The Failure of Ethereum Governance with Lane Rettig

 
 
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“Anytime you have a centralisation of power and wealth and influence in the hands of a small number of people…it’s so easy to delude yourself either as an individual or as an organization into thinking, just a few more years.”
— Lane Rettig

SHOW DESCRIPTION

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.

TIMESTAMPS

00:05:23: Introductions
00:12:13: Different perspectives
00:16:14: Ethereum projects
00:18:30: NFTs
00:22:49: DAOs and The Dao hack
00:30:54: Forking Ethereum
00:34:42: The Ethereum Foundation
00:39:28: If Ethereum were a company…
00:45:18: Where it went wrong
00:49:42: Lane's tweet and the subsequent backlash
00:57:54: Ethereum governance and the Tyranny of Structurelessness
01:09:39: Why the governance failed
01:12:34: Ethics, decisions and accountability
01:25:04: The Ethereum monetary policy and conflicts of interest
01:30:11: The difficulty bomb mechanism
01:34:35: Incentives and influence
01:40:48: Ethereum governance needs to be removed and rethought
01:46:23: Credible commitments
01:48:39: Naivety
01:51:38: Spacemesh
01:54:18: Eth2
01:59:33: Sacrificing decentralisation
02:03:15: Stop the vitriol
02:09:17: Final comments

 

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SHOW NOTES

Connect with Lane:

Mentioned in the interview:

Other Relevant WBD Podcasts:

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