99 - Endgame | Vitalik Buterin

Transcript

once all of these things are done like i will say this if this is all done and then nothing else ever changes after that then i'll be extremely happy welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance this is how to get started how to get better how to front run the opportunity this is ryan sean adams i'm here with david hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless guys we have a fantastic episode today with a vitalik buterin we talk about the future of ethereum the rise of alternative layer ones as well a few things to watch out for as you listen to this episode the first is we talk about the ethereum roadmap from the guy who actually helped create

ethereum how far we are in the ethereum roadmap as well that's number two number three what will ethereum look like when it's all said and done how long will that take number four can centralized alternative layer ones become decentralized in the long term or will they remain centralized number five what does vitalik make of the term ethereum maximalists number six will crypto actually be able to solve the big scale global problems in the 2020s in this uh decade that we're in david this was a fantastic episode they're all fantastic with vitalik i hope folks listen to each and every single episode with him what did you think about this episode i think

this is the perfect episode to kick off 2022. uh this is a hybrid podcast one one side of it is very granular in detail that's the first half where we talk about the ethereum roadmap just contextualizing and grounding uh people in what's left with ethereum some of the obvious stuff comes up first like the merge and charting but then there's a bunch of other things as well and we talk about those things and why we need them and what they do and what they do for ethereum both now and into the long term and then we actually fold that conversation into the conversation of the al the growth of the alternative layer ones and we talk about how the first half of 2021 was more or less ethereum's show ethereum just massive success in the first half of 2021 and

then the alternative layer ones came on the scene and now there's this growing ecosystem of many different chains all doing more or less similar things with different design structures and a lot of them have chosen centralization as their competitive advantage uh if you will and so getting vitalik's take on that in relation to the ethereum roadmap because some of the things we talk about in the roadmap actually lends itself directly towards how some of these centralized layer ones can actually migrate into a long-term sustainable robust ecosystem so vitalik not only is is unpacking the ethereum roadmap but also proposing a roadmap for alternative layer ones to actually be successful into the long term uh and so i really enjoyed that conversation and then of

course just zooming out and grounding ourselves not just inside the crypto industry but inside of the world at large where are we in the 2020s as you as humans as crypto people what's up with the 2020s and what can we do about it yeah i think that's been top of mind for me david because like uh going to this decade we're just one year into this decade but we have nine more to go and uh i'm a little worried like i'm a little concerned about where this decade might leave us but crypto is the thing that that keeps me hopeful um and seeing ethereum's roadmap laid out like this also makes me hopeful and bullish uh on ethereum i've never seen ethereum's roadmap as clearly articulated and stated having a precise and concrete roadmap is actually a luxury in the ethereum world and this is not something

that we could have talked about in this depth and with this much uh future in mind up until now so i'm really excited to just unpack all of the ethereum roadmap uh with you the listener uh and also what i'm also excited for you the listener is to do is to like the video uh rate and review us on itunes or wherever you get your podcasts uh and if you're watching on youtube make sure to subscribe so let's go ahead and get right into the future of the ethereum roadmap and the rise of the alternative layer ones right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible hey bankless listeners at the end of this podcast ryan and i unpack this whole entire episode in our debrief this is something that we only give towards our premium subscribers but since it's such a good podcast and it's

also the first episode of 2022 we've decided to release this one for everyone so at the end of the podcast or if you're watching on youtube in a separate youtube video there is a 30 minute debrief where ryan and i unpack the episode talk about the strategies for alternative layer ones talk about how we're all getting to this end game state that we are apparently all converging on and it unpacks the other you know crypto topics that we uh have seen in the latter half of 2021 so stay tuned for that and if you want more of these debriefs subscribe to bank list because we do one for every single podcast that comes out bankless premium subscribers have a private rss feed that they get these every single week uh and so if you like what you hear go ahead and subscribe to

bankless and you will get that every single week automatically downloaded to wherever you get your podcasts cheers and i hope you enjoyed the debrief arbitrary is an ethereum scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use d5 and nfts over 250 projects have already deployed on arbitram and arbitrom's defy and nft ecosystems are growing rapidly arbitrary increases ethereum speed by orders of magnitude for a fraction of the cost of the average gas fee when interacting with arbitrary you can get the performance of a centralized exchange while tapping into ethereum's level of decentralization and security if you're a developer who wants low gas fees and instant transactions for your users visit developer.offchainlabs.com to get started building your application on arbitrom if you're a user keep an eye out for your favorite defy apps or nft projects building on arbitron many of

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sell and receive the token you want to buy the uniswap grants program is accepting applications for grants do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the uniswap ecosystem no matter how big or small your idea is you can apply it for a unique grant at uniswopgrants.org and help steer uniswap in the direction that you think it should go thank you uniswap for sponsoring bankless bankless nation we are super excited to introduce our next guest who requires no introduction really been on the podcast multiple times vitalik buterin is on bank list today he's the creator of ethereum writer at vitalik.ca a popular bankless guest we have a number of episodes with vitalik welcome back vitalik how are you doing thank you it's good to be here

well we want to talk about a few things today with you uh the ethereum roadmap of course the rise of alt ones that was something that happened last year the end game this is an article you wrote called the end game which chronicles i think or describes maybe an end game situation for uh all block chains all layer ones but we also have the privilege of recording this uh toward the end of the year so we can't pass up an opportunity to talk about some reflections for 2021 just to get us kickstarted so what did you think of 2021 for crypto like high level okay a lot of people say it was a very good year for crypto i think they're mainly talking about prices maybe they're also talking about adoption and mainstream attention what are your thoughts on on 2021 was it a

good year for crypto what do you think about it um i definitely think it was a great year for adoption and for mainstream attention um i mean the rise of nfts was definitely something really fascinating to see and i think it's uh brought a lot of people into the crypto space that we're not uh would not have gone into it before um and i think uh you know things like well at least to me like blockchains are about creating these innovative new um ways to organize society and in some ways to me like what's happening with artists being able to sell nfts really is a realization of that spirit because like we actually are giving uh people who are creating art and new business

models we're uh giving the creators of this thing that's very valuable but that often has a hard time getting business models and a new way to actually get funding um so that's uh something that's uh been very interesting and exciting for me the rise of daos is definitely also interesting and exciting we've been seeing more and more daos that are actually doing lots of interesting things experimenting with different governance algorithms projects like city dow that are actually trying to you know do things in the physical world um so that has all been fun um

the progress that we have seen in layer two scaling i think has been really amazing like we've actually i think over the course of this year really seeing layer two is go from theory to practice um you know at the end beginning of this year there were only like one or two layer twos on mainnet and they either only support well pretty much all when we supported a couple of applications and now we have this thriving ecosystem and people are really experiencing what a layer 2 ethereum looks like firsthand um so lots of progress on adoption and lots of progress on tech definitely lots of uh happy things to report this year vitalik one thing i've got gathered while being in this space for a number of years i got in in 2017 ryan got in a

little bit before me uh but i hear all these crazy cerebral conversations that happened in the in the bitcoin space in the very early ethereum space from you know 2011 to 2015 uh and just like about you know what the possibilities of crypto could be and i'm from my perspective my limited perspective because i've only been here for for so long is that 2021 was a year where so many of these high in the sky like you know very very cerebral uh possibilities of crypto actually started to happen like nfts and unique tokens were a conversation very very early as well as um dao's even though we didn't call them daos way back when uh would you say that 2021 was the year that crypto actually started to um uh unlock

some of these early uh theorized use cases that were you know only conversations back five years ago i would definitely say so fantastic so vitalik let's uh let's talk about ethereum for a minute and um you know one of these days we're gonna have you on bank list and actually uh not talk about ethereum maybe not talk about crypto because i know you have tons of varied interests and a lot of insights on on many topics but today it's not that podcast okay we want to talk about ethereum um going into 2022 in in particular so when listeners hear this it'll be the first week of uh january 2022. we want to talk a little bit about um the roadmap for ethereum moving

forward but before we do let's talk about the progress ethereum made last year in 2021 so uh what were some of the main accomplishments milestones i know you mentioned layer two that's probably chief among them are there any others at the protocol level yeah so i think if we focus on layer one uh some of the big things are one is that the beacon chain just proved itself it's uh turned from being this very early thing into an increasingly mature ecosystem it also had its first hard fork the altair hard fork which of course added the a kind of basic scaffolding that we needed to have like line support and it was also just the first ever beacon

chain hard fork which is uh an important trial run for the march um so the next beacon chain hard fork and most likely the next um execution chain hard fork will actually be the merge um so that's exciting um speaking of the merge we also have test nets for the merge now the kenzugi test that uh launched them a couple of weeks ago and of course the consumer test the test that was not even the first test out of the merge there were a couple of other smaller ones that have been running for a couple of months but conservative has is one that is much bigger than before many more participants than before more extensive than before anyone could go and participate and i

even got some uh kimsugi eth from the consumi faucet um a couple of weeks ago um so that has also been i think a lot of great progress um a lot of uh just interesting infrastructure projects uh that have been coming of age um so proof of humanity has matured a lot and it's been seeing a lot of usage sign in with ethereum has been seeing a lot of adoption and that just like went from i think an idea that a few people were thinking about to something that lots of people are excited about starting to adopt in use over the last few months um what cross layer 2 bridging still in its

infancy but um much better than what it was a year a year ago which is basically not existing at all but account abstraction um there are um test net versions of erc 4337 this is something that hasn't really gotten into the public discourse yet but it's uh moving forward quietly a lot of progress there um so you know lots of small things um lots of uh progress on you know the various spec items that haven't been released yet but that we're going to talk about through the rest of this episode probably just them like a whole bunch of like really meaningful progress on i think pretty much uh all of the big big things that we care about and by the

way for people listening on youtube this is uh the test night you were referring to uh vitalik i believe so what are we looking at so this is uh kinsugi which is the newest um is this the beacon chain plus like ethereum one sort of you know test that this is the basically this is a test net of the merge okay of the merge so like what can people do here is this mainly for developers or is there anything is there they can connect they can connect nodes they can uh become stakers they can um you know launch contracts and trade coins around let's say this is this is the merge right this is the thing that is going to be put in production so what has to happen between

now and like the time the merge goes through is it just a lot of testing a lot of you know validation yeah definitely a lot of testing and auditing and all of that um the uh the one piece that i'm aware of that's like still the furthest from being certain is how clients would sync after the merge um basically the the the problem is that the way that proof of work um sinks and the way that uh the way that group of steak syncs are a bit different from each other um and so there's a bit of engineering that needs to be done to put the two together uh but this is something that people have already been aware of for a while and so there's um

a lot of things in progress and be and uh being implemented um so i think uh you know so far things are still going smoothly taking another opportunity to zoom out the ethereum protocol has developed throughout 2021 but there's also what i like to call meta development which is um just defining and understanding the long-term roadmap of ethereum to an actual concrete specific detail and sometimes in ethereum's history there wasn't all that much that with regards to details in the future i remember in 2017 i didn't really know what was going to be happening next in ethereum six months out but it seems to be that the meta

development of ethereum has gotten a lot more robust and partly that's illustrated by the infographic that we're going to pull up here in a second but vitalik ethereum changes every single year 2015 ethereum's different than 2016 ethereum and and so on and so forth how would you uh contextualize overall with the grand ethereum vision for what it wants to be and then also where it is in 2021 how far along are we are we like 60 of the way there are we 40 of the way there uh and then if we could just like uh give a grade towards just the progress made so far how would you evaluate it i would say around 50 um i'd be willing to go past six to go past 60 once uh the merge is fully complete and i'd be

willing to you know go past 80 once we have a full sharding implementation um but i think uh these like those two biggest items are definitely getting closer and closer but they're not yet in the real rearview mirror oh that's really cool over over 50 percent we're getting close then um very neat so so let's talk about what's coming so it's david use this term you know i guess meta meta development the roadmap roadmap to me at least this year for ethereum has never been clear which is super cool and you put out this uh infographic on ethereum's birthday um sorry not its birthday the beacon chain launched birthday december 1st uh that kind of highlighted progress across a

number of different work streams so i'm gonna go through those really quick at the high level and then let's take some time to talk about each of them so uh and by the way i love these nicknames that that you know used you christened uh they have a nice flow to them the first is the the merge the second is the purge then we get the verge uh oh sorry i messed this up the first is the merge the second is the surge the third is the verge the purge then the splurge so these are five different work streams the merge is really when proof of stake comes about and proof of work finally dies the search is about scalability particularly for rollups we'll talk about that the verge is all around stateless clients making ethereum nodes easier to run the purge has a bit of

technical debt elimination but also eliminating historical data if you want to find out more and the splurge of course any any good splurge is you know all about the extras all about the goodies and so we got some goodies on the road map as well uh i'm going to show that uh that infographic as we talk about each of these areas um but like to me the ethereum roadmap has really never been been cleared maybe we could address these things one by one vitalik so let's talk about and i think they're kind of in order maybe of um how soon they're going to happen is that the case so the merge is going to happen first so so time is left to right okay there's there's no top up to down top uh time dimension and that's why the time

arrow at the top goes off the right okay very good but we we we should say the merge is probably going to be the thing that's that's happening first uh maybe we should we should start with that so tell us about the merge sure so the merge is uh the same thing that the merge has always been it's the full transition away from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake um so there has um actually been a lot there's a lot of uh stuff that has already been done for proof of stake that's in the kind of what's already behind us column to the left and so the beacon chain already exists there's already been a warm-up fork proof of stake already has light client friendliness um but what's left to actually get to the merge

right um so the most recent thing that was finished is the full specification of the merge process um so the specification not just of what post-work ethereum looks like but even of how the transition process uh works and so how the process works of like actually changing from one to the other what is the the final proof of work block point going to be how is the first proof of stake um execution block going to point to that proof of work block what happens during edge cases like what if the chain reorg's right in the middle of that and so all of that that's the the spec um so this exists so that's what these test debts have been running that's where cozuki has been running um so full merge specification test networks in progress fork choice

improvements um so basically there just have been a few bugs that have been discovered in the fork choice rule this is the af function that nodes use to determine like which block is the head block if there are multiple competing blocks based on all of the votes that all the different validators have made and this is just like adding some armor to make it more robust against certain kinds of attacks um so once that's done um then the merge uh can happen right and once the merge happens then you know no more proof of work right um and so then that's the merge um after the merge we have the post merge hard fork um the most important feature of the post mortgage hard fork is just enabling withdrawals right so the merge

itself just to keep it simple does not enable withdrawals um but the post-merge hard fork uh which there is a spec for enabling withdrawals um but the this is something that will actually needs to be done a little bit later just to be clear vitalik this is about withdrawals for beacon chain ether uh depositors and validators uh so this isn't about tokens or anything else right exactly so if you threw your 32 ethan and you're a validator then once the post bridge hard fork happens you will be able to withdraw the ethander rewards and bring it back into the execution layer well everyone will be able to be able to withdraw all at once or how is that very easy there is a queue um so if lots of people start withdrawing and

lots of withdrawals will have to wait and so to be clear of attack those are happening in two different um hard forks right two different stages here and though any any idea on how far they will be apart will these be like months apart um weeks realistically like maybe six months okay six months apart okay so so so that's the merge and that means um proof of work is gone effectively we just have proof of stake what does this mean for the typical user or the typical defy application will they have to do anything do they have to click a button in metamask that says like upgrade to uh you know merged eth i mean they'll have to upgrade to merged metamask but they will not have to

upgrade their ether their applications um so from the point of view of applications like it just it's just like any of the hard forks that we've already been through so effectively effectively nothing effectively users don't have to do anything at all okay so that's the merge um let's talk about next and by the way with the merge we haven't mentioned of course um all the proof of work issuance goes away as well right so that's it says something over four percent or so and that is now gone um no more proof-of-work issuance uh no more minors on ethereum for the first time that's going to be an interesting um state to be in uh that all happens at the time of the

first merge is that correct yes okay interesting let's talk about the second which is the surge what's the search all about the third is uh scalability increases for rollups through sharding so basically roll ups by themselves are a yellow or two scaling solution and what role the way roll-ups work is that computation and storage go off-chain but data stays on chain right um and this allows um transactions to happen much more cheaply than they would if everything is done on layer one um but it's they still uh inherit the security of layer one right so roll ups are

this compromise that basically gives us a lot more efficiency than layer one with all of the security that um users are used to um and it's kind of the best combination of properties among all of the different layer 2 solutions that have been explored um and it's also i think the only one that really properly supports um like full evm scripting right like state channels for example uh they're they support payments they can support a few applications but like you can't easily stick una swap in a channel for example but you know you can stick unit swap in the roll-up um so about a year and a half ago i think there was this uh document that i published called the roll-up centric

roadmap where basically say like look roll-ups are realistically the scaling that's going to come the fastest and so and we know that roll-ups work the theory behind them is extremely well established so let's simplify the scaling roadmap by a kind of re-architecting the scaling roadmap around being based around roll-ups as much as possible right so the main thing that we get out of that is that instead of the sharding that ethereum has been planning on having all along uh being sharding of everything so shorting of execution charting accounts starting with smart contracts sharding is just sharding of data right so it's this very limited form of

sharding that basically says all we're going to do is we're going to have this kind of data layer this sort of public billboard that people can stick up to um around two megabytes a second worth of data on and when they do this um then the blockchain guarantees that that data is publicly available i may guarantee is that the data actually was published and that nobody is withholding it but it does not try to interpret the data right now who tries to interpret the data and that's the job of the rollups right so the layer one just handles data and it's the roll-ups job to kind of convert this highly scalable data plus the little bit of computation that the

ethereum blockchain gives you into a lot of computation and we've talked about optimistic ropes and we've talked about zika robes before right so i think people are going to know roughly how this happens um but like the core insight here right is basically is that if you sort of lean on rollups as this machine for converting data into execution then shorting just needs to support data and shorting can become much simpler um like one example way in which charting becomes simpler is that we the sharding design does not need to have any fraud proofs right so the charting designs that we were thinking about earlier where we actually have execution inside of the shards like we had to deal with this question of

like well what happens if one of the shard blocks is invalid right like does someone have to submit a fraud proof to uh show that it's invalid and what if there is one of these fraud proofs then does that mean that the entire chain has to get reverted and there's like all of this complexity that we have to deal with right but with uh data sharding like there's there's no such thing as an invalid block all there is there is an unavailable block um and so we don't need fraud proof so there's just a lot of machinery in terms of managing state doing cross-shore transactions just all of this complexity that can just completely go away um and so the protocol can be really elegant and simple and it's roll-ups job and to actually convert this into this kind of

high performance i mean a very paralyzed but very secure evm ecosystem um so what this actual roadmap is right so we have the basically four stages here is basically just adding more and more of this data um all right so step one short term call data expansion this is if something like eip4 uh it could be something like the ip4488 could be something like eip490 or just adding more data space in the short term uh to make rollups cheaper then we have basic shorting um and steps two and three like actually you like add-on kind of full-on the like the full-on shorting specification right so they add on this idea that you have

these transactions and these trends that can contain a huge amount of data um except at the beginning like we might do we might compromise a bit and we might say well you know everyone still has to download all of this data but it's just some dedicated space to store the data and so we're kind of easing into the sharding model and rollups can kind of re-architect themselves to actually take advantage of this data and then when we go from a few shards to many shards like that's when we actually kind of take off the training wheels and we say like now finally we don't need to have any node downloading everything right like we just rely on committees rely on data availability sampling we'll rely on all of these other technologies to verify that the data exists without

requiring any single node to download everything individually and then the fourth one data availability sampling this is this really sophisticated technology that clients can use to basically check that all of the data has been published by randomly checking like just random pieces without having to download all of it right so it's like first add data then add more data then add even more data and then near the end we started adding more and more armor to make sure that we have like both the scalability and the security so more and more data and rollups get cheaper and cheaper and from a user's point of view like users once again they don't really have to notice anything the only thing where users have to do is

they just have to move their activity from layer one to layer two at the point when they're comfortable with it right and then once they've moved everything into layer two then all that they see is that layer two just keeps on getting cheaper and then it gets cheaper again and then it gets cheaper again um so that's the surge and so when you say the layer twos just get cheaper and cheaper are they also getting faster at the same time are those hand in hand uh define faster uh faster execution times well so the word faster like i think there's two kinds of fast right there's like latency and there's bandwidth um so latency is like how many seconds do you have to wait for even one transaction to confirm and then bandwidth is like how many transactions per second so no no none of

what's happening in the search improves the latency uh so so far all of this like you know you still have your 12 seconds a lot of times the swat times might even have to increase a bit um to handle sharding so it might have to go up from like 12 to 16. uh but what's going to go up a lot is bandwidth right so like the ethereum blockchain today can handle 15 to 40 transactions a second um roll ups today if they add proper compression can go up to 1500 to 4 000 transactions a second and then rollups with sharding can go up to 100 000 transactions a second the reason why they get cheaper is basically supply and demand right if the chain can handle more transactions then that means that there's more space and

you don't have like all of these users that competing for the same very small number of slots and so the transaction fees that every single user has to pay just go down by a huge amount like that's basically where the cheaper comes from so it's it's cheaper because it's a higher bandwidth by the way this bandwidth thing i think a brilliant site to see this is um tps i don't know if you've seen this before vitalik but um i have yeah it kind of showcases the the bandwidth of ethereum when you take into account um this polygon but also all of the other you know optimistic uh roll-ups in roll-up chains as well and so ethereum currently does 65 transactions per second if you add all of that together and you know in this

block it's 87 transactions per second and what you're saying is basically that number will go up and up and up and up for higher and higher and higher with uh with the uh the surge exactly and what would this mean for anyone who is still living a life on the layer one uh with the expansion of the number of shards and also the size of shards does that mean l1 gas fees are gonna come down or what's the deal with that i mean in the short term maybe but i think realistically in the long term using l1 is just gonna keep getting more and more expensive um so you like as a user i think like you do needs to be prepared for the fact that ethereum already is transitioning away from being aware one-centric ecosystem toward being a

layer to a centric ecosystem um i like today the gains that you can make from switching to layer 2 are like maybe only 5x but you know in the future it'll be 10x and then it'll be 50x and then we'll be 1000x um so eventually all activity is going to have to transition to being layer 2. eventually even bridging from one way or two to another layer two is something that will mostly have to happen without layer ones um and this is a change that users will have to get used to and i think it's a change that some users are starting to get used to already um but you know if they can do it then everything other than that is going to be fairly under the hood for them with regards to the shard size and shard count i want to unpack this one a little

bit because we have a couple phases inside of the surge where first we add in charting in the first place and just a few shards and then we add more shards um but from what i've gathered from other people's writings polynyas and and some other uh client devs is that um long term there actually could be no cap on both the size and the number of shards so long as the resources that ethereum has uh to its availability is is sufficient uh is is that true and so so then a couple questions to follow up on that how will we know when we're ready to add more shards and is there an ultimate final number of like we are going for this many shards with this size or is this a number that's always going to be

dynamic in ethereum's future so i actually wrote an article about this like six months ago and if you go to the post called uh the limits uh to blockchain scalability i think so sharding gets around a lot of the limits the scalability of non-charted blockchains that i talk about above um so the first limit i mentioned is uh quadratic charting right which basically is this idea that like it's the m the beacon chain is going to contain headers of shard blocks and then your and then you so you have the vegan chain block and then you have shard blocks you only have two levels it's uh theoretically possible to make blockchain designs that have three levels or five levels or a dynamic number of levels um and like i think

i remember the time network for example like they were trying to do exponential sharding and like they had this a dream of going up to two to the power of 92 shards eventually um like my opinion is that that stuff is possible in theory but in practice going beyond two levels it's just like too hard and that's too much complexity and so it's not worth it um so ethereum is staying with quadratic um but there's other reasons why um scalability going too high becomes too risky and like there we go so what are these risks excellent so keep going down um so basically what i talk about here is that as the data capacity of the chain increases you you get this property that because

no single user down is going to be downloading or processing the entire chain you get a minimum number of users that you're counting on uh to ensure that the chain continues to be secure right um so like i guess one analogy of this is that if you imagine like a blockchain as one city and you imagine you start off with a blockchain that's just a small town how small is the town the town is so small that if you make one guard tower and you make the guard tower tall enough then you can have one security guard and the one security guard can watch the entire border of the town and make sure that no attackers get in right so that's like an unscalable blockchain now imagine you start scaling the town up more and more um eventually you get to the point where like you can't have one

guard tower in the center you have to switch to having guards on the walls and you need multiple guards on the walls well once you get to a town that's like let's say um i don't know like has a hundred thousand people then you know you might have a wall your wall might be 10 kilometers long and like you might need let's say 50 guards right if you have less than 50 guards then the guards can't see far enough and so someone might an attacker might slip through in between two of the guards um if uh the city expands further and then the city is like say as big as manhattan then you're gonna need like a thousand guards right um and you know if you don't have your thousand guards then um you know they're like an attacker might slip through in between two of the

guards and like the security of the town might break um so the bigger the town gets the you start getting like you start committing to an assumption about how many security guards are you sure that you can that uh that you're always going to have now the good news episode about about a blockchain here right is that with data availability sampling every user of a blockchain is one of these guards right every user is kind of randomly watching a random portion of this sort of metaphorical wall um and every and so every user is helping to check that like there aren't any unavailable uh like data chunks that are getting through um but like whatever your scalability level is that you're committing to you're also

committing to saying you were deaf we guarantee that we're definitely going to have at least 100 users or say at least 1 000 users active at all times right so like that is a yeah that is an assumption right and the higher your scalability gets the stronger that assumption gets like once you start talking about blockchains that have like gigabytes per second you're basically committing to saying we are always going to have hundreds of thousands of active nodes um so if your chain suddenly becomes much less popular that's that suddenly becomes a security risk um if everyone suddenly like switches to using more centralized clients that's a risk or not for them that becomes a security risk for the

entire network right so security just becomes more and more uncertain um and also your ability to guarantee the availability of history also becomes more and more uncertain right so like for example the ethereum roadmap rated basic the the parameters that we have right now is i think it was about 2.6 megabytes per second of blockchain data um i think and 2.6 megabytes per second there's a 31 million seconds in a year um so that's going to be 90 million meg 90 million megabytes a year so that'll be somewhere around like i'm 85 terabytes per uh per year um so

you know like there's already that's like already a lot of terabytes that the uh every year that are being uh added to the blockchain right and people have to store all of that now if you crank that up by another factor of 100 then we're talking about like eight petabytes per year right and so the higher the higher you go the we the the higher and higher the risk there is that just people are gonna like get tired of like all of this data and there's just you're gonna have an accident at some point and you're going to realize that like some piece of data from somewhere in history nobody is doing it anymore now i think um 85 terabytes per year is actually is totally fine right like because 85 terabytes per year like if you have

if you have even one person that just keeps buying like um a hundred dollar hard drive like i think once every month then they can store it right like it's something like that so it's too big for just like a casual user that just wants to run the chat on their laptop but one dedicated user who cares like they can totally afford to afford to store the chain um so 85 terabytes not a big deal right but once you crank that number higher there comes a point at which it starts becoming a really big deal um so i like i guess that like the answer is a little bit unsatisfying in that there isn't some point um above which like it's obviously scalable up to this point but it's obviously not scalable beyond this point it's like

there are these weird systemic risks and as the scalability goes up the systemic risks go up and there just comes some points at which you know it becomes harder and harder to argue that this is like a credibly 100 secure and reliable blockchain but you know do we know what that point is well unfortunately we don't really know until an accident happens and so we have to be careful um and so like i think like i personally am convinced that um you know the 2.6 megabyte per second number is very safe um i'm like i'm even convinced that going up like another half order of magnitude another order of magnitude is very safe but um you know realistically we do want to keep the numbers like on on the lower side so so that we can

actually set up so that nobody feels uncomfortable like that that's basically where the limits are at um but you know 2.6 megabytes a second is a lot right like if we're talking about zk roll ups that implement full compression um 2.6 megabytes divided by 16 bytes of transaction that's like 130 ktps um so and if we add a decade of moore's law then you know we're talking hundreds of hundreds of thousands of tps so that's just like enough to run most users transactions um so i've basically i think with quadratic sharding will be fine as uh so we've we've gotten through the uh the merge and the surge right we still have three other urges to go through um but

okay so the merge gives us proof of stake basically people know what that is uh the surge gives us scalability so we get massive bandwidth massive throughput particularly on roll-ups um so now we have scalab scalability on ethereum and now we have um proof-of-stake uh what about the verge that's the next one on the roadmap so what does that add the verge um is the introduction of a vertical trees right so virgo trees are a replacement for the merkle patricia trees that currently store the ethereum state uh so the ethereum state is this database of uh like all of the accounts all of the smart contracts all of the

balances all of the contracts code all the contract storage everything that is remembered by the ethereum blockchain that that contracts and users and applications can access um and that is all hashed into this tree structure right and vertical trees replace that tree structure or they replace the current um hash based tree with a uh a vertical tree which is based on vector commitments now you have to ask well what's the benefit of switching to vector commitments the benefit of this has to do with this concept that i think i've talked about many times historically which is a stateless clients so what is the sales clients right so the like today in order to verify uh block n you have to have the entire

ethereum state and how do you get the entire ethereum state like you have to like either you like fast sync and you download everything or you have to download block and block n minus one or you have to verify block n minus one right so in order to kind of keep verifying ethereum blocks and stay up to date with the chain you have to have this entire database locally this database is big it's about 40 gigabytes i think and it keeps on getting bigger and if we end up like massively increasing the gas limit then it'll get even more bigger so it's um so what do stateless clients do stateless clients are basically let you say what if instead of needing this entire database to verify a block we're

going to have this thing called a verbal proof which which gives you only the pieces of the state that are read and written to and accessed in a particular block along with a proof that proves to you that those pieces actually are correct right and so if you have that proof then you can verify a block without needing any other information so you can imagine this proof as being an extra couple hundred kilobytes um so there is the data so there are the accounts the code and the contracts that are being read for that particular block and then there are just these extra intermediate commitments and this is another few hundred kilobytes and that and those proofs um like basically tell you that the data that is being claimed

actually is correct now technically you can make up you can make proofs with patricia trees right but the problem is that the proofs are incredibly big like we're talking like more than 10 megabytes in the worst case rule what are we talking about 400 megabytes so it's a little too much for users to be able to actually verify but vertical trees they use like some fancier technology and if you want to learn more about that technology i once again i wrote an article about it um and the fancier technology of verbal trees allows you to have these proofs that are much shorter and that are fast to verify um and so we actually can't afford to have these sales clients right so what is the benefit of sales clients um stateless

clients basically let you just like immediately step in and say hey i'm going to verify this block you don't need to have the state you don't need to have anything like literally a fresh node can just swoop in and say hey i want to verify this block and it can ask the network for the block ask the network for the proof and once it has the block or the proof it just immediately sweeps through and it just verifies the whole thing um so that now why is that useful um one reason why that's useful is that it allows validators to be much lighter um validators would not have to have this big heavy um database validators could just only

verify blocks that they need to verify in real time right so as of as a validator you would not need to have a big hard drive you would theoretically be able to just do everything in ram so it will be scalable faster much much easier to set up much more convenient um so the experience as a validator will be much more decentralized and all you would have to do is you would just um have to um you know verify these blocks with these extra proofs attached and um you know like that that would be all that you need to do to just participate in the network well so does this mean does this mean like running a validator writing a node becomes so much easier on ethereum so that you know somebody could run it

on a phone for example i mean possibly yes right so like and this is a um a design for the decentralization of ethereum right it's like all of all of these urges have the same thing in common which is like scalability without sacrificing decentralization that's what we're doing with the merge and so like if more people are running nodes have the ability to run nodes back to your point when you were talking about the the verge this gives us more defenders of the city basically so now we have the ability to add more bandwidth and increase the population of our city because we have more defenders who are able to run nodes um to verify that you know everything in

the city is is it's going okay exactly like i guess one analogy might be that like instead of uh having to like actually physically get your armor and weapons and go to the wall to be one of these watch guards like you know you could just sit in the comfort of your home and you could just have a drone so the there's a theme that i'm noticing so far is is some of these updates some of these urges are really about increasing scalability and then some of these updates some of these uh hard forks other these urges are also about making sure that those upgrades are secure so one is upgrading scalability and then the rest are making sure that that effort is safe

and the verge really seems to be about democratizing access to the broadest number of participants possible to anyone and everyone who wants to verify the validity of the chain um would you say that's a fair summary yeah i think so okay and then of course the the desire for everyone to be able to verify the chain is that when everyone can verify the chain you as an individual can't be bullied by someone that can propose blocks when you can only verify blocks cool exactly this brings us to the fourth urge this is uh the purge i think there's a a popular movie with that title but uh no relationships not a popular movie not a popular movie anyway this is not at all related to

that what what are we talking about when we are talking about the purge here on ethereum's roadmap vitalik um basically this is about kind of eliminating the dead weight of history from ethereum now um in a very broad sense right um so there's different kinds of dead weights of history that we have to deal with um one example of that is just like the the load of the historical chain right so today a client joining the ethereum network has to download all historical blocks um and they have to store all historical blocks and this is a lot of data this is like hundreds of gigabytes um and post sharding it will be even more uh like well it'll be terabytes um so

the history expiry this is that blue rectangle that's a little bit to the left um basic um and by the way like in this uh diagram time approximately is left to right so i'm hoping that history expiry actually does happen only a little bit after the merge right we see how the history expiry rectangle is like only a little bit to the right of the merge uh so history expiry um basically says we don't we stop requiring all nodes to store all of these historical blocks um instead clients stop storing history that's more than one year old and we kind of uh shifts the responsibility of storing and retrieving that history to other protocols um so um eip-4444 is probably the most popular uh history

expiry erp right now it's just very simple and dumb just says clients don't have to store that stuff anymore um so i think the interesting question there is if all client nodes do not have to store history anymore then who does right there are applications that depend on history that are more than one year old i mean even roll-ups do right like a roll-up uh in order to actually sink the state of a roll-up you like you do have to get did like be either you kind of like trust some state route that's say one week old and you have some separate peer-to-peer network that you download the state from or if you want to do it with just a blockchain then you do have to basically walk through the entire history of the

roll-up and so you do have to process all these blocks one by one right um a lot of um like applications depend on old history to tell you about like all instances of when you use that application so like tell like i'm not sure exactly how like me like diane ryan all these things work but like maybe you need uh the to scan the history to tell you what all your cdps are um if like i know auger needed to use um like historical logs to tell you like all of the different markets that you've participated in um so there is a lot of value in uh in history and for at least some applications and so there's this interesting question of like well what are these alternative ways of getting history right

now the good news is that history is the sort of thing that is very self-verifying right you can just give someone merkle proofs and they can verify merkle proof um so it's not super hard to create protocols that actually that kind of replace the ethereum blockchain in uh actually giving users this data and the other really nice thing about historical data right is that it is a one of interest model um so i think in one of our previous episodes right we talked about trust models like i i wrote this post on trust models and like the difference between n out of two of n one of n zero of n um and the big difference between consensus and history is that consensus is an n of n out of two event trust model and so we have to worry a lot about it but history

like data grabbing is only a one of interest model and so you know it's uh it's something where we actually can breathe a little bit easier and we don't need still like require everyone to store everything right so the main contenders for getting history data one is obviously the centralized approach right ether scan etherchain beacon chain beacon scan amber data like all of these lovely folks they are going to keep storing the entire chain because their users want the chain and so if all else fails there are these uh like about half a dozen centralized backstops that you can go talking to um decentralized protocols um the portal network is the ethereum foundation supported uh kind of um protocol for doing this uh basically every node could

would only need to store a small percentage of all the data and you would have a network that would just automatically route users to the subset of nodes that store like one particular piece of data so one simple mental model for thinking about this might be that like when you start up your node your node is just going to pick a random number from 0 to 100 and let's say your node picks the number 67 and then your node is going to just agree it's going to store the entire history for all blocks whose block numbers end in 67 right and so if a user needs a transaction from a block whose block number ends in 67 it's going to talk to you but instead if a user needs a transaction from a blocker's block number ends in 45 then it's going to

talk to david instead right and you have networks like the porter network that just automatically make all of this happen um so that is the yeah what like roughly what the portal network is going to do there are also third-party protocols right so the graph is one that i think is very far along in doing this sort of stuff that a lot of people are excited about um the graph is a protocol that a lot of applications are switching to already right so a lot of existing applications they stopped using ethereum native um like history and log grabbing because it was too slow and they switched to the graph because it's faster right and so the graph already provides a lot of this now the graph is not yet fully

decentralized the graph still has some a kind of training wheel some centralized stress built in but they do have a road map for kind of taking that out over time so the graph is another option there's another option is also on like client protocols right so like clients protocols um well i think eventually they are going to end up kind of plugging into the portal network um but there's a lot of work happening with like client fraud protocols so like client approaches they're going to become much easier as a result of the merge because the merge supports sync committees which make being a running electrolyte much easier um and so we'll have a lot more like clients and we'll have a lot more of this merkle proof grabbing infrastructure um so the summary right is that the ethereum base

protocol will stop forcing every node to store all of history but instead there's like this entire array of alternative solutions um centralized solutions like block explorers the portal network um the the graph and even more protocols that i've forgotten about all of these different alternative solutions that clients will have to ins instead go to if they want a really old history information now remember most applications don't really even need old history information so this is like for that subset of the applications that do there are these solutions um but for users that don't then you know ethereum will just keep working exactly the way that ethereum works today um so that's history expiry

um the one the longer term one that we could talk about next is a state expiry right so history is um like the the analogy for history and state that i talk about often is um like history or the state is like a country's record of who its citizens are um history is like all the birth records and all the death records right um so it's obvious that history is bigger than state because like when you when someone dies they they get removed from the state but they're still part of the history um and then an archive node is like a node that stores like basically that has a separate page storing like

who the citizens were during every possible year in history right um so now obviously if you have the history you can use that to regenerate an archive node um and if you if you have the history you can kind of place the the history and you can use that to generate the current state um but the history is bigger than the state and the archive node data is bigger than the history or much bigger than the history and the state but you can regenerate it from the history um so the state expiry basically says well even though the state is smaller eventually the state is still going to get really big and so we're going to do is we're going to read say objects in the state that have not been

touched for the last year are going to go into the separate expired tree and the ethereum protocol is not responsible for storing the expired tree the expired tree is part of history but if you care about some account or some application that got moved into the expired tree you can you can go and provide miracle proofs and you can revive it right so state expiry does not impose on anyone like a risk of you know their coins getting deleted if they accidentally go into a cave for two years like if you go into a cave for two years then you're just going to have to provide the merkle proofs to recover to recover your coins right which is something that you totally can't do but in order to do that like you're not

going to have to be able to just go through the regular ethereum protocol you're going to have to like talk to the portal network or talk to the graph or talk to a block explorer talk to one of these other people in order to actually get that data um so state expiry is actually something that i think can wait a very long time um so you can see that in this diagram it's uh the the rectangle is like far to the right of even all of the other rectangles um one of the reasons why it's so far to the right has to do with something that is uh we'll skip briefly ahead to the splurge proposer builder separation um this is this buzzword that i think has become very popular over the last few months this is basically this idea that

the validator that proposes a block and who actually constructs the block do not have to be the same actor right and instead of forcing validators to create blocks we're going to have an auction and we're going to auction off the right to create the blocks and the reason why we're doing this is because creating a block that like really mag gives us the uh the highest gives the creator the highest possible fees gives them the highest possible ibv gives them the highest possible revenue in the long term is a pretty hard problem and we don't want to force validators to have to like figure out the complexities of dealing with that problem because we want anyone to be able to be a validator and so instead we're just going to say that

there's a separate class of actors that can they're going to create these blocks and there's going to be an auction and so proposers can just easily choose to block the pace of the most um and we'll add some extra protocol armor to ensure that this whole thing is still censorship resistant that transactions can still get in um there's uh um like degrad and defran uh francisco have been doing a lot of research on that but one of the really nice side effects of pbs is that validators are no longer involved in the job of creating blocks right so validators no longer have to store the state um this also gets into verbal trees right validators only have to verify blocks it's the builders that have to create blocks so the builders have to store the state but the builders

are going to be pretty specialized anyway and so if the state blows up to four terabytes well you know the builders can store four terabytes right so if we have virgo trees and we have pbs technically we don't really ever need state expiry and so if the can gets kicked down the road 20 years on state expiry that's actually totally fine but like i think eventually we do want the ethereum protocol to be kind of more elegant and to not have this kind of extra junk data that keeps going up and up forever and so adding some kind of state expiry does make sense right um so that is like a much longer term thing but if if it has to happen it can happen um and then the last part of the purge has to do with technical debt right so

it has to do with actually simplifying the protocol and actually removing a lot of the complexities from the from the code that currently make it more difficult to create a node that currently make it more difficult to like like actually run a node to debug and like to or just you know make an ethereum implementation um so the self-destruct op code is one of those up codes that i really hate um and that i have good reasons to um i think if you just like a google search like vitalik bans or vbooter and banned self-destruct he can probably find the post for advocate for why we should ban self-destruct oh no sorry it's a debutant pragmatic destruction of self-destruct that's the title um so i talk about like that why i think

that's a good idea um verbal trees also depend on banning self-destruct because they change the storage layout in a certain way um gas stipends are another thing that i want to remove at some point a lot of the pre-compilers we can remove and we can just replace them with evm implementations um we can remove we can simplify logs eventually we can remove rlp eventually uh we can find solutions for dust accounts so like if someone has like say fifty dollars of ether fifty dollars of erc20 tokens today and they have a hard time paying the gas fees to remove that then there are a number of ideas that can make it cheaper for them to deal with all of that stuff um so a lot of little

things right but the core idea here is to basically kind of like leave the past in the past and create an ethereum that actually becomes simpler and simpler over time so i want to try and summarize that using a metaphor and see how well how well that lands with you and so my mind is actually going to um the game of snake uh once upon a time the game of snake was played with little squares and the snake you would start off really really short maybe it'd only be four or five blocks long and it would move around this green and it would eat a block and then it would grow one block longer and that's kind of like a block chain right block chains grow people add data to them the snake gets a little bit longer and as that snake gets longer it also

gets harder to manage and sometimes it runs into itself and dies i actually think this is a really good metaphor for a blockchain um what you're what you're saying with the purge is there and if ultimately the game of snake ends with you dying because you got too long that's that's the long-term conclusion of the game of snake and maybe also the long-term conclusion of blockchains maybe if there's too much data in a blockchain it just gets too long and then it dies it crashes and so what you're saying with a purge is is there's a bunch of ways where we can start to trim off the snake and keep it shorter keep it more agile keep it more lightweight and when it's shorter more people can manage it more people can use it and so state expiry history expires expiry and then just eliminating some of

these evm up codes and some other things are all different ways that we have determined that we can safely trim off the tail of the snake and leave what you said the past in the past so that the snake stays at a manageable length uh that could be managed by more people how is that for a metaphor that is a really fun analogy um okay let's see if i can like take like to come up with a city analogy for the purge like let's say imagine you have a city right and let's imagine that because of global warming every couple of years you just have to move the city 100 kilometers north right because the earth is warming and so eventually where the city was before it gets too cold um now imagine if

like you have a like like for some reason um today we just decide designed the city kind of security protocol in such a way that even though the city keeps moving and we have to keep building new city walls we still have to keep on guarding all of the old city walls forever right so every time there's a new city like in like the the number of walls that keep that you have to keep guarding just keep just keeps increasing even if the city's population doesn't go up right so the purge basically is about fixing that problem and about saying like hey these cities are abandoned and you know if you really want to like if you really want to like go and grab stuff maybe from your old home then you know we can

provide you for some way to like hire some private security so you can go and visit that city but like we're not going to keep maintaining security for that city forever um and then on theme with uh what's been going on so far is is with uh you know first uh some of these changes are ethereum expanding and growing into new fields and then some of these changes are ethereum protecting that that expansion right first we build out and then we harden uh and so and one of the questions i had for you is is that you know we're eliminating state eliminating state in in ethereum with part of the purge which is kind of antithetical to what a blockchain is blockchains you're not supposed to eliminate data that's not what they do in fact it's actually quite the opposite but what you're saying is with some of

these strategies we can safely prune some of the data and have strong assurances that that data will still be available somehow some way by some manner in ways that it feels still secure to eliminate that data from the current state while still having strong assurances that that data is available somewhere exactly so like the way that i think about the blockchain philosophically is that it becomes this kind of public billboard where the billboard guarantees that everything that looks like it's on the billboard actually was published to the billboard and it actually was correct um but like you don't actually have to have everyone that's responsible for securing the billboard also be responsible for

recording the entire history of the billboard right because uh like recording history is an easier problem than uh than securing um and so you know we only have uh a smaller number of people actually like record the history of the entire billboard and that smaller number of people is enough because securing the billboard is an n out of two of end problem but recording history is a wanted event problem and so like we just don't need to have this incredibly huge number of people recording the history of the billboard forever there we go guys isn't blockchain fun snakes and cities mergers and purges uh here we go with the fifth one is my favorite at least in title is the splurge uh let's talk about the splurge and

there's so many things i think we could talk about because this seems like almost like a grab bucket category miscellaneous category of all sorts of other cool things that ethereum could do in the future maybe some of these things are further out than others but could you pick like maybe one or two vitalik uh that uh that you think would be useful to talk about in this catch-all bucket sure um so uh proposal builder separation we've talked about already um account abstraction that's a uh one that we've talked about i think since forever and i think people have heard about that in a long time right like basically the idea is just like make smart contract while it's more like first class citizens and so it becomes as easy to like

do all of your ethereum with a smart contract wallet as it is with a regular account and today that's not the case because of the way that the ethereum protocol was just structurally assumes that everyone has what's called an externally owned account but account abstraction just fixes those issues and so things like multisig wallets things like social recovery wallets uh just become really easy for anyone to use as their primary account um so i think the newest development disaccount of in a cab abstraction is erc-4337 um so this is a layer like a a layer two sort of approach to account abstraction that says instead of changing the protocol the support account abstraction we're just going to create this kind of second

transaction layer where we have these user operation objects that directly talk to smart contracts and then there does need to be like a wrapper transaction that wraps around all of the user operations that get included in a block but instead of having the transaction overhead per user operation you just have it once per block right um and this and then you have a separate mempool for user operations miners can listen to that mempool um you could and uh um actors like that participate in flashbots could listen to that mempool um and so like basically you create this kind of like higher level ecosystem where users can do everything that they need to do with the smart controller quality with

these user operations um and every there exit there is this kind of higher like higher level construction consisting of these actors part in the ecosystem that are listening to this mempool that actually make sure that everything gets included on chain right so it's like instead of changing the existing protocol you create a protocol that sits on top of the existing protocol so instead of layer 2 for scaling it's sort of layered to for account abstraction but like the difference here right is that like this this isn't creating like a separate universe that's account abstracted like account abstracted wallets will be able to interact with all existing applications they are they just they are ethereum addresses

they are ethereum smart contracts right so account abstraction and like another really nice thing about air c437 is that the exact same erc 4337 can work on if you're in layer one it'll work on optimism it can work on arbitrary we can work on polygon um you know kid i think with some modifications work on stark net um so like all of this uh st and so it basically is this uh kind of path toward an ecosystem-wide upgrade that that could bring us toward um smart contract while it's actually being a reality that's very cool can i ask the other thing in this grab bucket maybe there's so many other

things we could talk about but um zk snark everything zk snarkifying everything that that might be a bit more uh on the distant horizon but it's that sounds really awesome what is that basically like we like we wants to completely move away from this idea of like users verifying things by re-executing them right so like zika starts the evm so that um users don't even have to verify don't have to run the evm um zika snark the beacon chain transition so that users don't have to run the beacon chain transition zk snark you know signature verification so users don't have to verify signatures right so

basically get to the point where the only person who needs to actually run the evm and actually like run the the beacon chain like state transition function and run any of that stuff is whoever is at whoever is creating the block everyone else just verifies one snark and that one snark wants to verify the entire block and so what does that give us like does that provide dividends across all of these things that makes it extremely easy for anyone to run a node so it just adds more and more drones watch towers of all types to the city so that everyone is part participating in the security of the city in an easier fashion yep

cool it it chops the snake's tail david again like a off it's just a single yeah so like you have all you have is like the head of the snake and instead of the body of the steak you just have like as it gets dark of a body of the snake and like the snake is happy it doesn't need the body it just has a proof that the body exists oh my god okay i want to unpack that so there's just one head of the snake which is normal and then the whole rest of the body has been uh zk snark so it's this tiny little tail that's connected to this normal sized head and that's how ethereum just becomes super ultra lightweight exactly somebody's going to make a zk snart game in zk yeah stark technology somewhere

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privacy browser on the market whether you're new to crypto or a seasoned pro it's time to switch to the brave wallet download brave at brave.com bankless and click the wallet icon to get started vitalik give us kind of the i guess the high level overview so we we started this episode you said you felt like you could be convinced uh in saying that ethereum is maybe 50 of the way done okay does the end of these things after the merge surge purge verge uh splurge are we a hundred percent at that point in time is everything i would say so um i mean there are a couple of these longer term extras that we haven't talked about but it would probably take too long for us to talk about all of them but i feel like and i i do think that like none of these road maps are

final right like these road maps are kind of my attempts to reflect the current rough consensus of the research team um so like there are new things that did not exist before right like pbs did not exist a year ago and so you did not see pbs in last year's roadmap um so there might be a couple of things but i think once all of these things are done like i will say this if this is all done and then nothing else ever changes after that then i'll be extremely happy right now like i feel like this covers everything that's like necessary for ethereum to not only survive but even thrive going into the long term so i i was just gonna ask as well the timeline so the theorem is six years old

is how long is this going to take is this going to take another six years i could definitely see all this happen in six years yeah vitalik is if one one or a handful of these things doesn't happen is everything here crucial does everything here need to happen in order for ethereum to last multi-generations i would say if only the merge and the surge happen then ethereum can already survive and thrive and last multiple generations um to me the uh again it's possible that pbs is necessary for security um and and it's like possible that you know we'll the the verge is going to

become really important eventually but even there it doesn't need to right because uh like one alter like one possible alternative to the verge is that eventually if the if the merge and the surge finish at some point we just reduce the gas limit all the way back down to three million uh because we don't like we don't need a layer one gas anymore because everything happens on way or two right so aside from the merging of the surge i do there are alternatives to everything but i think it is still a nice to have um and so you know i'm still really excited about all of these things taking place and so what we're looking at guys is for bankless listeners we're we're breaking into kind of the firmware the the machinery of uh this trust computer that we call ethereum here right um like

that's what we're doing we're kind of almost looking at the motherboard with vitalik if you will what once this computer is built and of course i know you remember vitalik the meme of um ethereum the internet computer that went a little wild in 2017 it's a world computer the internet the world excuse me the world's computer uh that went a little wild in 2017 um but like there's some truth to it right this is a world computer that that has been built so once this roadmap comes to fruition what will we have like what is at the other side of this i mean bitcoin's vision famously is now become sort of a digital gold if you will it's all about bitcoin the uh the asset and the

scarcity of that asset what do we get when this when this world computer is fully built out when you'll get a system where if you want to build an application where you want some piece of that application to have execution that's globally trusted you can just use ethereum to do it and that spawns you know infinite numbers of possible applications some of which we have designed so far and some of which i guess we'll see in the future you did so vitalik that was a high level summary of the ethereum roadmap thus far and and into the future even though it's a always changing thing uh the crypto industry is always changing and something that we've seen in the last year is the rise of the alternative layer ones

and where ethereum has this goal to get to the state that we've been discussing alternative layer ones have cropped up um some with different goals and some with other goals and you've also written an article lately called endgame that makes the case that all blockchains ultimately converge on the same future and so we want to unpack this uh this part of this conversation because other alt layer ones alternative layer ones have their own uh roadmap and you think that ultimately long-term blockchains will converge upon the same future so so we want to unpack that but before we get into the endgame article i just kind of want to get your take on on 2021 with regards to ethereum and then all the other smart contract platforms that that came about

the first half of 2021 was really just a theorem show uh nfts absolutely blew up defy was huge uh we got we saw the seedlings of web3 platforms put cryptography into corners of the world that had never seen it before so many people got uh private keys so many people learned how to use metamask so many people approached crypto in a positive light rather than just you know drug dealing internet money um which was really cool and ethereum in the first half of 2021 kind of turned into a victim of its own success in my mind it got so adopted so quickly that it became extremely congested uh just massive adoption turned into exclusionary gas fees expensive nfts price out everyone and ethereum kind of got this um negative

branding as like a whale chain if you will uh and that turned this turned into a bunch of pushback into uh alternative newer layer ones uh and push the users into these newer layer ones because crypto people want to do crypto stuff they want to push buttons on their metamask they want to push buttons on their ledger and so we saw the rise of binance smartchain solana avalanche phantom tara just a slew of other layer ones to really satisfy the demand of layer one block space um so i don't really have a specific question here but what do you what do you make of 2021 and the distribution of where the average crypto user has fallen with regards to all the different new crypto systems that are out there what do you make of all this um yeah and i think

there's clearly a lot of demand for scaling there's a lot of demand for blockchain space that is cheap um and like ultimately users are going to gravitate to where that space is provided right um so well actually this reminds me of fun um fact from my recent trip to um argentina um so guess what is what is the alternate layer one that is that the yeah like people just like using cryptocurrency um on the grounds for for commerce in argentina are using most often that as far as i can tell bitcoin no bitcoins also expensive right okay it's it's one where transactions are extremely cheap okay well let's go through is it um is

it matic no is it okay not matic is it uh tara no solana i think you might be remember ryan i think it's tron binance is it going to be tron okay um tron is probably the one one of the number two like what's the number one um binance chain uh it's finance not finance smart buying finance decentralized exchange ah okay for you know like for for doing what what are they doing on binance like they just like need cryptocurrency for payments um yeah like look one of them was just the coffee shop that ex that um accepted crypto there are a couple of other

businesses like when i ask if they can pay with if i can pay with if they just show me the qr code of a deposit address and like it's just obvious that they're used to um like finance to finance transfers which are instant right and like my ethereum to binance transfer has to wait for 12 confirmations in the app um so yeah you know there we go that's uh you know that so far that's the ethereum killer so is is binance like an alternate layer one in your mind or like i've always thought it is right like sure it's like a guy's database but you know if like if like if we're talking about people who don't care about the level of decentralization then like so

just to illustrate this uh if you have a binance address and i have a binance address both binance knows that it has both of our addresses and so if it goes from binance address a to binance address b it just accounts for that on its internal ledgers and just updates its internal balances and the users are apparently okay with that in argentina exactly and they should be because like it's it's better than the existing system which is what makes them users right right but you know yeah like i think like in argentina i remember that the thing that all of this crypto stuff is competing with is uh one like highly inflationary argentine pesos and two usd over cash which is inconvenient you have to hide it under your mattress and

potentially have it get robbed or you have to put it in some complicated safety deposit box that you have with like some company that you have to maintain so like even binance decentralized exchange is already a big improvement over what these people would be using otherwise um now obviously ideally um you know the ethereum ecosystem would be able to serve all of these users directly but scalability is not high enough for that yet but it is uh as i think we've talked about it it's coming quite close to being ready so are you making the case vitalik i want to make sure i understand so like um do you think it's true that um users don't care about decentralization or like why

should they even care about decentralization if binance is going to service their needs and provide what they need and you know maybe i'd as an uh someone in argentina would you trust cz and finance over my my local banking system i understand why um are you making the case that's true and and that therefore is from these alt layer ones that trade off decentralization for bandwidth and speed and that sort of thing that's that's a good thing what are what are your thoughts there um i think a lot of people do care about decentralization but like they're not going to take the decentralization of the decentralization costs to eight dollars a transaction [Music] there's uh there's this um quote that you had in 2017 that says the internet

of money should not cost five cents per transaction and uh i remember when you said that in 2017 and i i think a lot of um you know people who have been angry at uh gas fees high gas fees on ethereum have used that quote recently let me ask you do you still believe that of course i do yeah so yeah talk about that in the context of the ethereum roadmap yeah i mean i think um you know what like in order for blockchains to be able to actually be something that like people are going to adopt for just mainstream applications like it it it has to be it has to be cheap and it has to be not just cheap by the standards of

whales who bought crypto in 2014 it has to be cheap by the standards of people who are coming into the system today and who are going to be putting you know 20 or 40 dollars into crypto if they put in anything at all right and so ethereum to like you know yes ethereum today is not a yes uh like the layer one is not a system that's uh ready for like direct mass adoption by users but that's exactly why we've been like harping the drum of a scalability and layer twos and charting and all these things pretty much since uh uh 2014 right like the the ethereum's road map like any kind of vision and strategy is like exactly the same as it was back in 2017 when i talked about the need for the need for

fees to be low um and uh you know the way your twos are coming close to close to providing that right like bloopering has been around for a year and it provides uh you know transaction fees that are not quite five cents but they tend to be like around 15 cents or so today and of course once shorting comes along then like it will be much less than five cents again um so there's uh like the layer two ecosystem is definitely um together with layer one sharding is completely on the way to like bringing us back to the really low fees that we had back in 2014 and 15 and that allowed so much um amazing experimentation early on to start happening um but you know to get there

we do needs to actually get solve all of these hard technical problems there's a line that's going around in the crypto twitter sphere and the overall conversation of all the crypto people out there uh about how ethereum maxis are just bitcoin maxis 2.0 and it's unknown whether this trope is uh actually stated by the users or perhaps injected by the vc l1 builders out there trying to fight ethereum perhaps the truth is somewhere in the middle uh but vitalik as somebody who originally forked off of of bitcoin how do you feel about that line um i mean i definitely think that maximalism is something that's uh very unhealthy um and like there definitely

are tendencies i think among some people in even the ethereum community to try to kind of brand everything outside of the ethereum ecosystem as being boring and illegitimate which like i don't think is true like i think you know there's real fun like interesting stuff happening in z cash lands there's real interesting stuff happening in like say tezos you know there's uh that one of the cities that i talked about in my crypto cities article they're doing everything on tezos um so they're like i i do think that you know there are honorable communities that are not just like taking the quick buck and that that actually do care about decentralization um but at the same time right like it's uh

like it's it's also pop like there's definitely a lot of people that like basically just to use the word ethereum maxi to just refer to someone who supports ethereum which is just crazy right like there's like this idea that um decentralization is really important for example right and i think ethereum is like one of the brilliant valuable and important things about the ethereum community is that it does have a core that is that strongly believes in decentralization it's willing to continue fighting for it it's uh you know willing to like even delegitimize and stop publicly supporting applications that kind of betray those principles um yeah whereas uh you know on a lot of other ecosystems

like you have entire gaps that are like close source and people just like like barely blink an eye about it um so that's the so i think um you know i i guess my my view there is it is uh somewhere in the middle like i think it's definitely important to like also have our eyes open and look at all and look at what's going on in all of these other ecosystems um but at the same time like we do have to remember because or that a lot of people do like support ethereum not just because of uh you know some kind of like you know bias of like they got their bags in earlier because like ultimately like you know if you have your bags in ethereum but you

decide ethereum is worse than you can just move all your bags to something else you know it's a it's a free mortgage um but i i think you know people do believe that um decentralization is valuable and important and they just see the ethereum community as being a community that is well that is uh willing to actually work hard and take all of the necessary steps to actually build the future where we have scalability and decentralization at the same time and that's i think something that's uh you know really important to keep and i know you personally vitalik aren't maximalist about anything read you know your article about concave versus convex thinking right that sort of thing but if

um if you had to be ascribed the label of maximalist something would you would you like how close are you to being a decentralization maximalist what was that again how close are you to being a decentralization maximalist does that describe your philosophy on things vitalik i mean i would not call myself in anything maximalist but i definitely think that decentralization is extremely important um it's like ultimately decentralization is what this space is about right and uh like once you start compromising on that then there does come a point where you just have to ask well like what is even difference between what's being built here and uh centralized systems um and uh

like i think the more that we can actually get to like genuine um decentralization and an ecosystem where you know in order to make changes to the protocol like he actually needs to have buy-in not just from a couple of protocol elites but from the entire user community like i think that's a really important and beautiful thing um and it's also an important and beautiful thing for um you know eat the asset to maintain its credibility it's an important thing for a lot of the applications on ethereum to maintain their credibility and it's something that we need to fight for and support starts to get into the conversation of the end game paper which i think we want to transition into now um and i think i do agree with you vitalik that

uh obviously the decentralization is the prime thing that we are uh that really supports this entire industry uh but a lot of the uh alternative layer ones that have cropped up in the in the last half of the year have um penetrated into the crypto markets using cheap fees cheap blocks based fees having ample blocks based supply and they got that way via centralization but there's an argument out there that's that says that uh while ethereum sacrificed scalability first in order to achieve scalability later other uh centralized layer ones sacrifice decentralization first and can achieve decentralization later it's just a matter of picking which of the blockchain trilemma systems uh points do you want to compromise and then work on

um so i want to get your perspective on if you think that's a fair characterization can you compromise on decentralization at the start to achieve it later and do you think all of these alternative layer ones all layer ones all blockchain layer ones ultimately converge on more or less the same design structure in the very distant long term i mean like first of all like i think this post is is in some ways more about the theory than the practice right like in practice i think a lot of these communities pay lip service to decentralization but they don't like deeply give much of a crap about it like how many of them even try having multiple clients for example some do right but others don't and i think looking at which ones do and which ones

don't and it tells you a lot about an ecosystem um but the so the question i ask basically is like if you were to like say put me in charge of one of these centralized big block chains and like and i were to put like and you were to ask me like what would it take to actually turn that chain as it is today into a blockchain that has what i would consider to be acceptable levels of decentralization and stresslessness and censorship resistance right and the like plausible roadmap that i have here basically has a collection of things that a big blockchain can do and

basically to add what what i would call protocol armor that actually adds a sensational resistance and decentralization so which was a big part of the conversation of the ethereum roadmap that we just had exactly um so the core ideas here basically say well okay look we have this chain where block production is very centralized but what if we can allow block verification to happen in a way that is decentralized right so you have all sorts of decentralized actors that can propose transactions where those transactions have to be included and so you have censorship resistance and then you have all of these different actors actually do the verification so that a bad block producer or a bad collusion of block producers can't actually like push an

invalid walkthrough right so i talk about like having a second tier of staking with low resource requirements that does some distributed block validation and so you can do some committee verification um you can also do verification with zk snarks or verification with fraud proofs um to check that block data is available and the blocks aren't being hidden you can introduce data availability sampling um secondary transaction channels so different ways for transactions to get to get um like seen by these uh second tier stakers so that they the protocol then actually forces them the creator of the next block to include them so all of these kind of pieces of armor that you can add around a protocol so that even if you do have one big block producer the big the what they

produce is still validated by this highly distributed process that prevents them from actually using their power to do anything terrible right so this is like the best that you can do if you want to start from what where these blockchains are today and get to a point that i would consider acceptable so so just to iterate this is a strategy for crypto systems that uh have compromised on decentralization and they have uh centralized just a small handful maybe just even one block producer some one entity or a very small number of entities that actually produce the blocks but what you're saying is there's a series of technologies that allows for the individuals the many of the world to to check the powers of that central

party so while that central party does have a lot of power because they're the only ones proposing blocks or maybe there's a few of these block proposers they still have to pass through the many many many individuals that are given power given uh sovereignty through some of these cryptographic techniques is that what we're saying and what what kind of system do we end up with if uh if they did that metallic is this um is this what we mean by decentralization so like yeah what sorts of things could the block producers you know have have power over and how could the the verifiers the validators um sort of you know provide a check on that power right so the worst that they could do what one is they can extract

all the mev um they could probably delay all transactions by a couple of blocks so like we do we have a lot of this research on these alternative uh transaction inclusion mechanisms that can force transactions to be included but those met like those mechanisms aren't perfect and they don't like they eliminate a lot of the block producers power but they don't eliminate all of their power and so block producers would still be able to like manipulate ordering of transactions a little bit um you know if like you have an nft auction suddenly appear then like the block producers would still be the ones that will be able to get first first dibs on everything um so it's not perfect but it is still a system where

like you can't push invalid blocks through you can't completely censor transactions um you can't push on available blocks through and so the core things of what a blockchain needs to be a blockchain theoretically are still there so one of the questions i have for you vitalik is uh there are some parallels here and this is a in next up in your in your article there are some parallels between centralized l1 with centralized block producers and layer two roll-ups on ethereum can can you elaborate for the listeners as to why why so much of these conversations overlap between centralized l1 and l2 roll-ups sure um so this is the second thought experiment i have here right

which is like imagine if we do layer two scaling and some there is one roll-up team that does a really good job of engineering and they get really high levels of scalability right so like imagine arbitraring for example they have an amazing evm zk roll up and they figure out how to do parallelization they figure out how to do like an amazingly parallel evm they have a super high performance node and they have you know a roll up that does 10 000 tps right now the techniques for how to do this are actually are pretty well known right like daniel erimer eos like has been talking about this stuff since even 2014 right um now imagine if you have this system and you

have this as a roll-up running on top of ethereum what does that world look like right so i would argue that that world actually looks extremely similar to the world where you start with a centralized chain and you add the protocol armor the difference is that in the in the centralized chain like you have the centralized chain that does the centralized sequencing and then it also adds the decentralized validation in this world you would have arbitrarium or the arbitrary sequencer whoever that is do the centralized sequencing but then you would have the arbitrarium protocol pro fraud proof functionality um that allows the decentralized validation to happen um and then you would have the ethereum

protocol itself provide all of the protocol armor to keep the the rest of the decentralization right so like for example you would need um roll-ups already they generally have secondary transaction channels so if the main sequencer is not accepting a transaction you have an alternative way of get of uh getting your transaction included and the next roll-up block is forced to include that transaction um you also have um data availability verification is done by the ethereum protocol um so today everyone downloads everything but in the future we have data availability sampling um so the ethereum protocol um becomes this kind of guarantor of

sensors resistance and availability um and all of all these other things and then you have like in this case the arbitrary smart contracts that would actually provide the fraud proof like verification and a lot of the rest of the armor that make sure that whoever does create the blocks can't actually abuse their power right so even though it's implemented using a very like a very different path and you have this different kind of division of labor between the arbitrary layer 2 protocol and the ethereum layer 1 protocol the result actually still ends up looking fairly similar to what we had in the first section there so that's the that's the second thought experiment and um

you know we get sort of a similar result similar end game as the title of the article says but that's probably not what we expect or at least most in ethereum right now expect we probably aren't going to see one roll-up dominate and win that's a possibility but we probably won't see that given the plethora of different roll-up solutions implementations you know trade-offs that they're making and um your strengths that they have what we'll probably see is a multi-role up world where we have many different roll-ups from many different teams but you make the argument in this third thought experiment that even if we have a multi-role up uh kind of world if we live in that world we might still end up in the same

place can you walk us through that piece of things sure um so this gets us into this discussion of crosstown mev right so the issue here basically is okay you have many different roll-ups but even if you have many different roll-ups there's this argument that there is an incentive to try to be a block producer on all of them at the same time and the reason why there's an incentive to be a block producer on all of them at the same time basically has to do with this concept of crosstown arbitrage right like if you scroll down to that diagram like this is an example no no the western gate one you have the purple yeah like this is um yeah yeah crosstalk mean mev opportunity discovered by western gay right so

you're converting 44 374 usdt into 44 660 usdt and half of the operation happens on i think that's polygon right and then the other half of the operation happens on the ethereum base chain um so as we move to a layer two centric ethereum things like this will become normal it will become normal to see that like there are these arbitrage opportunities where one half of the opportunity gets done in lawyer two the other half of all of our of opportunity happens on a different way or two so like it might happen on starkx for example um or you know what might happen on like you know the as on dydx um you might or some some exchange running on optimism um you

might even have like an arm between uh the copy of una swap that's on optimism and the copy of uniswap that's on arbitrom uh so the like in this world there are advantages from being the proposer for everything at the same time um and so if now it's not certain that things will go in this direction right but if things do go in this direction then like we could easily see some kind of protocol take over that basically auctions off like kind of the right to be a proposer for these rollups as a package deal and so you end up having the second the same actor end up proposing on all of them even if the like the protocols are designed in such a way that you could have different proposals

on them right um so now if the world does go this way it's actually not that bad the reason why it's not that bad is because roll-ups provide all of this protocol armor to make sure that even if there are centralized actors taking over a book proposing they can't uh push through invalid things they can't push through on available things and because roll ups all have these sensors persistent bypass channels they can't even censor anyone right so the world of uh rollups where proposing gets concentrated is still a role a world that is not that bad and also interestingly enough it's a world that is very similar to the world of one roll-up or to the world of

centralized chains right so basically we end up potentially getting to a future that is a very similar to the future that we will get in these other two worlds i i think this all brings up the point to me then vitalik if all three of these approaches result in the same thing then why not just take the big block approach from the get-go and scalability and all the are the alt-layer ones taking the right approach after all i think the ethereum approach is more future proof right it's more future proof because like it still leaves agnostic the question of you know are we going to be in a single domain world or are we going to be in a multi-domain

world and it doesn't completely surrender um on the centralization issue right like if it turns out that there are that the optimal way to organize proposers is some decentralized structure where like for example something like the existing flashbots model where you have a like this internal market consisting of searchers then the ethereum like uh system is still friendly to that right so but on the other hand if you start from a layer one where you make the assumption of a centralized proposing then like you don't really have a good way of getting out of that right um so i guess the the question is not like is about like the more you believe in

uncertainty and the more you believe that like we really want to have a system that is open to all of the different possibilities then the more kind of this ethereum approach that is agnostic toward what the future will be but tries to be you know friendly to and have ways to support all of them um looks like the more that approach looks the most attractive it's funny to me as much as ethereum by maybe uh bitcoin maxwell's and others has been criticized in the past for being um i guess moving fast and breaking things too much i often see ethereum in the road from a road map perspective taking a very conservative approach it's a very conservative approach to decentralization and in particular it looks very conservative

uh when you contrast it with all of these very high throughput big block uh alt layer ones that have definitely agree with that one of the dynamics that has really come about in the second half of 2021 is ethereum just got so successful so quickly uh the eth price went from like 600 in january of 2021 to 4 300 six months later uh and then it took a big crash but whatever um the and p there's this very very strong incentive in the world of crypto for people people want people obviously uh think that crypto is where you get rich really really quickly that's kind of what people think of our industry from

the external from the outside in and when people look at this the insane success that ethereum has had they want to emulate that success they want to mimic that success people want to get in on the ground floor of something and i definitely think that incentive is one of the reasons why there's so many newer layer ones out there is just because they incentivize so much just new users to come into their new ecosystem because it's brand new and something that i think concerns me vitalik about the possibility of one single dominant rollup on ethereum is that that if if that happens instead of many many many roll-ups on ethereum then that concentrates wealth into that one single roll-up where there could have been 5 10 15 20 roll-ups each with

their own token each with their own ecosystem that allowed so many people to get in on the ground floor of something that kind of answers to people's desire to you know kind of get have exposure to the the growth of these ecosystems and this is definitely been some of the one of the big themes of the end of 2021 is people users both want cheap blocks but they also want to get in on the ground floor of something um how do you think is that just like a big wrench that gets thrown in the gears of trying to make a decentralized system or how do you like tussle with this this incentive that users have to always adopt something else yeah i mean i think like users wants to get on the ground floor but then users also want stability right like if you

have a system whose entire legitimacy is based on the idea that this is a system that's uh where you can come in and still be early then you're just setting yourself up to be replaced by the next cycles version of the thing that lets you get out on the ground floor and be early um so but and and then if you wants to build something that lasts right then like you wants to build something on a base layer that has a long history of lasting and that you know is going to last for and be relevant for a long time going into the future um so the the this kind of hybrid vision where like ethereum is the thing that lasts a long time and where you just keep having more way or two roll ups pop up like it is an interesting hybrid approach right because like there is

something that you can still get on the ground floor of and there even is something that might be able to have more activist approaches to token issuance for example like if you look at say optimism's approach of retroactive public goods funding um that they that they're up sending their transaction fees into um that is um like you basically get both that and you get the base lawyer that lasts a long time and i think that is a combination that is really powerful and you're right that is not a combination that you get if you have ethereum with a dominant roll-up and in the long term it's not even a combination that you get inside one of these alternative your ones whose marketing pitch is being on the ground floor today

right because like 10 years from now their marketing pitch is not going to be here on the ground floor um and so looking at what's going to happen 10 years from now right like what's the ecosystem it's like it's not about what is the ecosystem that lets people get on the ground for today it's about what is an ecosystem that ensures that there is space for ground floors to appear 10 years from now um and like an ecosystem that allows for some some kind of room for pluralism is pretty much the only way to do that between the two versions of ethereum's roll-up future where there's one dominant roll-up versus many many many roll-ups if in your own opinion is one more desirable

it feels like the the single roll-up one is more convenient for users but the second one is like healthier in some important way um right like it's more fragile more future proof there's more opportunity for things to to improve if things if the existing approach goes bad for some reason whereas the first one is like you know if you can make something that looks like ethereum but it supports 10 000 tps and like you know in the short term that is a huge amount of convenience metallic we've talked about so much on this podcast thank you for spending the time the ethereum roadmap uh alternative player ones and the end game for all of these systems and and that is incredibly important i think we want to end the podcast sort of um where we started but on the flip side where we

asked about your your reflections on on the previous year uh now i find myself kind of reflecting on the next decade and wondering like um i i think uh you tweeted this that this meme a year ago or so about the weird 20s right 2020s and now we're 10 of the way through the weird 2020s so 10 of the way through this decade and like i for one i think everyone listening want to avoid wars global chaos all the things that we're seeing in kind of the news cycle as as potentials want to start solving some of the big problems in our world that just remain unsolved by the existing legacy institutions um also i feel like this need to make sure we don't just descend

into this digital dystopia that appears all around us in various forms do you think crypto has a role to play in the 2020s and preventing some of the worst outcomes and maybe helping to usher in some of the best possibilities i think it really does um i think you know there definitely is this really important need for um some kind of alternative to centralized institutions right um because like we're entering into a world where like it's not disintermediation it's hyperintermediation right like every transaction like has like goes up to having lots of different actors that are in the middle and a hyper-intermediated centralized

world is a world that can easily become dystopian right because if there are like five different pressure points that i can lean on to stop a transaction between you and david then like that's really friendly for anyone who wants to stop things from happening because all they have to do is just to lean on any one of those five um yeah but so if we want to have a future with the kind of intermediation that's necessary to you know get the efficiency and all the good things that we want out of the 21st century then like there needs there need to be some form of the intermediaries that cannot be corrupted that easily and that's i think is what blockchains provide it is what decentralized networks provide um and

like it's it's not just theory right like this is something that i think in a lot of different ways people do recognize as a reality right like lots of people you know they've built startups on top of twitter and facebook and then twitter and facebook shut down those apis and their startups are gone in a day um you know i mentioned argentina like people there definitely understand a lot that you know sometimes the local fiat currency really can't be trusted and uh now maybe your local fiat currency in your country is uh is fine today but but it might not be fine tomorrow and if it's not and just in case that's not fine tomorrow then you know you might want uh to actually have some kind of alternative um if uh you know if you're engaged in um

international transactions then um you know you you definitely don't want something that goes through like all five intermediaries that um that consist of all five of you know the world's major geopolitical um actors because uh you know maybe one or more of those actors have very different ideas about what kind of uh transactions deserve um deserve to be allowed to exist than you do um so then i basically yeah you know moving away from a you know this kind of world where um into hyper intermediation turns into like hyper choke pointization and uh toward a world

where these intermediaries can turn into something that is really empowering is something that i think is really necessary but in order to have that kind of world you know blockchains have to actually be decentralized blockchains have to um actually be credibly neutral and blockchains have to actually scale right so that the blockchain can actually provide those benefits in practice and not just in theory and i do think that we have a road a roadmap to make that happen and i do think that there are a lot of people who are working really hard and uh doing a better and better job of executing on making that road map happen um so i'm uh very excited to see what the the future is going to bring five or ten

years from now there you go crypto has made me more optimistic about the world as well so is decentralization and uh so if you in today's episode vitalik thank you so much for uh joining us on bankless thank you too guys a few action items for you today we always leave you with these the first says you can view that diagram of the ethereum roadmap that i was referencing in this podcast we discussed with vitalik there'll be a link in the show notes also take a look at some of the articles that we mentioned in the podcast as well the end game article is one uh there's a self-destruct article mentioned those will be included in the show notes we also have some previous podcasts with vitalik on bankless an episode on legitimacy an episode on coin voting and

a few others we will include in the show notes guys as always risks and disclaimers none of this has been financial advice theory is risky so is crypto so as defy all of it is you could lose what you put in but we are headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless hq right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence we recommend joining our daily newsletter podcast and community as a bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your bankless experience you'll get access to our market analysis

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