ETH2.0 & Beyond Fireside Chat – Vitalik Buterin, Founder of Ethereum & Jeff Roberts Fortune Magazine

hello hi everyone metallic thanks for joining us let's jump into it I on Twitter beforehand I put it out to the Twitterverse what question she asked metallic and what I liked was this one it's year 2025 five years from now what is the killer app and aetherium it's difficult to predict you know like I remember in 2015 the kinds of well I mean the kinds of things I was predicting back then was and if thinking about and some of the things that we've seen like decentralized financial systems like stable coins daos ENS and of all all of these different applications and it does feel like those those things are kind of starting to come now and a lot of the stuff that's actually happening now is kind of the same sorts of things that we did end up seeing you know 2015 though at the same time we've also seen a lot of other things that I was and not really expecting and a lot of the other kind of non-financial applications around just using blockchains for just like things like tickets certificates and of proof of like being at a particular place or doing a particular thing and all these other kind of little fun applications it's just one example and I see five years from now and I guess I could see it being a lot of the same things that we see today still being there but just hopefully being better and kind of bigger and more mature and kind of fewer risks and better usable and better usability and all of these things though at the same time I think we'll also see a lot of surprises that I just don't know about you know I'm looking forward to them oh you mentioned deep fryer let's stick with that for a bit because that was quite hot in this world but I know the mainstream financial industry they're like what's that and someone told me today they estimate maybe 50,000 users and defy platform so hmm take us in the next year or two on that is that kind of mushroom or do you think it's viable to catch on I think the tea fly up locations that are gonna see the most users or the simplest ones like if you're holding die or like actually we know and should all die everyone should I get remember solving die should hold chai instead because it comes with the interest rate and you're still it's still inside of the same platform but like if you're am like then it feels like you're holding a token and it barely feels like you're using an application but you are using an application and you know lots of people are using like die for different kinds of things so I expect to know in the future as well and the application so that for the most user is also to just keep being the simple ones so stable coins other kinds of synthetic assets decentralized exchanges a lot of similar things that what we that kind of what we have today though in there's things like I don't think there's anything that kind of completely doesn't exist today that I hope starts existing I think the thing that I hope for is just for things that are similar to things that exist but the try to kind of reduce a lot of the complexity and the centralization that we see right now like there's concerns that some people have raised around like maker governance and like how much MTR you need to kind of take over that mechanism for example there's concerns around just like relying like kind of three smart contract platforms one after the other and are you kind of tripling your smart contract for risk there's concerns about what to do any of these that you centralize there are costs actually work and you know I definitely hope that we see more improvements and of that kind of risk minimization you know it's if privacy is part of defy then I would also hope for more improvements in privacy as well if smart contract wallets are part of dfi I hope to see more smart contract wallets to December you later to pretty ambitious timeline for e2 we're gonna see beacon later this year I really predicted and then you know next year we could see Swan swept into youth to you it you still stick to that do you think that's realistic and I definitely think that the e2 has been kind of proceeding quite kind of quickly and regularly the last few months so the next milestone that we're gonna see right now is probably when we get to a kind of stable multi-client test said with just a substantial number of people participating in it and over the last few months I mean we've been seeing a lot of kind of long-running single client tests that's we'd be seeing those clients just do a huge amount of optimization work like increase your efficiency and kind of reduce their overhead by a factor of like more than a hundred I feel like we're weeks away from that and then when were there then like it's theoretically lunchable it's just a matter of like how long we have to we wants to run it in order to reduce the chance of security risks you know and so like once you have like test nets then it is kind of your risk than subsets right because you know you don't really have any like it's just obvious that there aren't more fundamental barriers it's just a matter of just making sure off all of the bugs are fixed and yeah and I'm optimistic now then I'll be sweet after per mistake we have sharding and then sharding like that's a lot tested and it's the sort of thing that kind of no blockchain has really gone before like you know you don't really have yet kind of a large-scale blockchain networks that don't have kind of single nodes that have all of the data and you know it's been kind of solved and you got a theoretical level but it obviously needs to be solved in a practical level I mean we're hoping for next year but we'll see you but I mean at the same time also we have been seeing other scaling solutions emerge other than the whole ds2 direction and look and I specifically mean roll ups right and then over the last six months we've seen this big move from plasma and of thinking about these kind of purely or tools to kind of largely thinking more about these kind of hybrid layer two is where you do a computation off chain but you keep the data on chain and it turns out that with that combination it's just much much easier to build these s scaling solutions that just scale the EVM it exists so lets you just take any existing application and just like run it inside of a rollup you don't have to design your application in a different way just so we can scale and I mean I think that's gonna put a leave a lot of pressure in the short-term as well you know just to give out some statistics like the numbers say that if everyone switched to roll-ups then the transactions per second on the etherium chain could increase to about 2500 which is like a factor of 100 increase from today made and so if that happens then you know I hope that each 2 takes it gets released safely quickly and expeditiously but if it ends up T like taking even something crazy like five years then I think just roll-ups alone are still gonna give us enough leeway to survive until we get until we have charting and watching a theorem for a few years this has seem to be the story a little bit theoretically you're there but operationally it always seems to take a lot more steps in a couple people today so I've suggested on the governance question do we need more transparency does this every needs to do more to signal where it's going and to sort of you know maintain trust and what it's doing what's your latest thoughts and governance and on that side they know there's a lot of people calling for transparency but that gets less clear transparency of what specific things like the client development teams are pushing out release a blog post with updates every one to two weeks and you know there's core developer calls that are and if open in public happening every every couple of weeks there's blog posts from meteor and foundation happening every couple of weeks so if you're actively mulling it I think the information on and if we reach to is going and where the latest progress is it's there I mean things like how the foundation kind of internally decides like how certain kinds of grants are allocated yet I mean I admit that that part of things kind of is still more opaque at this point but even there like I feel like there's a lot of information that's in a very public if you know where to log and this one might be a bit of a perennial question too but I think areum's flourished in part because it's got a leader knew where as Bitcoin you know as I think had more fractious and fights because in the absence that so could aetherium do you think survival on its own without you right now I think on a technological level it's definitely gotten to the point where it absolutely can I mean Danny O'Brien one of our weed and if researchers from javis has proven extremely capable of and of coordinating the the work happening between these two development teams and these two development teams themselves have proven very capable of operating autonomously I mean research there's and that used to be like two people two years ago but now there's this in a fairly substantial team you know people like Justin rock the ink read I'm a couple of others that have been actively pushing forward on that I mean one point X is autonomous privacy work is autonomous so from a technical point of view I really feel like it's just should be obvious that nothing and it depends on myself but I mean there's also the social question of like if I disappear like would there be kind of different people and I'm trying to kind of push their own agendas harder and kind of fight harder each other harder and I mean it's possible but at the same time I also feel like Nick I've tried to kind of let the community resolve things by itself like on a couple of occasions like I've definitely sat out of a completely of a bunch of the more contentious debates like I I've sat out completely over the most recent issuance reduction and bison team from three to two and that kind of just passed on its own reasonably well the you know the multisig like wallet unlocking debate I have you know barely and like in the world I didn't really say much and like there there were arguments there was contention there was a carbon vote in the kind of resolved itself in the the no direction pretty clearly I feel um so I think there's definitely evidence that kind of the community is capable of coordinating these things and the community kind of does have these sort of antibodies against people trying to make proposals that are kind of really hostile add another interesting question day it's staying on the topic of italic you launched a theorem Ithaca says four or five years gonna or more how are you different from when you launched it in many ways you know I think the biggest kind of challenge that I've had that I had at the beginning and I haven't have talked about this many times is just and of understanding people and understanding of the limitations of people like I back in 2014 and then I did and it ends up kind of hit hard quite a bit because you know there was this and if initial founding team and I kind of expected everyone to just kind of work together for the common good and just be nice to each other and in a lot of ways that ended up not happening and there are a lot of these different kind of interests pushing for and if influence and money and all of these other things and that's something that I feel like I have even a much better handle on than I did five years ago otherwise and my understanding of a lot of technical questions definitely I mean my understanding of a lot of kind of half technical half social questions like even just topics like governance for example like governance is the ultimate kind of question that's in the middle of those two areas because you know you can model it mathematically you can model it psychologically and you can model it in ways that kind of combine elements of both and like both sides of that or something that I didn't really understand well and now you know I've kind of gone through a lot of different possibilities kind of worked through a lot of different directions and I feel like I mean both myself but also the whole space just kind of understands what the different options there are and kind of what what the different trade-offs are and like what are the directions that we could still improve hmm interesting I'd like to kind of look at the broader centralized space or the other chains emerging and just to mix it up a bit I'll give you a name and just give me a kind of a one-word answer a one sentence answer what you think of it so let's start with cosmos interesting I mean the cost the the well the cosmos kind of pitch that you hear is kind of interoperability between blockchains which and it's interesting and I'm definitely kind of very happy that they're kind of proceeding and they're doing and they're doing all of that work on making it happen I mean the I guess I know the main risk that I would see for them is just the possibility that interoperability can happen without cosmos has this um I mean one definitely one of the one of the projects that I have I'm gonna have respect for because like it has a community if that actually kind of has values and has a philosophy that is trying to put forward like it's not just a coin that's like there to just be a coin and just try to kind of make money for people I mean and I mean a lot of the values there I in many cases I disagree with like I disagree with their approach to Unchained governance I mean I've dig criticized and if certain other things but just the fact that idea is a project that seems to kind of have a concrete philosophy of what it's trying to accomplish and seems to be or honestly I'm gonna do it just doing that is I think a positive mark for it polka dot oh no I mean it's kind of in this weird kind of middle points between being kind of cosmos alike ins be instead of being a smart contraction I mean we'll see you just a couple more I promise infinity great little the great was in and I'm and I think like Dominic does a lot of kind of and the team and they've done a lot of good work around BLS and they've done a lot of good work around just kind of researching and trying to do new consensus algorithms and trying to kind of capture this kind of in each of you know at least as as far as I interpreted kind of more more high performance but a little bit a little bit less decentralized Amy and we'll see you any other projects out there you want to talk favourably or against I don't know I mean I like criticizing categories because dyneisha individual projects can kind of the old plausible deniability because then you'd pretend that there's a good guys in the category so like I'm critical of the VM VC chains that I think VC chains are generally lame but like not your VC chain I'd like to shift again to the broader world of macroeconomics and geopolitics last year I think was quite interesting with these books Libra and then China you can see American interests in Facebook trying to say ok America you have to do this because the Chinese will do it first and use you know their new digital currency yeah if the Chinese were doing it because Americans were doing the first right but how does this take us in the future and conventional banks put this back in the bottle or will they be able to have excerpt like you know foreign policy pressure with currencies like Lieber the Chinese version of it um and I definitely and I think these kinds of things are going to happen and I think a lot of innovation states are going to try pushing out their own currency in different forms but I think the equilibrium of it is definitely one that's kind of relatively favorable to things I care about which is basically just like not having the kind of super powerful global choke choke points of failure kind of controlling large chunks of the world I mean or the entire world and the reason is that like if you have multiple options to choose from then that kind of puts competitive pressure on them and also just if these like the more of these platforms become digital like it's hard to make a platform that's digital without making a cryptographic report provable and when you can cryptographically proved transactions you can make a decentralized exchange because you can make a smart contract on a theorem that says you know if you give me one like Libra or if you give me one of like this other kind of central bank wine and if I kind of cryptographically verified that transaction then will give you like zero point zero zero whatever you and it's actually going to like you have to actively try hard to stop those kinds of exchanges to be possible and so the natural default is kind of for all of these systems to just have like lots of pathways for a kind of interconnection between them like whether the developers of the systems like it or not and so yeah and I am like I definitely think the future we're the only kinds of currencies out there are kind of centralized them and if the nation state issued ones would be a quite an undesirable one but I think just and so like I do believe in the crypto just continuing to exist as a fear at least as this kind of global outside option but I think like with this competitive market existing in with crypto existing I think like there's reasons to be optimistic who shouldn't be too worried about China because the surveillance state they have already is you know extreme and the notion of being able to issue a currency where you can track all of your citizens with that I mean that's for the dark side of crypto that's not something like keeps you up at night um I guess that's the sort of thing that would like end up happening in centralized systems regardless and so I mean yes the kind of decentralized systems and centralized systems are kind of in competition in some sense and if the centralized systems end up winning then you know yes you end up having all of these kinds of surveillance and like there's a lot of scary things that can come out of that but like I just the important thing is just making sure the dissenters exist making sure that access to the decentralized alternatives exists and the kind of as much redundant and kind of reasonably accessible access to the decentralized alternatives exist and I think even if not like not everyone ends up and or even a few people end up actually using the decentralized systems I think kind of the fact that people have the option of moving for them all itself kind of would pressure on the centralized ones to have play nice all right I'd love to turn out for questions in just a sec there's a mic right there we have about 15 minutes left I've just got one more for you if well more it depends the audience now same but for me I'd like to ask to what degree are you following the American political scene right now if it's the remarks from populism the American political scene that's like almost as fine as like crypto Twitter isn't it it's like really fun like just see like the Bloomberg campaign like release that really weird ad where you have like trumpet that you have the gingerbread to be added that they have him going like lie lie lie lie lie lie oh no it's like this is a weird system oh I don't disagree in a world between Bernie and Trump and Bloomberg do you have a preference of those I mean am I allowed to just like not comments I mean I don't know and [Applause] you can take a pass I'll take I'll take a pass on that I mean I don't know I mean I think I thought I think the yang gang is cool I'm kind of sad that it's going for this this round around great answer um anyone else have a question for italic Utes how do you feel about crypto currencies lobbying governments and it does the etherium Foundation spend money to lobby politicians elsewhere I mean lobbying is one of these things where this kind of this double-edged sword is kind of impossible to separate kind of just legitimately providing information to politicians that in regulators that like actually wants to hear the information versus and if exercising outside in outsized influence and there's this entire gray area in the middle and my opinion is that the foundation hasn't come close to doing anything unethical in that regard and like I'd certainly not support not supported doing anything like this but we've definitely had a kind of had a lot of friendly discussions with plenty of regulators have different kinds around the world and and I feel like in general it's and have led to positive results and people and have appreciate that were open and welcomed and happy to talk and I know if any regulators are listening where we definitely continue to be open and happy to talk today just a question I know people talk a lot of a lot of the problems of a decentralization mainly scaling but my question is can you really solve the problems of decentralization with centralization because a lot of the solutions offered that I see to solve the problems around decentralization sound centralized or centralized so I think I mean I think sharding scales and I think sharding is not centralized so that's one example I mean roll-up scale to some extent and roll-ups are not centralized um you know the entire kind of research that we've been doing around scaling the last five years is like precisely about how to kind of solve like the scalability triangle like how to get decentralization security and scale at the same time and I feel like we've made a lot of progress and I'm happy with the solutions we've come up with as everyone knows sustaining open-source development is wide known issue not just in our space but open source in general Carl from optimists gave a presentation on me the minor structural value auctions I was just wondering what your favorite approach in the space was for maybe securing developer funds and whether it's go ahead yes so I guess oh focus in general the public goods problem is split up into two problems like one is how you capture the value that you'll use to fund things and the other is how you decide how to find things and it sounds like the question is about the first one like I'll focus on the first one so I like miner extract about value auctions in general I kind of I like the idea of having Medavoy or two protocols that might have a large portion of revenue that they get in various ways back into the etherium ecosystem so miner extracted by value auctions and roll-ups I think are cool I think these for a kind of storage inside of execution environments was another option that I brought up on the application layer I think like even things like revenue from like EMS from LeAnn DNS like things in and of auctioning off names like if that becomes if Lara more than enough to support that project itself and I think it would be nice if and if some of that revenue could be directed to supporting public goods in the etherium ecosystem I mean the more extreme option is it's always kind of like baseball you're in protocol funding and that's what C cash is going for that's what kind of that proposal in big win cash has been going for and that always exists that's an extreme option but it's extreme because like it does compromise the theorems monetary neutrality to some extent I mean you can kind of split it into two categories like you could say oh we're going to direct a portion of transaction fees but we're gonna have a social contract that you can't kind of increase issuance itself and that might kind of make people more ideas because like they know that there is a kind of natural limit to how much money can end up kind of redirected by whatever the mechanism is but I mean in general I think the protocol layer approaches are more kind of last resorts just because they do kind of break more things that more forms of kind of neutrality that people would want these are in protocol to have and it would be nice to see if these and we can make these way or two techniques work hello my name is Anne from Toronto good to see you so my question is after we disintermediate the banks and the government's and the corporation's and all the machines in our lives have their own self sovereign ID and they are effectively self sovereign entities within our own society what is the role of human beings when we disintermediate ourselves I mean I think the employee the important thing right is that like kripp in general decentralization is not about this necessarily disintermediation it's about kind of dicho pointing like there's lots of intermediaries rights like for example every single note in the etherium network is an intermediary when I do a trade on you know swap every liquidity provider is an intermediary when I send the transaction through an optimistic roll up whenever whenever I'll do that get it done quickly guys I am the the sequence there will be an intermediary alert there's lots of kind of layers of intermediaries but the fact that they're decentralized means that it's ANF chokepoints I mean I guess like there's and you can make this kind of analogy from a kind of Electrical Engineering right like when you have kind of resistors in series the resistance adds up but when you have kind of resistors in parallel that kind of the electrons can kind of choose between then the resistance goes down so it gets that kind of thing right when you and if at every unnecessary layer of inter mediation if you just allow anyone to and have participated as part of that and so you create kinda just inherently this kind of competitive market of different options then that's where the benefits come from and and ultimately I think like we are creating systems that are inevitably going to kind involve and if aggregating but from humans I mean robots could help like this to some extent but ultimately and even the robots are the thing that they're doing is at least for the foreseeable future predicting humans and and so like even if it's kind of locally controlled by a robot you know what's ultimately kind of from a kind of looking further back controlled by whatever robot or whatever human the robot is hopeless we trying to predict and like that's how things should be right business or there to benefit people and so the if you want to actually do that then the behavior of the system should somehow kind of be a consequence of things that people kind of want and things that people feed into the system as a result of what they want and I think that's the way that things are going to continue being great I think we have time for two more questions well she just mentioned that you know we're talking about the centralizing everything so I'm curious if you think there's anything that is either impossible or very unlikely to ever be decentralized I mean in decentralizing like individual human brains after you upload them is gonna be kind of hard like I think I don't know like MPC overhead it's a lot and I mean like I do worry that you know if the MPC is end up colluding then like they could download a copy of you and then they can like torture it and that would be not very nice the more near-term things in general things are harder to decentralized if they require kind of like very sophisticated and kind of high effort subjective input like if you have sophisticated and subjective input then like it's just too many patients to have like most many people kind of going through the same thought process and so it'll end up kind of converging on just being one and that seems and if relatively difficult to avoid also I mean I think as far as kind of governance mechanisms go is saying I like decentralized ones but I also think there was this interesting design space of governance mechanisms was kind of found a decent centralization where you have kind of individuals having decision taking power within some latitude but then a more decentralized thing like basically having control of a nuke so they can just say like you bye-bye you go you go entirely and like we'll replace you with someone else yeah and you know in general okay and I think kind of the design space for kind of centralized and decentralized things to complement each other as one that where there's a lot of kind of really good solutions that could end up lying a question with the advancement of proof is staking and a lot of things taking that position how do you feel like with the money and in flow some entity a person just kind of taking up the proof of staking buying up a supply taking up spinning masternodes or whatever the case may be for any like type of blockchain itself that you know essentially one entity or Anthony a person can kind of control a lot of the supply and the masternodes upset blockade and have you know how the centralized do you become or lose it because one entity controls so much of in the notes yeah so I've actually recently started to do a bit of research into what I call kind of 51% attack mitigation and 51% attack recovery so this is basically like if there is an entity that controls like more than half of the chain and they do something bad how can we kind of automatically detect that this happened and how can we automatically kind of coordinate on what the recovery path is and it turns out that there actually are ways to do this that are rather based on and of the what I call 99% faults are and consensus it's this kind of branch of consensus research that was so important and if included in his paper back in 98 1982 but then nobody cares about for some reason and you can kind of basically at least achieve agreement between online nodes about whether or not an attack happened and whether and kind of how to recover from it and so if you kind of combine that with kind of some level of reliance on the social layer and you can come up with a system where my attacks actually don't cause that much damage and so there isn't even that much benefits here and of starting an attack mmm so that's kind of that's one possibility I mean otherwise and aside from that there's also the second line of defense which is just kind of making sure that the number of alligators participating and staking is large enough that it's like really really really expensive and difficult to actually get more than anyone else put together and part of that is just democratizing staking making it easier to stake which we've been doing a lot of making it cheaper to stake so that's a combination of those two approaches so it sounds like you're more confident in staking and proof of stake than ever before I think so right just like to wrap up the more general question of what ideas are really exciting you lately is there something you've read lately that really you know it's got vitalik excited mmm I mean a lot of things that I mean I think these and a 51% attack recovery things are exciting and I think quadratic funding is exciting I think the progress that was made in there were know which proofs in the last year is like amazingly exciting a lot of kind of I'm also just kind of things that I'm seeing in the ecosystem so like the fact it's also like kind of the crypto space as a whole is taking these kind of public goods funding challenges within the ecosystem much more seriously and being open to different approaches to meeting them so you know you have the Z cash extension of the founders or the dev reward you have the the Bitcoin cash a kind of proposal and you have one of the quadratic funding and give coin grants happening in the etherium ecosystem in all these discussions around mev auctions so like the fact that all of those discussions are happening as some definitely something that and it makes me happy and just generally also the facts that kind of the they're like it feels like the etherium community kind of has more and more of a kind of coherent philosophy around these things and it's not just kind of jumping around and they're trying to do everything like there's more and more kind of coherent ideas about you know what kind of world these things are all trying to create and they I mean there's still like a lot of internal diversity within a theorem community and I think kind of internal diversity of this as the etherium community's greatest strengths but you know you can kind of how have both at the same time let's actually wrap up on this let's speak right to the theorem community they're here before you what is the health of the community right now how are you feeling about it compared to other times I feel like it's the healthiest that's ever been I mean I and like you could say that like on the one hand you know the number like if we did a conference the number of people that would show up to the conference is lower now than it was like at the top of the bubble at the in January 2018 but at the same time like the people that join in during the bubbles like some of them stay for the long term but a huge number of them don't stay for the long term and I kind of they're like you need time to and have understand who is there for just for because like this is a temporary thing and it's cool for like a short amount of time versus people who kind of really are there because they believe and the ideas and the values for the long-term and I feel like I know the people that have stuck around in the last two years are people that have stuck around for the right reasons and the people like the community has and have grown kind of in the right directions so I think that's been a very kind of positive thing I'm also just the growth of are kind of different projects trying to do things and if independently of the etherion foundation is a really kind of huge and positive sign like I mentioned I think the etherium community is way more self-sustaining and if than it was two years ago and all those things make me really happy it's great ok well let's give it a perfect Alec thanks [Applause] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: ETHDenver

Views: 17,560

Keywords: Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum, Jeff Roberts, Fortune, ETHDenver, fortune magazine, Cryptocurrency, Crypto, Blockchain, Blockchain technology, Bitcoin, Decentralized finance, DeFi, Hackathon, Smart Contracts, Social Impact, Decentralization, Privacy, Identity, Crypto Education, Blockchain Education, Blockchain for Good, ETHDenver BUIDLathon, ETHDenver hackathon, Ethereum Denver, ETHDenver 2020, Ethereum hackathon, Ethereum Denver hackathon, #BeABufficorn, #imapegabufficorn, Web3

Id: 3nFdFgAHzo0

Length: 36min 41sec (2201 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Crypto-swiss]

Where is the fire ?!

[u/EuphratesGroup]

3:10 "synthetic asset" first time hearing that