Written by: 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 suggestion 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 Economics.
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 the Nobel Prize.'
Why does Vitalik often engage in philosophical thinking?
At the age of 19, Vitalik Buterin began working to build a new economic infrastructure for the internet. According to author Nathan Schneider in (Proof of Stake), Vitalik Buterin's initial ideal was writing. After being encouraged by his father to take an interest in BTC, Vitalik Buterin posted on a forum in 2011 asking: If he wrote an article about Bitcoin, would anyone pay him in BTC?
As a result, some people indeed paid for this. Thus, Vitalik Buterin was able to continue writing and subsequently collaborated to establish (Bitcoin Magazine), detailing Bitcoin, which at that time was still a niche cultural phenomenon.
From writing magazines to founding Ethereum, and now 10 years later in Ethereum's development, Vitalik Buterin has been continuously writing, sharing his views on blogs, forums, and various social platforms, and actively engaging. Thanks to such exchanges, Ethereum has attracted a group of loyal supporters during its development over the past decade, and its roadmap is gradually becoming clearer.
In the future, if Ethereum's roadmap is to be ultimately realized, founder Vitalik Buterin's viewpoints still need to gain broader understanding. Of course, these viewpoints may also provoke controversy, but controversy and skepticism are also sources of motivation for Ethereum to move towards a better future.
In the second half of 2024, alongside the ongoing U.S. elections, discussions in the crypto industry about asset appreciation continue to heat up, igniting many users' 'wealth creation dreams', as if technological iterations are no longer the most concerned goal. On August 21, 2024, Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform, jokingly responding: I was told to 'do less philosophical thinking and post more Ethereum bullish posts'. Therefore, the following image is a bullish post about Ethereum, created collaboratively by the AI image generation tool Stable Diffusion 3 and GIMP.
This is the difference in the Ethereum ecosystem.
In an atmosphere where 'everyone talks about getting rich while you still talk about technology', Vitalik Buterin steadfastly spreads the technical philosophical goals of Ethereum. Starting from October 14, 2024, Vitalik Buterin published 6 consecutive blog posts, deeply analyzing the future technical development and solutions of Ethereum based on a review of the Ethereum roadmap.
The Merge: Released on October 14, 2024, it discusses the directions for improvement that Ethereum needs to consider after transitioning to the PoS consensus mechanism, divided into two parts: technical optimization (such as stability, performance, and accessibility for small validators) and economic transformation (to address centralization risks, which is included in this part). The former belongs to the discussion of 'The Merge', while the latter falls under the discussion of 'The Scourge'.
Among them, the goals of technical optimization include: improving single-slot finality to quickly confirm and finalize transactions while maintaining decentralization; enhancing the feasibility of individual stakers; and strengthening Ethereum's resistance to 51% attacks. Additionally, it includes research areas such as accelerating transaction confirmation.
Read the article The Merge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/14/futures1.html
The Surge: Released on October 17, 2024, it discusses the development history of Ethereum's scaling strategies, from 'sharding' to 'Layer2 protocols', and then to the integration of two paths, ultimately forming a scaling solution centered around Rollup, achieving a significant increase in data bandwidth, but still facing many challenges, such as ensuring the robustness of Layer1 and maintaining decentralization while ensuring maximum interoperability between Layer2.
Read the article The Surge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/17/futures2.html
The Scourge: Released on October 20, 2024, it discusses the centralization risks and value extraction risks faced by Ethereum Layer1 after adopting the PoS consensus mechanism, emphasizing that the risks specifically concentrate on two aspects: block construction and staked assets. It also introduces the progress made since 2024 in addressing these two risk areas, such as implementing a dual-layer staking model and reducing asset issuance.
Read 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 under Ethereum's stateless verification, focusing on how technologies like Verkle Tree and STARK enhance the decentralization and efficiency of blockchain.
Read the article The Verge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/23/futures4.html
The Purge: Released on October 26, 2024, the article discusses how Ethereum faces the challenge of reducing complexity and storage demands in the long term while maintaining the chain's durability. Decentralized applications need to ensure that their dependencies do not lead to functionality disruptions due to upgrades, especially for the Layer1 protocol itself. Proposed solutions include cleaning up unnecessary protocol features and reducing client storage burden through strategies like 'historic data expiration' and 'state data expiration'.
Read the article The Purge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/26/futures5.html
The Splurge: Released on October 29, 2024, the article explores the concept of 'Splurge' in the 2023 Ethereum development roadmap, aiming to bring the Ethereum Virtual Machine into an efficient and stable 'final state', implementing account abstraction in the protocol to allow all users to enjoy safer and more convenient accounts, optimizing transaction fee economics, enhancing scalability while reducing risk, and exploring advanced cryptography to improve Ethereum's long-term performance. Specific implementation steps include the EIP-1559 technical proposal.
Read the article The Splurge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/29/futures6.html
Perhaps, while others are talking about getting rich quickly, Ethereum is still focusing on technology, which is the biggest difference between Ethereum and other blockchain ecosystems.
A large developer community and the attraction to developers are the foundation of Ethereum's establishment and its future development. Compared to other ecosystems, Ethereum has more toolchains and frameworks (such as Truffle) that can support the development of more types of smart contracts and DApps.
At the same time, Ethereum's tools and frameworks balance performance and depth, not merely created as infrastructure for developing a single high-performance 'trading tool'. After years of development, the technical standards proposed by Ethereum have become widespread, such as asset standards like ERC-20 and ERC-721, which have been deeply applied throughout the crypto industry.
How can we more accurately envision the future?
So, what exactly is the future that can be envisioned through technology? Vitalik Buterin once stated in a blog that he has a fondness for technological optimism, but this feeling is somewhat nuanced. He believes that fundamentally transformative technologies will have a brighter future than now.
Vitalik Buterin advocates that what people should strive to do best is to keep the world roughly as it is today, just needing to reduce some greed.
At the same time, Vitalik Buterin believes that technology should not only focus on magnitude; direction is also very important. If certain types of technology develop well, the reliability of their potential to improve the world 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 importance. This requires humans to consciously choose the direction we want, as the formula for 'profit maximization' does not automatically lead to the destinations people desire.
How can we see the future direction more accurately? In a blog post published on November 9, 2024, Vitalik Buterin reviewed and expanded on a very innovative viewpoint, mentioning that the feature he finds most exciting in Ethereum applications is 'prediction markets'.
Vitalik Buterin believes that 'prediction markets' are actually very useful tools for the world, not just a place for betting as generally perceived. Moreover, from a higher dimension, 'prediction markets' are merely a use case within a broader category of future applications that have the potential to become important methods for improving various fields such as social media, science, news, and governance — this application category is called 'Info Finance'.
