The Unified Architecture of Ethereum | DH + RSA

Today we have a bankless take talking about David's recent article, The Unified Architecture for Ethereum. Where does Ethereum fit in the world of many chains? We got Bitcoin over there, we got Solana, we got Celestia, we've got other layer twos. What is Ethereum's future there? Also, what functional escape velocity means and why it's important? And finally,

David's conclusion. Eventually, everything becomes a branch on Ethereum's tree. That's what he says in the article. It's safe to say today's episode, I think, David, it's gonna be uh a bullish Ethereum episode, but I would say, at least from the the tone and tenor of the article, it also acknowledges the design choices of other chains and the spaces that they have carved out and will continue to occupy. I don't know. Would you say this is an ETH Maxi episode, David?

Uh, I think you can see many things in this article. I think somebody else could rewrite this article from a perspective of their particular chain.

Uh and so it's it's one part like, hey, here's how that I've come to the conclusion that I've come to about Ethereum. Uh, but the parts of this article are universal. Uh so we can always place chains in relations to other chains on a particular axis. Uh, and then I've also proposed the uh an axis for like kind of understanding uh the where chains kind of fit in relation to others. Uh I'll talk about like why I wrote this uh article and what listeners I think can get out of it in a second. But first,

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Why'd you write this article, David?

Yeah. So uh I th I've had this article like in my brain for like almost two years now. Uh and it is kind of carrying forward a very early conversation, probably the earliest big conversation in the crypto space that I think really ever emerged, which is the Bitcoin block size wars. Uh Bitcoin block size wars were just the wars were just concluding as I was getting into crypto and some of the fallout was starting to happen. This is uh right when Bitcoin Cash started to become a thing. It's right when uh the the the Bitcoin camp divided into two.

Based off of philosophical differences. And I think that a lot of people coming into crypto in modern times

don't really have this lesson of like the Bitcoin block size wars and what it means for crypto. It's kind of something that this weird thing in history,

but I think it's actually much more emblematic of a lot of the tribes that we've seen today. Like Bitcoin split into two tribes based off of philosophical differences.

Hmm.

Now in crypto, we have

like a plethora of tribes. We probably have too many tribes. Each one of these tribes believes something, some philosophical truth about the design construction of chains. And so I kind of attempt to define the landscape of tribes based off of what was one of the original like cellular divisions of the Bitcoin camp. One going to the small block camp, one going to the big uh big block camp. And then I also kind of explain the grand unified theory of uh design architecture for blockchains. It's like an allusion to that whole like grand unified theory of everything in physics, but for design architecture, I explain like why Ethereum occupies this particular spot in this trade off landscape that tries to maximize for everything and incorporates everything, which is why you get the tagline eventually everything becomes a branch on Ethereum's tree.

Uh so that that was the motivation here.

Well, let's get to it. Uh, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. All right, David, let's start here. We got to go back all the way to 2015 through 2017 when something called the Bitcoin block size wars was going on. These were formative days for me in crypto, uh, as for you. But this was a debate that was really like occupying all of the mind space, all of the mind share of crypto, I would say for like a good 12 to 18 months at least. Take us back there and uh tell us what that was. Give us the context.

Yeah. Interestingly, I think my f the first ever podcast I ever listened to in the crypto space was Laura Shin moderating a debate between a big blocker and a small blocker.

And I I was like,

somebody tell me how a blockchain works.

And there was- You didn't understand

either. I did not understand a damn thing that was going on. That was like my first introduction.

Um and so like

Let me ask you when you first heard that on like uh unadulterated like virgin ears, uh, whose side were you on? Were you like?

I was too I was too early for any of that. I was I was trying to understand anything. Like the words were not going into the brain.

Uh it didn't did not compute. Did not compute.

Do you do you know whose side I was I was probably default on or more receptive to?

I'm gonna guess.

Go.

You're you were a big blocker.

Yeah. It just sounded like I was like, big blocks. Yeah, like why have small blocks when you can have big blocks? It's just like

it and and the this was Bitcoin Cash, who had sort of the argument for for big blocks, and that's what that tribe and that fork sort of became. But it was just they're they're like, we can do so much more with block space if only we had more block space.

Yeah.

And so it seemed like

More block space.

Yeah, it seemed like there was a like a tribe of like old grandpa Bitcoin people,

uh, you know, curmudgeons that were just like shaking their canes and saying, no, we want small blocks. That was my default, like no knowledge, sort of uh I'm just hearing for this first for the first time, quick judgment. I quickly refined my views after learning a bit more about it, but that was my immediate reaction.

I think that was my introduction to the space as well. Arguing with my my first podcast co-host, who's a big Bitcoiner, and I came into the space and just like immediately identified with Ethereum. My arguments to him were like very big blocker arguments.

And so like maybe we can go into and define like big blockers and small blockers because like a lot of people's arguments about how you should build crypto or what crypto should look like can be characterized as like a big blocker or a small blocker argument.

Uh and so big blockers in the Bitcoin space uh advocated for this this basically was a debate of like how do we scale Bitcoin? Bitcoin is this thing now in 2015. In the future, we want it to support the entire globe. And why?

Because gas fees on Bitcoin were getting really expensive. Like transaction fees were getting expensive at this time, and people were angry about it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So famously, there was always this like one sat, uh one sat per byte or like the lowest possible fee for Bitcoin blocks, basically free.

Uh and then in 2015, 2016, they started to creep up. And then all of a sudden people are like, oh, like, how are we going to scale Bitcoin? Like, how are we going to take the world and put it on top of Bitcoin? How do we scale the network?

And so two philosophical debates forked in the Bitcoin culture to become the big blockers and the small blockers. So the big blockers advocated for just increasing the raw size of Bitcoin blocks from one megabyte to eight megabytes, allowing for like theoretically eight times more transactions, which would lower transaction costs. Small blockers advocated for keeping the block size the same.

And argued that increasing the block size would compromise Bitcoin's decentralization. Because if you make blocks bit bigger, you make blocks harder to verify, which is a core principle of blockchains, is that the blockchain should be trivial to verify for users. Users need to be as sovereign as anyone else in the system.

And when you increase the scope of the complexity of the layer one, then you actually uh make it more difficult for the long tail of humanity, the long tail people, to partake in the validation of the Bitcoin system.

Well, let's let's define what that means when you say users, right? Because users cast a very wide net. You could be a Bitcoin user by just holding Bitcoin. You could even be a Bitcoin user in a way by holding Bitcoin on the exchange, right? That's not like the deepest use case, but like just holding Bitcoin yourself, self custody keys. That makes you a Bitcoin user. I would certainly argue that. What you're talking about is um a more advanced type of user.

Who is uh not only holding Bitcoin, but also running a Bitcoin node to validate the transactions from the miners. All the proof of work miners, they put out blocks. This gives uh somebody who wants to choose to run the Bitcoin soft software the ability to validate that those uh transactions are in effect, you know, correct. So it is a user, but it's a slightly more advanced user because it's a user that's actually running Bitcoin software

Yeah, I would I would uh contend with one nuance of that, which is that you say like slightly more advanced user. And a big blocker would philosophy would actually make that like a a much more advanced user, where a small block philosophy would be like, well, no, actually, that same user that's holding BTC on Binance or Coinbase,

they could become the same user that's verifying uh the actual layer one because it's not that hard to do.

because the node requirements are light. You can run

The node requirements are like therefore the hardware uh requirements are light. So your

shitty PC from 1992.

Can actually become a Bitcoin node.

Oh wow. You think so? 1992?

I don't know. I just made that up. But the point is, is like if you desire to, if you are merely a Bitcoin holder,

but you also desire to become a validator of the network, which is different than Ethereum validator, validator is just processing the Bitcoin transactions self sovereignly and verifying them.

Verifying.

That's not a complex thing to do. And you could become that person because it's trivial to do.

Yeah, you're democratizing that, right? Whereas the the big block path where it eventually leads, eventually, is no one can run a node unless you have like state of the art

uh compute. And maybe the end of that is like you're in a data center somewhere. And so you, you know, no normal person is able to actually validate the blocks. That's where big blockers kind of end up if they continue to, you know, 8x block size.

Right. And so the small blockers would also point to the big blocker argument, saying, like, if you just raise the block size of Bitcoin from one to eight and allow for eight times more capacity, that's like still not anywhere close to enough. Like we eventually need infinity transactions if in order to scale this to the globe. And so small blockers advocated for a different scaling strategy. They called this alternative path segwit for segregated witness, which is basically a mechanism for.