Journalist to cover crypto fulltime. And is the author of tonights featured book. Joining laura in conversation is Christine Lee Christine Lee anchors and produces first mover at 9 am Eastern Standard Time in nyc every weekday live coin desk tvs flagship show and first look at the days Global Crypto news headlines. She also hosts all about bitcoin at 3pm Eastern Standard Time for markets analysis and all things. Btc coin desk is the leading news event and data provider for the blockchain. Digital assets industry previously christine worked at thomson reuters, bloomberg and propublica her research and writing on nuance abatement laws contributed to an investigative series that was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and led the new York City Council to pass sweeping changes to the law. You can follow her on twitter at christine news. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming laura and christine to the stage. Hi. I did such a pleasure and honor to be here with you all and to be a moderate for lauras and your new book. Ive got to say that ive been a fan of laura. Since you were forbes senior editor, yeah, and you all had all the you know, the big scoops in the crypto scene following followed by your hosting of the unchained podcast, which is still going strong and yeah, you know on my car rides to work, id always listen to you and to get the latest like updates and indepth knowledge on folks in the crypto space so seeing this book come out. I was very highly anticipating it. Thank you so much, and its a fantastic read. It really goes into death into aetherium and the egos the struggles of involved in making this historic crypto project. So very incredible work. Yeah. Thanks. I had a lot of fun writing it and reporting it. So maybe i just want to start off with kind of getting a sense of our audience. How many people here are new to crypto . Okay. So id say about half how about intermediate level . Okay. And in advance, you know, youre working on a crypto project youre developer. Okay . Okay, so see. Have beginners a quarter intermediate a quarter advanced interesting to know the beginners are some of my personal friends. Okay, so maybe ill start off just asking some questions. What do you think folks knew to crypto will get out of this book . Well, i think that a lot of people conceive of crypto was just being Like Technology or machines. But i think when you read the book, it becomes pretty obvious that actually people in personalities and politics do influence the development of these technologies in major way, so that is probably one of the takeaways and im guessing that you notice that when you read the book, because some of these, you know, long drawn out sagas between different personalities clashing and like, you know, the egos just battling it out that can take up many pages of the book and it happens multiple times over and over again with different people. So well, i would say with a lot of crypto projects. They can be a little opaque. Bitcoin is made by satoshi nakamoto, which is a pseudonym who could represent a person various people. We dont know but its ethereum is a project where we actually know who the founders are and but its still hard to you know, even for me like that you mapped out how it all worked the founders the theorem foundation the, you know, forprofit nonprofit entities. I mean that there was some serious fact finding and investigative work there. Yeah. Yeah and one other thing i would say actually that i noticed in working. And i actually think that this is a trend thats been happening kind of overall. In the world is that the Power Centers are shifting from finance to developers to coders and so what you see happen in the founding of aetherium, is that there are these conflicts and especially in the beginning. Theres a lot of conflicts between the group so sort of known as the biz guys and then the other group known as the devs and whats fascinating is the devs just prevail over and over again, and i sort of feel like that is a further reflection of how you know, previously wall street kind of was the center of the universe and thats where like young grads would want to go work and then it became Silicon Valley, but now, you know Silicon Valley executives are leaving for crypto companies. And even one of the cofounders of coinbase he started off as kind of like a programmer at goldman sachs, but he told me that he was treated like an it person that the finance people with random strong and fred are so fred are some and the finance people with stand in front of his desk and bark orders at him and even have their feet on his on his desk while theyre, you know ordering him about and he would say, oh they treated me like an it person and now hes, you know, one of the kings of crypto and you know, i feel like kind of this transition that were seeing is reflected on a small scale in the book and in these conflicts that like that play out and its very fasting to watch. Awesome, i so im wondering why did you decide to choose aetherium as the project you want to tackle . So for anyone who was around in crypto in 2017, that was definitely a historic year. After i lived through that in early 2018, i just realized wow. This was something that was totally new in the world. It was something that was historic and i wanted to explain how that happened and i wanted people like a hundred years from now to kind of understand like what caused this and how did it occur and since the theorem was the main platform on which the icos were happening or the initial coin offerings as their known. Which was this phenomenon where projects would be like were gonna launch a coin and they would take bitcoin in ethereum as money to fundraise for the development of these projects that they were trying to launch and this was just happening on such a grand scale that billions of dollars were being sent in crypto to launch these coins and that just had really never happened before, before, you know to have capital flowing like that around the globe for these brand new projects just from you know people, you know, that were not socalled accredited investors or vcs. You know, its just unprecedented and i wanted to explain that in sense that theorem was the main platform the book ends up being mostly a history of aetherium, but then at toward the end when the ico craze really gets going it branches out. Yeah, i would say, you know, there are already a couple of books on ethereum out there, but i would say lauras is the most detailed comprehensive really gets into the weeds of who these founders of ethereum are what makes them tick where theyve gone on to since then she she even she played a part role as a detective in breaking one of the biggest mysteries in ethereum, which was finding who the dow hacker is and well go into that a bit later, but i guess tell us a bit about your fact finding process and the process of writing the book because in approaching a project like this. I mean its again crypto can be very opaque shall we say and so how did you go about even starting, you know mapping out . Who these people were finding about you know how these foundations nonprofit for profits worked and getting into it. So i created a big timeline a massive timeline. I also had a very big document whereas collecting a lot of information and i was just trying to kind of like organize it in a timeline because its just the easiest way to tell a story and so um, i yeah once i would kind of find so i feel like once i would find some information sort of figure out where in the story that would go i would you know, put that in its right place and i was trying to find the people also who could fill out the narrative around those moments because you know, it doesnt you know mean a lot if i say, oh, well this entity was formed at this time or that time but a lot of this actually, you know when youre creating these different entities a lot of it actually is like power plays amongst different people so, you know you then start to kind of fill in the story around each of these events. And another thing was that there were so many people. Which frankly made it quite a challenge, but so when when people would Say Something to me, i would then check it with the other people and that that was very, you know, timeconsuming but through that you sort of get a better sense of kind of like what happened because you might have one person that remember something and then you cant find any corroboration. So there are moments in the book where you might see ive mentioned that you know, i only got that from one source. Or often other times if were just stating things in as facts then is because we found my pattern where i say me i mean we i mean i factor and i so then we were able to kind of corroborate with multiple people. You did have any interviews. I did more than 200. Yeah. Yeah, its definitely i mean when you have these like decentralized technologies then for sure, you know, its not going to be like following a startup where theres going to be x number of cofounders and its just those people that youre mostly dealing with. I mean ethereum alone had eight cofounders and then two got kicked out and then two additional leadership people came and then you know, then the center of the story moved to the tax thing and so then i had to introduce all these other hair. I mean like, i havent listed 50 characters in the beginning of the book and that was after i trimmed it down. So yeah the story that youre seeing actually doesnt even fully represent everything and yet theyre still 50 people they have to Pay Attention to well. Whats interesting is you were able to talk to each of the initial cofounders. And then also talk to a lot of their associates so that you have more of a balanced. Approach in take on what happened. I wonder what what did you learn in your conversations with vitalik, you know and you know, what was he like throughout the process . So for those of you who maybe are not so familiar with vitalik booter and hes the creator of aetherium. And a people i actually mentioned this right in the beginning when i introduce them as a character, but a lot of people have described him as being alien. And he definitely can be a little bit socially awkward. And so oftentimes when i interviewed him, i found his answers would be very brief. They would be one word answers, you know one sentence answers. So frankly a lot of our conversations were me asking questions hit him answering very briefly in me basically asking the same question with slightly different words and then him giving his very brief answer and then me just trying to milk it like more and then asking him some other variation on and so this went and on and on. Eventually there came a point where a large portion of our interview was actually done on chat apps. And that kind of worked a little bit better. It felt like it felt like, you know, maybe just taking out that personal interaction just helped it flow a little bit more but you know, he was definitely a kind of challenging person to to interview ive interviewed other people and when they will tell you about things theyve done they will give you their whole psychology of well, i was thinking this and then when that thing happened i thought oh, but you know what maybe if i do it this other way, but no he that was there was none of that with him. So it was literally me kind of asking every single angle in a question and trying to get that extra information. Its really interesting you say that because when i spoke to vitalik voter and about aetherium wormhole bridges exploits canadian truckers, he was very fluid and eloquent in very wellrounded prosaic. I would say answers, but when i asked him about his experience with your book, it was a oneword answer. Can i asked what the one word was. I what did you did you did you read it . No. It did you what what would you have to say about your experiences, you know . Apparently a you know in the book, i would say he came out cross someone who was not privy to confrontation. He said id agree with that. Whereas all his other answers were very, you know. A lot more in depth, so i just think he might not be comfortable with talking about personal aspects of the creation of ethereum. Exactly. Yeah, and he i think he has a hard time expressing his feelings as well. So yeah, hes very fluent when it comes to technical things and then when it comes to talk about more personal things or his feelings and its its much more difficult. When you also had a chance to talk to the lesser known cofounders like amir chettra and mihai alicee, and im very curious about your impressions of them. So amir is somebody whos very confident in himself, but also very controlling and so he would only talk to me in certain ways and then he was very controlling about what the teaching was going to be and of course. His messaging was very different from what all the other cofounders were saying and so the in the main narrative you will read kind of about him and then it will be his response because from what i can tell in my reporting it seemed that pretty much everybody agreed on one narrative and and he didnt so i just included what his you know version was nihai. Alicia is a good friend of italics. Hes very different. Hes extremely gregarious. Very talkative a great storyteller. It just very like physical and kind of you know, hes this romanian and an anarchist and you know was into bitcoin early. Hes very entertaining he founded bitcoin magazine, you know, its kind of interesting that hes such good friends with vitalik because vitalik is quite so different, but you know, i i feel like it maybe it makes sense sometimes, you know opposites attract. Here id say there were some very and the account nobody really looked good like it nobody. Yeah people dont when i think of, you know reading about Charles Hoskinson and some of the tails alleged about him and gavin wood and and Anthony Diorio and even joe lubin whos in brooklyn. I wonder was there a Common Thread in this it was there anyone that you were you felt uncomfortable in particular speaking with . Well, i definitely had tense conversations with. I think with all of those people maybe with gavin a little bit less. So so one thing thats interesting is so gavin wood and joe lubin are two people that dont like each other in crypto. And whats fascinating is that theyre both similar in the sense that people either love them or hate them. However, there is one way in which theyre different, which is that everybody agrees on gavins personality and just some people dont like it and some people do. And when it comes to joe people, i think either have a good experience with him or they have a really really bad experience with him. So its more like dr. Jekyll and mr. Hyde and the people that you know kind of get on his bad side as far as i can. Tell they say oh, well, its because with joe its like a popularity contest and they say that you know, they used to be on on his good side and part of the people who had won the popularity contest and then when it switched it switched, you know, really dramatically so its kind of a fascinating thing. Yeah, and i dont know for for anthony and charles you will read in the book, i think. A very large percentage of people, you know, dont dont really have good recollections of them. So so is it a benefit or or not to know the founders are versus bitcoin where you know, we could kind of the community could kind of create their own narrative of what bitcoin is all about compared to ethereum. You know, i i guess i just leave that to the Crypto Community to judge. Um clearly the bitcoiner is just love that satoshi was the ultimate cipher punk, you know created bitcoin and walked away for almost no personal gain. And aetherium, you know obviously was a very different story and now weve got my book that is kind of exposing all the messiness and frankly. Some of the somewhat shocking i guess and and just tasteful and uncomfortable facts about the personalities involved in creating it but personal opinion is actually doesnt take away from ethereum itself ethereum is clearly extremely successful, you know that and bitcoin to my minor the only two blockchains that are really established and have really succeeded. You know whether or not theyll succeed in the long term is another question, but for now they are and i personally just dont think that that really would take away from a theory, but thats just my opinion. Im sure many bitcoiners would have would raise issue with that stance. Yeah, well my sense from reading this is that you get into the weeds of how building a decentralized cryptocurrency protocol is like with holding those values and how messy can get throughout the process with the egos involved. But whats really incredible is that these founders went on to in some cases create their own cryptocurrencies that have become wildly successful in their own right top 10 crypto. Disease right now by market cap so at least in your book there there have been a lot of tensions in terms of getting the project together leading up to an incident where eventually they were basically voted off the island if you will and they refer to that as the game of thrones day, and so you what do you want to yeah, sure put some context into that and okay past that you want. So ill do a reading on this section in a moment but to give you the context. This probably was the first. Moment when that conflict between the devs and the business guys came head to head. And essentially the business guys kind of wanted to follow this more traditional Business Model of doing a startup where you know, they would get equity and the way the Business Model. Work would be the way that a lot of the tech giants today work, which is they take the user data and then they make a profit from that, you know, they sell it or sell it for advertisements or whatever. It might be. But as many of you probably know and the crypto world the ethos is to make things decentralized and in a decentralized world. The users themselves can retain their own data. And the company at the middle isnt the one thats extracting value, but the users become the owners right through the tokens. So you have these user owners that own these tokens and theyre sort of invested in the network. At the same time in a different way, you know then in a startup obviously because obviously weve seen these massive startups that have grown from nothing and then the founders are just gazillionaires, but with these Crypto Networks a lot of these people that buy in early sort of can ride along to their own riches, so yeah. Of this came to a head around how to manage ethereum and at the same time. There were a lot of personal conflicts with. The socalled ceo at that time Charles Hoskinson and people felt that he was lying. Essentially that was kind of one of the things he had told several different people that he was satoshi, nakamoto. Which yeah, thats definitely a very interesting part of the story and there were there were some other conflicts but this is the backdrop to this day and one last thing i is that because they distrusted them so much they had gone on the internet and they had collected a bunch of information about him that they considered. And so there was a dossier on charles that theyd all been passing around and kind of checking out before this big meeting. So charles is the founder of a cryptocurrency called cardano. Just a little more like top 10 crypto. Coin he has something called the cardano army. So laura. Be careful. Okay, does this work . Yes. Okay. Can you can you hear me . Oh, yeah, you can okay. Finally in the early afternoon. Everyone began gathering on the top floor at the long table. It was made of six long and wide bleached wood kitchen countertops arranged three by two with thin gray streaks laid on blonde wood worker style table legs. Some sat in the high backed mesh fabric black Swivel Office chairs with cervical and lumbar support and wheels that rolled almost too easily on this smooth wood floors. Others stood vitalik who sat at the head of the table his back to the smaller deck facing. Kitchen at the other end of the room. Set a few words and then asked everyone to go around and say their peace. Jeff and so jeff is one of the Main Developers the three developers are jeff gavin and vitalik himself. And so they make the dev group. Jeff thought that he gavin and vitalik had made a pact to say that they didnt think charles could lead and therefore had to leave. Gavin and vitalikenitis so jeff was surprised when vitalik didnt mention that then it was gavs turn and again gavin didnt explicitly say that charles needed to go. Although others would later claim. He did say that if charles stayed he would go and do a new project. He did however Say Something along the lines of amir is contributing astoundingly little to the project. Amir says that since he was on the business side and gavin was a dev. Gavin was not aware of what work. Mere did and that gavin was saying these things so he could consolidate power under himself. But his not mentioning that charles should be removed took jeff back. Jeff looked at him and gavin returned his gaze. Jeff felt betrayed by gavin and vitalik why didnt you say anything . So ever the honest dutchman jeff told it like it was charles we feel you were leading us in the wrong direction. We dont want to be a google. We want to be a mozilla and we would like to see you leave. I dont want you to be ceo. To at least one person watching jeff seemed absolutely livid. He was really loving he was really letting charles have it. Charles looked shocked, but jeff who had always found charles fake couldnt tell if it was sincere. Then jeff invoked the nuclear option. He made it clear. He would no longer be part of the project if charles stayed. Charles objected talking about all the things hed set up but jeff said it doesnt matter. I dont believe in becoming a google we need to build something for people not corporations. Jeff also said amir, im sorry. I gave you the benefit of the doubt, but i dont think you belong here because i have not seen much contribution from you. Mihai went next he said he agreed with jeff with regard to charles. Jeff was outraged. Dont trust agree with me say whats wrong . Mihai added he couldnt trust what was real or not. Basically it seemed charles sometimes lied. Joe said and so joe was one of the business guys. Also, joe said he trusted charles believed charles wanted the best for ethereum and supported him staying with the project but he would support any final decision. Someone felt he seemed flabbergasted. Joe denies this at least stefan also said charles had to leave those stefan who felt that the dossias becoming public would be the end of ethereum didnt go into details. He just said charles has got to go. The guy is a liability and used more colorful language like the word sociopath. Taylor pushed for amir to go because amir was technically his boss, but taylor considered him mia. Taylor did all the work but was not allowed on Decision Making calls. Despite having compiled the dossier. He didnt say much about charles. Gavin who had spoken early was watching the proceedings appalled by how vitalik had invited everyone to point fingers and name names. And everyone who happened to be in the house including joes son was privy to this sensitive discussion. Sitting through an hour of people proclaiming their enemies was excruciating. He felt charles didnt deserve a public bashing. Even if it was by the people who had been living with him. Gav felt calling a meeting when vitalik knew in advance that people were unhappy with charles was a poor decision. Vitalik felt that the meeting was spontaneous rather than organized and doesnt see any Smaller Group with with which the problems could have been discussed. Matthias one of the main orchestrators of this moment was conflicted. So there were two. Staff that had kind of like plotted to oust charles. Even though he knew this was the right thing to do. Hed always struggled with confrontation and the way everyone was airing their grievances about charles made him feel awful. So when his time came to speak he held back and only set of fraction of what he truly felt about charles. Roxy was stressing about what to say, but when the moment came she spoke her truth. So roxy is roxanna. Shes me highs girlfriend, and she at this point was the executive assistant for the Ethereum Fund or for ethereum. She said she didnt trust anthony because he acted like he was superior to everyone else. Plus he was pushing for a forprofit structure. Then she looked them dead in the eyes and said charles and anthony are not trustworthy. You cant trust them. In one of the most uncomfortable moments in their lives. She made the most directly negative remarks. Charles widened his eyes at her as if he was surprised. She hadnt believed all his stories. Shed never said to his face that she thought he was lying. She thought it absurd that he hadnt realized she had her own thoughts. Gavin watching from the other end of the table knew then that charles could not recover. To him until then it had been all boys condemning charles. So the disagreement had felt like a fight amongst boys. But for the only girl who lived in the house fulltime to say she didnt trust charles felt decisive. Charles would later say that this meeting was an hour of the others brutalizing him. Oh, sorry charles who later would say that this meeting was an hour of the others brutalizing him defended himself saying they could make things work that he promised things would be better that they could do the nonprofit. He seemed to think the forprofit versus nonprofit issue was the crux of things. No one brought up the dossier. Here so thats just a taste of some of the struggles in the early beginnings of ethereum. So and thats one of the first challenges really was the the fight between i guess the forprofit. Folks the biz guys versus the developers who wanted to make it a forprofit foundation. And and so on and so forth Forprofit Corporation or nonprofit foundation. Yeah. Mmhmm and eventually vitalik and the devs. Won out yeah, because they wanted open source. They wanted to have this decentralized network. That wasnt going to profit from the customers, but have everybody share in the Wealth Creation with the users and even before then actually vitalik had these other ideas to make it more like bitcoin more the way satoshi had done it where there wasnt going to be whats called a premine which is where the creators kind of create some of the coins before they launched the network to sort of like creating equity for themselves beforehand. But he was overruled by the business guys early on so well one of them in particular anthony. Mmhmm. So but eventually yeah the devs went out and then so then there was a second phase of am i would say and this took everyone to switzerland and to create a nonprofit organization, but then a whole new set of characters were introduced and one of them was ming chan who became the executive director of the theorem foundation and and this was little well known about you know, how her processes were how the Ethereum Foundation worked. Maybe you can shed a little light into that. So mink chain was definitely probably the most i think difficult person for me to write about just because the way people spoke about her was pretty much very different from the way that ive ever had. Any people describe somebody to me. And she seemed a little bit unbelievable basically and kind of the extremity of what they were saying and the good thing is that actually in the course of writing the book i was able to get a lot of her own writings in texts and chat messages and things like that. And so that was good because then it sort of made sense what people were saying and then her character became more believable. But hopefully, you know, i so i know probably not everybody has read the book so i wont give too many spoilers, but pretty much immediately there were major red flags. And there was an incident very early on which only became known to like a very small number of people but it was you know, she basically accidentally sent some communications to somebody she didnt mean to and they definitely showed something concerning about her character frankly. And i was able to obtain those messages and so theyre theyre in the book and i think it it kind of raises questions about what her intentions were and whether or not they were frankly good for ethereum and then as time on and she you know kind of stayed with the foundation quite a bit longer. I think than most people would have expected given kind of issues around performance and then kind of her own instability and things like that, you know. Yeah there. Yeah that ends up being a quite long saga in the book and hopefully i was able to explain it, you know, some of the explanations are definitely, they dont seem very rational, but the fact that this person was kept for as long as she was does not seem a rational and so yeah, the only explanation that i have are ones that arent irrational. It was also really interesting was the shadow. Folks of the Ethereum Foundation who kind of controlled things in the background but were never really named. How did you even find these people and what is their power over the Ethereum Foundation . You know, so this is toward the latter part of the book but a lot of people also talked about what they called the shadow government of the Ethereum Foundation. Its different people who wield a lot of influence or at least at that time because so my book ends in early 2018. So kind of in probably the 2017 era the shadow government started and there were a lot of people that were wielding influence in ethereum in the foundation, but were not necessarily people with official roles. And so a lot of people said to me, you know, this is going on and you know, we dont like it for for these reasons and whats interesting is the people that were named as being kind of the big power players in this shadow government. You know, it was fascinating people would be scared to even mention their names to me. They would be scared to say that they had even just been at an event not even that theyd been like doing anything at the event, but just that theyve been there witnessing something, you know historic. So i mean people were yeah, they seemed frightened of them which was fascinating and even you know, i i mentioned so yeah, i am giving maybe a boilers, but when i asked metallic about one of them he whistled. You know like he was it just surprised i mentioned the name or just an easy about it or i dont know. I dont know but that was his response. So yeah clearly, theres something well, there was there was a lot of concern about you know is ethereum sufficiently decentralized if italic has so much power over the foundation, and ive asked you this before, but maybe you can give your thoughts again. Yeah, you know, actually my personal opinion is that it actually is but only because that theory was so big now. That i do feel that if the Foundation Went away people would figure out some other way to organize to keep the development going. Theres just too many people that are invested in it and theres like this report that comes out every year about the number of Developers Working in different crypto blockchains and ethereum far and away. The most developers. I mean, its like theyre just no contest. Its like 4x the next highest or Something Like that and then 20 of all new developers to crypto do stuff in ethereum, which is again, you know, theres just attracting so much mind shares. So i my personal belief is like even if the Foundation Went away, even if italic went away, like i just think that theory would keep on going. There were just people would figure out some other way to organize it to see still have the three votes over the if yeah, i dont know but do you remember that i write yeah, so you guys have to read the book, but theres a very very interesting subplot. Where lets just say, yes, somebody might have lied about anyway, so vitalik himself may have been how should i put it vitalik himself . Yeah, just may have been conned into thinking something about his status with the foundation by somebody who wanted to wield power over him and i wasnt able to resolve it, but i just left that hanging because i yeah anyway, so okay interesting aside from the personal dramas within ethereum. There were some massive technical dramas and one of them was the dow hack which was the first kind of app and ethereum about 150 Million Dollars was raised for this dow decentralized Autonomous Organization 16 million was stolen which was an ultimate represent. I think 14 of ethereum. Yeah, so its hard to put a dollar amount because the day of the hack the price of ethereum just dropped from like 21 to 14 dollars. So in the book i said well if you take it by the high prices, you know, 78 million or something by the low. Its like 59 or whatever. But yeah, it was so this dow had attracted almost 15 of all of all ether and then to fundraise and then the hacker took 31 so suddenly the hacker has 5 of all aetherium, which is you know, more than like the ethering foundation or anything. And but then you actually kind of deduced to this person was its one of the greatest mysteries in crypto. Yeah, so this is crazy. So this this all hopefully wont be spoilers for anybody because i actually wrote a long article about this already was released on forbes the day my book came out last week. But yeah, this had been i would i called it cryptos greatest who done it because to my mind so the biggest mystery in crypto is who is satoshi and this was maybe the second biggest mystery but, you know creating the coin wasnt really like a crime or a theft or whatever and this was so i call this cryptos the biggest two done it. And you know i worked on this for very long time and for years. I really didnt have any leads. The main one that i had was from an investigation at that time, and i followed the lead all the way through i investigated everything i could about it. I interviewed the main suspects it was a group of people. And the way i was going to write it in the book was just heres the evidence for you know why they came under suspicion here is their response and then i was just gonna leave it and you know people could do with it what they wanted, but i wasnt gonna say anything conclusive. And when youre wrapping up a book you do what are called three final passes which are you know, things like copy editing proofreading legal and then basically the publisher will have it and theyll pass it back to you after they make their changes then you check your change their changes and you know, maybe make your own tweaks and then they take it again and they look over what you did and blah so, you know you do that in three rounds. Well one of my sources in brazil reached out to me right before we were going to turn in the second round my fact checker and i and he said oh, you know. I the Brazilian Federal Police opened an investigation into the dow and extension by me on me. And so i want to exonerate myself. So i would like to commission this report and i thought you might want the information too. And you know, these reports are kind of expensive so he was able to get a discount in exchange for me giving credit to this company in the book. And so we could report and what were looking at is basically how the dow attacker was cashing out . So the so after this hack, so im just going to give you some background if youre not familiar basically as i mentioned the dow, you know raised all this money. It was actually the highest crowdfunded project in all history, which is amazing because they were collecting cryptocurrency that thats how and enthusiastic people were. And like i said eventually when they hacked it, they got 5 of all ether. Well what the Ethereum Community did was they did this change where they essentially a new blockchain that had the same history as the old one, but at that moment of the change they just kind of like erased the dow and they took all the money that had been in the dow in all the related things and then moved it over to a place where everybody who had been involved in it could just get their money back. However, since not everybody agreed with this decision some small group kept the old chain the original chain where the hack occurred going and that chain became called if youre in classic. So the hacker then had 5 of all Ethereum Classic and they were trying to turn it into something useful because the theorem classic, you know was only a few months old. It wasnt really usable as money and frankly everybody knew those were the stolen coins. So nobody was going to be like sure you can you know, turn those into some legitimate currency on my my exchange or you know, and so they were trying to turn it into bitcoin. Because its much more liquid and they were using an exchange that didnt take. Customer identifying information so they wouldnt have to give their name or anything like that. And we were looking at these transactions and we were kind of like mapping them onto like a utc schedule just to see like what hours are the caching out . And it was from like zero hours utc to 1500. And so then you know for the rest of it kind of look like they were sleep or whatever. And i had actually gotten a Customer Service email that the hacker had sent in the days before the hack when they were kind of like collecting the money and putting in all the smart contracts to do the attack and in that Customer Service email even it was so brief like two sentences. It was so obvious. This was a fluent english speaker like its not even just that, you know, the english was fluent, but even they used shorthand. In that just shows another level of fluency and so i was like okay, the times are you know asian cash the cash out times are the map onto an asian like morning to night schedule. But i know from their communication like theyre affluent english speaker and the suspects id written about already they were all based in europe not asia. And so its just i was you know, just trying to kind of figure this out, and i had been working with this other company on all kinds of things for my book and i sent some of the you know information to them. And i wanted more time to look into this right like were literally at the moment where were supposed to be sending the final changes, which is like very minimal changes. And i did ask the publisher for a little bit extra time and they were like what you know because this is not the time to be to be asking for for extra time. But meanwhile, you know this other Company Chain analysis what you know, they did have the information i sent them and so even though i didnt get that. Okay from the publisher then of course later when she analysis felt like they had something and so i cant go into all the details around every last step of finding this persons name. But so the key thing that shane nelson was able to do was so once this person had turned their money into bitcoin. They were using a bitcoin mixer which basically is the way that it kind of like mixes your coins with other people will anonymize the trail. So it makes it difficult to follow so theyll take you know, like lets say if all of us are doing a bitcoin transaction at the same time when we all want to kind of make our activity a little bit more private it would mix all our coins together and then when it spits on the other side, its harder to follow the trail back to you know, where the coins originally came from. Well jane analysis disclosed for the first time with my article in my book that they are able to demix these transactions. And so then they could see okay, the bitcoins went to four different exchanges. And then eventually you know, i did a lot of stealth reporting on this but i one source at one source was able to find out from one of the exchanges what happened to the money in that exchange and it was converted to a privacy coin called grin and then withdrawn to a grin node, which had human readable address, which was grin. Toby. Ai. And my sources and i looked at the ip address for grand. Toby. I. We saw these other what are called bitcoin lightning nose, which is like another type of crypto thing. Its related to bitcoin. And when we looked at those bitcoin lightning nodes on whats called a lightning explorer meaning like a website where it just gives you information about other lightning notes. We saw the name of the lightning node was 10x. So, you know when you google 10x then the ceo of 10x comes up in his name is toby honus and his alias is toby. I and then i realized like oh he uses to be a on, you know, angelus fatalist github reddit, you know twitter like i mean pretty much medium, etc, etc that were i think 16 places that i found and then two weeks after that we were also able to get the email address on that account. Which was the name of the exchange at toby. Ai . So, you know, he he controlled that domain. I also eventually later found out he used with another source that he used an email address and that person knew that to end and at toby. Ai. So, you know i felt that evidence was very good and the publisher definitely agreed like okay. This is definitely a good scoop. And so we pushed the publication yet again. And so yeah, so then finally it came out last week on 22 22, which somehow sort of sums up how magical that whole last bit of it. Like, you know, just i described it as like a comment from out of nowhere is very rude goldbergian. It was so last minute. But yeah, thats thats how we were were able to break that. Wow, is there any chance of bringing this suspected alleged hacker to justice . You know that that is about my pay right . Im sure theres people like i did have some people tweeting about that to me, but i was like you guys i have not been a law school. I dont know these things but theres a limit to what laura has journalist by day detective mind by night can do so but incredible work in finding this potential hacker from so from there. I think what is your biggest takeaway upon learning about, you know, the people and going through this journey and learning about the technical aspects of it. Like whats the biggest takeaway . From writing this book and learning so much indepth into ethereum. What are you going to take away from it . Well so i do feel that one that i mentioned earlier about kind of like this really represents this moment where coders are kind of overtaking business people. I do feel that theres something very significant about that, which i dont want to understand one other thing. You know that i feel like i mentioned is also i just feel like a lot of people feel that these technologies are sort of bloodless and sterile and know like the personalities involved really make a difference. I mean, you know one thing that weve talked about a lot like with the people that created the dow once i went to them and i said, oh, you know, i think i have a good suspect. Because he was a thing actually not only when i got the name, you know, did i have that evidence just around that transaction, but later when i went back i realized. Okay at the time of the doubt, he was really into the doubt to the point. Where in the slack i could see he was making a lot of comments about the technical difficult like kind of vulnerabilities in in the dow and then he had had emails with the dow creators saying like, you know, these are the things that i think are wrong with it. These are the things that you you need to fix and then after the hack he was tweeting things that were kind of against the side of erasing the hack and sort of like for the side of keeping the hack. So all of then, you know, its like once you have the name then when you go back and film the story then the rest of the picture just really it really fit and you know, what one of the creators said when they were talking with me about this person that persons identity is they said oh, wow, you know, its amazing because so just one other technical aspect. Is that the way that dad worked is that once he had the money he couldnt just take it and run because they were all these rules about like you were withdrawing money, then there were like 28 days where it had to be locked in this one area and i was a complicated thing. Its sort of like a video game or something, but you know, he had basically a month when he could have sent the money back. He could have made things right he could have come forward and said hey, i wanted to make a point that the funds are vulnerable in this way. But you know now ill send the money back and like lets lets make it better or and they just one of them just expressed surprise that he never once tried to you know, fix it and the other one said, oh, wow, you know this guy really messed up because reputation is so much more valuable than money and he was saying oh if he had rescued the money instead of taking it then he would be a hero today. You know, he would be like there are these people for the crypto people youll know like sam sees his son this like one of these famous hackers and crypto who often will find vulnerabilities and like rescue the money before anybody knows that its vulnerable and like hundreds of millions of dollars are saved or whatever and hes really treated. Like a hero, he was like a lot of fans and you know the person that i alleged to be the hackers definitely not, you know, somebody who has like this kind of massive following is definitely obviously now who especially not seen as a hero so, you know, those are kind of interesting lessons and i think yeah, theyre they apply for anything but but yeah here they really come out i would also say that, you know crypto. Theres a sense that you can hide behind this cloak of anonymity but everything you do every transaction you have on a blockchain is seeing publicly at least with the theorem with bitcoin even and thats why were seeing you know in recent weeks. Big hacks that were mysteries are coming to light and were discovering whose was potentially behind it. I mean just a month ago. We learned who the hackers of one of the biggest hacks the 2016 hack of bitfinex. And yeah, although we dont know if theyre the hackers they sorry under the money launderer. Sorry alleged alleged money launderers, but the crypto from that hack has been seized. It was worth 70 Million Dollars back then now its worth over for about four and a half billion dollars and you can see the transactions on the blockchain and in this case you were able to trace back the transactions back to this person who could be toby. A honest, yes. Yeah, i i actually i noticed after my story and then the other one the bitfinex one. I feel like there was no i cant remember but i noticed a bunch of people mentioning. Oh, whoa, like all of these hacks from 2016 were now figuring out who did them and yeah, im kind of feeling like oh, you know if youre thinking about stealing some crypto, you better know that forensics is gonna catch up to you because thats how it feels like the space is going so all right, i think. Now we can open up the audience to q a. So if anyone wants to come up and have a question for laura, we have a mic here and you can come on up. Yeah, just come on up. Yes. Oh, so hi, laura. Sorry i work at coin desk. Oh cool. Congratulations on the book. I guess following up the discussion about this big revelation of this person behind the hack. Were you able to confirm with him . Try to get him to comment on your findings . And also what are you exploring next . I know the book just came out, but you probably already exploring the next subject to yeah. Yeah, so i cant talk about that too much. I will have an announcement at some point when when its all ready, but i will say about the attacker. So yeah, i didnt mention this part. So while we were reporting the book i sent him super why i tried to get an interview with him multiple times. No response. So and i finally just sent him whats called the factchecking meaning just a document with like all the statements that i was going to put about about him in the book. And ultimately he actually wrote me and he said your statement is your statement and conclusion is factually inaccurate. I can give you more details if you like and so i wrote him back immediately, and i said, yes, please give me the extra details and i said, you know, do you want to talk on the phone . No response, and i gave him the deadline very clearly five times. I literally, you know said like like by midnight on this day and this time zone, but again no response and then when we did the forbes article later because there was even more information and i had to give him more factchecking again and also let him know was going to come out in forbes given given the opportunity to respond. But no response and you know, i sent him emails about that multiple times as well. You know a few things. I did kind of expect that maybe he might delete some of his social media. So i actually saved everything before i reached out to him and he did delete some of it although on his twitter. He said the reason he was leaving his twitter was to do like a decentralized kind of twitter. So he was one tweet left saying that you know, hes gone to this other platform. But yeah, i saved all the tweets, so i have pdfs. Who and so if you want to ask a question, its probably but oh okay, go ahead. Hi, my name is eric. I work in eric doyle. I work in crypto. What would you say . The biggest thing you learned about human nature and or yourself in the process of writing this book. Ive talked about human nature. But i so people who listen to my show know that im really into meditation and i was medit. A lot. Well, i was working this book and when you when you meditate a lot and youre also wearing out a book a lot and you know, i live alone so i was kind of like just you know in meditation trying to turn off my mind and then when im by myself, im in my head. The meditation makes you very okay, i dont know what im doing. But okay, im just gonna turn a little bit. Im so meditation makes you very aware of your mind and i suddenly realized oh when i am working my book if i feel that im like if i feel like i made some kind of mistake, even if it was something very minor like i didnt phrase that question to that source the exact perfect way. I would make myself feel so bad about it that like i wouldnt even be able to work on the book for a few days and i suddenly realized i was doing this to myself and i and because like honestly i highly advise if you ever have a bad habit that you want to get rid of i would just meditate for a little while and just getting habit because you just start noticing things about your how your brain works. And so yeah. I just noticed that and i when i realize that like i just stopped from that moment and i now i like never would criticize myself in my head to the point where like, i just cant even function because its highly unproductive. But yeah, that was probably the the most important thing i learned about myself. Nature. Yes. Yes, or at least my own human nature founding im supposed to move. Okay. Congratulations on the publication of your book, so i just got back from i just got back from east denver and i found it to be an incredibly inspiring experience as a woman whos hopefully going to be working in web 3, but i also found it to be im gonna be crass now at measuring contest and im wondering what you think. The space whats the future of women and nonbinary and queer people . In the web 3 Blockchain Space oh gosh, thats thats definitely hard question. I agree with you about like sometimes again because i meditate a lot. Im very aware of like peoples ecos. And so i sometimes when im uncrypted twitter, im like, oh this is just peoples egos fighting each each other all day long. And it is very fascinating to watch. You know, like im totally well aware that if i were to engage in a lot of fights on twitter, i probably would have like a much bigger following, you know what i mean . And you know, i do see people that kind of employ that strategy which is sort of disheartening but you know, whatever it works for them. Um, but in terms of you know more women in the space, i mean you know one thing granted, you know, ive been covering this for almost seven years. So one thing thats heartening to me is the fact that theres a lot more women now than there were back in 2015. And i definitely would say that like nfts have brought an even more women in which is great and one other thing. I dont know if youve heard of the web 3 investment clubs, but this is syndicate dow. So by the way, so as we mentioned, you know dow stands for decentralized Autonomous Organization, but there are these like many dows now where there are groups of 99 people or less and the reason why its 99 or less is because the sec would regulate you if it was more than 99 but there are these groups of people that are getting together and then they basically have, you know, like a Crypto Wallet and they share and they invest together. And so when this company syndicate down launched their web reinvestment clubs, they were going to launch with a with some kind of like initial set of of weary investment clubs and at the end of kind of getting the group together. They realize oh wait half of them are either all women dows or women led and thats very unusual in crypto, but they realized oh the kind of natural ideals and mission we have with these web free investment clubs. Its just attracted more women. And or more women, you know, then then you see traditionally in crypto. So another part of me things like oh well, maybe because personally it does feel that the ideals of crypto and web3 are probably something that would appeal to a lot of women, but it is true that you know, there are a lot of reasons in our society why theres probably fewer women in tech and finance which has led to this, you know situation where we have a lot a lot fewer women in this space than you would see in a different. Industry, but yeah, i would hope that naturally people will figure out that it makes a lot more sense to have more women involved. I think were getting the time is up thing. But but we do have two more questions. I dont know do we have time for this . Okay, so well do the last two and then ill try to speak quickly and ill be quick to congrats again on the book. Um, i hope this isnt too much of a spoiler, but it was just kind of an interesting thread toward the end of the work it kind of where you talk about how vitalic seemed to really i guess prioritize depriotize competence at you know, and prioritize his echo chamber and people sort of echoing all the right things back to him. Im curious if you think that has changed any with the you know, the introduction of or the evolving of what three and the theory im or whether you think this is still i dont know an issue with ef and issue with the space overall. So, i dont know if i would necessarily say that hes only looking for people to echo certain sentiments back to him i do. Know and again, so, you know, my book ends in early 2018 and i really didnt do that much investigating and whats happened in the years since but i do know some of the people that i interviewed that had criticisms about the shadow government etc. Did say things like, you know, they felt that he still because he i think he he probably frankly after his early experience with etherium doesnt always trust himself when it comes to judging people. So thats why i think he uses these sort of like trusted advisors or at least that was the case in early 2018 late 2017. So, you know, i dont know if i would say that that necessarily means that hes just looking for people to reflect his own view because frankly it almost looks like hes kind of looking to them for guidance in a way. But you know granted hes also a lot older than when i then when the book start. Know hes like nine years older or Something Like that. So hes just grown a lot. Frankly, you know, i think that thats one other part of my book that i didnt expect when i went to write it but the book ends up being kind of a coming of age story for vitalik, which i literally it wasnt until i had done my reporting. I suddenly realized that thats what it was. So and frankly, you know, i would just imagine that hes just continued to mature, you know, so. Yeah, i beginning it seemed that this metallic. He was just trying to get money and or get people who believed in his project and just anyone who was interested and showed some, you know interests support, but then he realized you know, it it takes more than folks. Just being nice to you to understand that theyre really with you or not, and he seemed to after that. Shes folks who had values and shared similar principles. And so i feel thats what he the carries on with him now i feel that. In the Ethereum Community, you know, theyre all about rainbows and unicorns and vegan and its its very vitalic. So hey laura, youre out on the book. I was just really curious cuz its such an interesting world to cover and and you do such a good job with it. But im curious if you personally are like a cryptobian or an idealist in the crypto space like do you buy into it . Being this revolutionary technology for better or worse probably i i do think that that is likely to happen. You know that the technology will develop and become life or worldchanging at the same time. I am completely prepared to cover it if it goes crashing to the ground, so i try not to have fixed views on what i think is going to happen because i like never want to miss what the story will be. You know, the journalist job is sort of to be like trailing the action a little bit and so i dont ever want to come out and just be like, oh, i think this is gonna happen and then have some invested interest in like not being proven wrong or something. So probably the the reason why i said yes, though is just because you know my so i graduated from college in 1997 and hilariously, so i went to stanford and i remember at the reunion, i showed up and you know, id been working for like whatever like 50k or something at my journalism jobs, and i by that point i had classmates like marissa mayor was in my class. I never knew her but if i had classmates by the fiveyear reunion, he would already launched startups and then become millionaires and you know, theyd sold them for like millions of dollars to these other companies and then they like gone backpacking around south america or whatever and i i like i showed up i had no idea this was going because ive been living in new york in new york and and so, you know if i just think about how Much Technology has changed in the 20 whatever five years since i graduated, i mean, it just seems unlikely that this crypto stuff isnt going to develop and and become Something Big so when i say, yes, its more really just around that. Its just feels common senseical that its gonna, you know, continue to develop and become Something Big. Well a nocoiner. No, um, so im not in no cleaner in spirit. And actually my company does own some eve for things like just having my. Eave name so in crypto you can have a an address thats like a url and youve receive money in it. So i own laura shin. Eith or like unchained. Eath and thats more just because i get a lot of imposters and so i had to buy them to prevent people from scamming people with my reputation. But yeah me personally no, i dont all right, we gotta wrap it there. But again, thank you so much laura shin. You got to read the cryptopians. And i believe youre gonna stay behind a bit. You have some signed copies of the book. Yes. So if you want to sign your book, i think theyre gonna yeah. I can take this moment to leap in so if youve yet to purchase the book you can purchase it at the reg. Years in the back my colleague shawn will ring you up in just one second and then if youre staying to have your book signed, im going to ask that you remain seated for just a minute while we set up the signing and then we are going to call you up in rows and then on that note. Thank you everyone for coming. Booktv. Org. It is my pleasure to introduce today, dr. Albert. Berla the chairman and ceo of fiser nowadays a household name in the last couple