Steps to the Digital State & Open Mic AMA - Vitalik Buterin

Transcript

📝 New institutions like digital states fundamentally change problem-solving and relationships, with the Ethereum community fostering positive cultures and innovative arrangements, exemplified by Wyoming's law supporting DAOs, and the potential for collaboration between crypto and existing institutions in projects like City Jail, while Colorado could facilitate collaboration and experimentation with digital and crypto-based solutions.

okay [Music] [Applause] yay okay great so I'm apparently supposed to talk about digital States um so to start off um the way yeah that I tend to think about these things is that like new institutions are never going to be exact for like carbon copies of old ones right like they're never going to be exact like a better version of something that fits into the exact same box right so you know like when you

have cars like cars don't perfectly replace horses there's things that horses can't do that cars don't do there's things that cars do that horses don't do you know there's a lot of differences between them um and when we talk about even like the internet replacing telephones or like the internet or the internet replacing like some aspects of in-person communication right like it's it's not about creating a new thing that is exact like that is to like the old thing except it's just better because like you know you you add this like piece of magic pixie dust and you know the like one particular aspect of it becomes 37 better for whatever reason like it often does end up changing like how we actually relate to like what fundamental

problems that we're trying to solve right so when we talk about like the digital State like I even find it less interesting to ask the question of say yeah you know what can City governments do to become more digital or what can National governments do to become more digital or you know how can we coordinate um 10 000 people to go to the same location in the middle of a in the middle of a desert in Nevada and hopefully like actually create a new city with fancy blockchain quadratic stuff that actually works well um I like all of those questions are interesting um but prefer to kind of step back and just think about this from the point of view of like what are we trying to accomplish and you know why

are we even having having this conversation and of what are the tools that we have and how do we kind of start to narrow the gap between the tools and the results right so I think the um most um fascinating thing about at least like this particular ethereum Community is that it just has this lovely combination of a whole bunch of like very positive cultures that I like right um so the first I read a very positive culture aspect that I like is just the fact that this Esa culture that is uh very interested in ideas like creating new institutions creating new ways for people to cooperate creating new governance structures

um even creating new communication structures thinking about relationships between um communication and governance and like actually you know using things like blockchains and cryptography and incentives and tools and putting them together into these different like Arrangements where you know hopefully we'll build something that allows us to work allows us to work together on something better in some way um so that's the first thing that I like the second thing that I like is uh there is a uh I mean at least I think very Cooperative aspects to the community um like ever like everyone here is working together everyone here is kind of aligned on this uh set of several different many different Visions but

still like fairly aligned Visions on just how to actually turn all of this into uh some kind of a better world um and I mean we even see like a lot of very positive interactions uh between the crypto community and institutions right like so the governor Jared Polis spoke here there's uh plenty of other people from um you know local government for many other kind many other institutions that are here what was that Wyoming wyomingdale yay Wyoming Wyoming is okay yeah I mean it was actually I was going to mention I mean I think the wyomingdale was like actually great and it's like one of the in like in my

opinion the wyomingdale law actually is one of the best um examples so far of like governments doing something like something that like goes beyond like just um not like not breaking the industry that is actually like really helpful uh helpful to the the crypto spaces ability to thrive right because like what it basically is is I mean it's like government passes a law and it basically gives Dows this new superpower right like they can incorporate and they can and they can now legally own property and they can like actually legally do things and act as legal entities like that's probably one of the most powerful like kind of bridges between the crypto world and the ends of the traditional world that we

have right and so because of that things like City Jail can exist because of that plenty of other projects can exist right so that's amazing um so I guess okay in Colorado and while filming there seems to be this little lovely Spirit of collaboration between the crypto community and um you know governments and many other kinds of Institutions so this is good right and the year so then the question is well okay so there's people in the the crypto community and there's people in existing institutions that are interested in these goals of using these new technologies to help people uh cooperate better um to you know create more open more free and more fair and more transparent forms of cooperation

um and how do we actually take that energy and like what kinds of specific things can we work on in order to actually start to like you get closer to those kinds of outcomes now the reason why I kind of phrase things in this way is that it doesn't matter as much who does it right like so for example um you know if the state of Colorado like does something that enables some kind of some kind of crypto support across the stage it doesn't matter which then you know that's one way of doing it but what if instead the state of Colorado creates some kind of law that makes it easier for independent groups to spit out to whether it's Dallas whether it's local governments whether

it's something else to the basic week work together themselves to achieve that same outcome and you end up having the same result right so sometimes I think like there is this solution of like taking existing um institutions and kind of pushing them in this direction and then there's sometimes there's this approach of this kind of more bottom-up approach right where you start with a small scale but something that's kind of purely crypto and purely digital and you do some experiments and some of those experiments fail some of those work and you scale it up from there and these New Paths are not opposing right like sometimes people think of these two paths or not as opposing I don't actually think that they are opposing um I actually think um that you know often they can complement each other um so

often uh the you know as a wyomingdale law is um excellent example there right institutions can do something where once they do it from their institution the EGA institution doesn't need to do anything else and it actually creates space for it of the bottom-up community it's a and do all of this work and actually make all the all of the amazing progress happen right so I think that's like one um definitely great path to take um other paths to uh take would be obviously um you know starting from the ins from the institution and then kind of adding pieces on top right so at the end of last year I wrote this article on City

📈 City coins can improve local governance by creating economic alignments within cities, but alternative techniques are needed to foster economic alignment without individual property ownership, and collaboration is required to develop frameworks for launching tokens and exploring blockchain-based DAO governance.

coins and you know City coins are this kind of concept that people have been starting to think about and like there's this idea of you know can we create coins that are attached to cities somehow and could potentially introducing City coins actually like fixed incentives and improve local governance and there are some interesting um things that you can do there right so like how can you create economic alignments between people in a city and the whole city like I think the traditional uh like way of doing this tends to be about encouraging like basically property ownership and land ownership and you know everyone must own a house and uh you know if you don't own a house and you and you love your

avocado toast you're a bad person I know I love my avocado toasts um so but you know the reality is that like how is this or non-fungible um houses are you're either a renter and you're negatively exposed to your community or you're a buyer and you're just massively Overexposed to your community and the reality is that they're both irresponsible um how then you know houses are not they do not create economic alignment with the entire city they create economic alignments with a very small portion of a city and often um to the in in ways that create conflict with the rest of the city right so you know people often are like hey you know we want more

development we want more great stuff but like not in my backyard right so the the idea of like can we create cities that have more economic alignment inside them and can we come up with techniques other than like individuals owning specific pieces of property I think it's a really good idea and it's an idea that like we don't know exactly the correct way to implement that idea um but you know there's a room for a lot of good experiments um and uh you know I guess this category of City coins would be one thing that we call those experiments so one right so City now City coins are just like one um example of like a thing that

can be done but then there is the question of like who does it right and here again um this is uh like the there can actually be a lot of different answers right so like Miami coin for example is like this interesting project on one end of the spectrum where they basically say like okay this is basically just a community project um and it starts as a community project and it doesn't have any kind of direct connection to the city governments like you don't actually have like City defined legal rights as a result of it but you know it's gotten some support from the government um and you know maybe over time the coin's role might change who knows um so that's one way of doing it another way of doing it would be like for the city itself to actually create the coin

so you know which of those approaches you take could you take some approach in um you know it depends on the situation um but in in general General like if you are a city government and we want something like that to exist then like both of those routes do exist right like one of the things that you can do is you can do it yourself and one of the things that you can do is you can create the environment that makes it possible for other people in the community to basically do all the work for you right because there are lots of people in the community and there are lots of people that are very willing and very excited to do these kinds of interesting things and really Empower people but like in order for that to happen you know you

actually do need to like somehow create some create a framework that is supportive of them there are Frameworks that are supportive of people there are Frameworks that are kind of like actively I guess anti-supportive of people right so you know legal Frameworks that for example make it easier to launch a token the the less your token promises people like in some ways that's actively antisupportive right and like coming up with uh you know structures that are better and coming up with like say ways to have for people to launch tokens where you actually have like that are more friendly to more friendly to the project the more aligned its incentives are this

is like the sort of thing where you know we do need to kind of lots of people to work together to actually make it happen um and it is the sort of thing um that uh like it's great where it's great that we actually have lots of different kinds of people all in a room and where people have all of these different like interests and perspectives and can actually start working together um so that is and you know that is only one example right so you know there's plenty of other examples as well um so if we take like let's say yeah so the concept of uh you know this blockchain like Dao governance in general right and there

there's this question of like how do we actually create like these Dao based structures that actually like do something in the main in in the mainstream somewhere right I think uh you know obviously a lot of people here are working on Dallas and I feel like a lot of people here are working on doubt governance um there are plenty of ways of improving Dow governance so the way that many Dows are governed today coin voting I've written about this many times coin voting is just terrible um now okay wait wait I get collapsed we're just saying coin voting is terrible [Laughter] uh coin voting is good

📊 Coin voting is not a good way to govern Dows, and improving blockchain scalability may require compromising decentralization, but data centers should only be allowed if they generate verifiable ZK Starks for blockchain voting, and a combination of cryptography, zero knowledge proofs, and encryption can potentially provide high bandwidth democracy with better security, privacy, and frequent participation.

okay good good this is uh see if okay maybe I should just like come up with a list of things and come up with a list of judgments and like randomly shuffle them and see what the response is um but okay if uh you know if let's see I should restart yeah so like I said you know so there's lots of things that we can that we can do to kind of bring you know improve uh blockchain so like for example if we want to like if we want to like really scale blockchains up I think you know sometimes we do have to make some compromises for decentralization and do some data center scaling collab for data center scaling you're not supposed to clap for data center scaling Okay so

exactly decentralization no data centers unless Camilo if the data centers are generating zks and arcs and I can verify the ZK Stark on my phone then fine So speaking of UK's darks actually you know we talked about when we talked about this kind of concept of of like blockchain voting and this is one of those topics that I think is that like uh very interesting and I think it's actually it's like one of the natural kind of synergies between like cryptographic technology in general and a lot of the kind of governance Ambitions that people have but in some ways this is like one of the most

challenging things to do well right and the basically the reason is that like on the one hand I think in general we do need to have like like there is a big opportunity I think to add much more of like what I would call kind of like good high bandwidth democracy um and today we have we have a lot of uh low bandwidth democracy right like you know you cast a ballot once every four years um so low bandwidth you know one bit of information every four years we have lots of high bandwidth things that are not democracy we have one lots of high bandwidth markets for example we also have lots of low security high bandwidth democracy voting on social media right

you know someone makes a tweet it gets uh you know it gets 50 000 likes 50 000 retweets in two minutes well maybe it's actually one guy controlling all of them and it's a bot and you have no idea right so the challenge is that there's just like there are we like there clearly is this big need for kind of what a high bandwidth democracy in general um and there are already a lot of these applications that are providing high bandwidth democracy but they just tend to have very crappy security I mean and so the question is like can we have kind of like higher security high bandwidth democracy um and this is one of those things that I like I actually think potentially some

kind of combination of cryptography and zero knowledge proofs and encryption action we can provide right like you do I think you do need all of the Technologies so like you need the encryption to make sure that nobody can see the votes they need zero knowledge proofs to make sure that the votes are being counted correctly um you need blockchains to make sure that whoever's counting the votes is not censoring anyone so we actually do need all of the pieces to come together right and you actually can create something with some pretty strong properties and there are even projects you know being kind of homegrown within the ethereum space that are trying to kind of make things like this possible but in order to um like in order for this to really work like it has to really be done well right

you know it has to be efficient it has to actually be secure it has to actually be privacy preserving um and in terms of like where to actually accomplish this I think like like I actually feel like focusing on a kind of national level votes is almost like the like the wrong place to start it's like the last thing you should do instead of the first thing right like I think in general Crypt like adding kind of crypto features to existing governments can sometimes the best way that tend to make it work is not to actually like add in like crypto modifications to things that already exist it's to build completely new things that have better properties that people

we're going to appreciate because they make it possible to do things that are not possible today okay yeah so you know what this is what this is a big part of why like for example I'm a big fan of quadratic funding right and I think quadratic funding is that even something that could easily be applied at the government level right like you know or at the you know state level at the city level at many kinds of political levels there are many kinds of local public goods and it might you know people do have like all sorts of kind of this widely distributed information about like what kinds of these public goods they actually find valuable I mean and so if we want to actually kind of

gather together this kind of information then you know we do want something that's high bandwidth we do want something where um if people actually where people can participate at actual at a reasonable frequency and dude we also do want something that's secure right so you know if we come up with some kind like some fully decent like decentralized a blockchain based quadratic funding platform that provides all of the security and the pro and the Privacy guarantee is that a governance system needs to have to be resistance to things like say bribery attacks this could actually be something really valuable right and if something like this gets built then you know potentially you could just get adopted now this in some ways like it doesn't

like a lot of this stuff doesn't even need to kind of wait for um you know big for big institutions right in some ways like one of the way or the the watch it's based all by itself is powerful right and the watch it's based all by itself you know it can build things and the blockchain space by itself can do demonstrations and you know even git coin grants by itself I think has been just an amazing demonstration you know I have like 12 rounds of quadratic funding supporting importance public goods in the ethereum ecosystem we've had a lot of chances to see like what it looks like you know tens of thousands of participants what kinds of things it's great at what kind what kinds of things it's me it's um it misses and it's actually in my opinion become like a a

pretty significance and importance to all behind and how the ethereum ecosystem funds things that people in the ecosystem consider important um so that like um don't you know the more experiments and the more demonstrate like the the demonstrations like this that you can do like theoretically you know we could just like go and say we are just going to have a a gig when grants uh round for like say businesses in Boulder for example right like that is something that you know the community in Boulder can do um and I think it's interesting like this kind of um like actually like trying to like start materializing kind of like the online um the benefits of you know the online community and the offline world I think

it's something that we actually can start doing more of it is something that the crypto space has kind of tried doing repeatedly on a number of occasions right so like for example back in 2013 I mean when we had Bitcoin and when you know we had Bitcoin payments and back when cryptocurrency transaction fees were still so low that being cheaper than with then PayPal was part of the sales pitch it will be again um no but you know Let's uh oh no I should have like come up with some uh some phrase by some famous military leader that had to retreat from a country and promise to return but you know ethereum with five cent transaction fees we will be back and uh

📈 Ethereum is progressing with low fees, Roll-Ups, and sharding, while also focusing on wider adoption through initiatives like convincing stores to accept ETH and implementing Ethereum-based identity for decentralized usernames and service sign-ins.

Roll-Ups are already making a huge amount of progress you know sharding is already making a huge amount of progress so you know it's not just words you know the uh the the soldiers are already under development but anyway like so back in those days when we did the uh when what people would actually try to like or figure out specific cities and convince like or specific districts and convince people in this like very large districts to just accept cryptocurrency or or I guess in that case except Bitcoin right because back then you know realistically Bitcoin maximalism kind of was correct and that every cryptocurrency except for Bitcoin wasn't that interesting back in 2013 but you know anyway it it actually in my opinion it was interesting you

know it's something that can create local community um so now that scaling technology is actually are on the horizon it might actually make sense to kind of go back and start doing some more of this more of that sort of stuff right but when we do like that doesn't have to kind of limit itself to just things like convincing stores to accept eth for payments right like that could actually mean things like actually you know if doing quadratic funding rounds like basically saying you know hey you know we we as a community are going to organize like say a two million dollar matching pool and um you know people can go and actually like vote and kind of participate in the in the in the quadratic matching and we can actually see how that goes that's an

experiments right like you can actually like start doing these things and if these things are successful then I think that you know they're going to be picked up on right so quadratic funding is like in my opinion one of those kind of like examples of what I would call high bandwidth democracy that has actually been I mean it like it definitely not perfect for everything but it but it has been good at kind of capturing some important niches that existing forms of funding are missing and so the other question is like where do you go beyond where do you go from there right you know there's all there's lots of ideas kind of different pieces of infrastructure that need to happen like there is payments there is this kind of concept of identity and reputation and

the concept of identity and reputation already has been making a lot of progress right like I think people think about if you're like identity like ethereum identity in the wrong way or people think about kind of blockchain ID in the wrong way right and what I mean by this is like I believe in blockchain idea but I do not believe in blockchain ID platforms um so what I mean by this is like I think the version of ethereum based identity that's going to succeed is the version that is being implemented as we speak that has been happening over the last few years without anyone actually calling it that and the people that are trying to like do they do an entire stack themselves they're basically just creating kind of silos isolated from the ecosystem that are going to fail so what

do I mean by like ethereum identity that we already have so we have ens right ethereum the ethereum name system so if you have an ethereum address then you know you can register an ens name and you already have something that people can use like kind of you basically have a decentralized username for the ethereum world um if then we have signed in with ethereum so you can use your ethereum your ethereum account whether or not you have an ens name to sign into services including centralized web services um so in these two composed with each other so for example if you go to chat.blockscan.com so etherscan made this a lovely chat application that actually like accept sign in with ethereum and you know if you have if you

have an ethereum address you can sign in but everyone's going to see your name as like 0x blah blah blah for these quickly characters now if instead you have an ens name then people connect are going to actually see your account as being like your like your ens name as your username right so we already see synergies between those two things already then we have attestation so there's proof of humanity attestations there's just like whether or not your account sent a transaction it's like the simplest form of like blockchain based anti-spam you can possibly have there is um you know potentially like in the future whether or not you're running a validator there is whether or not you have a pope there's like what kind of Pope do you have so you know there is

📝 The speaker emphasizes the importance of building an open and interconnected digital government infrastructure in the Ethereum community, collaborating to solve challenges, and considering the switch to proof of stake for scalability and environmental concerns.

this growing ecosystem of like attestations about accounts that are happening right and like this is sort of the ethereum identity layer that already exists that's already growing and that like it's open and and it's this kind of growing kind of ecosystem that ever anyone can take advantage of and anyone can piggyback on so going back to kind of like building the digital State then you know one of the questions to ask would be like well no don't really think about it in terms of kind of the state creating you know its own kind of closed Silo system like actually think about the question of like well can we design like this more digital government infrastructure in a way that it's actually more open and that it actually does kind of talk to or

at least it's able to talk to some of these things that the ethereum community is building right so I guess and of conclusions from from all of this are right like one is I think this kind of really um important idea of like don't think about it in terms of like what can this specific institution do think about it in terms of like what problem is being solved um and who like what are the different groups of people that can work together to actually do it right and often like you are going to need like different groups of people from different from like from different parts of the room to actually work together this is a actually one of the most beautiful things that I know that I've seen about

crypto we just have huge amounts of cross-institutional collaboration that just nobody even recognizes so like for example zero knowledge proof protocols zero knowledge proof protocols they get frequently designed in by and kind of collaborated in you know things like telegram chats and like all sorts of other informal media that like contains some combination of you know you have like if University scientific researchers if you're in Foundation researchers Aztec people Z cash people and it's just kind of this assorted mythbrush of people and if something needs to be done they just come together and they do it right so we have that for technology you know we've had that for many zero knowledge proof algorithms we have that more and more for all kinds of

things in the ethereum ecosystem like erc4337 account abstraction you know started with a telegram chat and there's like people from at least like four different different in some organizations that are just coming in and working together and just working on making it happen right so like that kind of approach and like basically seeing like what is the function that you're trying to accomplish and like you know who are the people that needs to do to actually work together and make it happen and like can we actually make that happen like can we actually get people to uh work to get work together and make it happen um there's uh a lot of things that I think you know we can really innovate in um so I think you know in some ways decentralized governance is a kind of one of the big challenges of the 21st

century and I think it's a big or it's an important challenge even going kind of far outside of the crypto Space by itself right I think it's uh like coming up with forms of governance or even just the kind of large-scale social systems in general that satisfy kind of a lot of the properties including many of the properties that the crypto Space is really going after like it is something that's really important for many kinds of people right um so how can we actually make that happen like so you know how like what kinds of people needs to come together to make this happen um what kind like how do we actually make that collaboration um that collaboration happen like what is one

particular instance of the problem that we actually can start to get solved like is it you know do actual like get really trying hard to kind of push quadratic funding and getting quadratic funding out there as something that you know just more and more people in all kinds of ecosystems do that could be an answer um you know is could there be other kinds of local governance applications like could there be like some kind of micro voting um you know happening on like Street by Street zoning or whatever I don't know I mean like the like potentially what if we if you want something that the community can do by itself like you could even like we don't even have to do to do binding votes right like you can

start with signaling votes like I think the ethereum ecosystem actually way back then way back in the good old days way back when we had more kind of deeply controversial yetps than we did today there was this interesting kind of custom where people would do these kind of community and non-binding signaling votes on them sometimes it would be coin votes sometimes there would be like votes without votes and down votes on GitHub sometimes there would be votes by from known community members and people just make these votes and like there was also be non-binding but they would be internal signals that people could still listen to and determine like whether or not some particular thing that they want to do actually would have consensus right so can we do like signaling votes might

be another sort of application that like the community here could start doing um and then over time it could kind of end up growing and like something that is started as a purely kind of advisory and signaling thing could potentially get kind of taken up by existing institutions that if it works well then it could just kind of naturally start getting assigned more and more importance right so kind of can you build something that does something now but it does something enough useful now that once if it succeeds well enough then it is in a good position that existing institutions could just decide to kind of assign more and more power and more and more importance to it and then it

starts scaling up as a new institution from there right I mean think like like Glenn Weil like it talks a lot about kind of what he calls fork and merge governance and in some ways this is kind of this is like a similar idea right it's like can you create a kind of these institutions that start off being completely independent and you know if they succeed kind of the goal is basically is that they just start becoming more and more important and like they're you can't say they replace existing things because I don't think the goal is like replace the existing things so much as it is creating entirely new things and maybe the results of creating entirely new things is that existing things stop being important um but that's um mm-hmm yeah so you know maybe start by

creating these entirely new things and then like let's uh you know see what happens right so that's some another thing and then third piece is like the the technology right so like we do have to think about like what is the technology that needs today builds to kind of make all of these different things possible I think uh you know scalability is number one because scalability is always well is is always number one aside from of course the switch to proof of stake the switch to proof stake is important um and you know there are I think like a lot of people that do have uh like these deep concerns about the environmental issues of cryptocurrency as today and I do think um you know like those concerns are fair um and you know I think our risk like our response to these concerns never has

been that those concerns are fake news I think our response has always been that you know hey you know this is why proof of snake has been part of our Theory ethereum's roadmap almost since the beginning and this is why finally after like seven years of research and development proof of stake is you know finally like literally running on working test Nets and and it's looking like a month away from a final launch um yeah actually on that topic I mean I I have an interesting um suggestion if you like if you're listening to this and you're from an institution and your job like and you're really interested in doing something with um ethereum but you know

that you're you know you're going to get criticism because people are concerned about environmental issues then here's what you could do you could announce that you're interested in watching this some this crypto integration or this ethereum integration but you are going to do it the week after ethereum does the merge if the ethereum merge gets delayed until 2025 you're not going to do it until 2025. if it happens in June you're gonna do it in June right like just announce that and so you know you're lucky like it's you're not contributing to the environmental challenge in fact you're actually you're contributing to the motivation for this community to kind of keep to keep up the good work and finally get the thing over the finish line so I'm gonna and this is uh

yeah I don't know so you know the so technology scalability is important to the proof of stake is importance and also privacy um I think uh you know we don't talk some like I I feel like I try to talk a lot about blockchain privacy but watching privacy actually is really important and blockchain so blockchain privacy is important in actually with just like so many different ways I would probably say one of the biggest misconceptions that people have about privacy in general is that privacy is like either entirely or even a primarily a tool for um for resisting bad institutions now to

🔑 Privacy is essential for effective institutions, including democracy, as it prevents coercion and manipulation of votes, and can be implemented in a platform where users remain anonymous but prove their uniqueness for authenticity, while collaboration between different groups is crucial for making a large-scale impact.

be clear I think resisting bad Institute um resisting bad institutions is important you know there's plenty of not just governments but also corporations but also even just um you know public mobs just like all kinds of actors that you know do do like do things that they really should not be doing um and people being able to do things privately without kind of broadcasting to the world or broadcasting so the powers that be everything that they're doing as part of their lives is a really important check and balance against that sort of thing but I think that's not the only function of privacy the other function of privacy is actually that privacy is often a very necessary part of making this of making

institutions that work um probably the biggest example of this is uh the the secret ballot right so everyone's familiar with the secret ballot right like when you vote um like with a paper ballot the Voting is done in such a way that no one can tell where you're like no one can like no one can tell who you voted for and you can't prove how you voted even if you wanted to prove how you voted although but so there is a guarantee like the system does try very hard to make it easy to show that that the votes are counted correctly but at the same time it preserves this privacy um and like it preserves this kind of inability to prove how you participated and this is really powerful right it's

really powerful because you can't coerce people to vote in a particular way you can't coerce people not to vote um you can't uh buy people's votes you can't sell your vote and this is all real a really important part in preventing the entire system from basically being captured by concentrated interests that are willing to put to throw huge amounts of money into buying up everyone's votes now you know you might be cynical and you might think that like oh but they do this anyway it's called lobbying but like no no no no you know like if you Lobby like okay fine you know you can like pay people to like go to go to like blab to politicians if you haven't answered give them nice dinners and like fine you know but that's still there's still this like this much bigger

filter like there's a very huge difference between that and like literally actually not even having to come up with arguments that convince people because your argument is like hey if you vote for me able to give you 15 bucks like by the way like um okay like can I just like do a quick poll um everyone close your eyes um secret ballad um who here would um would vote for who some stranger on the street tells them to vote if they gave him 15 bucks okay see it's uh surprise so surprisingly virtue was crowd here 150 bucks hmm

getting up president peep yeah okay so 100 see him so I think but you know once those numbers start going up okay so this is actually a good point right so I think if you make secret battle let's go like as like if you try to make bribes kind of like as blatant as they as like hey if you vote for this guy I'm gonna give you 50 bucks then like often you're gonna get lots of people who do resist but here's what you could have right like especially any blockchain contacts especially in this kind of digital context where you know information travels much more freely and much more loose way then what is going to like what you can obfuscate your Vibes so I'm not by see I'm not buying your vote I'm

being a delegate and as a delegate I'm offering rewards as a delegate I am sharing some of the public goods Revenue that I get back to you the people who support me see doesn't that sound like something you want to contribute to but you know in reality it's economically equivalent to bribing right you know this is like stuff that's already happened in lots of blockchains um so this is a sort of a secret ballots sorry basically privacy in general it's like a really powerful tool and just like limiting the damage that these kinds of things can do right and privacy in general is a just a really powerful and really important look just ingredients in making effective in

making effective institutions for that reason like I think it's a a really powerful ingredient for democracy it's even a really powerful ingredient for systems of communication right like I think one of the things that somebody should build um is a platform where people can say things anonymously and they can upvote and downvote things anonymously but in order to get an account you have the zero knowledge prove that you're a unique human so like you have the zero knowledge proof that you have that you have a particular proof of humidity profile and only then can you participate and only then do you get one vote right so we get the Privacy benefits of anonymity but you know that if something has 300 of votes it was

supported by 300 unique people and not you know some some bot that just can that that just created 300 fake accounts so you know this is one of the nice things that we can do with this technology it's powerful these are powerful tools right like we could get very strong privacy and very strong safety and authenticity gains at the same time and you know lots of people here in the room are I think a big part of like like making this kind of Technology possible so technology technology can make a big difference existing institutions I think existing institutions things like the Wyoming Wyoming Bell and you know things like some of the kind of support to projects like City coins that they've given I think can be very helpful and very important and

yay um okay by the way is there anyone here from us somewhere other than Colorado or Wyoming okay cool yeah so is that is anyone here part of a doubt of any of those regions okay cool yeah see so we need Texas Dallas right so this is yay Texas now um see this is good right like you know it gets uh like you see the question isn't like how do like maybe the answer to how do we cryptoify it like say Texas isn't how do we like convince the Texas state governments to add more things one by one maybe the solution is like let's do

Texas now and then Texas now starts off being this kind of thing that's just a bunch of volunteers um and they just wants to want to do local community projects and then more and more people join and then it just becomes more and more powerful organically on its own maybe that is the solution right so like both of those Solutions exist like you can basically convince the big thing to improve incrementally or you can go incrementally by making a very pure small thing and having it grow over time and both of those paths are good and sometimes those paths even need to work together um so basically you know that those are kind of the takeaways like try and think through like what actually is the path toward making something with a large-scale impact don't just think

about like what specific like how to reform one specific institution think about like maybe the solution does actually involve like people from three different groups coming together maybe the solution involves uh people from like 20 different uh different groups coming together and I think like that kind of work is actually how we're going to kind of get uh somewhere close uh to this kind of like you know um I guess you know Dao based solar Punk world where you know everything is happy and the yeah um and and the buffer buff Accords can dance and the above and the buffer chords can accept cardano so okay yay questions yeah if you have a question you can come down

and get in line and we'll take them just for about about seven minutes maybe 10 minutes 10 minutes please hold on okay hold on here you go sleeping right there right here okay wow you guys all right all right okay that's good now hey how you doing good how about the pants by the way aren't those pens hot right let's get around Applause don't don't yeah my name is Tony I'm I'm from North Carolina I got a question I think a lot

of people want to ask how do you feel about Solana I don't know what's the line of school it seems sunny hey vitalik my name is Brecken Hager I actually started Texas Dow with a few lawyers here it'll be legally recognized as the second Dao in America next week my first question is do you believe in God what is God it depends depends okay and then the second question is with throughout history and with decentralization especially Mass decentralization one great centralization is inevitable how can ethereum and how can you make sure that

📚 The speaker emphasizes the importance of preventing centralization in Ethereum and maintaining diversity within the community to prevent misuse, while also highlighting the hindrance of forcing KYC and AML regulations in all layers of the ecosystem and the influence of culture on technology development.

this doesn't become a one-world you know in government so I guess like how to make sure that ethereum doesn't like itself turn into some kind of like centralized pull that like actually like controls things and yeah I mean I think it's definitely an important question um I think the biggest defense that we have if it gets to that isn't even a technical defense the biggest defense is like what kind of community that we have and I think uh the biggest uh the biggest virtue that I think the community has that I want to seek cultivated even more like basically is the like the diversity that it has and like I mean the and like I mean the diversity in like a very broad sense

right like you know we have people interested in like focused on technology we have people in institutions um do we have people in uh Texas you know we have people in kind of Far Corners of the of the world that are that are very outside of the us we have people that are like interested in ethereum in order to accomplish different things um and so the My Hope Is that as long as the community kind of keeps this the pluralist spirit that it currently has um and the like that that by itself can be a defense against like either you know the ethereum blockchain or kind of things that are close that are closely attached to it from kind of turning into tools that get that kind of get used to control people and and impose bad

outcomes I mean specifically speaking my biggest concern with I've been when I read the ethereum white paper in ninth grade it changed my life but now with data partitioning around the corner oh sorry forgive me don't that operation are religious freedom that's all I ask thanks no I support short and sweet so um many members of the community are advocating right now for going full kyc and AML for um promoting the adoption of uh of the masses and the institutions what would your message to the sector of the community be um I mean I think by the the message is that like one is just like privacy is

um and in other is that inquiry like inclusion is important um and I think the biggest kind of like inclusion that things like like forcing kyc and AML into like all into more lawyers of the ecosystem prevent actually is uh like it basically forces the system to to discriminate much more by nationality um right because it basically creates a students where you know if you're in the US and you have all of your U.S infrastructure and you can participate easily but then if you are in some other country then potentially you know your entire country might get labeled a money laundering risk and then suddenly like you basically just because of where you were born like you have a heart you have

a much harder time participating and like that sort of stuff really you know goes against what I think are a lot of the kind of core benefits that that the blockchain space is trying to accomplish um so I would say that um you know Kayla kyc and AML uh like like at the level of exchanges and at the level of like like centralizing like these infrastructure providers that are kind of like serving as you know Bridges from crypto to the rest of the space like that's fine and that's legally um unavoidable in any case but I think uh you know the it is really important especially for things really close to the core of the space um to like still have that kind of like this kind of full um level of like both

open like openness compatibility with people's ability to preserve privacy and all these values because like if the base player doesn't have those things then nothing built on top of it possibly can huh yeah maybe it's Alec My Name is Oliver uh there's a quote I think about a lot and I can't tell if it's true uh it says that Society is Downstream of technology and I think you're uniquely qualified to give an opinion on this do you see society as more shaped by technology as a force that inevitably moves forward or do you think we can pick our areas to innovate in places that are more likely to shape Society in the way I think Society can be shaped by technology but

a thick technology can also be shaped by culture I can I could even give like very specific like very specific examples of this um so like one very subtle one is like let's take let's say psihub for example right like so Sai Hub you know this like online website where anyone can go and download scientific like scientific papers and like the whole thing is totally copyright infringing right and like in in many cases um and like it lets people get this stuff for free um despite the fact that the paperback you know there's this University publisher kind of like infrastructure that and copyrighted all this that really doesn't want you to so this exists for um for science favors but and it's very

easy to use for science papers but it exists less effectively for same music for example right and one of the reasons why I think it exists um like less like the tools for doing this for scientific papers are so much stronger than this was for doing this for music is because there is a much like an even stronger social consensus that like like scientific papers really should all be open access and free and in reality you know there is a like like there isn't a like any like a good argument that like oh this should be restricted because like because the scientist needs to be paid because like well realistically like we know that there is plenty of like there are plenty of ways of paying them and like often

the the revenue collected by this kind of University system doesn't end up actually all like going to support research that much right and like you know people can make those Arguments for like say music as well and you know people like the pirate parties have but like it is I think in general people believe that like the case is significantly stronger in four scientific papers and so as a result of like these moral views that people have like the technology for the tools for making scientific papers Open Access like basically by force like it is just like much easier and and much more developed right so like that's one tiny example of how like even just moral views that people have end up influencing like what specific kinds of in this case like basically copy

protection evasion in technology but it could could also be censorship resistance technology it could also be technology in general let people spend their time working on um and I think that's true in a like ends up being true much more broadly um so you know the more people value privacy the more there are going to be smart people working on making zero knowledge proofs and like an encryption work much better and much easier to use the more people value say the like the the doing the more people value doing things like um having a better life in the um on the internet the more there will be you know software develops to try to you know make better forms of virtual reality

📝 The speaker discusses the importance of privacy in technology development, emphasizing the potential of blockchains and zero knowledge proofs, and suggests Ethereum should have a test net with economic incentives; they also discuss improving airdrops through proof of participation and address the issue of increasing female participation in the Ethereum space.

better ways for us to interact online meanwhile the more people value um interact with improving the physical world the more we're gonna see like you know all sorts of like new kinds of advanced like uh forms of transportation the more we're going to see supersonic Jets the more we're going to see it like better ways of building buildings and and all of this stuff right and like the rate at which those different trajectories can progress so I could think it does depend on the kinds of values that people have um so I do think that you know technology influence definitely has big influences on society technology has big influences enormous but I think that like culture has big INF influences on the technology that gets built as well and like I do think

that like eventually everything is going to get invented by I think the order in which things get invented does matter right like and especially if it's technologies that have to do with you know things like privacy where we're basically talking about like giving the little guy the ability to kind of like resist the bit like or like basically some kind of like defense against the big the big guy trying to trying to Snoop on everyone and see what everyone is doing right like in that case it's not even a matter of like how fast everything gets developed it is a matter of like well is this side of the technology being developed faster or is this out of the technology being developed faster and I think you know if we have a culture that values privacy then like the technology that um creates more privacy will actually develop

faster than the technology that breaks privacy and like in my own opinion that it's a good thing so you know answer yes culture matters thank you hi vitamic uh I had one question um what is one use case of blockchains that you think is over hyped right now and what is one use case that you think is uh neglected and we should focus more on um I mean neglected and we should focus more on like I think is the intersection of blockchains and zero knowledge proofs um like people focus on it a lot but I still think that people don't focus on it enough um in terms of uh something that is over hyped um I mean I'll give the boring answer

which is governance tokens I think you know people still do governance tokens too much I think people should do more of like governance using any way that's not a token just so we can experiment with new models and see what happens perfect thank you and where'd you get those trousers from A friend bought them for me as a gift so hey Dalek my name is Brian um thanks for existing by the way earlier today on this stage a lady from the polkadot ecosystem has asked the interesting question of what is something that ethereans can learn from polka dot her answer was look at what they're doing with kusama instead of

having a bunch of test Nets have like a live in production with real value move fast break things and kandering the Coleman is is that a bad idea um I would definitely support that I mean I've definitely like I definitely think that we sh having something that's kind of like between a tested and a main nut that has like some economic incentives it definitely could be valuable I mean I think in general we actually need to be bolder with our test stats like you know where is the ethereum proof of stake test net that has a one second slot time um you know where is the uh ethereum test that that has a young 140 million gaffle images so we can see what happens I think uh you know we do like having more and different kinds of tested Nets and including test debts that have more

of like that that have kind of enough realness to test like economic um uh properties and not just technical ones definitely something that I really support thank you uh thank you very much Metallica we're out of time dude okay I mean you can stick around and do q a all night if you want I mean I'll answer one last one all right it's up to him all right um I like the walkabee Hat by the way it's one thing I just want to say before we answer the final question because it's gonna get scattered we have the fire marshall here who's concerned about our Exodus

so please do so calmly we have the door through the other stage here the infinity stage that's actually open to the garage so there's actually two equal exits so thank you for coming vitalik go ahead thank you sir so I'm very interested in what is said about at the stations other than proof of humanity what do you think are the main building blocks still missing in that space and how is that space going to evolve okay um the one of the things that I'm excited about is like this concept of like either like proof of participation or even like proof of learning proof of like uh proof of having particular skills um so one of the voices of the that where this can be important is airdrops

right like I feel like ear drops are the sort of thing where like initially everyone really loved them right like because you know the restrictive swap airdrop which you know in the middle of the darkest days of the coronavirus just kind of like stood up and said hey guys everyone whoever use uniswab got this lovely 1400 stimulus check and you know I think that was amazing um but obviously since then people have started gaming their job people started like farming addresses and there's professional VC Farms that Farm address and all this stuff so if you want to improve your job so from that perspective then we make them proof of humanity gated right like you need to have an account that actually has it for a community profile by the way ideally whenever I talk about this stuff I assume that like this stuff should have

like some zero knowledge while you're in between to protect privacy it always should um so but that only solves part of the problem right the other part of the problem with airdrops is that I think project teams themselves are increasingly unhappy with them and the reason why they're unhappy with them is that you're basically you know spewing out large numbers of tokens to to an undifferentiated massive people without much regard for how much each of those people actually cares about your project what you want to do is you want to distribute tokens to people who care um so this is where I think like the what what would be ideal is you know if you learn something about a project you get some number like you get some number

of tokens if you perform some unit of work for a project you get some number of tokens if you like help a project translate a page you get some number of tokens and ideally this would be done to like one kind of like like basically give people a kind of like an on-ramp where people while they are earning tokens they would also actually be kind of like becoming more like helping to understand the ecosystem the the project that they're participating in and even being on ramp too like eventually like having enough skills to be full-time contributors right so like you're you're satisfying the function of like being an airdropper and while we're Distributing the tokens and so you know it's okay if you're paying people 45 bucks to do

something that like if you really wanted to you could do much more cheaply because like the goal is you're paying 45 bucks for people to like potentially become you know become a new user of this project and like become much more much more useful like way down the line right so if we want things like that to happen then like some version of Pope that like proves that you look did some particular thing um it like proves that you like say yeah you know what passed through some exercise that involves the learning about how a project works that proves that you like just performed some kind of tasks inside of a project like that sort of stuff the more infrastructure like that we have

then you know one of the nice things that we can get as a result is we can have better airdrops and I mean people have started doing this before right like there's like the coin there's coinbase earners rabbit hole.gg and there's this kind of like growing list of projects but like I do feel like we need especially for projects that are launching new tokens like you'll be it will be amazing if you could seem even more of that stuff hmm yeah okay okay okay what up what

oh um can you turn can you turn there we go here we go all right sorry we we here we need one uh one woman to come up here so she had something really important to say so one more question please vitalik okay hi my name is Irina and I see very few women here and a lot of men question to you is how do we get more women involved and maybe in which sectors would you want to see or would you like to see them where what areas um I mean the answer for where we would want to see women is I think like anywhere where like like anywhere where they will like where women wants to be I think right right like that's uh but in

terms of like how to make that happen I mean I I even feel like I'm not the right person to answer that stuff like I feel like that like if you like you know like women who have who are part of the the ethereum space and like especially who who feel like they are part of the space who join the space later than the um and then they could have like what is your answer I mean like I think like actually like I I even kind of like wants to um wants to ask their ask for the crowd this more than myself oh no no okay make a dowel yep no oh yeah