DAPPCON 2024: Fireside Chat - Vitalik Buterin

Transcript

viik thank you so much for being here it's a it's an honor we only have viik for 20 minutes so I'll ask him two questions and then I'll open it up for you guys so Blick um you are um a known privacy uh focused person so you were a tornado user and you're now a rail gun user um many people don't have that intense privacy Focus um do you think we should aim to get based their privacy or do you think kind of we should leave it up to people given that a lot of people don't care or don't care enough maybe yeah I so I mean I could give the reason

why I've been like not strongly pushing Bas layer privacy historically and I mean I think it has nothing to do with any kind of idea that privacy is not important like I actually think you know like privacy is a public good and like when I say that I don't mean that in like some like Feelgood way I mean that in the literal sense that you know the more people use privacy as Solutions the more privacy each one of them gets and uh the more it gets normalized whereas if privacy gets used by very few people like that actually weakens privacy for everyone right so the reason why I was not a like a strong Pusher ofay zcash style layer one privacy historically is

basically that if we look at like concretely how you get privacy like you get privacy with ZK snarks right and you know there are also things like um you know like Monero and ring signatures and multi- round mixing and Quin join but like realistically Zeki stars are the gold standard but then the problem is that there's like 50 different types of Z snarks and every time we agree on which type of Z snark is best something better comes out 6 months later right you know you have elliptic curves I know you have BN 128 you have bls2 381 you have uh hash based things you have Halo you have uh you know lookup tables you have caulk you have all you know do you do

joining do you do splitting you like now know the discussion is like privacy pools and like how does that work and the challenge is like if you enshrine any one particular scheme then like we're basically making that decision on behalf of the protocol at a time when it seemed far too early to actually make that decision right and so that's why back in 2018 we instead decided to take this much more general purpose approach where we said we uh are going to support the elliptic curve BN 128 promiles add multiply pairing and you can go build your own zikas snark based privacy Solutions on top right and uh you know people did right and uh people started

off doing some demos and then eventually tornado cash grew out of that and then eventually real gun and now Oxbo grew out of that and then there was Aztec and so on right and like all of those are based on that b28 precompile and uh the rationale for making that precompile um happen really was about um making privacy on ethereum possible right so I think uh the question around baser privacy is basically like does like the discussion changes if that rationale changes right and I think at some point it is plausible that you know we are going to get more and more certainty that like this uh particular Z snark solution is close enough to

Optimal that we should rally around it this particular way of doing joins and splits as like Optimal enough this particular way of doing privacy pools this particular way of doing like one or two other things so like you you know I think you know you definitely could see a world where enough of those things stabilize that like those arguments actually start to shift in the other direction right and like we've seen that happen in other areas right like with account abstraction for example right like you know account obstruction really started to see success when we switched from doing protocol level changes to doing erc's like offchain standards like 4337 but then we realized that you know chain

standards do have some limitations and you know like now 4337 has been reasonably successful and if we want to give it its full power then like maybe it does actually make sense to enshrine some features of it right and so you know we've been having all this discussion around like you know there's the 7702 and then 7560 and like enshrinement and and all of these things right so I me I think it's definitely a valid question if privacy is going to follow the same path eventually yeah that's uh that's a fantastic um fantastic very comprehensive answer do you think deps until then should make the decision on behalf of users and kind of just Embrace privacy fully maybe at the cost of additional gas I mean I think uh with privacy it's

uh important to focus on the basics before you uh like start to you know like go up the kind of you know the crazy Tower and do really really complex things like one of the worries I have is that you know you have engineers that are thinking about like oh how can we create you know theoretically perfect privacy preserving in our contracts but then at the same time like we don't have the basic thing which is just like the ability to privately send from one address to another inside of a wallet right and uh I yeah like I actually think you know the valuable thing to start from is to like you know go from the bottom up right and like start from the most basic thing and uh I think uh like privacy of basic transfers is the

most basic thing right and like actually create an ecosystem where it's actually feasible for a user to have multiple wallets and to keep or multiple addresses and to keep creating new addresses to use one address per application and to have stronger privacy between those and then like as we once we get to that basic level and then kind of keep climbing up from there right I think uh you know you always need to like start from the foundation m this ties in really neatly with my next question this is the second question so get ready for your questions um so second question um more or less every Bull Run we talk about mainstream adoption right uh so it's uh you know

price go up and uh all of a sudden like when are we going to see this on Main on Main Street um and kind of if you look at the values that we're currently offering to actual retail users kind of decentralization itself is not a value right so kind of it's kind of what it enables and kind of what it Ena is um uh individual agency decentralized ownership um better user experience through kind of uh permissionless platforms and platform platform ification so kind of if you look at um kind of the perspective users that we all hope will hopefully really come this will run um what what are the metrics by which they will be better off in web 3 based products than kind of the web 2

equivalent I think uh that answer is going to be very different for different groups of people right so like I was just in Africa for example right and uh you know in Africa the kinds of things that people build are just are you know like quite different right it's often just uh you know like much more pragmatic like much more just like nuts and bolts like people have problems moving money from one country to another country like international finance still sucks in much of the world you know like 80% of countries are not part of sea and uh the just like having easier ways to like just do basic International Commerce um in a lot of countries just having better ways to do basic savings right and like

that's already value that it provides um with uh to a lot of nft artists there it's just like the ability to participate in international markets right and like you know be able to like actually raise revenue from people in I you know like wealthy countries just like people in wealthy countries already can right so like just kind of like basic International equality is and just kind of basic stability of a of a really simple um economic system is something that's valuable for a lot of people then in um I think in other parts of uh the world it's uh like you be a the value of uh crypto generally comes from

like where the outliers are right like you know people who do things that are just like unusual in some way right and like I think everyone is unusual on at least one axis right it's like you know when when the world is as high dimensional and complex as as our society is like everyone just does something that like the system doesn't serve well on at least some axis right and I know there's people who make international donations there is uh people who want to um you know donate to organizations and preserve their privacy there is people who wants to participate

in things like prediction markets there is uh you know people who want just you know want to use things like ens and uh ipfs and have websites that uh they can guarantee are going to remain online there's you know just like this long tale of use cases I know there's people who for whatever reason know like dislike Twitter and uh want some kind of alternative or even you know like like Twitter but don't want kind of you know Twitter to be the end of history and I think you know the decentralized social media space with foraster and and lens has uh has been ethereum's kind of biggest Rising category of non-financial applications right so like it is all

about the long taale and the fact that that it is the long taale kind of makes sense because like if there is one single thing that like huge amounts of mainstream people all wants to do then like there is going to be more demand for mainstream like Financial systems and mainstream institutions to serve it right and and so I think crypto's value for people is just inherently in that longer tale of things and that's going of to be expected and it's okay um and you know I think it is slowly starting to grow and like it is slowly starting to succeed in all of those areas right like the the thing I've always said about uh like Real World Adoption of ethereum is

basically that uh you know the real world uh The Real World Adoption pitch or the pitch for Why Real World Adoption of ethereum will like will happen even though it hasn't happened yet is basically because like all of the all of the applications that we have in mind depend on things like scalability and low transaction fees and high convenience but ethereum in all of those Dimensions is total crap but we have a road map for why one day it won't be total crap and like now guess what you know we have blobs and like if you go to know like L2 fees. or I think grow thexyz is the other one like you know you actually look at the prices today and like ethereum is know along those Dimensions no longer total crap right

like you know we've uh like remember I remember saying like about 7 years ago that you know the internet of money should not cost 5 cents a transaction and then you know people laughed at me because ethereum is more expensive than 5 cents a transaction but like guess what today it isn't right like get on an L2 it's under a cent um so like that aspect of things is actually changing right and then the same is true with user experience like I remember 2 and a half years ago when I was in Argentina and I was trying to pay for a coffee and I had to wait like 5 minutes for a confirmation and then then we had EAP 1559 and that reduced the average waiting time to like 12 seconds then we had the merge and you know because of weird statistical reasons

that actually reduces the average weight Time by a factor of two without decreasing the block time and then we have layer twos and then layer twos are doing pre-confirmation right so like it actually feels like now where we've like turned that corner and we're at the point where creating those more mainstream applications actually is realistic and uh look we and so we actually do have like that opportunity right so the and you know if you actually look at some of the applications that I mentioned I you know they are starting to see their own uh success in their own areas so I think you know things in ethereum adoption are going quite

well thank you so much um questions from the audience um I see one here up front hi velic Gareth you're from coin um I'm very curious um about your thoughts on the ethereum ETFs there's a lot of chatter that they might get to go ahead today uh does it matter to you and does it matter to get this endorsement from mainstream finance and secondly your thoughts on Alexi PV um going to jail in the Netherlands and uh the presedent that it sets uh for uh privacy tools going forward in the future thank you no yeah I mean I think the lxa thing is definitely really uh unfortunate like I think uh you know like a lot of people

have been you know going under the assumption that you know Society had a line and you know just building software is something that's uh that's okay and is you know a totally like legal and legit way to fight for privacy and you know there are regulations but you know those regulations apply to operators and transmitters and companies and like you know even finen like explicitly said things of that type I mean I know finen is not European and like I know you know preced are country by country but I think at the you know there is definitely still a level at which these things are international um so it's uh definitely really uh really sad and I

definitely hope that with uh youo Roman's trial in the US we get some some positive Clarity there um but no and I think Minal privacy is important and I think the ecosystems willingness to like even also rally around things like tornado C like rail gun and Oxo and you know like similar Next Generation approaches really shows a lot of people's uh like the the sincerity of the desire to like actually focus on you know providing privacy for the common people and you know like not empowering the Kremlin or whoever else um and I think that's something that the ecosystem really stands behind right so

I'm uh you know really supportive of uh people working on those things and you know I hope that know the things go in a good direction within the ecosystem and you know I think I also you know hope um that governments um as well see see the value of this right I think it's important to also stress that like it's not true that governments are uniformly hostile to privacy and like you know here in Europe you know we have laws like gdpr that even actually mandated right and uh like I you know there's definitely an inevitable clash and like you know a conversation and these are normal things that happen in democracies but I think you know with like a lot of

these you know like second generation solutions that are being developed and a lot of the active work and even um you know I think very deliberately conciliatory work that's been done by people like I and I you know I hope hope that we can come to a better equilibrium on this and here also in the front what do you think about St yeah I think uh I mean stable coins are clearly really important and really valuable for people right like uh if you go to places like uh you know Africa or

Latin America for example right and if you look at you know the the ways in which they use crypto like a lot of the time it is stable coins right like people in those kinds of places where they have I know like real direct personal problems that crypto solves I know they're very pragmatic people they're not going to you know use Bitcoin or use ether just because it's only kosher to use Bitcoin or use ether you know they they want stability they you know do not want things that can fall by 30% in a single day and I think that's like really uh a totally reasonable thing for them to expect and it's a really valuable service that stable coins provide um I I think uh there's definitely challenges with the

stable coin ecosystem as it exists today right like you know it definitely does create dependence on the US dollar and I would definitely prefer the ethereum ecosystem to have a lower level of dependence on the US dollar and I mean that this is part of why I think like things like cry I mean even though they're still US dollar based like the fact that they don't attempt to track the US dollar exactly I think makes them somewhat of a bridge uh to some form of stability that's not directly backed um by the currency of a single country um but uh at this so like very supportive of things like that very

supportive of stable assets of other types being created though I do think I me know it's it's one of those things where some of these other approaches are like they're not going to succeed immediately but I think they are really valuable to have in in the back pocket cool unfortunately we're out of time um thank you for all coming and thank you most of all to vitalik uh for stopping by yes you're happy to be here [Applause]