Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin recently published his views and attitudes on several key issues regarding the future development of Ethereum and the crypto industry on his blog and social media platforms. Bulu has compiled the key points from July 2024 to date. Let's take a look at the details:
Cross-Layer 2 interoperability issues "will soon be no longer a problem"
Vitalik Buterin: I think the interoperability problem across L2 will "soon be a non-issue" and the entire Ethereum (including Layer1, Rollups, Validium, and even sidechains) will have a smooth user experience that will surprise people. I see a huge amount of energy and willingness to make this happen.
I am against choosing political allegiances based on who “supports encryption”
Vitalik Buterin: Don’t just support crypto assets, support deeper goals and policy impacts.
Over the past few years, "crypto" has become an increasingly important topic in political policy, and various jurisdictions have been considering bills to regulate various actors engaged in blockchain business in various ways. In my opinion, most of these bills are reasonable, although there are concerns that governments will take extreme measures, such as treating almost all digital assets as securities or banning self-custodial wallets.
As a result of these concerns, more and more crypto supporters are becoming politically active, but their preference for parties and candidates depends almost entirely on their willingness to take a lenient and friendly approach to “crypto digital assets.”
I am against this trend, especially because I think this approach to decision making is highly risky and may go against your original intentions and values in entering the crypto space.
“Crypto” is not just about crypto assets and blockchain
Vitalik Buterin: "Crypto" is not just crypto assets and blockchain. In the field of crypto assets, people tend to focus too much on the centrality of "assets" and regard the freedom to hold and consume assets as the most important political issue.
I agree that doing anything important in modern society requires money and assets, and the private consumption rights that Zooko tirelessly advocates are equally important. Moreover, asset issuance can greatly enhance people's ability to build digital organizations, so that they truly have the power of collective economy, thereby advancing the work of the organization. However, the near-exclusive focus on crypto assets and blockchains is not the ideology that originally created crypto assets.
Crypto assets have their origins in the Cypherpunk Movement, a techno-libertarian movement that understands the importance of decentralization, as Satoshi Nakamoto explained in one of his few public political statements:
A long speech on the system's vulnerability to the monopoly of force.
You won't find solutions to political problems in cryptography.
Crypto assets are just one of several important scenarios for applying decentralized networks
Vitalik Buterin: Freedom is important, and decentralized networks can protect freedom well. Crypto assets are an important scenario for applying decentralized networks, but it is only one of several important scenarios.
I can think of at least a few other technological freedoms that are as “foundational” as the freedom to use crypto assets: freedom and privacy of communications, free and privacy-friendly digital identities, high-quality access to information, freedom of thought and privacy, etc.
Freedom of thought and privacy will become increasingly important in the coming decades. Unless something drastic changes, more and more of our thoughts will be mediated and read directly by the servers of centralized AI companies.
My basic point is this: you don’t join crypto because of crypto, you join crypto because of a deeper purpose. Don’t think in terms of crypto, think in terms of the fundamental purpose of crypto, the whole set of policy implications. And the current “pro-crypto” initiatives, at least for now, don’t think in that way.
Crypto-friendly today doesn’t mean crypto-friendly in 5 years
Vitalik Buterin: Internationalism is a social and political cause that I and many of my crypto peers hold dear.
In theory, the internet does not discriminate between the richest and the poorest countries, which is an important aspect of the internet's liberation. Once we can get basic internet access standards to most people around the world, we can have a more equally accessible and global digital society. Cryptocurrencies extend these ideals to the realm of economic interaction. This has the potential to greatly contribute to the flattening of the global economy, and I have personally seen many examples of this happening .
If you see a politician is crypto-friendly, one thing you can do is look up what they thought about crypto itself 5 years ago. Similarly, look up what they thought about crypto-related topics 5 years ago. In particular, try to find topics where "supporting freedom" and "supporting companies" are inconsistent.
If a politician supports cryptocurrencies, the key questions to ask are: Are they doing it for the right reasons? Do they have a vision for 21st century technology, politics, and economics that aligns with yours? Do they have a positive long-term vision beyond their immediate concerns of “beating up the other bad tribes”? If they do, great: you should support them and make it clear that this is why you support them. If not, then either stay out of it entirely or find a better force to ally with.
Original link
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/07/17/procrypto.html
What do I think of Circle STARK?
Vitalik Buterin: Circle STARKs don’t introduce a lot of additional complexity for developers compared to regular STARKs. In implementation, the three issues above are basically the only differences I see from regular FRI. The underlying math behind the “polynomials” that Circle FRI runs on is very counter-intuitive and takes a while to understand and appreciate. But it just so happens that this complexity is hidden from developers. The complexity of circle math is encapsulated, not systemic.
Understanding Circle FRI and Circle FFT is also a good gateway to understanding other "exotic FFTs": most notably the binary field FFT used previously by Binius and LibSTARK, and even weirder constructions like the elliptic curve FFT, which use a few-to-one mappings that work well with elliptic curve point operations.
Combined with Mersenne 31, BabyBear, and binary field technologies like Binius, we feel like we are close to the limits of how efficient the "base layer" of STARKs can be. At this point, I expect the frontier of STARK optimization to move toward doing the most efficient arithmetic on primitives like hash functions and signatures (and optimizing those primitives themselves for this purpose), doing recursive constructions to enable more parallelization, doing arithmetic on virtual machines to improve the developer experience, and other higher-level tasks.
Original link
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/07/23/circlestarks.html
We do need advanced tools, but we also need to make them easy to understand and use so that more people can work together
BUTERIN: It’s in this spirit that I published my article, trying to make more people aware of advanced topics in cryptography: we do need advanced tools, but we also need to make them easy to understand and use, to ensure that more people can work together, and to ensure that the future is one that empowers people , rather than turning into a series of iPhone interfaces built by a few people that the rest of us can only access in a standardized way.
Original link
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/08/03/museumfuture.html
If you want a strong ecosystem, it has to be simple
Vitalik Buterin said in a speech at the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC 7): If you want a strong ecosystem, it has to be simple, it shouldn’t have these, like 73 random hooks and some kind of backward compatibility.
Ethereum is a "large and reasonably decentralized staking ecosystem" and a highly international and knowledgeable community. But the blockchain's weaknesses still need to be addressed, including the difficulty of single-person monitoring due to the need for 32 Ethereum to become a validator of the blockchain, and the technical complexity of running a node.
