Author: imToken
With the conclusion of the Devcon7 conference, the future development direction of the Ethereum ecosystem has once again attracted widespread attention. This inevitably brings to mind the proposal by economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok in a recent podcast: Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin should be a strong candidate for the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.
Tyler Cowen praised: 'Vitalik Buterin has built a platform and created an asset; his achievements can be said to refute Mises' regression theorem. Although Ethereum developed on the foundation of Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin, Vitalik Buterin's achievements have undoubtedly reached the level of a Nobel Prize.'
Why does Vitalik have a lot of philosophical thoughts?
At the age of 19, Vitalik Buterin began dedicating himself to building a new economic infrastructure for the internet. According to author Nathan Schneider in his book (Proof of Stake): Vitalik Buterin's initial ideal was writing, and after being encouraged by his father to develop an interest in BTC, Vitalik Buterin posted on a forum in 2011 asking: If he wrote an article about Bitcoin, would anyone pay for it with BTC?
As a result, someone indeed paid for it. Thus, Vitalik Buterin was able to continue writing and later collaborated to found (Bitcoin Magazine), which provided detailed coverage of Bitcoin, an emerging phenomenon at that time that still belonged to niche culture.
From writing magazines to founding Ethereum, and then seeing Ethereum develop to where it is today after 10 years, Vitalik Buterin has continued to write, sharing his views on blogs, forums, and various social platforms, and actively engaging with others. It is thanks to such exchanges that Ethereum has attracted a loyal supporter base over the past 10 years, and its roadmap is gradually becoming clearer.
In the future, if the roadmap of Ethereum is to be ultimately realized, founder Vitalik Buterin's views must still gain broader understanding. Of course, these views may also spark controversy, but controversy and skepticism are also sources of motivation for Ethereum to move toward a better future.
In the second half of 2024, as the U.S. elections proceed, discussions in the crypto industry about asset appreciation continue to heat up, sparking many users' 'wealth creation dreams,' as if technological iteration is no longer the most focused goal. On August 21, 2024, Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform, jokingly responding: I was told to 'think less philosophically and post more bullish Ethereum posts.' Therefore, the following image is a bullish Ethereum post, generated by AI image generation tools Stable Diffusion 3 and GIMP working together.
This is the difference in the Ethereum ecosystem.
In an atmosphere where 'everyone is talking about getting rich, and you are still talking about technology', Vitalik Buterin continues to firmly propagate the technical philosophical goals of Ethereum. Since October 14, 2024, Vitalik Buterin has published 6 blogs, deeply analyzing Ethereum's future technical development and solutions based on a review of Ethereum's roadmap.
The Merge: Released on October 14, 2024, it discusses the directions for improvement that Ethereum needs to take after transitioning to the PoS consensus mechanism. The directions for improvement are divided into two parts: technical optimization (such as stability, performance, accessibility for small validators) and economic transformation (to address centralization risks, which is included in this part). The former belongs to discussions in the 'The Merge' area, while the latter is included in discussions in the 'The Scourge' area.
The goals of technical optimization include: improving single-slot finality, that is, confirming and finalizing transactions as quickly as possible while maintaining decentralization; enhancing the feasibility for individual validators; strengthening Ethereum's resistance to 51% attacks. Additionally, it includes research areas such as accelerating transaction confirmations.
Refer to the article The Merge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/14/futures1.html
The Surge: Released on October 17, 2024, it explores the development history of Ethereum's scaling strategies, from 'sharding' to 'Layer 2 protocols,' and then to the integration of the two paths, ultimately forming an expansion plan centered around Rollup, achieving significant improvements in data bandwidth, but still facing many challenges, such as ensuring the robustness of Layer 1 and adhering to decentralization while ensuring maximum interoperability between Layer 2s.
Refer to the article The Surge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/17/futures2.html
The Scourge: Released on October 20, 2024, it explores the centralization risks and value extraction risks that Ethereum Layer 1 faces after adopting the PoS consensus mechanism, emphasizing that the risks are specifically concentrated in two areas: block construction and staking assets. It also introduces progress made since 2024 in addressing these two risk areas, such as implementing a dual-layer staking model and reducing asset issuance.
Refer to the article The Scourge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/20/futures3.html
The Verge: Released on October 23, 2024, it discusses the challenges and solutions of Ethereum's stateless validation, highlighting how technologies like Verkle Tree and STARK enhance the decentralization and efficiency of the blockchain.
Refer to the article The Verge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/23/futures4.html
The Purge: Released on October 26, 2024, the article discusses the challenges Ethereum faces in how to reduce complexity and storage requirements in the long term while maintaining the chain's durability. Decentralized applications need to ensure that their dependencies do not break functionality due to upgrades, especially the Layer 1 protocol itself. Mentioned solutions include cleaning up unnecessary protocol features and reducing client storage burdens through strategies like 'historical data expiration' and 'state data expiration.'
Refer to the article The Purge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/26/futures5.html
The Splurge: Released on October 29, 2024, the article discusses the concept of 'Splurge' in Ethereum's development roadmap for 2023, aiming to bring the Ethereum virtual machine into an efficient and stable 'final state', implementing account abstraction within the protocol, allowing all users to enjoy safer and more convenient accounts, optimizing transaction fee economics, improving scalability and reducing risks, exploring advanced cryptography to enhance Ethereum's long-term performance, with specific implementation steps including EIP-1559 technical proposals.
Refer to the article The Splurge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/29/futures6.html
Perhaps, at a time when others are talking about getting rich, Ethereum is still focusing on the technology. This is the biggest difference between Ethereum and other blockchain ecosystems.
A large developer community and its appeal to developers is the foundation upon which Ethereum was established, and it is also the basis for future development. Compared to the ecosystems of other chains, Ethereum has more toolchains and frameworks (such as Truffle, etc.) that can support more types of smart contract and DApp development.
At the same time, Ethereum's tools and frameworks balance performance and depth, and are not just infrastructure created for developing a single high-performance 'transaction tool.' After years of development, the technical standards proposed by Ethereum have become widespread, such as ERC-20, ERC-721, and other asset standards that have been deeply applied throughout the crypto industry.
How to look ahead more accurately?
So what future can be envisioned by discussing technology? Vitalik Buterin once stated in a blog that he has a liking for technological optimism, but this feeling is somewhat subtle. He believes that fundamentally transformative technologies will be brighter in the future than they are now.
Vitalik Buterin advocates that the best thing people should strive to do is to keep the world roughly the same as it is today, only needing to reduce some greed.
At the same time, Vitalik Buterin believes that technology should not only be measured in terms of magnitude; direction is also important. If certain types of technology develop well, the reliability of making the world better is higher, which can mitigate the negative impacts brought by other types of technology.
Because in today's real world, certain technological development directions are overly emphasized, while others are not given enough attention. This requires humanity to consciously choose the directions we want, after all, the formula of 'profit maximization' does not automatically lead people to the desired destination.
How to see future directions more accurately? In a blog published on November 9, 2024, Vitalik Buterin revisited and expanded upon an innovative viewpoint, mentioning that the feature he finds most exciting in Ethereum applications is 'prediction markets.'
Vitalik Buterin believes: 'Prediction markets' are actually a very useful tool for the world, not just a place where the average person thinks of making 'bets.' Moreover, from a higher dimension, 'prediction markets' are just a use case in a future category of more macro applications, which has the potential to become an important method for improving social media, science, news, governance, and other fields — this application category is called 'Info Finance.'
