V God 2022 New Year Interview: Blockchain can bring positive impact to the world
On February 4th, ECN connected Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, for an interview and AMA. Vitalik discussed the development of Ethereum in the past year and his expectations for the future. Q&A highlights from the following interviews:
1. What is the significance of the progress, merger and sharding of Ethereum 2021 to the roadmap
Vitalik：The three most important hard forks we will do in 2021, the first is Berlin, and the second is London. The most important part of the London hard fork is EIP-1559, which is the reform of the transaction fee mechanism. 1559 has two important parts. The first part is that the transaction fee becomes more useful. If you send a transaction before the London upgrade, you may have to wait 30 seconds, 60 seconds, sometimes longer for your transaction to be packaged. But now it might be waiting 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 15 seconds. So now, sending transactions has become extremely fast. Regarding this, there is an article written by students of Peking University and Duke University. I forwarded this article on January 17.
The second part is that 1559 began to consume a lot of ETH, and now it may have consumed more than 1.7 million, so now the additional issuance of ETH has become very small. This is the big stuff in London. Altair is the first hard fork of our PoS chain Beacon chain, and both Berlin and London are upgrades of the PoW chain. So we've done a fork now, we know how to do it, it's kind of a test, so to speak. So we did a fork, and the next time we do a merge it will be faster, safer, and easier. The most important thing we have to do in 2022 is merge. After the merger, the PoW chain will not exist, and we will only have the PoS chain. The accounts, contracts, and transactions we have now will all run on the PoS chain. So this is a very important advancement. The most important thing for us after the merger is scalability. Now Ethereum can handle not many transactions, and the transaction fee is still high, but if we can solve the scalability problem, the transaction fee can become extremely low. Those rollup projects have been done a lot. Now there are Optimism, Arbitrum, StarkWare, zkSync, Loopring on the mainnet, and there are many good projects. But rollup + sharding can make transaction fees extremely low. So consolidation and scalability are our top priorities. After doing these two things well, it can be said that 80% of the progress has been completed. It is still 50%.
2. 'The Urges' Roadmap Explained
Vitalik：I posted a roadmap last December: The first one is The Merge. The second is The Surge, which is sharding and some scalability things. The third is The Verge, which is about Verkle tree, which is a technology that makes it easier to verify the Ethereum chain and run a node. The fourth is The Purge, which is to delete some historical things and delete some things that we used in the protocol before but don't need now. Make the protocol of Ethereum simpler. The fifth is The Splurge, which includes all other important upgrades, such as account abstraction, PBS (PBS is a topic we are particularly focusing on now), EVM upgrades, and so on. But if we get merging and sharding right, we solve the biggest and most important problem.
3. The specific progress of the merger
Vitalik：Yesterday, Péter Szilágyi, the core developer of the Geth team, tweeted that after the next pull (PR, Pull Request), it will be ready for the merge. It can be said that after their client releases the next version, they need to test a lot, but there is nothing left for the remaining development. So now we are probably at this stage. We already have a network, we already have kintsugi. Been running for six weeks now and the only and biggest untested thing right now is optimistic sync. That is, when a new node enters the network for the first time, how can it synchronize and download network information. This process still requires some development, some of their client teams have done a lot of development, but more testing is needed. So now it is very likely that the merger can be completed in June. Now there is a difficulty bomb, and if we haven't solved some problems before that, the time to produce blocks will become longer and longer. Of course, it can be delayed if it is really needed, but in fact we still have some time pressure now.
4. The expected development of L2 in 2022
Vitalik：Recently, Optimism and Arbitrum have a lot of users. Refer to the website cryptofees.info, and their transaction fees are relatively stable. But they are not yet a decentralized rollup, and there are some private keys that they control themselves. Because they still worry about bugs in some of the fraud proof technologies, they will do some audits and verifications. So the next step is to completely decentralize the verification process, and completely decentralize the process of sorting transactions, which will take a little more time.
5. What are the conditions for becoming a user centered on Layer 2?
Vitalik：There are many projects that are not moving to L2 because the usability of L2 is not good enough. The transaction fee of L2 is a little lower than that of L1, but not low enough. The L2 project still has some technical problems, and many ecological tools are not yet fully supported. Now the state of Layer 2 is still growing slowly, and I think this problem can be solved in a year.
6. Security issues of cross-rollup
Vitalik：The security issues of Cross-rollup bridging are simpler than those of cross-chain bridging. Because the merkle roots of cross-rollup bridges are all on L1. Therefore, the technical problems are smaller, and there is no need to worry about the consensus algorithm of the two chains. So it is much easier to do a safe coss-rollup bridge than a safe cross-chain bridge. But there is still a lot of technology to do, and there are a lot of teams doing this now, but it can be done better.
7. Data availability off chain off chain availability
Vitalik：Now many projects choose off-chain data availability because the current on-chain data availability is still relatively expensive. But after sharding, and some short-term solutions such as EIP-4488, after these solutions come out, the availability of data on the chain will become cheaper. But because the availability of off-chain data can make transaction fees extremely low, some projects still choose zk-validium. But the security problem of cross-validium is not big, and the security problem of two validiums and the security problem of one validium will not be very different.
8. Layer 2 Token Model
Vitalik：Maybe some L2s will have their own coins, maybe some will not. 3 or 4 years ago, the Ethereum community particularly disliked some projects as their own coins. It may be because many unreliable projects issued their own coins in 2016 and 2017, and everyone would not like it. Everyone's views on tokens have changed, and their attitudes have changed, and they think that tokens are tools for self-government. I have previously published articles critical of token voting. Now there will be many projects doing some experiments, no longer just token voting, there will be a lot of innovation, but I don’t know what it is.
9. The practice of DAO and the interaction between blockchain and the real world
Vitalik：I especially like citydao, which can be combined with the real world in terms of IDENTITY, REPUTATION, etc. Now many people think that blockchain is related to finance and gambling. The energy consumption problem of pow is one of the reasons why everyone criticizes blockchain, and pos can solve it. The biggest obstacle to non-financial applications is the issue of transaction fees, which certainly cannot solve all government opinions on the blockchain, because the principles of the current world and the blockchain world are still very different, but doing the current things well can Do your own ecology
10. The positive impact that cryptocurrencies and blockchain can bring in various world crises
Vitalik：Different places have different problems, such as serious financial problems in Argentina, currency inflation, and the way of doing business. The ability to do centralized infrastructure is relatively low. With quadratic fundraising, new governance methods can be done well, and these methods can be used in other fields, even in the political field. Economic problems, Europe's economy is not growing so fast, other regions in Latin America have this kind of problem. I now find that the ecology of the blockchain is different from the ecology of centralized technology in that to do a successful thing in a centralized field, you need to be in a center, such as a big city in China, in San Francisco. But this is not the case in the blockchain field. Many Ethereum projects come from Argentina, a relatively poor Eastern European country. Where it has not been successful in the field of web2, it can be successful in web3. The way web3 is developed can help places that are not central to succeed in web3 and reduce the problem of world imbalance.
