Nick Szabo  🔑

This was the first call that was intentionally run under the Chatham House rule. No recording, no livestreaming, and we will publish unattributed notes shortly. On balance I always want more transparency but several ppl on the call said they felt freer to speak candidly.

We should stop suggesting that Eth 1.x is a monolithic roadmap, which it is not, and each proposal should be evaluated independently: state pruning, Ewasm, storage rent. We need to kill the narrative that "there is a massive Ethereum upgrade coming in June."

Rather, these initiatives will each be phased (e.g. @realLedgerwatch's rent proposal has six phases) and, while the June target is somewhat arbitrary, we do want a sense of urgency. We will meet in January and discuss dates again at that point, but I'm all for deadlines.

We had *very* in-depth, productive dialog and debate about each proposal. Looking forward to sharing the notes shortly and dissecting and discussing them with the community on @EthMagicians forum.

There was an impassioned plea for us to save the network from unbounded state growth, especially in light of a likely ability to increase tx throughput by as much as 10x, which would cause it to explode and cause the network to shrink to a centralized core of nodes.

And one way to frame this is that, while rent is a stick that would have clear UX impacts, a ~10x increase in tx throughput is a carrot that's incredibly valuable, and is a tradeoff that the community may be willing to accept.

There are a *lot* of unsolved challenges around data availability, if we break the existing invariant (*not* specified in the yellow paper, however!) that all block headers, bodies, receipts, and logs are always available within the existing P2P network.

Finally, multiple folks brought up concerns about avoiding a technocratic decision-making process and ensuring that we have community buy-in before moving forward with any of of these proposals, esp. something as controversial as rent.