CEO OF COINBASE ON FIRESIDE WITH VITALIK: ETHEREUM FUTURE
Brian Armstrong became familiar with Vitalik Buterin at the bitcoin conference in San Jose, California.
Brian: started with the query: what’s the current state of the etherueum foundation and the recent development with Ethereum 2.0?
Vitalik: Ethereum Foundation, initially created in the middle of 2014, with different core developers around Europe trying to make the protocol happen, it originally expanded a lot around 2018 when we announced the big grant program as we wanted to go beyond paying the core developers but also supporting different independent projects in the community which was a way to encourage the diverse ecosystem, building some layer two project-related things and the big long list, So the Ethereum system support things that are good for you and the world. So basically its a very global distributed organization, says Vitalik, with its significant bases in Switzerland, Singapore, Berlin, and Francisco
Do i correctly understand the foundation is defining the spec protocol and a grant-making organization?
UNISWAP, STARTED WITH A GRANT FROM ETHEUREUM
Vitalik: There is a lot of team building Ethereum 2 spec, there is the solidity team, the python team that has been working on ethereum python implementation and then with the grants, the ethereum two clients: prism from prismatic lighthouse from sigma prime-nimbus received a combination of support from the ethereum foundation and other organizations in the ethereum ecosystem. Of course, other applications like Uniswap started with a grant.
ETHEREUM 2.0 MAJOR UPGRADES: FROM POW TO POF: energy efficient AND SHARDING : scalability upgrade
Vitalik: Ethereum 2.0 started is geared mainly to two upgrades. One of them is Switching the consensus from Proof of work to proof of stake, which will be more energy-efficient( a blog on vitaliks.c.a talks detailed this)
And the other is sharding, a scalability upgrade that will split up the transaction load and increase the blockchain throughput from 15 transactions per second to tens of thousands of transactions per second. Successfully launching the first phase: phase zero proof-of-stake beacon chain basically just a private stake chain just maintaining consensus on itself which will kick off once the amount of ether reaches 524,000.
DOCKING, HYBRID LAYER 2 TECHNIQUE AND MORE COMING UP WITH TEAMS: THE LOOP RINGS, OPTIMISM, ARBITRUM, AND ZIKA ROLLUPS.
After phase zero, there are minor improvements to the merge or sometimes called docking, which basically means taking the entire eth1 system and actually moving it on top of these two layers. So we would basically get rid of proof of work right though that would take a bit longer as we want to be sure the community is confident with the process.
We’ve also been onto this hybrid layer two technique, which is similar to the Bitcoin lending network. A lot of work has been happening like these plasma roll-ups. Unlike the other layer two schemes, they require a little bit of data on-chain; they require about 16 bytes of data on-chain for every transaction.
So a lot, we’ve been actively working with teams like optimism, Arbitrum, the loop ring making things happen, and can scale up transactions. There is literally nothing left to be done with Zika roll-ups supporting payments and optimistic roll-ups on the test net. It just a matter of the stake chain getting up to over 500 thousand.
Various next-generation projects are working, like polkadot, cosmos,algoran, and then also Eth2.0. A race to meet up or the wait worth the process?
Vitalik: Having a successful blockchain with useful features and the right adoption is not just a matter of tech. It’s also a matter of like ecosystem and community adopting it and implementing it on their wallets and getting used to it in the long run. Everyone wants to be the king of their ecosystem. Still, you can often be the most useful by just building a tool and being okay with being a tool; for example, a tornado cache is just a tool, and it’s getting a lot of usages, which has been great for the past year.
“PEOPLE UNDERESTIMATE THE VALUE OF AN EXCELLENT COMMUNITY BECAUSE IT IS MORE OF A STORY WHY YOUR PLATFORM IS UNIQUE THAN HAVING A GREAT TECH,” says vitalik
Do you anticipate mergers or acquisitions of different consolidated blockchain? Brian asks
Vitalik: Yes, we haven’t seen a merger before, and that would require a type of coordination that decentralized communities are not good at though a successful trial would lead the way. Imagine the ETH killers pivoting from ETH killers to being out of the satellite with a bridge right beside the Ethereum system that you can bounce back and front. So with these, i see some portion of them going down that part.
The most exciting part isn’t becoming a clone rather doing something Ethereum can’t do like protocol changes, dow forks, and having built-in price feeds and oracles or a more significant handy thing like governance blockchain.
Any advice for companies like coinbase or other crypto-related to help this transition happen?
VItalik: As you are already taking roll-ups seriously, staying in touch with the roll-up ecosystem and being part of the solution terms is also a big thing. Another significant gateway is providing an easy access interface for the easy purchase of some crypto by a newbie in the crypto ecosystem. So having just an easy to use wallet is a big shot. Adapting to growths/improvements example: Having multi-sig wallet at least on the Bitcoin side.
Ethereum vision in next decade or half, do we get a million users?
PRIVACY: SOCIAL RECOVERY BETTER THAN 24 WORDS ON PAPER , SCALABILITY MAKING BIG THINGS HAPPEN!!
vitalik: If scalability can successfully happen, then a lot of other big things are about to happen, as it will attract large enterprises doing useful things on the chain, unlock a lot more and micro-payment related things and even the simple consumer and work to merchant payments starts to kind of become viable again in a way that they’re not in many smaller cases today.
Privacy is also another milestone, as it will unlock more possibilities. Another essential thing is Wallet security: as many people are not going to adopt 24 words on a piece of paper and if the paper accidentally goes in the garbage, so do your life savings. It goes back to multi-sig wallets and off-course Social recovery that already exists in We-chat as some people are comfortable with the idea of putting in some contacts that they collectively trust the collection.
Finding a better security model moving away from a decentralized kind of control to approaching an excellent and comfortable user experience is another crucial thing for adoption.
The Ethereum community has this unique culture with memes, unicorns, rainbows, .and cats. So what’s the origin of the inspiration?
OPENNESS AND TRANSPARENCY ARE WHAT CRYPTO REPRESENTS!
vitalik; Yeah, it is merely a cultural value of the Ethereum community and myself, which illustrates a kind of “Don’t take life too seriously and no need to be aggressive and fierce like some of the maximalists on Twitter.
Not being bad and being straightforward, open, and transparent to the world is precisely what crypto represents. So our culture of cats, memes, and so forth is just practice to make people feel welcome and friendly, perhaps reminding us of the lighter side of life.
