Global Perspective, Unique Insights
"My original intention for creating Ethereum was to build an open, decentralized and transparent and easy-to-use platform where anyone can freely participate and create things. I think this kind of platform is beneficial to human development"
"Vitalik Buterin."
Vitalik Buterin , a 23-year-old genius who co-founded Bitcoin Magazine at the age of 17, dropped out of his freshman year at the University of Waterloo in Canada two years later to create Ethereum, and beat Zuckerberg to win the World Technology Award at the age of 22. Named among the top 40 outstanding people in the world under 40.
be interviewed
Q
1. Why did you choose blockchain as the starting point for your career development?
Vitalik Buterin: I first heard about Bitcoin in early 2011 when I was in high school. My father mentioned bitcoin to me, and I saw all kinds of discussions about bitcoin online. At that time, I was already very interested in open source software projects such as Linux, and I felt that the technology of Bitcoin was very meaningful and worthy of my exploration. So I immediately joined the Bitcoin forum, hoping to learn more; someone else offered to pay me to write articles for his blog, which was 5 Bitcoins (about $4) per article at that time. I made 20 bitcoins and bought a t-shirt for 8.5 coins. But now this "expensive" T-shirt is nowhere to be found.
Imagine a community of thousands of people like me using their computers to create an entirely new financial system from scratch. We are independent of each other and do not need to rely on any existing institutions or intermediaries. At the time, I was very excited when I thought of this idea.
After that, I co-founded Bitcoin Magazine, an online and print magazine to talk about Bitcoin and its related knowledge, including mathematics, economics, political science, decentralized technology, computer science, and cryptography. content. I started to put more and more effort into it.
Q
2. What inspired you to take a break from school and start traveling the world?
Vitalik Buterin: In 2013, I realized that while I was in college, I was spending more than 30 hours a week on Bitcoin projects. I attended the bitcoin conference in San Jose, California, USA, where I realized that the bitcoin industry is real, not just a matter of a few developers hiding behind it, in fact there are more than 1000 people trying to start a business in this field, To some extent, the industry has gained considerable attention. I thought this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so I decided to take a semester off and spend all my time traveling around the world, working on projects, and talking to other developers.
After a four-month trip, I stopped in Israel. There I met several teams working on using blockchain technology to build next-generation applications, allowing blockchain to serve more scenarios than just virtual currencies. I find this direction interesting, but I don't think those projects are enough to support this grand goal. The general idea at the time was to create a protocol that could drive multiple types of transactions, with each application having one or two transaction types. I came up with a more general approach, using a common built-in programming language to create a blockchain.
When I first wrote the Ethereum white paper, I emailed it to a few friends, who then sent it to their friends. In the following month, about 10-20 people responded to emails saying they wanted to be part of the program. That's how Ethereum did its initial team formation.
Q
3. If you have the opportunity to do it again, will you stick to the same idea? Or will something change?
Vitalik Buterin: I will change some technical details, such as making the technical protocol more compatible and capable of concurrent processing when the protocol is initially formulated; I will also consider changing the way the team is formed and managed. But my original vision will not change.
Q
4. Why do you define Ethereum as a nonprofit rather than a for-profit?
Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum should be a neutral project for the benefit of the world, not belonging to a country or organization that exists only to benefit a small group of people. this point is very important. Therefore, Ethereum as a non-profit organization seems more suitable.
Q
5. What are the problems that Ethereum needs to solve at present? What are the future needs?
Vitalik Buterin: The current challenges are mainly technical issues, which can be roughly divided into the following three categories:
First, scalability. We want to increase the capacity of the blockchain, and this performance is mainly reflected in the number of raw transactions per second that can be processed. Ethereum can currently process around 15 transactions per second, but it will take thousands of times faster to meet mainstream adoption.
Second, privacy. We need to work hard to ensure that personal privacy data is not leaked when using blockchain applications.
Third, security. We need to technically help the community to minimize the risk of digital asset theft, as well as minimize the risk of private key loss and smart contract code loopholes.
There are also some challenges in terms of usability, but the development team of each individual application has a greater impact on usability than the core protocol and platform itself.
But we already have many solid solutions to all of the above challenges. For example, we have dedicated teams working on state channel technology, sharding and Plasma technology to address scalability issues. The Byzantine hard fork has been completed and its cryptographic capabilities have reached a usable state, but there is still a lot of detail work to be done in terms of building the infrastructure and utilizing them.
Security is divided into two aspects. First, to ensure that Ethereum itself is secure. This will be improved through the Casper Proof of Stake algorithm (PoS). The algorithm is nearing completion, the testnet is running, and algorithm implementations in other languages are already being written. Second, is the security of applications on Ethereum. This will be addressed through a range of technical means, including innovations in programming languages on Ethereum, such as Vyper ( https://vyper.online), as well as improvements in formal verification, and better standards for smart contract development.
Q
6. Can you talk about the latest progress of sharding and any other new ideas during this time?
Vitalik Buterin: Now we have at least three separate development teams dedicated to researching and implementing Ethereum sharding technology (Sharding), and the sharding technology itself is developing rapidly. We are also working on multiple scalability techniques that would make sharding more powerful and easier to implement, including stateless clients, proposal/consensus/execution separation, Merkle tree improvements, and virtual machine optimizations. We are rapidly moving towards our goal of launching a testnet.
Q
7. After the DAO hack, what steps have you taken to ensure a high-quality blockchain ecosystem?
Vitalik Buterin: We pay more attention to promoting good coding practices in the community and improving security by using formal verification. We've also added programming language features to help developers write secure code more easily. Also, I think development teams creating complex projects like theDAO on the Ethereum platform today are also very cautious before moving large sums of money into contracts than before.
Q
8. What are the vision and goals of the Ethereum Metropolis phase?
Vitalik Buterin: The Metropolis phase mainly looks at the privacy features of Ethereum, including support for ring signatures and zero-knowledge proofs. At present, it has been successfully forked, and people can build applications based on these technologies. Now we just need more people involved in building the infrastructure to make it easier for ordinary developers to build privacy-preserving applications.
Q
9. When Ethereum switches from PoW to PoS, many miners may continue to use the old PoW protocol for economic reasons. What method will Ethereum use to motivate miners to continue supporting the new network?
Vitalik Buterin: The transition from PoW to PoS will be gradual and will happen in stages. The first phase will be implemented through a hybrid PoS approach, using PoW to create blocks, but with PoS finalizing blocks for added security. Although the mining reward will decrease, PoW will still exist. The second phase after that will completely cancel PoW.
If miners fork at some point to continue supporting PoW (and implement a hard fork to delay the ice age), then a third "choice" for Ethereum will clearly emerge on top of ETH and ETC. But I don't think that's likely to happen, as miners can simply choose ETC (and other Zcash-like alternatives) outright.
In addition, miners who have acquired enough ETH can also choose to become a validator of the PoS system, or choose to mine for a second-layer system based on Ethereum (such as Golem). These will also continue to bring economic benefits to them.
Q
10. Regarding public and private chains, what type of chain has more potential? What are your thoughts on this?
Vitalik Buterin: Private blockchains do solve some real-world problems. For example, public chains cannot solve the scalability problems required by large-scale enterprise applications, or the large-scale application problems currently required. A private chain of nodes run by large organizations on high-quality hardware with more processing power, higher memory and bandwidth, and the existing Ethereum private chain "Istanbul" can currently process hundreds of transactions per second.
However, companies running private chains have not made much progress so far. The reason for this is that while private chains are cheaper in terms of technical costs (i.e. paying transaction fees), they will be higher in terms of social costs. Getting a group of competing bankers to agree in one room is actually quite difficult.
I think from a long-term perspective, there will be a combination of public and private chains. Many of the problems of the two extremes can be solved by a hybrid system that is audited and anchored through a public chain. Plasma is a good solution.
Q
11. In general, how would you describe the future of Ethereum?
Vitalik Buterin: I hope that over the next few years, we will continue to release protocol upgrades that address our technical challenges, including Casper, PoS and sharding. We will also take into account the establishment of second-layer solutions, such as using Plasma and State Channels to improve scalability, and improve privacy protection performance through zero-knowledge proof technology.
Once users gain confidence in low transaction fees and are confident that transaction fees will continue to remain low even at higher capacity, I think we will see more applications on Ethereum. One can do many things on Ethereum, including decentralized insurance, financial applications, supply chain applications, medical care, identity authentication, Internet security and many more, and there are many test cases in these areas. I hope that within the next few years, these trials will become a reality.
Q
12. What is the future mission of Ethereum?
Vitalik Buterin: My purpose in creating Ethereum was not to build any specific application; it was to create an open, decentralized, transparent, easy-to-use platform for anyone to freely participate in and create things. Although I didn't know what kind of things would be built on Ethereum at first, I thought that this kind of platform should be beneficial to human development. That's the beauty of creating a universal system: the best thing is seeing your users creatively create an app you can't even imagine.
I am happy to see that we can have decentralized applications that are transparent, easy to use and trustworthy. I love this platform because it empowers individual developers, even 15-year-olds, to use the infrastructure to create apps, while also giving apps a similar level of security and trustworthiness that was previously only available to large enterprises . Obviously, blockchain cannot solve all security and trust problems, but it can bring us many possibilities to solve problems.
Q
13. Which industry/business and blockchain technology do you think can be better linked?
Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum is unique in terms of diversity of users. Users creating applications on the platform include individual developers, non-profit organizations, open source communities, small companies, large corporations, central banks, people from multiple continents and countries, and many industries. And there are applications in finance, logistics, identity management, digital assets, registries, gaming, healthcare, decentralized credit systems, and more.
There is a reason for the financial industry as the initial field of application, because the existing systems are often far behind the times, and many things need to be done manually; the traditional financial system is too high threshold for developers. But as transaction fees decrease, I think many other industry applications will become more viable.
Q
14. How will new start-ups develop in the future? Do you have any suggestions for their sustainable development?
Vitalik Buterin: I think it's very important for startup projects to choose a specialization where they can deliver real value with blockchain and are more capable of delivering that value than any other project and focus on that. For example, in addition to a clear market demand, we still do not currently have widely used ERC20 tokens that are backed by tangible assets (such as gold, fiat currencies, and other raw materials). An exception may be Tether, which is considered unreliable by many of course.
Many projects are also trying to continue doing very complex schemes like DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations), creating very complex private chains for high-speed transactions, etc. But they didn't realize that the market demand might actually be just a simple ERC20 token. Businesses can create tokens backed by gold, and others in the Ethereum ecosystem have come up with more and better ways of transacting, including solutions for layer 2 scalability. Ethereum is essentially a community in which people build different applications and work together with each other, instead of everyone trying to create their own personal empire and build a WeChat-like one that only belongs to themselves. ecosystem.
If you are issuing coins, please do so in a standard way to ensure that it supports all wallets and trading systems. If you're developing a wallet, also build it in a standard way to make sure it supports all coins. If you are developing a scalable payment solution (eg Raiden or Plasma), please also do it in a standard way to support all tokens and ideally extend it to other applications as well. Everyone should pay attention to their own role in the ecosystem, so that our efforts are not duplicated and thus can help each other on the platform.
Q
15. Do you think true decentralization is possible? To what extent?
Vitalik Buterin: I want Ethereum and its applications to be as decentralized as possible. Obviously, complete decentralization is impractical, but it is definitely possible to build systems that are more decentralized than we have today, and provide real value through decentralization.
It’s also important to note that decentralization itself is not the only thing that makes Ethereum valuable. The openness and ease of use of the platform is also a measure of value: anyone can use it to create applications. It's also very convenient in some ways: for example, you can upload a program, and the program can interact with people as an application, and you don't need to maintain it, and you don't have to worry about server crashes, restarts, or other similar problems. There are a lot of things I would consider building on top of Ethereum, and some don't even need decentralization.
Q
16. There are a lot of predictions about the price of ether right now, what do you think about it?
Vitalik Buterin: I don't predict prices, it's too hard. For me, I don't care about currency prices, I care more about how people use technology to create more valuable things.
Q
17. If I want to learn how to create an app, how do I get started.
Vitalik Buterin: If you can't read apps written by other people, learn how to code first. You can also go to the official Ethereum website (ethereum.org), there are some tutorials that will teach you how to create an application step by step.