Dialogue with Vitalik: Future Outlook and Industry Thinking of Ethereum

Original title: " Dialogue with Vitalik: Future Outlook and Industry Thinking of Ethereum "

Original source: UpOnly

Original compilation: Dong Yiming, Chain Catcher Chain Catcher

Recently, UpOnly, an encrypted video podcast, invited Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, to have a dialogue. The progress of zkEVM, encryption wallet optimization, NFT prospects, privacy challenges and other issues are discussed in detail. The following is the text version of the podcast, with some deletions.   

UpOnly: Looking back, do you think there is anything on Ethereum that you regret doing? Might be done differently? Earlier you mentioned that having too many co-founders was one of the problems.

Vitalik: The co-founder thing is definitely a big deal . A few years later, a VC who had given up investing in Ethereum at the time told me that a very important reason was that they knew that a project with 8 co-founders would not work. I think he's right that having 8 co-founders is a big problem because they have very different values and different ideas of what makes a good project and what they want to create.   

But I think he underestimated The only thing is that after that, the original structure did collapse, but it turns out that Ethereum has an amazing ability to bounce back.

There are also minor technical issues like we shouldn't use Merkle Patricia Tree (Editor's Note: Merkle PatriciaTree, also known as Merkle Patricia Trie, is an improved data structure that combines the advantages of Merkle tree and prefix tree. It is used in Ethereum to organize and manage account data, An important data structure for generating transaction collection hashes.), but use Binary tree from the beginning.

I also wondered if Ethereum used a different distribution model at the beginning what will happen? A more random example — like an airdrop of half or two-thirds of the supply to Bitcoin holders. So what kind of cryptocurrency will it be? Become a Bitcoin fork?

For another example, if Ethereum did not have a centralized fund at the very beginning What will be the result? Then people can participate in the post-construction decision of the project by buying in the pre-sale stage, so this will make Ethereum more reliable and neutral, and will it attract more people (who were originally offended by the centralization idea? previous) to participate?

UpOnly: Do you think you will spend the rest of your life building Ethereum? Or will you choose a successor and do something else yourself, like farming?

Vitalik:I think Ethereum will be It has been an important part of my life for a long time, but I will always do something other than Ethereum, for example, I am trying to write some works now. But I will not force myself to give up working on Ethereum.

UpOnly: We know that your parents are also crypto enthusiasts, and they got very excited when they knew you were in this industry. They are closely watching the industry every day and participating in the work of this ecosystem. Does this have any impact on you?

Vitalik: This is actually quite strange. You know, like my dad who was an entrepreneur (software company founder) turned crypto influencer. And my mother changed from studying drugs to studying optimistic rollup. I certainly hope they are doing well, and it would also make for a more interesting topic of discussion at our family gatherings.

UpOnly: You once launched a poll on Twitter: Ask if people wake up in 2035 and find more than 80% of the world's transactions + storage Both use a currency other than ETH, which currency do you want it to be? There are two options, one is to choose from BTC, USD, ADA, SOL (the result is that ADA won with 42% of the votes), the other is to choose from TRON, BNB, CNY and NEO (the result is that TRON won with 42% of the votes). 51.3% win), what is the grand plan behind this poll? Or is this just a piece of spam?

Vitalik:I want to perceive what the values of the community are like , to see if they pay enough attention to the fact that Ethereum is different from other cryptocurrencies - whether some cryptocurrencies are more evil - they may be more centralized and dystopian than existing business models. Or are they going to feel that eventually cryptocurrencies will eventually come together -- and I think most people think that's going to be the case.

UpOnly: People like to say that so-and-so is the Ethereum of China or the Ethereum of other places, this kind of words will make you feel annoyed what?

Vitalik: No, I don’t think so, People in the crypto community like to do crazy things and say crazy things, and I'm used to it.

UpOnly: Why do you think NFTs are so good at capturing mainstream narratives success? If you made a new white paper today, what do you think the future will be like?

Vitalik:People’s desire to own digital collections and digital property has been very strong for a long time, NFTs give people that power. It also attracts more people, because NFT is also the next mainstream use case of blockchain technology after cryptocurrencies and DeFi.

I know there are African Ethiopian and Latin American artists using NFTs. It's far from perfect, but it's still an effective channel for artists from some non-rich countries to be seen globally.

Regarding the future development of NFT, I would like to give a very random example. Now people will issue certificates to people who have climbed Mount Everest, and people can use this certificate to show off their achievements to others. Similarly, NFT can also function like a certificate, and it can be traded. If votes can be traded in the future, the Dow could crash very quickly.

Like in traditional democracies we have a long history of something like the secret ballot History, not only are these votes done in secret, but you can't prove to others how you voted. If it were possible to be proven true, some people might start forcing the other to vote and democracy would be worse.

UpOnly: What do you think is the biggest research problem of Ethereum as a community?

Vitalik: The most important thing now is It is about software construction and optimization. For example, the working mechanism of PoS, the related concepts of sharding and how it works, such as data availability, samples and how to perform these things, and ZK SNARK, we all know how to use these concepts, but there are still many of them that need to be optimized place to make it more effective. There is also MEV.

UpOnly: What do you think is the biggest hurdle that crypto wallet products need to overcome? What?

Vitalik: I often remind the public about Questions about wallet security, especially around things like multisig and social recovery. We know that most encrypted wallets have a private key, which is a 32-byte number. If you lose this string of numbers, you will lose the assets in your encrypted wallet, or your computer is hacked, and you may lose Your encrypted wallet.

There are many solutions, one of which is multi-signature, that is, the user can create an account with three passwords, and one password can be stored in the computer, One is stored in the phone, the third can be owned by your friend or an institution, and you need 2 passwords out of the 3 to transfer any funds. Even if your friends or third parties decide to betray you, they cannot steal any of your assets because they only have one key.

The concept of social recovery is this: If you have an account, you will Select some guardians and form a guardian list. More than half of guardians have the ability to restore your account. For example, there are 6 guardians in my cold wallet. They are all people I trust very much, but they don't know each other.

The signature of more than 4 guardians can allow the transaction to happen. I also wrote an article about social recovery in my blog vitalik.ca, if you are interested, you can find it. There are still many technical difficulties that have not been overcome, so that it is still difficult for Ethereum users to apply, but I have been working hard to make these technical obstacles smaller.

UpOnly: A single transaction fee on Ethereum is relatively It is too high for small people, and this is also their barrier to enter Ethereum. You have said before that each transaction fee on the Internet in the future should not exceed 5 cents. Do you regard this as the goal of Ethereum? Do you think there is a solid roadmap to achieve this at scale?

Vitalik: I think this expansion should be achieved The goal requires some sacrifice of decentralization or security or other rights. If we use cross-chain completely. For example, there are different applications and ecosystems on 100 different chains. If one chain is attacked, the entire ecosystem will be threatened by danger.

But when we create a multi-chain application, one chain can Recovery without a chain. Layer 2 is getting better, there is a lot of work going on here, for example introducing data compression into optimistic rollup could make it 1.5-2x cheaper than before. If full data compression could be applied, optimistic rollups would be as cheap as zK rollups are today (i.e. ten times cheaper).

UpOnly: If in a few years people can trade at a transaction fee price of 5 cents, then generally everyone will only be on Layer2 For transactions, Layer1 is more like a layer that makes various rollups interact with each other.

Vitalik:Yes.

UpOnly: How do you feel about the progress of zkEVM? Can you give an example of its application?

Vitalik: I think zkEVM is progressing very well smoothly. People are looking forward to seeing it in action this year, but there are obviously some challenges in terms of optimization and security audits, but I think it's going pretty well. Applying zkEVM in layer1 means that we can use zkSNARK to prove that the execution of Ethereum blocks is correct, which means that not every node in the network has to process every block, and we can see a world-only A node needs to complete all computing power, and others only need to verify this node, so this can save time and money to operate a node.

The application of zkEVM in layer2 means a fully EVM-compatible zk RollUPs - This means it will fully support the EVM with no/little modifications to improve efficiency, which will make the gas fee lower because the hash function is harder to prove in zk.

For users, I think zk rollups are better than optimistic rollups in two points:

First, in optimistic rollup you have 1 week waiting period to withdraw your assets, while zk rollups don’t have this waiting period. Because optimistic rollup relies on fraud proofs, it will trust by default whoever submitted the block, if a block is wrong, then someone will challenge them for a period of time. In zk rollup, when you submit a block, you submit a block with proof rights. So assuming you build an invalid block, it won't be accepted in the first place either.

Second, the security risk of zk rollup is lower. Assuming that an optimistic rollup needs to process 10,000 transactions per second, only 5 people have the ability to participate in the operation of the node. What if an attacker submits a fake transaction record and knocks down all five nodes? But zk rollup does not allow this to happen at all.

UpOnly: Another question about security. Now that many institutional investors have entered the DeFi field, do you feel that there are too many risks and interdependencies at present, and a small loophole will cause the entire system to collapse. Do we need to address the way smart contracts cooperate because something buried 5 layers deep could end up being the trigger point for losing tens of billions of dollars.

Vitalik:This is a very good question, and I The reason for really wanting to keep these protocols as simple as possible. When I discuss how PoS or sharding will work with the team, I think about simplifying the line of code as much as possible. There are also a lot of simplifications that happen because there are many things that can be replicated exactly, like both Optimistic and Arbitrium are EVM chains, and they use the same code that the Ethereum-based layers use.

So you know that in the first layer you have the same thing, in the second It's the same thing in the layers -- a lot of the same encryption is being reused in a lot of different places, so it makes sense that there are a lot of building blocks that can be used simultaneously in four or five different layers.

UpOnly: I was wondering if you think there might be something like a web standard that could be used to secure assets on chain long term ?

Vitalik:Yes, I think this Standards for things like this will keep happening, and over time, everything decentralized will have to upgrade to Layer 2. I recently tried uploading my blog to Mirror, which cost me about $15 in transaction fees. I look forward to the day when ENS will support Layer 2 so that my transaction fee may shrink to 2 dollars, then maybe 20 cents, and finally 3 cents.

UpOnly: When you bring real privacy to people, what risks will exist, and what do you think will happen in the future because of this issue Dispute?

Vitalik: I think striving for more Privacy is an important challenge, and many of us now underestimate the risks of not having it. Just like everything after us will get more encrypted, they will become like twitter for your bank account. We can see how much someone sent another person, and if we narrow it down, we wonder why this person is sending so much money to another person, what is his purpose, and it can easily become dystopian.

UpOnly: From an investment point of view, what industry (non-crypto field) would you invest your assets in?

Vitalik: I will choose biotechnology, I think it's going to be as fast as computers have been in the last 70 years, and it's going to be fast in the next 70 years.

UpOnly: Can you tell our audience about your life advice?

Vitalik: My answer is, everyone You can try to become a better person every day than yesterday. For example, you can be more friendly and learn more knowledge, such as starting to learn Spanish, mathematics, or cryptography. You can even exercise more. I am working hard to run 20km now.

The above is the entire content of this conversation.   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J9ex32-pCI

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