YouSaid · the spoken record

Vitalik Buterin

lines on the record: 195
first: 2021-06-03
most recent: 2021-06-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It came from the fear, and that's what I allowed people to rationalize in abandonment of principles that I think they would not have accepted in other circumstances. And I definitely to some extent played along with this myself. I do definitely regret that to some extent. Well, and I definitely regret the excesses completely. And then obviously, you know, Bitcoin block size war, similar sort of stuff happened. So that insight was interesting because it does mentally make a lot of sense, right? Like when you're actually afraid that, you know, unless you act in some way that, you know, your entire world is going to collapse. It's much easier to just rationalize forgetting your principles and doing whatever you have to just save the specific thing that you care about.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Using, like basically using the government as a weapon to try to attack the other cryptocurrency and destroy it as goes completely against them, you know, the ideals of freedom and things that at least in theory were supposed to stand for. In that particular time, basically what was happening was that the ETC price was rising and at the same time the ETH price was dropping in lockstep. And there were a lot of Bitcoin people basically saying this is the end of Ethereum. And I think a lot of people really were afraid that Ethereum would be just completely destroyed as a result of this. And so...”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That and I feel like I during that time did not do a very good job of grappling with that. And so there was a lot of blaming the Bitcoiners. There were also even a lot of people calling for us to use trademark law and like basically sue exchanges and try to prevent them from a listing Ethereum classic. And to me, that was very unethical, right? Like these.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dropped more. And people were saying things like, oh, this whole thing, Ethereum Classic is just a psyop by, you know, the Bitcoin community and just a wealthy Bitcoiner is trying to destroy Ethereum. And in the back of my mind, I knew that that wasn't entirely true. There definitely were Bitcoiners, but at the same time, I think blaming political internal disagreements on foreign interference, right? Like this is the sort of thing that countries governments do all the time. It's a very convenient excuse, right? Because it allows you to just blame these things that are happening on the foreigners and avoid actually grappling with the fact that like, well, no, actually you have people in your very own community who just disagree with you and have a different belief. And I think the Ethereum community during that time did not do a very good job of grappling with.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And like one example of this in Ethereum lands, right, is I think the part of Ethereum history where I thought that the Ethereum community was at its lowest and even when I personally was at my lowest, if you go back to the Dow fork in 2016, right? So the DAO hack happens and then we made this controversial decision to change the Ethereum protocol. Then there was that Ethereum classic split. And as soon as that Ethereum classic split happened, there was a lot of anger everywhere. And there started especially being anger when the price of ETC started taking up, right? So this was the time when Ether started off being $13 in an Ethereum Classic started at zero, but then suddenly there's this one day when ETH dropped a 12.5 ETC went up to 0.5 and then they dropped.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the fascinating thing for me is that Nick, I've been, you know, obviously reading and listening to the history, and then at the same time just observing things happening in the crypto space. So one of my interesting mental intuitions that I've gotten is that I think most evil doesn't come out of greed. It comes out of fear.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of, I guess, the right kind of personal experience, like, especially if your personal experience starts off being sheltered. It was for me, right? I know the stereotype is that the nerds get bullied in school, but like actually for me, in my school experience was just being treated with kindness by everyone. So that definitely made it harder to understand things. I remember actually being pretty blindsided when I started Ethereum. And then within six months, there started being fights over like who would get more shares if Ethereum turned out to be a company. And then I suggested we should just make it to be a nonprofit and somehow that ended up upsetting people.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like the 1930s and 40s are fascinating because they force you to really grapple with the question of where does evil come from. The sort of mental puzzle that I've always had in my head is on the one hand, you know, things like the Holocaust happened, but on the other hand, if you just go and like have a coffee with people, then a hundred times out of 100, everyone just seems so nice. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like, how do you kind of reconcile the macro and the micro there, right? And that's the sort of thing that's very difficult if you don't have.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sum of all five, definitely some self discovery. I definitely did take this very deliberate decision that like, okay, I have this time and I'm going to actually make something meaningful out of it. So one example of the things I did is I just actually started listening to audiobooks and podcasts much more. Like just this year, I basically kind of discovered that the podcast space is real for the first time, I guess. Like before that, there would be things that I would get interviewed for, but I was not really kind of like mentally incorporated. I did not mentally incorporate this idea that like podcasts are a thing that you can go listen to. And this year I did. And I'm my friend Carl LaFlourch, one of the optimism people recommended hardcore history to me. And so I went ahead and just listened.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually interesting because in some ways I feel like even my first five years of doing Ethereum things, my life was not even all that self-directed because a lot of it was just responding to obligations. Someone said, oh, you know, come to speak at this event in Korea. Okay, you know, come to speak at this thing in Taiwan. Okay. Oh, like we need for Ethereum to launch, we need this particular piece to be done and tested. Okay, work on that, right? We need some proof of stake algorithm, work on that. And the last year of COVID life, like basically I was holed up in Singapore for much of it, right? And it gave me a lot more alone time. You know, I had much, much travel, and that was definitely a very new and interesting experience for me.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've both lived through 12 years of that, right? So, you know, like, what does that say about us? And I think in one thing aspects, obviously, is that there's definitely an easiness to living life if all of your decisions are made for you. And one of the challenges of adulthood, I guess, is moving to this world where your choices are much more self-directed and you just have to learn to live and deal with that.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one way to think about it is think back to how you thought about life when you were in school, right? In school is interesting to think about, right? Because in a lot of ways, it's just totally outside of bounds of the kinds of systems that are like social systems that we live in as adults, or maybe not, like maybe things like academia are intended to replicate parts of school. Like, first of all, school is very totalitarian, right? Like, you know, you have to follow the teacher's instructions, the bulk of your schedule was forced to be in particular areas. Control view from leaving the grounds during this period, this period of time, assign a lot of homework. But at the same time, also, you know, school is a bit of a post scarcity utopia in that you just don't have to worry about getting resources for yourself.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like this aspect of just reducing troubles and like opening up room for other things I think is a big part of it. Like if you just think of money as being like this positive or this thing that like gives you stuff and you try to derive meaning from the stuff, I think that's much more likely to be like a road to basically squandering that opportunity. So yeah, and I guess my philosophy on that is definitely more subtractive than additive there.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you have, if your savings are just non-zero at all, then you don't have to worry as much about losing your job. And if you feel like you have a job that just really conflicts with your values, then if you have even six months saved up, that just makes it easier for you to say bye-bye. I'm going to do something else. If you have more money, then you can not worry about even what you're doing needing to be profitable at all once you get more money than you can choose transportation options and food options that just like have less hassle in your life and allow you to be lazier so if you”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that I've realized with money as I have experienced both having little of it and having a lot of it is that the benefit of you can get the most out of money if you think of it not as something that lets you do and have more things, but as something that lets you worry about fewer things.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does as well, and then Yeah, I mean, I think it's definitely sad whenever these groups are fighting each other and say it's definitely good for them too. If people can cooperate more. But at the same time, just Having groups of people that have different kinds of life experiences, there's definitely something to benefit from that.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's definitely a richness that you're missing if you're only in one of these language bubbles. But I guess the arguments on the other side would be that, you know, if everyone spoke the same language, then there would just be one bubble. This is the challenge, I think. There are actually benefits to having cultural diversity, and you definitely don't want the entire world to be too conformist Well, one of the interesting things about crypto is that it's just a culture that actually manages to somehow have its uniqueness and even preserve its independence from all of these surrounding countries despite being embedded in all of them.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's definitely benefits, I think, to be able to speak multiple languages and like once you can, right? You discover that even your mindset changes while you're in speaking in one language versus the other. People have told me this. Like when I speak Russian, I sound more like, I guess, like to the point and pragmatic when I speak Chinese, I sound more cute when I speak English. I'm something else”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Four or five of them. Okay. In my case, the answer is zero for middle school and two for high school. But you're right. Right. It dropped. Exactly. It dropped a lot. And so there's a lot of these just like relationships that end up being very finite. A person changes their, I feel like a person changes enough of their worldview after 25 years. Was that there even a study about this? Something like a person and themselves 25 years later about as different as two different people or something like this. So, you know, like, I mean, just like you can have conflict without bloodshed, I think, you know, you can have finiteness and even the necessary sorrows of finiteness that give meaning without literally anyone having an end their life.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe we'll get the Of ourselves that die. Interestingly enough, as I've just like personally spent more time in this world, I've started realizing that there is a concept of real finiteness that still exists and it might even still be a thing that provides meaning that doesn't require anyone to actually die. Like, for example, how many people from middle school or even high school, yours, like do you still talk to regularly?”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's still a striving for technological progress. There's still a striving for self-improvement in general. And it turns out that you don't actually need to have existential conflicts in order to have that. Now, maybe you need conflict, but we have other kinds of conflict, right? Like we have competition between businesses, competition between political ideologies, competition between projects. And so these are the psychological needs are like they're just our substitutes for it. So I guess like, yeah, so if we're trying to say, I feel like once we start living to the age of 200, then I'm just intuitively expecting that we'll see substitutes emerge in the same way.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess the one historical parallel, and this might be a bit unfair, is that there have been philosophers that have said things like war gives meaning to human collectives and the struggle for supremacy between nations and races as this big driver of progress that ensures that everyone strives to be their best. And of course, this viewpoint got into the head of a crazy Austrian guy in 20 years later, his soldiers were shooting at my grandparents. So, you know, these days we don't really have that, but yet life still feels meaningful. We've still found other ways to...”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engineering problem I agree with that. I'm definitely in the camp that consciousness is a property of the algorithm and not a property of brain structure. The other fun, the kinds of philosophical things we'd have to grapple with is like once you upload yourself, you can hit Ctrl Couldn't be lovely to have like 10 copies of Alex Friedman and then we can just interview everyone.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. The way it works is, you know, you have these light sails, like you basically take these spacecraft and you shine a laser at it, and the laser is insanely strong, quickly accelerated at 100 G's, I think it was 10,000 G's until it gets to 20% the speed of light, and then it goes on your merry way. So if you want to be in personally explore the Alpha Centauri system within like two centuries or one century, then being a robot is by far the most practical way to do it because there's no way that a human being can survive 10,000 Gs. It's definitely interesting long term, but at the same time, there's definitely a lot of psychological hangups and a lot of deep philosophy that we'll just have to grapple with. Well, I think to get there.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a lot easier if you're not a human, right? Like one example of this is that in the context of humans, we're talking about like, oh, we're going to be able to go to the moon, oh, we're going to be able to go to Mars. But there's this project called Starshot, I believe, right? That's basically trying to send spacecraft to mini spacecrafts to Alpha Centauri. And they literally believe that they're going to be able to get spacecraft over to Alpha Centauri four light years away by the 2060s. No, I mean,”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have the That stuff's interesting too. I agree. Again, I think we have enough resources and we should just try all the parallel tracks. It's great that we have people just trying to make our bodies work. It's great that we have people trying to upload or improve brain scanning. It's also great that we have just people improving cryonics. We could just go to sleep in the freezer and eventually hopefully sometime in the future, Helfini's going to be able to wake up all of this. Anyone who gets chronically frozen today will be able to wake up. But that's a bet, right? That's the last resort. And then the other interesting thing about extreme uploading approach, right, is we're excited about space. And one of the points that a lot of science or like hard science fiction types make is that, you know, if you want to explore space.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Change of minds that I want to see, which is like basically treating aging as an engineering problem, right? Like the default is all 7.8 billion human beings that are currently on this earth are going to die and they're going to live their last decade of life in a debilitating pain. And the only way to stop that is human ingenuity. And we don't have that solution yet. But if we work hard, we will.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like, you know, the way that kind of philosophy talks about, you know, markets and the goal of not interfering with them, like, you know, it is very nature styled. And then, of course, the conservative one is just traditional culture that existed before the activists started controlling everything as also being a kind of nature. But the 21st century attitude and really COVID, you know, has flipped a lot of minds because with COVID, what's happened is that, well, no, like it's not nature is not safe, right? The default is untold and misery and suffering in tens of millions of people dying. The only way out for us is through basically human ingenuity. And that frame of mind is one that's like much more friendly to this other.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the political spectrum, right? So there's nature as in literal nature, and my view is that the right wing version of that is markets as nature, right?”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put people into this mindset that you know, wait, but it's not just the bits and tweets that are going to save the world. Bio is actually like super important and huge. And ultimately what's ending the COVID basically is the vaccines and the vaccines have just been amazing. And if you can take that energy and also like this, I think philosophical attitude that I've noticed, like I think the way that I would describe the philosophical attitude here, this is going more depth first, is that I think the way that I kind of interpret part of what I would call late 20th century ideology is that there is this mentality that nature is good and disruptions from nature are bad and generally want to minimize disruptions from nature. And like this exists everywhere.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think with just present day technology, I have at least 70 more years to left. So just like imagine what kind of sea change will happen in biomedicine during that time. And the other thing that made me optimistic is that I actually think COVID has been this kind of event that's really kind of pushed biomedicine and especially like activist approaches to biomedicine really into the public consciousness, right? Like it basically it's”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I definitely think that we can get there. I definitely think that it's the sort of thing that's going to take an insanely huge amount of work. And I definitely think it's the sort of thing where once we figure out the first crop of problems and people start living to 150, we'll just realize that there's like 10 other problems that Kill you have as slowly and we'll have to do more work. But, you know, the good news is that this is Aubrey's longevity escape velocity argument that if you get everyone to lift 250 now, then you have half a century to fix all those other problems as well. So I'm optimistic for that reason. I think you definitely do not want to underestimate human ingenuity, especially over the long term. Just to look at what happens to computers between the ENIAC in 1950 and where we are in 2020, right? Like that's a span of 70 years. So both of us.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say absolutely, and I'd say I'd say battle where really have started over the last five years in particular to see the first cracks of humanity starting to make things that look like they'll turn into victories.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I hope to see the concept of seeing your parents and grandparents die just slowly disappear from the public consciousness as an experience that happens over the course of half a century the same way that getting lost in a city slowly disappeared over the public consciousness over the last 50 now that we have smartphones”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like elevated the impact of this, imagine Mac versus PC Wars if everyone who bought a MacBook had 10 Apple shares inside of it and everyone who had a PC had 10 Microsoft shares inside of it. And then you had the elites who bought their Macs back in 1983 that they spent $500 dead and now they have $40 billion that they just think that they're these gurus who understands the future of finance and geopolitics and they make theories about why Apple is the one that's going to bring freedom to the world and Windows is like secretly aligned with the access of evil. Oh, that's brilliant.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That space. In the case of Bitcoin, I would definitely not call Bitcoin a scam. I would also not call Litecoin a scam. There's people who call Litecoin a scam because they just say, oh, look, it has no fundamental use case and the concept of being silver to Bitcoin's Bitcoin's gold is just like stupid. And millibitcoin is the silver to Bitcoin's gold. But the... At the same time, if you have these people who just, you know, they do seem to earnestly believe this and they are trying to just make Litecoin be Litecoin as best as they can, then to me that's enough for it to not be a scam. And then so, yeah, I think the biggest gray area is definitely between projects that are earnest, but they have just all sorts of these different combinations of flawed qualities to them.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a voice guiding the community. Yeah, like I think in the case of BSV, the humans, they make just completely wrong and just obviously wrong claims about what BSV is capable of accomplishing and what it conceivably could accomplish. And there's just a lot of aspects of it that make it feel like a money grab. So that's one example. And then, you know, you got to go a bit further. And then, you know, you have the trans of the world. And like, no, that's a platform. You can use it. You can do stuff on it. But at the same time, like, you know, they did.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you want to go a step, like if that's 100% scam, then what would I call 80% scam? Like Bitcoin SV is one example. This is Craig Wright's fork of Bitcoin. Theoretically, it's a blockchain, right? It's a fork of Bitcoin. It has 500 12 megabyte blocks. If you really wanted to, you could use the blockchain. It satisfies the properties that you can send transactions onto it. You can probably use it as a backup to store your files if you really wanted to, just because it has so much space. It might fail, but... Like it's the but at the same time as we basically said like Craig Wright is a scammer and like half the community is just totally bad shit insane.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then, of course, there was this spectrum of things that are not completely scams and then things that are not scams and that are technically totally fine projects, but where their community is just incredibly sketchy and then all the way to things that are where the community is nice, but maybe the project is just fundamentally incapable of achieving what it's trying to do or the community doesn't realize. And then really good projects, right?”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's definitely a gray area. There's definitely things that are really in actual scams. Like, I mean, Bitconnect would be one example of something that's way on the scam spectrum. Did you see their 2017 promotional video, by the way? Of BitConnect? Yeah. Hey, hey, hey. What's up? What's up? What's up? Bitconnect. It was this three-minute 48 second video that was just of this guy making this totally crazy rant and it was at some conference in Vietnam where they were of course trying to convince a whole bunch of people to buy this coin and they had these claims about how it would go up in value. That was definitely like the peak of these pure completely scammy coins and that was definitely really terrible. And I actually, I feel like we have less despite cryptocurrency as a whole being bigger. We have quite a bit less of that now.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the thing that makes me very happy about the space now that it has happened is that this gets back to the conversation that we had at the beginning, right? Like I'm interested in this concept of decentralized public goods funding, right? Like I want things that are good and valuable to as much as possible also be things that can economically sustain the people who produce them. Because if you don't have that, then either the public goods just don't get produced at all or people make centralized versions that have some of the properties and try to be substitutes, but actually just concentrate control in a very small group. Both of those things are not very nice. So the nice thing about NFTs would be, well, if you're an artist and you can just mint NFTs, then this is a source of revenue, then like, great, that's another stream of revenue for creative work that often does still get under.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, exactly. I definitely cannot really understand the psychology behind paying $200,000 for original art painting. I'd be like, you know, if I had a mansion, just like give me photocopies of everything, you can hang three photocopies of the Mona List. Why would even have the Mona Lisa? I think I'd probably just have some Nan cats or something.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was definitely surprised by NFTs in particular. I even actually think might be on record somewhere on some tech conference panel. Like they were asking, it was one of those overrated or underrated sections and asked about NFTs. And I thought, and I said, like, hey, I don't think NFTs are overrated. And in retrospect, that turned out to be quite wrong. I think, I guess I just personally can't really relate to this concept of spending a lot of money on a thing. Like there's nothing there's no queer kind of understanding of why that thing would maintain its value.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are honest. Can you trust the 51%? If you can't trust the 51%, can you trust the other 49% to be able to coordinate on making their own fork? What will happen to coin prices? How do people as human beings react to these events?”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Provably. And then blockchains and cryptocurrency. I think the one area where consensus mechanisms is still more an art than a science is that these aren't just technological systems. They're crypto economic systems, right? And they make assumptions about people. And which assumptions you can make about people is not something that you can prove with math.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did it a couple of decades, no one's found anything faster than baby step giant step stuff? That's And, like, there's definitely ways in which that approach really makes sense, right? Because at least you can concentrate your analysis on a small number of building blocks. And you do have some intuitive reasoning about those building blocks, but at least there is a small number of building blocks and lots of people are looking at them. And then everything else just sort of gets formally built on top. And you actually can mathematically reduce the security of big things to building blocks, right? Like you can have mathematical proofs that say, you know, if you make a ZK Senark of a Yes statement when in reality that statement is false, then you can use that to extract information out of elliptic curves that completely breaks the problem or something like that.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, formalize, try to improve just AI legibility, like trying to understand if the AI makes some classification so we can actually see what happens and what's going on in the middle. Whereas with crypto or with traditional cryptography, it's very much not, well, okay, I mean, I should quite say that. Traditional cryptography is this interesting mix of being very formal and being very informal because it's very formal with given these security assumptions prove that the protocol works under these security assumptions. The places where it's very informal is like, well, how do we even know that there isn't an efficient algorithm for factoring numbers? Yeah, we kind of tried it for 40 years and then so far no one's found anything better than the general number field civ and like, okay, fine, we'll just assume it's fine. How do we know you can't find the discrete log between two elliptic curve points? Like.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Take GPT 3 like things and just scale them up, and their intelligence will continue to improve, or is there just like some types of reasoning that they're fundamentally bad at? And they're not going to get good at it no matter how much you scale this exact same approach and add more hardware to it. Thinking about what's going on more explicitly. I mean, my understanding is that a big part of AI safety research is trying to do that sort of stuff, right? Formally.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my impression is actually that this is more of a kind of faraway impression and it could be wrong, that it might even be that one of the challenges is that AI is not formal enough. Like because AI is very practitioner oriented, right? Like it's all about like, hey, I found a couple of hacks and look, I ran them and look, you know, they seem to improve classification accuracy from 0.684 to 0.773. A lot of the time there just isn't actual science behind why this hack works and why this other hack doesn't work. You just sort of like trial and error your way into it. And I could see how that approach works. But at the same time, like that approach is not good for legibility, for example. It's not good for understanding what the heck is actually going on, like how these kinds of systems conceivably might fail. There's even, you know, a debate on can you.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Than even once public feedback on the quick and dirty stuff, and then later on you formalize it more, and then you get more feedback. In general, I guess I feel like the norms of the research in the future, the internet has just changed so much. There's no way that it's not going, and it's even changed collaboration structures and the patterns in which we work with each other. There's no way that the correct structure for collaborative research is the same as what it was 15 years ago, but what combination of these existing components and of newly ideas it is something that's totally legitimate to kind of fight it out. And I think it's great that there's different ecosystems that have different attitudes to things. I think there's a big possibility that things that the Ethereum, ways that the Ethereum ecosystem approaches some problems is totally wrong. And if there's other ecosystems with different principles,”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source