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

“Yes. So the basic idea is that if you have the ability to choose which transactions go into a block and in what order, then you have the ability to take advantage of that position for economic gain in a lot more ways than just collecting transaction fees, right? Like, for example, there's decentralized exchanges on chain, like Uniswap. And let's say the price of ETH versus USDC was $2,700. The previous block, but then there was a bit of a market drop and now it's 2680, where you can go on Uniswap and you can just gobble up the entire part of the automated order book that's like between 2700 and 2680, right? And that's, and then at the same time, you like run a bot and you buy some ETH back at 2680 and you've just made about $10 of profit, right? Well, $10 times, you know, whatever the depth is, right? So, and so there's lots of.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love this conversation, depth first search instead of breadth first. So basically, okay, Ebby V minor extractable value. It is not different in proof of work and proof of stake, right? So if you want to call it block proposer extractable value, like it sounds less sexy, but we can call it BPEV instead of Mav, who cares. So this is a problem.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I'm sure the proof of work people you talk to will give a very different and contradictory opinions, and that's totally fine and amazing.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to pretty much either take out none of the miners or you do a fork that changes the proof of work algorithm, which takes out all of the miners. The economics of recovering from attacks and proof of work, at least to me, actually do seem more unfavorable.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone who's running a node is going to see almost the same thing, right? Like they're going to be off by a few seconds and maybe they'll be off by they'll disagree by a few minutes. But like if it's a serious attack, people are going to know, right? It's not like one of those things where we're trying to agree on like, I don't know, did Epstein kill himself or like some random political facts where in reality no one knows a single thing about what's actually going on and they're all speculating like it is much more visible, right? So we do have that. But, you know, at the same time, I'm happy to admit that these are fairly untested mechanisms. But at the same time, they're also untested mechanisms and proof of work, right? And in proof of work, it's even harder because in proof of work, you don't have the ability to identify and say, you know, I'm going to, these miners attacked, and so we're not going to let these miners in, these miners did not attack. So we're going to keep them in.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's definitely talking as well. I mean, like we have to agree on protocol changes somehow, right? Like there's Twitter, there's Reddit, there's GitHub, there's all of the various Ethereum forums, Ethereum magicians, Ethereum research. There's just in-person communication. Then there's just kind of like the hidden web of everyone talking to everyone on Telegram or Signal. So it's like some of everything, right? But I think the thing to emphasize around like, can you actually come to consensus on whether or not to fork the chain because the attacker is censoring everyone just for example is like”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is painful, yes. I think the one big unknown, of course, is like if an attack actually happens and like if an attack happens that requires the community to actually choose one of these minority forks, then what would the community actually successfully coordinating on this look like? you know, we can talk about it and we can write science fiction novels about it, but like until it's happened, you don't really know the details of what it looks like and how difficult it is”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that in a proof of stake system, you can identify specific participants and you can say these isn't a human going in and saying, I don't like you, I don't like you, I don't like you. This is like automated, right?”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Accept a different block. In order to make that kind of attack, you basically have to have your validator, like a big portion of your validators signed to conflicting messages. And this is something that once these messages are on the network, you can go and prove. Like, look, these people did it. And so we have this feature in the protocol called slashing where you basically take all these people who provably misbehaved and you burn their coins and you don't burn anyone else's coins. Now, there are other cases like, for example, if instead of reverting blocks, the attack just tries to censor everyone, right? Then everyone who got censored would just basically create the minority chain. And then the community would basically have to do a soft fork, right? They would just have to say, look, this chain is clearly attacking us. This chain is the one not attacking us. And so we're going to join this chain. And then what happens is that on that new chain, the attackers also lose a lot of coins, right? So the difference between proof of stake and proof of work.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think proof of stake is very secure because in order to be able to attack the system, you need to have basically as much stake as the rest of the network, right? So that means like right now, for example, we have 5 million ETH staking. So you have to come up with 5 million ETH and then join the network. And then the other, so 5 million ETH is a lot, right? It's like, how much is it now? Like $15 billion. So that's actually more than I believe the cost of attacking the Bitcoin network. And then the second thing is that recovering from attacks is much easier in proof of stake than in proof of work, right? Because in proof of stake, you have like, first of all, for many kinds of attacks that you do against this network, we have this concept of like automatic slashing, right? Which basically means that in order to revert a finalized block, so if there's one block that's accepted by the network and you try to convince the network to kind of revert that block in a”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Outbidding the nearby towns and they just didn't have enough. And then there was Chia, the one that's doing proof of hard disk mining basically is just grabbing up so many hard disks. There's a shortage. So that's the second reason. And then the third more selfish reason is that because participating in consensus does not require so much energy expenditure, you don't need to pay people as much to participate, right? So like Bitcoin and Ethereum, they both issue somewhere around 4% of the total supply every year right now to miners. So Ethereum is about 4.7 million Ether and the current supply is about 115 million. But with proof of stake, like we expect it'll be somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million per year. So that means the supply doesn't have to increase so quickly.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But like actually about half the cost of proof of work mining is the cost of the hardware. So hardware is a very big deal too. And you need this really big and powerful, very specialized hardware, the kind that fills up these big warehouses. So proof of stake, you don't really need that much electricity. You just need just a little bit to run a regular computer. You can run proof of stake validators on computers that you already have. It's just much less resource intensive. And like this is good for a few reasons, right? Like one is the kind of environmental rationale that you're not breaking the environment. The second is that you're not taking away electricity and like other resources from other people. Right now there's, I think just today I saw a story about like Iran wanting to shut down some Bitcoin mining because it was just grabbing up so much electricity that”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's like the core distinction between proof of work and proof of stake. I like proof of stake and I've liked proof of stake for many years basically because like it just requires much less ongoing resource consumption, right? Like with proof of work, you have to actually go and buy these physical computers. And these days, they have specialized hardware, ASICs, application specific integrated circuits. You have to go produce them. You have to go buy them. And unless you have millions of dollars, you have to buy them from one of these other people who creates them. And those other people often end up taking a huge cut of the profits themselves. And then you have to plug them in. You have to just burn all of this electricity that's just running 24-7. So it consumes a huge amount of energy, right? And not just energy. It also, you know, just to create the hardware, right? Like people focus a lot on energy.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, you know, a big word for especially if you've never heard of Sibyl's before. But the basic idea is that you have a network and you have lots of computers that agree on which block to accept. And sometimes you get two blocks that get published at the same time and you just have to agree in an order. So there has to be some kind of voting game. But then the question is, well, in this voting game, who gets to vote? Who gets to participate? Now, you can't say one person, one vote, right? The reason why you cannot say one person, one vote is because you need some kind of authority or some kind of mechanism to say who the humans are.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, proof of stake is a consensus algorithm. Or consensus mechanism, I should say. The difference is that an algorithm is something that you run by yourself, a mechanism interactions between people and it could even include incentives and all of that. Consensus mechanism, so by which nodes in the network agree on which blocks came in, which transactions came in, and what order, make sure that once a block gets accepted, it can't get reverted and all of these things that we expect from a blockchain. So existing blockchains, including Bitcoin, including the Ethereum of today, and including a lot of them, they use proof of work, right? So the reason why we need proof of anything is because the serve this function that I call economic civil resistance.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would be a new protocol, and people would have to take a lot of effort to migrate over. But later we've slowly changed the roadmap over to something that's much more incremental, right? So proof of stake happens kind of over time and then sharding gets added over time and all these features get added over time. And so the experience for just a regular Ethereum user still feels very seamless, right? It's like maybe a little bit more complex than the hard forks that we've already done from a user's point of view, but like not by that much, right? So the big two things that are happening, right? These are what used to be considered the two flagship features of ES 2.0 and now they're just the flagship features of the next devolution of Ethereum as proof of stake and sharding.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So I think recently we've actually been kind of deemphasizing the ETH 2.0 branding, I guess. So the reason behind that was that originally we envisioned something more like a big grand event where all the good things would happen at the same time and it would be a new blockchain”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of activity, even including stuff that is totally legal, that just, you know, there's this shadow PayPal credit card governments or whatever you want to call it. And that makes it just hard to participate in this stuff. So I think reducing the number of intermediaries is definitely. Normally, a good thing”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Yeah, I mean, the other thing to keep in mind, of course, is that the set of the kinds of things that just payment processors as companies try to restrict you from is much larger than the set of things that's illegal, right? Like part of that is because they want to be super conservative and the more layers you have, the more they're conservative because they're scared of what the layer below them will do to them. Sometimes they have their own moral opinions of various kinds. They go after lots of people, right? Like they make life really hard for sex workers, for example, psychedelics, as you mentioned.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“U.S. to be able to have this big back door into everything. So, I mean, I do think that a balance is needed, but at the same time, I do think, I guess, I definitely worry more about the possibility that just without things like crypto, kind of acting outside of institutions becomes too, and I don't even assert mean outside of governments, even just outside of corporations, like becomes too impossible. And there's just terrible things that come as a result. And if things going in the other direction, it obviously is a risk, but at the same time, I think in the long term, like a cryptokian potentially even offer defenses as much as attacks against that sort of thing.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is no privacy, for example, or the world where there just no ability to kind of act outside of the confines of mainstream institutions. That's something that's more realistic and that seems like something that could lead to a lot of kind of scary things, right? And like even from a government's point of view, right? I think governments over the last few years, a lot of them are very worried about sovereignty. They're worried about if their country's economy is a social environment, they're just completely dependent on basically foreign tech companies controlled by foreign governments. Like, you know, governments are not on team government, right? It's like, you know, the Indian government is on team India. The Russian government is on Team Russia and so forth. So they don't want the...”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's always that possibility, but like at the same time, I think if you look at the world as a whole and the way all the other technological trends are going, like, you know, in-person surveillance is just going up every year, right? The world where things go dark to such an extent as the one the police hawks sometimes like to say to such an extent that like, you know, oh my God, the criminals are committing crimes with impunity and we can't see anything. Like that just seems unlikely. But on the other hand, the world where they're just”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You just ban all exchanges and ban all links from the fiat to the ecosystem to crypto. And you ban all kind of mainstream employers from accepting or paying encryption. Then you can successfully turn it into a fairly kind of niche counterculture thing that has much less impact than it otherwise would. somewhere between the good scenario and the bad scenario. I'm obviously hoping for the good.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are happy with it. And there are going to be things that people are unhappy about. There's always going to be the people that want to surveil everyone. But if the kind of effect of crypto from just empowering people is greater than that and greater than that in a way that people can just easily see, then that would be a good scenario, right? And we'll just become kind of incorporated and accepted the same way as happened with the internet. In the worst case scenario would, of course, be just like people suddenly flipping and going into moral panic mode and just, you know, oh my god, like this technology is used by, you know, insert bad group over the day. And then I don't think governments have the ability to ban crypto to the extent of just completely like preventing blockchains from existing, but they definitely have the ability to really marginalize it, right?”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enough public support and just enough people that see that look crypto is clearly doing a lot of good things. And there are definitely areas where there's tensions, but there is areas where there's tensions, like there could be some kind of creative and interesting approaches that get figured out, right? The concept of corporate taxes, for example, right? That would disappear as a revenue stream if theoretically corporations just all get replaced by DAOs. But maybe there's some other creative way by which DAOs themselves can kind of have some kind of encoded governance that ensures that they have at least some of us, some kind of bias towards serving the global public good. And maybe it does enough of DAOs can do enough of that that”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best case is that blockchains continue to prosper and we figure out scalability so that people can actually start doing things on blockchain, all of the amazing use cases that people have been talking about instead of today where a lot of the great stuff gets priced out because transaction fees are at $5 to $10. And then we see a lot of different amazing applications happening on blockchains. It could be DAOs creating new ways for people to interact and organize with each other, new ways for artists to get funded and just all sorts of is amazing things. And there's just”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I definitely see Ethereum as being a mechanism to fight for definitely some specific things that are social causes, like just the fact of creating an open financial system that anyone can participate in no matter where they are in the world. That's a social cause. Just, you know, giving people the ability to organize and create projects, even if it's five people in five different countries. I think that kind of inclusiveness, I think that's a social cause and it's a core crypto value. But then at the same time, like the other important part of the magic of Ethereum that you have to balance that against is that it is also this open platform where ultimately the thing is just the things that the community makes of it.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, we haven't seen yet how that's going to be deployed, but it could be potentially deployed to do lots of really good and amazing things.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're not naive about it, and you realize that for these things to be produced, there needs to be a way for it to be sustainable. There needs to be some way of supporting people who are working these projects. But at the same time, you want to avoid that turning into a vector of centralization. trying to sort of get all of the good things without the bad things. To me, that's a big part of sort of what my grand experiment in crypto is about. And we are doing things in different kinds of things for this, right? Like the Gitcoin grants quadratic funding in the Ethereum ecosystem. And obviously these dog coins that just happen, I guess accidentally, there's other projects that, like, for example, Uniswap has their Uniswap DAO that just has a huge amount of funding.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. One of the kind of philosophical things that I hope to achieve is kind of decouple the concept of public goods, which are incredibly important and are the lifeblood of modern civilization, from the idea that there is or can be one central organization that represents the public and perfectly understands and can impose their idea of what is the good.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was interesting to kind of see becoming real. In general, I think public goods are very important. And on the internet, public goods are even more important, right? Like every single Lex Friedman podcast is just on YouTube and anyone can go and see it. There's no way for you to sell it so that some people can see it, but other people can't see it. You could do that, but then you'd obviously be reducing your impact. So thank you for making the amazing Lex Friedman podcast so freely available.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a big one for me is just this idea that crypto isn't just an opportunity to give people slightly better ways to save value in all of these things. It's also an opportunity to basically create these new digital institutions that could serve the public good in new ways. That's something that I've been interested in for a long time. I actually even have this article in Bitcoin magazine back in 2014 where I basically suggested this idea that you would have coins that represent causes and like people would just like buy and accept those coins because they support those causes. So I think it's called markets institutions and currencies, a new form of social incentivization or something like that. And I'm sure you can find it and throw it in the links.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Including the coin community is what perceive the whole thing. But I was actually impressed. For every poster that was saying, like, no, why did Vitalik rug pull on us? He was his wallet was supposed to be a burn address. There's like 10 people that were like, oh, you know, I thought I was just in this because it's a fun pyramid gambling thing, but instead I ended up being part of this great public good thing for humanity. And that's even more amazing. So the amount of that that I got was very impressive. So, you know, all in all, I think the doc people did great.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was stressful, right? I think, well, one of the really stressful parts was just the fact that I had to basically move all of my funds, including the $325,000 Ether from one cold wallet into another hot wallet, or sorry, into another multisig wallet. And maybe the multisig wallet had a bug in it. Maybe there's some mistake I'll make in the middle that causes the funds to get lost. That part was stressful. And I was definitely stressing out for two days. I mean, triple checking the new wallet. I even did a bit of an audit of the code myself. I wrote my own JavaScript DAP to make confirmations because Gnosis Safe didn't work with the status wallet well. That whole thing was definitely a bit of a marathon. I was also kind of a bit worried about or uncertain, I guess, how the public and”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's difficult to obviously there's parallel universes in which I did better, but at the same time, there's also lots of parallel universes where because I hesitated more and tried to spend more time thinking I missed the opportunity. So, you know, on net, it's like a luck of the draw and I'm just happy that everything was able to turn out as well as it did.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm sure there are some things that I probably could have done better. I was actually talking to some of these charities and I was impressed by just how much money they managed to get out of selling some of these coins. I probably could have done better by just like talking more with traders and actually ensuring that they can do a better job of maximizing the value of all of them. It was a very stressful time and I did have to act quickly. I did manage to make a lot of the donations before a few days before the great cryptocrash happened. So it was.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to say who they are because I think they want to announce themselves at some point. Sure. Yeah, but it's transactions were made on the blockchain. But it was just very interesting and unexpected and just an insanely crazy situation.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did not even have any idea of how much you would be able to get, right? Because on paper, the dog tokens are $7 billion, but like in reality, it's a very liquid market. Are you going to crash it by after you sell one million worth, are you going to crash it after 10 million? might you actually be able to get an entire 200 million? I had no idea. Definitely was just of the mindset of like, okay, again, I'll sell a bit, maybe get some ETH and then donated some ETH to give well, donated some to other groups. And then, okay, have some dog tokens. Like, I don't have an easy ability to sell more myself, but then I'll just give them to these groups. And like, you know, hopefully they'll do good things with them. It was actually, I actually donated 20% and dumped 80%. Yeah, so the COVID India group got one badge and then there's another group that got another badge.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And I needed my family to actually go and read the number on their piece of paper. And then in my new multi-sig wallet, there's other people that are signatories. But I'm obviously not going to reveal any details beyond that. So I did this, right? And I actually managed to get the private key, make the first transaction that would just move all my...”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I saw more and more people talking about them. And then at some point, I realized that, hey, these things are worth billions of dollars. And there was lots of really good things that you could do with that amount of money. And it would actually be a waste to just see it go. So I made the decision that I would actually power through and figure out how to safely basically get my private key. I actually had to call up my family, tell them to read out their number off of their piece of paper. I entered that into a fresh laptop that I bought from Target. Then I put in my other number on my piece of paper, added the two numbers together on the computer. There's the key. And at the same time, like just scrambled for two days, setting up a new wallet where I could move my ETH to safely getting people to be multi-sig partners, just like doing all sorts of stuff that, you know, 10 years ago you would expect to just be part of.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So cold is very inconvenient, but cold is also much more secure because even if that computer has some viruses on it, it's air gapped. It's not actually going to be able to upload it. So this cold wallet and all the money is out of the cold wallet. So it's safe for me to talk about my setup now, right? But it was a laptop that was sitting in Canada. And I also had two pieces of paper where I wrote down two numbers on those two pieces of paper. One was with me, one was in Canada. And if you add those two numbers together, you get the private key. So because of COVID travel restrictions, and this is a Cold Wallets in Canada, like it's very difficult for me to actually access it, right? And I'm not sure if they knew this. Maybe they just got lucky. But basically they sent a lot of these dog tokens into this wallet where it was very difficult for me to access it. But then I saw these docs.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Competitor or something like this, but I remember they just dumped $50,000 worth of their token into my wallet, and then they had their Twitter army just basically run around saying, look, look at Vitalik's wallet. Vitalik holds tellers. He's one of us. He's a supporter. And as soon as I discovered this, I just publicly sold the Teller tokens on Uniswap. And this created a bit of a Twitter splat. Now, the Shiba people were more clever. The Shiba people, instead of dumping to that wallet, they dumped to my cold wallet. So in a cryptocurrency, right, there's this concept of like cold wallets and hot wallets. Basically, like the thing that actually owns your money is like this 80 digit number called a private key, right? And a hot wallet is when that private key is just stored in memory on your computer, on your phone, really easy to access. Quald wallet means it's either written down on a piece of paper or it's on a computer that's just never accessed the internet.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Managed to sell the doja at the top, and I remember just feeling like I was such an amazing trader. But then, of course, the price went up from four cents, then to seven, and then 50 and just Doj becoming this big phenomenon where there's even a lot of people that have heard of Doge that have not heard of Ethereum. It's just like something even I wasn't predicting, right? And so after that, of course, we have Doge and then people are thinking, well, you know, if the leading dog token is worth $50 billion, then surely the second largest dog token deserves at least $7 or $8 billion, right? I feel like that's kind of what the mindset of these Shibai people is. So then, of course, they did this other gimmick, right, where they gave me half the Shiba token supply. They were actually not the first project to do this. So around the end of 2020, there was this weird project called Teller, like T-E-L-O-R. I think there are chain links.”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best investments I've ever made. And it did really well. And then at the end of 2020, Elon Musk, of course, started talking about Dogecoin and the market cap just shot up to about $50 billion. Actually, it shot up multiple times, right? Like the first time it went up from about 0.8 cents to about 7 cents. And this just happened all in one day. And I remember this was when I was still in Singapore in the middle of COVID. saw that the price just went up by 1,000% and I was like, oh my God, my doge is worth a lot. And so I immediately called up some of my friends and told them to drop everything Instagram. And I sold half the Doge. And I got 4.3 million dollars, donated the proceeds to give directly. And a few hours after I did this, the price dropped back down from about 7 cents to four cents, right?”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I should probably start by giving some of the backstory around these coins and this concept of giving me coins. First of all, Nashiba Yinu, as you said, is this kind of knockoff of Dogecoin, right? And Dogecoin was this initial kind of fun coin that was created back, I think, around 2014 or so. And it was just created by Jackson Palmer and put it out as a joke for a couple of hours and a community formed around it. At the beginning, people didn't take it very seriously. I actually remember putting about $25,000 into Doge sometime around 2016, and I just remember thinking to myself, like, okay, how am I going to explain to my mom that I just invested $25,000 into dog coins? Like, what even are dog coins? Like, the only interesting thing about this coin is that there's, you know, a logo of a dog somewhere. But, of course, that ended up being one of”
2021-06-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #188 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source