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

“I think the compromise that we've been taking within Ethereum is like when we have to take the crappy solution, we look for crappy solutions that are forward compatible with becoming good over time, right? Like when you build the quick and dirty thing, you would still already have ideas in your head about what the more complete thing with all the security features added on would look like, right?”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Favor and against optimism is that optimism is not live in Polyglania's wife, right? Like it just takes more work to create a system that has these extra roll-ups security features. And so Polygon just said we're going to be the system that makes the pragmatic trade-off. We're going to go functionality first. And then we can talk about adding back the security later. So I've talked to them and in principle, I think they're very open to the idea of adding more security.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, the thing that I want to say in Polygon's favor, just to be very fair to them, I really, you know, I definitely, really, you know, respect the work that they're doing, start with a bit with that word of not criticism, caution, right? that they made this kind of deliberate trade-off for very pragmatic reasons, which is that the Ethereum ecosystem needs to scale now. And there are applications that want to do something now. And if there aren't Ethereum-friendly options for them, then they're not going to just wait peacefully and do nothing for 12 months. They're going to go to either Binance Smartchain or one of some other system or potentially something that just has totally no alignment with Ethereum values whatsoever. But whereas with Polygon, the best thing that you can say in Polygon's”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in part, I imagine, I'm not sure exactly what its capacity level is, but I imagine it has a higher capacity because it's a bit more willing to take centralization trade-offs. And then another thing is that if the Ethereum ecosystem, even if it did not do that, right, if you think about an Ethereum ecosystem hypothetically scaling with sidechains, then you would have 100 copies of Polygon. And they would each have their own tokens. They would each have their own chains. And so even if each one of those chains was only as scalable as Ethereum, you could still, like the total sum of them would still be 100 times more than Ethereum.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Money in Polygon, they can, right? So And to be fair, there aren't even the supply I don't think is even that widely distributed, right? So potentially this idea 51% of the token holders come in and gather and stealing everything. It's not impossible.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think there is a really big and important difference in security models between rollups and sidechains, which is basically that roll-ups inherit from the security of Ethereum, right? So like if I have coins inside of Loopering or Optimism or Arbitrum or ZKSync, then even if everyone else in the world who is participating in these ecosystems hates me and wants to steal my money, I can still personally make sure that no matter what happens, I get my money out. It might be a bit expensive for me to get my money out and I have to do transactions like on the main chain, but I'll be able to do it. Whereas in Polygon, which is a sidechain, and so instead of being secured by Ethereum, it's also in part secured by its own proof of stake consensus with its own token. So if 70% of the whole or even 51% of the holders of Polygon tokens wanted to take”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's new technology, it's crazy technology, it's admittedly scary technology. If you want to learn more, I also have an article about this on vitality.ca. It's actually really, really good.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, the C case stuff is just like you can, in a CK rollup, you can withdraw immediately. You don't have to worry about the economics of proving as much. There's just fewer issues. The reason why CK rollups are not winning everywhere today is because ZK Starks is still a crazy new technology, right? Like this is something that 10 years ago it existed only in theory and there was none in practice. Then eight years ago people were just getting excited about it in Bitcoin conferences for the first time. Starting four years ago or three and a half years ago even, that was the first time you were able to make any ZK Snark based anything on Ethereum. And then people started making them. And ZK technology has only really become efficient enough to do a lot of things within the past maybe one and a half years.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think ZK roll ups once you accept that the technology works are just conceptually simpler and they have nicer properties. The reason is that they do not have this concept of a challenge game, right? Like as I mentioned in an optimistic rollup, the way that you ensure that the results are correct is that you let one person submit and they just submit with no proof. They just say here's what I think the result is. And then if someone else disagrees, they make their own submission. And then if you have two disagreeing exhibitions, then you actually publish it on chain and you see who's right. But for this to work, you need to actually wait for someone to disagree, right? So, for example, if I have an asset inside of an optimistic roll-up and I want to withdraw it, then I actually have to wait a week to withdraw it because if the block that contains my withdrawal turned out to be invalid, then there needs to be space for someone to disagree with it. Whereas with a ZK rollup, like you don't need time for disagreement because you just have a proof, right? As soon as a”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As well, right? So, like, within a few months, I'm expecting fully Ethereum capable roll-ups to be available as well. So then, so roll-ups, just summarizing, you know, do most of the work off-chain, put only a little bit on chain, factor of 100 scaling, sharding, and other factor of 100 scaling, 100 times 100 factor of 10,000”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you're pushing 90% over the workoff chain, and then 90% of the data and 99% of the computation off chain. And then you still have 10% of the data and 1% of the computation on chain. And so, you know, your scalability goes up by a factor of about 100. So these systems are already live for some applications, right? So there's something called loopering, which is just a ZK roll-up for payments, right? So you can have assets inside of the loopering system, and you can go around and transfer them. But what you and you get much lower transaction fees, right? Like instead of $5, you'd have to pay less than five cents. But the only problem is that this only supports a couple of applications right now, like making one that supports anything that you can do on Ethereum just takes a bit more work. But that's being done.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agreements, then you just run everything on chain, and whoever was wrong loses a lot of money. So disagreements are very rare and they're very expensive. And in a ZK rollup, you don't even rely on this challenging game at all. You just rely on a proof. The core principle is basically that instead of lots of transactions and all the transactions, everyone verifies every transaction, it is you take the transactions, you strip them down and compress them as much as possible, then stick that on the blockchain. You do need to stick something on the blockchain just so that everyone else can keep up to date with the state so they know what all the contracts are, what all the balances are and all of this. But it's a very small amount of data. And then you use one of these other off-chain games could be this optimistic game, could be a ZK Snark to just prove that somebody out there did the computation and the result is correct.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the amount of data that goes onchain goes down by maybe about a factor of 10. And then the second thing is that you don't do the computation on chain. Instead, you do the computation off-chain. And there's one of two ways to do this, right? One is called a ZK rollup, which is you just provide a ZK snark that basically says, hey, look, I did this computation and I have this proof that here's some hash of the result and it's correct. And then you stick it on chain and everyone verifies this one proof instead of verifying all these transactions. And then the other approach is called an optimistic rollup, which has basically made the scheme where first someone says like, hey, this is what I think the result of applying these transactions is. And then someone else can say, I disagree. The result is different. And only if two people disagree do you actually do publish all of the data and run the whole blog on chain. So if there's this.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That are like memory, internal memory of smart contracts. Basically, everything the blockchain actually has to keep track of and remember. So you just put in, you take all these transactions, strip out all the data that's not relevant to telling people how to update the state. And then you take the data that's needed to update the state, and then you really compress it, right? So, for example, if we say, you know, I, Vitalik, have an account that's 0x AB58, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it's 20 bytes, well, instead we can say, well, I have an account that is number 1874224 in the tree, right? And that goes down from 20 bytes to just like an index and a position, which is three bytes, right? So you use all sorts of these fancy compression tricks, and you basically just, instead of publishing all these transactions, you publish this tiny compressed blob.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so the idea behind a roll up is basically that so instead of just publishing transactions directly on chain and having everyone do all of the checking of those transactions, what you do is you create a system where users send their transactions to some central party called an aggregator. And like, well, theoretically you can have a system where like the aggregator switches around or anyone can be an aggregator. So, you know, it's still permissionless to send things. Then what the aggregator does is they strip out all of the transaction data that is not relevant to helping people update the state. So when I say the state, this is like, this is a very important kind of technical term from blockchains. I mean account balances, code.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first, I think the 64 can be hard forked up over time. So we've set it so that there's theoretically space in the data structure for 1,024 shards. It's just that 64 of them are turned on. There are challenges with having more shards because you have to have logic that just checks and manages all of those shards. And if there's too many of them, then that becomes too expensive. But even still, you can improve quite a bit. And then the other thing that we're doing is if we're getting maximum scalability by combining roll-ups and sharding. So this might be a good time to talk about roll-ups. What are roll-ups?”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Exactly. And like there's other hacks, right? Like there is another hack called data availability sampling that allows you to make sure that the data in the blocks was actually published. But basically, if you stack a couple of these tricks on top of each other, you can create a system where I, as an individual participant, can be convinced that everything that's going on in this distributed blockchain thing is correct without actually personally checking more than like a percent of it. So that's charting.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simple form of sharding. There was also other more clever things that you can do. So, for example, there's this concept of Ezekiel Snarks, right? Verified, or I ran some complex computation on this piece of data, and I got this answer. And so if you make these kinds of proofs, then if you see a ZK Snark that says some block is valid, then you're convinced that that block is valid. And even if everyone in that committee is evil, they have no way of making a valid proof for a bad block, right? Like, because the proof itself, it is a proof that you did the computation where that proof is much easier to verify than just running the computation yourself. And there's once again super awesome mathematical or cryptographic magic behind making ZK Snarks work.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Validate a block, they all sign a message basically saying, yes, we agree that this block is valid. And then they combine that signature into one, and then they broadcast that signature. And then everyone else, instead of verifying the blocks directly, just verifies that signature. And so if I see the signature, I'm not directly convinced that that block is valid. But what I am convinced of is that out of this committee of this randomly selected group of 100 validators, let's say at least 70 of them agree that this block is valid. And so if I trust that the majority of these participants are all honest, then because it's all randomly selected, the attacker can't just force themselves into one committee. And so, you know, the attacker is going to be evenly spread out too. And so if, you know, the entire set of validators is mostly honest, every committee is going to be mostly honest. And so bad blocks are not going to go through. So that's like one.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it turns out that there are some a bundle of different tricks that can do that, right? So one of them is just random sampling. So the idea behind random sampling is for simplicity, this is a proof of stake chain, and you have 10,000 validators validators, like the stakers. And for simplicity, we'll assume they all have the same number of coins, right? If someone has more coins, we'll just kind of split them up and pretend they're 10 stakers. You use some random shuffling and you basically say these random 100 validators are assigned to validate this block. These random hundred validators are assigned to validate this block. These random 100 validators are assigned to validate this block. And so each individual computer only gets assigned to validate like a small piece. But then the way that the information about what's valid gets passed around is that when these hundred participants”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To have a system that supports 10,000 transactions a second, but each computer in the network can only personally verify 100 transactions a second. So how can each computer get a guarantee about the other 9900 without actually going and verifying them themselves?”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Each individual node in the blockchain only needs to store a small portion of the data and only needs to process a small portion of the transactions. So you can think about it as being like inspired by BitSorrent, right? Like on BitSorrent, there's no such thing as a Bitsorrent full node that has every movie. The work is split up among a huge number of computers. And that makes sense. That's the only sane way to scale a system like that. And if they actually tried making a version of Bitsword that required full nodes, that story of every movie, then it would have zero censorship resistance and it would just be dead in an instant. So the challenge with taking that model and applying it to blockchains is that blockchains aren't just about spreading data around. They're about agreeing on exactly what data was spread around and ensuring that everything that you agree on actually is correct. And so you have this paradox where let's say you want to”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an evasing tangent. And I think crypto is just one of the most underrated aspects of crypto is, I think, how you can analyze the sociology and the politics and the anthropology. And I'm sure Dan Carlton would have fun exploring the space at some point. But the core trade-off, right, is that if you scale blockchains the dumb way just by increasing the parameters, then eventually you just make it harder and harder to participate as a node and you end up with a system where there's like 20 computers running the whole thing and it's just very centralized. So sharding basically says, well, instead of just increasing the parameters, what we're going to do is we're going to change the blockchain architecture in such a way that”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is. I would have definitely wanted to see more of a kind of principled coin with a that tries to be Bitcoin, but follows consistent big block values. But I don't know. Maybe I should just stop expecting projects that I have no involvement in to care at all about what my values are. And maybe Ethereum just is”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, exactly. But the point is that even after Craig Wright got expunged, the Bitcoin Cash community kept having these disagreements, right? And now after this development funds dispute, there was a further split between Bitcoin Cash and ABC. The Bradshagri continues to extend, right?”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's necessary. I think that's he could have done it without that, but that just, it's a marketing strategy. It sort of gives him more salience. There's other big block personalities, right? But what's the difference between what Craig, right? He's not just a big block personality. Potentially Satoshi. And he did say all the big block things, right? Like he talked about how, oh, the concept of a fee market is fundamentally economically wrong. And it should be a free market.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they were very angry at this. And I mean, I think a lot of that anger is justified. But at the same time, when people are in that menzo state, it's very easy for you to just kind of latch on. And if you find someone who expresses anger at the same things that you're angry at and also. It seems like someone who's strong and seems like someone who might be good to rally around. It's very easy to just get behind that.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The analogy that's at the top of my head will get a bit political. That's fine. You've had Michael Malice. So I guess I view Craig Wright as being kind of like a Donald Trump figure in that he's not very intellectual. But I think he gets a big audience because he says he says things that play to the resentments that people have. And he says things that people want to hear, right? Like in the wake of this block size war, the big walkers did feel very disenchanted. Like they felt that, you know, Bitcoin always had this vision that we were supposed to just keep increasing the block size and Bitcoin is peer-to-peer cash. It says so in the white paper. And then this elitist clique of core devs just like came in and said, you know, no, no, no, we're going to impose this totally different vision. And if you ever want your scalability, you'll have to wait for us to create this totally unproven fancy technology technology called the Lightning Network that works on your completely different principle.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Victim of this, right? First, there was a split with Bitcoin Cash. And then, of course, Craig Wright came in. And Craig Wright was this basically scammer who just keeps on pretending that he is Ceshin Akamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin. Hey, Craig writes a legal team. Do you hear me? Yes, I still think your client is a scammer. So sue me.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm definitely disappointed with what happened with the big block side. I think the source of my disappointment is that one of the things that you notice when just looking at this political disagreements generally, especially when you have environments where there are authoritarian or single party dominated, and then there's some opposition party, and the opposition often has very legitimate grievances, but at the same time, the thing you notice is that often enough the opposition just sucks, right? Like it just doesn't have political capacity, it doesn't have the ability to come up with policy because its entire culture is designed around resisting much more than it's designed around actually debating serious policy tradeoffs. And I worry, or I guess not so much worry, because it's already happened. Unfortunately, think that Bitcoin Cash ended up being”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends. And I think, well, for blockchains in particular, the costs of people being able to peacefully go off and do their own thing are much lower, right? Like, you know, okay, if you have a country and you have two groups, then often enough fighting out the new rules requires a civil war requires everyone to move and so forth. But on a blockchain, the costs are lower. And so.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it depends. Like, if it's a split because of a bug, then that's horrible. If it's a split as a result of political differences, then I think a split is better than one side being forced to basically just suck it up and accept the majority position, even if it really hates it.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's some truth to that. There's definitely a bit more risk of a split as a result of a hard fork than as a result of a soft fork.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, because fewer people can run a node that verifies the chain, and also because any of these things would require hard fork and hard forks are inherently risky.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But so you know, small block side was like happy with these very low levels of block size, and then the big block side wanted to expand to, you know, at the very least go to four megabytes and maybe go maybe 820. There's disagreements within there as well. I definitely was favoring the big side the whole way.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like weird and devious trick. Like, basically, what they do is they take the signatures of transactions and then they put them outside of the block. And then they add an extra rule that says that for a block to be valid, the block has to come with a separate, like basically extension block that contains all of the transaction signatures, right? So when you measure it according to the old rules, like, no, hey, it adds up to less than a million, but actually there's this extension block that the old protocol doesn't even know about.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And look, they have this belief that soft forks are kind of either less coercive than hard forks, which by the way I completely disagree with. I actually think soft forks are more coercive because basically they force everyone who disagrees to sort of go along by default or they have this opinion that there's like it's more difficult to abuse soft forks to do really mean things like or that completely violate people's expectations like increasing the supply which is like I think they're assumptuous to that so because of you know these reasons they just say we're only going to do softworks and we want to just not do any hard forks and they eventually discovered this idea called segregated witness that allows for like a very tiny block size increase to like the equivalent of about two megabytes with a soft fork it's it's a really”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the difference between a hard fork and a soft fork is basically that in a soft fork, blocks that were any block that's valid under the new rules was still valid under the old rules. So if you have a client that verifies according to the old rules, then you'll still be able to accept the chain that follows the new rules. Whereas with a hard fork, like you have to update your code in order to stay on the chain.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Proposal, which is a bit ironic because the 248 proposal started off being like a small block negotiating position. But then when the big block people came back and said, like, hey, aren't we going to do this? They're like, oh, no, no, no. We don't want the block size increases anymore. So, you know, there were these two different positions, right? The small blockers, I think they valued one megabyte blocks for two reasons. One is that they just really, really believe in the importance of being able to read the chain. But two is that a lot of them really believe in maintaining this norm of never hard forking, right?”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, just like made an update to the Bitcoin software that made blocks bigger than one. I think it's a million bytes invalid. And I think the impression that most people had at the time is that this is just a temporary safety measure and over time as we become more confident in the software, that limit would be and like raised somewhat. Then when the actual usage of the blockchain started going up and then it started going up first to 100 kilobytes per block, then to 250 kilobytes per block, then to 500 kilobytes per block, there started a kind of coming out of the woodworks, this opinion that like, no, that limit should just not be increased. And then there were all of these attempts at compromising, right? First, there's like a proposal for 20 megabyte blocks, then there was the 248.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but then Satoshi back in 2010 was worried that even 32 megabyte blocks would be too hard to process. So he put the limit down to one megabyte and I think the...”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is very unhealthy. In the Bitcoin case, basically, what happens was that Bitcoin originally, at the very beginning, it didn't really have a block size. It just had an accidental block size of block size limit of 32 megabytes because that just happens to be the limit of the peer-to-peer messages. Interesting.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So the way that I think about the trade-off is I think about it as a trade-off between making it easy to write to the blockchain and making it easy to read the blockchain. So when I say read, I just mean, you know, have a node and actually verify it and make sure that it's correct and all of those things. And then by write, I mean send transactions. So I think for decentralization, it's important for both of these tasks to be accessible. And I think that they're about equally important, right? If you have a chain that's too expensive to read, then everyone will just trust a few people to read for them. And then those people can change the rules without anyone else's permission. But if, on the other hand, it becomes really expensive to write, then everyone will move on to basically second layer systems that are incredibly centralized. And that takes away from decentralization and self-sovereignty as well. So this has been my viewpoint pretty much the whole time, right? You need this balance and going in one direction or the other direction.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so there's two major paradigms for scaling blockchains, right? As you said, layer one and layer two. And layer one basically means make the blockchain itself capable of processing more transactions by having some mechanism by which you can do that despite the fact that there's a limit to the capacity of each participant in the blockchain. And then layer two says, well, we're going to keep the blockchain as is, but we're going to create clever protocols that sit on top of the blockchain that still use the blockchain and then still kind of inherit things like the security guarantees of a blockchain. But at the same time, a lot of things are done off-chain. And so you get more scalability that way. So in Ethereum, the most popular paradigm for layer two is roll-ups and the most popular paradigm for layer one is sharding.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a risk. There's obviously a. We're definitely approaching it with the mindset of, you know, this is a problem, and yes, we do have to do some work to solve it, but we're doing it. And so far it's being solved.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The easy part, and then you have the hard part, and you have this special class of actor called assertor that does the hard part. And then the easy part, the people doing the easy part, which is just miners and validators, they kind of just talk to all the different people doing the searching and they just accept the highest bidder. And this is all just an interesting example of economic design philosophy, right? Like sometimes you can't just like make centralization go away. Sometimes it's inevitable. But at least you can try to kind of contain it. You can direct it. Or, you know, you can even sort of firewall it away from core consensus, the parts that really do need to be decentralized.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, or even validating proof of stake is going to centralize. So I think the ecosystem's best reply to this sort of risk and it's the direction where projects like Flashbots are going already is if you can't eliminate the centralization, then you try to firewall it. And the way that you firewallet is you basically say we're going to try to deliberately create a marketplace where people can just do the complicated work of creating what are called bundles like bundles of transactions that are very profitable, right? And then at the other side of the market, you just have block proposes, reminders that are just dumb nodes. And they go and ask what are called searchers, the bundle creators, and they just ask like, hey, how much can you give me if I put in your bundle? And then they just take the highest offer, right? So you sort of separate out the task and you have.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And the reason why this is a challenge is because First of all, it sometimes degrades user experience because users get less favorable trades. But there are sometimes ways to mitigate that for applications. Sometimes it's not that bad. But the bigger risk that I think some people consider more existential is that there's just much more economies of scale in figuring out how to extract all this revenue because if you're just collecting transaction fees, there aren't really economies of scale. There aren't really benefits to centralizing, right? Because it's a very simple formula. You just grab up the transactions that pay you the most. But with MEV, there's all these sophisticated algorithms. And if you have lots of money, then you can hire really smart people to make amazing algorithms. And then you can use the other half of your money to get a lot of mining power or a lot of stake and you get a lot of opportunities to use your even better algorithms. So there's this risk that as a result of this mining is...”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So there's a lot of these different arbitrage front running, backrunning, these different tricks that allow block proposers to”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Little things like that. There's also things that involve front running other people's transactions. So one example of this would be that if someone sends a transaction that says buy me five ETH for whatever price that you can get, but with a maximum of, let's say, $15,000, then you can go and you can put a transaction right in front of that transaction and you can buy up that ETH first. And then you resell it to him at $15,000 minus one.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source