Conversation with Tim Beiko, leader of Ethereum merger: Be the shaper of history
Original compilation: Kxp, Rhythm BlockBeats
Original compilation: Kxp, Rhythm BlockBeats
Tim Beiko is one of the well-known figures in the Ethereum Foundation, and his articles and Ethereum-related content updates have been forwarded many times by major financial news organizations.
Since 2018, he has worked full-time at Ethereum. He has been working at Joseph Lubin's ConsenSys before assuming the Ethereum Foundation in 2021.
As one of the leaders responsible for protocol upgrades and developer meetings, Tim is currently preparing for 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's mainstream adoption, his biggest regret in Crypto, and what it's like to work with Vitalik Buterin.
andr/Ethereum、r/ethStakerandr/CryptoCurrencyIs there any question you want to ask, and selected some good questions from it, waiting for Tim to answer it for us.
Tim, before we get down to business, can you briefly introduce yourself to us? Where does your motivation to work come from?
Tim：“The thing that excites me most is leading a project from the research stage to the actual development stage, that is, the completion of the entire R&D process. Ethereum is committed to developing cross-disciplinary innovation and incorporating it into the core roadmap. So for people like me For people like that, Ethereum couldn’t be better. I’ve also learned a lot from the people I’ve worked with, and it’s been a lot of fun hanging out with these great people.”
How did you choose to devote yourself to Crypto, and what process did you go through?
Tim：“I first heard about Crypto from a friend who always liked weird schemes. In 2014, he shared two of them with me. The first was buying Iraqi dinars on eBay because of its Coin prices 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. Although it all sounded far-fetched at the time, Bitcoin is much easier logically, so I This direction was chosen.
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 the two chains of ETH and ETC, and all this happened in the first month of my purchase of 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 the current projects failed, Ethereum would 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 mostly dealing with incidents. At first, as a person who is willing to take the initiative, I didn’t feel comfortable. But when I saw Vitalik doing the same on Twitter, I let it go.
Generally speaking, I will check the latest news published by various platforms 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 hottest questions on Reddit is - what makes you want to stay on Ethereum now that you're paid more for any DeFi project you work on?
Tim：“For now, working on Ethereum is the best value I can get. I believe that Ethereum has the potential to be one of the most influential technologies in the world for decades to come, so I would love to be a part of that history.” At the same time, when I think that Ethereum may have better development in the future, I even feel a little bit of chagrin, which is relieved every time 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 will think 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-brained things like this on Ethereum, but it still takes a lot of work to go from theory to prototype to secure implementation and deployment on the Ethereum mainnet. I really enjoy such a process. "
As weird as it sounds, a lot of people wonder 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 do you have the option to get paid in ETH, they even added L2 payments recently.”
What is your proudest accomplishment while working on Ethereum?
Tim：“So far, that’s definitely helping to rebuild EIP-1559 and get it deployed to mainnet. But the merger is probably more important than that, though.”
Is there anything interesting about Ethereum that we don't know yet?
Tim：“We are writing an executable specification for the execution layer (EL) of Ethereum. Currently, Ethereum’s specification is still in a bad state: at the execution layer, it is actually the "yellow paper and the latest forked EIP"; and at the consensus layer (CL), which is a single executable specification. So, on the EL side, we have the readable EIP, but an unrelated (mathematically) specification; A modification was made and a PR describing it.
My hope is that with an executable specification for EL, we can move to a simpler system and use an EIP to describe changes in the language and then link it 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. "
In your opinion, what would Ethereum's "mass adoption" look like?
Tim：“I’m not sure how different it will be from today, maybe it will be bigger. We have working applications, incrementally improving UX, general awareness of Ethereum/blockchain, but it’s all a bit Early, and too expensive. I think the point is that we should build a narrative around Ethereum’s culture, permissionlessness, and decentralization that will persist even as we expand beyond native Crypto.”
Do you think blockchain should be both centralized and decentralized?
Tim：“To a certain extent, yes, because there are some 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 centralized institutions .The example of PoW can illustrate: Although it is very difficult to produce blocks on Ethereum, it is easy to verify that a block is valid. This is why you want a large number of non-validating nodes on the network: even if they cannot create blocks, They can also flag malicious blocks being created and stop it from spreading across the network.
There are still centralized institutions 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 the PoS merger, what will be the next focus (besides stake withdrawal and sharding)?
Tim:"These two are already quite important, in addition there may be two hotspots, namely statelessness and the separation of the identities of proposers and builders.
The recent merger of the Kiln testnet is a huge milestone, can you explain what it means?
Tim:“Release testnet is to fix all kinds of problems early, before they appear on the mainnet. We run several testnets with higher complexity (and developmentnet, which is usually not advertised to the community), to ensure that the code works well in all cases. lower reliability.
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 have perfected the network, we will start upgrading Ethereum's existing public testnets (Goerli, Ropsten, Sepolia, etc.) and monitor them afterwards. After all testnets have been upgraded and stabilized, we will merge them on the mainnet. "
What was it like working with Vitalik?
Tim："The deepest impression he gave me was that besides Shuangshang Online, he could also distinguish the importance of various problems in a timely manner and start to solve the most urgent problems. You will always be amazed at his accurate judgment on problems. He There must have been a lot of hard work behind it.”
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 may 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.orgorethresear.chFind what you're interested in. Not only that, but the list of links recently posted by V God is also quite 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 types of podcasts, such as I have been listening toCold Takes。」
Have you ever bought any NFTs?
Tim："No, but someone gave me a Chromie Squiggle number 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：Original link
