Chainfeeds Introduction:
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech titled "What Excites Me About the Next Decade" on the first day of the TOKEN2049 main venue, describing what he believes is different from the current crypto space. BlockBeats compiled and sorted out the content of his speech.
Source:
https://www.theblockbeats.info/news/55078
Article author:
Vitalik Buterin
Viewpoint:
Vitalik Buterin: Are we really still in the early stages? My answer to that question is that I don't think we're early in crypto, but we are in a special stage. What's going on? We can dig a little deeper into that. I'm reminded of my visit to Argentina in 2021. It was my first trip to Argentina. The first thing that struck me was that there was a demographic across the country that was not only incredibly excited about cryptocurrency, but was actively using it on a massive scale. But I was actually walking around on Christmas Day, and the first coffee shop I noticed was open. I walked in, and the owner knew me and allowed me to pay for my coffee and the dessert that I was having with my friends with ETH. But they were not using decentralized technology. And that's the same thing that ultimately made me think that at least in the early days, the whole "getting everyone to accept Bitcoin as a currency" thing failed. It was fees. If you remember the marketing at the beginning, why Bitcoin was so great. It was generally mentioned that PayPal and some of the credit card companies, they all ripped off their customers on fees. They charged very high fees, it was terrible, but Bitcoin itself has fees of $1 to $50. Ethereum fees have also gone up. The highest fees I've paid on Ethereum are actually for privacy-preserving transactions. Gas has been rising, so to speak, and there have been a lot of comments on Twitter every time I do an operation. So privacy protocols have a very good market fit. Some transactions cost about $800. A lot of projects fail because of fees. Ethereum fees have dropped from between $10 and $0.50 to less than 1 cent, basically close to zero. At the same time, OP and ARB, the two main Ethereum Laeyr 2, have reached a major security milestone called Phase 1, and multiple ZK-based Rollups have also told me that they plan to reach Phase 1 soon. So Rollups will also become more secure soon. Fees are finally becoming affordable. But this is not the only improvement. Another annoyance I clearly remember when traveling in Argentina was that I tried to transfer money to someone using the Ethereum mainnet, and the transaction fee was about $4, and the transaction confirmation took about 5 minutes. Although EIP-1559 was already online at this time, this particular wallet was not actually upgraded. Bitcoin blocks are generated every 10 minutes, so you may have to wait 10 minutes or even an hour for a transaction to be confirmed. And Ethereum's theoretical block time is 13 seconds, but because the gas market was very inefficient in the past, sometimes if you're unlucky, you might have to wait a completely random amount of time, maybe 5 minutes or even longer for your transaction to be packaged. EIP-1559 actually basically solves this problem. So, actually these two things have allowed me to have a stable transaction confirmation time between 5 and 15 seconds today. If you use a Layer 2 solution with fast and free confirmations, you can usually get it down to one second. So basically, these two major issues are the biggest factors that have led to the centralized user experience being far superior to the decentralized user experience in 2021. This year we also saw progress in account abstraction. We saw more and more people using security tools. We saw EIP-7702. We started to see mainstream adoption of ZK-snarks, all kinds of different applications. So we have new and better privacy protocols. Even with the existing ease of use improvements, a few years ago people were complaining about having to manually switch networks. Today, I feel like I haven't actually manually switched networks in at least the past year. So the limitations of the technology were a hindering factor. I even remember that moment when it looked like CryptoKitties might become a real hit app. But then what happened? The success of CryptoKitties drove Ethereum's gas price through the roof. Ethereum became essentially unusable, which in itself limited its growth. That's no longer true today, but it basically means that the reason not to use crypto is gone. So what about the reason to get in in the first place? I think one mistake people sometimes make is to view crypto as an efficiency technology. That's something a lot of people were talking about a decade ago.
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