Organized by: Rhythm BlockBeats
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, delivered a keynote speech titled "What Excites Me About the Next Decade" on the first day of the TOKEN2049 main venue, telling what he thought about the current cryptocurrency The field is different from the past, and bluntly said: "The cryptocurrency field is no longer in its early stages; now Ethereum needs to meet the needs of mainstream adoption while maintaining the values of open source and decentralization."
The following is the original text of Vitalik’s speech, organized by Rhythm BlockBeats as follows:
People tend to say that it’s still early days for cryptocurrencies and we’re still building the infrastructure. Really, how long did it take for something like the internet to come to fruition, and I think people have been saying that pretty much since the launch of Bitcoin. A real challenge we face now is that today’s cryptocurrency field is no longer in its early stages.
Ethereum as a project has existed for more than 10 years, and in the 15 years since the birth of Bitcoin, we have seen things like ChatGPT go from completely non-existent to suddenly rising, completely changing people's view of artificial intelligence. understand.
So the question we have to ask ourselves is, what on earth are we to make of all this? Are we really still in the early stages? My answer to that question is, I think we're not early in the cryptocurrency space, but we're definitely at a special stage.
What happened? We can dig a little deeper. I was reminded of my visit to Argentina in 2021. This is my first time to Argentina. The first thing that caught my attention was that there was a demographic group across the country that was not only incredibly excited about cryptocurrency, but was actively using it on a massive scale.
But actually, I was walking around on Christmas Day and the first coffee shop I noticed was open. I walked in and the owner recognized me and allowed me to pay in ETH for coffee and a dessert I had with friends. But they are not using decentralized technology.
This is the same reason that ultimately led me to believe that getting everyone to accept Bitcoin as currency failed, at least initially. It's the cost. If you remember the marketing in the beginning, why Bitcoin was so great. PayPal and some credit card companies are usually mentioned, and they all rip off customers in terms of fees. The fees they charge are so high it's just awful, but Bitcoin itself costs anywhere from $1 to $50.
Ethereum fees have also increased.
The highest fees I paid on Ethereum were actually for privacy preserving transactions. Suffice it to say, the gas keeps going up and there are a lot of comments on Twitter every time I do it. Therefore, privacy protocols have very good market fit. Some transactions cost around $800. The reason why many projects fail is cost. So, what’s new in 2024?
Here’s a fee chart on Ethereum’s weirdness. Fees have dropped from between $10 and $0.50 to less than 1 cent, essentially close to zero. Meanwhile, OP and ARB, two major Ethereum Layer 2s, have reached an important security milestone called Phase 1, and multiple ZK-based rollups have also told me they plan to reach Phase 1 soon. As a result, Rollup will soon become more secure as well.
The fees are finally becoming affordable. But that's not the only improvement. Another annoyance I distinctly remember while traveling in Argentina was that I was trying to transfer money to a person using the Ethereum mainnet and the transaction fee was about $4 and the transaction confirmation took about 5 minutes. Although EIP-1559 was already online at this time, this particular wallet had not actually been upgraded.
Bitcoin blocks are generated every 10 minutes, so you may have to wait 10 minutes or even an hour for a transaction to be confirmed. The theoretical block time of Ethereum is 13 seconds, but because the Gas market was very inefficient in the past, sometimes if you are unlucky, you may need to wait for a completely random time, which may be 5 minutes, or even longer, for the transaction to be processed. Pack. EIP-1559 actually basically solves this problem.
So those two things actually keep my transaction confirmation times between 5 and 15 seconds today. This can often be reduced to one second if using a Layer 2 solution with fast free confirmations. So basically, these two main issues are the biggest factors that make the centralized user experience in 2021 far better than the decentralized user experience.
We can also simply evaluate the quality of the user experience of the application. You can see (speech PPT) a tweet from 2015, which was a hackathon presentation. And on the side, you can see Firefly, a client for Farcaster and Twitter, Lens. If you look at the quality of the user interface, it doesn't look that far removed from the quality of Web2 products, but it's based on a decentralized application.
This year we also saw progress in account abstraction. We are seeing more and more people using security tools. We saw EIP-7702. We're starting to see mainstream adoption of ZK-snarks, in a variety of different applications. As a result, we have new, better privacy protocols.
Even with the existing usability improvements, a few years ago people were complaining about having to manually switch networks. Today, I feel like I haven't actually switched networks manually in at least the past year. Therefore, technological limitations used to be a hindrance. I even remember that moment when it looked like CryptoKitties might become a real hit app. But what happened next? The success of CryptoKitties pushed Ethereum’s gas price to extremes.
Ethereum became essentially unusable, which itself limited its growth. This is no longer true today, but it basically means that the reason not to use cryptocurrencies no longer exists. So, what’s the reason for entering in the first place? I think one mistake people sometimes make is viewing cryptocurrency as an efficiency technology. This is something a lot of people were talking about ten years ago.
Let’s look at what people said about Bitcoin in 2013 – the benefits of accepting Bitcoin include easier payments, security and control over funds, zero or lower fees, protection of personal identity. Of the first four, two are features that I consider to be very unique to cryptocurrencies. The other two items were once unique to cryptocurrencies, but were they still so now? Nowadays we have Venmo, and some better payment methods, and WeChat Pay.
Centralized systems continue to improve, but they still have problems in some places.
Payment and access to financing remain very difficult. Why are they still difficult? This is not due to access to technology. Basically due to the constraints of global politics. Therefore, I think it is important to remember that the benefits that cryptocurrencies bring to the world are not tied to the same technological improvements. Just like switching from a conventional jet to a supersonic jet is a technological improvement, but it's a different kind of improvement.
Regarding technology, what kind of technology do you mean specifically? One way to look at it is to refer to this blog post written by Josh Stark at the Ethereum Foundation, published about two years ago. The title of the article is "Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains". The argument is that blockchain enables us to create a kind of digital solidity, basically any form of social solidity, that allows us to create long-lasting digital structures that are difficult to change.
And this resists damage, just like you can create strong physical structures out of materials like concrete. If you think about how blockchain is different from other things.
Some early cyberpunk technologies, such as hybrid networks, Tor, BitTorrent, etc. You will realize that the core of blockchain is to create durable and extremely powerful structures. So if your file sharing network goes down, that's okay, you just switch to another network. After a week, everyone will forget. If one locking mechanism breaks and you switch to another, everyone loses all their money. This is a fundamental difference.
Blockchain therefore enables networks to not only bypass the weaknesses of old world structures, but also to better build alternatives that can solve similar problems.
Blockchain is like digital concrete. So what is digital concrete used for? Digital concrete is used to build virtual sky castles. So who here has seen the movie "Castle in the Sky"? Come on, raise your hand if you've seen it.
So the reason this movie is interesting is, first of all, I actually thought it was great. I think this is an absolute Studio Ghibli masterpiece, I've seen it at least five times. But it turns out that the movie was also an accidental inspiration for Ethereum in a way that I didn't even realize. Basically what happened is that in 2013 I discovered Ethereum while browsing through a list of fictional elements on Wikipedia.
It sounds like a really nice name, and reminds me of a 19th-century scientific theory that held that there was a medium (Ethereum) that permeated everything. So I chose the name "Ethereum". Then two months later, one of the designers of the Ethereum Foundation, before the organization was even called the Ethereum Foundation, decided to use the diamond as the Ethereum logo. I thought it was cool and that's why I love the logo, it's beautiful.
There's a mix of serious and fun aspects of cryptocurrency, and that's what I want people to remember. A castle is something that protects you, your family, and your tribe. The castle can also be a Disneyland castle for your community to enjoy. The castle can also be a museum, preserving the thousand-year history of your culture. Castles can be all of these things as well, as well as various types of digital councils. Anything we can build on Ethereum.
What should be our key goals after completing the Digital Castle? My view has always been that we need to meet the needs of mainstream adoption while maintaining the values of open source and decentralization. What does this mean? Take, for example, wallet security. Historically, there have been basically two ways to keep your money.
One of the ways to do that is basically you take a crazy self-sovereignty extremist approach. You write a mnemonic phrase and everything happens offline. You engrave the mnemonic words on a piece of titanium metal, then put the titanium metal into a stronger titanium metal lock box, and then bury the lock box 10 meters deep underground, so that your coins are safe . This is one way.
Another way is to say, I'm just a normal person and I don't want this hassle. You give the coins to a trustworthy person. There is a "good guy" named Sam who attended the event with Clinton. He must be trustworthy. But two years later, it turns out you were a little wrong about who was trustworthy and who wasn't. So I think those are not the only two options. If you want to protect yourself from centralized bad actors, then you have to take traditional self-protection measures.
What if you are a centralized exchange and you want both? This is what a multi-signature smart wallet does. Multi-signature means you have multiple keys, for example you might have 6 keys and need 4 to send a transaction. You can even set a rule so that only one key is required for small transactions. These keys can be any combination you control.
Friends and family and so on, you can actually create an Ethereum account, which is a smart contract wallet that can only send transactions if you produce a proof that you control a specific email address, right. So you can basically bring the trust anchors of Web2.0 into the Web3.0 world, and in the Web3.0 world, you can even diversify your trust. I personally trust my multi-signature wallet more than any one centralized account.
For example, this is a demo wallet (PPT content) that is completely based on Ethereum, but it has the same user experience as Venmo. Through a special mechanism, users can prove that their withdrawals came from a certain deposit without revealing which one, but they can prove that their deposits did not come from criminals.
This is a way to give the average user a high degree of privacy while meeting many important compliance requirements, but without actually having a backdoor.
You can have privacy and trust at the same time. On the Ethereum mainnet, many technical improvements are taking place to make Layer 1 more decentralized and easier to verify while reducing final confirmation time and increasing capacity. These things are already happening.
This is where I think the Ethereum ecosystem, and indeed cryptocurrencies as a whole, are going to go over the next decade.
(The above content is excerpted and reprinted with the authorization of our partner PANews, original text link | Source: Rhythm BlockBeats)
Statement: The article only represents the author's personal views and opinions, and does not represent the objective views and positions of the blockchain. All contents and opinions are for reference only and do not constitute investment advice. Investors should make their own decisions and transactions, and the author and Blockchain Client will not be held responsible for any direct or indirect losses caused by investors' transactions.
"Full text of "Buterin"'s latest speech: The encryption industry is no longer in its early stages, and Ethereum needs to meet mainstream adoption needs" This article was first published on "Block Guest".
