Vitalik Chinese dialogue community: Ethereum needs new stories and new users, and EF is reforming internally

Source: BlockBeats

On the evening of February 19, at the invitation of FSL chief revenue officer Mable Jiang, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin conducted a special flash text AMA in the "Flash Interview Circle" in the Tako App. The interview has solicited anonymity questions from the community in advance, aiming to respond to the community's concerns and confusion about the future development of Ethereum.

The interview content involves the future adoption and ultimate narrative of ETH, how to view the relationship between L2 and Ethereum, MegaETH 's centralized sequencer solution, etc. Even Vitalik answered the question of community users asking him "whether he is a communist." It is worth noting that this is also the first time that Vitalik has performed AMA in Chinese in recent years.

The following is the content of this AMA:

Q1: In your mind, should Ethereum today be closer to the existence of Bitcoin or the existence of world computers? You mentioned in previous X post that many people who have negative views on ETH are actually just short-term speculators whose frustrations can hardly bring any constructive help to the ETH community. However, in many OG ETH-Maxi camps, many people also promote the concept of "ETH is money" with high profile (such as Bankless, which is the largest ETH Maxi media), and compare ETH with BTC, believing it is another kind of competition The digital currency form of force (or perhaps even better currency form). What is the ultimate narrative you envision for the future adoption of ETH?

Vitalik: Is Ethereum a world computer or currency? I think these two ways of thinking are compatible with each other.

If you need to distinguish which blockchains are "really decentralized", you can use a relatively simple test: If its foundation disappears, can the chain survive? I feel that only Bitcoin and Ethereum can answer clearly: Of course. Most of Ethereum's development is a foundation, and the client team has independent business models. Many researchers are not in the foundation now, and almost all activities except Devcon are independent. It is difficult to reach this stage, and Ethereum has not been like this 5 years ago.

Giving up these advantages in order to pursue TPS is a big mistake, because there are always new links coming out, and suddenly there is a higher TPS than you. But decentralization and resilience are precious, and few blockchains have it.

These characteristics are conducive to making a digital currency with long-term value and also to having good world computers. But world computers also need to solve the scaling problem. "World Computer" does not mean "a computer that can support every application in the world at the same time", but "a place where the applications in the world can operate with each other." High performance computing can be placed in L2, this is OK. But this stunning still requires L1 to have enough scale. For specific details, you can see a recent article I wrote: "Vitalik's new article: A significant expansion of L1 is still valuable, which will make application development simpler and safer"

ETH is a digital asset suitable for the world's applications (including finance, and other things, such as ENS, etc.). ETH also does not require every transaction to be placed in L1, but it requires sufficient throughput to allow anyone who wants to use L1 at least occasionally. So these two directions are also compatible here: the characteristics of helping Ethereum achieve a better world of computers are also the characteristics of making ETH a better digital currency.

Q2: Today, there have been many L2s, mainly OP stack systems, and some attempts to zkrollup are also made. I really hope to hear your evaluation of the rollups route in the past few years. I hope to review it objectively: where do you think is better and where are different from what you expected at that time; is rollups generally good for Ethereum or blood-sucking ( I saw you calling these L2s to give back to Ethereum a few days ago)? Does ETH really need these L2s?

Vitalik: Ethereum requires hybrid L1 + L2. So far, our expansion method can be roughly understood as hybrid L1 + L2, but I don’t think anyone has clearly defined which transactions should be in L1 and which transactions should be in L2.

The answer "Everything is put in L2" is difficult to accept because:

• This will easily lose the medium of exchange, store of value and other positions of ETH. If you are worried that L2 steals L1 users and don’t give L1 any rewards, this problem will be even more serious in a situation where “L1 does almost nothing”

• The operation across L2 still requires L1. If there is a problem with one L2, the user still needs to have a way to move to another L2 by himself. So there are some use cases that are difficult to avoid. I have written an article on this topic here: "Vitalik New article: The significant expansion of L1 is still valuable and will make application development easier and safer

The answer "Everything is put in L1" is also difficult to accept because:

• If L1 supports many transactions, it is easy to change centralization, that is, using ZK-EVM and other technologies

• The world's demand for on-chain transactions is unlimited. No matter how high the TPS of L1 is, you can always find that an application requires 10 times more TPS (such as artificial intelligence, micropayment, microprediction market, etc.)

• L2 not only does capacity expansion, L2 can also provide faster confirmation speed through preconfirmations, and also avoid MEV problems through sequencers.

So we need hybrid L1 + L2. I think the role of L2 will continue to change. For example, now it seems that evm-equivalent L2 is enough. It is possible that we will see more privacy-oriented L2 (aztec, intmax, etc.), and there may be more application-specific L2 (If an application wants to control its MEV situation, there are benefits here, etc.) So in the short term, I think we should continue to improve the ability of L1 at the same time, increase blobs to give L2 more space, promote interoperability across L2, and then market You will decide which capacity expansion method is suitable for which application.

Q3: The rollup route has been proposed for quite some time. Do you think that Arbitrum/Base/OP 's current centralized sequencer is a relatively big challenge for future supervision because it cannot truly resist censorship? Do you think they will move towards a decentralized sequencer solution? If your answer to the previous question is yes, then what do you think of MegaETH's centralized sequencer solution?

Vitalik: Regarding centralized sequencers, centralized sequencers actually have many advantages:

• Centralized sequencer can ensure that you will not steal users' money by frontrunning or other methods
• instant preconfirmations
• It is easy to turn a traditional application into a blockchain application because the server directly becomes a sequencer

The decentralized feature of blockchain can be used to avoid the risk of centralized sequencers: the forced inclusion mechanism does not allow sequencer censor users, the optimistic or zk proof mechanism does not allow sequencer to change or violate the rules used for reactions (for example, suddenly inflate a token or nft Collection)

However, centralized sequencers still have risks, so we cannot completely rely on centralized sequencers to solve problems. It is also important to have the ability to trade based rollup or directly on L1. So I support the two parts of the ecosystem that pushes these two methods at the same time, and then we can see which method is more suitable for which application. It is of course very important to maintain the ability of ordinary users to issue censorship resistant transactions.

Vitalik responded to comments "Actually, my starting point is that the US regulatory authorities may go after them, of course, this probability may not be very high": a single sequencer resists possible solutions and attempts. If this happens, there are two possibilities:

1. DAO will select sequencer and backup sequencer, and will move to the new sequencer
2. We use based rollups

I think the first one is worth studying, and I know some L2 teams think about this past direction. The second one is a backup. There may be other reasons why we think based rollups are better, so we can start using based rollups more directly. The advantage of Ethereum is that we can try several directions at the same time.

Q4: The technical route of ETH 3.0, the difference between the goals that I hope to achieve and the goals that I hope to achieve in the rollup era? In the 3.0 design plan released by Devcon in November last year, does it take into account that rollup does not really provide actual value to the Ethereum main network at this stage?

Vitalik: The relationship between value capture between L2 and L1. There is nothing called ETH 3.0 now. Some people would say that justin drake's 5-year plan is, but that plan is just a consensus layer, not an execution layer, so it is just a part of the future of the Ethereum blockchain.

The relationship and balance between L1 and L2 is an execution layer problem. Here is another roadmap: enhance L1's capabilities (improve gaslimit, add stateless verification (such as verkle) and other functions, etc.), improve interoperability across L2, improve blobs, etc. I also think that the question of whether L2 pays enough transaction fees for L1 cannot be viewed too from a short-term perspective. for example:

• 4844 Before, everyone's complaints were the opposite: Does L1 suck the blood of L2?
• Now, the blob fee for the last 30 days is 500 ETH
• If the blob target increases from 3 to 128, according to our plan, if the blob gaprice is the same, it will burn 21333 ETH per month, 256000 per year

So the narrative here is easy to change quickly. Now we need to strengthen L1 so that what should happen in L1 can happen in L1, increase blobs, and then maintain the adaptability of our community.

Q5: You decided to step up to lead EF again. I believe that after a lot of considerations, this is a very difficult decision. It is a courage to leap in love and stare into the abyss. I admire it very much. Do you mind sharing your entire thinking process with us today? At the same time, I am curious whether you agree with socialism with Chinese characteristics? My starting point for this question is the "proper board" mentioned in your discussion with Ameen: Do you think the organization needs strong leaders to guide and correct the direction before stepping on the right development path?
Vitalik: "Decentralization" does not mean "doing nothing".

I think the blockchain community and the entire world are in a relatively dangerous state. There are many things that have no long-term value and even malicious things happening. These things and the people behind them get a lot of attention. But we can't just shout against these things and then not mention better alternative. So our goal should be to do this alternative well and demonstrate that a stable, brighter future is possible.

Here I also talk about the blockchain circle (if memecoin, which has a 97% drop in one day, is not our future, then what is it?) and a macro-social aspect: many people now think that democratic methods are impossible, and they can only rely on strong man's leader does things. But a political scientist at devcon told me that one of the reasons why he respects Ethereum very much is that we are a truly open and decentralized ecosystem. We have succeeded at this scale so far, which gives him hope. So if we can succeed in this way, the positive impact on the world may be huge, and it will give many people a bright example of success that they can follow.

But "decentralization" does not mean "doing nothing". The Ethereum Foundation's philosophy of subtraction does not mean "reduce the foundation to 0", but a way to maintain ecological balance. If there is an imbalance in a place of ecology (e.g., part of the ecology is too centralized, or there is an important public item that others do not do), we can help counterbalance. Once this problem is solved, the foundation can retreat from that area. If there is an imbalance in a new place, we can move resources there, etc.

In Chinese culture, the way we pursue may be the most similar to the ideas of the Tao Te Ching, but taking this path requires intelligence and the foundation's ability needs to be improved in some places. It is not a problem of "success if you do nothing." Therefore, in the short term, we need to put more efforts to do some important pivots.

Q6: I am not part of the core Ethereum circle, so I am not very clear about some more detailed political issues. From your own perspective, what are the main reasons why some of the ETH Maxis OGs left the Ethereum community? When I was recording a podcast with shuyao, she mentioned a very interesting point: Ethereum needs to be reset to zero before it can be rebuilt (half-joking). At this stage, do you think Ethereum is indeed facing a major reshuffle of existing holders and community members in order to find its own path?

Vitalik: Ethereum needs new stories and new users.

There are many different people who have different stories. For example, many people in the blockchain circle would say 10 years ago that the goal of blockchain is to build a global neutral system to protect personal freedom and counterbalance the hegemony of the government. Now, if a president issues a memecoin, they would say , wow, this is real world adoption, so good, but why happens on other chains, if we can be a little more friendly to those politicians, it will happen on our chain next time! I personally think that this kind of person has gone astray. Of course they would say, I'm too purely idealistic, unrealistic, etc. Each side has its own story.

Some people will also say that the Ethereum ecosystem is too OG-controlled and there is not enough space for new people to come in. But this criticism direction is another direction, and there are different groups that issue these arguments.

I think there is only one suitable way to get us out of these dilemmas: we need to have some updated stories to explain why Ethereum is, what does ETH do, what does L1 and L2 do, etc. Now is not the era of infra, it is the era of applications, so these stories cannot be abstract "free, open, anti-censored, sun-punk public goods, etc.", and require some clear answers to the application layer. I plan to support more info finance in the near future (this is also the direction of AI + crypto), protecting privacy, high-quality financing methods for public goods, and continuing to do a good job in the world's open financial platform. Of course, this must include real world assets . There are many things here that are valuable to many users and conform to the values ​​we have always had. We need to re-support this direction, and we can also give new people more opportunities to come in.

Q7: Do you think Ethereum needs more commercial company-type management? Do you think that the current difference between ETH and SOL is essentially a difference in efficiency between different "organizational forms" and a difference in achieving goals? What are the goals to achieve?

**
Vitalik:** Ethereum becomes a company and will lose most of its meaning

I think Ethereum is a decentralized ecosystem, not a company. If Ethereum becomes a company, we will lose most of the meaning of Ethereum. Building a company is the role of the company. In fact, there are many large companies in the Ethereum ecosystem: consensys, various client teams (nethermind, nimbus, etc.), coinbase, L2 teams (including aztec and intmax, their privacy technology is very interesting and underestimated by many people).

The best way is to find ways to give these companies more opportunities to realize the advantages of the company, and the foundation serves as a coordination role.

Q8: You have always been paying attention to the application of ZK technology in the web3 field. In addition to the ZK application in asset trading scenarios, in social media networks, what scenarios do you think can be introduced to ZK to achieve privacy protection?

Vitalik: I'm very interested in many non financial zk use cases, such as:

• anti-sybil verification. Many services require you to log in with kyc not because they are very much like knowing who you are, they just want to know that you are not a bot, or if you are banned, you can’t reopen an account 100,000 times. To implement this use case, you only need zk proof of personhood, or proof of reputation. In fact, sometimes proof of tokens is enough, such as anonworld

• Use cryptography to protect privacy AI applications. Here zk is not necessarily the most suitable technology. FHE may be that FHE has made a lot of progress recently. If we can reduce FHE's overhead, there may be a chance.

• Use zk-snark to wrap any web2 account, use it in web3. zkemail, anon aadhaar, zkpassport, zktls, etc are good examples.

I feel this technology has many opportunities to solve many social and other areas of security, governance and other issues by protecting personal freedom and privacy.

Q9: You encourage more developers to join Ethereum, incentivize and retain existing developers (compared with some new L1 or even L2, Ethereum will definitely have a more complex situation), it will be Is the current priority? Accelerate network decentralization, improve scalability, and explore more application scenarios Apps. In these three aspects, which one do you think is the highest priority of Ethereum?

Vitalik: The alignment of the Ethereum community is not a social game but a technical game. Here we actually need to find a way to solve three problems at the same time:

1. Attract more developers

2. The applications developed by developers are encouraged to be more open source, safe, compliant with public standards, have long-term value, etc.

3. In the process of solving (2), avoid the phenomenon of the ecology becoming a closed circle ("We are aligned because we are good friends of developers")

So I recently said that ethereum alignment should be technical game, not social game. I want to emphasize this issue because I think in the aspect of decentralization, the most urgent centralization problem is often not the problem of L1, but the problem of L2, wallet or application. So the entire ecosystem needs to work together to expand and attract new developers and make progress in these decentralized and trustless aspects.

There are several ways we can help with this:

1. Education makes it easier for developers to know why blockchain is, what should be on the chain, what should not be on the chain, what needs to be cared about in the field of blockchain, etc.

2. If some blockchain-specific technologies are too difficult for application developers, the foundation can do it themselves, so that developers can combine it more easily. For example, zk's programming language, a16z's helios, etc.

3. Give developers clear standards. For example, if you are working on Ethereum clients and have many tests, you can run tests by yourself and see if your client can pass. If you do L2, there are frameworks such as l2beat's stage 1, stage 2, etc. This should also be given to zk applications, wallets, etc.

Q10: Today, when AI accelerates the evolution and development of technology, you mentioned the concept of d/acc (deaccelerationism/or defensiveism against accelerator). Now it seems that whether the effective acceleration process of decentralization/decentralization of technological rights is What does it meet your expectations? Do you have any hidden dangers in this regard? I actually feel a little powerless, that is, I know that "Beijing Fold" may be a future. From a humanistic perspective, I don't want it to happen, but I think it is getting closer and closer to us.

Vitalik: Here we need to make an important correction first: d/acc is not a de-acceleration, but a decentralized defensive acceleration. This is important because there are indeed people in this world who support deceleration, degrowth, etc., but I think this direction is wrong. In a peaceful world, it will delay important medical and infrastructure improvements, which will hurt more people. The more dangerous world today will be eaten by those who are willing to accelerate if it is not accelerated.

decentralized and defensive technology need to compete with other technologies. If the sword progresses rapidly but the shield does not progress, the world will become more and more dangerous. If centralized technology advances rapidly but decentralized technology does not advance, the world will become increasingly centralized. So we need counterbalance these trends. Blockchain is part of this story, but it is only part of it, there is decentralization outside of blockchain (such as p2p network), software and hardware security (the "shield" of the digital world), and biological Many things in the field, etc.

Q11: Does all Ethereum Foundation employees, including the leadership team, have KPI/OKR assessment mechanisms? Organizations with non-profit generally have inefficiency problems. Do you think there is such a problem in EF? If so, how to solve it? Can you tell me in detail about how to accelerate the development of Ethereum from all aspects? eth has been around for ten years, updated once a year, and I feel that the development progress is a bit slow and requires great acceleration.

Vitalik: The Ethereum Foundation has started a lot of internal reforms in recent months, so any answer I can give now will be outdated soon. This question may be better if you ask it in 6 months.

Q12: How do you understand the role of Crypto as an anti-establishment infrastructure in realizing Degencomeism? Do you think the current Memecoin (I mean more of the rapid launch from Solana) is a "helpful confusion" for realizing Degencomeism? (This word comes from your blog) If you don’t find anonymous function, just post it directly. At the same time, you are highly recommended to play "Disco Elysium", I believe you will like it.

Vitalik: Degenkonmi's core is to make better "the rules of the game". Chaos is not necessarily beneficial or bad, it depends on the situation here. The interesting question is, how can we make "the rules of the game" and lead to good results in the chaos of natural production in the community?

For example, a national civil war has a bad effect unless it is to get rid of malicious tyranny. But market chaos often has good results, eliminating old and inefficient companies and giving new companies opportunities recently, but sometimes the market can also lead to problems we see in the blockchain circle. So this is actually very complicated.

So how can we make better rules? I think memecoin is far away from ideals now. I wrote this article last year to see if there is any better direction. "Vitalik talks about meme again: What room for imagination in meme coins? 》

**Q13: You should know the Hamberg tax experiment of "This Art is Always on Sale" done by Simon de la Rouviere (sponge as an asset class) and you think this kind of experiment can be in the future. Is there any new progress on decentralized social networks? Is there any mechanism you expect to see to be used to experiment on decentralized social networking?
**

Vitalik: Yes, I think decentralized social media is a great opportunity to try a lot of new mechanisms. harberger tax is an example, and some other examples are:

• Mechanism similar to community notes https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/08/16/communitynotes.html

• creator payouts, similar to twitter and youtube but more fair and transparent. You can try retro foundation, deep foundation, quadratic foundation, etc.

• Governance combined with social media and DAO

Q14: What do you think about the fact that we, as a group of people in the crypto world, are still highly dependent on centralized social applications such as Telegram and Twitter for communication and collaboration? Building decentralized social media and real encrypted communication tools does not seem to be so popular and recognized. So far, their development is still in line with your expectations? What advice do you have for the teams exploring and building in this field?

Vitalik: This is also a question I care about. I have been working hard to move most of my conversations from telegram to signal in the past two years. However, signal is also imperfect. Although it is confidential, it is still centralized and there is no interoperability. You need to log in with a mobile phone number and the server sees you. a lot of metadata, etc.

But it is difficult to be a higher quality messenger. I try status every year and they try to do it completely decentralized, they do it well, but they still have some reliability issues. In fact, there are various small teams that are their own messengers now, but they are not united, so it is easy for each one to be not good enough.

I recently started using fileverse to do various documents for me, and I found that the user experience of this is good enough, and now there are many people who use it. If there are messengers with decentralization, encryption, etc. that can achieve this quality, I will definitely work hard to help the community move to this messenger.

**Q15: I heard from people in the Milady community say that you might have chosen Milady for why, but I am still curious how you will explain your sense of identity with Milady?
**

Vitalik: I think milady can attract many people because this Internet community has done two things at the same time:

1. Not boring
2. Not malicious

If you look at the circles in the mainstream world now, you will find that it is difficult to achieve these two conditions at the same time, and milady is one of the most successful examples.

Q16: Are you a communist?

Vitalik: No, I am not a capitalist either. Both are ideologies of the 20th century. (These words have been extended and abused to the point of meaninglessness: Remember, in the 1990s, Microsoft called Linux "communism": https://www.theregister.com/2000/07/31/ms_ballmer_linux_is_communism /)

I support freedom, global equality of opportunity, kindness and cooperation, human well-being and progress. These are eternal principles. The question is how to use our existing tools to realize these values ​​in the context of the 21st century. I've written in detail about the various mechanisms I personally support, but I definitely don't think I'm the only source of good ideas, I think finding the best way is a common project that requires both thinking and becoming more realistic. world experiment.

**Q17: Can you tell me in detail about how to accelerate the development of Ethereum from all aspects? eth has been around for ten years, updated once a year, and I feel that the development progress is very slow and requires great acceleration. eth/acc

Vitalik:** Ethereum development is currently focused on increasing the number of blobs. The main goal now is to increase the number of blobs, here are:

• pectra, improve blob target from 3 to 6
• fusaka, add peerdas, and then increase blob target
• Continue to optimize peerdas in 2026 and 2027
• Add 2D data availability sampling, and then improve blob target

There is also a roadmap for improving L1 gas limit, but this one is more complicated, such as delayed execution, statelessness, etc.

**Q18: Vitalik has grown gold grabs and silver scales, and has changed from a dragon-slaying boy to a dragon. During the Ethereum mining period, it was still a democratic consensus, but now V 's management system is an authoritarian and authoritarian management model. After moving to Pos, he changed from a democratic system to a people's congress system. He suspected that he secretly joined the party behind everyone's back?
**

Vitalik: POS is not a governance method in Ethereum. PoW can only be democratic in the short term. Because there is always economies of scale and larger miners are more efficient, they will become more and more centralized over a long period of time.

I think there is no ASIC before our PoS. It is very likely that everyone knows that we have plans to move to PoS, so no one has made ASICs. If we declare from the first day that we are always PoW, it is possible that ASIC will come out between 2016 and 19, unless we have been doing bifurcation and modification algorithms every year, but this is also centralized.

So I think our method, spending 7 years on PoW to do distribution and then moving to PoS, is the best. PoS has its own fairness: You have 10 times more money and you can produce 10 times more blocks. In ASIC PoW, there is economies of scale, which may be 10 times more money = 11 times more blocks. Another point is: PoS is not a governance method in Ethereum. Ether holders do not have the right to choose which EIPs are placed in the next bifurcation, etc. If we use PoS to make this decision, it will be too rich.