Author | Vitalik Buterin Original link: https://www.theblockbeats.info/news/55078?continueFlag=5d92b47827603f2ead3b136082bd6fec Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech entitled "What Excites Me About the Next Decade" on the first day of the TOKEN2049 main venue. He talked about what he believes is different from the past in the current encryption field, and bluntly stated that "the current encryption field is no longer in its early stages; Ethereum now needs to meet the needs of mainstream adoption while maintaining open source and decentralized values." The following is the original text of Vitalik's speech, which BlockBeats has compiled as follows: People often say that encryption is still in its early stages and we are still building infrastructure. Indeed, how long did it take for something like the Internet to come to fruition? I think people have been saying this almost since the launch of Bitcoin. And one of the real challenges we face now is that today's encryption field is no longer in its early stages. Ethereum as a project has been around for over 10 years, and in the 15 years since Bitcoin was created, we've seen things like ChatGPT go from being completely non-existent to suddenly rising up and completely changing people's understanding of artificial intelligence.   So the question we have to ask ourselves is how exactly should we view all of this? Are we really still in the early stages? My answer to this question is that I don't think we are early in crypto, but we are definitely in a special stage.   What's going on? We can dig a little deeper. I'm reminded of my experience visiting Argentina in 2021. It was my first time to visit Argentina. The first thing that caught my attention was that there was a demographic group across the country that was not only extremely excited about cryptocurrency, but was actively using it on a large scale.   But I was actually walking around on Christmas Day, and the first coffee shop I noticed was open. I walked in, and the owner knew me and allowed me to pay for my coffee and the dessert that I had with my friends with ETH. But they were not using decentralized technology.This is the same thing that ultimately makes me think that, at least initially, the whole “getting everyone to accept Bitcoin as money” thing failed. It was fees. If you remember the marketing in the beginning, why Bitcoin was so great. It was usually about PayPal and some of the credit card companies, who ripped off their customers on fees. They charged very high fees, which was terrible, but Bitcoin itself has fees of $1 to $50.   Ethereum fees have also gone up.   The highest fee I pay on Ethereum is actually for privacy-preserving transactions. Suffice to say, Gas has been going up, and every time I do an operation, there are a lot of comments on Twitter. So privacy protocols have a very good market fit. Some transactions cost about $800. A lot of projects fail because of fees. So what’s new in 2024?Here’s a fee chart of a weird Ethereum phenomenon. Fees have dropped from between $10 and $0.50 to less than a cent, basically close to zero. Meanwhile, two major Ethereum Laeyr 2 projects, OP and ARB, have reached a major security milestone called Phase 1, and multiple ZK-based Rollups have told me that they plan to reach Phase 1 soon. So Rollups will soon become more secure, too.   Fees are finally becoming affordable. But that’s not the only thing that’s improved. Another annoyance I distinctly remember when I was traveling in Argentina was trying to send someone money using the Ethereum mainnet, and the transaction fee was about $4, and it took about 5 minutes for the transaction to confirm. Although EIP-1559 was already live at this time, this particular wallet had not actually upgraded.   Bitcoin blocks are generated every 10 minutes, so you might have to wait 10 minutes or even an hour for a transaction to be confirmed. And Ethereum's theoretical block time is 13 seconds, but because the gas market was very inefficient in the past, sometimes if you're unlucky, you might have to wait a completely random amount of time, maybe 5 minutes or even longer for your transaction to be packaged. EIP-1559 actually basically solves this problem.   So, actually these two things have allowed me to have a stable transaction confirmation time between 5 and 15 seconds today. If you use a Layer 2 solution with fast and free confirmations, it can usually be reduced to one second. So basically, these two major issues are the biggest factors that lead to centralized user experience being far better than decentralized user experience in 2021.   We can also simply evaluate the user experience quality of applications. You can see (slide) a tweet posted in 2015, which is a demo of a hackathon. And next to it, you can see Firefly, which is a client for Farcaster and Twitter, Lens. If you look at the quality of the user interface, it looks like it's not far behind the quality of Web2 products, but it's a decentralized application.   This year we also saw progress in account abstraction. We saw 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 and better privacy protocols. Even with the existing usability improvements, a few years ago everyone was still 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, the limitations of technology were a hindrance. I even remember the 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 reasons not to use cryptocurrencies no longer exist. So, what's the reason to get in 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 – benefits of accepting Bitcoin include easier payments, security and control over funds, zero or lower fees, and protection of personal identity. Of the first four, two are features that I consider to be very unique to cryptocurrencies. The other two were once unique to cryptocurrencies, but are they still? Today we have Venmo, and some better payment methods, as well as WeChat Pay. Centralized systems are constantly improving, but there are still problems in some places. Payments and access to financing remain very difficult. Why are they still difficult? It's not because of 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 type of improvement. Regarding technology, what kind of technology specifically do you mean? One way of thinking is to refer to this blog post written by Josh Stark at the Ethereum Foundation, published about two years ago.The article is titled Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains. The argument is that blockchains allow us to create a kind of digital solidity, basically any kind of social solidity, that allows us to create durable digital structures that are hard to change.   And that resists being destroyed, just like you can make a solid physical structure out of something like concrete. If you think about how blockchains are different from other things.   Some of the early cyberpunk technologies, like mixnets, Tor, BitTorrent, etc.   You realize that blockchains, at their core, are about creating structures that are durable and extremely strong. So if your file sharing network crashes, that’s OK, you just switch to another one. In a week, everyone forgets about it. If one locking mechanism crashes and you switch to another, everyone loses all their money. That’s a fundamental difference.   So blockchains enable the internet to not only work around the weaknesses of the old world’s structures, but also to build better alternatives that can solve similar problems.   Blockchains are like digital concrete. So what is digital concrete good for? Digital concrete is used to build virtual castles in the sky. So who here has seen the movie Castle in the Sky? Come on, raise your hand if you have. So the reason this movie is interesting is, first of all, I really think it's great. I think it's an absolute masterpiece from Studio Ghibli, and I've seen it at least five times. But it turns out that this movie also sort of accidentally became the inspiration for Ethereum, and I didn't even realize it. Basically what happened is that in 2013, I was browsing a list of fictional elements on Wikipedia and I found Ethereum.   It sounded like a really nice name, and it reminded me of a 19th century scientific theory that there was a medium that permeated everything. So I chose the name "Ethereum." And then two months later, one of the designers at the Ethereum Foundation, before the organization was even called the Ethereum Foundation, decided to use this diamond as the Ethereum logo. I thought that was cool at the time, and that's why I like the logo, it's beautiful.The combination of the serious and the fun aspects of crypto is what I want people to remember. A castle is something that protects you, your family, and your tribe. It can be a castle in Disneyland, where your community can have fun. It can be a museum that preserves thousands of years of your culture. It can be all of those things, and all kinds of digital councils. Anything we can build on Ethereum.   Once we have our digital castle, what should our key goal be? My view all along is that we need to meet the needs of mainstream adoption while maintaining the values ​​of open source and decentralization. What does that mean? For example, wallet security. Historically, there have been basically two ways to keep your funds.   One way is basically you take the crazy self-sovereign maximalist approach. You write down a seed phrase and do everything offline. You carve the seed phrase into a piece of titanium, and then you put the titanium into a more solid titanium lockbox, and then you bury the lockbox 10 meters underground, and your coins are safe. That's one way.   The other way is to say, I'm just a normal person, I don't want to go through all this trouble. You give your coins to someone who is trustworthy, there's a "good guy" named Sam, who went to events with Clinton, he must be trustworthy. But two years later, it turns out that you were a little wrong about who was trustworthy and who was not trustworthy. So I think these 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 platform and you want both? This is where multi-signature smart wallets come in. Multi-signature means that you have multiple keys, for example, you may have 6 keys and you need 4 to send a transaction. You can even set a rule that only one key is required for small transactions. These keys can be any combination that 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 generate a proof that you control a specific email address, right.So you can basically bring the trust anchor of Web2.0 into the world of Web3.0, where 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 deposit without revealing which one, but can prove that their deposits did not come from criminals.   This is a way to allow ordinary users to have a high degree of privacy while meeting many important compliance requirements, but there are actually no backdoors.   You can have privacy and trust at the same time. On the Ethereum mainnet, many technical improvements are happening to make Layer 1 more decentralized and easy to verify while reducing final confirmation time and increasing capacity. These things are already happening.   This is the direction that the Ethereum ecosystem and I think the entire cryptocurrency will go in the next decade.

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