Yeah, I don't know what the phrase doing areas.
I just said true tethering tethering to my phone.
So that's better.
That's better my guy in business.
Back in business.
Welcome to Game of Nodes, a weekly podcast on the cosmos from independent
validator teams.
Hello, and welcome to Game of Nodes, a weekly podcast on the cosmos from
independent validator teams.
And that was the strangest intro we've had in a long while.
I couldn't tell when it started.
I couldn't tell what it ended.
Kind of seemed to end halfway through a bit of the thing.
So yeah.
Hey, guys, what's going on, man?
I mean, that was the normal intro, right?
I feel like that was the normal intro.
Maybe I just got right by the internet there.
Well, yeah, yeah, you just reconnected to the next thing you know,
you're like, oh, shit, we're live.
Like, oh, we hear what's happening.
Yeah, that's how it works.
I mean, but this is why, you know, go back to the last week's conversation.
This is why we get the business internet, you know, to a separate sim card
so that when everything goes to shit, we can still join the podcast.
So for context, those that don't know, the fray has just had to tether to
his phone rather than use his home internet because it was playing up.
It was not working great.
Which is weird because it should be a two gig line.
And if it wasn't, obviously today it was 700 kilobits for a second there,
which is somewhat of length, but I would say it was a good bit less than 700
kilobits is pretty bad on this side.
So, well, I mean, I'm using I'm using Collins internet.
So courtesy of artifacts staking.
Thanks, guys.
Oh, yeah.
Where are you yet?
I'm in LA.
No, no, no.
Yeah. Yesterday I rode a bicycle from Manhattan Beach to Venice Beach.
Oh, yeah.
And then Santa Monica and back.
Yeah.
It was probably like, I don't know, 45 kilometers.
And, uh, man, I woke up this morning and my quads and my knees were fucking wrecked.
After four kilometers.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, the phrase like, do that like sleep.
I literally coffee shop.
I actually did do 45 kilometers last Tuesday to go to our fine, our finance guys and back
because they're way out south of here.
So just cycled over at the meeting cycle back.
I was not in a good way.
Like for me, that was a lot like I haven't done a lot of exercise in the last like 18
months and it's the validator way.
Yeah.
Holy shit, man.
Like riding there.
The tire on the bike was like probably one third flat, which didn't help.
And then the rear toy and then when you stand up to pump, it was just like, I don't know.
Pump.
It was, this is an old rusty bike that I borrowed off someone.
When you stand up to pump like the front suspension was bouncing right up and down.
So I wasn't getting like the full mojo into it.
And, uh, you know, it was noticeable by the time I got back, I feel like I put in probably
an extra 30% work that I didn't need to.
I mean, that's the story of life.
Isn't that really like, you just summed up my entire experience of everything.
It's like, just put it about 30% more effort that was even necessary and ended up just tired.
And emotional at the end of it.
So the whole, the whole effort aside though, went to Santa Monica.
Uh, I had a great coffee and a nice.
Where did you go?
So I went to like Venice Beach and then which, which, which coffee place did you go to in
Santa Monica?
Oh, it's called like blue bottle, something or other.
It's not that one on the corner.
Is it on the main drag?
Yeah.
Well, it is on a corner.
Yeah.
So I bought a coffee pastries and like a, a window like seats down the window on the
left hand side.
Yeah.
Have you been there?
Yeah.
I am.
I worked from there for about four days in like a month, just before the pandemic
basically.
Blue bottles.
Such well traveled.
Yeah.
It's the only place where they just, as long as they kept buying coffee, they didn't fucking
throw me out.
So I sat there for about an hour noting and they were like, yeah, I mean, he bought a coffee
right?
So they're just happier there.
Yeah.
So I was like, if it filled the Los Angeles meme and the barista was just loudly telling
anybody who had listened all about his acting auditions.
And, oh, and his band, his band, he was in what, from what I could tell based on clothing
and vibe, I was feeling classic rock or maybe hair metal that I pushed, but probably more
classic rock.
So that was kind of funny.
It hit a lot of, I was just saying, it was the same people most days.
So it's kind of like, let's see what we're going over here today while I'm trying to
fix this iOS bug.
So the thing that struck me the most about Venice was like just the sheer quant of chads
getting around.
There was like mega chads everywhere.
I couldn't believe it.
Was it not like the homeless camp on the beach?
That was the thing that fucking struck me.
Yeah, no, there was like, there was homos, but the fucking chads, man, like as soon as
I got there, there was like 10 and a half foot tall people with that were like wedge
shaped with like 40 facts.
I'm like, and then just wandering around like, what is going on here?
Like what is this place?
It was just chads everywhere.
Just spend a lot of time.
It's fucking work out and like try to get in movies.
I guess so.
I mean, if you're going to do it anywhere in the world, that's probably the place to
do it to be fair.
But yeah, I just remember being super freaked out by not freaked out.
It's not right term, but just so like the extent to which there's like a tent city on
the beach, like it's India and this is LA and you're like, whoa.
I mean, there was far out.
There was a bit of that going on, but I mean, I don't know if that will clear out because
of COVID or something.
Maybe it caught.
No, it was still there, but I just don't feel like that's unusual these days.
Like you go to a capital city.
There's like a tent city there somewhere these days.
It's common now.
It's commonplace.
There's like no, there's no move along anymore.
It's like, oh, you want to live here?
Okay.
No worries.
Go for it.
Yeah, fair enough.
I mean, too fair.
I don't remember seeing that anywhere in Australia.
Oh yeah, it's it.
Fuck mate.
It's there.
Yep.
Definitely.
Yeah.
In Canberra.
Maybe not.
Well, I don't really get around Canberra that much, but you're sure in Sydney and Melbourne.
Oh yeah.
I do fucking Canberra on the weekends.
No, I don't.
Yeah, of course you don't.
I've been there twice.
You go to the Gold Coast, don't you, for a good time?
I do go to the Gold Coast, but I don't fucking knew it, but I don't go to like surface paradise.
Okay.
Do you hire a jet ski?
No.
No, you're not a jet ski guy.
Now we get hiking in the mountains.
There's some good mountains just like in the interland of...
Have you forgotten the rule of jet skis?
Nobody ever looks unhappy in a jet ski, right?
I can't afford to hire a jet ski, man.
Well, maybe not the bear market, but you should have gone there doing the bull market.
You could have bought a jet ski.
Put it on the company, whatever.
But I call for entertaining.
I like, I put all my money into my notes now.
I put all my money into Showa.
I don't know why I pronounce it like that.
Showa.
Yeah, Showa.
Showa Queen.
So I guess like in reference to my trip, Kozles Ham says, Nal-Eat-Taco, St. Bluthera of Targo.
So everyone has actually said that.
And I have not come across one fucking taco track.
Okay.
So go to Venice and then like fuck off a ways to the...
I think it's like a Whole Foods or something, and it's like about eight blocks back from
the beach, maybe a few more.
There are street tacos outside there.
They're really good.
Never came across any.
It's opposite.
Going back.
It's opposite a fake English pub called the Cock and Bull.
So Jake's advice to me, he said, if you're in Venice and you see any fucking food truck
that's got a line up outside of it, stop and get out of your fucking vehicle and wait and
line.
Yeah, but I didn't come across any.
So I didn't have to do that.
So I hit Jake.
So on your advice, Jake lived in Venice.
So I hit him up yesterday.
I'm like, I'm going to Venice.
I'm like, I'm in Venice.
So like, you know, where's the spot?
Okay.
I found the spot.
There's a good Irish bar.
All right.
I found a coffee.
All right.
Thanks for the information.
I'm heading out of town here and like I called him fucking three hours later.
It's like, oh yeah, man, I could have told you like all these places, but he just didn't
read his messages.
So, you know, ignored it.
I mean, you could have asked me for specifics and I would have told you where those places
were.
She's you're kind of like, and I was just like, well, I mean, like you live in London.
How would I just assume that you knew anything about Venice?
Because I've been to LA three times, four times.
I'm pretty well traveled.
Like reasonably well in the U.S. anyway.
I've got opinions.
I got opinions on pizza in Chicago.
Like that should have been a clue.
Maybe my opinions on pizza in Chicago were wrong, but I still have opinions.
You should tell you something.
You weren't a fan of the deep dish.
I think I said, yeah, I wasn't a massive fan of the deep dish on the whole, but the Lou
Manatees was pretty decent as far as the chain I gather.
So do you know that I am now actually considered well traveled by Americans?
You are because you're America.
Well, no, by American standards, I am well traveled.
Well, yeah, because most Americans never even been outside the state, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, pretty good.
You're not spending enough time in specific places, but you I mean, you're all over the
fucking place.
I definitely fucked up in terms of time, time on location.
Yeah.
So you never plan going in.
So you just mean there's nothing wrong with that either, right?
You're just kind of going down, going with it.
Yeah, right.
And next time you know, someplace, you know, you want to go back someplace.
You're like, I'm good.
I like I've had a good time, but it has been like, I don't recommend anyone just go to
a place without a plan.
It has been an incredibly expensive fucking endeavor.
Yeah.
That's how I feel about Australia, New Zealand, because I've been backpacking there.
It's just like you can just mill around, just burning kangabuck and kiwi bucks.
You're just like, why is everything so fucking expensive?
It's like, ah, because I had no plan.
Yeah.
That's why everything says it fucking expensive.
So what was your what was your worst place?
Definitely when you're when I go.
That's going to be controversial, but when you're booking when you're booking shit like
a couple of days ahead instead of months ahead, it is expensive.
Yeah.
Even their flights, like I caught a I caught a plane from Portland, sorry, from Seattle
to LA.
Had I just booked that like a couple of weeks in advance, it would have been like a third
of the price.
Yeah.
And and everything here is costing me like, you know, an extra 50% in kangabucks.
And the thing is, though, like if you can look at the kangabucks conversion, though,
is it's always going to look terrible, isn't it?
Well, I mean, it's just a it's just it's a tough pill to swallow because I was here
like 10 years ago and our dollar at the time was almost parity and things were a lot fucking
cheaper.
And so yeah, I mean, when the phone was 2.2 US dollars, I mean, we can all remember the
past now, but you know, it's a bit.
No, no, but what about it?
What I'm saying is that last time I was here, things were cheap for me.
It was like you want a beer?
It's like four bucks for a pint.
And you know, that was like four bucks Australian.
And now you want a beer?
It's costing me like fucking $17 Australian.
Like it's a big difference is what I'm trying to say.
And like, you know, if you're if you're paying $200 a night for a hotel over a month, it
fucking adds up.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah.
I think I've got friends like, you know, lavender and artifact who have like put me up for a
night so I can enjoy these beautiful cities without hammering money.
Did you actually go to SF in the end at any point?
To where?
San Francisco.
To San Francisco.
No.
So my plan was actually to go from Portland, San Francisco, LA, but I had like an Amtrak
pass, but I didn't book far enough ahead, right?
So I couldn't get a ticket from Portland to San Francisco.
Yeah.
So I was going to go to San Francisco and stay with Jake for a little bit, but I couldn't
get a ticket.
So I ended up just flying from Seattle to LA.
Oh, so you went north.
You went from Portland to Seattle.
You look at train north.
Did you go to Seattle for a little bit?
No.
So I was I was staying with Schultz.
Yeah.
I was staying in Portland and they were coming to Disneyland down here in LA.
So I got a lift with them to the Seattle Airport and the water plane from Seattle to
Yeah.
So everyone's actually, you know, my highlight of the last probably like week and a half,
two weeks has just been like a fast food safari.
Really?
That's one thing this country is good at.
I've been hitting all the shit.
So like in Australia, Taco Bell is ass right.
And man, I had like a crunch wrap supreme in from Taco Bell.
That shit is epic.
I would eat that every fucking day.
You saw Jesus.
Oh, yeah.
And so then we were like, Colin here at from Artifact.
He's been like, he's taken me on the safari.
Did you go to internet?
Yeah.
I got a shirt for my partner.
She's happy.
And I haven't been to Water Burger, but he took me to like Costco.
It's like you have to have the like Costco hot dog.
The $1.50 hot dog or whatever it is.
$1.50 hot dog is like they've never changed the price of this thing.
So I'm having like a $1.50 hot dog.
That's like going to Greg's and Newcastle, I'm guessing.
Yeah.
Last night we went to Greg's and you buy you buy a steak bake.
We had a Costco ribeye.
Holy shit, man.
Costco steak is good.
Oh, you guys cooked it.
You mean?
Yeah.
It's actually pretty decent.
Yeah.
Oh man.
It was like, it was fresh and tender.
I was like very surprised for the price.
Costco is pretty good over here.
We get ribs and like Boston butts and shit like that.
That's usually pretty cheap and they're usually pretty tasty.
Oh, it was good.
That's funny.
What else we have?
So we had, so last night we had Chick-fil-A, which is pretty epic.
Chick-fil-A deluxe and just like jam that fucking sauce all over the thing.
And then we went to like, what was left?
What's that?
No, what was left?
What was left?
Oh yeah.
So I mean, like it's probably more of a local thing, but we went and got these like thick
shakes.
I can't remember the name of the place, but they were epic, man.
It was like, it was 1300 calories in a thick shake.
I could fucking sleep.
Too funny.
And then for breakfast this morning, we went to Sidecar Donuts this morning for breakfast.
So I had a coffee and I fucked up.
I had two donuts and I was shaking till lunchtime.
I had something called a butter and salt donut, which was just crazy.
And then...
Donut, your genus.
And the other one was like a cinnamon swirl type fucking situation.
Yeah.
So basically I've just been on like a food safari and it's been pretty good to be honest.
Like it was a good way to go out for the last week, just hitting all the fast food joints.
Now I know, like, you know, when you're watching a movie and you're like, I got to get fucking
checkfully.
And they're like, that's a good fucking, that's a good chicken burger.
Oh, man.
Well, it sounds like you've...
So when you're out of there now, right?
Like today or tomorrow or something?
Yeah.
Nine o'clock tonight.
So probably head off like an hour and a half after we finish the podcast here.
Yeah, get down there and get registered.
Yeah, man.
It's been a good time.
I went to LAX after a send off joint and I was feeling fine until I got to security
and then it hit me and I was just like, oh my God, they're going to get me.
They're going to get me.
They know.
And then I was like, and my brain was going, it's fine.
It's legal now.
It's totally fine.
You're in the clear.
And that didn't help at all.
I was just sweating and not making eye contact with anybody.
It was horrifying.
And this was back when my passport had...
I went around North Africa a few years ago and so it had like all the Arab Spring Rogues
Gallery of passport stamps as well.
So they take one look at it all and they're like, where the fuck was this?
And you're like, hey, no worries.
That's just too nizier.
No worries.
There's just about that.
No worries.
Nothing that's funny about that place.
And they're like, what are you doing there?
And I was like, what do people do really when they go places?
You know, man, they just go places and they hang out.
They're like, this guy is fucking stoned as fuck.
I'm just like, you know, man, you just sometimes you just got to go to a place and see what
the people like, you know, just try not to get fucking thrown.
The thing is, I guess, if they're seeing you out the door, they don't get a shit for your
terrorist or not.
Right.
That's how it works in America, I guess.
Sure.
Plus or minus.
Yeah.
Maybe plus or minus.
But yeah, that fucking, the two, that one stamp, that Tunisia stamp, but before my passport
switched over to the new one I have that caused me, the Americans didn't like the Tunisian
stamp was what I learned.
Like what he says exactly.
Yeah.
I'm just glad.
I'm just lucky.
I had the fucking foresight to not let them stamp my passport in Cuba back in the day.
So I guess I would have been even more problems, but that's another story, I guess.
Should we get the cosmos stuff or this week?
What's happening cosmos?
I mean, there was a there was a, wait, I know what I know what happened in cause.
Oh, you got something.
I got something.
I'm just I'm just very, very.
We had a quintuple tombstone, I think, simultaneously, right?
Is it?
I score this though, because.
So you're right.
I could keep pressing the button.
You can keep, you can keep hiding it.
I could keep pressing the button.
Total pain in the ass for me.
Every one of those.
Is it, is it really a quintuple if it's the same validate around five networks or are
we counting them individual vows?
It's a point of order.
Yes.
Is that a new one?
Ben Kingsley has the opinion, I think that.
I mean, it's quite a philosophical question, really.
Is it is deep?
Are they all unique tombstone events?
Are they all part of the same?
Why?
I mean, I think they probably all count as the same tombstone.
They show us fucking layers.
So which tombstone are you talking about?
I believe noticed on five networks due to a misconfiguration while rolling some validators.
So I think to Yusef's point, it was actually all kind of the same incident.
If you were doing, if you're doing page duty, you probably have called it all the same incident.
The incident like the Underwhelming Porcupine Tree album, which I believe came up in conversation
the other day.
I apologize as well to listeners.
This is really peak exhaustion me and I've just had a sip of beer.
So this is going to be an off track podcast.
I can feel it in my bones.
It's going to be one of those.
I mean, things that things that things are, we've had, we've had a lot of fun, shall we
say over in another network as well the last week.
So it's been a fun week.
We also found out fun, fun facts.
So bear in mind that Callum and I wrote a lot of the documentation or a portion of documentation
for Cosmos 1.0 and Callum wrote Cosmos Hero to Zero, which is one of the definitive guides
to getting started with Cosmos and we did the Cosmos for Dummies.
So Cosmos and Buy Dummies YouTube series, which I still get a load of messages about
in terms of people getting started with Cosmos and whatnot.
And so the two of us, I would like to think we kind of were reasonably good at Cosmos.
We were very tired when we instantiated the contract last month and we uploaded the wrong
version of the contract at using the wrong binary and the wrong configuration, the triple
threat and only discovered it this week when we were just like, okay, there's actually
a substantial amount of funds locked in that contract now because we just configured it
fucking wrong.
And there's actually no recovery pathway for that.
So we are fine.
Very well.
This is fine dog with flames in the background.
So it's important to recognize your mistakes and then come up with a path forward.
We came up with the very grown-up idea to burn the funds because that's what grown-ups
would do.
We realized the contracting question actually had a burn function even though it didn't
have the other functions we needed.
It had a burn function.
So we're just going to torch the fucking lot, sweep it out of the rug and happy days.
I think that's the conclusion there is you win some, you lose some.
That's the grown-up thing to do.
It's like a hand in the air.
The noise go away, man.
It doesn't always go away.
That's what you learn in life.
It's like the cat on the string JPEG, right?
It's really what you guys are.
Hang in there.
Yeah, it's like that's the...
It's about the pressure of the cat.
Hang in there.
It really sucks when you're on a mutable type of structure to do that, right?
You can't just say, hey, can we roll back the simple data?
Yeah, can we just roll back the whole chain to just fix this by the fuck up by one team
who are a bit tired?
Yeah.
Yeah, so...
So, Sporthy's dropped in here with a comment.
Of course, it has to be fucking Juno related.
Juno Gaprop incoming to recover tokens from the contract.
Burn them.
The contract.
Burn them.
Oh, jeez.
Which contract?
That's spicy.
Which contract?
You talking about Prop 16?
I'm talking about it.
I'm thinking of it.
Just let that thing just die in the shadows.
Don't ever talk about it.
Just let it be.
Don't bring it up.
She's talking about you.
I don't realize just how insane that situation was last week.
I was supposed to talk about this last week, but I didn't because I'm an idiot.
I forgot I'd done it.
I went to...
I mean, Sporthy might entirely not be talking about that.
No, she's talking about you.
She's talking about, like, is there an incoming Juno Gaprop to fuck your fuck up?
We've just gone, oh, yeah.
Yeah, it's probably Prop 16 related.
Yeah.
Do I have to explain it?
We've just...
We just fucked it up.
It's probably... it is definitely problem-existing keyboard and chair, and the chair in question
is probably this chair.
The keyboard is this keyboard.
So that's fine.
All right.
So, hang on.
Let's real talk for a second here.
I need to apologize to Sporthy because...
Because you wrote Sporthy.
I did.
You pre-wrote it.
Yeah.
Today?
No, no, no.
We were supposed to have Sporthy on last week or the week before.
It was like the eighth or something like that.
And I done fucked up.
The eighth was not last week, my guy.
No, no, it was like weeks ago.
And...
It was like the 15th today, and that was like...
No, it was like the 25th.
It's like April now.
Yeah, I fucked up and...
Cheers.
Because I wasn't there and you guys didn't remember.
And so...
Oh, I like that.
That was a little share of flavour.
That was a little share of blame.
That was a little...
Are you a parent?
Because that was definitely a little...
Hey, I put it in the group chat and I said that Sporthy was booked in and you guys didn't
follow up.
So...
So, Sporthy just said in the chat, Null rugged me on International Women's Day hashtag
IWD.
I mean, I'm...
The whole reason that Sporthy was coming on was to talk about the Women's Day and Cosmos,
like Women in Cosmos and their valet.
So, I really fucked that up.
If I'm not a mod...
Well, Sporthy, since you're in the chat, you should probably come on next week.
And since the rest of us are in the organisation here, the organisation process, we couldn't
probably not screw it up.
I mean, come on right now if you want.
DM me, I'll flick you the link.
You're clearly fucking awake.
So...
That's just it.
I mean, everybody just joined in.
You could have up to eight people on the stream.
Yeah.
Like, we've got a spare slot here in the screens.
Okay, so back to my point.
My point was that, right.
Okay.
PTSD.
What?
So, it was this event, right?
It was a scientific blockchain convention, essentially academics, right?
An academic blockchain thing that happened to be in a city in the north of England.
So I was like, sweet, I can get that.
Awesome.
Cycled over, like the full DJ and idiot I am, just like rocked up basically on the bike,
locked up my bike, went in and was like, it's actually a bunch of academics talking about
blockchain and I'm just like an actual DJ and just sort of here.
I don't know, it really struck me just how fucking insane, like everything that's happened
in the last two years, all that kind of stuff is genuinely insane when you go and look at
where researchers are, what research they're talking about.
Researchers, there were all sorts of...
I mean, I actually wrote down some of the paper abstracts.
And I get also, if you're doing an abstract, if you're doing a paper, it takes some time
to get it published and whatnot.
So there's a lead time on it.
So stuff is going to be a little bit out of date, right?
But we're talking about like, yeah, like there was a thing about blockchain, like using account...
Oops, it's dropped the pen.
Using like carbon accounting on the blockchain for the construction industry.
That's kind of your wheelhouse, I guess now.
Solidity smart contract upgrade patterns, which I feel is very relevant as a cosmiser and developer,
not...
There were, okay, two very, very good abstracts from Swiss guys, kind of no surprise, who had
this...
One of them had this really interesting thing about basically platform volatility in lending
protocols and how it was tied to inequality and token holding.
And you could basically show that the more big...
I mean, it's kind of intuitively makes sense, right?
The more big back holders you have, the more potential problems you have with any kind of
DeFi protocol, but in particular lending protocols, and that was really, really interesting.
And the HHI was correlated with the risk.
And so the HHI from memory is also the one that people have been talking about in terms
of decentralization of valid data sets.
So there's...
Yeah, it's basically about concentration of deposits.
There's something interesting there versus, you know, like the Gini coefficient, right?
Which is normally used or maybe most commonly used to show inequality.
And there was some enterprise stuff.
There was some...
There was actually quite an interesting one about DAOs, where they were basically like,
yeah, basically nobody has really quantified how many DAOs are out there and who's being
paid by them.
And they just don't work like a normal employer.
And there's this whole semi-hidden industry of people who are literally now being paid
by DAOs that are just not in the employment statistics.
And because everybody's like, yeah, nobody's being paid by a DAO, that's bullshit.
But even in Ethereum, even in other ecosystems where DAO tooling is less sophisticated, there
are actually people being paid by DAOs.
And there is a path to employment as well by DAOs, which is very, very different to
a path to employment in traditional employment.
And so this person was basically like a more, I guess, a labor economist.
And they were sort of like, nobody's really studied what the career path is.
If you want to be employed by a DAO, like how you even get employed, nobody has just
written up a paper saying like, well, maybe nobody has.
But this was like, her thing was like, we actually need to kind of analyze how people
end up employed by a DAO and how that employment works.
Because we just don't know unless you work in that sector, you just don't have any idea.
There's no visibility of this currently.
And yet it's clearly more and more people.
So that was kind of interesting.
I thought that was quite pertinent, I guess, to Cosmos where everything is a DAO.
Because even all the chains are DAOs, right?
Why were they so focused on employment or compensation?
What was that?
Was it a compensation and crypto type of?
Well, so they were kind of like, look, if I was to say how many people work for startups
in London, I could give you a pretty concrete number, right?
Just as like a labor market number as part of the overall like census or like an idea
of how people work or what work people are doing in the economy, which is like, you know,
from a policy perspective or political perspective.
And they were like, look, I can't tell you how many people are full time working for
it now.
Maybe it's none, you know, whatever.
That is funny.
Null's just fucked off.
He's like, yeah, fuck it.
So for those listening on a podcast player, Null just got up, walked out of shot into
an Airstream trailer.
He's gone.
He's fully gone.
I thought that was a fake background.
I didn't realize that was actually an Airstream trailer in regards in California.
There's like a Chick-fil-A in there or something.
Who gives a shit about how many people are working full time for a doubt?
I don't understand why that's a yardstick.
Like who cares?
What is it?
Well, I think because this is academic research, isn't it?
So like you might do like any emerging market and say like, oh, policy makers consider this
to be unimportant, but we've done some research that has shown that there are, you know, like
maybe you do something on like informal employees in the economy.
Like it would be, you could see like somebody doing a research paper as an economist on
how many people work in the gig economy in London, right?
That would be a valid research paper to say, hey, you know, policy makers think it's not
that many people, but it's actually loads of people.
And here's the evidence.
So I think it's that kind of context where I think a lot of people who aren't in the
space are like, dows, yeah, all right.
And this, this, this person's basically like, yeah, scoff all you like, but we actually
just don't know the number and we don't really have a good way of finding out yet.
And maybe it's an intractable problem, but I think it's a problem that, you know, there's
a whole bunch of things that are very different like stability and pay path to employment.
And there's really no methodology for talking about it essentially.
And as labor economists, we essentially need to come up with that methodology for describing
how labor works in this new paradigm where you can work a long time for free and they
get paid retroactively and all sorts of other things which are quite not unique in the scope
of all employment, but quite unique in terms of like general modern employment within a
regulated economy.
So that was, I thought that was quite an interesting one.
And then there was a really good talk on the four types of stablecoins and the, the various
systematic risks associated with them.
Wait, there's four types of stablecoins?
And they categorize them as four main types, right, where there's kind of exogenous endogenous,
so like internal, external stability mechanism, and then centralized versus decentralized.
And they basically did a bunch of simulations on types of stablecoins with those characteristics
like fed into a statistical model to see what would happen to them when faced with essentially
like things like a bank run essentially, or like a demand side pressure or a supply side,
well, it's actually no, it would be supply side demand side pressure and a variety of
other things and what they found.
So an example.
Wait, wait, let me guess.
Let me guess.
The centralized one was like the most stable?
The exogenous centralized was the most stable.
Yes.
Of course.
I wouldn't be.
I'm surprised, surprised.
Right.
But the decentralized ones weren't the most unstable.
The most unstable was the centralized endogenous for which their market example was terror
and terror collapsed in exactly the same way their model predicted.
Oh yeah, that's right.
You showed me that, right?
I think I share, in the group chat, I shared a graph where it just shows like supply side
pressure and it shows, I think, Tether reacting to a demand side price, a demand side pressure
and it kind of does a really weird wiggle, but it does eventually revert to the mean
given a sweet generous type situation where there's not additional pressures and whereas
like UST is just, wow, it just like, once it pushed past the point, it does collapse.
Now there is a say.
I feel like I don't need to point this out, but I recognize that without a meme graph.
Yes, but of course, the point of academic research is to prove it repeatedly that if
you have a statistical model that you can feed inputs in within the range of any hypothetical
stable coin there and it will collapse.
We just have some old stable coins.
Since you want somebody to say your DGN tendencies are smarter than these academics.
We all agree.
Everybody on this, we all agree.
Okay.
I know that's what you want to hear before we can move on.
We're in.
We're smarter than the academics.
Yes.
Well done.
Especially on these DGN strategies thumbs up, right?
Okay.
All right.
Let's move on.
So basically the problem with the centralized ones is there's a higher risk of a bank run.
So that's why the exogenous one where there is external backing, the fact that there is
external backing just the same as there is in a traditional sort of central bank scenario
can mitigate the risk of a bank run essentially, whereas the endogenous one where it's basically
just collateralized by another fucking DGN crypto coin or whatever, the centralization
works against stability.
But then there's some interesting stuff that I didn't fully understand to be honest around.
There were some other examples like obviously die, but there were some synthetics and stuff
where they were giving examples of how you can build additional incentive mechanisms
using over-clateralization in a decentralized model.
The problem with the decentralized model is basically in all of their modeling, they were
kind of like, you just need to over-clateralize to a point that it begs the question why bother
other than the fact it is crypto versus a traditional central bank.
So because it has to be so over-clateralized.
And the caveat underneath all of this is of course, if you smash it with a big enough
crisis, almost everything deep acts, almost everything collapses because there is a point
where a complex system cannot regain equilibrium.
But they were modeling an inbound impact, an outbound impact, and then a total catastrophe
and then the catastrophe every time.
But it's also partially due to a loss of confidence too, right?
Yeah.
I mean, there's obviously a point where essentially confidence collapses at the point that the
thing hits zero anyway, which is if you're a government with a central currency, there
is a way of coming back from that.
But there is no way of coming back from that with something that is relying on a trustless
system.
So that was kind of interesting.
For the viewers, can you explain the difference between androgynous and the other thing that
you've been saying?
So basically androgynous was the way David Bowie presented during the Ziggy Stardust
era, his career.
And to some extent, the thin white juke era, when he was moving into the Berlin years.
What was the question?
Difference between androgynous and the other word that you've been saying.
Okay.
So androgynous and exogenous is basically just about how the thing is collateralized,
is my understanding.
So one of them is kind of external from the crypto ecosystem, and one of them is internal.
But I guess there's degrees of that on there because there's like literally collateralized
by your own fucking coin and then there's collateralized by a basket of coins.
So I think the distinction on, say, synthetics is my understanding anyway of synthetics is
it's collateralized by a basket of things as well as being decentralized and is a collateralized.
Synthetics are collateralized by nothing.
It's just hopes and dreams.
Well, are the crypto coins right?
Sorry, I thought you meant like synthetic representations of like.
You know, Tesla.
No, with an axe, it's a brand.
Yeah, okay.
Before we get too far down the old podcast line today, I just want to point out that
you have neglected to share with us a passage from your Twitter handbook of randomized Twitter.
I thought we moved down from that shit.
Really?
Did we ditch that?
Like when did we ditch that?
Like a month ago.
No, good point.
Good point.
No, no.
Seven cities ago for you.
Was I not here?
Okay.
Here we go.
Wow.
Okay.
So I've landed on a page which it just has a picture of what I presume is drill there
with the sunglasses in Master Chief's armor.
The title of the page and the section of the book is Halo and it says, my Christ, I am invigorated
using my new official old Spice Dr. Pepper Halo 3, exfoliating forehead wax.
This is God.
This feeling is God.
So I'm with you, sir, but let's burn that book.
You just brought it back.
The following tweet is there's a rumor that Master Chief will take off his mask and reveal
that he is the BTK killer.
Do not do this.
It would be disrespectful to the Halo.
That's better.
Amazing.
So the final interesting, the final funny thing that happened at this conference was
that somebody did an NFT talk where they were talking about social impact, sustainable
finance NFT and you're just like instant I-roll.
My favorite thing, I was just sat there as somebody who works as a data engineer.
I was like, I just don't understand why any of these use cases would just not be a database
like you don't need an FT, you don't need the blockchain.
The crown jewel of the things that they, and I don't mean to just bash on this academic,
right?
Because I think they mean well, but the kind of like the example they gave was the WWF,
not the wrestling, Tombstone, but no way.
But the Pandas, the WWF organization, the ecology charity, their NFTs, which were launched
earlier this year.
And the fun thing about that is I don't think the academic mentioned this, but of course
that launch was so botched and so controversial that it came up in the British parliament.
Because so it's kind of complicated.
This is obviously the biggest wildlife charity in the world, I think the biggest.
But the patron of the charity is Prince Now King Charles, right?
So although they're like these fucking hippies basically and academics who work on ecology
restoration, they have this weird sort of connection with the British aristocracy and
the British upper class.
It's kind of like they've been grandfathered in, right?
And so most people care about them for whatever reason.
They're like, green party scum, green piece scum, but WWF are respectable people who wear
shirts and ties and care about the loss of chaff inches from regional woodlands.
I don't know, I don't pretend to understand it, but there is some acceptance of their
cause in the British establishment, right?
And so the fact that they just issued NFTs, it was apparently this really con- it was
in this was in all the papers in the UK anyway.
It had not been signed off by everybody, right?
Shall we say?
And it got to the point that people were asking questions in parliament being like, what are
these crypto NFTs from establishments that we all know and trust?
And it cooked me up hand and the whole project was pulled because they were like, this is
a total disaster.
So yeah, that was kind of funny because I was like, oh, they're using an example that
was literally in the papers as a massive clusterfuck and a public, a real public catastrophe.
It's still a stupid thing.
It's just a little turnabout.
It's just a little, it's like a fine line.
It's just so, yeah.
So I was like, you may have a point, but that's probably not the example to use was my conclusion
on that.
I can't buy a Cross River Gorilla for 340 USDC though.
There's still some available.
How are they still available?
I think they got, I think they got, I think they got launched and then the whole thing
turned into a clusterfuck.
So they pulled their involvement, but I think they were already out in the wild as it were.
They'd already rewilded those NFTs.
They're out there.
Yeah.
Looking for kangaroos, I can send it to Noel.
That's the one.
In the wild.
That's the one.
Yeah.
So it's like, but I think the conclusion from this though is like, there was a lot of stuff
where it just felt like literally the daily stupidity and degeneracy that we call our
lives now is quite a long way ahead of where people outside of the space think the space
is.
Better or worse.
I don't know.
I honestly don't know, but it was one of those in the break I was talking to somebody and
they were like, oh, what are you researching?
I was like, oh, I'm actually just kind of came along to have a look like I'm maybe working
the Cosmos ecosystem and they're like, oh, what's that?
I'm like, it's pretty fucking small market cap compared to Ethereum, but some funny things
have happened.
And they were like, well, yeah, but everything's presumed to be really small fry.
And I was like, I don't know, man, we had a governance dispute over $120 million last
year, which was resolved with a smart contract.
And they were like $120 million.
I was like, something like that.
I didn't represent it.
It was all a bit of a blur because it was quite stressful as you can imagine.
And they were like, really?
And I was like, yeah, I mean, this is like this, this stuff seems to happen all the time.
We just burned it.
What are you doing?
Last year, we just, we let it on fire in front of their eyes.
It was just fucking busy.
They were just said, fuck you.
That was it.
Exactly.
Like, and they were just like, oh, funny.
I didn't hear about that.
No, you didn't, I mean, you could have done it.
It was on coin desk.
We got a very bad write up as I recall for the whole experience.
I think my attorney's had a blog post on it.
Do you know what it's like at the risk of being like in knows the legal, the legal advice
podcast, our lawyers, our lawyers sent us a quite interesting article on the legal status
of dowels in the United Kingdom the other day because obviously they helped us with
some of the thinking around the how down whatnot.
And there has recently actually been a consultation with businesses on their opinions on essentially
what how dowel should be treated moving forward.
And they're starting to publish some like preliminary information on how dowels will
be sort of treated moving forward.
And yeah, it's kind of interesting.
I don't think they've got it right.
Of course, nothing's ever going to be.
But are people required to like periodically ask, is this a down?
That is actually the first line in the recommendation position piece.
It's it has the mean.
Is this a down?
Yeah, this says this is this has been contributed by an industry partner on Voilaab's have contributed
this to our consultation.
Yeah, no, sadly not.
But yeah, I think the thing that like the thing that I guess came out of that was just
the the extent to which like, you know, going back to even the academics, right, who are
I guess presumably thinking about this stuff a lot.
Either they're very, very deep in the deep on one thing, or they are still quite like
a high level of like, oh, hypotheticals of what you can do with this thing.
Right.
And there's like they were talking about use case where they're like, oh, maybe in two
years, we'll see something, something, something.
And I just was thinking, you could write that in Cosmos in a weekend.
It's like, if you wanted to, it's just there's no money in it.
So why would you do that?
This idea that you've come up with, we've already shit down the drain because it makes
nothing.
Yeah, exactly.
Keep going.
Like we've already we're past that.
We've already realized that that makes nothing.
So keep going.
Yeah, we're already at a point where you can design, develop and deploy a an economic system
in a weekend.
Right.
If you want to, it's just that your idea is bad.
That's why nobody's done it.
And in fact, actually, somebody probably already has done it in Cosmos and you just don't know
about it because you guys are all looking at Ethereum because you actually don't know
all that much about the crypto space.
And to be fair, like, look, we don't know everything that happens in the Cosmos.
Like we can't keep track of everything that happens in the Cosmos.
But as a validator company, we're only in two hecos and I already find it exhausting to
keep track of what's happening in each one.
So I understand.
But it does remind me, I guess, of how I think we just sort of take it for granted.
We just like, oh, this is just what life is like.
All this insane bullshit all the time.
And it's just like, hey, this is normal.
And then you take a step back and you look at people whose job is to analyze things professionally
and write like a measured take on what is actually happening for consumption by people
in 50 years time.
And you're like, yeah, okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We are A, super early and B, this stuff is super insane.
Like it's
That's some quality analysis.
Yeah.
I mean, like you don't need to go to an academic conference to be like, we're early and this
stuff is mental, obviously.
It's kind of a given.
But like, you know, again, like the visibly the person doing the Dow stuff was actually
calling it.
I would have been like, hey, do you know Dow?
Because there's like payroll stuff coming in 2.1.
Like in two weeks time, you should just like check it out.
Oh my God.
You just like look at what's wallet to doing it.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Hey, so related unrelated.
Dow, Dow v2 has launched 2.1.
2.1, yeah, sorry, 2.1.
The Dow has been like upgraded to that.
So, you know, if you run it down, go ahead and fucking YOLO.
That's awesome.
I heard in the actually, you know, you what?
Yeah.
So partial max is that in the chat, the paper on how early we are will be released too late.
I believe I actually submitted it.
An abstract brief for the 2025 edition of the Journal of the British Blockchain Association
for We Are Early, a study in earlyness.
And we'll see how it goes.
They didn't seem to like it.
I don't know.
A study in earlyness.
The great thing about the great thing about the great thing about the great thing about
the great comedy writer, if I was, I would be here.
The great news about being too early is things like Dow, Dow get overlooked because in four
years from now, somebody releases on a different chain, one tenth of the functionality that
exists today and totally goes blows up because it was the right release at the right time.
And it was the right, right?
Like those things have to align for that success to happen.
Well, there's that saying, isn't there?
Like there's nothing more frustrating than being, the being, was it than being five minutes
too late or being a year too late other than being five years too early, something like
that.
That's something I don't know.
Somebody might know the exact quote I've probably butchered at, but yeah, it's kind
of unfair at this point.
So also unrelated related.
We're getting requests for the stickers, you surfer, from the waggy.
Yeah, I think, I mean, we have a ton.
And we have them on like three or four continents, right?
Like we're pretty good.
If people, if people want them in Europe, just don't do that.
Just send, don't do that.
Send an email to like, I want to fucking sticker at bigballsblockchain.com and we'll figure
it out and we will make it happen with your address and, and yeah, I'm in the mnemonic
exactly.
So we'll send you, we'll make it happen.
We will make it happen.
We have, we have tons of good stickers and, and we haven't talked about merch for a long
time.
We should actually come up with something.
I feel like, I've said before, I've said before I'll say it again, the baby grow has
been a staple.
It's a really good site if you have an underweight baby.
For people in the US that's a onesie.
If you have an underweight baby.
If you had, if you had a normal baby, you could just, I mean, it's, to be fair, it looks
like it's scaling with the child.
Like if you had an under, an overweight baby, you could use it for socks.
He's no longer underweight, but it still fits.
It's just, it was one of the only ones that did fit when he was underweight.
I love it.
So as the, as the babies developed the thickness.
Yeah.
They get really chunky quite quickly.
Would be my review.
My review of babies.
7 out of 10 would baby again.
I don't know.
I only really do.
My review of babies get chunky real quick.
Get chunky.
Chunky than you think.
You get a bit more sleep than you think, but the, the grind of not quite getting enough
sleep is very long.
Yeah, it's, it's fun.
Like the first month, right?
And you're like, holy shit, this isn't going to go out.
This is life now.
This is just life now.
When did I sleep to the night?
Yeah.
You kind of just like, oh yeah.
Like the thing that really gets me is like, you keep talking to people and you're just
like, yeah, you know, you know, four weeks, five weeks, whatever the number keeps going
up and they're just, and you're just like, yeah, some point though.
And people are just like, not really.
You're like, excellent.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Listen, sleep training.
Like we were, we were ridiculously structured on sleep training.
That was really my wife.
So we were, and sleep training is a real thing.
Like that term, like look it up and like, like people have a lot of different.
There's a lot of different.
I've, I've, I've, I've, or believe me, I've read a book now.
It's a real thing.
Like the shit needs to happen.
You have to train.
Seconds you can.
Like you think like kids like realize how to sleep.
They don't like you really need to be able to do that.
And he's still young.
It doesn't matter.
It's, this is later, but later, cause they'll like move forward and they'll regress, right?
Cause it's like, oh, we're past this.
They can sleep for five hours.
And the next thing you know, you have like three weeks of like, every two hours just
to piss you off, right?
So there's, there's at some point.
Last night.
Yeah.
You're going to have good nights, bad nights.
Hey, hey, how's it going everybody?
I'm just going to let you know I'm still here.
Like were you getting comfortable?
Do you know what the funny thing is for you is that you look decidedly less fucked right
now than what you have during like several other like blockchain related events.
But I think it's because there is a bunch of stuff where essentially as soon as the
baby arrived, I had to just be like, I can't do this anymore.
I'm not going to do it anymore because it's fucking, you know, there's, there's, I don't
know how to explain it.
I don't have to explain it really.
I'm just, I'm a genius.
You're fucking one because you'll never see me again.
It's basically just that.
Like, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you're just like, I can only
do what I can do, man.
And I'm not going to do, do that other shit anymore.
So I'm just going to try and take it a bit easier.
Yes.
It makes, it basically calls like a break in the timeline or something like that.
So you, sir, but has to then go and edit.
It's like back in the fucking thing that we just did.
I have five, five minutes left with my children every time that you hit that button.
Yeah.
So the fact that I kept hitting the, the, the tombstone button earlier was very welcome,
like a hundred percent welcome in the grand scheme of things.
Um, I feel bad about that now.
I'm sorry, man.
That was not cool.
It's all good.
Um, so.
I feel bad at all.
Fuck your time.
No regrets.
Nothing.
That's, that's the Australian way.
That's the Australian way.
Um, I mean, to be fair, it's probably actually the British way as well, isn't it?
Let's be honest.
It's just like, we actually regret nothing, but we just sort of pretend we just like,
sort of, it's just like a, a sense of melancholy.
You sent people on a boat to a different continent for stealing bread.
You are so.
Is that what it was?
Yeah.
And she, like, you know, sheet brush laying stuff like that.
It was.
Stealing bread.
It's pretty bad.
Or like, you know, looking at.
And high fight.
Probably call.
Cantus, Rome, or whatever.
Yeah.
I mean, look.
Look, I'm still alive at bread.
Get the fucking, get a plot.
I'm not an academic of that period of British history.
So I couldn't tell you exactly what the many pressures were that led to the, the
conclusion that those were good policies.
But if I had to put my finger in the air, I would imagine it is the, you know,
perpetuation of the same rule in class that took control of the country in 1066,
essentially, and wish to perpetuate their rule forever.
Historians of, historians of English history.
Prove me wrong.
Anyway.
Historians of English history.
It's, yeah, whatever.
Welcome to Game of Thrones, a weekly podcast on land rights and land use in the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland presented to you by
independent validator teams.
And class warriors.
Shit.
What, but there isn't, there is an interesting sense, right?
Which America, there's a lot of land to go around, right?
And you have a lot of problems.
You have a lot of problems.
And, you know, you did, you did fuck the Native Americans out of the good land.
That was a thing.
But there is like this sense in which you can still just like, get usable land to do stuff on.
Whereas like in the UK, there's so little land that it still is the case that if you own the land,
you just in a very real sense, just own what's going on.
Like the biggest landowners are still the aristocracy.
It's just like astonishing to me.
It's like this big thing we just don't really talk about how like land rights.
Well, I mean, maybe we do talk about it.
I feel like we don't.
We just don't talk about how like we're just still the same country we've been for like 500 years because
every time there's a change in like the wind, the people who have always been in charge,
just grandfather and the new people and just continue as before.
And maybe that's the same in every political system.
I guess there's never only ever, there's never a revolution really, only evolution.
Unless you're the French, Nugility and everybody, which got to say,
it might be the move.
Maybe that's the universe brain move.
I mean, like you've got to hand this to the Bolsheviks, right?
They got the SAR, they were like, our position is tenuous.
Maybe we're going to be in a position where we want to trade them back.
We might, you know, there might be some political deal, which means they're taken back or whatever.
I'll just shot them.
Just take that shit off the table.
Just end the bloodline.
You know, it's pretty beautiful.
I mean, it's probably makes a lot of sense.
I mean, they used to be the way, right?
You wanted to stop a bloodline.
You just fucking kill everyone.
You stopped it.
Yeah, I think that's maybe in my head a little bit because I rewatched June at the weekend.
You rewatched June because the new one's coming out soon?
Partly the reason, but also because I watched like a short documentary on how they did the sound design for it and like the various techniques and stuff.
And it was very interesting.
And I was just like, it was a really good soundtrack.
I want to hear it again.
So watch the film and it kind of reminded me like that.
That's the most bizarre reason I've ever heard for rewatching a film.
So something about the fucking film track, a bit of a bit of a watch that just to verify.
It's a great soundtrack.
I like don't trust verify.
Literally a music journalist.
Of course I like music.
Of course I like soundtracks.
Anyway, whatever.
The point is the thing that struck me on this rewatch is how like the when the when the Harkinons spoilers, when the Harkinons come in and fuck everything up, how it literally is like that is exactly how the destruction of a royal house in say like European antiquity would have been.
You know, it's just like, I know you lost so everything's fucked now we're going to kill all the peasants we can kill all your soldiers we can kill all your retainers we're going to burn down everything.
Those really expensive trees you had we're going to burn them down.
We actually quite like those trees but we're going to burn them down anyway just had a fucking principle.
And you're like, oh gosh, it seems a bit severe.
And then you're like, yeah, the Romans like salted the earth at at at Carthage after the Second Punic War, right?
Okay, so for those for those I've just obviously just stopped them in kind of.
Yeah, so for those again listening listening later, Ben Davis, the comment was, this is dangerously like the master and commander shit.
Well played you.
Which which play comes the first the first six months of game of the year how long ago that was working that was like six months ago but it was a long time ago.
We've had a lot of episodes this podcast now you somebody is going to be an academic is going to be an academic tracking the social history of the blockchain and blockchain ecosystem in cosmos via the medium of the podcast game and nose.
It's going to come full circle my friend they're going to find this episode and they're going to go, oh, that's a bit of a shame they're being nasty about people like me and until all this coming out of that study.
The only thing that'll come out of that study is the definitive list of two stones.
I mean that would be a great paper to be fair.
The only cause most piece we've had in this to be fair to that researcher and if you are listening in the future, we have no problem with academic obviously you are as far as I can tell, lovely, lovely people.
Sorry if there was any indication contrary to the contrary during this podcast. It's been a long winter and we don't just mean the crypto winter it's been a long cold dark winter.
More generally in the northern hemisphere.
Gosh, it has.
Oh my goodness.
Thank goodness where we're nearly in April when it finally starts to get a bit light.
You know, I'm going to go I'm going to go from winter in the States to winter in Australia.
You are. Yeah.
Although it looks like winter for like the last fucking year.
Mate, no, your winter is not like the winter in the north of England.
The winter that's behind you is sunshine.
Right. We don't get fucking sunshine.
This is the only fucking sunshine I have seen in like nine months.
Get out of here.
Nine months. You live in Australia. That is not plausible or correct.
We can literally if we had enough viewers, if we were like one of those, you know, those big gamer channels with like loads and loads of views on YouTube, I'd be like, I mean, guys, go back and clip, go back and clip a clip of when Noel was in the sunshine from the last year.
Go show me and people would just like sending hundreds of clips on YouTube shorts mocking you.
Laughing at you.
What an asshole. He's been in the sun the whole year.
What an asshole. Yeah.
Yeah. Some people, yeah. I mean, to be fair, compared, we don't need any part of that.
The drama associated with those YouTubers seems to be like, although a lot of it they do bring on themselves as far as I can tell.
I'm not an expert on it.
I think that's what drives listeners, right?
It's what kind of like it's built around that.
Yeah. I follow, I vaguely followed like a hitman speed runner niche you would think, but quite with quite a lot of followers.
And I, you know, I haven't obviously had the time in the last six months really to watch any shit.
And so I just saw their name came up the other day and it was of course, it like a scandal, like a cancel gate type thing where they had been doing a stream and they just like flick between tabs and then which is like, it was like,
it was something really actually quite really bad, like super unpleasant. It was like AI generated porn of colleague streamers or something like, yeah, it was like, it was like really actually like, you know, massive breach of trust, bad stuff.
And I was like, oh gosh, stop paying attention to the internet for five minutes.
Yeah, it's like, well, I guess, I guess I won't be enjoying that content when I finally get a chance to watch YouTube again whenever that is.
Ben, Ben Davis with the only comments in the last half an hour. The chain halt helped with your viewership.
I think our biggest, our biggest episode by viewers was the Gino.
The restart. No, it was the restart. Which never happened. It was just the circle. Which ironically, it was a rug ball, wasn't it? Because we promised a chain gets revived or your money back.
And no chain was revived. And a lot of money was returned.
A lot of money, as I recall. It was very financially brueness for the whole endeavor.
That was the one where we just pulled up all of the Dow Dow lot in Portland, wasn't it? They were just all in a big house, hanging out.
They just randomly joined throughout the whole thing.
Was that in Portland?
I think so. I would have thought it would have been in like San Fran or something.
You know what? There is something a little bit like, this is crazy, right?
I feel like genuinely, the period of time that Gino, for example, or any of the main cosmos chains, because for me, Gino and Stargate, they're launching the same month.
So it's all a bit jumbled for me. But I genuinely feel like it's only been less than two years and it feels like a thousand.
It does feel like five or six years of my life.
The compaction of time. It's like general relativity. The closer you get to the speed of light, as soon as you drop out from that, you're like, oh, a hundred years have passed.
I do feel like there's an element of that.
I was thinking about the number of people that have joined and exited the project or validators or applications or anything like that.
They're not even around anymore. It's like pretty crazy.
It's been that much of a, well, maybe in Juneau, but it doesn't seem like it's been that much of a flux in Juneau.
Yeah, I guess it depends which contingent of people you mean, maybe not validators so much as like there's all the people who I guess I talked to on a daily basis or worked with, maybe over the past couple of years, who just in some cases are not even in crypto anymore.
Be that from market pressures, be that from other things, be that things going wrong.
Can't blame for that.
Yeah, I know. It does feel like a long time on a lot of churn whenever I reflect on that.
Are there any comments on the old AIB?
I don't really know the whole story there. It's not like they were, so the way I understand it, which I don't, you know.
Well, say for first, Ben Davis asked, care to risk a hot take on AIB bridging a lawsuit against an ex employee who wanted to work on a fork.
I don't know the details, so I don't know if that's 100% correct, but anyone can.
So as I understand it, the, so, okay, allow me to choose my words very carefully.
As I understand it, allegedly,
AIB has brought a lawsuit in New York against the former employee who first made a Twitter post about
Denise Fedyev's desire to work on something that he was not technically allowed to his contract, although it was open source.
But he was not technically allowed to fork it and work on it as a result of his previous employment contract with AIB.
Meaning he was a full-time employee or an employee under contract.
He was an ex employee, I think, but still bound by the same employment contract.
Oh, so he had a not computer, some sort of structure.
Yeah, something like that. So he had, I think he had asked to say, to work on the open source software.
But he was not, are you sure he's not, he was not an employee?
I don't think he was an employee anymore. No.
But like, you know, you quite often have, it's very, very common for corporate contracting, you have a six or 12 month non-compete on any clause you sign.
They're not enforceable.
Yeah, I mean, they're not particularly enforceable in the UK either, but you have to sign them. You sign it, you move on.
Anyway, what the thing is, nobody ever tries to enforce them, that's the thing, like literally nobody ever does.
Oh, I got sued for that. I mean, yeah, absolutely.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They can try to be enforceable.
I mean, here in the US, it might be different elsewhere, but the core of it is you cannot stop someone from trying to earn to provide for him, him or herself or their family.
So as long as it's not, if you're creating competition, as long as you're not stealing IP, as long as you are, if you are creating a more competitive environment,
and you are learning what you learned at company A to go create or start or even go to company B to create competition,
there's no court here that would stop to do that unless you're stealing things.
If you're stealing IP and you're saying, hey, I'm taking this and I'm going to go somewhere else, I'm going to go recreate this with this kind of like, intellectual property,
that absolutely, you can absolutely get sued. I mean, you can look at, there's tons of fucking cases.
Yeah, I could imagine that that would be the case.
Yeah, yeah, like, or if you're stealing customers, the other thing is, well, two things.
One is if you steal customers, like, I have a good relationship with customer A, I'm going to go to company B, I'm going to go recruit this customer.
The courts do not like that because then you're taking money out, you're taking basically food out of somebody else's mouth because of a relationship that that's not cool.
And the other thing is stealing employees. Employees are incredibly hard to hold on to.
And so if you are like underhand in recruiting somebody, that is also something that you could say, that is very easy.
But if you say, hey, I learned this stuff at company A, I'm going to go start my own thing or I'm going to company B,
I'm going to use what I learned and go compete against company A, nobody will go against that.
Like that is, that is.
Yeah, that's kind of my understanding here as well.
Like if you, if you literally you contract with a company via say a third party and then you cease working for the third party and then you approach the other company to a contract, that is very much enforceable.
Anything other than that kind of level of like directly, I'm going to stop working for you and go to them directly is essentially unenforceable.
This is my understanding because it's just like your normal business practice is almost it's, you know, not taking the piss.
I believe is the legal term.
But yeah, in this, in this case.
And if the source is open source meaning like an organization has said, hey, we are giving this back.
And I'm not sure what license sets under, but assuming that company be wherever this person is left to and they're not, they're not violating the agreement of how they are utilizing that source.
I'm not sure what, what argument is here other than it less.
There's other intellectual property that that person is taking to say, hey, this is something I learned that is uniquely covered under IP, whether that be customers or whether that be something else that can be enforceable in some sort of way.
But so I didn't really, I mean, AIB's approach and like, hey, you know, we got to stand up and everything else.
I mean, I mean, honestly, usually you would not go public with that type of thing.
Like if you're going to sue an ex employee because the dickers an issue there, you're not like going to Twitter with it.
I don't know.
Yeah, as I suspected, it's Apache Apache 2.0 is the license.
Okay, so stop what ignite.
It just means they, what does that mean they can't they can't take that source and they can't resell it right. That's basically what it is.
They can't.
I think you can resell it commercially as much as you like. I think you just have to reprint the same license.
I think that's what it is for that whatever you create, whatever you create off that has to be public.
And then you can do one, right? I think. And then somebody else can fork you and do whatever, right? Like it's basically the idea.
Yeah, so the Apache license is a permissive free software license written by the Apache software foundation.
It allows the users to use the software for any purpose to distribute it, modify it, distribute it, modify versions of the software under any terms of the license without concern for royalties.
It does not require derivative works to be distributed using the same license.
It requires application of the same license to all modified parts in every license file original copyright patent trademark and attribution notices must be preserved.
If a notice file is included as any part of a distribution of the original work, a derivative works must include a readable copy of those notices within a notice file.
But these do not modify the license.
And there can be no patent litigation after the fact unless explicitly splated off otherwise any contribution is submitted by a licensee to a licensee will be under the terms of the license without any terms conditions.
Yeah. So, yeah, essentially.
Yeah, it's just it's a relatively straightforward open source license with some sensible guard rails around it that is over and above the MIT license.
But you might think about it as like, for the purposes of can you make it commercial? Can you work on it? Is it permissive?
Yeah, it doesn't seem to be hugely different from something as permissive as the MIT license would be.
Right. And I know a b also talked about some sort of like disparagement or something else against against themselves or whatever else like the definition was the thing that they were that that's a real concern.
And if they if they think that like whatever is being said is is number one, if they can prove that it's untruthful and they can approve that it's actually and they can claim some sort of damage associated that me which I think we really definitely difficult and Web three but whatever.
But if you're if you're proving to say, hey, we you know, this is our growth in terms of stakers and we have XYZ and it's going lower than that. And so therefore you're costing us money.
Like that's a real that's a real, it's a real number and a court might hear that but I think getting to that point is, you know, that seems like a kind of stretch you get to a point where you get a jury to understand what the fuck is going on here.
I think I think importantly, like one of the one of the notes is that it was not taken like very well by the community, I guess.
Doesn't matter in general.
Yeah, I mean, it's just it's interesting like to watch the the whole saga play out over time.
And yeah, I mean, it's just they don't seem to have like a lot of support at all in across like the community.
I mean, again, that doesn't that doesn't really matter.
Like the in the court of law, it doesn't matter, but it's interesting to watch from like as a bystander perspective.
Yeah, I think it like a personal take would be like if someone wants to kind of bait me into like obviously this I don't have any, you know, I think it would be like,
you should just kind of let devs work on open source software.
That's obviously my opinion like it.
It's kind of no skin off my nose approach, you know, like the barb you know the Barbara Streisand effect thing, you know, where you try and bury them the evidence of the big mansion and everybody just posts pictures of it on the internet.
Like it's not like I'm obviously not like one of the things about British law I like the least is defamation law because it's primarily designed to protect the interests of moneyed upper class who have more money than anybody else.
And like this seems like, you know, any big company obviously has more money and more resources and more lawyers than any individual employee.
This is why we have unions, right, but this is the extent to which AIB must have more money than anybody that could stand up to them is probably disproportionate to a ridiculous degree like even if you had a union, even if you had some other body that you could sort of look to for arbitration, I doubt that they could stand up to anything that could be thrown at you.
So it is like really something where it's so uneven always is going to stick in your craw, I think is the is the first observation.
You know, without really taking a side on it, I just think like whenever it's just somebody punching down, it's just a bad look.
It's just my opinion.
Not opinion of our company, not opinion of anything else, certainly not opinion.
You know, that's just a personal observation.
I think punching down generally looks bad.
And, you know, the second thing is just we're trying to get people to come and build in this ecosystem.
And what we've what you see time and time again is that like specifics of an issue don't tend to matter so much as the optics of an issue.
And the optics of this issue.
And this is again, this is not my personal issue.
This is what other people have said to me.
This is what people have said because people have asked us to talk about this on Game of Nodes and I was a bit like.
But like the overall impression I think that people have by and by could be wrong.
This is just the take that I've been given by other people is that this is basically an organization that is supposed to be a leader in the cosmos suing a dev.
Yeah, I mean, this is also a bear market issue, right?
If the bull is going on and they're making a shitload of fucking money and all this type of stuff, I think that they kind of let the slide or they find it.
Do it in a way that's not as so as visible or something.
But I agree like this, it's it's a bit petty for an organization and in the real real question of how much actual damages are they feeling because of this.
I think it's probably more in marketing terms.
It's not necessarily in terms of.
I think the damages they're looking for is like $150,000.
I'm like, you would even bother.
You're doing more reputational damage by chasing this lawsuit than anything that happened before.
Like, why would you look at their one tweet was like more fucking reputational damage than easily.
Yeah, like the outfall of them fucking doing workers.
Right.
Allegedly or whatever.
You know, totally agree.
Like, whatever, allegedly and stuff.
Like there has to be an I mean, like any any any at any sort of legal movement, you have to look at it and say, what is the ROI and this type of structure?
Right.
Like, are we really making anything?
And anyway,
Can I just observe to the listeners is why you separate is like, Loki, the smartest guy here is that we're all just like, oh, this is a complicated issue.
It's like, but what is the ROI of this legal move?
But if you've been in the cosmos for if you've been in the cosmos for 10 fucking minutes, right, you would know this is not the right move.
Right.
Like you would look at it and say, what's the ROI on?
Like, are we actually so what are we making a statement?
We're going to we're going to increase our our worth because of getting the community all fucking pissed of us about suing in this type of situation.
Or you just say, let's just see if we can go to arbitration.
Let's see if we can maybe make some some things to say that this is not go forward if they really feel there's damages here.
But they go after $150,000.
Like, what are you doing?
Like that doesn't make any sense, especially at there at that size, right?
It's nuts.
Like that's, I think that's probably it's like, it's like life ruining money to the dev.
And it's like, it's just to a large organization like them.
So it's just again, it's back to the punching down thing.
You're just like, what are you, what are you trying to achieve other than other than, you know, literally on this podcast, you know, all three of us are looking at that being like, I don't want to pay $150,000 because somebody decides they don't like my opinion on the internet, which is fucking ridiculous.
That is literally the death. You know what that is? That is just my opinion, but it's childish.
Yeah, it's what it is.
It comes off as childish and it is toxic to attracting devs to the ecosystem, which given that the SDK.
I go on about it is not an ergonomic product at the moment.
And obviously there are some very, very clever, very, very smart, very, very determined people who are currently working on modularizing it and doing lots of things that are going to make it more accessible for devs.
And you know, that's coming in SDK 46 SDK 47 SDK 48, you know, I'm kind of wired into some of those conversations.
And like I do appreciate there is some determined efforts to make the stuff more approachable to new developers.
But you also need a pipeline of new developers to stick the course and actually see that to the end.
Yeah.
And you just you just look at this and you're just like, why bother there are people in other near will throw money at you to come in their ecosystem.
Exactly.
And so it's will throw money at you to come in their ecosystem.
Why would you why would you do this?
Hey, come work in our ecosystem and maybe get sued.
So fucking short-sighted, right?
So fucking short-sighted.
And I even there's no even like it's not short-sighted for like millions, right?
It's short-sighted for for literally to them, I would assume incremental cash, right?
And and you're make and like, how would you not read the fucking room?
That's just like it doesn't make any sense to me, but whether the right or wrong, like I'm not saying they're right or wrong.
I really not that in a legal system that doesn't make any like that has only that's only part of the truth is if they're right or wrong.
Even if they're right, is it worth it?
Like is this in the long term the right thing?
And is this in the right thing for and we've talked about this on this fucking show more times rising a rising tide raises all ships, right?
And so to your point for a like if you're shitting on this whole ecosystem or you're trying to say, hey, this is Dev hostile type of thing.
And even if people don't read it, it's still news, right?
It's end up on coin desk or some stupid shit, right?
So like, how do you not look at that and say, this is this is stupid?
Like, what are we doing?
Like, you're in a bad position, even if you're even if they're right, I'm not saying they're right, but even if they are right.
And they think that this is a bad situation and like they're getting fucked here.
You got to look at the bigger picture to say we're getting fucked, but what what solution do we have here that really solves this problem?
Right?
Well, that's just it, isn't it?
Like, and yeah, and especially like, you know, AIB must be a large backorder as well in atom and a variety of other currencies in the eco.
You just like, all of those things are going to add up to substantially more potential return.
Like you said, then anything to be gained from this, either reputational on the one hand or financial from damages on the other hand.
And the knock on effect I've seen in this is even in a short period of time is other people basically waving around the defamation stick and being like, see, see that time when you did say something about me, I could have done this.
And it's just like, it's such a bad precedent because now other people are talking about defamation lawsuits.
Right.
In the bloody interchange, you know, what are we doing?
We're just completely wasting.
Like, if that's the way this ecosystem is going to go, I'm out.
What's the point?
Fuck this shit.
You know, because I tell you where nobody threatens to sue you for just going to work every day corporate contracting.
You can you turn up your fucking right, your terraform.
You give you corpus.
You give you you give your executive summary.
You say, hey, guys, you should be running on AWS on GZP rather than run your own data center.
You're wasting a load of money.
You know, it may not look like it right now, but believe me, you're wasting money.
You just your job is selling widgets.
You should be focused on selling widgets, not running servers.
You know, you'll thank me in five years.
Let's fucking go.
Yolo, come on.
You hand that over to the board.
You go about your way.
You know what happens?
You don't get fucking sued.
I love it.
That's how you make that's how you make money in this business.