Original Title: "Must-read! Highlights of yesterday's AMA with the Ethereum Foundation"

Original Translation: Karen, Foresight News

Starting at 21:00 on January 10th, the Ethereum Foundation research team held its 11th AMA on Reddit. Foresight News reviewed 313 comments, compiled and summarized the key views of Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum Foundation members. The discussion mainly focused on the limitations of EIP-4844 in expanding Ethereum, liquidity fragmentation and composability challenges on Ethereum L2, thoughts on Lido's dominant position, Ethereum security budget, native Rollup, the intersection of AI and blockchain, privacy, Rollup, and other topics.

Vitalik's Key Insights

Question: How much Gas Limit can we safely increase now? What about after Verkle?

Vitalik: To be honest, I think it is reasonable to moderately increase the Gas limit even today. The Gas limit has not been increased for nearly three years. (Vitalik did some simple calculations, stating that this means the network throughput will increase to about 40 million.)

Question: What is the mid-to-long term plan to bring privacy to Ethereum users? In the future, is it possible for privacy to take a backseat to other more pressing issues such as scalability?

Vitalik: There are definitely other privacy solutions, such as Railway, that I have been using. I expect such solutions to eventually be available on top of existing L2 solutions. Because we have not yet approached a single ideal technical path to achieve this, there are dozens of methods, including (i) which ZK-SNARK scheme to use, (ii) how to do privacy pools, (iii) what kind of UTXO system to build, and (iv) the trade-offs between complexity and functionality.

Question: Can you specify concrete advantages of blockchain technology over existing non-blockchain technologies?

Vitalik：

Many people, especially in politically unstable countries, are using cryptocurrency to perform basic business functions and savings. In some cases, more than 10% of the population is affected by this.

·ENS is the world's largest and most well-maintained domain/username system that is not dependent on a single company or organization and has censorship resistance.

·In many cases, multi-signature is a more convenient and easy-to-deploy way for group security management of funds compared to any method provided by traditional finance.

·NFT is being used as a way for artists to raise funds, which was previously impossible. In my opinion, the average quality in the NFT field is improving.

Question: When will crList be released? Is it sufficient to provide resistance to review systems (along with PBS) in the foreseeable future?

Vitalik: It may be determined around the same time as the single slot, or shortly thereafter.

Question: Is it possible to run other clients as a backup to address the issue of Geth client preference, and would this increase technical workload?

Vitalik: I know that the infrastructure for running multiple clients as a staker is improving. I also expect upgrades such as statelessness to further improve the situation.

Question: Do you think there are security and social fragmentation issues in the current Rollup Centric roadmap?

Vitalik: I agree that this is a problem. Ultimately, I believe it should be the responsibility of the wallet, not the individual user.

Question: What are the advantages of ZK Light Client compared to Helios, Kevlar, or Nimbus?

Vitalik: ZK light client can be lighter and may cover the entire state transition function, not just the sync committee or consensus.

Question: Are you still exploring the possibility of reducing the Ethereum threshold required for running validators?

Vitalik: There are two points, one is to reduce client resource load and the other is to lower the 32 ETH threshold.

Question: What is your opinion on Vitalik's 8192 signature post-ssf proposal? If validators are subject to reputation restrictions and have high entry barriers, wouldn't Ethereum become a DPOS like Cosmos? Not allowing individual staking seems to be a major risk to Ethereum's decentralization.

Vitalik: Option 3 in this proposal is undoubtedly the most popular, largely due to this reason.

Question: How do we responsibly abstract the complexity of modular blockchain from end users? Who owns it? Is it a public interest in this field? Is it someone from EF or various teams building consumer applications?

Vitalik: I think there are many aspects that can be improved at the wallet level. For cross-L2 transfers, I am optimistic about open and permissionless cross-chain trading protocols like UniswapX. The rest is presenting it to the user, existing wallets are definitely not doing a good job, and there is room for improvement. I have already seen good progress, for example, Rabby has done a good job in aggregating cross-chain views.

Question: Once the EVM is SNARK-ified, will Rollups appear on Ethereum's roadmap? How will this affect scalability and what does it mean for users running light clients?

Vitalik: If the synchronization committee is removed, it is because the basic consensus itself has become light enough to allow light clients to verify it directly (or light enough to allow dedicated nodes to perform SNARKs for it so that light clients can verify it). This is the main reason for considering 8192 signature methods per slot: it sets a relatively low limit on the complexity of verifying basic consensus.

Justin Drake: An important intersection is "AI currency". We are building programmable digital currencies that can be hosted and traded by artificial intelligence without permission. Advanced AI will use cryptocurrencies to pay each other and store their savings in cryptocurrencies, ultimately making AI the richest entity in the world, thanks in part to cryptocurrencies. Like artificial intelligence, this is bullish in the medium term, but incredible in the long term. Another intersection with AI is security, where artificial intelligence is much better than humans at identifying vulnerabilities.

Privacy

Question: What is your opinion on implementing privacy on Ethereum? Vitalik previously mentioned Railway and Nocturne. Given government crackdowns, what is your view on the long-term feasibility of privacy on Ethereum?

Nerolation: There are currently more complex privacy tools available that do not simply mix assets, but also provide compliance tools. Ameen's privacy pool project is a good example of striking a balance between providing privacy for everyday Ethereum users and making it difficult for black hat attacks. Here is a paper on the topic. The only downside is the cost, as on-chain zero-knowledge proof verification is very expensive.

Another option is stealth addresses. They provide a weaker form of privacy - only unlinkability, not untraceability - but are easier to implement and much cheaper to use. Stealth addresses have huge potential for donations, salary payments, or everyday grocery shopping.

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Question: What is your opinion on VanEck's commitment to provide 5% of BTC ETF profits to core developers? Is this a potential risk? If a large amount of cash begins to flow from TradFi to the ETH core team and becomes a significant portion of their income, how would you mitigate centralization risks?

Justin Drake: I personally think this is a good idea. If the specific organization that accepts donations becomes corrupt, a ten-year commitment may be too long. It is suggested that VanEck make shorter commitments, conduct regular reviews and revisions to maintain consistency in the incentive mechanism.

Question: What is your opinion on the re-pledge risk of Eigenlayer?

Barnabé Monnot: The risk facing Ethereum is a large EigenLayer reduction event, but if the reduction is legitimate, then the Ethereum protocol will self-repair. Higher rewards for lower staking values will attract new stakers. For illegal reductions, such as smart contract risks, EigenLayer plans to implement protective measures.

Justin Drake: At this stage, I haven't seen a practical or meaningful way to "ensure" restaking. The closest possibility is to limit staking by reducing issuance (even possibly negative issuance) when staking approaches its limit. In fact, the staking limit can be seen as a "restaking destruction" mechanism.

Question: Is one-shot signatures the ultimate game of blockchain?

Justin Drake: Yes, I believe that one-time signatures can fundamentally change the outcome of consensus. Of course, we are still decades away from this goal (perhaps more than 30 years).

Question: What impact will most or all L2s moving from Ethereum to DA have on L1?

mikeneuder: There are two scenarios. The first is that a new L2 is widely adopted. However, assuming that the L2 has its own native assets, it can be used as gas and users on the L2 do not need to interact with Ethereum (they can directly join the L2). Now, the only contribution of L2 to Ethereum is to pay for data published in blob form.

The second scenario is that different L2s still use Ethereum as the settlement layer, but publish blobs to Celestia. This is commonly referred to as "validium". Therefore, this L2 no longer pays for L1 data blob fees. This is unlikely to change its settlement layer, as ETH, as the Gas token on L2, is crucial for cross-chain bridges between Ethereum L1 and L2.

Justin Drake: There is a strong network effect around the shared security of DA. If Rollups stop consuming Ethereum's DA, it would indicate that Ethereum has lost to some competitors in the settlement game. As a result, Ethereum will lose fee income, currency premium will decrease, economic security and economic bandwidth will shrink. I predict that it will slowly but surely die.

Question: What is the structure of the Ethereum Foundation research team? Is there a team responsible for specific risks (such as re-staking or centralized liquidity staking)? How many researchers are there?

Barnabé Monnot: There are multiple teams within the research group, such as our team, the Robust Incentives Group (RIG). The topics are very diverse, and many teams may be interested in the same topic. You will see many discussions among teams about LST or re-staking, so the focus is more on each team's default scope and approach. We have a total of about 35 people, with 7 members in RIG.

Question: Should Ethereum strive to maintain the ability to join the validator set without permission?

Francesco: The validator set will definitely never be allowed, in this sense, if the current validator set cannot handle the activation of validators that meet all requirements, it should be considered a secondary review attack. The tricky part is "meeting all joining requirements", which may change from 32 ETH to other values depending on the choices made. Personally, I believe that maintaining the accessibility of solo staking, and even increasing its accessibility, is very valuable for Ethereum.

Question: What are some interesting ideas from other blockchain networks that may be implemented in Ethereum in the future?

Barnabé Monnot: I don't know if they will be implemented, but I am interested in the following ideas:

Multiplicity (多重性) is introduced as an anti-censorship tool in the context of the Cosmos network.

Batch block space from Polkadot can provide long-term supply guarantees for projects such as payment blobs. Rollup, and is provided at a fixed cost.

Question: If Ethereum continues on its current path, do you think other blockchains will still be needed 20 years from now?

Barnabé Monnot: Rollups are like other blockchains. I believe in heterogeneity, Ethereum is a model, but not a single model, and there are many other ways to build blockchains that make sense for various use cases, and I hope their design choices are also validated.

Question: Will the amount of ETH required to run a staking node be reduced? If so, when will it be reduced? What about transaction fees?

Barnabé Monnot: Regarding transaction fees, we do not have direct control over them as they are determined by the market. The best thing we can do is to improve Ethereum through L2 or L1 enhancements to expand its capacity as much as possible. This should allow us to increase the Gas limit on L1 and provide more capacity.

Question: The current consensus is that Ethereum's monetary policy no longer needs to be modified since the implementation of self-merging and EIP-1559. If not, how will the issuance be adjusted? Will it be increased or decreased?

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