The Failure of Ethereum Governance with Lane Rettig - WBD404
Mr Obnoxious
Peter McCormack
4.8 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 1 October 2021
⏱️ 132 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Location: New York
Date: Sunday 19th September
Project: Ethereum
Role: Core Developer
Ethereum was created to build upon Bitcoin's innovations and offer more functionality, and in 2015, Ethereum developers launched an ICO selling millions of ETH tokens, at the time worth over $18 million.
Some of those funds, now worth nearly $1 billion, went to the Ethereum Foundation, which oversees the ongoing development and promotion of the Ethereum project. The foundation is a central entity that issues grants for relevant projects and employs core developers to work on the protocol.
While the Ethereum ecosystem is thriving, questions remain about the technical roadmap, scalability, decentralisation of the network, and governance of the project itself.
From changes in supply schedule and frequent hard forks, Ethereum governance is in stark contrast to the conservative, slow-moving and consistent nature of Bitcoin.
So will the Ethereum project overcome the hurdles that lie ahead? Or is it doomed to fail?
In this interview, I talk to Ethereum Core Developer Lane Rettig. We discuss the Ethereum foundation, why Lane quit, ethics, hypocrisy, decentralisation vs scalability, and building better institutions.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Anytime you have a centralization of power and wealth and influence in the hands of a small number of people, |
| 0:08.5 | it's so easy to delude yourself either as an individual or as an organization into thinking just a few more years. |
| 0:15.0 | Hello there from Nashville, what a place, what a city. |
| 0:19.0 | And you know what, I really love for Nashville. |
| 0:21.0 | I've had such a great time here. I definitely think I could move it. It's good competition for Austin |
| 0:26.4 | I've had such a great time. Oh my God if you've not been to Nashville, you really need to come. |
| 0:30.8 | Really need to come. Check it out. Head down Broadway, see some live music, eat some of the food, |
| 0:35.9 | meet some of the people. |
| 0:37.2 | Yes, I love Nashville. |
| 0:38.4 | I'm going to be back. |
| 0:39.4 | I'm going to be back very soon, hopefully. |
| 0:41.0 | Also, got to record the first live WBD show yesterday, which was with Marty Bent and Preston Pish, |
| 0:47.0 | which was super cool. It was a great venue. The team did a great job putting it together and thank you to everyone who came. |
| 0:52.0 | Hopefully I'm going to do another one of those soon. |
| 0:54.8 | Anyway, welcome to the What Bitcoin did podcast which is brought to you by Gemini, the only place I'm using for buying |
| 1:00.4 | Bitcoin. I'm your host Peter McCormack and today I have an interview with |
| 1:03.5 | Lane Retic to discuss why he quit the Ethereum Foundation. But before that I do have a |
| 1:08.5 | message from my show sponsors and first up today we'll be talking about compass mining who are my newest sponsor but they're not just a sponsor I'm also a customer of theirs and I am now back and mining Bitcoin and in the first 44 days of mining I've mined 0.41 Bitcoin which is worth over 6,600 now with |
| 1:26.8 | the little price a spurt this morning with Bitcoin Moaning so it's good to be |
| 1:30.4 | back mining and I really love these guys. Compass are amazing. |
| 1:33.1 | They've made mining accessible to everyone and as a Bitcoiner |
| 1:36.2 | I'm happy myself to be supporting the decentralized growth of the hash rate. |
... |
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