Interview with Vitalik: Community is far more important than code
Editor's Note: This article comes fromOrange Book (ID: chengpishu)Editor's Note: This article comes from
Orange Book (ID: chengpishu)
, Interviewee: Vitalik Buterin, Interview & Writer: Li Hua, Retric@ Orange Book, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.
This year marks the 21st anniversary of the Apache Software Foundation. As a representative of the Internet open source community, Apache projects support more than half of the Internet, and Apache Hadoop projects almost constitute the entire big data ecosystem. The core principle of Apache is "community is more important than code".
As a representative of the blockchain open source community, how does Ethereum view the open source community and how to build an open source community? We interviewed Vitalik Buterin for this.
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1. The power of the open source community
Q: As the largest open source community in the blockchain field, is the community the most important thing for Ethereum?
Vitalik: I definitely think the community is the most important part of Ethereum. The code determines what a platform can do now, and the community determines what a platform can do in the future. What's more, whether it is for the blockchain or for any software ecosystem, it is very important for people to participate and feel friendly, and this cannot be achieved by relying on code.
Q: Compared with traditional software development methods, what advantages does the open source community have?
In addition, for very smart, talented people, money is only one factor, they will also be attracted to a healthy, exciting environment, because they feel that they are doing something that makes sense for the world. Feel inspired by things that money can't buy. If you try to replace these things with money, you will quickly spend a lot of money without necessarily getting the desired results.
Q: Do you think open source culture exists in other fields? Fields other than software and code?
Vitalik: I think something similar exists in other fields. For example, many people who work in the municipal government often go to each other to chat and share their ideas. Many intellectual communities, such as mathematics and the humanities, operate in similar ways. I think human beings naturally like to cooperate, but sometimes, the incentives generated by competition between countries and companies will hinder this kind of cooperation.
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2. Ethereum Open Source Community
Q: When did you first consciously feel that there was a "community" in Ethereum? What was the Ethereum community like at that time, can you briefly describe it?
Vitalik: It should not be felt at a certain moment, but a gradual process. For example, in the past few years, I went to a new city and a new place every month, and every time I heard or saw some new Ethereum applications. In 2015, if someone made something on Ethereum, I would know it almost immediately. But now, I feel like there are more and more projects, more and more things I don't know. Sometimes I even feel that in the community I initiated myself, I am like a foreign tourist. The Ethereum community is so big now. From the initial community to today, it is indeed an amazing growth.
Q: According to a report, 18% of the developers in the blockchain field belong to the Ethereum community, which is four times that of the second place. What do you think is the most important reason why developers want to "work" on Ethereum?
Vitalik: I think people see the Ethereum community as a place where a lot of the most interesting work is happening, be it in cryptography, economic mechanism design, or blockchain protocol development field. And people will find that the Ethereum community is promoting the development of society and technological progress, it is not just focusing on currency prices.
Of course, Ethereum is not the only encryption community that focuses on these aspects. For example, Zcash is also a very strong community. They have made important pioneering work in the field of zero-knowledge proof, protocol management, and developer incentives. work, but the Ethereum community is the biggest one.
Q: The reason why Ethereum has such a strong community and open source ecosystem is because of what important things have been done right? Many public chains are also building communities, but the progress does not seem to be very good.
Vitalik: I don't think you can forcefully create an "ecology". The ecology needs to grow by itself, and there must be ideas and values that can be shared to attract people to join the community. I think the reason most projects fail is because they think that money is enough and that financial incentives create a community. In addition, projects with unique ideas (such as Tezos, I personally do not agree with the method of on-chain governance, but at least they are doing things in new and unique ways) are often more likely to succeed.
Q: Can Ethereum developers be "stolen"?
Vitalik: Many people have tried to steal! For example, TRON has provided economic incentives to Ethereum developers on many occasions, persuading them to transfer to TRON. There are also many blockchain project teams trying to come to the Ethereum conference, and then introduce themselves as friends of Ethereum, but actually want to chat with developers and persuade them to transfer to their own platform. Of course, this strategy usually doesn't work.
Q: What are the main development tasks in the Ethereum open source community? Are they all financially supported by the Ethereum Foundation?
Vitalik: At this stage, the most active development activities on Ethereum occur in the following areas:
Zero-knowledge proof technology, including privacy protection in transactions, privacy protection in voting, and improvement of the protocol itself (such as PLONK protocol and STARKs protocol).
Layer 2 scalability, especially work on ZK Rollup and Optimistic Rollup.
The client team of Ethereum 2.0.
Most of these projects are supported by the Ethereum Foundation to varying degrees, and they will also seek financial support through other channels, such as from companies like Consensys or other fund projects, or invest in their own companies.
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3. Construction of open source communities
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1. "Reputation Incentive" and "Economic Incentive"
Q: What do you think of reputation incentives and economic incentives? Cryptocurrency introduces a means of economic incentives, how do you think it has changed open source development?
Vitalik: I've been reading some books from the 2000s on the new Internet economy, including Yochai Benkle's The Wealth of Networks and Rick Falkvinge's Swarmwise. What touches me here is that I found that as early as 15 years ago, intrinsic motivation was considered an important basis of motivation theory. Intrinsic motivation means that people will do things out of the pursuit of reputation, fun, and sense of meaning .
In this sense, there should be many things similar to Wikipedia in the world, but in reality, this model sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails. For some types of projects, people are intrinsically motivated to do it happily, but for others, this approach alone is not enough.
Cryptocurrencies offer a new model that opens up the possibility of economic incentives for open source software development, which I think is a big part of why Ethereum, and many other projects, are possible. But in 2017, the "boom" happened too quickly, and the economic incentives quickly became very large and took over, which led to some purely money-making projects, and their goal was not to make the world a better place. good.
So I don't think a single intrinsic incentive or a single economic incentive is sustainable, and to have a healthy project and community, you need to combine the two.
The biggest challenge for economic incentives is how to fund projects. Most allocations are one-time (including Ethereum premines), but this method cannot guarantee continuous funding. The Zcash community is experimenting with community voting to determine which projects get paid for development, which is a way to provide ongoing funding for projects, and the results of this experiment may be very important; the quadratic financing that Glen and I are exploring is also a kind of problem potential solution.
Q: Economic incentives need to continue to explore better ways. Does reputation incentives need to think about mechanism design?
Vitalik: I definitely think social incentives need to be improved. The social mechanics, especially on the Internet, tend to over-reward the loud, obvious, and easy-to-understand things, and under-reward the quiet hard work.
I think there are ways to solve these kinds of problems, but it requires a careful look at the platforms where these actions take place and how the incentives of the platforms work.
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2. "Management" and "Autonomy"
Q: Starting this year, the Ethereum Foundation no longer distinguishes between external developers and internal developers. The method of resource allocation has changed from a "salary system" to a "project system". Is this to give projects more autonomy?
Vitalik: This approach allows individual teams to have more meaningful autonomy, and they can choose how they operate. Ethereum is a global project with teams spread all over the world, and it would be difficult to directly manage these teams, and given that these teams perform almost independent tasks, such management is not necessary.
But this approach does not completely eliminate governance, the Ethereum Foundation still decides which teams to fund, and these teams also need to adjust their work to meet the priorities of the Ethereum Foundation.
Vitalik: Members of the Ethereum community are geographically dispersed, and everyone is far away, so meetings are definitely an effective tool that helps the community unite. But I think we should have more frequent, local events or meetings, it's not enough to focus on one meeting like now.
Q: There is a view that the evolution speed of the Ethereum Foundation has not kept up with the development speed of the Ethereum community. What do you think?
Vitalik: The evolution speed of the Ethereum community must be faster than that of the foundation. To some extent, this is a situation we hope to see. The center is often blinder than the fringes, and to do something well in this situation, you have to be willing to trust the wisdom and goodwill of the community itself.
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3. "Community" and "Leadership"
Q: As the leader of the Ethereum open source community, how do you define or understand this role?
I've really been thinking about my role in the community, and I think it's going to evolve over time into a higher-level, more abstract level of something that includes the work of a spokesperson, thinking on a philosophical level, and in my Conduct in-depth research in the areas in which you are most able to contribute.
Q: What is thinking from a philosophical perspective?
Vitalik: The philosophical level refers to looking at what is important to the Ethereum ecosystem from a certain height, so as to provide a reference for the development of the Ethereum platform and ecosystem: what people want to use Ethereum for, how does Ethereum What to do to meet this need is a key challenge in this.
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4. "Donation" and "Investment"
Q: Does the foundation need to have the ability to continue fundraising?
Vitalik: The funds of the foundation are enough to operate for 5 years, so there is no need to worry about such problems in the short term. If someone wants to donate money, I think a better way is to donate directly to the development team of Ethereum 2.0, such as Prysmatic, Status, or MolochDao or Gitcoin Grants (Editor's Note: MolochDao and Gitcoin Grants are both new financing mechanism attempt).
Long term, I will continue to explore ways to organize funds through mechanisms built into the protocol. This approach means that the protocol itself has a set of governance mechanisms that can define who has contributed to the ecosystem, and allocate part of the transaction fees or newly issued Tokens to these contributing participants. But its implementation is not that simple. We need to avoid cartels using this mechanism to allocate funds to themselves, as well as unnecessary chain splits caused by differences in fund allocation.
The built-in mechanism of the protocol also includes another way, that is, the developer of the smart contract can get benefits every time the contract is called.
Vitalik: This approach will face some challenges. People are very wary of the underlying protocol becoming non-neutral, as this could pose a potential risk of "political" domination. We expect to conduct some small-scale experiments in the internal ecosystem of Ethereum and external ecosystems such as Zcash to see how the situation goes.
Q: Do new financing methods like MolochDao and Gitcoin Grants belong to investment or donation?
Vitalik: I think it's both.
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5. Public Goods
Q: Are there any topics that you think are important but we haven't talked about?
Vitalik: I mentioned this in a previous question: I increasingly think that the crypto ecosystem needs to get serious about funding public goods. This public good includes protocol development, research work, marketing work, work on training and documentation, application software and application development, and many other jobs contained within the blockchain ecosystem.
The early cypherpunk ideas that led to the birth of Bitcoin were influenced by Austrian economics and liberalism. It has many good things, but one of its big problems is that it does not give public goods their due attention. People either assume that the company will provide sufficient funding, or that people will be motivated by social incentives and think that will be enough.
