Bankless interview with V God: The Merge has not been priced by the market, and the bear market brings encryption back to its original intention

Editor's note: V God, the founder of Ethereum, accepted an exclusive interview with Bankless founder David Hoffman during EthCC. The following content is compiled from Bankless, and the text has been sorted and deleted.

How do you feel about winning the EthCC Best of Show award?

Vitalik：I wore Unisocks this time and unicorn t-shirts, kitty watches, these things are fun, I hope we should have more fun socks, t-shirts. I only have about eight (maybe one more) t-shirts, but I really like these unicorn slim tees.

Note: There is no such thing as the best modeling award.

What are your thoughts on the current state of the encryption field?

David Hoffman：secondary title

Bear market brings crypto back to its roots

Vitalik：I'm sure there's also some sense of relief that everything (with the bear market) has quieted down. I think it is important to remember the lessons learned during the bull market bubble cycle, the crypto space has attracted a lot of attention in the past year, which is good, but some things are counterproductive, such as:

-The established impression given by the encryption field in the past year is that "promised a lot of things".

-Promise too much, the greater the public expectations, the greater the disappointment.

- Attracted too many unpleasant people.

- Attracted more regulatory attention.

So I think it is a good thing to let the encryption field return to its own space and make full preparations for the next time it breaks out of the cocoon.

Vitalik's technical vision

Vitalik：Blockchain scalability is still far from enough, but we have seen a lot of progress, such as the development of Rollups, sharding, Volidium, ZK-Rollups, zkEVM, etc.

A lot of the stuff that I've been emphasizing over the past few years, people seem to be slowly starting to take seriously. For example, Optimism and Arbitrum are being implemented. If we introduce more data compression mechanisms, Rollups is expected to reduce transaction fees by five times. I have also mentioned the account abstraction proposal ERC-4337 several times in this program.

Note: ERC-4337 is mainly used in recovery wallets. Users who lose their private keys can contact the relevant private key guardian and sign a special transaction to restore the wallet.

Ethereum's development iterations seem to be getting faster and faster?

David Hoffman：secondary title

Ethereum development is both fast and slow

Vitalik：I think there are two different stressors pulling. Ethereum as a community has more and more great researchers, developers, and problem solving, which forces us to accelerate the progress of development.

On the other hand, we have to avoid mistakes, such as deploying updates to different clients, taking into account the infrastructure, etc., which brings us the pressure to slow down,

These two pressures exist at the same time, and are healthy to a certain extent, prompting Ethereum to accelerate development in the next few years, to carry out some destructive construction and radical changes, such as changing the consensus mechanism, introducing sharding, etc.; at the same time, we also It is hoped that Ethereum, as a public chain, can settle down and develop towards a static state, with technology and security as the update orientation.

How is the morale of Ethereum developers?

The Merge has not yet been priced by the market

Vitalik：When experiencing the 2018 bear market and the fork of The DAO in the past, everyone must have been a little bit frustrated, but I think the morale shown by everyone is real now, and as The Merge is getting closer and closer to being realized, everyone's thoughts will be a little bit Like "Is this really going to happen?":

In addition, I think that The Merge has not been priced by the market not only from a market perspective, but also from a psychological and narrative perspective. Therefore, when The Merge actually happens, I expect that morale will be further greatly improved, and then Ethereum will be really Priced In.

Note: David Hoffman reminded Vitalik to be careful with his words, this sentence may be used as a headline by many media. Vitalik replied: Oh well, then I have to think of something more interesting to say: "Everyone should buy Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision (BSV)."

Be wary of blockchain-related applications

David Hoffman：secondary title

Terra frustrates principled thinkers

Vitalik：If you are a principled thinker, you will say that anything above 10% APY is at best unsustainable and at worst becomes a case of fraud because nothing in the fiat world can Risk provides a steady 10% gain.

So why on earth do we think cryptocurrencies offer higher returns? Especially with no real economic activity behind these APYs. In the past, we have also seen high APY and increasingly crazy liquidity mining. I believe this makes everyone start to think:

secondary title

Hope Terra crashes soon

Vitalik：The sudden collapse of Terra is like (these high APY projects) saying to everyone: "Oh, no, no, principles are still very important to us, we still have to return to reality."

And I'm really happy that Terra crashes in time, I actually hope it happens a few months sooner, it'll probably just blow $5 billion instead of $50 billion, but it's better now than later, that's the case like:

If only $5 billion is blown up, it’s okay, maybe it’s just a group of rich geeks playing around, and it’s their own problem; $50 billion is to make everyone more scared, and it also makes the situation in the encryption field even worse. difficult.

secondary title

Bitcoin and Ethereum are not worthy of being issued ETF

Vitalik：These high APY activities are also the reason why I have not been too enthusiastic about Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs. It seems that the encryption field needs a longer period of time to develop. Part of the reason can be attributed to self-inflicted. Like the so-called Wild West, where you can literally lose all your money.

community expectations

David Hoffman：secondary title

do something meaningful

Vitalik：secondary title

How to deal with enthusiastic selling?

Vitalik：It's good to chat with people, to understand what people care about and what they are working on, but it's best not to have too many people. Assuming that they are developing a social platform, they should not focus on issuing tokens, but have an interesting vision, such as what mechanism to reduce harmful and unproductive content.

But I guess all of this is part of the ethereum community, and sometimes they need attention, funding, or help finding people who are working on the same pain point, and sometimes they need some encouragement, and all I can do is try my best. May help.