Geth AMA

I'm Matt, I go by Light Clients, I am a member of the Geth team for the past few years, and I think that's all I'll say. I'm Guillaume, also a member of the Geth team for the past few years. Oh yeah? Maybe, who knows? I'm Marius, I'm very surprising also a member of the Geth team, otherwise I wouldn't be sitting up here.

And I've been also with the team for, I think, five years now? Hey, I'm Jared, I've been with the team since 2021. Let's get some questions going. Okay, so one of the questions that has been voted the most has been, if you couldn't work on Ethereum, what would you work on? Yeah, I don't know.

We don't really know, honestly. Is it possible to put the questions on the screen? I mean, we also have to just answer the current question. It doesn't help us to check the other questions, because we have to answer them. Or you can start.

I actually really like fuzzing and testing. So I always had this idea of doing like a company that does fuzzing for other projects. So that is something that I would probably work on. I would be building blimps. Not even a joke.

I would probably work on Bitcoin. Yeah, for myself, I don't really know. I think I would just have a job at a startup or something if it wasn't this. Yeah, likewise, I don't really know, but I definitely want to stay in the space. I think all of us would probably.

We would prefer to. We would prefer not to. Okay, okay. Some of the next questions here in this list. What are your thoughts on wrath?

Come on. We need to answer your question, so we should just answer your question. No, no, no, it's okay. I mean, that's not the top one. Oh.

How do you like working with Tomasz? Oh, that is a good one. Yeah. No, I mean, so seriously, we have been getting accustomed to the Tomasz experience for the last couple of weeks, and it's an interesting thing. Like, he is bringing a very new dynamic to the Ethereum foundation, I have to say, and it's good and bad.

So, I mean, it's not, I mean, I don't want to say it's bad. I mean, sorry. No, I mean, ah, damn it. I'm too honest. No, I mean, it is a big shift, I have to say.

Like, he is bringing this energy where, like, you know, we are laser focused on, you know, like the immediate goals and also, like, the very big goals, and I think this focus was maybe not there before as much, you know, and so he's honestly bringing this. And at the same time, that is, I guess, the good part. And like, also, the bad part is maybe that, like, with all the recent reorganization, it's hard to say, like, how much of this can be attributed to him, but specifically, but it's like, also, just all of these changes, we are currently still kind of processing all of this, and it's very, yeah, it's not all, like, good feeling. Yeah, I mean, maybe just to add on, I think it's a little too early to know what really the outcome of this transition is going to be. Like, a lot of things have happened in the past few months, and I personally am excited about change.

I think that, like, for a while, we, you know, for the past couple of years, it felt like we were sort of stuck maybe in some sort of rut, and now I appreciate that there is some vision and some ambition in what we're going to be doing with the Ethereum protocol. Like, vision and ambition that wasn't, it wasn't as, you know, quite there or communicated as clearly, you know, to the community. And I think, like, he is bringing a lot of that, and he's trying to, like, mechanize that across the Ethereum Foundation. Again, like, this, you know, he's been officially with the Ethereum Foundation for two and a half months. It's very early in his tenure.

We'll have to see what the next, like, six months, or the year after that, to really be able to answer how we like working for Tomasz. I think we also, like, we worked with him before in a different context, right? Like, he was a, he was a core dev, he was a client dev before. He, like, really built up Nevermind, and I actually really liked working with him back then. So, I haven't had much contact with him since he joined DEF, but I really liked, back in the day, working with him on the, on the engineering problems, and I hope that we will, we will have a maybe more, more engineering-focused organization going forward.

Yeah, he's, he's questioning a lot of things, which is a good thing. It's also fairly uncomfortable one, but, yeah, we, like, like other said, we are gonna have to wait a little bit to figure out if, if this is what we need, or whatever happens. I guess not really a comment on Tomasz specifically, but I think I'm excited to see what this new laser-eyed focus on accelerating scaling brings, and I think that if we can push that along more quickly, then his, his entry into DEF will be a good thing. Next question. Okay, and remember when you use the mic, add it horizontally.

Next most unvoted question as we're continuing this. Do you think there would be benefit to spinning out of DEF and become a grant-seeking organization, I guess? So, I can answer that one. We have discussed the spin-off question many times over the years, but we always end in the conclusion that specifically for GEF, it makes no sense. GEF itself will never be profitable in any way.

Like, it's not a, it's more like this type of project where we, in order to be fully committed to just the Ethereum protocol, we have to be supported by an organization. And at the same time, we are super deeply integrated into the Ethereum foundation, its structures, and also the people there. So, I think, I would say a lot of the value of GEF within DEF is just this integration, us like knowing everyone, having all these ties, having all these projects within the EF with other teams and so on. And if we would leave the EF behind and we would just focus on GEF, it would be a big change. But I think it would also, we would, a lot of the value that we actually bring to the world would be lost by this transition.

So, that's why we think the spin-out makes no sense. Yes, as Felix said, we have debated this over and over, over the years. There might be some benefits. We might, I don't know, be more independent, but the drawbacks definitely outweigh, for us, outweigh the benefits that we would have from spinning out. So, and I think that the other thing that is like, we're not only maintaining GEF, right?

We're also, we feel very responsible for the protocol itself. We feel very responsible for, like, the testing, the standardization of processes, like the APIs, and all of these things would be things that would if we were becoming a for-profit company. And I don't think that would be to the benefit of Ethereum. And our biggest goal is to work on Ethereum and to maintain cool software. And I think this structure that we have right now is the best way that we can achieve our goals.

So, I don't see a point in changing that. Anyone else have more than? Yeah, we need to kind of go through the questions a bit quicker, I think. I'll just switch the mics. Okay.

So, let's just go to the next. Next question. What are your thoughts on REF? They added, why do you prefer it to GEF, but it doesn't make sense. So, just what are your thoughts on REF?

I think it's a trick question. Yeah. They're going to get it. Answer a real question. The honest answer.

Um, yeah, no, I love it. It's a really nice heater for my, like, I run it on my nock and it really heats my office very nice. And also, the fan spins really, really quick, so I really enjoy the background music. And also, it's a great test for my internet connection, because every time I compile it, it downloads the entire internet. Um, yeah.

Do you actually run REF? Yeah. So do I. In my backup PC. Oh, okay, right.

Backup. I mean, REF is definitely like a newcomer to the execution client space. And I mean, we always find it quite exciting to work with newer clients, because they do bring some new ideas. In the case of REF, um, yeah, I mean, they have a very different focus. Again, it's a very performance-oriented focus, as we are used to from the Rust programmers.

They love to optimize. And, um, it's, um, it's great. No, I mean, we very much enjoy talking to them. And, um, yeah, we've been sharing knowledge and there are no negative feelings towards REF from the guest side. I don't really know how they see us.

I guess they answer this differently. I mean, I think now they see us a bit more, with more animosity, I would say. Oh, yeah. But, I mean, after what I said. But, uh, but it's, uh, no, it's a very strong team, for sure.

Anybody else have something? Can I go to the next question? I think one aspect of REF that's really neat is their close connection with Foundry and a lot of the dev tooling aspects. I think that's one thing that fundamentally a lot of the client teams have always been kind of separate from. And the separation just grows with time.

Like at one point, GoEthereum was much closer to what was happening with developer tooling. And now there's just so much going on with their protocol. There's only so many hours in the day for us to see all those things. But because they have that very close proximity, they are able to bring a lot of the feedback that exists from developers to all core devs. And so just that aspect of REF has been awesome.

Like when we have the cross-client discussions, they always come with these suggestions saying, yeah, we know that there are these users doing this type of operation, for example, very often or so. And then this is something that we might not necessarily always know. And they have this because they have a lot of users of their tools reporting certain things and so on. So it benefits us, actually. Okay.

I'm going to combine two questions. There's something about top three engineering problems and then also about technical depth. So maybe could you guys go on those? What kind of top engineering problems are there still left with a guess, especially in relation to technical depth? It's kind of weird to combine these, I would say.

We can also start with one of them. We can just riff on the general area, I guess. Just trying to go fast as we have. Yeah. Okay.

So I mean, technical depth, what are you even talking about? I think that's another word for the Ethereum protocol. Yeah. We just heard it from Justin Drake. Basically, all of Geth is technical depth.

Like there's no single part of it that, you know, it is not. Actually, I think he meant all of Ethereum. Yeah. Okay. When it concerns us, it basically means Geth.

No, I mean, I guess when it comes to technical depth, then one thing to realize is GoEthereum has a kind of big API surface. And nowadays, because since the beginning of this year, we have had a bit of a pivot, and we now care a lot also about the Layer 2 forks of Geth, for example. And this increases our API surface even more, because effectively, all of the core of Geth is now kind of like has to be maintained with the eyes of someone else having to work around the changes that we make and so on. So we have a lot of difficulty trying to keep certain parts stable and not changing them so that other people's projects are not broken. And I would say that if we are planning to make certain changes to very core APIs, it's a challenge, because we have to maintain the backwards compatibility.

We have to really think through what is the longevity of this interface and things like that. And yeah, so there are some parts that we maintain where we think if we could do it again, we'd do it totally different, but everyone depends on it now. So we will not change it. In general, we've been pretty good at just deleting functionality that isn't used anymore, I would say. And I mean, some of this stuff is also like we're kind of on the fence about.

So for example, Geth still has a library that can talk to hardware wallets, for example. But obviously, nobody's going to be using Geth for their hardware wallet transacting. I mean, there are some projects using this as a Go library, but it's like one of these things where we've been thinking this whole account management direction is something we would probably just delete if we could. But at the same time, it doesn't cost us too much to have it. So we're just like, yeah.

You guys also want to chime in on this? I could speak on the top three engineering problems with Geth. Like I also think that we don't have that much tech debt in Geth. The only thing that we still not have is the small archive node, but that's coming very soon. As we probably said like two the legacy archive node, we kind of consider it to be a bit like this.

It's all like we have two big modes of storing a state. We have the path-based state and the hash-based state. And the hash-based stuff is like we want to remove that, but it is very hard to remove. This week, we learned about three more projects that heavily depend on this mode of storage, for example. So yeah, some stuff would be great if we could remove it, but it's dependent on.

Yeah. One thing I think REST, by the way, does very well, but for us, it's perfectible. It's the modularity. Like Geth is just a big chunk and extracting stuff is really hard. So that would be one thing.

And technical depth, the genesis code, I would totally get rid of that. The other question was top three things that we want to improve or something. Top three things that are problems in Geth, I think the biggest problem is state. Like we don't know. The Ethereum protocol itself has no real answer to what are we doing with the state.

Yes, for most of the users, it will be solved by statelessness, but there will be the need to be these users that just have the complete state and have the access to the state and can provide proof of the state in order for live clients to work properly. So I think that is something that is more on the medium to long-term roadmap where we see we need to invest much more resources to understand the problem, to see if we can find good solutions to manage the ever-growing state of Ethereum. Anybody feel more to add? No, I think we should go to the next. So now I'll give you a choice.

We can do the Peter thing. Come on. It's okay. Okay. Can you also, because this is ambiguous, can you share Peter's frustrations and can you also explain what you think his frustrations might be?

Yeah. I guess this is one of the main reasons people came here to hear about the whole Peter situation. So yeah, it's fine. I mean, this is good. Peter, as many of you guys know, Peter went on a sabbatical at the end of last year and then up until basically now.

Like he hasn't been back. It's a complicated relationship, I have to say. So Peter was always frustrated with EF and specifically was frustrated with processes at the EF and management at the EF. And yes, we have at times felt equally angry about the EF processes. It's not been an easy ride.

How he deals with that is a bit of a different thing. So he is famously very active on Twitter and can be very toxic even. And this toxicity has led to the current situation where basically it's not really possible for the EF to work with Peter because of the way he has been behaving socially. We value his technical contributions and we would love for him to be back at the EF contributing in a technical way, but it is very difficult for us to deal with his behavior, I would say. And some of the latest frustrations that he has been sharing, I personally would like to say that I have researched these claims that he has been making the last couple of days over and over.

So I do not share the sentiment of these claims at all. The EF does not want to remove the guest team. The EF does not somehow think we are worthless or whatever. And the EF has also not been trying to create a secret second guest team that could somehow internally replace us. These things have not transpired in the way that he has been portraying.

I hope this answers your questions. So, like me personally, I do share some of Peter's frustrations about the processes as they have been in the past. Like everyone knows there was the idea of subtraction and teams were getting removed from the EF. And there were plans for guests to be also spun out of the EF. And we had a lot of discussions about it.

And in the end, both we and the leadership team at the Ethereum Foundation came to the conclusion that it does not make sense at this point for the guest team to leave the EF. And yeah, it was like at the time we were kind of, I was also kind of like miffed about it. But I do not think we should dwell on these issues that, like for me, I feel like they are in the past now. We have a new management team. We have more direction.

We get more. We hope that in the future the EF will provide more direct feedback. And I do not know. Yeah. My answer to the question, I have shared some of his frustrations in the past.

But as Felix already said, I do not think that Twitter is the right place to make room of those frustrations. And to be clear, Peter has held the team together for the longest time. He has been the one dealing with, let us say, leadership trying to find its way. And yeah, clearly, we do share at least some of Peter's frustrations, like the exact accusation. Well, okay.

For example, I am not in a place to verify all of them. Yeah. We just appreciate Peter. I think that should be the math. All right.

We have a few minutes left. One or two minutes. Yeah, we can. Let us do. Would you still work on Geth if your pay was cut 50 percent?

Yeah. I have to say, this question is not the first time we received this question. I think something that you need to realize when working with Tomasz is he states a lot of very provocative questions, like, what if we fired this team? What if we doubled the salaries of this team? And so I think he is questioning a bunch of – he is trying to question the common wisdom of the EF.

And so I do not really see this question of what would happen to the Geth team if the salary was cut by 50 percent as a real thing that he wants to do. It is just a hypothetical that he throws out there, and he expects to be pushed back on this point. Yeah. To that question, I would say yes at optimism. Yeah.

I think that is the thing for us. We can probably go into a lot of companies in the probably get much more, but we feel that Ethereum is our mission, and Geth is for now the best place to capitalize on that mission and to work on that mission. But I think we all share if we feel not appreciated by the Ethereum Foundation, then maybe it would be time to move on. But I think right now that is not the case. And so we are staying, and we love to work on Geth, and we also love that Geth is the most forked client in the ecosystem.

We especially love that part. Thank you, guys. Let's give a round of applause for them.