when I entered the space, it was just when we were starting to see like arbitrum launch and just understanding what L2s would allow for Ethereum and all this stuff. And I remember like going back to the top the. The debt, like the first DEVCON that Ethereum was so I guess DEFCON 1. And then also Vitalik's like, kind of like initial pitch of Ethereum to the Bitcoin conference. And I just remember seeing like, like, like it's all out there, man. Like they're telling us what they're gonna build. And like, yeah, it's like implicit, but like there is an implicit call that says, like, this is what we're gonna build. If you can help, like, get your ass over here and like start helping. And you know, that means like very different things for very different people. But like, for, for you. What that started meaning is like, no one can figure out how to get a badge. And like, what that ended with is like we need to like kind of fast forward just through the exposition here, but like you leaving the Ethereum foundation, like, as like one of like the like, names and the champions and like one of the people that built it into like, what it is today. So, you know, I just again, I think for everyone aspiring to like, kind of figure out their place in this industry, like, the reason I work so hard to like, get people to tell their stories is like so everyone can learn. Like this is the only way in. Like you got to get interested, you got to learn and then you just like roll up your sleeves. **Speaker B:** Yeah, it's so much, it's much more accessible than just about any other, you know, place out there, including technical places that you can jump into because people are offering educational materials and I mean it used to be sparse. It used to be very sparse and hard to keep up and learn with everything and now it's still kind of hard to keep up with everything because there's so much going on. But at the same time there's also more niches for people to dive into. Like if you just want to do governance stuff and you're non technical, like people can do that, you can do economic elements, you can do any number of use cases and daps. Like it's just grown so much and that idea of openness that people carry on the projects that have that, you know, in their DNA, just like Ethereum did. And our Ethereum aligned in that like do the best. **Speaker A:** Yeah. And I think like we one day, right, like we're not at institution level yet despite like the way we understand what institutions are. Right. But like one day JP Morgan will have like the regulatory cover they need to get involved. Right. And like one day Quorum will or wait, sorry, it's Onix now, right? Onyx will become a roll up. Like that's just like how the economics work and like the whole point of what we're doing here. And so like I don't, I don't really know if like all it's always going to be the decentralized, transparent open projects that win or whatever. But like the point of Ethereum is like we all get to play, all of us. Like you get to play against JP Morgan. Like that's never been possible before. **Speaker B:** Yeah, yeah, no, it's, it's, it's really neat. I hope it does keep that as well. And one thing I do like though that's promising. You say you came in, you know, during a lot of the L2s rising up and like becoming actual things people could, could play with. I feel like many of the L2s are at least trying to, you know, to actually do like what Ethereum's done as far as the openness and stuff. Some of them are masquerading as it, but then other ones are truly like no, you know, we're, we're aligned with Ethereum. We're here to complement Ethereum and not to compete and and that's very promising. **Speaker A:** Yeah, there's a lot of like rent seeking and a lot of just like, like trend chasing and dollar chasing and you know, for better, for worse. Like our industry is, you know, it's. The majority of our industry is that stuff. And so that's just something we all have to reconcile with. And like, it's kind of funny between people like you and me and like really hard and embarrassing between people like me and my mom. **Speaker B:** Yeah. Oh, I would say, though. I would say so shout out to my mom because she since 2011 has been listening to me, talk to me about this. She'll listen for hours and be like, okay, I kind of get this. And you know that she wasn't necessarily raised and you know, all the technology growing up or anything, but like, even today she'll like, listen to all my. She's gonna listen to this interview probably. She's listen to all my talks, gives me like feedback because she's a speaker and like, okay, you should have done this differently, but you did this good. So. So yeah, having support is also really good. Just as a life thing. **Speaker A:** Yeah. No, and yeah, before I'll stop this, before we get too esoteric, but like, the problem with like what social media has done to us is like we think, think that we're connected when we're really alone. And so like what you're queuing off on is like, okay, there's like a real difference between, like a real difference between your mom and you. Like a real difference between like the. You and I have like met in multiple cities across this country and developed something versus like the people in private discords that you know versus, like your friends on crypto. **Speaker B:** Yeah, for sure. Crypto X. Oh, gosh, I hate that. **Speaker A:** Like, do we say like, cx? Like, oh, did you learn that from cx? **Speaker B:** Cx? Oh, no. Yeah. I don't even know what to say. Yeah. **Speaker A:** So, okay, I don't know how to do this elegantly. So I'm just going to use like the knowledge that I have to like to, to get us to where I want to go. Like, so we are, we are recording here on Tuesday, August 1st. I will be releasing this on Thursday in two days. And like, like what we are sitting in is like the like molten hot, like, crappiness that is like this curve situation. And so like one of the reasons I'm so excited to be talking to you in this moment is because, like, well, like the history of Ethereum is these moments and like, is, is understanding like what is existential what to do in existential moments like and really just. Well there's a lot, there's a lot, lot, lot going on here and so let's. We'll do this chronologically and kind of get to where we are today. But one of like so, so again I don't know how to get here elegantly, so I'll just ask like Hudson, what happened when you first started at the Ethereum Foundation? **Speaker B:** Sure. So when I first started the Ethereum Foundation I immediately went into put out the fires mode for the next six years pretty much. So. So what I mean by that is, you know I played a lot of roles and wore a lot of hats at the Ethereum Foundation. Initially I was there for DevOps which I was the DevOps lead with Jamie Pitts from when I got there till when I left in 2021. I also co ran dev cons 2, 3 and 4, did internal like org security stuff and then also was kind of the incident response person both for Ethereum foundation specific things but also war rooms and you know, incident response channels and organization when there was an Ethereum incident or a major ecosystem incident basically. So I'd be the line of communication like the Ethereum found Twitter like wouldn't be like oh this happened. It would be me basically on Twitter saying this happened and posting it on Reddit and Twitter and Facebook and whatever else. So as I was doing that I kind of had to quickly grow into that role. I was in my early 20s so that was kind of a lot to be to be put under especially for like multi millions to then multi billions dollars network that was, you know, being protected. So like a lot of these, I think I was involved in every major Ethereum incident, especially the on chain ones from 20, I'd say 2016 until 2021. Since then I've been doing off and on a few different things. Like if there's a war room happening for Dapps in trouble then I would handle it. But then not as much for the protocol stuff. Granted we haven't had many major protocol incidents since even 2020. **Speaker A:** Well now you got to knock on wood. **Speaker B:** Yeah, I have wood here thankfully. So yeah, the biggest one I think though or the one that's like most probably known earlier on was the Shanghai attacks in the Dow. The Dow was first, so the Dow, when the Dow happened, that was my first week at the Ethereum foundation. So I was there more of a fly on the wall more than any active participant. You can go to Reddit and Twitter and see some of my very early thoughts and like putting my opinion out there and stuff like that and there's that history. But I didn't actually like do anything myself for any of that response. **Speaker A:** Yeah. So let me just, for the audience's sake let me try to give a summary of what the DAO was and then we'll have somebody who is actually there tell me how wrong I am. But so essentially before we like the kind of origin of the idea DAO was kind of what we think of daos today. But originally like the entire Ethereum community, it was small enough, it was energized and focused enough that it wasn't. The idea wasn't everything should be a dao. It's. There is one dao and that one DAO is like the coordination mechanism by which, you know, we, we fund projects. We. That's why it's basically like the government of Ethereum Community. **Speaker B:** It's very interesting that you label it like that because that means that there are pieces of history forgotten. This actually had nothing to do with the entire community. This was a specific project by slock it. **Speaker A:** No, no, sorry, fair enough. Like I mean when I say the entire Ethereum community, I mean that like much more colloquially like oh, gotcha. **Speaker B:** So everyone participated. That is a good, that is absolutely accurate. **Speaker A:** Yeah, yeah. So like again this was not an official Ethereum project. It didn't come from the foundation but like probably everyone who had ETH sent some. And so basically this, the DAO was funded with I think about 15% of all Ethereum. And turns out that there was a vulnerability in the dao and we don't need to get in the details but like two key things. One, an attacker was able to drain all of the ETH out of the dao and we, you know, we knew at that time that we were going to move to proof of stake. So not only was that like financially disastrous, that had like actual existential implications on Ethereum. And then two, the, the weird thing that happened here was that you couldn't directly drain the dao. You could drain the DAO to a subcontract that would drain it to you 30 days later. And so that created this literally like 30 day doomsday clock on basically like everything. On totally everything. So Hudson, would you kind of like one, correct anything I said, but then two, take us home with. With kind of with the result and what chains came out of that. But like would you just keep in mind like you weren't a principal agent in this, you were an observer. But like what did you Take away and like what? Life lessons and like Ethereum lessons, like do you now know, came from this experience? **Speaker B:** Sure. So yes, I think your thing was fairly accurate. The only things that I would say would be different are when the. Yeah, when the exploit was exploited from the dao, there was actually these really cool. There was a group called the White Hat group and they were semi anonymous, like most people know who most of them were today, but they were a group of people who would. Every time the DAO hacker would send a transaction, they would send a counter one. And so it was really a back and forth where a portion of the funds would be stuck forever basically back and forth, back and forth. Another portion was in that 30 day lock period. The amount that could effectively be gained by the hacker or things like that would be about, I think it was 15% of the circulating supply. One thing I'd say though, at the time and I. There's actually, interestingly enough, a Reddit comment where I asked Vlad and Vitalik at the time, is this existentially terrible for proof of stake? And they said no, it wouldn't be enough for at least back then. And I actually did confirm that in the last two years that even today's proof of stake would not have been affected by it. But the biggest effect honestly would be the fact that, you know, there'd be so many people. Basically almost everyone in the ecosystem was participating. This was the only thing to put money into besides random little Ponzis and the boards for like the, the I guess the stewards or whatever they called them at the time for that DAP were all like OG Ethereum people, like founders Ethereum foundation people, consensus people like there. Everyone was involved in it. So it's kind of not a thing where it was like, you know, oh, it'd be something like if Uniswap had a bug and then everything got drained like that. It was bigger than that even. Like it was bigger than. Because it was the only thing at the time everyone put money in there. So more so than like, you know, philosophical things about immutability and things. What I learned from that and what ended up happening was we did do. We did decide as a community to like not roll back the chain, have a. Like we kind of did surgery on it more or less because it wasn't truly a rollback technically, but you can think of it that way, I suppose. But we put the funds in a multi sig that then people could automatically get their funds back, including their stake in the Dao, et cetera. And so people actually profited from that to an extent. Like I got more money out of it because there was a contract to convert Dao tokens to Ether. And so that's how it ended. People are saying like the Ethereum foundation made a decision. So some of the biggest things that happened behind the scenes that people don't know about, there was a lot of back and forth in the foundation about what to do. But at the end of the day, every dev team in the foundation to this day is autonomous from the management of the foundation. Ming Chan, anyone in operations, anyone in non technical leadership did not ever give guidance on what to do. In fact, the Geth team internally secretly went back and forth on what they wanted to do. They were super torn. It was super stressful. The Mist team, which was the graphic client at the time, had a pop up when you opened it. This was like the first desktop Ethereum wallet. This was before Metamask. You would open it and it said, hi, a hard fork could be coming. Do you want to stay on the old fork or the new fork? And it would like randomize the yes and no buttons. So they really did a lot to be like, we want this to be a choice. But at the end of the day, and people will cite the whatever token vote that that was the deciding factor that was referenced in places I don't think that was the deciding fact was really a lot of people getting a lot of community sentiment and then ultimately saying, here's the choice we have. Once it happened, there was a chain split. The way that Proof of Work mining worked at the time. When a hard fork happens, everybody who's on the new version of the software goes to the continuing chain. And if you stay, if miners stay, you know, mining the old chain, then it goes and that's the old chain. So this is the only fork in Ethereum's history that truly made a chain that lives today that is not the original Ethereum chain and it's called Ethereum Classic. And the main takeaway, just to wrap this up from all of this, I actually am glad this happened. I don't know if I would have been for or against it. I was kind of on the fence myself. But I don't think that a coin should live and die by philosophy alone because there's been so many other coins since then and even before then that had a major attack where they say we're not doing anything and then the coin dies. So the fact that we knew, hey, this is the first year of Ethereum's life, we Kind of picked practicality over dogma. And I know that like this was a one time thing, we're never going to do it again. And people are like, well, it sets a precedent, but like, we haven't done it again. And we've had opportunities and huge discussions, including the second parity multisig hack that happened years later where a ton of people wanted to, you know, revert it and we didn't because it was just like, nope, we, we. Early on, I think Andrea Santinopoulos worded it like this and said, you know, the DAO hack was. Ethereum was a baby learning how to walk and the baby hit its head on the table. Like it's not going to do that again because it learned and it's getting older and it's not going to do that. But it was just like it was an infant. So like Ethereum was in its infancy. We can make mistakes that aren't going to be, you know, existentially awful for the network. **Speaker A:** Yeah. And first of all, thank you. Like, I mean, first, like, thank you for just like finishing out the story, but also like giving us miss like a peek behind the scenes. I mean, I guess it's like six years later now, so it's not. **Speaker B:** No, I mean, yeah, it's still pretty cool though. I kind of like it. **Speaker A:** No, for sure. And for me, as someone who wasn't there, and especially, not only was I not there, I wasn't participating. Like you were even. And you were just participating as an observer as your first week, but you were there, right? For me, like, I don't think about this stuff in moral terms. Like I, you know, like I don't think, is it good that it happened? Is it bad that it happened? Like it happened happened. Right. And it's part of the history. And like when I look back at this, I, I see like two major lessons. Like one is like Ethereum Classic is like it's like the six or whatever somewhere between the top 20 largest coins by market cap. Right. And like essentially what it is is like the oldest, like untouched version of Ethereum with this hacker running around with a massive amount of eth. Like, you know, and, and we can talk about like there's a whole interesting conversation about like the reason that this happened and that like a bunch of people decided to run these like out of date minority clients that created Ethereum Classic was so that like exchanges could like sell it, you know, or make fees off it. Like, so that's one lesson. And just, you know, if our, let's say 15th largest coin is like the decaying remnants of an old hack. Like we all need to think about more what we're doing here. But two, I like the lesson of the DAO hack is like, who owns Ethereum, right? And to make it relevant. **Speaker B:** Right? **Speaker A:** Like the thing that's existential about Curve right now maybe is that like the tokens have this voting power that like, like if they're like distributed through the market because of some liquidation thing, the question is like, well, what does this mean for the future of the protocol? And like what we learn and like a lot of people don't talk about from the DAO hack is that the owners of the Ethereum protocol are the people like, literally I am one of them. I know Hudson, you are one of them. The people that are running physical computers that are like, hey, I'm going to update this software or I'm not going to update this software software. And you know, I think like from there like it's just like really important to actually understand how Ethereum works before you like can credibly say like, this is going to change everything. **Speaker B:** Yeah, no, I completely agree. And there's a lot of, I mean, at the end of the day it is kind of about people. There are so many good actors. Excuse me? There are so many good actors that started Ethereum. Well, actually, no, there actually was very few good actors that started Ethereum. Almost all of the co founders are not good people. People except for like Vitalik and Mihaly and a few others. So anyways, but, but I would say that because Vitalik held on and kept going with it and then brought in other people who have, you know, been steadfast leaders and not leaders because they were elected and not leaders because, you know, they were assigned it necessarily, it was more just like there was a gap and they decided to fill it and if they didn't do a good job, people would speak up about it and then someone else would go do it. And that was much easier to do in the early days than now. But there's very few people I know that were like really strong leaders or very big names back in the old days that still aren't, that are like completely gone from Ethereum. Right. Like there's been a lot of turnover but like some of the largest voices, especially with it and like the core developers and a lot of the protocol and like client dev and networking and research people are still here. And so that's kind of a testament to how comfortable and like safe the ecosystem is for those types of Roles and also a really good thing for Ethereum because you have those morals and those values and that like kind of attitude, the care, like kind of carefree or like, you know, less intense, you know, just like understanding pragmatism, I guess. Like having fun and being pragmatic rather than making this a religion or making this, you know, more than what it is. I mean, what you're saying about like having Ethereum classic being in the top 20 is because at the end of the day we're working on hyper capitalistic money machines like we have to, because that's how you get censorship, resistance. But beyond needing that, I'm just kind of glad not everyone is completely enamored by greed and money in Ethereum. **Speaker A:** Yeah, well, I have some pretty strong thoughts and thesis on this, but we'll save it to the end in a conversation we have about like the purpose and the future of Ethereum. But let's, let's kind of continue through like the fun stories. So I think we can talk all day about the Dao. Like there's so much more there than the 10 minutes we just went through it. But with like your experience and especially your experience as a watcher and more of a bystander there, like with all that in mind and everything you learned, like, let's move on to the next one. Like the next question. Core moment in Ethereum history. And so that is the Shanghai attacks. And so, you know, I'm. Why don't I again try to tell the master what happened and then feel free to correct and then kind of finish it off for us. But this is named the Shanghai attacks because basically the entire Ethereum team, Tiny at the time, was at Shanghai for DEVCON 2 or 3. 2. Right. And again there is an incredible video of Vitalik telling this story on like a zoom call. So I'll make sure to link that in the show notes. But as he says, he was like woken up in the middle of the night by like all these famous people that you've heard to like go in this tiny room with all the founders. And it turns out that there was a like incredibly massive, it's called a denial of service attack. But essentially somebody was spamming Ethereum network so much that like Ethereum was completely unusable by like legitimate people. And I think back at the time that essentially meant like people couldn't send eth back and forth to each other, maybe two exchanges. But today what that would mean is like you can't get your transaction in to like stop to top up your debt position to do a liquidation or you can't buy a like a token that just like dipped down because of like a crazy like huge market sell like Ethereum is inaccessible to you because this attacker is just saying like nah. And so I'll like essentially what this boils down to is like devcon's crazy. They think they get it, you think you get it fixed and basically it turns into like a two to three, a three month game of cat and mouse where it's patches new attacks, patches new attacks, patches new attacks until finally like the, the, the last vulnerability like seems to be patched and then as far as I know, the attacker just kind of went away. **Speaker B:** Yeah, no, that was a good summary. I'd say the two or three months was. Two or three months was more figuring out how to fix the damage. They only attacked for two or three days during death devcon. But oh my gosh, that was the. That might have been the most chaotic time in my life was devcon too because. And this is highlighted in Laura Shen's book so I can kind of talk about it now. But Ming Chan turned out not to be a great leader and was not doing good organizing the conference. So it turned me and my spouse Lilith were two of the main organizers along with only one or two other people in China where we don't speak Chinese and handling all this. So it was just super chaotic stuff not done to the last minute. I wasn't sleeping, so, so the night before day one, I'm asleep and I wake up. I think it's like three in the morning. Like I wake up because someone, George Hallam, who was the communications person for the Ethereum foundation called me and he said, hey, the network's under attack. Wake up everyone and meet, you know, in like somewhere. Like it was like the second floor hallway but there was like a side area with some chairs, kind of like just like a meet area. So I get up and I get dressed and I call like a bunch of people. I call a few core devs that are across the street at another hotel. We're in like the Hilton or something and I get them and I'm like, hey, come over to the hotel, come to the second floor. Da da da da da. And so I then go down to the front desk just panicked and I'm like, there's an emergency with the technical stuff we're doing for the conference and I need to get in touch with these people. And so I say a name and they're like we don't have that person in the system. And then I think, oh my God, they're using an anonymous name when they talk to me in the community, they're actually booked here on their legal name. So like I'm trying to like figure out what their legal name is or if like part of it's real. And I do that for a little bit and get a few more people. So we all go up and I'd say There's like at max 20, 25 people in this hallway by the time it's all over. At first it was only about 10. So I get there and. And Martin Swinde, who's now prolific as a Geth developer and someone who's helped with attacks before or prevent attacks before, he is like, this is his first week at the foundation, although he's been doing a lot of stuff before. So it's not like he's, you know, at the state where he knows Geth inside and out yet. Vitalik sitting there, Peter, like from the Geth team is there. Felix, I think, and a few other people and we're all trying to figure out what happened. And so just as like a two sentence summary. Yes, it was a DOS attack. There were only three clients. So there was Geth, there was Parity, which was from Gavin Wood's team when he left the Ethereum foundation. And then there was also Ethereum Java, which was a separate team that hardly no one used that client. So when the, when the attacks came in, the Geth client couldn't handle the load that was coming into the nodes because of mispriced opcodes. But Parity was able to stay up. But like no one was using Parity hardly because it had just been released and especially not miners. So miners were having to very quickly switch out Geth nodes for other types of nodes. The good news is we were in China and the majority of hash power was in Asia at the time. And so in the middle of the night, suddenly Spark, or Eth Fan's pool, which then became sparkpool, was there with us. They were literally sitting beside me in Vitalik and saying, what can we do to help? And then we also got in touch with the American mining pools that were awake because it was the middle of the night, China, so it was daytime in the us I'm pretty sure. So yeah, we get everyone together, we say, okay, miners do these steps, they do the steps. Then finally the transactions can't go through because the gas limit is so low. They can't submit contracts and transactions that are large enough to slow it down anymore. So then we're fine. So then it's like 7am and it's gonna start in an hour. So I run down to get ready. The first person of the day to talk is Vitalik. So we're down there and we're giving an intro and like 10 seconds before we're like, oh, crap, Vitalik's not here to give the intro. He runs in, he runs, he runs up on stage. And I'm trying to think exactly of what he said, but I think he said, like, we have a patch or something like that because, like, Geth had built a patch in like less than two hours for their client to fix this. And everyone like, stood up and cheered and stuff because people had started hearing that there was something going on. So the conference went on. Next night, I get woken up again in the middle of the night. I call everyone again. We go down. Another vulnerability is exploited that now hurts both clients, but doesn't completely take them offline. But it's still a big deal. So we work on that. We get that the miners still have their previous thing happening, like their previous resolution. So we fix that again for the time being. And then that's kind of the whole story there. I literally ran myself ragged between dealing with devcon and then dealing with this attack. So are the attacks. And it got fixed later through a series of smaller hard forks that, like, cleaned up the damage, man. **Speaker A:** Incredible. And. And I think it's so. It's so easy to hear that story before you're an Ethereum and just say, like, okay, so there's like a DOS attack and like, a couple of guys, like, didn't sleep that well for two nights in China and like 20. But, like, to. To really, like, live and breathe and like to have your home base be the evm. I mean, it really is existential, like this whole thing. Literally the point of Ethereum is that it can't be DDoS, right? Like that no matter what happens now, in 12 seconds, every 12 seconds there's going to be a block and that block is going to have open space for you if you can pay for it. Right? And yeah, so, I mean, I don't need to explain to everyone, like, why this is a big deal, but just to kind of like, cut to the hearts of the matter, like, what can you just like, reflect on what it felt like to like, to now go through this event, this time as a leader and really, like, feel the existential risk to Ethereum and like, the true threat to, you know, something that we're really not experiencing today at all. But, like, truly, like, is Eth going to survive if we don't pull this out? Like, what was that? **Speaker B:** Like, it was pretty scary. The DAO hack in particular. Like, right as I was joining the ef, I kind of thought it might be over. Like, I thought depending on what happens. And I didn't have all the details, but for a day I was like, maybe this is over. Maybe Ethereum won't last for these DAO attacks. You know, I didn't think. I. I think it's one of those things where there's so much going on and I'm running a whole conference on. On Ethereum, you know, in four hours and this is going on and people need to be organized. I wasn't as worried because I couldn't be. Like, there wasn't room. There wasn't room to feel like this could be the end of Ethereum or anything. Also, part of me was also like, we were still small enough but getting big enough that I think part of me was like, if we need to do a restart, I guess we can. We already did the Dow and we're still young was, like, part of it. But I, of course I didn't. Wouldn't want to do that. There was a time when, like, that thought would be eclipsed over the years of, like, okay, now it really can't happen. But the number one thing that I learned from that and I think the reason. So people have commented on, like, how during the emergency situations and war rooms for other stuff, how I can be so calm. I kind of got out my nerves out back then. But also. So whenever I'm in that situation, the number one thing I think about is like, no matter what happens to Ethereum, I'm still Hudson. I still have my friends, my family. Like, there's no one harming me physically. Everyone who's in this war room with me, we're all humans, we're all fine. We're gonna be hopefully taken care of. Or at least I know that, you know, I'll still have support and things to do. So it's kind of like a. You know, this isn't the. The only thing. And this isn't like the most important thing even, like, if Ethereum's your most important thing, that's unhealthy. So, like, to me, it's like, yes, this is one of the top things in my life that's important. I've literally been obsessed with it since it came out. But, like, it's still not, you know, people. And it's still not that. So that that helps somehow where with, like, putting things in perspective where I can then focus and be like, okay, now that I have that out of the way, I don't have nervousness or fear to, you know, clamor up what the next steps need to be. **Speaker A:** Yeah, man, that's amazing. And I think that you are a better human than me because, like, I don't, I don't know if I'm able to dissociate, like, myself enough from, like, my personal to, like, really just think about, like, humans. **Speaker B:** And, like, I can see you doing that. I can totally see you doing that. You can do it. **Speaker A:** I appreciate it. I mean, I think that, I think, like, that's why I love talking to you and people like you and, like, me that are, like, adults and, like, have experienced the world outside of Ethereum and understand that, like, like, this, this is the most important thing I'm working on. And yet, like, if it was gone tomorrow, like, you know, my identity is not gone. And, like, part of that is, like, about, like, appropriately sizing your investments. Like, and I say that because, as you said earlier, our industry is driven by hyper capitalism and greed. And like, again, like I said, 90%, the vast majority of our industry is not, like, the true core builders that, like, like, are pushing this forward. So, I mean, I just, I, I find it so important to, like, make people think about the, the money aspect in a dirty way as much as possible because, like, we have attended, like, the, the whole technology forces you not to. But anyway, I, I, I was talking to mutual friend who got pretty severely, like, hit in the hacks in the last couple days, and here I'm just pulling it up so I can read it directly. What he said to me is, I'm actually in a good state of mind. My mood is operative as usual. And, you know, like, I couldn't stop thinking of that when you just explained to me, like, what you were. Your experience of the DAO hacks are where it's like, like, I get it, I get it. Taking a step back in the moment, I get it. Talking about it now, like, it's huge. It's huge. It's huge. But, like, in the moment, like, none of that matters. Like, you are looking at this, like, small, scrawny Ukrainian kid in front of you and, like, asking, like, like, what do you need? Like, how can I help? And, like, you know, I think that's what it means to be a, like, an operator and a leader and, like, how the world happens. **Speaker B:** Oh, well, Yeah, I think, I think that's right for a lot of the people who, you know, jump into this kind of stuff. And a lot of people, because especially if you come from the outside, don't feel like they can jump into this stuff or like they may be fit for it, but just are worried about taking that dive. But everyone's usually pretty nice, especially if like, you know, you intro yourself, even if you're anan and you know, just say, here's my skill set for this. So yeah, like we said earlier, it's a lot more welcoming and you mentioned, you know, you'll still have your, you know, like you'll still have your ID or your what person or personality and stuff like that. But the issue is once worldcoin takes over, we won't have that if Ethereum breaks. **Speaker A:** Yeah, but you'll have like 30 coin or whatever. **Speaker B:** Yeah, I'll have 30 world. I'll have all this world in my wallet. **Speaker A:** Yeah, yeah. So I guess I did not. I should have paced this better. So let's just fast forward to, at least from my perspective, what the most recent existential risk is. But I'm very curious to see if you perceive it the same one, which is ftx. And like, for me that I really, I think that you can make an argument that there might have been an existential risk in the Black Thursday or Tuesday or whatever it was around March. But like, honestly, the world was an existential threat in that moment. So like, I don't really think Ethereum gets like special, you know, like whatever and nothing happened. So like, it is what it is. But for me, like ftx, it was that. Right? And we, I still don't understand how the financial impact alone wasn't like so much bigger. Like we still have the FTX hacker, we still like, I still don't understand how Solana is alive when we found out that it was essentially like a like hot air factory for the bankman, for eats, like, like. And most importantly, it was the first person that American politicians decided to embrace and he turned out to be the worst of us. And I think that we deserve every single thing we're getting from Gary Gensler. And I think he's right. Honestly, I think he's right for most things. Not on technicals, I don't really know about that stuff, but on vibes. And so first question to you, do you agree or would you say that there is another existential risk we should be talking about? And secondly, whatever you choose, like what. Why are you choosing this as the existential threat. **Speaker B:** So it's funny because FTX is like I honestly it was very entertaining that day. Not like everyone lost money and I'm happy about that, but more of like the memes and keeping up and it was like, it was like a rush of like information and all this stuff culminating in, you know, like an avalanche falling. So like all that to say I was very in tune with that. However, I don't really know much about Defi at the end of the day. I don't participate in Defi a lot. So because Defi is one of the main use cases of Ethereum and I've been mostly in the protocol dev side or like governance or community, I didn't feel it was that big of a risk. I felt like, you know, FTX could go under and that may set us back up to six months which is looking like that might be what it is but like the markets are entirely irrational. Ethereum Classic has been like double spent on four times and it's in the top 20. We have coins from clear, you know, shysters and people were like, they clearly inflate the numbers and no one can call them out like Tron and Richard Hart and stuff. Finally he's you know, someone getting taken care of. But it's a slow process. So all of that to say like, like I've kind of turned myself off to anything that's like oh no, this major bad person that has to do with the capital or coin volume or coin price involved is going to kill crypto because like to me, way back then when crypto like was 50 cents or a dollar for per Ether, we didn't really care about any of that. And that same vibe is there for the people who are still building from back then and a lot of them, a lot of those that have come on and like lived by that philosophy. So and it's really, I mean it kind of feels weird to say because like yes, people do make a life changing amount of money and then they lose it through, you know, incidents like that. And that is still really awful and sad. And there's good people, people I know, devs, protocol devs that like lost a ton of money because of ftx. So that part that's awful, it shouldn't happen. And at the same time is it, you know, a threat to Ethereum as a whole, you know, idea concept, you know, being around. I don't think so. I think that I can't see so many things would have to happen for the price to crash so greatly. And I, I mean I the thing I would be fearing about the most is the potential for some type of regulatory or legal hindrance on the Ethereum network from like a, like a validator perspective like making it so that the validator set has to like all move to a certain of kind country or I'll leave a certain country or things like that or that someone finds a bug in Ethereum or in you know, some type of thing to allow for you know, a complete attack on the proof of stake network. These things I find very unlikely because of the price and a lot of other things. But if Ethereum even went down to, I don't know, I don't know the economics of it, so don't quote me on this but I'm guessing if it you know went down to 500 bucks per coin or even less because I mean even in the last three years it was down to what like 400 or 180 per coin. So like we can, we can do a lot of shifts and it's still operate the same defi. Isn't the going to be the most important use case in 100 years potentially? **Speaker A:** Hudson, I feel like, I feel like we coordinated on this and like I got you like because like okay, so look like I agree with you that like when first of all existential is the wrong word. I said earlier that post merge like I think that Etherium is de risk. I think like exactly what you're saying is that SBF was a risk from regulatory standpoint. I think like the path to it's illegal to run the computer program get is paved with FTX and SBF and Alameda. Right, but so I love that you took me like to where I want to go which is essentially like I don't believe that like the purpose of Ethereum is defi or finance and I think that that is like an incredibly provocative like scary thing to hear for a lot of people on CX or like within a lot of the communities that you know really captured a lot of the energy through the last cycle. And so like in our last few minutes here like I would love just an opportunity to kind of pitch you my like narrative idea of what's happening here. So pre, preamble over. Okay, so look like I am becoming more and more convinced every single day that DEFI is exactly the same as NFTs from the standpoint of like when we look at NFTs now it is so clear that that was like a bullshit bubble that like we're not like the purpose of this technology is not to like create like addresses within the EVM that we like off chain tie to photos that we sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. None of this really is that real. But what we got out of this incredible narrative bubble was these really, really important primitives within the EVM or within business or systems design that we will see over and over and over again. And so when I look at Defi, I am like becoming more and more convinced that like it's the same thing and that like I kind of think that you know, in five years when we look back like CVX will look like a mutant ape or whatever, right? And like that is like really comes out like I have a tradfi background, like I've done real finance, like this isn't how any of this works at all, right? And like I just fully believe in a world where again we've talked about JP Morgan and Onyx, like they already have a, like a sidechain or sorry, a all L1 today that is doing literally billions of dollars in repo transactions every single day today, right? Like I believe that as soon as they have a regulatory framework like they're just going to come in with 10 times the TVL that DeFi has and just say, hey, just play on our toys, like don't fuck around with any of this curve stuff, like just come do your stable swaps here, right? And so I think that like Defi was important and that it taught us like a lot of interesting things about liquidity and locking and like all this stuff. But like I think it's going to go away. And so that brings up like, well what then? What are we doing here? What's the purpose of Ethereum? And like my kind of like thing is like, I think the point of Ethereum is not trustless finance, it's trustless computer. Like the whole point is to have this credibly neutral, perfect computing space and in order to get decentralized we had to make it as shitty and slow as possible. But what the magic of ZK is, what the magic of roll ups with the magic of oracles, of data availability, of dank sharding, what all this is, is like how do we take all of modern computing and get it into that EVM space? And so I'm just so confident that that is like the basis of the next narrative bubble will be about Ethereum adjacent compute and blah blah, blah. I'm going on and on now, so I'll let you react. **Speaker B:** Yeah, no, that sounds great. I completely agree with that. I would say, yeah, DeFi isn't the main use case, but it is a use case and it is going to kind of go away. I don't know enough, I'm speaking unintelligently on this, but I would say these money Legos, once they get high enough, once you build the Legos high enough, it kind of topples because, like in the real world you don't have like nine protocols on top of each other to do very risky things. And yeah, I mean, like, you could do the gambling stuff, but it's not like the whole world and like my mom and you know, play people all over are going to do that. So that's, that's. Yeah, I agree completely. And then lastly, the general purpose computing. Yeah, that, that is the, the number one invention, the censorship resistant, distributed, decentralized, you know, general purpose computing, even as slow as it is, and you know, as it's going to ossify and just be more of a proving layer for these other systems and L2s and chains and stuff, then yeah, that's, that's kind of where we're heading. And it's okay to kind of pivot from what we initially imagined in 2015, which is like, everything's on Ethereum. Like, like it's okay to pivot because we still have the initial goals in mind and it does align. **Speaker A:** Yeah. No, and like, one of my favorite games to play is like, how do you describe Ethereum in the most reductive way possible? And like, I just, I stole mine from Vitalik. Right. I think I heard him describing dank charting in some talk and he's just like, when this is all done, it's basically like Ethereum is just a bulletin board where you put something up and 30 days later it falls off. Right. And so like, you know, I think that's like, really? What, why? The more you know, the more you realize like, well, what does that enable and like how that truly changes everything. But like, I don't know, I mean, I guess that's like the challenge that we're dealing with is like, this is so abstract and it's so on the bleeding edge of the like most bleeding edge, like technology that's ever been created. And like, like you get into number theory for this elliptic curve cryptography, it's. **Speaker B:** Yeah, I'd say the last thing just to close out. I feel like my definition of mainstream on Ethereum hasn't changed since the beginning, just about. And what it is, is I don't believe that Ethereum will be mainstream until I'm using it. And I don't know, I'm using it like I'm on the computer like an hour, I'm on my phone and there's some kind of weird background microtransaction that I might have set up years ago. But like, like, you know, it's being used and it's has all its benefits but like I'm not having to do all the stuff. **Speaker A:** Yeah, dude, exactly. Like what I try to tell people, like, people tell all the time, like, how do you know there's not going to be another chain? Or like, why isn't it not just like stripe or something? And I'm like, you guys, you guys, you're wrong. This is about computer science, right? And what you should think of Ethereum as is HTTP. It's just that you get to own part of it. And like, like, here's the thing about HTTP, like all it is is like sending messages but like through it, like we have like building on the layers and everything. Like we're able to do this like real time recording while like you're in Texas, I'm in Los Angeles. And we'll be able to distribute it to like, you know, literally unlimited amount of people. Like when I think of Ethereum, it's like in the end game it'll be like, okay, yes. Like there's these letters that you sometimes eth. Like I don't know. But like you don't actually have to know what the fuck any of it means. Like you care about applications. **Speaker B:** Yep, yep. Absolutely. **Speaker A:** Cool, man. I won't take up any more of your time. I really appreciate it, man. Like my mind is, it's just racing. So before I let you go, would you just share like any socials or where can people find you anything you want to shout out? **Speaker B:** Perfect. Yeah. So you can find me on social media, on X, it's on Twitter, HudsonJamison. I also have HudsonJamison.com but I haven't updated it in a while. And then. Yeah, I think that's just. Oh, I guess I'll shout out one more thing. I work at Polygon as the VP of Governance and community and my governance team and I are doing a Polygon online governance hackathon. It's really not even a Polygon thing though. We're like working with people from around the ecosystem to come up with governance problems. And if you don't know how to code at all, this is for you. Like you come in here, you get, you pick one of our ideas or you bring your own and then it's a hackathon, but just with ideas and, you know, giving a presentation on the answer. There might be some small technical components for certain ones, if you want, but the most accessible hackathon to help widely in the ecosystem is something we're setting up soon. So be on the lookout on my Twitter for that. **Speaker A:** That's awesome. And I'll make sure to boost it as well. And I'm just, like, a huge fan of, like, creating space and opportunity and, like, encouragement for people that aren't, like, ready or able or have any desire to actually touch code or on chain. So thank you for that. **Speaker B:** No problem. Thank you so much for having me. **Speaker A:** Yeah, man. Hudson, it's always an honor. And I hope to talk to you soon. **Speaker B:** All right, bye. **Speaker A:** Sam.