Vitalik: Ethereum, Part 2

Vitalik, I want to ask you a little bit about how your role has evolved since it began in Ethereum. So in the very beginning, before all of this, of course, you were once the uppity young entrepreneur. It's been what, six, seven years now? You've moved on from being the entrepreneur to being the chief technologist to being the politician. You're now the elder statesman of smart contract blockchains. What have you learned about protocol politics?

Protocol politics is less different from regular politics than you might think. What's all this emergent phenomenon of what happens when you stick many thousands of people together and we have incentives that are aligned in some cases. So you have some competition in other cases and you have different groups of people that have different opinions and they have to fight it out sometimes within one protocol and sometimes between different protocols where there's competition.

A lot of the dynamics that you get are Surprisingly familiar. the kinds of religious fervor that you get when people defend their opinions. Is it better to have blockchains that have smaller blocks so they're easier to verify versus bigger blocks so that more people can afford to use them? People have very strong opinions in the same way that people have strong opinions about either religion or democracy or freedom of speech or the welfare state or any other mainstream political topic.

You build your career as a response to Bitcoin maximum. and you've now lived long enough to see the rise of Ethereum maximalism. Three, four years ago it didn't seem like something like that existed. And now it's become very clear that as you have all these alternatives to Ethereum arising

there's a strong need for people within Ethereum to set apart their identity from other people. So I'm curious how you think about how to keep Ethereum healthy and not see i the Ethereum community degrade culturally and religiously the way that you saw at the Bitcoin community degree. One of the things that I feel like I've learned over the last decade is that people are at their morally worst, not out of greed, but out of fear. And

This is true in mainstream politics and this is true in geopolitics and in crypto as well. COVID showed that. That was all fear driven. The Russia Ukraine crisis shows that. Russia's not attacking Ukraine to get oil fields. It's out of fear. the responses are all fear based. And fear is used to justify all the horrible things from the Patriot Act to the COVID lockdowns.

Fear drives it all. Because greed is always done in your own name and nobody wants to do it in their own name. Fear is always done in everybody else's name. So you end up with a whole bunch of self styled white knights battling each other. Right. And even when the leader actually is greedy and medial maniacal, fear is what they use to sell it to everyone else. The times when I thought both the Bitcoin and the Ethereum community were both at their morally worst.

would probably be in the Bitcoin Cash small versus big block war crisis, where people felt like there was this very zero sum struggle between one vision of what Bitcoin would be and another vision of what Bitcoin could be. A lot of principles got thrown out. People behaved terribly in a bunch of ways.

In the case of Ethereum, there was this big application called the DAO, and the DAO got hacked. And a big portion of all of the ETH was stuck in the DAO. If nothing had been done, the attacker would have been able to get it out after a couple of months. And this was less than a year into Ethereum's history. So a decision was made to make a change to the rules of the Ethereum protocol to bail out the users of that application.

And there was this big debate. Some people thought this is fine one time because it was early days and some people thought that it should be a principle that we never interfere and it's best to start those principles from day one. We did end up hard forking to fix the doubt and a lot of people disagree. That ended up splitting Ethereum into two chains, Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, where Ethereum Classic refused to implement the hard fork, so they let the attacker get away out of principle.

The way that both communities behaved at the time was not good. People were openly advocating that we should use trademark law to try to not allow Ethereum Classic to exist. And then people were advocating fifty one percent attacks and all kinds of things. I think the reason why people were okay with things that they would totally not have been okay at any other time is because they were afraid.

Ethereum people were afraid that Ethereum Classic would replace and completely destroy Ethereum, and Ethereum Classic people would be afraid that their principles were being destroyed by Ethereum, which could then grow and overtake the version of the chain that stuck to its principles. the situation did end up working out well for most people. There hasn't been a violation of that kind of immutability on Ethereum since.

Which is something that a lot of people were not projecting. A lot of people did think that If you violate the principles once then it would be open season to do it many times. But no, people have valued not fixing the parity wallet a year later in order to set the counter precedent that we actually do take this seriously.

There was a bug in a multi sig wallet called a parody wallet, which caused a massive loss of funds. But to be clear, I think the Dow hack was much larger in magnitude than anything subsequently, correct? Yeah. It was much larger and it was very unique in that it was even possible to fix it with a fork. Because normally when a hack happens, the attacker gets the money instantly and there isn't a way to fix it even if you want to. So the Dow was really special and unique in that way.

As a protocol politician, what do you feel has been your finest moment and your worst moment of blockchain statecraft? least proud momentum. It's definitely handling the Dow Fork situation. A lot of people did feel betrayed as a result of the Dow Fork. A lot of people did feel like their expectations got violated. And a lot of people who felt like their opinion was disrespected, especially people who opposed the fork, a lot of them did feel like there was this social environment where

if you oppose the fork, then you're evil because you're pro hackers stealing millions of dollars. That environment ended up turning a lot of people off. There is a lot more that we could have done to not create that environment and still make people feel welcome despite the disagreement. Do you regret the decision or do you regret the way in which the decision was made?

I don't think I regret the decision. I think the decision did have a lot of positive consequences too in how it put a controversial stake in the ground, and if people interpreted the stake in the ground in different ways.

The way I interpret the stake in the grill is that it was a moral statement that said that you can believe in principles without assigning those principles an infinite amount of weight, without saying that we're going to stick to those principles in absolutely all possible circumstances. And that kind of moderation is something that's very morally important to me personally.

It's very pragmatically important to me personally too, because most people that try to take a more purist approach end up hitting a scenario that is extreme enough that you have to compromise and if you committed too hard to never compromising, then your rhetorical posture becomes even more screwed up. It's better to be transparent about these things early on.

People who are pragmatic and people who were willing to look at things in a more moderate way, they're definitely very happy as a result of that. But there are also the purists.

And there were even people who believe in moderation that actually opposed the Dauphorg, which was interesting too. Most people ended up sticking with Ethereum despite the Dauphork happening, but there weren't a lot of people for whom the Delph Work was this watershed moments where like they were curious about Ethereum before then they realized, Oh wow, no, this is a centralized evil chain which is unfortunate that we can't satisfy everyone.

But on the other hand, satisfying everyone is expensive and satisfying everyone so hard. I sometimes even think, had we successfully satisfied everyone during the Dow Fork, then might we not have had much harder politics getting proof stake out the door?

I see you taking incredible slings and arrows on Twitter and being very good natured about it, something that Zuko seems to also do. The visible leaders of protocols. uh or creators of protocols, because I'm not even sure Ethereum is really led anymore, they tend to have this ability to operate in public either with a certain nonchalance or with a certain combativeness that normal humans I don't think could sustain.

How did that come about? Do you wish you'd just remain anonymous? Did you have to go through a learning curve to learn how to deal with all the trolls and all the haters and all the Bitcoin maxis attacking you? Do you wish you could just press a button and disappear from ETH and then ETH goes into the foundation's hands? There's definitely a learning curve. There's big mistakes that I made in my Twittering in years past.

Especially times when I would let myself get carried away in a particular discussion and I'd say something and I feel like I'd have to justify myself and I'd go into a deeper hole. You wish you didn't argue as much on Twitter, is that what you're saying? Yeah, you learn over time that there is a good style. It accepts the criticism with grace. You learn what to respond to, you learn what to let slide because realistically no one's gonna see it anyway.

There's definitely like subconscious intuitive art to being a good Twitter meme lord, and being a good crypto meme lord in general. How much influence do you have on ETH today? Especially compared to the Dow Fork time? Because my sense was in the Dow Fork we were very involved, but if something of that magnitude came up today, how much influence would you have relative to what you had then?

I feel like Land Force and Ethereum keeps decreasing every six months. I have less now than I did six months ago. six months ago I had less than I had a year ago and then a year ago I had less than I had eighteen months ago. These days the number of people that even I have to convince to push in a particular direction is significant.

Watch some of the EIPs that I personally promote. Some of them don't even make it in. For a lot of them you have to try pretty hard to satisfy all the people's concerns. What's the biggest thing you push that isn't getting adopted? EIP four eight eight is one example. If I had more control it would have been in Ethereum already. What is that one? This is the one to do a short term decrease in the gas cost of call data.

It's your only technical change that makes roll-ups cheaper in the short term. It seems to me like a lot of your evolving role within Ethereum shows ways in which blockchains are like religious. Imagine Ethereum started off as a sect that you founded as a charismatic leader and you were like, hey, we're gonna break off from the religion of Bitcoin or break off from the religion of MasterCoin. I believe in these new principles of Turing completeness.

once upon a time you were the the sect leader and as the sect becomes a church There becomes more bureaucracy, more vetocrazy, there's more and more mechanisms that are developing behind the scenes, and pretty soon you might be the charismatic voice of Ethereum, but the formal leadership of Ethereum has taken on its own life force. What is your observation of how Ethereum has become more systematized as a culture compared to what it was five years ago?

Today, the protocol decisions tend to be done through this mechanism called the Alcore Devs Call. Like this is a call that happens once every two weeks. As the name implies, all of the core developers uh come online and talk about all the proposed protocol changes and everything that people agree on gets accepted, and if people disagree, then it doesn't get accepted. So there's this fairly complicated pipeline that changes have to go through. Step one is the idea making stage.

Then step two is the refining stage, and then there's the stage of convincing more and more people, making a test implementation, eventually turning it into a fully formalized proposal, what we call an EIP, an Ethereum improvement proposal. And then finally got said to it all cored down.

And then if Alcore Devs accepts it, then it eventually goes into a hard fork, which is what we call it, a protocol upgrade to Ethereum, which includes changes to the protocol that everyone has to download to get accepted to the network. So there is this long process. There's many points along the way where different people have to agree. Near the beginning, the research team has to agree.

And then in the later stages the core developers, the people actually writing the code have to agree as well. So it's definitely more vitocrat considerably than it was three years ago and definitely much more than it was six years ago when we could get a change accepted and it would get included very quickly. And even now, like I feel the window is closing on substantial things. It's getting harder to do big things even today. How do you feel about that?

In some ways relieved, Ethereum becoming more vitocrat gives me more freedom to retire, Well, retire is a complicated word. I feel like I'll keep doing things forever, but what kinds of things? As you've mentioned, my role is changing in complicated ways that are hard to describe. What would you be working on if you weren't working on each?

Good question. I'd have my big long list of things that I think need to happen and I would do some combination of writing about and explaining them and probably putting some of my own money into making them happen, trying to put teams together and make them happen. This would be things like account security like what we talked about with social recovery wallets, ideas around privacy, some of the secure blockchain based voting stuff.

that I've been pushing the entire roadmap of what do we need to do to make this ideal, trustless, decentralized society work. You've already had that, the aforementioned AMMs that Hasib uses automated market makers, that was an idea that came out of one of your blog posts. And then it got implemented as Uniswap. Any other low hanging fruit there? Social recovery wallets. I heard that one. Blockchain voting. If you're a young hacker listening to this podcast,

And let's say you're not shilling ETH, but you're like, Hey, the world needs this, someone should build it. What would they build? Right now, decentralized clients is one important thing. Ways to access the Ethereum blockchain that are cheaper than running a full node, but they're still decentralized that don't depend on a server.

It's something that's going to become much more possible with the Switch to Proof of Stake, and there's some people working on it, but we could use more people working on it. There's things at the application layer that could be useful. I've seen people working on decentralized VPNs, which are cool.

Do you feel like there's any applications of blockchains that haven't taken off yet because of scalability or it's not ubiquitous, not everybody has a wallet yet. What's the extreme case? What could people be doing with blockchains a decade from now that seems like science fiction today? Some kind of decentralized blockchain-based social media would be interesting. The thing that would be valuable to do with social media is to split the layers between content and user interface.

content should all be on one shared layer and people should compete on providing different interfaces. Twitter and Reddit gets users make comments and users make votes. The only real difference is what are the interfaces that people use to show it. So why not create an ecosystem where anyone can go post stuff and people can post things that link to other things and people can make messages that are upvotes and down votes, and people can post other people's posts.

And just have ten different ways of viewing it. They might have different presentation. They might have different styles of moderation. We might have different subcommunities. Some might be more free-for-all, some might be more restrictive, some might be more focused on specific areas.

Some might be free speech zones and some might be venues for like highly focused scientific discussion, but things would still end up sharing the network effect of having the same common standards of content being published to one decentralized network.

People have tried to do it somewhat, but nothing's taken off. Why is that? If we have a super scalable blockchain where we can afford to stick these kinds of actions on by default, then what could happen? Who do you look up to? Who are your heroes?

In the crypto space, I have a lot of respect for Zuko. Zcash is just a wholesome and honorable project. It values privacy and is just working really hard at achieving it in this theory friendly way. He's incredibly friendly. The amount of abuse he puts up with is unbelievable. And he's one of the OGs in crypto. He's been in it forever.

For all the right reasons. I remember talking to Zuko in the early days and I was like, Hey, if you build this thing, is it even legal? What if they arrest you? He said, I'll miss my kids, but I'll go to jail. He's a real believer. He also has this habit of retweeting people even when they attack him. One of my favorite Twitter moments was years and years ago where somebody tweeted I said Zuko

Stop retweeting useless crap. So of course Zuko retweeted this person who became an accidental genius. Now I'm trying to remember whether or not I picked that up from Zuko. I do think Zuko set the tone. for how you build a community with a smile.

For example, now Zuko's talking about taking Zcash to proof of stake and he still keeps getting attacked over things like the founder's reward and people say, Why did you have to go build an altcoin? Why did you this part of Bitcoin? I remember originally. He wanted to do it as part of Bitcoin, but they said no, go implement it as an altcoin first and then if we like it, we'll adopt it. Vitalik knows that story well. Exactly. Bitcoin is

trying to be a certain thing. I do think Bitcoin is incredibly valuable. It is the OG. It does fall short in two ways. One is it's not programmable, and the second is it's not private. Can those be fixed not without severe trade-offs to what Bitcoin is? So it occupies a very important part in the ecosystem, probably the most important part, but it doesn't mean that that's the entire thing. There's a lot more to it.

And Bitcoin may have nailed the basic protect your money Austrian economic style use case, but there are many more use cases. The thousand flowers that have bloomed on Ethereum and other smart contract blockchains since has been incredible. And as Haseeb said, we're gonna see a proliferation of blockchains. One, the incentives are just too strong.

Second, there are different trade offs you're making between decentralization and security and programmability. There are people coming up who are saying, Well, we're more programmable. Agoric is saying you can write JavaScript based smart contracts. There are people who are saying that W faster and simpler out of the box. You'd have to deal with layer twos and roll ups and sharding and all that, you just write and it's easy to run.

There's some parts in the spectrum I don't understand. Things like Binance Smart Chain, the level of decentralization is so low, they just stick their name in it. But it's obviously for the people who care a lot less about decentralization and a lot more about cost and performance and so on. It's gonna be a very rich ecosystem. Blockchains are a fundamental shift.

into a new form of computing. And I think you do have to be good natured about it because there are all these disingenuous attacks on like the Berkeley professor who wrote this long piece about how his raspberry pie has more throughput and therefore

Ether Bitcoin will fail. It was just a nonsense comparison. It's just apples and oranges. You're comparing an airplane to a car. Just two different things. Yet he wrote pages and pages of this. Like only a Berkeley professor could. I guess these are what Nassim Teleb calls the IYIs.

Nassim has the completely opposite Twitter strategy of Vitalik, where if somebody attacks him, he just executes them. Speaking of which Vitalik, who would you say are your enemies? Unfortunately, Vladimir Putin's lovely Russian government is one of my enemies now. I did talk to him five years ago. I believe in talking to people. I talked to Putin, I talked to the Vice Premier of Taiwan at one point. I talked to people in the government of Singapore. I've talked to people in

Canada, UK and lots of places. But at the same time, there definitely are times when you make the judgments that you have given someone enough latitude and as much as it would be good to give someone even more love, unfortunately, at the present time, there are

cities that are being bombed, there are millions of lives and people's families and futures that are being potentially destroyed and cut short and a beautiful country that risks being turned into Syria. Ultimately first priority has to be doing all that we can to

help people affected by that situation. So that's a really unfortunate thing, and I've been very public in speaking out, that I do fully support Ukraine, and I do strongly oppose all of the characters that are complicit in trying to destroy Ukraine as a country and as a nation. And I used a Russian profanity that some Ukrainian soldiers made famous because of how they used it as a brave show of defiance against Russian soldiers that demanded they surrender.

and I repeated it to the head of Russia today. So my general approach was that I don't believe it being mean zero percent of the time. I believe it being mean like maybe zero point five percent of the time. If you're mean only 0.5% of the time, then that actually makes that meanness more effective.

Whereas if you're the sort of person that being mean as your default mode of discourse that at at some point people just stop paying attention to it. The Bitcoin community can learn from that a little bit. Although they're definitely kind people within Bitcoin too, is we just have to be a little quieter because the maxis dominate. I'd like to talk a little bit about the unusual aspects of your life. And not because we're celebrity chasing or navel gazing here, but because

points towards where you can live your life, right? One unusual thing about your life is that you don't seem to have large collections of houses and cars and you're not doing the standard wealth thing. Another is you're still working as this leader of this decentralized organization. You speak some very large number of languages. Would you mind giving us an idea a week in the life of Italic or a month in the life of Italic?

And it might be s interesting to look at where it's different than the normal person's life. The last six months of my life I was in San Francisco, Toronto, Argentina, Costa Rica, Mexico, Singapore, so a big long assortment of places. I've been a nomad for about eight years now. I started doing that as part of my Bitcoin trip in two thousand and thirteen and then Ethereum started and it's like my Bitcoin trip never stopped. I just kept on going to different places.

Because I was the person that was willing to travel to any particular events to talk to people, people just kept on piling more places for me to visit. Eventually that part of my lifestyle just became permanent. And you've given away ridiculous amounts of money, right? ETH, if I remember correctly, had seven founders and you've probably been among the most generous of them. Do you plan on giving it all away or most of it away? Does money not matter to you?

I plan on putting the money toward things that are the most important and meaningful to the world. How many languages do you speak? It depends on what count somewhere between four and six. And pretty fluently, right? I saw you on a airplane once speaking fluent Chinese, which caught me off guard a little bit.

Was that something you learned recently? Well Chinese over the last five years. English and Russian I grew up with. French learned in school, then Chinese and then some German and some Spanish. I was gonna ask you said you're still on your Bitcoin trip. When is your Bitcoin trip gonna be finished?

It might never be. A few years ago I thought that guy would settle down eventually, but then during COVID I spent about six months in Singapore and I realized that wow, at this point my brain is rewired and I'm just not meant to stay in one place. The nomading is probably never going to end. It was liberating, realizing that I'm off the standard track for good, and I'm fine with it.

I got one last question which will be useful for my audience. A lot of people who listen to these kinds of podcasts, they're just trying to be the best version of themselves. whether it's the happiest or the most successful or the healthiest or the fittest. And I'm wondering if you have any philosophy that helps you make decisions.

that you think contributed to where you are today, a conscious philosophy where you'd like, should I put time into my own education or should I travel or what have you? Is there any advice you would have for a young person who's sort of going down the standard track. The standard track is I went to high school, I go to college, I get a degree, then I go get a job, blah, blah, blah. Is there any advice you would give them given where the world is today and what you have learned?

Strive to be a better person at the end of every week than you were at the beginning of it. What better means can be very different. It could mean learn something, it could mean exercise and get better at running than you were before. It could mean improving your ability to interact positively with other people. It could mean try something new, visit a country that you haven't visited before, and add some experience.

Live every week so that you don't feel like at the end of the week you've wasted it. Keep on moving forward and you'll be fine. Don't live life on autopilot.

Hasiv you got any closing questions or remarks or thoughts? I know that I'm not alone in saying that the crypto world owes you an enormous debt in having moved it forward. There's a great man theory of history that feels more and more outdated over time, but you're one of the few examples of a living person who has massively and single handedly moved forward history.

And I know it probably is difficult for you to have the sense of everything that Ethereum has done in the world and feel it, but I can tell you that all of us owe an enormous amount of what we're doing with our lives to what you start. I would echo that by saying it was remarkable how young you are.

And you're already a multi act person because you contributed significantly to telling people about Bitcoin. You contributed obviously by creating ETH and then you've also contributed through the creation of Uniswap and AMMs and now pushing social recovery wallets and privacy and so on. You have a multi act career in front of you and I look forward to seeing the future act.

as you were talking about improve every week, that's compound interest. And compound interest is a function of the number of iterations, not time. So as you keep iterating and iterating, I'm curious to see the Vitalik that comes out the other side and the huge, huge impact that he has. And honestly it's for someone like you, politics is a waste of time. And yes, you have to engage in it because you have to coordinate people. But I'm sure at some point you're gonna have some great idea.

And this time instead of having to create it yourself against all odds, you'll be able to recruit a great team and finance them and shepherd them into building something as impactful in a parallel domain. So looking forward to that. I know you do a lot of these. We tried to make it a little different, keep it a little more high level, keep it a little more timeless. You're tireless on the podcast circuit, so thanks again and hope to be helpful to you in the theorem.