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Vitalik Buterin

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2021-06-03
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2021-06-03
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  1. “Curious outsiders, whereas I personally, Matt totally optimized for curious outsiders, or at least I feel like I strive to. So I guess that's my case for why I tends to behave in ways that, you know, occasionally traditional academic types criticize as being reckless. But on the other hand, there's definitely real benefits that come from just taking a rigorous approach, especially when you know what the thing is of what you're trying to get. And you're trying to kind of improve your way or provide protocols that actually provide that. You know exactly what you're looking for. I feel like realistically, you probably want to do both kinds of analysis. And like sometimes even want to do both kinds of analysis and stages, right? Like you have, you want to do more quick and dirty things.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I found a bug in a proposed consensus implementation from either BitShares or EOS. This happened around the end of 2017. So that was definitely inside the model because they had a very clear idea of what they were trying to achieve. They had a very clear description. And there's a very clear mathematical. So, you know, I think there are kind of these two sides. And then the other thing is that a lot of the academic approach ends up basically optimizing for other people inside of the academic system. And it doesn't really optimize for like.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Did not think about incentivization much, right? There was a little bit of thought about incentivization. There's a couple of papers on the Byzantine altruist rational model, but it wasn't that deep. It was mostly operating under the assumption that we're going to make consensus between 15 participants in these are institutions. And if something goes wrong, then if it was, we can figure out whether or not it was deliberate offline. And if they did something evil, we can sue them. Whereas in the crypto world, you can't sue that, right? And so that whole discovery basically arose just because the model of traditional consensus research didn't cover those possibilities. And then once you got out of that model, those other issues do exist, right? Then at the same time, there definitely are protocols that turn out to be that do have failures inside the model. This reminds me of the time when”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Interesting. I'm actually the sort of person who thinks Deep Rigger is overrated. The reason why I think Deep Rigger is overrated is because I think in terms of why protocols fail, I think the number of failures that are outside the model is even more important, is like bigger and more important than the failures that are inside the model. Right. So if you take selfish mining, for example, that original discovery from 2013 that showed how Bitcoin does even if it has a 50% fault tolerance, assuming everyone's honest, it only has zero to 33% fault tolerance depending on your network model if you assume rational actors. And like to me, that was a great example of like an outside the model failure, right? Because traditional consensus research just up until before the blockchain data.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “There's definitely interesting ideas in there. And I do think Cardano takes a bit of a different approach than Ethereum in that they really emphasize having these big academic proofs for everything. Whereas Ethereum tends to be more okay with heuristic arguments, in part because it's just trying to do more faster. But there's definitely very interesting things that come out of IOHK research.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Such things are possible. People definitely absolutely have a right to. And I think should strive to just constantly change and reinvent themselves.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Oh, interesting. Is this going to be one of those things where everyone comes full circle and then 2030 Vitalic and Charles are best friends? Not my friends.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I kind of want to let the various books about Ethereum speak for themselves. But, you know, I feel like since that time, I think, you know, Charles says queerly progressed into matured in a lot of ways. And people who follow Charles closely have definitely told me that 2021, Charles is very different from a 2014 Charles. And I'm sure 2021 Vitalik is much different from 2014 Vitalic as well.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Like, for example, imagine if there was some civil war in the US split up and you had two currencies that both claims to be the US dollar. Well, Ethereum would have to pick one for the sake of everyone who's already using that org also. Does that mean that the blockchain would be taking a position in this big megapolitical debate? So I think for just those kinds of reasons, I would personally prefer Ethereum itself to be more of this sort of pure platform that just analyzes transactions just mathematically using deterministic consensus rules. And then if you need the oracles, that can be layer twos. I think Ethereum... Benefits from not trying to do everything at layer one and having this very robust layer two ecosystem where you have all these projects doing interesting things.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I personally would prefer the Ethereum base layer, like, stay away from trying to provide too much functionality because once you have the Ethereum base layer making a claim about, say, the US dollar to Ethereum price, at some sense you're basically saying that Ethereum as a base platform starts making what could be geopolitical statements”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “And I think it's definitely necessary for a smart contract so that you do a lot of things to use off-chain data of some kind, right? Like if you want to have a stablecoin, you need a price oracle so you know what price you're targeting. If you want to have some fancy crop insurance gadget, like I think EtherRisk has been doing a lot of good work with that. And I think it was either Kenya or Sri Lanka or both like they're making a lot of good progress in some in some of those places like you need some kind of or So, I mean, I think the chain is definitely taking a good and important part of the Oracle design space. And I'm definitely happy that there's that project taking the task on. At the same time, I do think that their frog army on Twitter can get a bit intense at times. The frog army, is there...”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Oh, that would be fascinating for when the merge happened. And I think Elon, you definitely think you would make a mistake if you were to kind of ascribe too much sophisticated and malevolent or deep intentionality to the whole process. I think he's just a human being and he likes dogs just like I like dogs. I think that is”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I'm sure that if they stay in the cryptocurrency ecosystem at all, then they have to at some point number one Dogecoin number, I mean, you know, come on, he deserves to be number three or number two. And then Ethereum can be whatever that other number is.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “They'll do it that way. And if Doge wants to make a fork that allows for two-way transferability with the Ethereum, then they could. I mean, I think that would be a lovely collaboration to make if there's interest. I think there might actually even be some multi-sig funds that has some funding. It's just a bounty for someone to make a bridge between the two.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I think people stopped really caring about and maintaining it because there just weren't enough applications that were actually interested in using it at the time. And then transaction fees got too high to actually maintain it. So I think if we want to make a BTC real A 2.0, that becomes cheaper because it uses Snarks or something like that, then you probably could. And maybe now is the time when you actually can do that sort of one way verification. But the one challenge, though, is that if you want to have a bridge that allows you to move assets between chains, then you don't just need one-way verification. You need two-way verification. And Ethereum can verify anything because Ethereum's smart contracts can just run arbitrary code. But if you want Bitcoin to be able to do things based on what happens in Ethereum lands, then Bitcoin would have to basically, well, they can do everything with soft forks because that's their religion. But”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “It's definitely something that's in its infancy. There definitely have been some cross chain interaction things that have been done before. So the earliest is probably the concept of merge mining, right? When a chain just makes its entire proof-of-work algorithm dependent on the proof-of-work algorithm of another chain. And so I think famous Dogecoin actually merged minds to Litecoin, which is, I think in retrospect, not looking like a very good choice because now Dogecoin is bigger than Litecoin. No, no, if there's potentially some way for Dogecoin to merge mine within Ethereum proof of stake of some kinds, then that could be an interesting alternative. So that's one type of chain interaction. As far as bridges, like one chain reading another chain, early in Ethereum's history, there was this project called BTC Relay. It's a smart contract on Ethereum that just verifies Bitcoin blocks.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I think if we could have a secure Doge to Ethereum bridge, then that would be amazing. And then when Ethereum gets its scalability, any scalability thing that works for Ethereum assets, you would be able to also trade wrapped Doge with extremely low transaction fees and very high speed as well.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I personally think that if Doge wants to somehow bridge to Ethereum and then people can trade Doge thousands of times a second inside of Loop Ring, then that would be amazing. I mean, if they want to just take ZK roll-up style technology and just have thousands of transactions a second on their own chain, then that would be a great outcome as well.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “So, you know, we accept Doge every year for our annual DEF CON conferences. So I definitely don't think Ethereum is opposed to Doc coins. I kind of want to feel like Ethereum is at least a little bit in spirit itself a Dotcoin. And then, you know, as I mentioned, I love Doge. I bought a bunch of Doge. I still hold a bunch of Doge. On the scalability question, the challenge basically is the limits scalability and the trade-off.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I definitely feel obligated to correct the record. I definitely do not fear the Doge. I love the Doge. I actually visited the Doge in Japan a few years back. She's an amazing dog is still alive.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Pure now you're giving them stable coins, which are mirroring dollars, and obviously dollars are going to collapse too. But the reality is that dollars are vastly more stable than the Venezuelan Bolivar. There are really meaningful and beneficial things that you can give to people by having a global and open financial system. But I think if you want to actually do that, like you have to have much more than just a currency, right? And then if you want to go beyond financial things, then you have to obviously have much more than a currency and then, you know, you also have to actually take scalability seriously because the non-financial applications like nobody's going to pay $5 a transaction for them.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I guess my perspective on why the whole we're going to save the world and create and create peace by denying governments the right to stealth taxation kind of perspective doesn't really make much sense for me and I do think that there is real value that comes from a decentralized and open currency like just the fact that there is a financial infrastructure that anyone in the world can you know go ahead and use right like it's That's something that can easily be a big boon for people, right? There's a lot of places where the currency is much less stable than the dollar. And these people, like they don't, well, if they use Bitcoin, their only option is to get Bitcoins, right? Which, you know, are also pretty volatile. If they use Ethereum, then they can get Ether, but then they can also get stablecoins. And you might think that, oh, you're not being ideological.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Your new magic youth fangled cyber currency that takes over the world take away the government's ability to have senior revenue. And so you reduce the government's revenue by 10%. If the government is that evil, which portion of its expenses is it going to take that 10% from? Is it going to stop the bombing people in Afghanistan or is it going to cut welfare? If you think it's the first, you have a very optimistic view of the government, right? So that's...”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “My contracts Yes, exactly. Smart contracts, the computer programs that are running on Ethereum, they are the core of what makes Ethereum general purpose. I do think that there's a lot more wrong with the world than just money, right? Like I'm not one of these people who thinks that, you know, if you get rid of fiat currency and you replace it with cryptocurrency, then suddenly wars are going to go away, right? Because first of all, like Senior Age revenue is only a small portion of government revenue, right? It's like, what, five, ten percent, something like that. Second of all, like if you are the sort of, this is one of the things I don't even get about their philosophy. Like let's say you're the sort of person who is in extreme and very distrusting libertarian and you think that these governments are terrible, right? We know today that governments find a combination of things like welfare and things like the military that goes and like bombs people in Afghanistan. So the question you have to ask is like, okay, with”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “So, Ethereum was like always from the beginning about that, right? It's about, hey, this isn't just money. There's so much more that you could do if you could just go ahead and make any infrastructure or digital institution or DAO or whatever you want to call it, where the kind of the base layer of the logic is just executed in this open and transparent way where everyone can see what's going on. Or if you like your zero knowledge proofs, at least everyone can see proofs that prove to you that what's going on follows the rules. And you don't need to just constantly keep trusting centralized actors.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Systems that just keep track of whether or not some certificate was signed or whether or not some cryptographic key got revoked. There's this big long list of just interesting things that you could use about blockchains to do basically they are sort of the missing piece that where without them the kinds of things that a decentralized computer network can do is very limited. And once you have them, you know, a lot of those limitations end up going away.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “So, and the thing that always attracted me about Bitcoin is these values of decentralization, creating these open permissionless systems that anyone can participate in and that aren't just going to flop over and die of whoever created them gets bored and that are resistant to whoever runs them breaking the rules and all of these things. And I think that pretty strongly that these principles are really valid and importance to much more things than just money, right? Bitcoin is the blockchain for money and Ethereum is built from the start as a general purpose blockchain, right? There is Ether the asset on Ethereum, but then you can also make decentralized financial things, what we call DeFi today. You can make ENS, the decentralized domain name system. You can make prediction markets on it. You can make totally non-financial.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Basically, so that was interesting. And then there have definitely been other learnings as well, just from seeing the chain alive and seeing what actually is the staking experience like, what are the actual incentives for all the different participants. So I definitely feel like we're gaining a lot from this sort of one year of trial running the chain before we actually make all of Ethereum depend on it.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “That's, I think, a big learning that we've had from multiple of our experiences in the Ethereum ecosystem, just like validating this multi-client model. And to be fair, it's a model that we get criticized for a lot, right? Like Bitcoin people talk about the risk of consensus failures that this creates. VC types are like, well, isn't it expensive and wasteful to fund three software teams when you could just be making one quote focused effort? They love the word focused. And Ethereum is not that, but it's amazing despite not being that.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “The attacker just managed to create billions of Bitcoin out of thin air. And this was not only discovered and fixed after something like 12 hours. But if Bitcoin had been a multiple implementation system, what would have almost certainly happened is one of the clients would have bugged out, but the other clients would have probably actually had a check for that, right? And so there would have been a consensus failure, but at least that would have alerted everyone that there is a problem very quickly. And it also would have given everyone just obvious social permission to go and, you know, pick whichever one of the chains is correct and solve the problem.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Rapid sprint of just like optimizing the hell out of everything and make sure there aren't any of those DOS blocks and DOS bugs remaining. So that was another example. And then as a counterpoint, as a counter example, so like something that also shows the point from the other side, Bitcoin had this bug in 2010, right? The balanced overflow bug. Basically, someone created a transaction that had two outputs and those outputs had were both of a few billion Bitcoin. So like about two to the power of 63 Satoshi's. And then if you add those numbers together, you'll go above two to the power of 64. And of course, computers, once you go above to the power of 64, you wrap around. And so Bitcoin nodes thought that there was enough money to pay for the transaction because it was asking for, let's say, like a billion Satoshis or something, but actually it was asking for to the power of 64 plus a billion. And so, you know.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “So, what happened basically was that someone came up with a way to create blocks that were very slow for one client to process, but not the other client. So at that time, there were basically two Ethereum clients. They were called Geth and Parity. Right now, I think the top three ones are Geth, Nethermind, and Bezo. But what happened as a result of us having two clients is that the attacker was just not able to come up with blocks that both clients were completely failing at processing. And so a lot of the miners and a lot of the network participants, they just kept on switching between the two implementations depending on which one worked. And that actually really helped the chain kind of survive through that month of attacks as the attacker just kept on hammering at our system and identifying all of the weaknesses and just like forcing our clients to do this, you know.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Yes, it's a Prism Nimbus Teku and the Lighthouse. And then also Ethereum back in 2016 had this fun event that we call the Shanghai DOS attacks. They were called that because the attack started right on the first day of our annual conference at DEF CON. That happens to be in Shanghai that year.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Can verify, right? So they all speak the same language. Now, sometimes when there is a bug, they disagree. And when two clients disagree because of a bug, we call this a consensus failure. And consensus failures are pretty serious, right? And when you have clients monoculture like Bitcoin does, then it's more rare to have consensus failures. You still have them, actually. Bitcoin had a consensus failure between two different versions of the same client back in 2013. But they're more or less likely to happen. But the interesting thing is that the multi-client architecture has actually, I think, saved Ethereum much more than it's harded. Even in this most recent incident, right? Like Prism was not producing blocks, but all the other clients were still producing blocks.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “So, one of the lucky things there was that this particular bug only prevented proposals of blocks. It did not prevent attestations. So attestations is just a mechanism for voting on blocks. And it's the attestations that are actually responsible for the chain finalizing. So like coming to this more permanent agreement on blocks, right? So the chain was actually quite stable all the way through. I think the thing that we generally learn from these experiences is just how valuable it is to have the sub-multi-client network. So this is one of these areas where I think Ethereum distinguishes itself from Bitcoin, for example, that in Ethereum, we don't have one single client that everyone just runs, right? There's multiple implementations of the protocol. And these multiple implementations, they all process and verify the blocks that each other”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “There were definitely things that we learned. Like, there were a lot of things, especially optimization and how to build their clients in a way that they can process things efficiently. There's a lot that we learned from. Weird, unusual state of the chain continues for a while, and then eventually everyone who is not participating just gets enough of their stake. We don't use the word slash, we use the word leaked for this, but basically also burned until the people who are participating go back up to two-thirds and then the chain goes back to finalizing. Just seeing all of those edge cases play out live, I think actually helped a lot and probably helped really contribute to making us feel better about mainnet.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “I think that incidence was that there was a consensus failure of some kind, as I remember. Basically, just different clients interpreting things in different ways, and then one of them getting kicked off the network. And then it ended up taking a while to actually get everyone to get back online. A big part of the reason why it took weeks to resolve, right, is because it's on a test network. The coins are valueless. And so there's not really this big push of any kind for people to actually, you know, going download the new client so they can start participating again. And so, you know, it definitely took a while until the chain started finalizing again. And then also there was, I think, another round of just not finalizing in October, as I remember.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Runs on not just the specialized test network, but on, say, an existing test network like Robston or Rincoby that Ethereum people already significantly use. And if it works, then you can deploy the transition on mainnet.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “So, the thing that we had last month is we had this online hackathon called Rayanism where basically a bunch of the different client developers that are going to be part of the transition, hacks together some test nets of the post merge Ethereum chain. So these were only test nets of what would happen after the merge. There were not testnets of the transition itself. So the thing that people are working on now actually is the transition. So having a full specification of both the transition and post-transition, and we have specifications now, but in a realistic way, there probably needs to have a couple of changes and have things that continue to be ironed out and then have a testnet that does both the transition and the post transition. And then once you have a test network, then you just have to do a lot of testing and audit it and then do some.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “I think early it's 20, 22 was the most realistic. I think there's definitely still an optimistic case of it happening this year. The realistic thing to count on is definitely the early part of the very early part of next year.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Not something that we kind of put on anybody by surprise. And then when the DAO fork happened and the people on the ETC side split off, I think it also just happens that a lot of the people that were not willing to stomach the DAO fork and then join the ETC side, they were the more Bitcoin-y types and the more Bitcoin-E types do also tend to like proof of work more. And so that also sort of ended up purifying the communities on both sides, I guess. So Ethereum Classic is not switching to proof of stake. And they're happy with their setup. And by the time that it came to the beacon chain launching into now, I think the community is very strongly in favor of the proof of stake switch.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “No. I think the biggest part of the reason is just because we have been talking about proof of stake in sharding as being part of the roadmap since almost the very beginning of the project. The very first proof of stake blog post was from January 2014, which was two months after the project started and maybe even a day after the announcement. So it was proof of stake was.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I think the biggest reason is just we've been underestimating the technical complexity. There's a lot of technical complexity in making a successful proof of stake chain. There's a lot of technical complexity in actually figuring out the transition process.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “It's not important. For just any smart contract or just applications that run on the blockchain, it can be important to users and it can be important for some applications. But we're basically saying that maintaining and serving that is not going to be simultaneously the responsibility of every Ethereum node if you want that information. There can be separate protocols for backing it up. And these other protocols actually exist, right? There's something called the graph, which is doing some history retrieval. Potentially, you can just take that entire chain and stake it on BitTorrent. There's lots of ways to archive it and create customized search protocols for it.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “The new chain is not going to hold information from what happened in the Ethereum chain before the merge. So Ethereum clients of the that people are going to use like around the time of the merge soon after the merge, they're probably just going to sync and check the proof of work chain up to the merge and then they're going to check the proof of stake chain. But at some point in the future, I think people will just stop bothering checking the proof of work before the merge.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “So basically, at the same time, you both get rid of the proof of work requirements for one of these blocks to be valid, but instead you require these blocks to be embedded inside of the proof of stake blocks, right? So you basically have like a chain inside a chain. And this is, you know, from an architecture perspective, you might think it's a little bit suboptimal, but it actually has some nice properties and makes it easier to kind of think about the consensus and think about what we call the execution layer, like transactions and contracts kind of separately and upgrade them separately. And it also just means that the upgrade process is extremely seamless, right? Because from the point of view of a client that's following the chain, you basically have to update nothing, right? You're still following the same chain and follows the same rules, except instead of checking proof of work, you'll switch to checking that the”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Take the activity that's being done inside of the proof of work chain and you actually move it over into the proof of stake chain so you get rid of the proof of work side completely so The way that the merge will work is it's definitely gone through a few different iterations. The earlier versions of this actually required more work for users and more work for clients. It was much more like, oh, there's this new chain, there's this old chain. And then everyone has to like migrate from the old chains to the new chain. And then at some point, we'll forget about the old chain. The new version is designed to be much more seamless for users, right? So basically what actually happens is that the old chain basically becomes embedded inside the new chain. Starting from the merge transition block, every proof of stake chain block is going to contain a block of what we consider now to be the Ethereum chain today, but we'll call it the execution chain. And then at the same time, to create one of these blocks, you're not going to need proof of work anymore.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Right. So, as you've said, the way that we have set up this proof of stake transition is that at first, the proof of stake chain just launches on its own, right? And this is the thing that happened in December. And the proof of stake chain has been running for close to six months now. I mean, by the time people watch this, it might actually be six months. But it isn't actually coming to consensus on anything except for itself, right? So the idea behind that is to just give the proof of stake chain time to mature time for people to build the ecosystem around it, time to make sure that there aren't any bugs, and just like prove to the community that proof of stake actually is real. And a full transition is realistic because the thing that you're transitioning to already exists and already works. And then at some point in the future, you have this event called the merge, where you basically”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Cases where I think the Ethereum ecosystem has suffered from that, and we have had to expand pretty significant effort on, for example, removing features that we didn't realize that we actually can't sustain. Like one big example is just increasing the gas cost. So like making some operations more expensive because they should be expensive because they actually take a lot of time in the process. So that's making something's more expensive, kind of like taking some functionality away. So if you can be cognizant of where you're likely going into the future, and if you don't know, like even be cognizant of both the most likely paths that you'll take in the future and coming, like thinking about your roadmap and coming up with a roadmap where you know that if you want to do either of those things, then you have a queen path toward it. That's probably the best kind of practical way to get the best of both worlds.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Yes, like even so, for example, with sharding, right? Like, yeah, I think it's so likely that the first version of sharding that comes out is not going to have ZK Snarks and data availability sampling, for example. But we know what these technologies are. We feel like we have wrapped our heads around them. And so we know how to build a system where we can put all the pieces in place so that it becomes very easy to bolt those components on in the future. So if you do things that way, right, then at the beginning, you can have your system that has the functionality, but say has less security or less sustainability or less of something else. But then over time, it's designed in such a way that it has this easy on-ramp to adding those things. And if you don't think explicitly about being future compatible, then you do often end up with a quick and dirty solution that backs you into a corner.”

    2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source