AMA with Vitalik Buterin
Welcome to @vitalik.eth, co-founder of Ethereum!
He’s kindly agreed to do an AMA. Reply with your questions. :)
- @vitalik.eth What keeps you motivated?The knowledge that our community and the technology that it's building is in a very unique position to do something really valuable in an increasingly complicated world - and that a positive outcome here is not automatic, we have a responsibility to think it through and make it actually happen.
- One more.. What are the traits you’ve observed that make for a successful crypto founder/leader?Depends how you define "successful"! The ones I personally respect the most are the ones that have clear values of their own, and an understanding of what they're in crypto to do, that visibly goes much deeper than platitudes they could have inherited from crypto conferences.
What is your biggest worry or concern when it comes to Ethereum's future?The risk that crypto stagnates, things like privacy and open internet infrastructure become lost causes, and the big techno-political questions of the 21st century just get decided by whatever happens in AI over the next decade (where I honestly am suspicious of many big actors' incentives)
In a future full of embedded wallets, do people have: 1) Primarily a new address for every new app, 2) Primarily one address across many apps, or 3) A fairly even spectrum?Today we're at (2). I hope that we move closer to (1), as that would be better for privacy. Sometimes it makes sense for different apps to share wallets, but that should not be the default. We also need to keep improving ZK sends so that the privacy gains from splitting activity become actually real.
@vitalik.eth what do you think about most of the time?For the last week or two, thinking through what my opinions on the various AI-related issues are (including x-risk etc) and how/if the ethereum community could productively engage on them.
As I come to grips with the limitations of SNARKs for mechanisms that have a mix of private and public data, I have a question: what do you think about FHE? Do you think the advances of the last 2 years will lead to a Moore’s law in practical code, like we saw post Groth16 or not?FHE still has practical limits that preclude it from being a "magic black box", namely you have to gatekeep the final decryption step somehow, and it ends up in practice often having similar constraints to MPC. So I definitely look forward to it (as well as side quests like much better PIR) but it's not a panacea
Given the debates on protocol enshrinement, are you in favor of a minimal on-chain governance tool for everyone to express their preference? Like a credibly neutral "vibes" signal to the EF & client teams (sybil challenges notwithstanding)?Yeah I definitely think more non-binding sentiment polling tools would be amazing. Hopefully not just coin-based; things like carbonvote were really cool back in the day, but the biggest flaw is definitely that they were very whale-driven.- Hi @vitalik.eth Wondering if you have any thoughts on “ticketing”. Ticketing is generally considered a fruitful usecase for crypto as a whole and for millions the ticket will be the first interaction with distributed ledger tech. Keen on learning if you have any specific thoughts on this industry.Yep I think it's valuable. Especially if we can (i) integrate it into ZK systems like zupass, and (ii) make it practical to buy tickets directly on-chain, making the whole process not depend at all on any centralized interface.
- @vitalik.eth you've often discussed succinct onchain security on mobile devices, but what unaddressed challenges did you find in offline mobile security after experiments like zuzalu? are you planning anything further with network states? is there a way for others to coordinate shared-security schelling points?We definitely need much more investment in device security, open source operating systems, etc. I've grapheneos-pilled at least a few people since I got pilled myself early this year. Our devices are an extension of our minds at this point, their security is paramount.
- What are some non tech related hobbies of yours?The past week I was poking into Toki Pona, we'll see what it is next week :D https://warpcast.com/vitalik.eth/0x1f3d808a
@vitalik.eth do you still have the Bitcoin tshirt that you bought for 8.5 BTC? Excerpt from The Cryptopians by @laurashinNo, regrettably I lost it when I forgot my bag on a British train many years ago :(
@vitalik.eth want to play tennis with me?You mean field ping pong?
I’m a little bit of a broken record on this on WC, but I’d like to know his sense of urgency and mitigation thoughts on quantum supremacy w/respect to Ethereum, as I think it’s closer than commonly anticipated.Account abstraction (ERC 4337) gives us a clean path to making users' accounts quantum-proof. For existing accounts, if QC comes suddenly we may have to do a hard fork where you can recover your EOA by ZK-STARK-proving your 12-word seed (that's already quantum-proof and should cover most users).
What do you think is the next meta that’s *not* 51%+ speculation related?You're asking me questions on it now :) (I do hope that Farcaster and Lens and co become as big as Meta one day!)
What book helped you most understand how western culture ended up at this point (widespread liberalism + democracy + capitalism)?I feel like books are overrated for this and real-world experience with cultures is more underrated. I don't just mean going to and living in different places, I also even mean crypto communities. Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc also have values and have pressures that shape but sometimes risk compromising those values...
hey vitalik, the new version of PoolTogether is launching tomorrow, aiming to be the permissionless, autonomous ethereum prize layer. what are your thoughts on layering incentives to drive both savings and community engagement on ethereum?Pooltogether is definitely one of those projects that I find quite cool. I feel like the "core primitive" is pretty simple and doesn't need to be made more complicated, the interesting stuff is in the presentation etc done on top.- @vitalik.eth biggest learnings / takeaways from Zuzalu? Is it a viable replicatible model for irl network state or more of an experiment on the path to finding one?I think it's a replicable model even today! You're not going to get a "network state" in the sense of having political autonomy, but "200 people come together for a few months in an arbitrary location" is a form factor that is super-useful all by itself. Already seeing spinoffs like https://twitter.com/themu_xyz
- What did you think of Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto? How you would frame crypto's relationship an optimistic, accelerationist outlook? https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/There's a lot I agree with - namely, that degrowth is bad, a lot of stagnationism that masks itself as caution and humility is actually a very anti-human force that needs to be directly opposed, but I also think there's a lot that it misses; namely, that the direction and order in which tech gets developed matters.
What is your favorite city (or place) to walk around? How has becoming a public figure changed that experience?I've definitely become less of a "city person" lately. Even when I am in singapore I tend to stay in the parts further from downtown, near the big reservoir parks.
@vitalik.eth what do you think is the greatest existential threat to traditional finance and late stage capitalism?traditional militaries and late stage authoritarianism
@vitalik.eth as an erudite, eloquent & intellectual spokesperson for the new way of thinking about the internet. How would you communicate to (for lack of a better phrase) to normals about the future which is based on the ideological system based on eth. The world equate crypto to grift, a serious communication problemimo we've done too much communicating, we need to do more demonstrating!- what did you eat for breakfast today?~16 grams of Lindt 85% dark chocolate. Ran out of the 90%, which is my usual favorite.
Do you see any value in Bitcoin while Ethereum exists?@abdel's post said it well: https://hackmd.io/@abdelhamid/ethereum-alignment Bitcoin takes a bunch of different technical tradeoffs, and so covers a different space of hypotheses from Ethereum.- Scroll recently launched the mainnet of its zkEVM chain; however, because it needs to closely mirror the classic EVM on Ethereum, it’s unlikely that we’ll witness innovative design concepts and experiments, such as privacy features, at the execution level there. What are your thoughts on these limitations?I don't think we need privacy at the execution layer! Totally okay to build it as a layer on top.
- Yo @vitalik.eth, I think light clients are really neat because I don’t have a full node to run (yet), and would love to use a light clients for my day-to-day interactions. What is preventing light clients like the portal network clients for example from being production ready?They're getting there! I think the next step is (i) integrating them by default into wallets, and (ii) extending them to cover L2s and not just L1. Though (ii) only makes sense once the L2s take off or at least limit their training wheels so that the underlying thing is decentralized in the first place.
what do you think about climate changeAnything that might do something like this to the world is really worth worrying about. 2x cut in GDP to the world's already-poorest countries is awful, not to mention more direct human consequences. Though the "this will make the world so awful I should not have children" takes are wrong and harmful too.- @vitalik.eth what music are you listening to these days?High-energy Mandarin songs are great for the 15-20th kilometer of a long run, eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmwJaG-R1iM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1_4y8RJ5xU are nice and both measurably increase my running speed by literally 10% Also started to do Japanese songs lately.
- @vitalik.eth if you were farcaster dictator for a day, what's something you'd prioritize that we're currently not doing?Whatever your strategy for anti-sybil is (the Kremlin is going to want to put its 390127 bot accounts on here eventually!), make sure it's ZK-wrapped, privacy-preserving, offers alternative paths for people who don't want to provide a government ID or proxy thereof (eg. phone number), etc.
@vitalik.eth why do you think crypto-based prediction markets haven’t gained much traction yet? do you still think they have potential and what do you think is needed for them to take off?They're slowly getting there! Polymarket has been making quite a bit of progress lately, it seems to have a better combination of business development talent and crypto talent than any of the previous attempts.
@vitalik.eth, do you watch anime? If so, what’s your favorite?I like many of the studio ghibli films, if that counts.- @vitalik.eth How Ethereum could help to mitigate wars?In the short term, simply by being one of the very few tech ecosystems that is genuinely international in appeal and is not being pressured to suck up to one side or the other of a big geopolitical power struggle. Give people something to care about that pushes against "my country good, their country bad" mentality
