Josh Stark: the Ethereum Foundation & Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains

Into the Bytecode

Here is my conversation with Josh Stark.

Josh has a long history in the Ethereum ecosystem going back to the early days of the community. He cofounded one of the first L2 scaling protocols with Counterfactual. He also cofounded ETHGlobal which is a much-loved series of hackathons/events that brings the community together and which acts as an entry point into the ecosystem for many people. And nowadays and most relevant to our conversation, he works in a leadership capacity at the Ethereum Foundation.

In this conversation, we talked about two topics: one being the Ethereum Foundation, and two being the question of why blockchain is matter — this being something that Josh has spent a lot of time thinking about and which he's written about in a long form piece titled Atoms Institutions Blockchains.

Timestamps:

3:50 subtraction

7:22 creating a self-sufficient crypto ecosystem

12:33 the property of ‘hardness’ for blockchains

17:47 understanding decentralization

23:11 Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains

26:00 blind men and an elephant

33:06 our civilization’s infrastructure

43:33 digitally-native hardness

59:38 how the EF operates

1:06:21 challenges with decentralized coordination

1:12:08 infinite players have nothing but their names

Mentioned in the show:

Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains: https://stark.mirror.xyz/n2UpRqwdf7yjuiPKVICPpGoUNeDhlWxGqjulrlpyYi0