Full Transcript of S16 E24 with Vitalik Buterin

Vlad Costea 00:01:13 Hello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover podcast. This is season 16, episode 24. We are live with Vitalik Buterin and this episode is sponsored by Layer Two Labs, NoOnes.com, HODLing.ch, SideShift.ai, Citrea, and Bitcoin.com News. Vitalik, the goal of this episode right now is to explain to people why you’re such a Bitcoin maximalist, and you’ve done a much better job upgrading Bitcoin than companies such as Blockstream or ChainCode or whatever, which raise capital for Bitcoin specifically. But a lot of the stuff that was built for Ethereum is coming back to Bitcoin right now, and it’s really incredible. And I also got to apologize to you because you turned out to be right in some regards. And I trolled you on Twitter a few times and I chased clouds. Just making fun that Ethereum 2.0 is not coming. It came. It never had an incident. It was cool. Thank you very much for your work. And let’s talk about Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Vitalik Buterin 00:02:13 Yeah of course very excited to get into it.

Vlad Costea 00:02:17 So I was thinking about a very logical way to pursue this.

Vlad Costea 00:02:22 So let’s talk about your involvement in Bitcoin first because there’s so much that people usually don’t mention when it comes to your contributions. And then we can transition into Ethereum. Sure. So when did you discover Bitcoin and what was it like back in the day.

Vitalik Buterin 00:02:41 Or early 2011. So I actually heard about it from two different sources at the same time. One was my dad just casually mentioning it, and the second was hearing about it from some the libertarian podcast on the internet. and I heard about which one.

Vlad Costea 00:02:59 Was it Ian Freeman?

Vitalik Buterin 00:03:01 It might have actually been. Yeah. I mean, I’m sure you know. March 2011. You know, within a year, the A’s will be able to nail down the exact episode. but, and basically I thought, okay, this is interesting. And, I figured I should take an honest, effort at, like, actually getting into this, community. And of course, you know, Bitcoin is a currency, and, normally with currency is you’re not supposed to buy them, you’re supposed to work for them.

Vitalik Buterin 00:03:29 And so I started scouring the Bitcoin forums. So looking for a Bitcoin job. And eventually I found this guy named Kiba who was starting this blog called Bitcoin Weekly. And he was offering people five bitcoins per article, which, back then was $4, to write, articles for his site. And so I actually very few people were taking him up on his offer. But, you know, I was, a high schooler with a lot of time on my hands. So I went and did and, I wrote an article on microtransactions. you know, I got the $4, I. Yeah, I wrote a bunch more articles eventually. And despite, paying me, you know, basically, you know, like, five times below minimum wage, I, he ran out of money, and, I came up with this, fun, business model, which was, that I would write two articles a week, and then we would publish, the first paragraph of each one, and then we would say the rest of the article is held for ransom.

Vitalik Buterin 00:04:35 Here are Bitcoin addresses and.

Vlad Costea 00:04:37 Like shareware video games.

Vitalik Buterin 00:04:40 Right. Well, so this is like, it’s kind of collectively. Yeah. I mean, like, you liberate an article, right? If, like, everyone, throws money into a pot and it adds up to 2.5, then, we would release the rest of the article. And, we did this, and then, we actually managed to keep on getting money and, if and so we kept, Bitcoin magazine running. I kept getting our bitcoin weekly running. I kept getting some bitcoin. Then, a few months later, Mihai Alicia was actually also from Romania. He, he reached out to me and he said that he was starting a Bitcoin magazine. It would even have a print IPO. So he asked if I wanted to become the main writer. And so I did. and so this was all happening while I was still, in high school. And then, I moved to be again in university in 2012. I basically kept on, just being a writer.

Vitalik Buterin 00:05:39 And I think to me, the process of like researching topics within the Bitcoin world and then writing them was my introduction into just learning about all of the different aspects of what happens in the Bitcoin world, right? Like I talked about technical things, economic political things, different, different parts of the Bitcoin community, the kinds of like bitcoin accepting businesses that people were trying and then it kept going from there.

Vlad Costea 00:06:08 Yeah, a lot of us started the same way. We discovered it. And then we searched for jobs. I think when I started it was a lot more established. You could actually find publications and there were much more serious paying more than $4, but it was still not that much. But you said that your first article was about Bitcoin for microtransactions, and I’m curious to know if your understanding of Bitcoin has remained the same, or your expectation of Bitcoin, or you believe that it evolved naturally into this store of value phase.

Vitalik Buterin 00:06:45 So I think one thing that’s really important to remember about the like early 20 tens environment.

Vitalik Buterin 00:06:54 Is that like the fiat payment methods at the time? They charge crazy fees, right? Like it was a major pitch of bitcoin that these other means of payment, they would charge $0.29 plus 2.9% for domestic and plus 6.4% for international, I think was what PayPal took. And like it was standard advice, right, that if you were a bitcoin merchants company, you don’t even emphasize the self sovereignty, because that’s like weird stuff that appeals to a few people. You just talk about how Bitcoin has low fees, right? You know, Western Union moving money for better bitcoin moving money far better. And it’s like unlimited amount of money for back then like very tiny transaction fee. And of course, you know what’s happened since then? I mean, obviously Bitcoin had its, whole situation and then fees went up. And then there have been these, attempts with earlier to, to try to enable kind of still self-sovereign ways of transacting with, lower fees. but then at the same time, like the, you know, the world doesn’t stand still for you, right? And, you know, the the fiat payment methods have gotten better specifically in terms of fees, right? I mean, they’ve gotten worse in terms of not deployed for video, but, you know, they have gotten better in terms of fees.

Vitalik Buterin 00:08:13 And like, that’s definitely a different landscape, right? Like, back in the 20 tens, I think even like within the. Yeah. You know, like I suppose, you know, blockchain not bitcoin space. you could basically, yeah. Get away by tricking people into thinking that things that are actually benefits of digitization were, were benefits of blockchain, because like the that was the frame that people were thinking it. Right. It’s like traditional paper stuff versus, you know, digital stuff, which is better and more efficient and, well, it happens to be on a blockchain, right? And today that’s not the game anymore. Right. And today, you know, you know, we have to admit that centralized fiat stuff is, very efficient. It has, lower fees. It makes sense. Like you can afford to have lower fees if you only need one server, processing a transaction and you don’t need any other nodes, you know, executing it. So, you know, you don’t need anyone proofing it and so on.

Vitalik Buterin 00:09:15 You don’t need consensus. but, and so, you know, like, self sovereignty is like really the, the thing that, any blockchain, really can compete on with regard to centralized systems. so I think, yeah, like that is, you know, a really necessary adaptation. And in terms of, Bitcoin’s role since then, I mean, I think evolving into a store of value is like a very natural and sensible thing to do in the context of, nuts, like the the block size being limited and the like the chain only being able to process a certain amount of activity. Right. It’s, you know, if you have a particular limitation, that’s just a, the natural thing to go forward to, that’s compatible with that limitation. I mean, I do think there’s, you know, all of the questions of like, is there were there other roads that could have been taken, but, you know, in this context, like focusing on being a store of value first, like it just makes total sense.

Vlad Costea 00:10:25 Yeah. I asked you this because I recall in 2017 that you seem to be in favor of the Bitcoin Cash camp, and there was a point when Bitcoin Cash was number two on CoinMarketCap and you posted that tweet which became famous or memorable. Congrats on this. Seriously. It was addressed to Roger ver, I think. And I’m curious to know if you still believe that Bitcoin should have scaled with bigger blocks, or you think that the current approach with experimenting with various types of layer twos is more wise in the long term?

Vitalik Buterin 00:11:03 By the way, did you end up reading the article I wrote? That was my review of the two block size workbooks.

Vlad Costea 00:11:10 oh yeah. I remember seeing that on Twitter when you posted it. And I agree with you, by the way.

Vitalik Buterin 00:11:18 Yeah. So by my view, they are adjusted to, to summarize, the array was that I think, you know, big bloggers were, responding to like very, very legitimate concerns and, like, there’s, a lot that’s, corrected their position, but at the same time, like, they as a faction, just like totally fails to have any kind of competence at actually executing on things and over time.

Vitalik Buterin 00:11:46 Like that’s basically what caused them to lose people, right? And so that it was a but there’s like, you know, the politics of, a situation. Right. And, the politics of a situation is like always a mix of, like, actual issues and the social factors. I mean, I think, like, if I had to actually think through the issues, I. Yeah, I mean, like, if I had to go back in time and like, push, like, say like this, this would be some kind of approach. I would have probably said some moderate but moderate blocksize increase and then actually put some more effort into into layer two is at the same time. but and I think my reason for that is like, I, I do actually believe that, Self-sovereign payments are important, right? And, I like basically the vision of, the world that I don’t want to see, right? Is like a world where you have theoretically self-sovereign money, but then it’s like gold, right? It’s like theoretically self-sovereign, but then it’s so inconvenient to do things with it directly that most people do things through centralized and not very self sovereignty friendly intermediaries.

Vitalik Buterin 00:13:03 And as a result, if the government ever, really dislikes it, they can just like do a repeat of good old Executive Order 6102 and then, like, basically, I know the whole game is lost again, right? So, like, I believe in, you know, like there being a large user base that’s, like, actually capable of, interacting with the chain and doing things directly in a very, you know, self sovereignty friendly way. And, but like I, I recognize that there’s a balance, right? And I recognize that especially in the context of the technology of the tens, you know, there would have been no way to do that, to scale up to the entire world without actually just completely breaking things.

Vlad Costea 00:13:48 Yeah, that’s another conversation that we should be having when we get to the Ethereum topic. But you mentioned that when you first discovered Bitcoin, you wanted to work for it because that’s how you earn money. I also know that you’re involved in Dark Wallet, and that was a project started by Amir Taaki.

Vlad Costea 00:14:06 And he presented some promo videos of you basically doing some jumps on stairs just to show that you’re a punk or something. And when I interviewed him, and that was a pretty long one, we spoke for about seven hours. He seemed a bit bitter or something because he said, you know, around the time when he was working with you on Dark Wallet, you were not famous or anything, and he was like the star of the project. And then he left the space for a few years. And when he came back, he realized that you’re the celebrity and he has to basically prove himself once again. What was it like to work on Dark Wallet, by the way?

Vitalik Buterin 00:14:47 Yeah. I mean, I mean, first of all, just like Amir himself as a really impressive character, right? So he was working on Libbitcoin back in 2013, which was like one of the first or the first alternate bitcoin implementations. And that was actually the thing that inspired me to start working on PyBitcoin tools.

Vitalik Buterin 00:15:07 and so that was one thing. And then with dark wallets. yeah, I remember, I mean, Coinjoin was, the new technology that was just that emerging at the time. Right. And there was this big question of, how do we upgrade the privacy of Bitcoin? And this was when, you know, the Silk Road arrest happens. And there were a few other things happen that just showed that like Bitcoin, blockchain analysis was actually getting really powerful. And just having your different UT be separate does not protect you, right? Or at least it does not protect you enough. And so the question is, well, how do you actually. Yeah, like step up and get to the next level of privacy. so I started working started helping I yeah, I contributed, some, like, basic patches. I’m trying to remember. I mean, one of the things that we did is like, I believe, like, actually made it in a in a browser extension format to make it more convenient.

Vitalik Buterin 00:16:19 so no, that was really interesting. And though, of course, eventually. Yeah. Like we first covered Mastercoin and then Ethereum ended up, just started taking up all of my time. but, you know, we’ve been doing our best to carry our part of the privacy torch since then.

Vlad Costea 00:16:41 Yeah, you gave me the perfect hook to basically move on to the next topic, but I still want to provide a bit of context to this conversation of Bitcoin privacy in 2013, because there are two papers that came out at the time. The first one was Zero Coin and the second one was Zero Cash. They had sort of similar authors, and they were proposed as soft forks for Bitcoin to improve the privacy with zero knowledge proofs. And I guess it was a bit too early for them. There were two avant garde and they were not accepted for merging. And Greg Maxwell put up this Bitcoin talk post in 2013. I think it was August. And he said, he’s gonna give out a bounty to whoever is gonna build the first coinjoin wallet.

Vlad Costea 00:17:26 And I think it was him who came up with the term coinjoin for the first time. Before that, it was just mixing. Yep. And there were three co-signers to this multi-sig. I think it was Theymos and Pieter Wuille and Greg Maxwell. Amir Taaki basically came up and said about a week later we have it, we built Dark Wallet. We want to collect the bounty. And part of the reason why, and this goes into conspiracy theories, and I’m not sure if you’re a fan of them, but there was this character who emerged at the time, and he was sort of like the Michael Saylor of his era. It was John Dillon, and he donated to the bounty. And Amir is still frustrated about this because he feels like that guy stole his opportunity to collect the bounty. So what John Dillon did was to donate some Bitcoin to the bounty and become a decision maker, and basically got his own seat at the table and said, you know, it’s dangerous to give this money to dark wallet because they’re using Bitcoin.

Vlad Costea 00:18:33 And there are some technical differences between Bitcoin and Bitcoin. And I don’t know, it was very political and very ahead of its time. And I’m fascinated by this whole story.

Vitalik Buterin 00:18:51 Interesting. Yeah I mean the whole like should be should our alternate implementations if even good topic is fascinating. I mean, I feel like I yeah, you know, I hope I get you a bit by parts of the conversation by with, Ethereum actually, like being this, like ecosystem where you have a lot of different clients. And so I think none of them has majority market share now. And so we can actually see what it’s like live. It’s, I mean, I’m actually curious because I haven’t followed. Like, how have I guess? You know, like your and other bitcoin people’s opinions on the multiple clients topic of like been or evolved since ten years ago?

Vlad Costea 00:19:36 Yeah. Today there’s still a lot of infighting because of bitcoin knots and some some people thinking that it’s the pure way of running Bitcoin because it filters out inscriptions.

Vlad Costea 00:19:48 The perfect metaphor for that is like trying to stop the rain with a tennis racket.

Vitalik Buterin 00:19:54 Right? Yeah. I mean like the whole filter inscriptions thing like that. To me, it never made too much sense. Right. Because I mean, one obviously. Yeah. You know, if you want to dump data on chain, then you can always just dump it throughout and to, and I and I feel like, like I’ve always Disagreed with it as a matter of, I guess, what you might call political strategy, right? Because once you start censoring something, even if you can say you’re like censoring a category. Through a technical measure, like it still creates this, impression of, like, unreliability of like, oh, you know, will there be another category of usage that, gets decided to be unkosher and then at some point in the future. Right. And, like I’ve always thought, like, hey, we have these, we have a free market. Free markets are, a great way of, like fighting pollution if there actually is a price mechanism and, you know, here there is and, and, and so we should just use it.

Vlad Costea 00:21:05 Yeah. Coming back to the topic of colored coins, you are a co-author of the paper as far as I know. And also around the time maybe a year or two later we got Counterparty and Mastercoin slash Omni, which were ways to create what was called at the time, Bitcoin 2.0, which was the idea that you can put other stuff on the blockchain, tokenize shares of a company or tokenize art, or pay dividends to investors using the blockchain. It was pretty novel at the time. Of course, it happened on Bitcoin because it was the most popular and most robust network, but there were some limitations to it. And the story is that you wanted to build Ethereum on Bitcoin, and then you decided to create an altcoin.

Vitalik Buterin 00:21:58 Yeah. So basically, yeah, what happened was, that at first, we, I was thinking to build Ethereum as a mastercoin style. I guess the thing that today people call a sovereign rollup, right? It’s like a layer two. Except like there isn’t a way for the by which the layer one actually recognizes the layer two state because Bitcoin scripting, like I guess at the time, definitely didn’t have the ability to do that now.

Vitalik Buterin 00:22:25 Like maybe it kind of does or will because of like BitVM and OP_CAT. but originally you started to do it as a layer two. And then actually I started, making it a layer two on top of, prime coin instead of, Bitcoin. And the reason why I made that choice was actually because of this whole, op return, situation was happening. Right? And basically, yeah, seems to be like a, you know, if there is this, big faction that’s, saying like this, use case is, bad and wrong. And they were seriously proposing and even implementing ways to censor it then, like, why would we want to be a layer two of a thing? Who is a developer community, like, actively thinks that we’re spam and is actively trying to censor it out in a few cases, right. And so for that reason, we just kind of went and I mean, at first did Prime Coin, but then eventually, yeah, what happened was that we yet realized that there was enough attention and enough development effort on the whole project.

Vitalik Buterin 00:23:36 So that like basically before that, I was literally assuming I would have to code up the whole thing myself, right? And I figured I would be able to code up some or two, but I would not be able to code up an entire blockchain with a peer to peer layer. Like I thought, peer to peer was totally incomprehensible at the time. And but then after like that moment, it was in January when we realized how much attention and how much development effort there was. We decided like, hey, let’s just make it an independent chain. And, things went from there.

Vlad Costea 00:24:11 Yeah. At this point, I gotta mention that one of the show sponsors, which is Citrea, is trying to build exactly what you said with BitVM and also a covenant. They want to build a layer on top of Bitcoin, like a sovereign rollup, which is offering extended financial services, like being able to borrow or maybe have some services like banking, but without the actual bank with protocols that you can verify.

Vlad Costea 00:24:40 Right now they’re on the Bitcoin testnet. If you want to download the wallet, you can check it out at Citrea.xyz. And the other sponsor I have to mention is Layer Two Labs. And that’s how we actually met. Vitalik. Because you’re you are on the Drive Chain Talk Telegram chat. And I saw that you said something in there, and I double checked that that’s your account. And then I said, hey, Vitalik, when podcast and you DM’d me, they’re also trying to build an Ethereum sidechain for Bitcoin. And I think they have the latest version right now. It’s called Zside. No no that’s the Zcash one, ETHside I think. And it’s really interesting because they’re taking your work and they’re trying to bring it to Bitcoin which proves that there is value to it. Contrary to what the Blockstream people will say.

Vitalik Buterin 00:25:35 That’s cool. Yeah. I mean yeah it’s, it’s definitely been interesting to like see there’s a new wave of people doing like various kinds of, layer two things, various kinds of like optimistic and approving things.

Vitalik Buterin 00:25:55 onto on top of the bitcoin’s, script. It’s, Yeah, I mean, I yeah, it’s, it’s cool to see and it’s also just like, so deeply fascinating on a technical level. Right. Yeah. The whole like puzzle of, you know, how, how you actually write something like, an optimistic, proof system or a. Yeah, ZK prover on this, look, very tiny stack based language that only supports a couple of things. And, of course, you know, I ended up making the EVM, considerably more complicated, you know, in part because I didn’t want every death to have to go through that kind of, process. So I think since ten years ago, I have like somewhat warmed up to that over time. so that’s been, like, it’s been interesting to just go through, you know, different scaling and privacy scenarios and start to see what the, what, the benefits are. but, you know, it’s, I mean, I think, you know, having, more innovative ecosystem besides doing these kinds of things is great for everyone.

Vlad Costea 00:27:05 Yeah. When it comes to Ethereum, what I’ve been thinking about this, basically that when you started this, people told you that it’s not going to scale and you’re actually there are two sides of it, the side that said, it’s not going to scale. And the side that inspired you to write the Bitcoin maximalist article from 2014 where someone told you, hahaha, whatever you’re building, we’re just going to copy and paste the code onto counterparty. I think at the time we’re going to take your EVM, we’re going to make it happen on Bitcoin. But in spite of this, you went ahead with it. And the criticism from Blockstream and Adam Back and all the others, Greg Maxwell was that it’s never going to scale and there is no way for this to work. But you found a way to work with ZK proofs and rollups, and I have some respect for you because basically you went head on with this approach and then you found a way to make it work, as opposed to just saying, well, it should not be tried because it doesn’t scale.

Vitalik Buterin 00:28:11 Yeah, I think I thought that clearly. Yeah, just. The benefits of, well, of an EVM style approach to smart contract programming. I mean, I think we definitely see them, right? Like, they are high in the sense of just making it easy for people to build all of these different DeFi protocols that have happened on top of it, whether like Uniswap or they or any of or any of these others. it’s, like there’s a lot of, logic that you can do in, like 10 or 15 lines of code and so on. but at the same time, you know, I do admit, some of the, limitations I had when I was, 19. And, like, there’s definitely big parts of the, the just constantly wishes I could send back some extra programming Wisdom back to the 19 year old version of myself, right? so with, scaling. Right. like the two axes that you want to disentangle, I think. one is like the VM and, two is the, parallelization.

Vitalik Buterin 00:29:23 Right? And because those are separate. Right. And since then we’ve seen there’s been a couple of these examples of, VMs, I think even some of the private blockchain projects from the late 20 tens, did them and now some other, others as well, right. Where basically it’s, like a UT based system, except you’re allowed to have an arbitrary program, determine whether or not, a particular transaction is valid. And then if you do that, then, like, you can make a lot of Ethereum like, things happen. but at the same time, you have, like, full paralyze ability and you do have, like, somewhat worse, death in some respects. Like making something like Uniswap is harder, right? because, like, basically for something like Uniswap to work like every cent, like you need to have sort of one UT representing the Uniswap state, and then every sender would have to basically, you know, the last senders, transaction. But like you would get parallelized ability.

Vitalik Buterin 00:30:24 Right. And the other thing is this like difference between sort of minimal script and, a full virtual machine. And that’s something that just like the the critic intuitively felt wrong. And I think the reason why the critique felt wrong is that I wrote about this in more in more detail. There was an article from, about, I think almost a year ago on, glue and co-processor architecture. But I basically made the point that you can split computation up into two different parts. We are one part I call like specialized heavy computation, which basically, you know, it includes AI. It includes cryptography. And that’s computation is like heavy, but it’s also it has a lot of structure to it. And so you can make like very optimized implementations of it. And then the other part I call business logic and business logic is like you know, like for I equal zero, I was at 100. I++. If this then do that. while this do that and so on. Right. And like that stuff is very unstructured and often hard to optimize.

Vitalik Buterin 00:31:32 But it’s also like very friggin trivial, right? It’s like 100 opcodes when we’re talking about CPUs that can do a billion cycles a second, right? Like if you think about, you know, an elliptic curve multiplication right inside of an EC model, you have a loop that that multiplies the points, and then it goes through the addition process like 256 times. Right. So it’s like compared to that like business logic is trivial. And so people complains like why 2:56 p.m.. Like why? Interpreter. Inefficient, but like that never actually mattered too much though. Although recently I think some you know, I don’t know if you saw the risk five stuff. Right. Actually, you know, the conversation is is changing a bit I think. But there’s definitely ways in which I was like a little bit overoptimistic. Like, I think that even being 256 bit and so on, like it was a not it was not fatal, although it was also definitely far from optimal. and then the other critique that I remember at the beginning was the whole sandboxing thing.

Vitalik Buterin 00:32:37 Right? It’s like, hey, how do you actually. Yeah, like VM sandboxing is just known to be a very hard problem. Like, how do you prevent bugs where somebody can, like, escape out into the computer? And that, interestingly enough, I think it never ended up being a problem even once. Right. And so basically, yeah, you know, we’ve had consensus bugs. We’ve had, like a resource, based on, like, denial of service bugs. We’ve had all kinds of bugs. I don’t think we’ve ever had a sandbox escape bug, possibly even at any implementation. I mean, definitely not the major ones. Right. And I mean, possibly they’re the reason might have been that the the kinds of VMs that people normally try to sandbox are just more powerful, and their implementations are more optimized than they try to sort of like, have much more like 1 to 1 correspondence between, you know, the top level VM and the underlying thing. Whereas like the VM started as just being a very naive interpreter and that’s just like natively much more sandbox able.

Vitalik Buterin 00:33:39 I think my other response back then is like, if we ever had a sandbox attack, then the sandbox attack would almost by definition, or a sandbox escape attacks, and that attack would like, almost by definition, run differently on every different computer because different computers have different data in the other parts of the machine. And so it would just immediately cause the consensus failure. So there’s just like a very natural and obvious fire alarm for that sort of thing. But we don’t know that that ended up not happening. I mean, on the parallelization side, I think the detractors did have a very valid point. It ended up not being a fatal point. It ended up being about. But but still a valid point. Right. And if you look at some of the layer one scaling ideas that we have for 2026, like something like block level access lists and like statelessness and a few other things. So like basically a lot of the scaling related ideas we have like basically, yeah, actually get end up trying to go into the direction of trying to like capture some of the benefits of the UTXO model, which is basically explicitly declaring what state you’re accessing, which, enables parallelization and enables a lot of other things.

Vitalik Buterin 00:34:49 Actually, yeah. There’s also an access list based solution for like long term state size sys management. so, you know, look, we’re sort of trying to, I guess, move from, you know, like single threat, just very naive, single threaded to something where you might call it sort of a halfway point, like basically something where, like whoever is responsible for building the block for the first time has to add some or some extra information or even people who are responsible for sending the transactions. they have to add some extra information. And then from then on, it gets executed in parallel. so, you know, like a lot of, really fascinating, like software engineering and thinking has happened there over the last few years that was just totally not a thing ten years ago.

Vlad Costea 00:35:37 I want to take just a step back, because Ethereum started out as this proposal for a Bitcoin 2.0 protocol, and at the time you had a lot of competition. There was counterparty, there was Omni, there was NXT.

Vlad Costea 00:35:53 and these guys seemed very professional. Like if you look at their videos back in the day, they promised a lot of transactions per second. They had a Dex from day one. They, they were very well funded and they seemed to be I don’t know, no offense here, but you are like a very young person doing this project with Ethereum. But these guys seem like, you know, they have gray hair and they basically sharpened their teeth coding. And they came up with this very compelling marketing and I’m not sure exactly what went wrong. And NXT was also a proof of stake since day one. They made a lot of promises that they’re more advanced and they’re superior from a technical point of view. But somehow it was Ethereum that is the one that we speak about today. And there’s also ripple, which initially was proposed like this. At one point you almost got a job at ripple. I’m happy you didn’t. But yeah, you you faced this competition from the early days, and yet Ethereum ended up becoming the dominant Bitcoin 2.0 implementation platform for tokens for computation for all of this cool stuff.

Vlad Costea 00:37:03 Why do you think that is?

Vitalik Buterin 00:37:07 Either. Yeah. I mean, I think, Ethereum was I mean, one it was the one that went all the way, right, in the sense of like actually offering general purpose programming. this is actually a lesson that, interestingly enough, Ethereum itself had to relearn in the layer two world. like I remember back in 2020. Yeah, or 221 looping, this was the very first ZK rollup on Ethereum, and it was even a stage two ZK rollup. So it even that like it was fully trustless, like didn’t have any, Security Council like backdoor stuff in it and, it did everything. It even did all of the hyper efficient stuff like it compressed transactions down to like 16 bytes. And so the transaction costs on it were crazy low. It was there, but then it just never got too much traction. Right. And the reason why is because it was not a fully VM, right? It supported payments. It supported like Dex. It supported very basic things.

Vitalik Buterin 00:38:07 But the thing that people wanted is full programmability. And of course, like that was even more true in 2021, where there were these huge masses of developers that were used to full programmability and they demanded full programmability, and they even demanded, like the EVM specifically, like even the differences between like the EVM and the EVM minus five features are like big enough to cause a lot of projects, not to not go in one on one way or two, and instead of go to another one. Right. But like the difference between the full programmability and the, what I called in, mastercoin, the Swiss Army knife approach. where you say, these are 20 applications that I like. Let me support those 20 applications and let’s do nothing else. that was like basically the problem is, you know, there’s always going to be applications where you don’t realize that those applications are even possible, or you don’t realize that there’s a completely different way of doing them. And so, that was that ended up, just not succeeding.

Vitalik Buterin 00:39:15 And, you know, the the full programmable approach, ended up succeeding. There were also other really interesting ones, in the early days. Right. Like, I remember, I mean, Bitshares, Bitshares launched a little bit after. Right. And, I mean, I always, like I have a bit of a soft spot for, bitshares. I think, because, I mean, first of all, like, to me, I like, I think a lot of, Daniel Larimer’s entourage are just total snakes. But I think I’ve always thought that Dan Larimer felt like a really, actually interesting person. I mean, he was clearly very philosophical, like he actually wanted to, like, make the world a more free place. And I also respected them for doing innovation on the like economics and mechanism design side. Right. Basically. Yeah. Like one thing that they did was the whole like shares and angel shares thing where like anyone could launch basically a network that’s part of their network. And then effectively if like the, the major shareholders have 20% of your thing, then like it’s this sort of one community that all shills and supports each other.

Vitalik Buterin 00:40:26 So work together. then like inside of each of these first Bitshares, then EOS, there was the whole, delegated proof of stake thing. And like on the one hand, like I always criticized it really hard. Right. And I wrote all these articles like basically saying that coin voting is bad and voting is broken. But at the same time, like, I really respect them for trying something, right? I yeah, like I respect how they managed to have all of these different nodes. Like there was an event later. I know there was like EOS, New York, EOS Shanghai, like EOS, Hong Kong, all these different nodes that were actually communities that were trying to, you know, support development support and like marketing for EOS. so I like to me, the like the economics were always one of the big weaknesses of, I guess what you might call, you know, the open source free software, like freedom friendly software kind of world, right? Which is basically that like traditional software, like it has business models.

Vitalik Buterin 00:41:28 But those business models depend on having walled gardens, having a lock in, having a lot of control over the user. And, if you don’t have those things, then, you know, what you’re building effectively is a pure public good right. It’s non excludable and non rivalrous. And you know in a traditional economics textbooks the only way to fund public goods is taxation. And of course you know as libertarians we don’t like taxation. At least you know from the government. Right. And so you know we get like, well, this is like it feels like, a lot of people sometimes like, think that I’m this, like, crazy socialist because I talk about this problem so much. Right. But, like, you know, like to me, like the, the motivation was always like, I want business models for things that respect people’s freedom and like, don’t try to create like, corporate logic. Right. And, like, if we could solve that problem in a generalized way, then, like, it basically means that the quality of all of this stuff that we depend on, you know, including zero knowledge proofs, including, you know, like basic, protocols and like, software, cryptography, everything is just going to be so much better and we’re actually going to like stand a chance at competing with, you know, the major banks and, and, and Venmo and, you know, like, Alipay and, and and so on and so on.

Vitalik Buterin 00:42:54 so I respected, Daniel Larimer for actually trying. Right. then and I felt like, yeah, you know, I, I guess I Bitshares and then EOS were probably the big one from, in the, I guess maybe 2015 to 2018 era. And then, you know, obviously others, started showing up later as well.

Vlad Costea 00:43:16 It’s funny that you foreshadow my upcoming question because I was going to ask you about Ethereum killers. Right. You launched the network. I think it went live in 2015. You’re going to turn ten years old very soon. And then in 2016, you had this rocky moment when you had the DAO hack and you had to make this political decision to basically return the funds and that caused like a community split. You still have Ethereum Classic today. They’re probably still not happy about some stuff, but regardless. In 2017, Ethereum was established as this major asset. The number two that almost flipped Bitcoin. You know, and what happened after is that a lot of people were trying to create a better Ethereum.

Vlad Costea 00:44:03 So you had neo, you had NEM, you had EOS, the one that did an ICO for an entire year. You had a lot of them. It’s very hard for me to make a complete list of all the ones that were trying to come for Ethereum by promising that they offer more expressive smart contracting or programming in multiple languages or whatever. But none of them gained the network effect. And even today, you’re competing. And there are some people in the chat mentioning Solana, you’re competing with Polkadot. You’re competing with, I guess, Avalanche. I’m not sure if it’s a direct competitor, but it it tries to do sort of the same. There’s also Tron. It’s it’s a weird story. That guy Justin Sun tried to be you, like, in creepy ways. And yet Ethereum is still holding its position and it still has users. It still has investors who build stuff. And it’s curious to me that you’re maintaining this, okay, because you started out as the underdog of this whole battle.

Vlad Costea 00:45:10 I think maybe you’re not underfunded, but you are not the most experienced team of developers. And then you grew the chain, and then you had all of these contenders trying to take Ethereum’s position. But they did not succeed, even though they they claimed some sort of superiority. And I wonder what’s the secret for this? How do you get people to stay even if there is something that claims to be technologically better.

Vitalik Buterin 00:45:43 And I think. The way that I think both, you know, like people working on Ethereum and people who, like stay here on Ethereum, tend to talk about it as, like Ethereum is like the one. other than, Bitcoin that’s, like actually has a credible story that it has a high level of, decentralization. Right. And, like this is something that we get that we hear all the time, right? Like, basically, yeah. You know, if, Vitalik hates you, you’re safe on Ethereum. If this, other person, hates you, you know, like, are you necessarily safe on their chain? Right? And like, a lot of those other chains, like they do, like, make, like a dao fork equivalence things for all kinds of different situations.

Vitalik Buterin 00:46:33 I mean, I think I saw, like hyper liquid, I believe. Like recently. Yeah. Like, did, reversion to get some, money back. but then it’s like they did that for some things, but then they did not, do that for other things. so, like, Ethereum is like the one where people actually get trusted not to, not to bug you in one of those ways. And. Well, what was interesting about the DAO fork, right, is that, like, a lot I think a lot of people thought like at the time that it was a precedent. but then, you know, in 2017 and 2018, like we did, also get some counter precedents, right? Like we got the parity wallet hack and it happened twice to like a couple of other hacks. There were a lot of situations where there were hundreds of thousands of eath that were lost. And there was a question of, like, can Ethereum? Will Ethereum do a hard fork to recover those funds.

Vitalik Buterin 00:47:31 And like, we could have. Right. Like, that was, it’s recovering money that’s lost is sort of a much in some sense even feels like a more innocuous thing than, like breaking, like taking money from one place to moving it, moving it to another place, like, it feels like the sort of thing that has no losers. Right? But, like, we ended up not doing it right. And I think when I say we like, I mean, I don’t mean, you know, the foundation, I mean the whole ecosystem. Like, there were even, carbon votes like eath holder votes, at the time. And, those were heavily opposed to doing those kinds of recoveries. Right. And like since then, you know, Ethereum has it’s really, yeah, disrespected, like user immutability, like pretty much at all like possibly the worst thing that might have happened where, like, some contract with $10, in it, like five years ago. that, like, stopped working because of, like some hard fork that had to change some gas costs to protect the whole chain against denial of service attacks.

Vitalik Buterin 00:48:38 I mean, I’m actually I’m not even sure if like, like when we did those gas cost increases, like we did very carefully like look through the whole, like ecosystem and see, like, is there anyone that’s affected? There were a lot of analyses. and so like we do that the that the downside was like basically none or almost none, but like theoretically, I mean, like there were like there might have been like one very tiny thing, but that’s basically it. Right. And then on these other chains, like it’s regular that, you know, there’s like some trader that loses $10 million because like someone else, some other trader has, even like a strategy that sort of where it’s even debatable whether or not it’s legitimate and then like, you know, hey, if you could get the big guys to revert for you, then, like, you could get reverted, right? So that was one thing. Also the multi client ecosystem means that Ethereum actually can survive without the foundation right.

Vitalik Buterin 00:49:35 Like like if I had to ask you know like what are the ecosystems that can totally survive and keep going without a haircut. Maybe slower but without a hiccup if their foundation, suddenly disappears like Bitcoin? Definitely. Right. And, I think like, I think Ethereum has, has gotten to that point. Right. But like, which other ones. Right. So I mean, so that was one and then I, you know, there’s like a strong culture of like, caring about, like, if we do this L1 thing, will that actually interfere with people’s ability to run nodes? There’s a culture of, like trying to build privacy related things and or tornado cash happened on Ethereum. And then, of course, railway and privacy pools happened on Ethereum. Now tornado cash is back on Ethereum. so there’s was this like deep culture of caring about these things. And generally Ethereum killers, like they don’t try to compete with Ethereum for that segment, right? Like they basically try to compete with Ethereum along with what they consider the pragmatist axis.

Vitalik Buterin 00:50:41 Right? Which is basically saying like, hey, high levels of decentralization are overrated. Let’s instead, like go for higher scale. And, you know, we’re going to have like 20 or 30 major nodes, right? And so they do deliver on higher scale. I mean, well, so they deliver less than, they promise often. Right. So like, I think all of these chains ends up like they promise, 10,000 TPS because that’s what you could do in a test environment. But then in a live environment, they pretty much all end up topping out in the hundreds of TPS. so.

Vlad Costea 00:51:18 I don’t even think they have so many users in the first place.

Vitalik Buterin 00:51:21 Right? Exactly. And a lot of the usage is subsidized by the foundations. A lot of it is that like very, very short term things. So but but like the, the kinds of like people and applications that they get. Right. They, they do tend to be people who, you know, care about decentralization less, care about, open source less, even care about security practices less.

Vitalik Buterin 00:51:50 And, you know, the famous quote is from, somebody is like, I, I value speed more. Right. And so, you know, it’s like basically, yeah, those but for those kinds of users, like, there’s, definitely. Yeah, a lot of, non Ethereum options and there’s even market segments where they’re winning. Right. And like I think that’s fine. Right. And I mean for and the way that Ethereum has historically competed for that segment basically is truly or Surulere to us. I look to have done quite well. Right? And you know, a base has gone up to. It’s like 150 TPS now with the extra hard fork. The amount of like blob space, like amount of data space for layer two is just going to go up by two x. And so bass and the others are going to go up even faster. So hey yeah. You know, this was also another one of those kind of arguments for the. Yeah. The the layer two approach.

Vitalik Buterin 00:52:53 Right. Like there’s things that you can do on layer one. And then there’s things that you can do on layer two. And like on layer two you have a little bit less decentralization. But you know, like you can do this smart this like smart contract and proof system stuff, to just, basically make it be as, like, still as self-sovereign as possible. And, you know, they’re doing the best job of that, that they can. So, you know, I think that’s fine. Fun.

Vlad Costea 00:53:21 Yeah. You opened lots of. You made some references that basically foreshadow topics that I want to ask you about. There is tornado cache. There is the layer one versus layer two situation, because I remember when Ethereum was you had lots of crazy ideas. At one point you said you can use Bitcoin Cash blocks to unload data from Ethereum. You also wanted to do sharding, which I don’t think went too far. But there are some alternatives to Ethereum that tried sharding. But anyway, before we explored these topics, I got to present two more sponsors.

Vlad Costea 00:53:57 One of them is signify. So if you’re listening to this and you want to buy some Ethereum, you can actually do that on SideShift in a way that requires no registration. And let’s say you have Bitcoin and you want to swap it for Ethereum because you you want to make Ethereum go up in terms of BTC. You can do that on SideShift or if you don’t believe in Ethereum anymore and you want to buy something else like Trump meme coins or whatever, you can still do that on SideShift. But usually I tell people when they get paid in stablecoins, use site shift to get free market money. I think that’s a more honorable way of accessing the service. But Andreas Brekken, who is the CEO of SideShift, says hello. And also, I know that he was one of the biggest contributors to your list of Craig Wright lies on GitHub. He was sending two articles and submitting pull requests, and I think that’s right.

Vitalik Buterin 00:54:51 Well, you know, the story of that list, like the list is actually his list, right? basically, yeah.

Vitalik Buterin 00:54:58 The reason why it sort of ended up being my list is, because, what I made, April to his list to add a few examples. And then I think he got a, like a takedown notice from, Craig Wright, and so he did not feel like he wanted to like he he did not have the legal muscle to properly fight it off. And so I believe he took it down. but then those same lawyers, of course, came for me. And like, I actually did not even realize at the time that just making a pull request means that you’re making a copy of the GitHub repo, within your own GitHub. Right. And so they came from me. And then of course, with, Ethereum Foundation, lawyers, like, I decided like, hey, no, you know, we’re going to fight this. And, actually, they yet never actually came to a lawsuit. I think they were too intimidated to try. And so, like, the, the that copy of, the list, which was originally I was like, basically.

Vitalik Buterin 00:56:01 Yeah. On GitHub slash and slash, I think Cult of Craig. I forget if there’s dashes or not like that. ends up being one of the last, copies of it, but, it’s, Yeah. That was, one of the biggest and the most fascinating documents. And the great is just that, such a character. And I mean, at the time, I think, convincing as many people as possible that, like, he actually is a fraud was, you know, obviously really important because the guy was just, like, causing so much damage and just, like, distracting so much effort toward all of these, like, pointless, and, given for even fraudulent things. But now, you know, he’s quiet and, of course, you know, the courts have, ordered him to be even more quiet. So I guess, you know, that was about one.

Vlad Costea 00:56:58 This is something else for which you don’t get much credit, but you’re responsible for it because you said in 2018, I think it was on the stage of Deconomy in Korea that you don’t want this guy to be invited anymore, and you sort of canceled him from all crypto events, and he was only speaking at Coin Geek sponsored conferences or whatever.

Vlad Costea 00:57:21 So when you did that, it had an impact across the whole industry. He was no longer invited to speak. Before that, he was sort of like a curiosity. People were curious to listen to him and see if he has any compelling arguments when you spoke against him. I haven’t seen him speaking at major events anymore.

Vitalik Buterin 00:57:46 Yeah. I’m trying to think. I mean, now that I think about it. Yeah. You’re right. I don’t think he has been at a non coin geek thing since 2018.

Vlad Costea 00:57:57 So I guess you didn’t even realize it, but it’s sort of obvious.

Vitalik Buterin 00:58:03 And I’m curious, are there any of, like, who are the biggest, I guess, like, fun characters in Bitcoin these days. Like, are there any that kind of, you know, measure up to all of the crazy stuff that happened in the late 20 tens?

Vlad Costea 00:58:20 No. Not really. I don’t think we have a Mircea Popescu or whatever.

Vitalik Buterin 00:58:27 All right. I forgot. Good old Mircea.

Vitalik Buterin 00:58:29 Yeah, I forget him too, I think. Right. He also offered to. I think he offered to, like, buy. Yeah. And, like, he basically shorted ETH by making a public, offer to buy people’s if at, or to sell people. You said 5000 to 1. despite, like, not having any, I’m not sure if anyone took, took him up on his offer because I think people didn’t really didn’t even trust him. but, that was, yeah, his his stuff was so crazy.

Vlad Costea 00:59:04 But I had, what’s his name, Daniel Kravisz on the show, like, a couple of weeks ago. And he still believes that Craig Wright is Satoshi. And I asked him, you know, did he prove anything to you? Did he show you anything compelling? Was he able to win a court case? And he said, no, but he taught me stuff about Bitcoin that I previously did not know. And I was like, what? Didn’t you know this guy? So I guess, you know, Daniel, he wrote some of the best articles about Bitcoin in 2014.

Vitalik Buterin 00:59:35 Yeah. You know that kind of reminds me a bit. I mean, I saw this like a very weird tweet a couple of weeks ago. It was a dating advice for right leaning people in Europe. And the this this guy was like very crazy, right? But the thing that he argued was like, hey, you know, if, like, if you become, if it becomes clear to a woman that, like, you support, you know, like right leaning crazy stuff, then like, she is going to totally like, nope, out of out of there. And, his argument was that you should first tell. Like tell her. Ask her who Otto von Bismarck is. And like most Europeans like, don’t really know much about him. But I guess, like, no one in any country on average knows that much about any history. But like basically, if you like show to her that like, you know more things about Europe than she does then like she would be. Yeah, become more open minded.

Vitalik Buterin 01:00:34 And I mean, this stuff is like, totally. Yeah. Crazy. Right? But, I mean, I like, I, I definitely don’t, Support any of those, like, manipulative styles. I’m not sure if they, if they even succeed. Right. But, like, I guess, it feels like, making a show, teaching someone else something that they don’t, something they don’t know about, something that they care about is like a common, I guess, I guess, guess you could call it scam or tactic, or a kind of one of these sort of black hat tactics for impressing people. so, yeah, it’s, something you definitely want to be careful about.

Vlad Costea 01:01:19 Yeah. And once again, you did a pretty good job with this. And I gotta plug this. Let me finish up with the sponsors, and then we can have a free flowing conversation. NoOnes.com is a website which has a peer to peer marketplace, which tries to onboard people from the Global South and the Middle East.

Vlad Costea 01:01:39 CEO Ray Yousef says hello, by the way, and he also says he owes you an apology. And also he wants to have you for a workout to do chest or legs together. Okay.

Vitalik Buterin 01:01:51 Okay. Oh, well, keep that in mind.

Vlad Costea 01:01:54 And there’s also Bitcoin.com news. And for a few years, Bitcoin.com was a Bitcoin Cash website. And it’s my duty to inform people that now they know the difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, and they followed the incentives of the market. And if you open Bitcoin.com today, it’s more centered around BTC and they have pretty good journalism. If the listeners have any time to read news, I think it’s pretty balanced. I would dare say it’s more balanced than Bitcoin Magazine, which is maybe too Trump centric. But anyway, check it out. Also, I should ask you about that one. How do you feel that Bitcoin Magazine is now like a Trump publication? Yeah.

Vitalik Buterin 01:02:40 Yeah. It was pretty crazy to see the evolution of that whole thing, right. I mean like it definitely became Bitcoin maximalist pretty quickly.

Vitalik Buterin 01:02:51 Then it became a Trump thing quickly. I forgot like Bitcoin magazine. Are they also the ones that do the Bitcoin 2024 or like the the conference.

Vlad Costea 01:03:01 Yeah I, I guess you were. You were at one of them like, two years ago, right?

Vitalik Buterin 01:03:06 I actually don’t think I was the closest was that there was in 2021 in Miami. And like, I didn’t go to the conference, but I was like once the, you know, like some surrounding, like events and just talking to people.

Vlad Costea 01:03:22 I think David Bailey posted a picture of you attending, and that’s what I remember.

Vitalik Buterin 01:03:26 Right, okay. I mean, it was well attended, something like definitely not a big, big win event, but I saw him like also on Twitter. I don’t know if it was them or another one, but like it was there was like an article like Russia legalizes crypto mining. And then they had this, like very cheerful, congratulatory thing of like Vladimir Putin holding up a glass of vodka. And it was like, oh, God, you know, like it’s like, do you guys even remember what it was? And, yeah, it’s, it’s pretty wild.

Vlad Costea 01:03:58 Yeah. I mean, I look at your style of journalism, it was mostly technical and also some travel stuff, like you went to Room 77 in Berlin, you went to Israel a few times to attend some hubs in there. Yep. And the Bitcoin magazine today is very different. Like I read your article about announcing Ethereum and it was not how should I put it? You are not selling the token, you are just explaining what this is, why you’re launching it. Why? Why it makes sense. And I don’t know, it changed a lot. I think it changed over ownership twice after you sold it.

Vitalik Buterin 01:04:37 Okay. I did not know that, but.

Vlad Costea 01:04:39 I think it was Charlie Shrem that bought it from you. And then it was David Bailey.

Vitalik Buterin 01:04:44 Right.

Vlad Costea 01:04:47 I hold some copies, some old copies of Bitcoin magazine. I don’t have them here, but it’s interesting that there was clearly a shift, and I used to work for them, by the way. I wrote for them for about a year.

Vlad Costea 01:05:01 Wrote about 50 articles.

Vitalik Buterin 01:05:03 Yeah. I mean, it feels like there’s been a lot of these, like bigger political shifts that have happened and definitely a lot in, libertarian lands. And, I mean, I think crypto was part of libertarian land from the very beginning. And so it had its own mirror image of like, basically every part of that. Right. And, you know, you see these days, like, there’s some libertarian parties arguing that the government should ban synthetic meat and, you know, there’s a bug. A lot of them are saying all kinds of things that I personally don’t consider to be very libertarian. so, you know, people a lot of people change a lot. There’s, a lot of drift. I mean, there’s a lot of intersection between that and, Bitcoin. so it’s, Yeah. You know, you definitely don’t want to like someone saying and doing things during one year is definitely, again, no indication that they’re going to do the same things 5 or 10 years in the future.

Vlad Costea 01:06:09 Yeah. You also have a question which I found interesting from a guy who’s named EarlyNFT.bit. He’s into Namecoin stuff, and he says that on November 27th, 2013, someone from Ethereum Foundation registered the domain name Ethereum and set up the domain To The Moon Ethereum. The very next day, the domain Too The Moon.bit was registered on Namecoin, even though Ethereum bit would not be registered until January of 2014. To the moon wasn’t a very popular thing at the time, so it’s unlikely that the two registrations are not from the same individual. Would it be too forward to ask if Vitalik personally registered these names? I hold the deed to both.

Vitalik Buterin 01:06:53 Yeah, unfortunately, we didn’t do that. That was not us.

Vlad Costea 01:06:57 Okay. He said he holds the deeds to both name name coin records and would be happy to reunite them with their creator at no cost.

Vitalik Buterin 01:07:05 Okay. Oh, no. Yeah, I appreciate that. We can follow up.

Vlad Costea 01:07:10 If the person who registered to the moon on Ethereum is listening to this.

Vlad Costea 01:07:16 Then you can get the name coin asset too.

Vlad 01:07:23 Perfect.

Vlad Costea 01:07:24 Yeah. So let’s get back to the conversation about Ethereum and scaling the base layer. Because I remember you had lots of proposals and approaches. In the end you settled for Layer twos. And some people were unhappy and they just became nihilistic. Went to Solana or whatever said oh we just want to do meme coins on the base layer because it’s simpler or I don’t know exactly the consideration. Maybe it was fees Is. And I gotta ask you, why did you decide to go to layer two? Even though there seemed to be like sort of a resistance to it because this was the Bitcoin approach to do layer twos, but Ethereum was gonna scale on chain also.

Vitalik Buterin 01:08:08 Yeah. So basically, yeah, we made that decision around late 2019. And the reasoning was that, like our development effort as the Ethereum Foundation was limited, we had limited resources, we had limited people. And also all of our team was like full speed ahead trying to figure out the merge.

Vitalik Buterin 01:08:33 And, the merge was like a really big grant project. And of course, you know, lots of people were saying it would never happen at all. Right. But eventually, you know, it did end up happening like, it took a long time to get there, right? And, in 2019, we basically just I did not want to distract people from working on the merge. Right. And so we did account abstraction as an an ERC. So like a second layer standard, that like people could opt into instead of being a protocol feature. though, now actually with, 7701 it’s, well, going in seven, 702, it’s going back in the direction of, sort of becoming a coming back to being a direct part of the L1. And then for scaling like similarly, we. Yeah, decided, that, the given that the L1, R&D time is like so concentrated on the merge and, and other things, that, we just, like we did not have the resources to do it directly.

Vitalik Buterin 01:09:37 And so we just did the pragmatic thing and said, like, okay, let’s, invite other people in the ecosystem to do it, and, let’s, basically, yeah, do the equivalent of, sharding, but where, You know, instead of the shards were a protocol feature there like a thing that other people could create. And then you would have, like fraud proofs, zero knowledge proofs, verify that whatever is happening in those layer two is actually that is correct. And so people would be able to, you know, get the benefits of like being connected to Ethereum and being like fully self-sovereign and all of those things in a way that pushes, the TPS, much higher. Right. And of course, you know, it definitely took a while, but over the next, 4 or 5 years, that’s, basically happened.

Vlad Costea 01:10:32 Here’s a question that’s popular among Bitcoin circles, and people like to dunk on Ethereum because of this. What kind of hardware does it take to validate Ethereum to run a node?

Vitalik Buterin 01:10:45 So today, You can you can absolutely do it on a consumer laptop.

Vitalik Buterin 01:10:52 So, the so the laptop that I’m using to talk to you right now, it’s, Dell XPS 15, it’s totally managed, managed to sync and run a, node. and actually, yeah, it managed to do an archive sync. So which actually means that you’re not just downloading everything since Genesis, but you’re actually directly verifying every single transaction since Genesis. And it managed to do that sync in four days. so right now it’s like very possible, I think. but this topic is, interesting because, I mean, I think you’ve probably seen, but we’re looking to, like, there’s a lot of momentum right now to also increase the scale of the L1 as well. Right? And, there’s a lot of these interesting questions of like, well, you know, like what is the role of things like phono and even going to be going forward. Right. And, and so there’s this, there’s this like interesting philosophical rabbit hole that’s being like I think Re-exported. Right. And like basically, yeah.

Vitalik Buterin 01:12:01 You know, the ultimate goal, right. I think, is, we want as many users as possible to be interacting with the chain in such a way that they actually are verifying the rules of the chain. And the reason why this is important, is, I mean, I had this, kind of like, mini story in, one of my posts a couple of years ago. I think it was on, like, limits to scalability. let me, try to, quickly find it. I can, see if if the story is, here, there. I’ll just read it out. so this is, imagine, like what? Like this story would be told in, one of these, like, highly scalable chains where no one’s running full nodes. At 2:35 a.m., you receive an emergency call from your partner on the opposite side of the world who helps run your mining pool. Or it could be a staking pool. Since about 14 minutes ago, your partner tells you your pool and a few others split off from the main chain, which still carries 79% of the network according to your node.

Vitalik Buterin 01:13:03 The majority chain blocks, chains, blocks are invalid. There’s a balance error. The key block appeared to erroneously assign 4.5 million extra coins to an unknown address. An hour later, you’re in a telegram chat with two other small pools who were caught blindsided just as you were, as well as some block explorers and exchanges. You finally see someone paste a link to a tweet containing a published message announcing new on chain sustainable protocol development funds. The tweet begins by the morning arguments on Twitter and on the one community forum that was not censoring the discussion. Discussions are everywhere, but by then, a significant part of the 4.5 billion coins had been converted on chain to other assets and billions of dollars of DeFi transactions taking place. 79% of the consensus, though, is in all the major block explorers and endpoints for light bulbs. We’re following this new chain. Perhaps a new fund will fund some developments, or perhaps it will all be embezzled by the leading pools and exchanges and their cronies. But regardless of how it turns out, the fund is, for all intents and purposes, a fait accompli, and regular users have no way to fight back, right? So this is kind of the, you know, the dystopia scenario that we’re trying to get away from, right? Basically, a scenario where a majority of the mining power or stake power can just like push a change to the protocol could be creating new coins, could be changing the rules, could be deleting some contracts or whatever.

Vitalik Buterin 01:14:24 And like because regular users are not actually validating the chain. Like they just like everyone just accepts their new blockchain by default, right? So this is what we don’t want, right? And I think in Ethereum like we’re Are 100% set in stone. that’s, like, we do not want a future where that kind of scenario is possible. And so we’re like, we want to do everything to fight against it. Right. So in the tech with the technology of the 20 tens, the only way to fight against this kind of thing is basically for as large as possible, a set of users to actually run their own full node directly. Right. And, but in the 2020s, you know, the game changed in a lot of ways, right? so like, basically, we actually have a whole bunch of technologies that basically all have this flavor of one actor spends more resources to add some kind of extra information, and in exchange, the process of verifying the blog for everyone else becomes much easier.

Vitalik Buterin 01:15:27 Right. So and obviously, yeah, you know, ZN Snarks are one of them actually, stateless clients are another example. Right. Basically what what what happens there is, you could have one node that’s creating the block. Also, add on Merkle branches for everything that they’ve accessed. And then all of the other nodes that are that are verifying, like they would just verify everything through those Merkle branches. And so they would require somewhat more bandwidth, but they would not require any hard disk space. Right. And so they would be able to sync instantly. Yeah. They, it would, it would not take up space like a much larger number of, just existing computers would be able to do it. And then of course, like one node creates a block. And then for everyone verifying it, it just becomes trivial. Right. So like sum to me the bigger like possibly even the bigger embarrassment right now is with Ethereum is like one is of course, that there’s like a relatively small number of people running full nodes.

Vitalik Buterin 01:16:30 But the other is that on the in wallets, like there’s a large number of users that are not even doing light verification, right? They’re basically just fully trusting RPCs. And, I mean, I think even in, in Bitcoin, right? I think like a pretty, a pretty small portion of, users are like actually directly running, fully verifying bitcoin full nodes. Right.

Vlad Costea 01:16:57 Yeah. Last time I checked, they’re like 15,000. And I don’t know that there may be 100,000 users of the main chain every day.

Vitalik Buterin 01:17:06 Right? Yeah. So 50,000 is still good, right? But, like, I think what we want to get to is we want to get to a world where, you know, the average, like MetaMask, user like within MetaMask, you just have a. Yeah, and Ethereum node, and that Ethereum node is actually fully verifying the Ethereum chain. Right. And of course, to do that, like you need like you would be able to do it with ZK Snark. Right.

Vitalik Buterin 01:17:28 And so with a snark, basically one person creates a snark. It proves that the whole chain is valid. And then, another user would or any other user would be able to just verify a proof and they know that the chain is correct. Right. And then we also came up with this technology called data availability sampling, which verifies that not only is the data valid, but the data is also like also has actually been published to the internet, which is important. Right. Because, that’s another kind of invalidity that, cryptography is never going to capture. so that’s some I, I don’t know if also you saw this, but recently I published, this if magician’s post, it’s called, a maximally simple L1 privacy, roadmap. And a big part of it that I talk about is basically, how do we make like, things like tornado cash and railway, a default part of people’s user experiences? and, that just means incorporating them into existing wallets, like using private sense by default. but another big part of it also is the other big reason to use a full node, which is privacy, right? Because if you use an RPC, then first of all, you’re trusting the RPC node to tell you the information and to be correct.

Vitalik Buterin 01:18:42 But also you’re trusting that RPC node to not log your private data. Right? It’s like, you know, if you’re use doing some like say, politically sensitive donation and okay, maybe, you know, you use tornado, you use railway. And so there’s no on chain evidence. But then if you’re going through an RPC node, then like whoever controls the RPC node, they see what requests you’re making. They see what transactions you’re sending. They see everything. Right. And so the question is how do we get around that. Right. And so we’re starting to also think about, you know, various like privacy technologies to make it possible to do reads privately. Right? So I guess, like the big change that we’re trying to adapt to is that, like, there’s all of these new technologies, like all these new forms of cryptography, including snarks, also including peer, including a lot of things. Right? They all have this property that they basically allow, like a little guy to connect to a big guy and get but but at the same time, like get all of the same guarantees without doing all of the big stuff themselves, right? And like, that didn’t exist in the 2010s.

Vitalik Buterin 01:19:53 Right. And a lot of the mentality around, like full nodes, like it, it was, created in an environment where like that, like that totally new option did not exist. Right. And so now we want to like Ethereum is going through this process where we’re rethinking, you know, one, we want verification to be available to everyone. And we want everyone to verify by default. And you have snarks, you know, we have data availability sampling. We have all of these things. That’s good. Right? Two is, we also want participation in consensus to be. Yeah. as, distributed as possible. Right. And then there’s the question of, you know, like, what is that like? Does that mean decentralized stake pools? Does that mean, solo stakers that does that mean, some, some combination of them? How do we make either decentralized staples or solo stakers competitive with, the big pools for as many people as possible. So that’s also another discussion. And then, there’s some of these kind of heavier tasks, right? Because, the price of, the whole thing is like, it’s it’s, basically like, let’s say 10,000 times cheaper to verify a block.

Vitalik Buterin 01:21:09 But on the other hand, some one person needs to do 100 times more work to generate the proof. Right. And then who does that work that works? Going to take more effort than one single computer. How do we ensure that that’s still going to be like globally distributed, so we can still rely on at least one of those two to continue existing weekend proofs, even in some pretty exceptional cases. Right. So there’s, and like, I think the other thing that’s important, right, is that how do we said layer one is never going to scale like everything goes on layer two is we would have basically had the same debate. Right. Because, but instead of having that same debate with regard to Ethereum, we would have had that same debate with regard to like a base. Right? Because it’s like even if theoretically you have all of these proof mechanisms saying, like all on base, like whatever happens on base, you’re safe. Like as a user, you still need the practical ability to ensure censorship resistance.

Vitalik Buterin 01:22:04 You still need the practical ability to ensure that if the base nodes go down, you can still take your coins out, you still need all these practical abilities. And so like basically the exact same kind of thing would be happening. Right? So there’s yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of, really interesting discussion happening on those, on those topics, right now, I guess, you know, you could call it. You can call it Ethereum’s scaling debate, though. I feel like it’s, like we’re less of a debate and, and more collaborative and hopefully, yet with the newer cryptography, like, we’ll actually be able to address all the different, types of people’s concerns at the same time. But, you know, this is like the thing that’s happening right now.

Vlad Costea 01:22:55 this is why I have respect for your work on Ethereum, because I don’t think there’s any conversation in so-called Ethereum killers about getting rid of RPC and just using servers, because that that basically creates points of failure and also makes it less censorship resistant.

Vlad Costea 01:23:15 You can have a few of these servers basically denying service to some countries or deciding that some transactions are non-standard or undesirable or whatever, or they come from certain addresses and they’re not going to be broadcast. And that’s not something that you want to have in something which is supposed to be sovereign and global and neutral and everything else that we claim to care about in Bitcoin. Sometimes, because I get disillusioned that there are times when I realize that some of these talking points were just LARPing to make the numbers go up. But I remember Eli Ben Sasson was probably the first person to talk about this in 2013. He’s a co-founder of Zcash and now Starkware. And he was talking about doing instant things of the full node just by verifying a ZK proof. And that has been the dream for like a decade. And it’s cool that Ethereum is embracing this approach. And on the topic of ZK stuff, I know that Ethereum has paid through the foundation. A lot of the research that basically created the rollups and also the ZK snarks became more advanced.

Vlad Costea 01:24:30 I think Zcash had like five iterations right now. They finally got rid of the trusted setup, and they also have smaller transactions with Halo two and your thread pools. And it’s pretty cool. And I was gonna ask what’s the relationship between Ethereum and Zcash? Because as far as I know, Zcash was like this experimental lab for Bitcoin to bring privacy to it. And I don’t see it coming anymore.

Vitalik Buterin 01:25:00 Yeah, Zcash still exists. It’s still around. It has a community. I mean we’ve collaborated on cryptography. Yeah, quite a bit. we’ve used some and obviously like Ethereum is fully dependent on or at least Ethereum’s privacy side is fully dependent on technology that they’ve significantly helped the pioneer. I mean, we’ve also, given them, advice on, proof of stake related, things. So there’s definitely been like some very positive interactions between those two communities for quite a while.

Vlad Costea 01:25:35 That was very diplomatic of you. Well, what do you think about Zcash nowadays. Do you think it still has chances to recover.

Vlad Costea 01:25:43 Or was it sort of abandoned by the investors and everyone was bullish on it.

Vitalik Buterin 01:25:50 I think I mean it was definitely a not like it definitely hasn’t been abandoned by its team obviously. Right. And people are still, like working hard on pushing it. I think, the challenge that it’s had is obviously, you know, the challenge of, the coin retaining value. And, I mean, that’s, that’s a hard thing for a lot of projects, right? It’s, like one of those things in the crypto space is like, sometimes, Like technical value and, like, economic value can be just, like, so disconnected from each other. I mean, you know, they’re like. Yeah. It’s the position, that they’ve, like, put for, themselves, right? Is basically. Yeah. Saying like trying to be a bitcoin like thing. but then at the same time, like becoming the, the standard bearer of privacy, it’s, I mean, it’s a challenging thing to succeed at, right? Because I think, like, if you want a sort of bitcoin like legitimacy, like a big part, like the biggest part of it is not technical.

Vitalik Buterin 01:27:04 It’s social. Right? It’s, and a big part of it is just like this mode of having an established community, this, history of, not making crazy decisions. this, This history of people valuing your thing. So it’s a and definitely a challenging a game that, they’re playing. though like I definitely wish them the best. And like, I definitely really hope that they, succeed because I think it’s, you know, a world where people can be. It’s a really important technology to succeed is, including financial aid is definitely a better world.

Vlad Costea 01:27:42 Yeah. And I think without Zcash, correct me if I’m wrong. I don’t think railgun or tornado cash would be possible.

Vlad 01:27:51 Correct?

Vitalik Buterin 01:27:52 They would.

Vlad 01:27:52 Not.

Vlad Costea 01:27:54 What do you think about the situation of the Tornado Cash and Samourai developers?

Vitalik Buterin 01:28:01 Yeah. I mean, it’s, definitely, yeah. Crazy that, you know, the government’s, like, actually started, like going after developers in, that particular case, right. It’s like the sort of thing where there’s a large category of software where, like I said, once you start opening up, that, that, that Pandora’s box, like, just, becomes risky and like, you know, like that action that probably made the, you know, the US a significantly less attractive, destination for many different kinds of, of software developments.

Vitalik Buterin 01:28:42 Right. Like, I feel like, you know, the really strong advantage that, the US has as a jurisdiction is like the First Amendment and all of the, you know, the strong history of, protections that are associated with that. Right? And so, if that like, if you, weaken, that I mean, even for code, I mean, like the like these are precedents that can easily become abused in all kinds of ways. I mean, obviously, I think the cash thing itself is an abuse because I think, privacy is, is good for the world. Right? And I think, like, even if you don’t believe privacy is good for the world, I think, there’s, plenty of other ways to, like, go after it that don’t involve going after developers. but then separately, I believe that, you know, privacy is good. And, like, we, we should not go after it. like, basically. Yeah. Like my view. My general view is that, you know, to the extent that, we do need to go after bad actors, which, you know, we do like, and, you know, I think, you know, like, in North Korea sending, there, like, thousands of soldiers to attack Ukraine is bad, right? And, like, if there’s ways to, go after that, then we should.

Vitalik Buterin 01:30:03 But basically, like, I think that should happen at the layer of goods and services rather than at the layer of money, as much as possible. so and like the layer of goods and services is like, even the easier one. like, it’s going to be the easier one in the future, right? Just because, you know, the physical world is just, inherently much more transparent, right? Like, I think if we can keep the, the money layer as free as possible, then, you know, like, to me, that feels like, you know, the right, just like, balance or distribution of, responsibilities.

Vlad Costea 01:30:43 Yeah. For the longest time in Bitcoin, the holy grail has been that of creating sidechain for scaling and figuring out a way to not have a federation or not have a trusted setup. And in Ethereum, I think you had plasma. You had what what was the name of the Lightning Network equivalent writing? Raiden. Yeah. Like the God of Thunder from Mortal Kombat? Yeah.

Vlad Costea 01:31:13 That one. And there was a lot of experimentation that led up to the rollups, and I think it’s been a few years until you came up with that and you decided that it’s really good. I usually ask people this, and I’m curious to know your distinction between them. How would you define a rollup as compared to a sidechain?

Vitalik Buterin 01:31:40 I think the difference is in verification. Right. So a side chain is just it’s a loosely defined term right. It’s basically just a chain that has some kind of connection to a parent chain. A roll up is you know, to me it’s specifically a chain where all of the underlying data is, posted to the parent chain as opposed to being somewhere else. And the reason why data being posted to the parent chain is important is that it’s actually a critical part of the security property. Like basically, yeah, if you imagine, you know, the operator of, the roll up, some just like, suddenly disappearing. Right. The whole point is that the safety of your coins inside of a rollup are not dependent on anything to do with the roll ups.

Vitalik Buterin 01:32:34 Like, operator, you know, ecosystem multi-sig, coin holders, whatever. They’re only dependent on the underlying chain, right? And so the if the operator disappears, then you need some way to get your coins out. Right. And if you don’t have the data then you don’t have a way of actually doing that. And like you don’t have a way of actually proving that you have those coins. And so now there are other ways to achieve like a similar type of guarantee. Right. So plasma is the other really big category. And now we have int max which is doing this interesting type of hybrid role of plasma for privacy. so. But you know, and so with that data published on chain, you have this like really strong security, guarantee that basically if you have a coin inside of a roll up, then if it’s like actually a full roll up and, like the training wheels are taken off and so on. And of course, the security of the proof system is correct. Then you have a guarantee that you that you can turn your coin in the side, the roll up into a coin on the underlying chain if he wants to.

Vlad Costea 01:33:46 What do you think about drive chains on Bitcoin? I, I basically mentioned the topic previously, but I didn’t ask you exactly what you think about the security implications of it. You’re going to have the miners securing these chains. So you trust them with escrow with the funds.

Vitalik Buterin 01:34:03 Right? I think a big part of the philosophy like to me has always been that, like, there’s this higher level of trust in the miners, right? Like basically, yeah. The way that, you know, remember, the design is like, you know, you have like basically different kind of tiers of block sizes. And then like as a user, you can, you know, you can verify some of the tiers, or you can also choose to not to, to not verify higher tiers. But then the question is like, well, what happens if there actually is a 51% attack, right. And you know, with if there’s a 51% attack, then again, like the thing that you do not want, right, is you do not want the 51% attackers to, like, actually be able to, like, steal the coins, from, from inside of, like, any of these constructions and then turn them into like valid coins on, like whatever is the underlying chain.

Vitalik Buterin 01:35:06 and so here it’s this, framework where, like, what even is the, you know, sort of the L1 versus, like, what is higher layers that kind of gets a bit blurred, which is interesting. it’s there’s like something that’s, elegance to that approach, though. There’s also something that where like there’s an aspect where like, I would just, you know, like, prefer knowing like, this is, like this particular thing is, the thing where we agree that it’s, we agree on what the validity rules are. And, like, even 51% of miners can’t say it can’t break them. And then we try to scale past that in ways that 51% of miners also can break.

Vlad Costea 01:35:55 Some people in the chat are curious about this, and I think it’s a legit question. Was the transition of Ethereum from proof of work to proof of stake purely ideological in the sense that you wanted to have a lower energy consumption and basically escaped the Greenpeace campaign that was run against Bitcoin. Or is there something more to it?

Vitalik Buterin 01:36:19 so I think there’s a few arguments for proof of stake.

Vitalik Buterin 01:36:21 Right. So I mean, the environmental thing is one. But then also you need to keep in mind too, that, like the benefits of, not consuming energy are something that also benefit the ecosystem because, like, the ecosystem doesn’t have to pay for that energy in the form of, higher emissions. Right. Like issuance. so, like, there’s this big, you know, like, problem that everyone’s thinking about, right? Which is basically, yeah, you know, like, once issuance runs out, then, like, how do we pay for security? And, like, there’s theoretical arguments for why proof of stake could give you a higher economic level of security for the same or significantly higher level of economic security for the same budget. So that was also one of the reasons. And then another reason is that proof of stake has this concept of finality, right? Basically where after a very short time, a block can get to the point where like basically enough Stakers have signed onto it in such a way that if the chain ever deviates and the like reverts that block and it goes in some different direction, then like there would be evidence by which all of those stakers would like basically lose all of their coins.

Vitalik Buterin 01:37:36 Right. And so you have like a very high economic level of security that appears like very quickly after a block. And that’s like a useful property that a lot of people care about. So I think it’s probably a combination of those three things.

Vlad Costea 01:37:53 I want to get to the topic of privacy. But before that, I’ll take a couple a couple more questions that I think are interesting in the chat. Robin Linus, who is the creator of BitVM, actually tuned in and I’m really happy that he’s listening. He says I’m happy that he’s heard of BitVM. Would be interesting to hear his take on ZK coin / ZK CSV which is client side validation. It’s a paper that he published. I’m not sure if you read it or if.

Vlad 01:38:21 You’re curious to read it.

Vitalik Buterin 01:38:23 ZK CSV. Let’s see.

Vlad Costea 01:38:25 The paper is co-authored by Liam Eagen and Robin Linus and Jonas Nick.

Vitalik Buterin 01:38:33 An intellectual descendant of earlier embedded consensus protocols. and then, basically, yeah. So the idea is like you have client side validation, but then I’m assuming I’m just kind of reverse engineering this, that it’s like you can client side validate master coin style protocols using like basically snarks.

Vitalik Buterin 01:38:56 And then the other thing that you can do is, of course, if you have things like things like VM or things like the things start where wants to do with OB cat, then like you could make Bitcoin scripts that are themselves aware of the execution of these, like embedded consensus things. I mean, basically like this sounds like this is like basically layer two, right? Like like this is rollups. So I think it’s great.

Vlad Costea 01:39:20 You’re good at this. You didn’t read the paper. You just assumed what this is about. And you’re right. Except that the comparison he made was with counterparty as a protocol, not Omni, but. Right. Yeah. Yeah, you’re spot on. And there’s another question from someone who has my sponsor. Very early on he was working on Volterra and he built something that’s called the standard on optimism or no arbitrage. And he’s curious what you think about his basically BlockFi. Without the company, it’s like a lending protocol called a standard. He’s been building this alone.

Vlad 01:40:03 I don’t think.

Vlad Costea 01:40:03 I’ve seen for feedback.

Vitalik Buterin 01:40:05 Yeah. What’s it called?

Vlad Costea 01:40:07 TheStandard.io.

Vitalik Buterin 01:40:09 TheStandard io.

Vlad 01:40:11 Okay.

Vlad Costea 01:40:13 I owe him, like, a big favor. He used to own an exchange called Vaultoro, where he was selling gold and bitcoin since 2015 or whatever.

Vitalik Buterin 01:40:23 Right. Okay. So Unchained vaults, multi-asset collateral. I guess, like, I’m like, do you have a, I guess, a one sentence summary of, how it differs from like, of type of things?

Vlad Costea 01:40:40 I don’t know, I’ll wait for him to reply and let’s move on to other topics. Until then, I don’t want to shill anything. I’m just curious about your thoughts and on stuff?

Vitalik Buterin 01:40:51 Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, these kinds of things are definitely. Yeah, like, really valuable. I mean, I think to me, the big thing is that just giving like regular people access to like stable valued assets with competitive APIs in a way that’s like fully, globally accessible and fully self-sovereign, that’s like big, right? That’s it’s something that’s really valuable to a huge number of people.

Vitalik Buterin 01:41:20 And as the technology matures, it just keeps on improving. And like it actually. Yeah. Has gotten to the point where like I’m not constantly worried about like smart contract risk overshadowing whatever tiny interest points I can get. And so that’s, it’s been good to see the ecosystem get to that kind of state. so I expect more and more people to, like, actually start just like doing the bulk of their banking in crypto for that reason.

Vlad Costea 01:41:54 I have a question from the last sponsor I will show today, which is HODLing, their service that supports people with their self-custody. And the question is, what is your recommended way for people to back up their coins and to hold their keys?

Vitalik Buterin 01:42:11 is this on bitcoin? On Ethereum generic?

Vlad Costea 01:42:15 generic I guess.

Vitalik Buterin 01:42:16 Okay. I mean, I can just like, say the setup that, like Isaiah used to recommend. basically, yeah, like half a big multisig. so like on Ethereum, I use, like safe and I mean, I’m sure on Bitcoin there’s great multi-sig as well.

Vitalik Buterin 01:42:36 And you have some number of keys and the majority of those keys should ideally be held by. Yeah. Like people that you trust who are maximally distant from each other and who don’t know each other. So they should not definitely not know that each other are the are the key holders. And then, you know, just to make sure that they, know about security questions and they know how to like, you know, if you ask them to, to, make a transaction, like how to verify that it’s actually you instead of someone hacking your account. so this is kind of, you know, like my relatively high effort in high. Yeah. And high value setup. if you want something that has, like, less involvement, involvement from other people, like, I do think Multi-sig is the gold standard for everyone, right? And I think the general principle is he wants like a multi-sig between different things whose reasons for failure, failure are not coordinated, correlated with each other. Right. and so one example is like things that physical devices that you control.

Vitalik Buterin 01:43:42 One of them is like things that you remember. So. Like, I mean, even, like Brain Wall. It’s really fine as long as you like, actually make sure you remember them. one is, other people, institutions if you can, though, if it kind of sad to see that there actually haven’t been many institutions that have been offering this kind of like be part of your multi-sig as a service. I remember back in 2013, I think it was like Ryan Singer had a company that was, trying to do that. I forget his name. It’s like starting to come back in Ethereum lands, though in Ethereum Land, the thing that’s like really starting to take off is, things like email where like there’s like email, there’s like ZK government ID like there’s a lot of these, like basically you take like some centralized form of trust and then you basically you make a smart contract wallet where that smart contract wallet has a rule that it only accepts a transaction. If you can prove that you have control over that, like that form of ID.

Vitalik Buterin 01:44:42 And then the idea is like, you obviously don’t want that to control your whole accounts, but you just like use that as like one of your, one of n and you know, you can mix and match different ones, right? So, ideally, yeah. I mean, you know, you would even, use, like, some commercial provider from one jurisdiction and then, you know, some government ID from a totally separate, jurisdiction. And then the majority of it can be things, that say you control, like, basically, yeah. You know, you want to have a multi-sig and then you want, like, the different pieces of it, like you want some core subset. Right? So like let’s say if you have a 3 or 5, you want three of them to be things that are like, like reasonably accessible to you. And you want the other two though, like really. Yeah. Aim much harder on the, on the security dimension. And then just like choose things that you’re that that’s that you’re confident in, and like at the beginning, you could even start with something basic or like, you can start with, you know, your phone, a hardware wallet and a piece of paper, right? And that’s, like, totally fine, right? And then over time, you can, like, basically switch over and migrate them to different things.

Vlad Costea 01:45:53 Yeah. Sometimes I think in the past I was criticizing Ethereum people for using browser extensions and storing thousands of dollars or even more using these. Yeah, without any proper backups. But I think right now it’s a lot more professionalized. MetaMask has access with your Trezor or whatever to be able to sign transaction from a third party device, which may most likely is not tampered with. And yeah, I think the industry has come a long way. Also, when I asked Mike Belshe from BitGo the same question, he said that Multi-sig is works pretty well. Basically, his whole business relies on it. So. it’s sort of a big deal.

Vitalik Buterin 01:46:43 Yeah, multisig has definitely come a very long distance since I first started talking about it 12 years ago.

Vlad Costea 01:46:53 What was it back in the day? Was it on Electrum or Armory, or were you just coding it yourself?

Vitalik Buterin 01:47:01 I’m trying to remember, like I remember I wrote that article in Bitcoin magazine where I was like, I like advocating for people to do a more multi-sig thing.

Vitalik Buterin 01:47:09 I remember I actually wrote a multisig wallet back in 2013, because, like, there weren’t good ones back then since I remember, like, I remember the bitcoin Bitcoin wallet was one of the very early ones that had good UX. I am, and I’m not sure what’s and then the for the Ethereum Foundation’s Bitcoin we like basically we did a custom solution with like a lot of custom scripts. And I mean, I ended up using pi bitcoins a lot for my share of the signing. so it was definitely like a very OG era back then, but now it’s much easier.

Vlad Costea 01:47:52 Yeah. I want to ask you about your views on privacy, but before that, Robin Linus came back with an extra explanation saying that he said ZK CSV when its actually called Shielded CSV. And the advantage is that it decouples CSV transactions from Bitcoin transactions, giving you scalability.

Vitalik Buterin 01:48:14 I see it. scalability because the transactions, like, is there some way that the transactions don’t actually have to be on chain or like, do you still have to pay the data cost?

Vlad Costea 01:48:26 I don’t think they’re on chain.

Vlad Costea 01:48:28 And I recall there was like an equal size to them, like 50 bytes for all transactions.

Vitalik Buterin 01:48:34 Right. Because if they’re not on chain, then like you have the whole issue of like, well, who is responsible for like storing that record, right? We have if you have assets inside of that system and like, how do you as a user know that you can actually like have the evidence to take them all out? and then it gets into a rabbit hole. There’s like a bunch of, like different ways to solve problems that have different trade offs.

Vlad Costea 01:48:59 It’s funny, Robin started typing, but we gotta move on to the privacy topic because you wrote a very good article, which I think explains a very deep philosophical truth about privacy, that you don’t care too much about it until you realize that it’s a bit too late and you wish you had it, you wish you cared about it, and also that the norms and the laws in meatspace, in real life, they change very fast. And you don’t know how the stuff that you do today that is totally moral and totally legal is going to be interpreted in the future.

Vlad Costea 01:49:39 And I like this. It wasn’t along the lines of oh, privacy is normal. Oh, you know, I don’t have anything to hide, but you shouldn’t care about what I do. You presented some very compelling arguments in there, and I recommend people to check it out. It’s on Vitalik.ETH.limo. I don’t know why it’s so, but.

Vlad 01:49:58 It’s so.

Vitalik Buterin 01:49:59 Basic. So. Okay, okay, I can explain that. so the site is on ENS, right? So actually the entire site is like a sort of self-sovereign site in the sense that it’s like the it’s hosted on IPFs, you know, like the decentralized, file storage and then, it uses, ns to store the, like what the root hash is of the, of the whole file structure. And, each limo is like a forwarder, like, it’s just that, a thing for people who have browsers that don’t support ENS directly to be able to access the ENS websites.

Vlad Costea 01:50:39 Yeah. So why are you doubling down on privacy and what are the limitations that you envision for this because you’re not going full Monero saying that, oh, privacy should be for everyone and I don’t care about criminals and stuff like this.

Vlad Costea 01:50:53 Even though if you read the Cyphernomicon by Tim May, he outlines it very clearly that privacy should be there and protect individuals, even if there are some exceptions. Sometimes when criminals use it.

Vitalik Buterin 01:51:10 So I think in the crypto space we talk a lot about protecting individuals from abuse by centralized actors. And what one of the kind of philosophically awkward things, that, you start noticing is, that, like, the things that blockchain blockchains give you, right, is they give you guarantees, that, like, a service basically won’t bug you by editing the spreadsheet, right? But, in reality, the thing that people, are most worried about on the topic of abuse by centralized services, it’s not even abuse by editing the spreadsheet, right? I mean, sometimes it’s about changing the rules. Sometimes it’s about the service disappearing. But like probably even most often, it actually is about, like, like services collecting your data. Right. so if you think about, like, the biggest complaints about centralized AI, I mean, one of them is, of course, that the I could just rug you by disappearing and like, that has happened to a lot of people’s, you know, like AI girlfriends, which is, I boyfriends, which is definitely sad.

Vitalik Buterin 01:52:24 Right? So, you know, if, if you use AI for that, you should definitely run it locally. but,

Vlad Costea 01:52:32 And seek.

Vlad 01:52:33 Help. Yeah.

Vlad Costea 01:52:34 Sorry.

Vitalik Buterin 01:52:36 The other. but but then the really, like, the bigger one is basically like, hey, OpenAI is getting all of your data and they’re all probably training on it. And, you know, if they’re training on it, then, like, they just have no way to guarantee that your personal data is not just, like suddenly going to become accessible to some, like, random, cleverly engineered query, some, like a year in the future. Right. And then there’s all these concerns about, you know, like digital surveillance. And then actually, this is an interesting anecdote. so, like in the mid 20 tens, China started, like, pushing really hard to push out a lot of, like American tech services, right? Like Uber was one example and like one half of, the reason why is, of course, that, you know, like they want to have, like, control people through, like users doing things through local services.

Vitalik Buterin 01:53:35 But then there was also another reason that, like, made that whole push significantly stronger. And that reason was like it actually came from, the Snowden revelations. Right. Like the Snowden revelations spooked a lot of people because they realized that, like, wait, like basically every American tech company is like actually a vector for the US spying on people. And like, there was a lot of, like people discussing this, I mean, like within China and, like a lot of, discomfort with this. And like, that probably was, the moment by which, sort of us tech companies stopped, like being viewed by the world as being sort of like, you might say, sort of basically blockchains in the sense of like, oh, you know, it’s neutral. We don’t care who runs it. It’s a freedom platform. And then they realize that there are like levers of control, so That and the prospect of like, basically U.S. tech companies getting a lot of people’s data was like this really big, like second arguments, right? So even governments are afraid of, you know, your data being spied on by the government.

Vitalik Buterin 01:54:39 Right. As the lesson there. Right. It’s a and if you just think about it, like practically right. the big I think the biggest risk that a lot of people have in terms of abuse from a centralized actors just is centralized actors abusing them by selling their data. I mean, you know, if you’re like location data from phones as being, like, sold off in all kinds of different crazy ways, like, just all kinds of data could, could get sold to third parties, it could get hacked by third parties. So like, a lot of different things could happen to that data. Right? And, the and like, that’s something that’s like, you all really wants to be protected against, right? It’s also, you know, there’s freedom of speech, but then you also want freedom after speech, right? It’s like in all of these, different situations, privacy is just like it’s this really key aspect of, decentralization and of censorship resistance. And it’s something that I think like, what’s interesting is that the very in the very early cypherpunk days, right, that that was highly valued.

Vitalik Buterin 01:55:49 Right. Like Zcash, very privacy preserving, like it was basically considered mandatory that if you’re going to create an eco system, the point is that it’s an encrypted cash system, right? But but then in the blockchain era, we just did not know how to do, like privacy preserving cash without a centralized operator. until ZK SNARKs came along and ZK SNARKs did not exist back in 2008. And so because, like, I think because we did not know how to do it like our community is just like felt a lot of pressure to sort of devalue it. Right. And to basically, yeah, instead emphasize like, oh, you know, if the bad guys can’t edit your spreadsheet anymore and, now, you know, we have snarks. And so I think, like, there’s no good reason for us to not care about this whole really important big aspect of, of like, freedom and decentralization and censorship resistance. And so we really, yeah, needs to go back to making it be one of the front and centers of the discussion.

Vlad Costea 01:56:53 Would you say that Ethereum is a cypherpunk project? Because I guess the Blockstream side has been trying for years to frame it as this JP Morgan experiment, you know?

Vitalik Buterin 01:57:07 Yeah. I mean, I think, like Ethereum has a lot of, deep cypherpunk roots to it. And both are both the cypherpunk roots that Ethereum itself created in terms of like things happening on it, but also even the influences of a lot of the early contributors. Right. Like, like I definitely like read things including the, you know, work of David Shaw and the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto and all of these, David Friedman’s Future Imperfect, I think, also was like, has a lot of cypherpunk, parts to it, though I mean, the thing that I like about David Friedman so work is that I think he has this like trait that I share, which is he doesn’t just care about freedom. He also cares about, like, making society work in the context of, freedom being respected. And he just put a lot of, like, deep work into figuring out institutions that could, try to do that.

Vlad 01:58:07 and.

Vlad Costea 01:58:07 He also plays World of Warcraft.

Vlad 01:58:10 Yes. See, I.

Vitalik Buterin 01:58:12 Mean, games are just like, like really lovely environments for experimentation in so many ways. Right? Yeah, it’s I think it’s like he even said at one point that this is one of the reasons why he really likes, like the idea of having games that, they are these, like, closed environments in which you can try out all kinds of different institutional ideas and then, like, see how they actually work. And it’s like, we’ve arguably even seen some of that. Right. Like probably less on the like economic mechanism design and governance side and more on the communication side. Right. Like things like discord, you know, they have their roots in the gaming era. And then, a lot of those, like that ends up, turning into like, software for all kinds of companies to use, even, like outside of, the crypto world. so a lot of that also, I think a lot of, you know, like free software, and, open source influence.

Vitalik Buterin 01:59:08 And one funny thing about Gavin Wood, one of the, co-founders from early on, right, is like, he did not even come from the Bitcoin side. He came from the free software side. And the problem that he was solving is like, well, how do we make free? Like the ideals of free and open software work in the context of software needing to be sort of like massively multiplayer, right? Because like classical free software is single player, right? But then if it’s massively multiplayer, it’s not just the software that matters, it’s also who runs the database, right? And if the database is run by someone who could run you or could, you know, like seize your data or like change the rules on a whim, then like, it doesn’t even matter if the software is open and free, right? Because like, they just don’t have so many levers to abuse you. Right? And so that’s like his gateway into Ethereum is like actually solving that problem. Right. So like a lot of the especially earlier contributors, like a lot of their motivations that came from some of these like both free software, heavier and even more privacy heavy.

Vitalik Buterin 02:00:17 Types of contexts.

Vlad Costea 02:00:19 I know that the Ethereum denominations carry the names of cypherpunks like the Dai, the Finney. And I was curious if you were able to get any feedback. Of course not from Hal Finney, because you did not launch while he was still alive. But if there is any feedback from David Cham or Nick Szabo or Wei Dai if they said anything about Ethereum.

Vitalik Buterin 02:00:42 Yeah, I think I mean, Nick Szabo definitely wrote some very positive commentary. Yeah, at the beginning we had a few email exchanges, though since then I think both after the DAO fork and also I think after like we kind of diverged politically. Yeah, he’s definitely been much cooler.

Vlad 02:01:00 I remember that.

Vlad Costea 02:01:01 2018.

Vlad 02:01:02 Yeah.

Vitalik Buterin 02:01:03 Yeah. let’s see who else. thinking of the other denominations. Well, I guess the guy was also called the Shannon. Claude Shannon is obviously also not around. Neither are Charles Babbage or Ada Lovelace. Wait, I think we’ve, like, actually met him. Like, I think at least once, although the topic was like more about like AI safety and like AI futurist types of topics rather than Ethereum specifically.

Vitalik Buterin 02:01:30 I mean, funnily enough, there’s, a totally different person named, Wei Dai who, is like kind of involved in Ethereum. I think he runs, the, the, the De Infra Summit that’s happened a couple of times and has some other projects.

Vlad Costea 02:01:45 it’s funny how this works, because if you read the white paper for B money, it’s very similar with Ethereum. I think it’s closer to Ethereum than to Bitcoin, or at least that’s my reading of it. Were you inspired by B money when you wrote? I mean, I’m not sure if you wrote the white paper yourself, but.

Vitalik Buterin 02:02:07 I did write the white paper. I was thinking, what my inspirations were. I mean, they were definitely, like, pretty. Yeah, eclectic, I guess. like. A big a big part of it was just like various, you know, like, work on, like programming languages that I’d personally seen in the years of, of programming that I had since then. I think also Daniel Suarez’s diamond, that, novel is like a really big inspiration for the concept of DAOs.

Vitalik Buterin 02:02:40 and then, of course, the original diamond was, I and now we actually have AI at a level that can possibly do those kinds of things. And now we’re actually starting to look into AI DAOs. so.

Vlad Costea 02:02:55 I want to ask you a couple of personal questions, because through this interview, we had like 21,000 viewers and most of them in the chat were complaining about the price I’m scrolling right now. They’re just saying price, price, price. Some of them are shelling their own token. But what I want to ask you about, is it difficult to be in this position where everyone expects you to do something to pump the price and they they basically correlate what’s happening with ETH, the token, with your private life? I remember at one point in 2017, there was a fake news report that you died or something, and you had to come up with a piece of paper where you wrote the block hash of a recent block to prove that you know you’re still alive. It’s insane what kind of stuff is happening out there.

Vlad Costea 02:03:43 And it sort of sucks that there was also that documentary about Ethereum that somehow turned out to be your biography, and it’s unfortunate that you get so much attention. And sometimes it comes at the expense of the project or at the expense of other builders.

Vitalik Buterin 02:04:03 Yeah, totally. I yeah, Yeah I think. This is like one of the challenges that like, I’ve been trying to do over the last like over the last couple of years of, like how to do a better job of, like elevating some of these other people that have been taking on different aspects of Ethereum and seeing, you know, like some of them really come to the front as like very independent actors. Right? There’s a you know, people are research people on developments. I mean, also even people like, like PCA versus who has been, you know, like pushing on privacy more and more lately. so, it’s, Been, starting to get some, progress. and like, I definitely personally, you know, like, I, I definitely don’t like having that kind of attention.

Vitalik Buterin 02:04:59 I mean, it’s even, like, it’s bad for me personally, right? Because it’s like when everyone has that, that many expectations about every single thing I do. And then like, I don’t have freedom, right? the yeah, yeah, that always price thing. Like, I’ve just come to acknowledge that there is, a large group of, of people for whom that’s their primary focus. and, like, that’s the thing that they care about. And like, I cannot, affect, you know, the eath price anymore than, like, Obama was able to affect the price of gasoline or whatever. It’s, I mean, for me, it’s like even less, right? Because, like, I have way fewer levers than, you know, like Obama did in the US. it’s like, even when, well, you know, like, I make significant, like, announcements that crypto Twitter gets worked up about, like, the price doesn’t move. Right. And so in some ways, you know, like, I like to be like even that sort of market acknowledgement of Ethereum’s decentralization in some way.

Vitalik Buterin 02:06:01 Right. but. There’s like, like basically especially in the short term, you know, prices like pretty random and there just aren’t many ways to affect it in either direction. And so if you can’t affect it, then, like, you just, acknowledge that you can’t cater to the kinds of people that, like check whether it went up or down today. I actually went up, it’s, it went up about $50 over the last 24 hours, interestingly enough. but, you know, like, as a signal of, like whether or not Ethereum is good at doing good or bad, like, good or or badly in general, I yeah, I tend to focus on what I can change and what I can change is basically, yeah. Is Ethereum the kind of ecosystem that’s being effective at supporting Ethereum’s underlying values? And that’s something where I think the answer is, I mean, like being honest, it’s definitely sometimes yes, sometimes no. And I’m doing my best at like really pushing so that the the fraction of the pie.

Vitalik Buterin 02:07:05 That’s. Yes. keeps on growing and expanding and, you know, when, like when, you know, now we have, lots of functioning privacy protocols on Ethereum. That’s a win. you know, now we have, functioning, layer twos that are at stage one. And so they’re like halfway to the ladder of being, like, fully trustless. So that’s a win. you know, the L1, gas limit going up and that happening like safely in a way that keeps the protocol decentralized. But, you know, when that happens, that’s a win. the Ethereum protocol not being vulnerable to DDoS attacks anymore, that’s, a win. you know, currently. Yeah. Like, I still think we haven’t quite solved the problem of how to make, like, really optimized, sort of like self self-custody and decentralization at the same time, especially for newer users. But there’s progress on that happening. So I just try to focus on the things that I can change and like focus on improving the parts of Ethereum that like, I think I can improve and should improve, and so we can do our best.

Vitalik Buterin 02:08:19 That’s like making a platform that can, you know, like keep, like humanity open and free and safe for the 21st century.

Vlad Costea 02:08:28 If you look at the Ethereum page from 2014, it advertises some use cases, which ironically ended up being focal points of bull markets. Distinctively like if you look at the 2014 page on the Wayback Machine, you’re gonna see that Ethereum is advertised for enabling decentralized companies. And there was this Dao moment in 2016 or something for allowing art to be tokenized. And there was the NFT mania. And there was also something about being able to do Kickstarter style fundraisers. And we had the ICO moments in 2017 and 2018, and it’s really cool how all of these use cases somehow ended up being the center of bull market narratives. And I was going to ask you, what do you think is the next big bull market narrative? Because right now it seems that only some acknowledgement from politicians and institutional adoption is driving up the price. But there is not something coming from within the community for use cases which are like fashionable, like NFTs were four years ago or something.

Vlad Costea 02:09:38 Which one do you think is the next bullish narrative?

Vitalik Buterin 02:09:45 So I expect that Ethereum is going to bifurcate in the application layer into kind of scaling proven use cases and then doing like really interesting and, and cool things. And so like to me, the big scale, the big proven thing that Ethereum has is the DeFi ecosystem. And like even just like as I mentioned, right, the fact that, you know, you can, do things like, like hold stablecoins and, I mean, if you want. So, like, you could even hold the algorithmic ones. And so you personally don’t have risk of getting rocked by, like one of them, and, like actually getting competitive, interest rates. That’s like a product that a huge number of people in the world want. And then if you’re holding if then like, that’s, you know, you’re also effectively benefiting from the ecosystem of other people doing that. Right? And then at the same time, there’s, the ability to, easily move between different, tokens, you know, the ability to do, like all kinds of more complicated things, even just like hold them in fact, effectively.

Vitalik Buterin 02:10:59 Yeah. So that to me is something that’s like starting to be proven for Ethereum. And there’s just like a large group of base of people that do this kind of thing quietly. And I think an even larger base of people that can do it. If the technology is improved to the point where it can be. Yeah, like really effective and just like really easy for people to participate and like I expect, right, that we’re entering this period of greater political instability where like basically, yeah, I don’t think there’s any country in the world that has a zero chance of like basically becoming the next Argentina in terms of the kinds of stuff that a desperate government does to its people’s finances to try to stay afloat. Right. So like I, I saw, I recently like basically I asked GPT to just quickly tell me, like, what is the volume of DeFi hacks divided by what is the TVL of DeFi? And the answer is it’s like basically half a percent, right? And that if you stick to conservative protocols, it’s like less than 0.1 percent.

Vitalik Buterin 02:12:05 Like, I think at this point, for any single country going forward, for the next decade, like the chance per year that you will be robbed of by, yeah, some kind of crazy political move is very plausibly greater than half a percent, right? So like, I think there’s just like a very valid thing there that like we have that’s very usable to a huge number of people. So I think that’s one. and then there are obviously other things that are happening that are super fascinating, like prediction markets, are. And what if the reasons why I talk about them is like, I mean, I’m a big prediction market enthusiast. I mean, obviously Paul is as well, right? It’s like a big topic for me for a couple of reasons, but the thing that Poly Market did in 2024 is it broke out and it got mainstream adoption even among people who would otherwise not care about crypto. And I mean, they even got sort of three sided adoption, right? There’s like the sort of relatively naive people who just like bet on things and some like for fun and excitement, there is like really sophisticated people that do some deep analysis of like what probabilities should be.

Vitalik Buterin 02:13:15 And then there’s people who read the markets and they use that as a source of information. Right. And like even in that third category, like I’ve seen very mainstream US political intellectuals, even the types of people who would normally be the types to say like crypto is useless and it’s a scam. Like even they they’re retweeting screenshots of Poly Market, right? So it’s like a really big adoption success in that sense. But like realistically in terms of, you know, how many fees wouldn’t pay to Ethereum. I mean, even if like polygon, kind of like moved to being a full roll up and like paying a bunch of fees to layer one, like, definitely. Yeah. Not a huge amount compared to some of the, DeFi use cases. Right. But at the same time, like, I think it really improves Ethereum as an ecosystem that, you know, like things like quality market also things like true markets, that like exist in, in our world. then I mean, there’s like a lot of fascinating stuff that’s that our world is doing with zero knowledge proofs.

Vitalik Buterin 02:14:20 Right. And I don’t know if you, saw but like today. Yeah, Google announced that they’re doing, like, privacy preserving age verification with zero knowledge proofs. And like, to me, the whole age verification thing is like kind of math. But, at the same time, like it being privacy preserving is better than it being not being privacy preserving. And, you know, like the fact that technology that our ecosystem is incubating is like Actually starting to get used by mainstream actors is just like, really cool. I. Yeah. So that’s, like I think there’s, you know, there’s this like, long tail of just interesting and cool things, but like the way that I see it, like that’s also not the money go up there. The number go up narrative. Right. That’s like that’s the narrative that makes Ethereum be the kind of ecosystem that like someone who is a cypherpunk or a dev or a researcher would wants to participate in. Right. And, I think realistically, you know, the number go up narratives are going to be dominated by a fairly small number of financial use cases.

Vitalik Buterin 02:15:23 And like I think that’s fine. I think that’s fine if they are honorable financial use cases. Right. Because, you know, over the last six months, like we’ve seen a huge amount of what I would call very dishonorable finance, right. Like there’s a lot of these, like, I think like meme coin things where, like, I’m definitely not against all, like, all meme mean points by far, right? Like, I’ve been a Doge fan and a Doge supporter for a decade, right. But like the type that sort of go up and down within like 12 hours and, like effectively they have sort of like they, they don’t feel like good food. They feel like heroin, you know what I mean? Like, not like that kind of stuff I think is less honorable. And just also especially, you know, political points because I think like that just turns into, like basically a political corruption vehicle, so that like, if Ethereum succeeded by being the home of that kind of stuff, then, you know, I would be unhappy.

Vitalik Buterin 02:16:21 But if Ethereum succeeds by being the home of just all kinds of people in, environments that either are politically unstable today or could become politically unstable tomorrow, which is like the whole world, being able to just safely, yeah, save, and, grow their wealth with their families then like, that would be a really happy outcome.

Vlad Costea 02:16:43 Yeah. I mean, these are use cases, which I guess were not envisioned in the original design from a decade ago. And it’s cool that you keep on shipping code and building stuff. And yeah, the the Polymarket phenomenon is really incredible. And the way it was used during the US elections was mind blowing. And even Bitcoiners embraced something that’s built on Ethereum, the same guys who otherwise say, oh, Ethereum is an unregistered security or whatever they like to say. They basically said, this is legit. This is something that we’re interested in using. And. I feel sorry for asking you this so late into the interview, but I’ve been meaning to. What do you think about the situation of Roger Ver.

Vlad Costea 02:17:32 I feel like it’s a very divisive situation among libertarians. There are some OGs who defend him, and then there are some others who say, well, I’m not happy about his attitude during the block size words, and maybe that he does deserve to go to jail because of this.

Vitalik Buterin 02:17:50 Yeah. I mean, I think as a matter of principle, saying that someone deserves to like, go to jail because of like unrelated context that he did in some other situation, whether that’s taking, you know, what you consider the wrong size of the block size war or whether that’s expatriates from the US, because I know some libertarians have been going more nationalist lately. Like, I don’t like, I like, I think being cool with someone, being wrongly imprisoned, for those, reasons is, just because you don’t like him for other reasons, like, that’s very wrong, right? And I think it’s, like, important to stand on that, point of principle. And I mean, I have, you know, like, looked somewhat at his case.

Vitalik Buterin 02:18:39 And, my, like, my impressions are in, like, these kinds of situations. There’s obviously, like, all kinds of, information on, that’s like, hidden for a long time. There’s a lot of things that are not visible. Right. But like, if, like, his case is basically. Yeah, that’s, you know, he tried to comply and, he. Yeah. You know, the coins that they were going after him for were coins that he like, you know, like a gift to his wife, like even like before the whole, expatriation and, the. Yeah. Like, basically that he did his best to, like, honestly comply with a law despite that law, in my opinion, being being fundamentally, unreasonable. Right. like like the whole like, you know, like us, you know, like, you have to pay taxes that no matter where you are to be a citizen thing. and like, I, I think that’s, If those facts are the way they are.

Vitalik Buterin 02:19:40 But there’s a lot of facts that does make it look like effectively, yeah, the government is going after him because it wasn’t because it wanted to go after libertarians, right. And so that’s like unfortunate. Right. And then the way that it went after his lawyers and like basically yeah grabbed their private information like that feels like a serious breach of attorney client privilege. Right. So I, definitely, yeah. You know, I hope that, Roger gets like, a very here, like the fair opportunity that he deserves to make it that, to make his case. I mean, everything that I’ve seen, it definitely suggests that, you know, things are not with the the way the government makes it seem.

Vlad Costea 02:20:21 Well, I’m happy you’re so well acquainted with the case. And you mentioned some details and the distinction that you made in the beginning against, I guess, what we could call karmic justice is very important. Like some people think that just because they don’t like someone and they did something to them in the past, then they deserve to go to jail for unrelated reasons.

Vlad Costea 02:20:45 And it’s really unfortunate to see this in the Bitcoin community.

Vitalik Buterin 02:20:51 So yeah, I think, right now, like the thing that we really need, right, is to just like remember what our roots are. And I mean like that I think that means like remember what our principles are and right. And that, you know, the principles, I think are that, you know, we believe in, things like open source. We believe in things like privacy. I believe in things like freedom. And, like, these are principles that, we, believe in, like, because, you know, like having a strong guarantee that these principles are broadly applied is good for society and good for humanity, but maintaining those principles requires not turning them off in specific cases that you think is a convenience, right? And like the whole concept of a blockchain censorship resistance, is that right? Like, I feel like, you know, if you’re going to be okay with, throwing Roger beer in jail for some unrelated thing to do with the Blocksize war, like, how can you not be in favor of the Dao Fork at the very least, right.

Vitalik Buterin 02:21:55 Like, you know, the like.

Vlad 02:21:57 The.

Vitalik Buterin 02:21:58 Basically, the DAO fork is like a thousand times milder, like. And it’s not even getting into government coercion. Right? so that’s, Yeah, I think, just there like, there are a lot of people right now who claim to be upholding, principles, but then just, like, completely ignore them when it’s, convenient for the sake of, like, some political tribe or like, some kind of personal dispute. And I think if things, go in that direction, then, you know, the credibility of, institutions that they care about will go to zero and that that will be replaced by, credibility in, basically cults of personality where they might like one, but then they might discover the, the one that comes after it is just completely. Yeah, go after them and destroy them. So no, I, you know, I think, we need to, you know, believe in freedom, believe in, a rule of law.

Vitalik Buterin 02:22:57 I believe in fairness and, also believe in, privacy and censorship resistance on chain for everyone.

Vlad Costea 02:23:05 That’s really beautiful. I’m gonna cut this and make it a short clip because it’s so nice. I want to ask you something about Ethereum, which has puzzled me for many years because Blockstream has been marketing liquid, which is their federation slash sidechain, as a competitor to Ethereum. And they said, you know, Ethereum is the place where they do. CryptoKitties is the place where they do ICOs. And some of them are fraudulent. But you know we are serious about this. We’re like business people. We want to tokenize for companies on Wall Street. And we can do everything with regulations and blah blah, blah. And you talk to our lawyers. But what was funny that actually happened is that people use Ethereum anyway, because it turns out that the Wall Street people don’t like regulations either, or they think there may be too much and they don’t want to deal with them. They would rather build in a permissionless way.

Vlad Costea 02:24:00 So to me, it’s been very funny. Like, why do you think this happened? Is the world waking up to the Cypherpunk ideology?

Vitalik Buterin 02:24:09 I mean, I think now is a very good time for the Cypherpunk ideology because the world has had multiple recent and very yet painful and crazy examples of what all the possible alternatives are. so it’s, Yeah. And and Again ultimately, like, what might my critique of some of the stuff that happened in the late 20 tens? And, I mean, I actually think this applies. This applies to liquid, and I think it applies even more to some of the Ethereum enterprise. Stuff that happens is that, basically the thing that they wanted to do is they wanted to create a compromise between centralization and decentralization that gets the best of both worlds. Instead, they ended up creating a compromise between centralization and decentralization that gets you the both the worst of both worlds, right? Like if you look at the Ethereum chain, enterprise chains like often the pattern is they do a very good job of getting their first five partners, and then the five partners get together and they create this lovely chain and it seems like it’s amazing.

Vitalik Buterin 02:25:13 But then when it comes time to expanding from five partners to 25 partners, nobody else is interested. Why? Because they don’t want to join an ecosystem that’s dominated by like, the first five major banks, right? And then at the same time, Like if you’re moving from a centralized server set up to a permissioned blockchain, like you still have to deal with BFT, you still have to deal with writing everything in the EVM. You still have to deal with asynchrony, but you still have to deal with like basically 80% of the problems of building on a fully public blockchain, right? And so it’s basically basically just ended up being completely, you know, the worst compromise. And like, you get the downsides of being decentralized without the upsides. And I mean, my impression is, is that a very similar thing ended up happening with liquid. I mean, liquid definitely like these. Yeah. Like it was a consortium sidechain. Like it was basically the thing that, like did like bitcoiners that criticized rollups for being for being for like years later.

Vitalik Buterin 02:26:15 Right? Which is just like being a multi-sig. Right. And, you know, with Ethereum, like, this year, we’re finally making serious pushes that’s, moving away from that and getting to your tools that are secure in a decentralized label, like what? It was just like that all along and it’s like, yeah, it’s, you know, it’s not decentralized enough. And at the same time, like, it’s just, it does like it ended up not offering enough of, the benefits that people wanted. Well, this is probably the other thing, right? Like the whole sidechain elements thing, like, there was a there were a lot of these beautiful ideas of how to upgrade, bitcoin scripts. And they’re like, very technically beautiful. But they were also sort of not the thing that devs wanted. Right? Like the thing, the devs one is like something that just compiles from an existing language that’s like at least looks like, you know, like C plus plus or Python or JavaScript, right.

Vitalik Buterin 02:27:11 And then and that’s the thing that, you know, the EVM offered. That’s also the thing that, I mean, like risk five, offers. It’s but it’s not the sort of thing that like Bitcoin scripts plus 2 or 3 languages with like with simplicity and like a much more famous or much more fancy working is is going to offer. Right. So I like, I think as a product, it just sort of got stuck in the middle in that way.

Vlad Costea 02:27:37 Yeah. It’s beautiful that you mentioned it, because you said over the last month that you support the transition from EVM to risk five as far as I know, risk five is the standard for open source hardware, which allows you to verify every piece of hardware, like the processing unit and the motherboard. And everything is built in a stack where it’s open source and verifiable, and it’s very cool. I think it’s made some great progress over the last decade. And my first thought when I saw that was that it’s cool that Ethereum is still moving fast and breaking things and basically pushing the entire industry forward.

Vlad Costea 02:28:16 But on the other hand, you have like a multi-billion dollar industry of EVM products. Some of them even coming to Bitcoin and trying to bring financial services to BTC. So do you think it’s too radical or do you do you think the industry will follow through with RISC V.

Vlad 02:28:36 I mean.

Vitalik Buterin 02:28:36 I.

Vlad 02:28:36 Think.

Vitalik Buterin 02:28:37 The question is not binary, right. And the question is always like how much adoption a thing gets. So if you look at like WebAssembly, I mean it’s gotten like it’s a level of adoption within browsers. So it hasn’t really gotten too much further beyond that. I mean, risk five has a lot of advantages because just like such a a simple and kind of naturally canonical architecture. the yeah, I mean, we’ll see what its adoption in hardware looks like. And then the other question is like what its adoption in ZK VMs looks like, right. Because, one of the reasons why I suggested it is because, like, more like something like two thirds of the SSC, the limitations that are being built today, they’re being built by making a XXvi of RISC V and writing the RISC V.

Vitalik Buterin 02:29:23 Right. And so the argument is like, well, if this is how provers work, then, you know, you might as well just expose the risk factors smart contract developers already directly. And then, you know, you get like 100 X gain, by, you know, just completely removing both the EVM overhead and the overhead. like, that’s inherent to having an interpreter. so that, is, it’s like really nice, right? Then the question, of course, is like, you know, ZK proving is still a rapidly moving space. Is it going to be even more different in 2 or 3 years? And, I guess, you know, we’ll see. but, you know, right now, RISC V is definitely looking like, a super promising, choice. And I think, like, we should do an honest effort at, like, also evaluating the, like Cairo style, like very optimized VM route. though the, the challenge with that is that, like often if the prover tech changes, then the VM that’s optimized for the previous prover often ends up being like worse on the next prover than it does on risk five.

Vitalik Buterin 02:30:34 Right. like like that was definitely true for the 256 bit stuff. And so now the question is like if we yeah, make something that optimizes around like say, yeah, you know, like 32 bit prime fields, you know, like koala bears, like the, the, the big one right now is like, it’s like two to the 31, minus two to the 24 plus one, or something like that. And then like, imagine if two years later, all the provers just switch to being, over binary fields, then, like you, you risk creating something that was actually. Yeah, even worse than, risk five. Right. So that’s like it’s it’s all a matter of kind of prediction. Right. The downside of choosing risk five is like, well, what if it turns out that risk five is like 100 hundred times less efficient than a super optimized VM. So yeah, it’s, I think it’s, we’ll have some period of, discussion for this. I think hopefully we’ll converge to something like by the end of the year or so.

Vlad Costea 02:31:30 I look forward to that. If you could travel back in time like a decade ago and redesign Ethereum with the knowledge that you have now, what would you do different?

Vitalik Buterin 02:31:41 Definitely just make the VM basically be something like risk five. like the VM just ended up having a lot of needlessly complicated bits. There’s like ten different features of the Ethereum that are just needlessly pointless. Like, one of them is that even being 256 bit, the other is the Merkle tree being like hex instead of binary. it turns out like the reason why that was done is to optimize for databases. So you only have to do like eight reads and writes instead of 32. But the thing that I completely missed is that you could make h 3D like binary from the perspective of marketing, but from the perspective of databases, and that option just totally did not even come up to me. I think, there’s a lot of, like, probably like half the pre-compose that we did. We should have just never done them. Probably most of the pre-comp files, like, they just ended up contributing a lot to consensus risk without actually getting the benefits of, the, like, getting a lot of usage on them.

Vitalik Buterin 02:32:45 Probably the only exception is the, elliptic curve stuff. And that ended up being, like, the bedrock of the Ethereum privacy ecosystem. I think we should have never done Caddyshack, or we should have just that done shot to physics from the start. There’s like a bunch of technical things. There was also, like, there’s social things that, Could have been different. Like one like crazy idea that I sometimes like. Think about like as a sort of alternate history, as like, what if Ethereum had had no sale and no pre mine, but instead there was some kind of voting gadget by which, like 30% of the supply could go to fund that development for some period of time and the like. Basically, the argument was like, you know, it would have still developed the. Yeah, like there would have still been a lot of resources for development, but at the same time, like, it would have at least actually been an open system from day one. And like, just not even having the foundation as a central actor from the beginning.

Vitalik Buterin 02:33:58 so that was a, you know, I don’t know if that would have been, would have worked. But I think things that.

Vlad 02:34:05 Like.

Vitalik Buterin 02:34:06 Could have been interesting to try. Then. Of thinking, I mean, a lot of like individual choices in terms of, like how to deal with, like the people aspect of starting Ethereum. And, you know, I’ve talked about that in a bunch of different, occasions. On the proof of stake, I think, like we should have gone with a simpler and crappier proof of stake at the beginning, because, like, we just ended up spending way too much effort on an overcomplicated protocol that’s, like, actually ended up having quite a few security issues. And so now we’re actually going into single slot finality. And so now we have, a lot of this, research, around, around like an optimized protocol that’s, like, gets you the same kinds of properties in terms of, like finalizing, but the chain also being able to continue. If a lot of nodes go offline and, the and the like.

Vitalik Buterin 02:35:13 I made an implementation of it and it’s like only like the, the full thing is like 300 lines of code. so that’s like basically I think we should, we should have done, something simpler instead of showing like overoptimism ending up creating something that, like, needs to be replaced anyway. yeah. Like basically there’s just a lot of little things. also, I think, for privacy, I’m, the challenge was caring about privacy at the beginning was like, we did not have zero knowledge proofs. Right? but, I mean, we I guess we very plausibly could have had an, like, in a privacy ecosystem that started off being sort of Monero like, with ring signatures and then upgraded to snarks over time. I also think we should have started much earlier on the wallet side of privacy, like basically making it. Like a more default experience inside of wallets. Like that could have a there’s a lot of things where I think one of our biggest weaknesses is like, we haven’t paid enough attention to the wallet layer, right? I think it’s true even today.

Vitalik Buterin 02:36:18 Right. Like a lot of people have these big complaints about like cross-sell to interoperability and like I look at them and over half of the time the thing that they’re complaining about is a UX issue. So had we, like, done more at the wallet layer that, like a lot of things about Ethereum, could have been much better than they could otherwise have been, like even the whole two click to trade thing. Like obviously there’s like EIP 702 fixes that. It makes it not necessary. But there’s there’s ways that the like wallets could have been designed better to make that a one click experience for for users as well. Right. So you know just a lot of those kinds of little things.

Vlad Costea 02:37:02 Today WBTC on Ethereum, which is a wrapped Bitcoin, is like 100 times bigger than lightning Network and Liquid and rootstock, and it seems to be a pretty popular choice for people wanting to do DeFi with their Bitcoin. And I was going to ask you, first of all, would you say that Ethereum is a layer two to Bitcoin under these circumstances? And secondly, do you see this use case becoming more popular in the future?

Vitalik Buterin 02:37:30 Well, it’s it’s technically not a layer two because they don’t have verification.

Vitalik Buterin 02:37:34 Right. But I guess in that circumstance Ethereum is a sidechain to Bitcoin. Yes. and you know, if bitcoin DeFi happens then Bitcoin will also be a sidechain of Ethereum, which is, you know, pretty fun. but, then, Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely interesting to see those use cases take off more. I mean, the one thing that I wish for is definitely for them to be stronger on the business side. Right. Because I think right now the. Yeah, like it’s like basically a multi-sig and then like I think didn’t like like it get bought by Justin Sun recently or like something like that. Right. And like, I think you want something that’s, where the security doesn’t depend on knowing who the operators are. And like, increasingly, that kind of thing is actually possible with the technology. And so I think like, it just needs to be some team to just go and actually build it.

Vlad Costea 02:38:40 Do you see Bitcoin and Ethereum being complementary or friendly with each other, or are they actively competing for users and use cases?

Vitalik Buterin 02:38:50 I yeah, I mean, I think like realistically, yeah, I mean obviously some of both.

Vitalik Buterin 02:38:58 Right. Like I think there is a reality that sort of every cryptocurrency is competitive because they’re competing as places to store wealth. But at the same time, I think there’s a lot of, complementarity, as well. Right. Like just the kinds of use cases that they have, attracted so far have been very different. And, and also I think both, you know, the two have, just benefited each other quite a bit on, technology. like, you know, Bitcoin is now doing layer two is I mean, basically all of, it the original Ethereum design was motivated by Bitcoin, either by copying Bitcoin or by learning from, you know, what we perceived as mistakes of Bitcoin and, I mean, potentially, you know, things could go in the other direction, like maybe. Yeah, you know, like Bitcoin would become a, a multi client ecosystem, over time. And, you know, like maybe things in the, like the experience of the Ethereum ecosystem could help there. and I mean, a lot of, like the kind of philosophical backbone is, shared.

Vitalik Buterin 02:40:06 Also just, the a lot of, like, the institutional, kind of backbone of the, you know, making sure the cryptocurrency stays, easily accessible to people. I mean, like, like that, like, stays legal, you know, like, stay is like having a friendly, regulatory posture, like, I think there’s, a huge number of, common interests there. There’s, a huge number of common interests also in, like, cypherpunk values lower down the stack. Right. So, ultimately, you know, secure like your coins are not your coins. if you don’t, you don’t know if the hardware is going to rug you. Right? So, you know, you have to think about that. Think about the operating system. You don’t know if if you don’t know the operating system is going to, radio. right? think about like, you know, programming languages. so, peer to peer networking, right? Like peer to peer. Like, I think the needs of, are very similar.

Vitalik Buterin 02:41:08 so, like, there’s a lot of common interests and I think, like, more collaboration across those common interests. it would definitely be really great to happen to.

Vlad Costea 02:41:21 This question is going to be much more direct, because I guess for a number of years, there are people who built a platform basically vilifying you and calling you the King of bitcoiners and whatever. But the question is, do you still hold and use Bitcoin? Would you describe yourself a Bitcoin?

Vitalik Buterin 02:41:39 Yes I yes I, I still hold Bitcoin and I still I have sent a and I still have used it of actually I think I have like literally yeah. I believe within the last couple of months. I’ve actually sent a bitcoin transaction to pay for. I forget what it was. I think it was either a Namecheap subscription or like it was some some kind of subscription. So yeah.

Vlad Costea 02:42:06 Have you tried the Lightning Network because some people say this is the gacha right. It’s the end to all altcoins.

Vitalik Buterin 02:42:13 Right? I yeah, I mean I actually have not yet.

Vitalik Buterin 02:42:18 I think I’ve been, like waiting to see. Yeah. You know, like, it’s kind of solve its problems. Like, you get it, I get enough I get enough adoption. to get your point. I mean, is there, like a lightning? Like just like a desktop, like lightning friendly wallet that you could, recommend to me, and I’m happy to just, like.

Vlad Costea 02:42:42 Well, I would say so on mobile, the one that is non-custodial and works pretty well. There are a bunch of them. There’s Phoenix and there’s Blixt. I think Blixt is more nerdy. Has more options. Phoenix is, I think, more popular because they think has one of the largest nodes on the Lightning Network. Right. But for desktop, there’s Elan bits, which is pretty cool because it’s like WordPress. You basically have plugins that you add on top of your client, and you can unlock all the use cases that you want. You can make faucets. You can. But I think it’s by default custodial.

Vitalik Buterin 02:43:20 Right. How standardized is there? Like I guess like payments experience like if I yeah like pay for something with bitcoin that accepts bitcoin. like like what would be the like whether it’s, you know, like something like Namecheap or I mean like buying paying for plane tickets. Actually that’s also one of the use cases because like, you’d be surprised how often credit cards all break at the same time if you’re a nomad. like, what’s the probability that they’ll Accepts name, coin, or accept the lightning in a way that all of the different, lightning. Lightning wallets would be able to interoperate with.

Vlad Costea 02:43:59 Well, I think it’s been pretty standardized at this point. You’re describing issues that were true like six years ago or something.

Vitalik Buterin 02:44:07 Oh, okay. Okay. I yeah.

Vlad Costea 02:44:10 Then I think most wallets right now on mobile, they let you do submarine swaps, meaning that they go from lightning to unchain if you scan an engine address.

Vitalik Buterin 02:44:20 Right. Okay. No, that’s, I mean, that’s good. Yeah.

Vitalik Buterin 02:44:23 No, I definitely. Yeah. Have, Not, like, looked at the, like, practical, day to day use of, lightning, recently. I definitely is one of my faults. I will, I will make it, one of one of my top priorities then. It’s,

Vlad Costea 02:44:41 I think whatever uses BTCPay as opposed to centralized payment processors is also using lightning because it’s very easy to integrate. At the same time, it’s difficult for the operator to run a lightning node. And that’s another issue because the network became more centralized with Lsps, which is lightning service providers, and they take fees. Basically, it went back to the same issue that they were trying to solve with intermediaries taking fees. I think I’m responsible for paying one of the biggest fees on the Lightning Network. Last year, when I bought my car, I basically sent coins from lightning to Kraken using lightning, and I paid like $50 for a transaction fee, which is ridiculous. I could have paid much less on chain, but there are some advantages to using lightning, which is finality and also fungibility, because sometimes in Bitcoin and this is an issue, I think about this a lot.

Vlad Costea 02:45:42 I receive donations to my addresses on my website, and then I use Coinjoin because I don’t want to have these coins associated with any identity, you know. And I’m concerned at the same time because I see, for example, North Koreans using mixers and stuff like this, and I have no idea what my coins are going to catch. So I put them on the Lightning Network, and I pay with this because it becomes more fungible. It’s sort of a very complex workaround. I’m not very happy with it. I wish it was much simpler, but I think it’s the use case that works for having Bitcoin privacy right now.

Vitalik Buterin 02:46:21 Right. Yeah. That’s good. I mean, one of them. Yeah. I mean, I remember reading, like in Roger beers, like a book he complained about, like some of those, intermediation aspects of, lightning. And just like the difficulty of, like people running their own, 24 over seven box. I in. But, I mean, it’s a bit like making any of these kinds of things work.

Vitalik Buterin 02:46:52 Well, it’s like really hard, right? Like, even, like, with, roll ups. Like, it’s basically been now five and a half years since the roadmap started, and, we’re just getting a stage one way or two now, so, hopefully. Yeah, they’ll get the stage two over the next year as well. I mean, one of the things I’ve been thinking about for a while is like how we can make it easier for more people to run always on boxes, and, like boxes, like computers that, do some kind of service. That just depends on them, staying online. But it sounds like a lot of use cases, right? Like a lightning node is one. Ethereum staking is one, and then, AI is the other one, right? And, I.

Vlad Costea 02:47:38 Mean, I can get you in contact with the Start9 people. There’s Matt Hill, the CEO. I know him very well. He’s been on the show and he basically has this box that has also like a marketplace from which you download the applications that you want to run.

Vlad Costea 02:47:54 It has Bitcoin core, it has lightning clients of your choice. It has AI, it has the Monero node if you want that. But they don’t have anything Ethereum yet. And if you are able to explain to them which client they should be using to make it work on that hardware, I think can be very nice. Okay.

Vitalik Buterin 02:48:12 Yeah, yeah, I’d be happy to talk to him.

Vlad Costea 02:48:15 Yeah. And there’s also umbrella. There are a bunch of projects that try to sell something that you just plug into the wall socket, and it’s supposed to work.

Vitalik Buterin 02:48:26 Right? Right. Yep. Yeah. I mean, I’ve seen, like, providers like this, you know, they’ve been around for a while. I think there’s like Freedom Box was one from back then. So it’s it’s definitely good to see it becoming more mature. Maybe it’s the sort of thing where there’s just once there’s enough of a critical mass of applications, then it just like flips from being like a hobby that you forget about to just suddenly being a very viable thing.

Vlad Costea 02:48:53 I think it can definitely happen at the same time, the communities are too tribal. And sometimes I think about this because, for example, when Casa, which is Jameson Lopp, it’s he’s not the CEO, he’s the CTO, there’s someone else who is in charge there. But when he announced on Twitter that there’s going to be support for Ethereum and other ETH assets, there was a backlash and people called him a traitor and stuff like this. And I guess some companies are afraid of basically losing this purity argument and saying that they’re Bitcoin. Only in the case of start nine, they already added Monero, which I think is trying. It’s starting to get some acceptance among Bitcoiners that okay, this currency is not really fungible, but you can add Monero and there are some use cases there with Ethereum. If people understand that they can build contracts and whatever without being tribal and dogmatic, it can also happen because you guys have been able to lower their requirements. And I think the hardware also got exponentially better over the last decade or so.

Vitalik Buterin 02:50:06 It really has the hardware has gotten better. Also. The software has gotten better, like the the efficiency of, you know, like the EVM on the same software has increased by at least an order of magnitude. And then the denial of service stuff has been completely solved. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, to me, like, you know, the tribe should be. Yeah, I think first and foremost, not about a particular asset, but about the underlying ideals. Right. And, you know, I hope that, as you know, in Ethereum, we can continue to convince all of you guys that, you know, we can be a very effective stewards of the UN, of the underlying ideals and, just making sure that, financial, self sovereignty and, a free and open internet can continue to actually be a, a reality. People for people, you know, even during a time when lots of people don’t, don’t want it to be a reality. So let’s, let’s work.

Vitalik Buterin 02:51:08 Let’s keep working on this.

Vlad Costea 02:51:10 You can disagree with me, but I still see Ethereum as a research lab for Bitcoin, and it took me a few years to develop this vision. But a lot of the stuff that you built benefits Bitcoin. And as you said vice versa. You’ve learned from Bitcoin’s breakthroughs and mistakes also.

Vitalik Buterin 02:51:29 Yeah absolutely.

Vlad Costea 02:51:30 And maybe the go on sorry.

Vitalik Buterin 02:51:34 Yeah. No it’s like it’s Just, you know, as I’ve said, there’s a lot of, plenty of very good opportunities to learn from each other and, collaborate more in that way.

Vlad Costea 02:51:45 Some people think that the future will be just 21 million Bitcoin, and that’s the only asset. But I think for a cypherpunk future, we’re gonna need like 4 or 5 or more blockchains which serve different purposes. Just like today we have visa, we have Mastercard, we have American Express. They’re very similar, but they have a different customer base, and they have trade offs that you can find. So I see in the future that we’re going to have Bitcoin.

Vlad Costea 02:52:14 Definitely something for smart contracts. Unless Bitcoin I don’t know how we’re gonna get that into bitcoin at this point. Even covenants seem to be very divisive. We’re going to have something for fungibility slash privacy definitely. We’re gonna have maybe something just for experimentation, like general purpose, whatever. And there’s always going to be, you know, the casinos, the pansies. It’s inescapable. Every generation has these. And technology doesn’t enable or disable anything.

Vitalik Buterin 02:52:56 All right. Well, it’s,

Vlad Costea 02:52:59 Yeah. I wanted to ask you before this that we what’s your current opinion on Bitcoin maximalism. Because you wrote two very different articles, one which basically tried to turn the term into an insult, and the other one which basically described carnivore lifestyle. And that I think if it was a prank, it was one of the best ever. If you were serious about the carnivore diet, I want to learn more.

Vitalik Buterin 02:53:28 No, my actual diet is like I have a lot of fish and a lot of vegetables. so, I guess, you know, it’s still, but, no, I think, the, like, philosophically interesting thing there, right.

Vitalik Buterin 02:53:45 Is, this the like what kind of a community are you needs to have to, like. Really? Yeah. Like, maintain, particular values even in the face of, like, very strong actors, including on the inside and on the outside, including governments and commercial, including people who, like, present themselves as being very friendly and, and, well and well meaning, like, all trying to push the ecosystem in some direction that goes further away from those values. Right. And, well, these are problems that, like Bitcoin had to face. I mean, I think these are problems that, like Ethereum has to face as well. Right? And I think, you know, if there isn’t a contingent of Ethereum culture that’s like very strongly, pushing for, like decentralization, privacy, censorship resistance, then like, there is a very natural way in which the ecosystem could, just like, slide into being a corporate chain where we sort of accept intermediaries out of pragmatism, and then they get, enshrined forever, and then suddenly we get don’t have self sovereignty anymore.

Vitalik Buterin 02:55:01 I mean, the challenge, of course, is, you know, there is such a thing as autoimmune diseases, right? And, there’s definitely a huge number of, very smart people that can be repelled by maximalism. Right. And so, and there’s, like a challenge in, getting a kind of, you know, the good parts of that without the bad, right? Like, basically. Yeah. Like having a. Yeah, culture that is, like, Too strong without being cruel. And I think that is possible. And I think like that is the sort of thing that Ethereum definitely needs more of. And I mean, I think I like Bitcoin, I definitely really get needs and needs as well. I think I mean like probably the, you know, like the failure modes are a bit different, right? Like I would say. Yeah. Like though in the in, in the Bitcoin case like it has been interesting to see some of these kind of newer attempts at co-opting. Right.

Vitalik Buterin 02:56:05 things. So like, you know, like basically Saylor ism. Right. It’s like, hey, you know, like people’s ability to self-custody doesn’t actually matter. Like, let’s let’s just be a fully institutional asset and, that, like, basically, I think the, the one of the big failure modes of, a toxic, like culture, aside from just driving people away, is that it often ends up being toxic in only one direction, right? It ends up being, like, super vulnerable to like, people who present themselves as being like friends, right? I mean, even like Bitcoin Cash is vulnerability to Craig, right? Is like an excellent example there, right? It’s the it was the thing that, Scott Alexander in one of his posts a long time ago, he described it as, the it’s the 50 Stalin’s, critique, which is basically his argument is like, oh, well, actually, yeah. You know, in the Soviet Union, you had plenty of room to disagree with the governments.

Vitalik Buterin 02:57:03 Like, you could totally say, like, hey, I think Stalin is great. I think Stalin is amazing. We just, he’s so amazing that really the biggest problem is that we don’t have 50 Stalin’s that are running and die, making the Soviet Union 50 times greater. And, and so his argument is like, well, actually, yeah. You know, in any kind of, culture, you know, you’re going to have a sort of approved, you know, a direction to kind of be maximalist, right? And, you want to make sure that like, that also doesn’t start becoming a problem, right? So I yeah, I mean, I really hope that, you know, the culture of, like nodes, the culture of, like doing things on chain. I mean, like, the more technical, sides of things can be. Yeah. Like stronger in, in Bitcoin to, like, really start to push back against, sailor ism more. I mean, maybe after the current political winds that kind of blow over, there’s going to be more of a, an opportunity for that.

Vitalik Buterin 02:58:03 And I think, I mean, in Ethereum, you know, the like I think the risks are somewhat different. Like the risks are basically that, people accept, just like adding in seven different types of intermediaries. And then all these intermediaries are like VC funded startups and they, you know, like market themselves as being Ethereum alliance and like being friends and, And, like, we need a strong contingent to try to, push against that. So it’s like, that’s necessary, though. Also, we, like the the way that that happens, should not be capricious. Right. And like, the downside is always, like what happens when it is capricious, right. What happens when like it is kind of random and, it’s like the equivalent of, you know, like having, like, police officers without laws where, like, they just, you know, there’s no speed limit, but they just, like, randomly decide like, hey, you’re going too fast and like, let’s, like, take away your entire car for it, right? So.

Vlad Costea 02:59:05 Yeah. And I, before I let you go and I gotta acknowledge that you’ve been here for three hours. I have a lot of respect for being able to go for so long before losing interest. Is there anything in Bitcoin today that gets you excited for the future? Something that gives you hope that the project can still scale and become private and get everything that it currently lacks.

Vitalik Buterin 02:59:31 I mean, I think the the layer two stuff, is it right? I think like to me, yeah. For Bitcoin to really like succeed and be vulnerable. its needs like I think it needs to have a strong technical core and not just a, financial core, because if it just has a financial core, then the tech becomes perceived as something that should just be outsourced for convenience. And once you have that, then like the decentralization begins, right? And so like seeing the renewed excitement around like around the object based historical tours, around inscriptions, around all of these protocols, like, I think that stuff is good, right? And the more that, Bitcoin does things like that, I think the better.

Vlad Costea 03:00:19 Thank you very much for the telling. Where can people follow you and read your latest thoughts?

Vitalik Buterin 03:00:25 Yeah, so there is my blog, which is on ENS at Vitalik. And if your browser is not ENS capable, then that’s Vitalik.eth.limo. There is, there are my socials, which are Vitalik Buterin on, forecaster and, Twitter. there are I mean, also, you know, I can also I think lens is Vitalik for me as well. then there’s like various kind of haphazard, you know, like podcast and, in-person things that I do in various contexts. Also writings in other places. So, Ethereum magicians and ether research are very big ones. And I think you should also follow those to see some, Some writings by other people about Ethereum. So no, I’m definitely in many different, places online and offline.

Vlad Costea 03:01:26 Thank you very much. Vitalik, come to ETHDam next week if you can, but don’t give an answer because your OpSec should not be compromised if you want to join.

Vlad Costea 03:01:36 Thank you to everyone who listened to this. It’s been a pretty high number, 33,000 people. Thank you very much for tuning in. And thanks to the sponsors once again, Citrea, Layer Two Labs, SideShift, Bitcoin.com News, No Ones, and HODLing. Thank you very much. I’ll see you next week with an interview with portal, which is the sort of layer two solution that’s trying to do swaps between Ethereum and Bitcoin with the Lightning Network. I don’t know how how that works. I’m going to learn from them next week. And I guess good night. It’s five in the morning here already.

Vitalik Buterin 03:02:15 Yes, yes. Good night.