Why does Vitalik insist on technical philosophical thinking?

With the end of Devcon7, the future development direction of Ethereum ecosystem has once again attracted widespread attention. This can't help but remind people of the proposal of economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok in a recent podcast: Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin should be a strong candidate for the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Tyler Cowen praised: "Vitalik Buterin built a platform and created an asset. His achievements can be said to refute Mises' regression theorem. Although Ethereum is developed on the basis of Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin, Vitalik Buterin's achievements have undoubtedly reached the height of the Nobel Prize."

Why does Vitalik have a little bit of philosophical thinking?  

At the age of 19, Vitalik Buterin began to work on building a new economic infrastructure for the Internet. According to the author Nathan Schneider in the book "Proof of Stake": Vitalik Buterin's original ideal was to write. When he became curious about BTC under the encouragement of his father, Vitalik Buterin posted a message on the forum in 2011 asking: If he wrote an article about Bitcoin, would anyone pay for it with BTC?

As a result, someone did pay for it. So Vitalik Buterin was able to continue writing, and then co-founded "Bitcoin Magazine" with others, which introduced Bitcoin, a new thing that was still a niche culture at the time.

From writing magazines, to founding Ethereum, and then to the development of Ethereum to today, 10 years later, Vitalik Buterin has been writing non-stop, continuing to share his views and actively interact on blogs, forums and various social platforms. Thanks to such exchanges, Ethereum has attracted a group of loyal supporters in the past 10 years of development, and its roadmap is gradually becoming clear.

In the future, if Ethereum's roadmap is to be finally implemented, the founder Vitalik Buterin's views still need to be more widely understood. Of course, these views may also cause controversy, but controversy and doubt are also the driving force behind Ethereum's better future. In the second half of 2024, with the US election, the discussion on asset appreciation in the crypto industry continued to heat up, arousing the "dream of getting rich" of many users. It seems that technological iteration is no longer the most popular goal. On August 21, 2024, Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform and jokingly responded: I was told that I need to "think less philosophically and post more bullish posts on Ethereum." Therefore, the following picture is a bullish post on Ethereum, which was completed by the AI ​​image generation tool Stable Diffusion 3 and GIMP.

This is the difference of Ethereum’s ecosystem

In an atmosphere where “everyone is talking about getting rich quickly, but you are still talking about technology”, Vitalik Buterin is still firmly spreading Ethereum’s technical philosophical goals. Since October 14, 2024, Vitalik Buterin has published 6 blogs in a row, reviewing the Ethereum roadmap and deeply analyzing the future technical development and solutions of Ethereum:

The Merge: Released on October 14, 2024, it discusses the direction that Ethereum needs to improve after switching to the PoS consensus mechanism. The improvement direction is divided into two parts: technical optimization (such as stability, performance, and accessibility of small validators) and economic change (coping with centralization risks, this part is included). The former belongs to the "The Merge" field discussion, and the latter is included in the "The Scourge" field discussion.

Among them, the goals of technical optimization include: improving single-slot finality, that is, confirming and finalizing transactions as quickly as possible while maintaining the ability to be decentralized; improving the feasibility of individual pledgers; and enhancing Ethereum's ability to resist 51% attacks. In addition, it also includes research areas such as accelerating transaction confirmation.

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See the article The Merge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/14/futures1.html

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The Surge: Released on October 17, 2024, it explores the development of Ethereum's scaling strategy, from "sharding" to "Layer2 protocol", and then to the fusion of the two paths, and finally formed an expansion solution with Rollup as the core, and achieved a significant improvement in data bandwidth, but still faces many challenges, such as ensuring the robustness of Layer1 and adherence to decentralization, while also ensuring the maximum interoperability between Layer2.

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See the article The Surge ：https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/17/futures2.html

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The Scourge：Published on October 20, 2024, it discusses the centralization risks and value extraction risks faced by Ethereum Layer1 after using the PoS consensus mechanism, and emphasizes that the risks are specifically concentrated in two aspects: block construction and pledged assets. At the same time, it introduces the progress made in solving these two risk covers since 2024, such as implementing a two-tier pledge model, reducing asset issuance and other solutions.

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See the article The Scourge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/20/futures3.html

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The Verge: Published on October 23, 2024, it explores the challenges and solutions under Ethereum's stateless verification, focusing on how technologies such as Verkle Tree and STARK can enhance the decentralization and efficiency of blockchain.

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See the article The Verge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/23/futures4.html

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The Purge: Published on October 26, 2024, the article discusses the challenge facing Ethereum is how to reduce complexity and storage requirements in the long term while maintaining the durability of the chain. Decentralized applications need to be confident that their dependencies will not be disrupted due to upgrades, especially the Layer1 protocol itself. The solutions mentioned include cleaning up unnecessary protocol features and reducing the burden on client storage through the strategies of "historical data expiration" and "state data expiration".

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See the article The Purge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/26/futures5.html

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The Splurge: Published on October 29, 2024, the article explores the concept of “Splurge” in the 2023 Ethereum development roadmap, aiming to bring the Ethereum virtual machine to an efficient and stable “final state”, implement account abstraction in the protocol so that all users can enjoy more secure and convenient accounts, optimize transaction fee economics, improve scalability and reduce risks, explore advanced cryptography to enhance Ethereum’s long-term performance, etc. Specific implementation steps include the EIP-1559 technical proposal.

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See the article The Splurge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/29/futures6.html

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Perhaps, while others are talking about getting rich quickly, Ethereum is still talking about technology, this is the biggest difference between Ethereum and other blockchain ecosystems.

The huge developer community and its appeal to developers are the foundation for the establishment of Ethereum and the foundation for its future development. Compared with the ecosystems of other chains, Ethereum has more tool chains and frameworks (such as Truffle, etc.), which can support the development of more types of smart contracts and DApps.

At the same time, Ethereum's tools and frameworks take into account both performance and depth. They are not infrastructure created just for the development of a single high-performance "transaction tool". After years of development, the technical standards proposed by Ethereum have become popular, such as ERC-20, ERC-721 and other asset standards have been deeply applied to the entire crypto industry.

How to look forward to the future more accurately?

So, what is the future that technology can look forward to? Vitalik Buterin once wrote in a blog post that he has a good impression of technological optimism, but this feeling is more subtle. He believes that with fundamentally transformative technology, the future will be brighter than the present.

Vitalik Buterin advocates that the best thing people should do is to keep the world roughly the way it is today, just by reducing some greed.

At the same time, Vitalik Buterin believes that technology is not only about the order of magnitude, but also about the direction. If certain types of technology are well developed and can make the world better with higher reliability, then the negative impact of other types of technology can be mitigated.

Because in the current real world, some technological development directions are overemphasized, but not enough attention is paid to the development directions of other technologies. This requires humans to consciously choose the direction we want, after all, the formula of "maximizing profits" will not automatically reach the destination people want.

How to see the future direction more accurately? In a blog published on November 9, 2024, Vitalik Buterin reviewed and extended a very innovative point of view. He mentioned: The most exciting feature of Ethereum applications for him is the "prediction market".

Vitalik Buterin believes that the "prediction market" is actually a very useful tool for the world. It is not just a place for "betting" as most people think. Moreover, from a higher dimension, "prediction market" is just a use case in a more macro application category in the future, and this application category has the potential to become an important method for improving social media, science, news, governance and other fields in the future - this application category is called "Info Finance".