[AUDIENCE] My question is, what do you think about the current governance we have today in Ethereum?
Specifically, how we make major decisions. What are your thoughts on how we're doing, if it should [change]?
[ANDREAS] I have been involved in it tangentially. I have attended a number of the developer meetings,
which are public on Google Hangouts; anyone can attend and watch them.
I think a lot of the criticism of the governance model in Ethereum is unfounded. If you watch the proceedings...
understand the dynamics between developers, and the way it has evolved over time, it is clear that...
There aren't many domineering ideas or positions.
People are able to come up with positions that are out of the ordinary, present them as an EIP,
bring them up to the core developer meetups, and have a conversation very openly.
I haven't heard anyone being shouted down, turned away, or chased out of a meeting for...
expressing a different opinion.
The funny thing is, if you watch it from the outside, you will think there is a person in charge of Ethereum,
or the three people in charge of Ethereum are 'X', 'Y', and 'Z.'
But then you watch one of these developer meetups, and they are clearly not in charge.
The beauty of actually knowing these people...
If you have just joined to Ethereum and think, 'Oh my god, this 19-year-old kid [started this],'
you are in awe.
But here's the thing, that is a result of distance. Once you get to know the kid, he is just a kid.
A very nice guy, and so is everybody else in Ethereum. That awe is washed away.
You need to start dealing with another person who has ideas that are sometimes right, sometimes not.
You can have arguments, debates, and reasoned discussion.
I haven't seen anyone on the developer calls defer to authority. I think that is powerful.
I would say that, in Ethereum, developers are more powerful than the miners.
In Bitcoin, the miners tried to use their power and we ended up with a constitutional crisis.
It is kind of like declaring a national emergency when there is no emergency. [Laughter]
Was that left-wing or just anti-fascist? [Applause]
The bottom line is, I think there are differences in governance, but it is mostly just interplay...
between miners and developers.
I think one of the reasons it is not insular and heavily controlled in Ethereum, is because you have a bigger...
ecosystem of (D)application and library framework developers,
who are trying to take the [core protocol] and make it work in a broad range of use cases.
That keeps the protocol in check. If you were to break things for those thousands of application developers,
you will not hear the end of it.
That is a balance which doesn't exist in Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a singular application platform.
There are few voices and many of those voices are large corporations.
I have an ambivalent perspective on it. I hope that was a satisfactory answer.
[AUDIENCE] Great answer, thank you. [ANDREAS] Thank you, Jameson.
[AUDIENCE] I absolutely believe everything you have said about unstoppable code.
I believe all of us are in this room because of unstoppable code.
But we saw, a few years ago, when TheDAO had a problem,
the Ethereum Foundation was able to exert central influence on the community and distributed nodes,
to roll back certain transactions.
In effect, that meant the code was stoppable. What are your comments on this? Thank you.
[ANDREAS] That is a great question, Michael. I delivered some talks about TheDAO situation [before].
A couple of disclosures: I invested $16 in TheDAO. [Laughter] I wanted to see the voting system,
but I also understood that this was alpha code, at best. That was how much confidence I was willing to put in.
I think TheDAO was a case of two terrible choices, neither of which was any better than the other.
On one hand, one person would have had 14% of the ether in circulation, just one year-
two years... four years before you [transition] to proof-of-stake. [Laughter]
An untenable situation. That could cause some wrinkles in the future, you know?
I do believe in the idea of a mulligan. Do you know what a mulligan is?
It is from golf. When you are golfing and break a window, [you ask if you can re-do it].
That is a mulligan and you try again. My golf game only consists of mulligans.
TheDAO was a case where it was early enough, stakes weren't that high, and there were two bad choices.
I think it creates a bad precedent. Every time it happens, it weakens the ability for people involved...
in those decisions or promoting those decisions to later say, "I can't." The "can't" will sound more like "won't."
I have a rule in life. When you make decisions, write emails, or communicate with people,
always think about how it will sound if it was being read aloud to my mother.
How would this sound if it was being read aloud to a grand jury or a congressional hearing?
When it comes to making these decisions, I transport my mind.
I think, now that you have made this decision and are sitting in front of the congressional committee,
they will say, "Mr. Andreas. There are terrorists from ISIS trying to buy child pornography, to trade for drugs."
Just to combine all of them together. [Laughter] "We need you to stop this DApp."
"Your Honor, sirs, distinguished ma'am, congress people," whatever their title is.
"I'm afraid I can't do it."
"Well, in [July 2016], as the record shows, you did do it. So why are you saying that you can't do it now?"
"Oh, that was a mulligan. Allow me to explain, members of Congress."
"When you are playing golf and break a window..."
It goes downhill from there. This is a dangerous precedent.
I think we all got away with it.
There are a lot of people in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that are very smug about TheDAO.
I think we should all be more humble when we see a stumble. That rhymes, accidentally.
Every cryptocurrency will have crises, bugs, and problems.
Bitcoin did. It had a moment where it issued a hundred billion bitcoin in a single block. Oops!
Yeah, that is a bad one. Hard sound money with a fixed monetary policy... [Laughter]
It is okay, these things happen. The question is, can we mature passed this and learn the lesson?
From TheDAO, there were two lessons. Don't put too much money in untested code.
And that was your last mulligan, friends. The next one will carry consequences.
Maybe you got away with this one.
[AUDIENCE] I want to start with Bitcoin as an example. With Bitcoin, you [can't] introduce censorship...
due to the pseudo-anonymous nature of addresses.
Some other protocols make that infeasible with different encryption and cryptographic approaches.
In something like Ethereum with unstoppable code, I and many others would worry if the "oops" clause...
has already been [left] too late for Ethereum.
At a cryptographic level, when you can't know how... Do you see that as the way to go?
At a protocol level, should I not be able to roll anything back, because I don't know how to?
[If I couldn't] find the outputs that were responsible? What are your thoughts on that?
[ANDREAS] Well, I'm not quite sure what you're asking but...
One of the things we can do, when we make decisions about how we develop code or a platform...
I don't really have a role in that. I am mostly the explainer who comes in afterwards and says,
"Let me tell you what just happened."
But if we can put unstoppable characteristics in the protocol, encryption, and various layers,
we will be strengthening the "can't" defense.
If you have built an unstoppable DApp without any governance, and there is no way to stop it,
then [the requests will be] appealed to the "Supreme Court" of Ethereum.
You must realize, the people we will be dealing with come from an institutional mentality,
whereby [they first seek the managers].
"Young man, let me speak to your manager." They call the person who [coded] the DApp.
[The programmer] says, "No, I can't." "Young man, let me speak to your manager."
Eventually, they will bump it all the way up to Vitalik, or somebody like him, and ask, "Are you the manager?"
You will see this escalation, right? If you can't stop the DApp, they will try to stop the whole platform.
If you can't stop the network, they will try to stop the currency.
If you can't stop the currency, they will try to stop the exchanges, and then you will all find out...
why Bitcoin is a very useful ally, because it has built unstoppable money for you.
Yes, we need to put these unstoppable characteristics deeper into the code,
[including] better privacy and confidentiality in the base layer of Bitcoin and Ethereum,
with zk-SNARKs etc.
[We need to] create more protocols for privacy, mixing, and anonymity.
It is very important to develop these technologies now. You can't become anonymous once they go after you.
You need to do that in advance.