Vitalik's latest views on the future direction of the crypto industry

Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, recently published his views and attitudes on several key issues for the future development of Ethereum and the crypto industry on his blog and social platforms. Bulu said that he has sorted out the key points from July 2024 to date. Let us learn more:

 Interoperability issues across Layer2 "will soon no longer be a problem"

Vitalik Buterin:I think interoperability issues across L2 "will soon no longer be a problem", and the entire Ethereum (including Layer1, Rollups, Validium, and even side chains) will have a smooth user experience, which will surprise people. I see a huge energy and willingness to achieve this goal.

 I oppose choosing political allegiance based on who "supports crypto"

Vitalik Buterin:Don't just support crypto assets, support those deeper goals and policy implications.

In the past few years, "crypto" has become an increasingly important issue in political policy, and various jurisdictions are considering bills to regulate various actors engaged in blockchain business in various ways. In my opinion, most of these bills are reasonable, although there are concerns that governments will take extreme measures, such as treating almost all digital assets as securities or banning self-custody wallets.

As a result of these concerns, more and more crypto supporters are becoming politically active, but their preference for parties and candidates is almost entirely based on their willingness to take a lenient and friendly attitude toward "crypto assets."

I oppose this trend, especially because I think this way of making decisions is highly risky and may go against your original intentions and values ​​in entering the crypto digital asset field.

"Crypto" is not just crypto assets and blockchain

Vitalik Buterin: "Crypto" is not just crypto assets and blockchain. In the crypto asset field, people tend to over-focus on the centrality of "assets" and regard the freedom to hold and consume assets as the most important political issue.

I agree that doing anything important in modern society requires the drive of money and assets, and the private consumption rights that Zooko tirelessly advocates are equally important. Moreover, asset issuance can greatly enhance people’s ability to build digital organizations, giving them real collective economic power to advance the work of organizations. However, the near-exclusive focus on crypto assets and blockchains was not the ideology that originally created crypto assets.

Crypto assets originated from the “Cypherpunk Movement”, a movement that upholds the spirit of technological libertarianism and understands the importance of decentralization, as explained by Satoshi Nakamoto in one of his few public political statements:

• Long-winded exposition on the vulnerability of the system to monopoly by force.

• You will not find solutions to political problems in cryptography.

Crypto assets are just one of several important scenarios for applying decentralized networks

Vitalik Buterin:Freedom is important, and decentralized networks can protect freedom well. Crypto assets are an important scenario for applying decentralized networks, but only one of several important scenarios.

I can think of at least some other technical freedoms that are as "basic" as the freedom to use crypto assets. For example: freedom and privacy of communication, free and privacy-friendly digital identities, high-quality access to information, freedom of thought and privacy, etc.

Freedom of thought and privacy will become increasingly important in the coming decades. Unless major changes occur, more and more of our thoughts will be mediated and read directly by the servers of centralized artificial intelligence companies.

My basic point is this: you don’t join crypto because of crypto, you join crypto because of a deeper purpose. Don’t think in terms of crypto, think in terms of the fundamental purpose of crypto, the whole set of policy implications that it implies. The current “pro-crypto” initiatives, at least for now, don’t think in that way.

Crypto-friendly now doesn’t mean crypto-friendly in 5 years

Vitalik Buterin: Internationalism is a social and political cause that I and many of my crypto peers hold dear.

In theory, the internet doesn’t discriminate between the richest and the poorest countries, which is an important aspect of the internet’s liberation. Once we can get most people around the world to enjoy basic standards of internet access, we can have a more equally accessible and global digital society.

Crypto-digital assets extend these ideals to the realm of economic interaction. This has the potential to contribute greatly to the flattening of the global economy, and I’ve personally seen many cases of this.

If you see a politician who is crypto-friendly, one thing you can do is look up what they thought about crypto itself 5 years ago. Similarly, look up what they thought about crypto-related topics 5 years ago. In particular, try to find topics where “pro-freedom” doesn’t align with “pro-corporations.”

If a politician is crypto-friendly, the key question to ask is: are they doing it for the right reasons? Do they have a vision for 21st century technology, politics, and economic development that aligns with yours? Do they have a positive long-term vision beyond their immediate concerns of “beating down the other bad tribes”? If they do, great: you should support them, and make it clear that this is why you support them. If not, then either stay out of it entirely, or find a better force to align with.

Original link

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/07/17/procrypto.html

 What do I think of Circle STARK?

Vitalik Buterin: Circle STARKs do not bring much additional complexity to developers compared to ordinary STARKs. In the implementation process, the above three issues are basically the only differences I see from ordinary FRI. The underlying mathematics behind the "polynomials" that Circle FRI runs on are very counter-intuitive and take a while to understand and appreciate. But it happens that this complexity is hidden and invisible to developers. The complexity of circle mathematics is encapsulated, not systemic.

Understanding Circle FRI and Circle FFT is also a good gateway to understanding other "exotic FFTs": most notably binary field FFTs used previously by Binius and LibSTARK, as well as more exotic constructions like elliptic curve FFTs, which use a few-to-one mappings that work well with elliptic curve point operations.

Combining Mersenne 31, BabyBear, and binary field techniques like Binius, we feel like the efficiency of the STARKs "base layer" is approaching its limits. At this point, I expect the leading edge of STARK optimization to move toward doing the most efficient arithmetic on primitives like hash functions and signatures (and optimizing those primitives themselves for this purpose), doing recursive constructions to enable more parallelization, doing arithmetic on virtual machines to improve the developer experience, and other higher-level tasks.

Original link

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/07/23/circlestarks.html

 We do need advanced tools, but we also need to make them easy to understand and use, to ensure that more people can work together

Vitalik Buterin: It is in this spirit that I published my article, trying to make more people aware of advanced topics in cryptography: We do need advanced tools, but we also need to make them easy to understand and use, to ensure that more people can work together, and to ensure that the future empowers people, rather than becoming a series of iPhone interfaces built by a few people that the rest of us can only access in a standardized way.

Original link

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/08/03/museumfuture.html

 If you want a strong ecosystem, it has to be simple

Vitalik Buterin spoke at the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC 7): If you want a strong ecosystem, it has to be simple, it shouldn't have these, like 73 random hooks and some kind of backward compatibility.

Ethereum is a "large and reasonably decentralized staking ecosystem" and a highly international and knowledgeable community. But the blockchain’s weaknesses still need to be addressed, including the difficulty of single-person monitoring due to the need for 32 Ethereum to become a validator of the blockchain, and the technical complexity of running a node.