Ethereum’s Progression with Hudson Jameson | Layer Zero

welcome to layer zero player zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the ethereum community crypto is built by code but is composed by people and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell the cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it and layer zero focuses on the people behind the code because ethereum is people all the way down and it always has been today on layer zero i'm talking with hudson jameson and hudson is a perfect example of this intro of the show he got pulled in like so many of us do into ethereum

because he saw the vision for it but it's because he met the people and vibed with the people and in his words and many others felt like he found his tribe so he tells this story and we start at the very beginning in 2015 because hudson has been around ethereum for so long and we go up to where hudson is today and this is a story of the progression of the core developer and uh core developer community in ethereum the ef in ethereum the story of devcons uh the story of the dow hack the story of

the ico mania the 2018 to 2020 bear market the story of prague powell and just really how each one of these events have shaped the story and trajectory of the ethereum core devs the ethereum community and therefore ethereum at large hudson he's one of the corest ethereum community members that there ever is and he's seen it all and so he's one of the most apt people to tell the story of ethereum and how it's progressed along the way both from the perspectives of the community and also the perspective of the core depths hudson is a person that just exudes

ethereum values in ethereum ethos and so it's been a delight to have him on this podcast so i hope you enjoy this fantastic conversation with hudson jameson right after we get through some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible arbitrary is an ethereum layer 2 scaling solution that is going to completely change how we use defy and nfts some of the coolest new nft collections have chosen arbitrarily as their home while d5 protocols continue to see increased liquidity and usage you can now bridge straight into arbitrarily for more than 10 different exchanges including binance ftx kuobi and crypto.com once on arbitrary you'll

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finance bank list hey hudson what's up hey hi david how are you doing i'm doing absolutely fantastic how are you i'm doing pretty good pretty good we got all the av issues settled so i'm happy about that yeah to kick things off the podcast listeners won't get this one but i have the the guests with the most flowery vibrant tv shirt with the most flowery vibrant wallpaper in vancouver's history going on right now i i'm proud of that i'm proud of it you can thank my spouse lilith they uh bought me this shirt and bought the

wallpaper it was not me hudson uh a lot of early ethereum people and later at hearing people like myself definitely know who you are uh but can you just explain what your role okay how would you explain your perch in ethereum for people that are new to ethereum i would say that it was harder for me to answer this question last year because i was kind of like working so much i didn't have time to reflect but now i can say that i see

myself as a connector in the ecosystem someone who tries to bring good vibes and niceness and make sure that like we're not just gonna turn into awful toxic you know maxis that are gonna you know keep people out of the ecosystem uh and also keep us on track for the ethos of ethereum and how do you go about doing that that sounds hard lately i [ __ ] post a lot but i also just maintain presence in a lot of different uh chat rooms i have a lot of discussions i feel like i've

been told i'm one of the more social people at conferences and like online when i get into that mode so it's just basically keeping connections making sure um you know just kind of stay down to earth and talk to people about it and when did you get into a theory so i got into ethereum in 2014 to 2015. i was there for the pre-sale and i bought ether in the pre-sale but i didn't actually get heavily involved until uh i'd say early 2015 uh i was writing documentation for the homestead

uh hard fork uh as a volunteer and then i went to devcon1 and volunteered and from there joined the ethereum foundation what'd you do before before that i did a computer science degree um at the university of north texas in denton texas and then went on to work for a bank at first i was doing mainframe development but i was so annoying about what the promise blockchain brings that they eventually sent me to what they called the innovation lab to be the lead blockchain researcher in 2015 which was really weird for a bank

at the time but i got to look into all the really crappy solutions and scams people are coming up with uh to get kind of my um my grounding on blockchain in general can you put the listeners into the shoes of 2015 what was blockchain like back then what what what did crypto mean was crypto a word in 2015 um you know i'm trying to remember i think it was but it wasn't as widely used because there was still some like oh that's short for cryptography people you know right right right i would say

that back then there was a definitely a different feel about things a different flavor because um in 2015 there was a lot of bitcoin forks that were still trying to compete like everything was a bitcoin fork everything kind of had the same idea that bitcoin had uh and there was a big um push for finding a way for people to use cryptocurrency to pay for a cup of coffee which as you can probably see over time yeah that was the meme and now it's like very different both in bitcoin

and other places in the cryptocurrency space so yeah i wasn't around for the bitcoin fork and fair launch era but i've had it described to me as something very very similar to the food farm launch era on d5 during defy summer can you help like draw those comparisons for listeners who weren't around like and me yeah for sure no so like it it kind of was that way but i would say that um i think the biggest difference to me is that there was a much more diverse like

political and social leanings uh for the d5 food era where that didn't play as big of a factor as back then in the bitcoin you know fair launch era and stuff like that in 2015 and maybe around 2014 i i feel like it was more very heavily libertarian and like heavily that kind of dude and i say dude because there was like even less women than than there are now and stuff like that so it just had a different it had like a different feel and a different like it was very policy and libertarian focused

in my opinion and less about innovation and making really cool things whereas the d5 farm era was really exciting as well but it was like about making cool things and pushing the limits on innovation okay okay so the perhaps the word monoculture might be appropriate back then absolutely were were the bitcoin forks all that innovative like were they really all that different from each other how crazy did like the ambitions of these things go there were a few that stood out um and

the problem was the ones that stood out as you can see the people i feel like in crypto who are the most creative push innovation the hardest sometimes are more quiet or they're like less like out there and like really trying to show their product at first because they're just really interested in making cool [ __ ] so for instance name coin um i think sunny uh made the first proof-of-state coin back then around that time setting aggrowald from cosmos no a different sunny um i think they're annan it's just like

sunny 97 or something but they made they made um i can't not think of the name it was the first proof of state coin back then which was really crazy but like everyone was [ __ ] on it because it's not bitcoin it's not proof of work um and then you know there was a few other experiments that were pretty neat there was one that was um a coin that airdrop to like everyone in a country i think finland uh it was the first airdrop back then uh that ever happened and that was kind of a neat idea to play with the economics of an airdrop and you know giving people back like you know kind of

like a universal income in a way but through a one-time airdrop my take on that whole era of crypto was that a lot of the ideas that it brought are fundamental ideas of the crypto industry and zero of the projects that invented those ideas made it that's correct and i think there's a few reasons for that yes and the thing is like so the biggest one is colored coins and uh you know kind of the omni uh kind of layer of bitcoin which was kind of a

extracted you know smart contract layer in a way and colored coins were the first chance to do kind of erc 20 tokens but on bitcoin and like there was some interest in it for sure but like i i think it was more the team's execution of the idea like they weren't really marketers they were technology people like through and through i think that led to their downfall so now the need this really i guess at the end of the day highlights the the um position that marketing is a really big factor in projects if you don't have

marketing it's much harder to get your innovative idea out there and the sea of other stuff just like it was back then yeah we'll we'll turn to the ico media in a second which is where i kind of think marketing really started um for i would say for better or for worse but it was mainly for worse um but i kind of want to go through some of the uh ideas that came out during the fork and fair launch era that we know of today you already named one like the airdrop um namecoin is now instantiated in ens i

would say it's like that the what namecoin was was a blockchain that was a blockchain with like a name right was there like a currency of namecoin or like how did namecoin really work yeah so namepoint and actually funny enough it's still being developed there are releases every month or so there's like one guy doing it uh but um how namecoin worked was basically it was a separate blockchain that was uh a court of uh a code fork of bitcoin and you would get name coins instead of bitcoins and you could use you can mine namecoin to buy

name coin uh like domain addresses basically so i could buy hudson dot i think it was dot name i i mean i'm not i can't remember it's been too long but i actually did mine namecoin for a little bit um it was it was a long time ago like but uh it and i think i got like seven namecoin which is now literally almost worth nothing but uh yeah it was very creative and it did lay the groundwork for things like ens um

but i think that there were gonna be limitations just like as we've seen now any code i feel like that has forked bitcoin's code base now has limitations heading into programmability uh and that includes namecoin that includes zcash that includes litecoin everything like if you want programmability you're forced to do an l2 you can't do base layer as easily as you could right right right um was there any like philosophy on what the name coin asset would become

uh and like fitting that into the broader landscape of like all of these different blockchains are being built with each one a little bit more of a specific use case than bitcoins bitcoin being money name coin being question mark purecoin being question mark what was the philosophy of like what the role of each currency of the blockchain would would be in over the long term back then uh you know i think i think that that involves them like working together which i

didn't really see happening if i recall so blockchain interoperability yeah there wasn't there wasn't that cohesiveness and idea of blockchain interoperability at the time there wasn't cosmos there wasn't a vision of a network of blockchains so working with one of the blockchains didn't mean you were in competition but it's like i didn't see bitcoin people really clamoring to have like uh connections with name coins so i guess that's to say to answer your question there were people who used all the blockchains but it was kind of a wait and see who won out and then bitcoin

kind of won out right was there what was tribalism like back then the tribalism was mainly about people who were against private and enterprise blockchains and i guess that's kind of biased on my part because i worked in the enterprise blockchain space which is which then and now wasn't really that great not like enough there's bad people there's great people there but just enterprise blockchain's a hard sell so like there are people who are like to this day you can't have private

blockchains you can't have you know consortium blockchains those are stupid that's how that's where i saw it so i guess it's hard for me to say because i wasn't deep in the weeds on bitcoin development uh what the tribalism exactly was like there would sometimes be um some like some stuff where like uh someone would go crazy and a dev would say something absolutely ridiculous like luke jr saying something stupid and then like you know that would make news for a day and that's mostly what i remember interesting okay so i'm gonna go with

the tribalism was not nearly as present as it is in today's world i would say between blockchains correct absolutely right okay so there was no real like sense of like bitcoin maximalism right yeah because it was kind of the only one it was like the there was a leader there wasn't a competitor or anyone really trying to compete there were people that were trying to do things that bitcoin couldn't do like name coin and omni and stuff but and all in all they they would be aligned ethically politically etc with bitcoin for the

most part and the the launch of ethereum both has an idea before the actual blockchain got launched that was like bitcoin's first significant competitor right um because like ethereum as an idea was put out in 2014 and from my very loose understandings of the history back then like it offended a lot of bitcoiners back then and if you're telling me that um although there was no tribalism there was no real competition to bitcoin but then this ethereum yellow paper got released by vitalik and gavin wood and a

few others and then a lot of bitcoiners were like that's that's bad uh to me that's like is that is that the first indication of when this like tribalism part of crypto really got kicked off i'm trying to think back to the feelings around the time when the yellow paper and white paper came out because i remember reading the white paper and was blown away but also by that time oh you know what else that there was starting to actually be more competition to bitcoin at the time like maybe 2014 2015 like you were talking about i might have to take back my earlier

comments because i worked closely with darkcoin which was the one of the first privacy-based coins it's now called dash and they've kind of gone away from privacy a little bit but uh at the time i was working with them and they had their own unique like x11 mining protocol they were a brand new code base so they were starting to be those pop up and they were starting to go to battle with bitcoin for their lack of innovative features lack of privacy stuff like that i think ethereum's white and yellow paper coming out i think it didn't got i don't think it was taken

seriously for a while i think that like there were a few people who were really interested in it but like it was posted if you go back to the forum on bitcoin talk it was kind of treated the same way as like a bunch of projects that never really made it back then like quarkcoin and stuff that had their own consensus algorithm and new ideas and new code base where it was like what's this about like like i'll look into it but like this isn't gonna change the world like no one was saying this is changing the world until maybe 2015 when it launched interesting so like this is

like a little bit of a lesson in alpha like ethereum was just as like mixed in with all of the [ __ ] that never worked and went to zero as every other chain was back in 2014 2015 huh yeah exactly and i mean like the the marketing for ethereum back then was basically this guy named stefan twall and uh yeah and like even that and like that was good marketing from him but like everybody else who was made on the project like did not have the social skills or eq yet to like really bring

ethereum to the level it is now or do something like what eos and other ones did to really bring their project up at a marketing level that's respectable but when i hear that i'm like okay good because part of like the philosophy the in my philosophy of chains is that the innermost i always view blockchains as like a set of concentric circles and the innermost circle needs to be these like die hard free open source software developer maxies that don't care about the money that don't care about the marketing that are probably like uh too

like just socially awkward to really unders like promote this thing in a chilly way and that keeps the vibe of the blockchain very pure would you agree absolutely yeah blockchains and their communities have have a heart and like if you don't have the social acuity to see that find someone who does and you can copy their trades because like that is really what makes a project like valuable uh and also like worthwhile so how did you stumble upon ethereum the ethereum white and yellow papers like what what was that first like an

introduction to you so i was working at usaa and um i had actually this was before usaa so i was i was working on dart coin stuff and i saw the white paper and so i participated in the pre-sale for aetherium and then i kind of forgot about it for a while like because i was getting like started at work working for usaa and i was reading about nick saba's like 1990s uh ideas around smart contracts which were like one of the first instances of a smart contract on a blockchain idea before blockchains were

even a thing and i think that that inspired me to look even deeper into ethereum and then when i became like the blockchain person at usaa ethereum was the clear winner in technology and innovation um in fact we had some internal hackathons at usca where me and a team of people used solidity smart contracts before ethereum was released like in 20 early 2015 i think or 20 late 2014. so you you're running into literally before

the blockchain was alive yeah i was writing on solidity with a few other people um it was like release candidate 6 i think which is like there was no documentation hardly there was like three videos on youtube of some randos like being like here's how to do solidity and they weren't even on the team uh because the team was working so hard but we tried it and i was like this works that's crazy this works um and so that's kind of what gave me hope because all the other enterprise blockchain people i talked to seemed to not know what they were doing the one exception i would say would be

heiress industries which is no longer around but they did turn into tendermint um so so the cosmos tendermint people some of them um kind of started with aeris industries connections and other stuff like that to do enterprise blockchain stuff with their uh pro with their software but uh yeah that's just kind of a little side piece that i got to talk to some really early like cosmos people that was exciting and then so you started tinkering with solidity right read the white paper read the yellow

paper got ethereum pilled uh not to put words in your mouth but yeah absolutely i would actually be at usa sorry for my uh old manager from usa but i would literally like sneak in working on on ethereum while i was at usca and then i'd work like a full day at usa come home and then ignore my family and friends and work six to eight hours on ethereum which i do not recommend um i think it contributed badly to my burnout later in life but uh i was that obsessed yes yeah yeah yeah certainly kind of par for the course for people that found and found

these things very very compelling uh so what did you do about that well how did you how did you scale that up i did a few different things um and this actually goes into what i usually so like i right now i'm doing a lot of things to help people um mainly on twitter who just dm me like hey how do i get into the industry how do i get a job with ethereum or with blockchain technology one of the things is just like be in chat rooms talk to people and volunteer so like i let up the homestead guide development i guess like

the um one of the only full guides on ethereum at the time uh in 2015 for a hard fork that was going to happen later and then i also um volunteered at devcon1 and i wasn't signed up to volunteer but i got there and it was pure chaos so i was just like hey i can help and i jump behind and i like did tickets and badges and then i did t-shirts and then i did like time keeping and then like three hours later i was like on the phone with the venue solving like structural problems with the venue and

i'm not even i don't even work for ethereum someone gave me a credit card and said we need these copies now go down the street to the to the copy store and make copies with my credit card i'm like ah okay so like i'm just running around doing all this stuff and i did a post-mortem uh privately for ming chan the executive director where i wrote like a five-page thing on what went right and wrong with the conference and uh after that she wanted to hire me so i got hired to do the future devcons and devops and community stuff well this is a great lesson of people get hired after they just do work for free and

prove their value for a lot of these communities uh the the early culture of ethereum i think is pretty interesting especially when like something like ethereum and bitcoin also as well especially in the early days before the culture is defined by the community the culture is defined by like the vision or the code and so like ethereum was defined by like a bunch of people who read the yellow and white papers and then like got compelled by the actual like ethereum itself rather than like

you know ryan john adams and david hoffman of bankless on youtube right like no it's actually like ethereum code that is really talking to these people and attracted a very specific set of you know early believers into this thing uh and that was who you were experiencing and meeting with at like devcon one and zero at one and like the early days with him culture can you just like for the listeners and and also for me just like what was ethereum culture way back when like what was it like what was it what did it mean to be an ethereum back then it was it was very interesting number

one i felt like i was like had found my tribe which i've heard from a lot of other people who join the ethereum ecosystem even today because there is this really cool thing and it wasn't you know maybe it wasn't as big back then but like you can cross like a lot like even if you have different political ideas than people you all kind of have the same ethos of having a decentralized censorship-resistant technology that it can be useful for everyone around the world that governments can't interfere with and so like that's something that brings a lot of people together and then after that there's this curiosity

especially if you're into technology or you're a technologist like doing development work or something that this technology is being built by people who kind of are like you i guess is the best way to put it like everyone there had like pie in the sky visions there was people early on talking about nfts and ercs and uh the eip uh repo got released during devcon1 which i ended up eventually being one of the main maintainers of um so like all these things coming together was like really crazy and on

top of that you had that combination with like reddit posters and somewhat twitter posters although less so than reddit at the time uh people like vlad zamfir where you'd read their stuff and then i got to devcon1 and i was like fangirling because i was like oh my god there's vlad and i got to talk to him and he was super nice and he actually ran out of fiat money and uh had like three or four bitcoin or something and was like hey can i trade you this bitcoin and you go to the atm and get me cash and i was like oh i'm doing a task for vlad and it was like i was just like so freaked out and i got to talk to like

uh yeah like alex van dysen was super nice the first person i met when i got there was piper mariam and i i was the first aetherian person he had met too so i'd gone to dinner with like piper and martin swinde well before they worked at the ethereum foundation and we were all just there like we we found each other we're here like we've talked online for months every day sometimes multiple hours a day and we're here so yeah it was just this excitement of finding your tribe finding uh people who really relate to your ideas and being excited about a common goal

i this is the same exact experience that i like communicate when i tell like my beginnings into ethereum like your devcon1 was my east denver 2017. uh just to have like a little bit more context on that like i was part of a a recreational soccer team with like some of my best friends growing up i was part of a fraternity in college i was part of all these like different like social groups but i never felt like 100 a part of these groups and then i go to dev uh east denver 2017

and i you know have like three days of conversations listen to the talks talk to strangers yeah like at the end of that weekend i'm like this is this is the 100 like alignment with this tribe this is my people this is my community and i even just after just like three days of this it was it was painfully obvious and it's just interesting to see like some of these like early relationships being formed just on just like a very just like a gut feeling of like this is the right thing for me uh and it's cool to see this like

same story repeated both in the early days the middle days and now like the later days where we are today like through and through absolutely and like i i see something that i don't see in other communities that i see in ethereum are people who are welcoming like welcoming and accepting of people who are neurodivergent and i don't mean like explicitly like oh poor soul more just like oh you're autistic hell yeah like you probably code better and like oh like you don't i know like i know you're talking to me and you're staring at the wall right now but i understand that and

i'm not gonna judge you for that like i would if you were at some kind of other thing right you know right like it's a lot easier to be weird in aetherium it's definitely true uh what what about um okay so that's like the kind of the community culture community vibe but like what about like actually getting [ __ ] done like you kind of talked about the chaos of like devcon one uh was can you talk about like that whole side of things yeah you mean at the time during devcon1 yeah and overall just in like the 2015

to like 2016 era of the of ethereum and that and they're like this the the chaos of like because there's so many like visionaries right everyone has these like utopian visions for what ethereum could be and then everyone forgets to like also file the paperwork and make structure and process and all that stuff there were dozens of people who would work more than over time to keep things together despite people getting in the way and when i say people getting in the way like even even people what's the best way to put this

there were forces that were going against ethereum at the time a lot of it was with the leadership of different organizations a lot of it was with developers being overly opinionated but throughout all that uh people just kept coding and kept making decisions and things like that i mean if we look back like some of the biggest things that i feel like just to get some spicy takes out there the biggest things that i think were forces going against ethereum were the like organization like

the ethereum foundation like leadership and organization structure has always been wonky i mean i has made it a lot better but at the time ming chan if anyone read loreshan's book you can just see how crazy it was and that was put that was causing a lot of friction with the operations and other non-technical people at the ethereum foundation luckily it didn't affect the technical side much and then on top of that while ethereum foundation's doing that you'd have like uh parody technologies that would apply friction and stuff like that after gavin left the ethereum

foundation to get their opinionated stuff across and then that would cause even more tension between groups and i only know this because um rather other than being in the ethereum foundation myself um i also led the core developer calls which meant that i had to be a kind of middle person between parody technologies romans java java java team uh and uh the geth team and the javascript team and everything else so like