Dialogue with Tim Beiko, the leader of the Ethereum merger: become a history shaper

Original title: ""It's Pretty Wild To Have The Opportunity To Shape The Future Of Finance.."Tim Beiko Talks About Life In The Ethereum Foundation & The Merge"

Original compilation: Kxp, Rhythm BlockBeats

Tim Beiko is One of the well-known figures of the Ethereum Foundation, his articles and Ethereum-related content updates have been reposted by major financial news organizations many times.

Since 2018, he has been working full-time at Ethereum. He has been working at Joseph Lubin's ConsenSys before taking over as the Ethereum Foundation in 2021.

As one of the leaders responsible for protocol upgrades and developer meetings, Tim is currently working hard on the Ethereum merger. According to the plan, the merger will take place this summer.

In this installment, I chat with Tim about the Ethereum merger, Ethereum mainstream adoption, his biggest regret in Crypto And topics like what it's like to work with Vitalik Buterin.

I also asked about r/Ethereum, Does r/ethStaker and r/CryptoCurrency have anything Questions to ask, and picked out some good ones, waiting for Tim to answer them for us.

Tim, before we get down to business, could you briefly introduce yourself? Where does your motivation to work come from?

Tim: "The thing that excites me the most is leading the project from the research stage to the actual development stage, That is, the entire R&D process is complete. Ethereum is working on developing cross-disciplinary innovations and incorporating them into the core roadmap. So for someone like me, Ethereum couldn't be better. I also started working with me I’ve learned a lot from people like me and it’s been a lot of fun spending time with these wonderful people.”

How did you choose to devote yourself to Crypto and what process did you go through?

Tim: "The first time I heard about Crypto was from a friend who always likes weird projects. In 2014, he and I shared two of them. The first was buying Iraqi Dinars on eBay as their price plummeted due to economic sanctions. Hope to sell them in the future when the US leaves Iraq and the value recovers. The second is Bitcoin Bitcoin. Although it all sounded far-fetched at the time, Bitcoin is much easier logically, so I chose this direction.

I first started paying attention to Ethereum a few years later when I learned about TheDAO. I contributed to this project, but then quickly lost a large amount of money to hacks, swinging between ETH and ETC chains, and all this happened in the first month I bought Ether. After that hack, I have been following the community, but still feel that Ethereum has a good chance of becoming a failed experiment. In late 2016-early 2017, I paid more attention to Ethereum as more projects started to reboot on Ethereum.

By the middle of 2017, it became clear to me that even if all current projects failed , Ethereum will not fail, so I started to study it in depth. Since I was not very willing to participate in any specific project at that time, I wanted to directly participate in the construction of the protocol, but I was neither an engineer nor a research institute, so it took me a while to find a suitable position for me. In 2018, ConsenSys hired me as a PM for their new mainnet client, Hyperledger Besu (then Pantheon). During my second or third week at work, I went to Devcon in Prague and have been working on Ethereum protocol development ever since. "

What are you currently responsible for at the Ethereum Foundation? Can you tell us about your day job?

Tim: "My job is mainly to respond to various incidents. At first, as someone who is willing to take the initiative , I didn't quite get used to it. But when I saw on Twitter that V God did the same, I was relieved.

Generally speaking, I will check the latest news released by each platform in the morning to see if there is any urgent matter that needs to be dealt with. If there are, then my job for the day is to deal with these emergencies; if not, I will reply to the messages sent by those overnight people in case they block me. After that, I also have a few meetings in the morning. When I am free, I have a lot of time to do "deep work" in the afternoon, and I can go to the gym in the evening. I also check some messages at night, but unless it's an emergency, I don't reply more than a few messages. "

One of the most popular questions on Reddit is - now you work for any DeFi project and you will be paid more , so what made you want to stay on Ethereum?

Tim: "For now, working for Ethereum can maximize my value. I believe that Ethereum may become the One of the most influential technologies in the world for ten years, so I would love to be the shaper of this history. At the same time, when I think that Ethereum may have a better development in the future, I even feel a little chagrin, and every This mood can be relieved when we have completed some constructive work.

EIP-1559 is what I think is the strongest example: if you explain how Ethereum works to people who don't know Ethereum, they It will feel that EIP-1559 exists by itself. In their view, it is normal that the basic fee will change with the transaction demand and can capture part of the transaction expenditure. In a sense, Ethereum would be fragmented without EIP-1559.

There are a lot of less mindful things like this on Ethereum, but want to start from A lot of work still needs to be done from theory to prototype, to security implementation, and to deploy on the Ethereum mainnet. I really enjoy such a process. "

As weird as it sounds, a lot of people want to know if you get paid for the work you do at the Ethereum Foundation ? If yes, is it paid in ETH?

Tim: "Of course, we are paid. Not only can you choose to get paid in ETH, they L2 payments have even been added recently.”

What is your proudest accomplishment while working on Ethereum?

Tim: "So far, that's definitely helping rebuild EIP-1559 and deploying it to mainnet. But, nevertheless, Mergers may be more important than that."

Is there anything interesting about Ethereum that we don't know yet?

Tim: "We are writing an executable specification for Ethereum's execution layer (EL). Currently, Ethereum's specification is still in poor shape: at the execution layer, it is effectively "the yellow paper and the latest forked EIP"; at the consensus layer (CL), it is a single executable specification. Therefore, on the EL side, we There is a readable EIP, but an irrelevant (mathematically) specification; on the CL side, we've only made changes to the code of the specification and have a PR describing it.

I hope that with the executable specification of EL we can move to a simpler system and use EIP to describe the language changes on , which are then linked to executable specifications on EL and CL. In this way, we get both an accessible repository of changes and EIP, and a clear implementation of the specification implementation, which is guaranteed to be always in sync with the mainnet in both EL and CL. "

What does "mass adoption" of Ethereum look like in your opinion ?

Tim: "I'm not sure how much different it will be from today, maybe it will be bigger. We have working applications, incrementally improving user experience, and general awareness of Ethereum/blockchain, but it's all a little early and the fees are too high. I think the point is that we should build around the culture of Ethereum, go Permission and decentralization unfold the narrative, and they will persist even as we expand beyond native Crypto.”

Do you think blockchain should be both centralized and decentralized?

Tim: "In a way, yes, because there are things that inherently lead to Centralization. Even so, I think we still need to maintain and clear checks and balances in the agreement to ensure the integrity of the centralized organization. The example of PoW can illustrate: Although it is very difficult to produce blocks on Ethereum, it is necessary to Verifying that a block is valid is trivial. That's why you want a large number of non-validating nodes on the network: even if they can't create a block, they can flag a malicious block being created and prevent it from propagating on the network.

Centralized institutions still exist in several areas, so I think we have to devise ways to keep them honest in the network. MEV is one example, and many of Ethereum's future roadmaps will focus on avoiding excessive centralization. "

After PoS is merged, what will be the next focus (besides stake withdrawal and sharding)?

Tim: "These two are already quite important, in addition there may be two hot spots, They are stateless and the identity separation of proposer and builder.

The recent merger of the Kiln testnet will be a huge milestone, can you explain what it means?

Tim: "The release of the testnet is to fix various problems early and prevent them from appearing on the mainnet. We Several high-complexity testnets (and devnets that are usually not advertised to the community) were run to ensure the reliability of the code in all cases.

Last December we launched Kintsugi, our first new public testnet. At that point, we expected the specification to be in good shape and started deploying it on the application. Before that, we found some issues on the network and got initial data points about the app working as expected.

We recently launched Kiln, our second public testnet, with some fixes. Now, we are looking at its implementation, application or tool level. Currently we have found some issues with our network implementation and are working on a fix. The community can try out the network and make sure their projects run on the merged Ethereum.

After we complete the network, we will start upgrading Ethereum's existing public testnets (Goerli, Ropsten, Sepolia, etc.) monitor. After all testnets have been upgraded and stabilized, we will merge them on the mainnet. "

How was it working with Vitalik?

Tim: "The deepest impression he gave me is that he can distinguish You can always be amazed at how well he judges the problems, and he must have put a lot of hard work behind the scenes."

If you were given a display card that the whole world could see, what would you write on it?

Tim: "I don't have a good idea for now, maybe I will put a picture of my dog."

Do you have any advice for people who want to get involved in Ethereum development?

Tim: "Ethereum is all-encompassing these days, so I might not have a good suggestion for Solidity/application development. In terms of protocol building, I suggest that they can be found in the Ethereum client Github repository, ethereum-magicians.org  or ethresear.ch to find the content you are interested in. Not only that, the list of links recently sent by V God is also It’s pretty instructive.”

Can you recommend some Crypto podcasts worth watching?

Tim: "I actually rarely listen to Crypto podcasts, because I pay attention to the latest developments in Crypto every day, but I often listen to some other type of podcasts, such as Cold Takes, which I’ve been listening to lately.”

Have you bought any NFTs?

Tim: "No, but someone gave me Chromie Squiggle #1559 and I love it."

Do you like Lamborghini or Ferrari?

Tim: "Tesla?"

What is the highest transaction fee you have ever paid?

Tim: "I probably don't want to talk about that."

So when does the merger start?

Tim: "Soon." 

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