Vitalik Buterin - A New Era for Ethereum | Devcon 2022 #1

Transcript

foreign [Music] welcome to the Devcon 6 experience I just got back from Devcon Bogota and it was my first Devcon and I had a ton of fun and this is something I do every time I go to a conference some big conference I try and come back with as much content and interviews as possible so this trip I come back with about 10 interviews between 10 to 20 minutes in length from a variety of members throughout the ethereum community to get their perspective as to what Devcon was for them what they're paying attention to in the future and overall just how much fun do they have while hanging out in Bogota Colombia first up in the list vitalik buterin of course and we talk about a number of different things throughout Devcon he's been to every

single Devcon so I asked him about the history of Devcon and how Devcon has progressed forward as ethereum has progressed forward and I also make the point about how Defcon isn't really just a Tech conference it's also something much more than that so what does Devcon actually do for the ethereum ecosystem and then we just go through the list of a variety of other subjects as well such as what are developers focusing on now now that we are post-merch and also what does he think about the arbitrum acquisition of Prismatic labs and overall what's he going to do in Colombia once Devcon is over and what does vitalopram do when the Sun goes down and everyone goes to parties what does he do does he go to parties uh so stay tuned for all of those questions and more but first we're going to talk

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in Bogota Colombia and I'm of course here with vitalik buter and fatalik how are you enjoying Bogota it's a it's a nice city it's a nice conference so good so developers convention Devcon uh would give the air that it is a Tech conference but I don't really think that summarizes what Devcon really is enough what is Devcon Defcon is kind of the you know it's a decentralized everything conference maybe that's what Dev stands for um it's you know there's just all kinds of different uh communities that are coming here and you know sometimes they're even kind of intentionally brought together here right like there's the uh a whole bunch of different uh developers um you know layer one layer

two cryptography um you know programming languages everything there's uh local community people from um you know both Latin America and plenty of other places you know saw a couple of people from Iran a couple of uh days ago and uh you know big shout out to all the brave people uh protesting there um it's uh there's uh people from you know all all kinds of different Industries there's uh you know intellectuals of various kinds that we're kind of brought in now you know Bruno massage and uh venkatesh Rao this year and uh you know they've been kind of walking around and doing some presentations and kind of blabbing their thoughts on Twitter and it's just been

fun to see their Outsider impressions of you know what's going on here so yeah I think in general it's just this uh you know really cool and uh weird events where all kinds of people get to see other people that they would not normally get a chance to see and that's certainly the experience that I've been having and you know many other crypto conferences out there pick cities like New York San Francisco Chicago but Devcon has always picked uh off the beaten path cities uh here we are in Bogota Colombia previously it was Osaka Japan and also Prague and the Czech Republic and what what's the thought process behind how cities are selected in Bogota and why are we going across the world rather than being in the

United States I mean we definitely do intentionally try to move the continents around every year I think part of that is a yeah it's a very intentional strategy to kind of empower the yeah you know ethereum Global community and to try to give people from all these different uh regions and you get a chance to I'm going to be able to come to at least tell one of the events easier and you know share their side of you know what crypto is doing for the doing for them um it's uh I think you know having a geographical age had a decentralized community is a this has to be part of having a

decentralized community in our Modern World um and you know give an aggregated an opportunity it said just see you know kind of talk to all kinds of people that I think we would not be able to if it was just happening in the same place every time certainly and ethereum of course is technology it's software but it's more than that right it's social coordination and this brings it beyond the areas of just like fintech and coding stuff and much more deeper into the world of culture I think that's what I've really been enjoying here in Bogota and many of the of the other ethereum conferences is it's one part Tech but it's also one part experience uh and I think that's what really ethereum is emblematic here to do in this world is

you know produce new technology that is really just to enable to facilitate culture and so I think it's really important that we go around and experience different parts of the world that you know you don't you're not going to get in New York or San Francisco absolutely and so uh this is my first step con actually and even though I've been in in the ethereum space for about four or five years the other defcons have sadly escaped me but I'm wondering you're uh if you could give us a trajectory of the development of the Devcon coordination and I my take here is that uh as ethereum has become more and more coordinated and organized so has Devcon how are the previous Dev constant how does this one how's this one different yeah so in Defcon zero was like actually kind of the equivalent of you know what we do now with like things

like the M4 retreat in Athens right it was um last year I was just uh this uh you know private events like kind of 50 people get all the developers together just kind of get all of uh you know people working on ethereum itself and sync and that's uh pretty much all that we could do because I know the ethereum community was just so tiny then right then Defcon won in London uh first public one which was uh exciting um this was also the time when Microsoft was doing lots of ethereum things and you know they were doing their Enterprise blockchain stuff and they sponsored at Defcon which was just mind-blowing for everyone at the time that you know a company as big as Microsoft would um you know Grace a uh a tiny little

movement like ours by and even to the point of being willing to sponsor it and you know send a bunch of people to speak um and it was a lot of developers a lot of applications just a lot of different tracks then Defcon 2 uh Shanghai uh definitely the kind of first you know out of a lot of people's comfort zone one and they're trying to and no make a kind of better relations with the Chinese community and you know that was uh interesting and uh I'm gonna feel like the you know the Chinese Community has been kind of doing a more and more you know great things and uh in ethereum since then right you know we've got like scroll and soul wallet and you know all of these things uh happening now

um then Cancun um Manoa just uh wanted to be in North America and uh you know Cancun is more accessible from people from down south so than uh doing it in you know us or Canada and we also wanted to we always keep in mind you know trying to not host uh events in uh like too often in voices where the Visas are too restrictive and like that's you know one of the challenges that yeah you know the US unfortunately has right like there's that famous story where ADI Shamir is like one of the you know literal grandfathers of cryptography got rejected for a Visa for a cryptography conference yeah um but you know each time the events got bigger they're

they're kind of more and more tracks uh there's uh you know more and more attempts to kind of be intentional about promoting all of the different uh parts of the ethereum community that would and if not not naturally get promoted by themselves um then you know Defcon 4 in Prague was the really big one right and problems well like twice as big as anything that happened before and that was uh also one that I remember should I read the first one where we made a really serious attempt to kind of bring in interesting thinkers from the outside right so Corey doctorow was uh there uh Glenn Weil from you know radical exchange was there so uh a bunch of speakers and uh you know also speakers

who had a kind of interesting and you know not just positive but also kind of importantly cautionary things to say about crypto which I think is uh important for us to engage with um then you know DEFCON 5 Osaka and that's uh it was uh I feel like it was a continuation of things that were there before and uh you know also interesting people also uh more both developers and all kinds of um other projects and then I hear this is like the first one in three years right so that by itself makes it really big and you know there's a I think in efforts to really take the best from the previous ones um right so you know

developers and uh really yeah interesting and fascinating people getting into you know the deep end of uh polynomials and you know well no meals are important right as I said you know I'm a polynomial you're a polynomial we're all polynomials and the and then you know people from all over ethereums local communities and people talking about different kinds of applications and then people on the philosophy side and it was just all of that the yeah it feels like the venue was pretty successful right like just uh you know as a venue it was effective at venuing which is something that has not always been true in the past it's uh you know close to

um close to hotels convenient for a lot of people to stay probably the biggest weakness of the venue is that like like I found myself when I get a dragged off to like various I mean outside dinners and events and so forth like there's one specific District of Bogota about 7.5 kilometers to the northeast of here we're just like everybody wants right and uh okay it seems obvious that like if we could just teleport this place I mean or 7.5 kilometers to the Northeast like that would have uh you know two Ox improved it even more but you know there's uh there's never Perfection and you know still in the grand scheme of things I mean it feels like everything has worked out I mean obviously yeah a lot of people are worried about we came in

worried about issues like safety but um you know so far I think there have been you know far uh you know fewer like serious incidents of that type than I would say even the Bulls expected uh so you know you know hopefully yeah you know it's in the event even gave a lot of people a chance to kind of see Latin America better for what it really is um yeah no I so I'm gonna I'm happy lots of people good conference I mean I hope we can do more um excellent ones like this in the future yeah certainly and this is also an interesting time in ethereum's history that we're having Devcon right after the merch right after proof of stake uh because this seems to be a new chapter for ethereum and so it's it's a just great timing that we

can put everyone into the same spot and kind of come come to consensus about what is the next era of ethereum now that the proof of stake era is is well underway but also now behind us because it's done uh 2021 was kind of the year of shipping proof of stake ultrasound money uh and now those boxes are checked uh so what what boxes aren't checked that we are going to be going into in 2023 that's the conversation here at Devcon solving scalability is number one I mean yeah I think fees have been low for the past six months so it's uh a bit easier to kind of back burner the problem but I think um you know if ethereum succeeds we're going to have another Bull and you know we know what Bulls mean for transaction fees right

it's uh yeah and you know from the like from the point of view of a user or some you know balls I mean can even be something to drag just because of how it makes a transaction Visa you know shoot up to 50 or 100 or whatever and uh you know there is a uh kind of taking a clock on us to solve the issue and uh you know we don't know how long the exactly the clock is going to keep ticking and uh yeah I know it's uh you know our responsibility to really make sure that scaling is figured out before then um so scaling um privacy Gem and you know another one um the base lawyer censorship resistance is another one account abstractions another one and you know there's all kinds of complicated ways in which these problems uh intersect and tie in with each other too

um on the positive side uh zero knowledge proofs as a technology have just uh you know seen a huge amount of progress in the last three years right well the yeah there was kind of this big weep that started I feel when uh September 2019 when flunk was introduced right because uh like from the user's point of view it's like okay Blanc there's another snark protocol it looks like it's a little bit niftier than before but like from a uh you know like deep practitioner's point of view it's like this very deep philosophical Improvement in how we think about uh scenarios right because like we're able to basically think about you know converting things that we want us to prove into abstract polynomial equations

and then separately figuring out okay how do we prove the polynomial equations and it turns out that like you know both of those areas are you know you can do lots of deep improvements on and uh Things become you know conceptually much cleaner becomes much easier to progress when you do really start thinking about those two separately right and you know one side can think about you know how do we turn problems that we care about into polynomials develop the key about the other side and since then we've seen amazing stuff like flick up and you know more and more interesting things lately and then on the other side there is the problem of like okay you know you have a polynomial equation and you know the polynomials are big but you know how prove it and that's seen a lot of progress too and there's amazing stuff

happening with Starks and all that right but this conference I feel has to some extent sort of been a Victory lap for the just a bit the facts that that technology exists and has practical use now right like it's uh you know everyone is talking about synarks and it's increasingly a default thing that you stick into applications that you're building and that's just totally not what the discourse was like five years ago right the uh the thing I want to check with you is before before getting into proof of sake shipping proof of stake it seemed to be the focal point of all of the developers like it was the thing we were focusing on and now post-proof mistake I mean we're definitely a focused on on producting and charting

eip4844 as like the big one but it doesn't seem to be a monolith right it doesn't seem to be attracting everyone's attention and so would you say that we're going from all of the core devs and ethereum devs focusing on proof of stake to now focusing on a variety variety of things all at once and so perhaps we're getting into a an era of parallel development in ethereum how do you how do you like that take I'd say that's true though I think that also I like underestimates how much parallelism there was already right like even the marriage you know there's all this work on the execution clients there is work from the consensus client said there was work from the Mev people right that's uh you know actually a pretty big project and then you know they're sort of you know sort of de facto precursors

like uh the eip1559 which is like you know it doesn't have anything to do with proof of stake technically but it kind of uh you know exercised a lot of the muscles of being able to make significant changes to the protocol I think one way to think about post-proof of stake ethereum development is to think about what the kind of long-term North Star of uh like what ethereum could look like from a technical perspective right and like I have this uh you know fairly simple description that I you know gave on stage a couple of days ago right which is I'm like so ethereum in 2032 you have a note your node runs on your phone every 12 seconds or 32 seconds or whatever number we agree on um you download the 3.6 megabytes of data you hash it um you do a couple of elliptic curve

equations to check a snark that's it you know the block is valid wait to add 12 seconds get 33.6 megabytes of data hash it do a good do some elliptic curve operations verify the snark and uh valid 12 seconds later data hash elliptic curve check valid right so from the point of like the whole process just becomes in you know incredibly sleek and seamless to the point where like literally a phone could even do it right because it's incredibly light on computation the only thing that it's heavy on is data and data just happens to be the thing that you know phones are increasingly getting insanely good and it will get even better at over the next 10 years right so in that kind of a world you know we yeah we have you know extreme protocol Simplicity we have high

decentralization from Easy ability to run a node easy ability for anyone to stick um you know simple hopefully you know simplifying the fork Choice down we have uh we have singles a lot finality um you know everything about accounts and abstraction and all these things just um it'll just work right and the protocol does just like get to a state to this kind of stabilized end state that just looks really beautiful right so like that to me is what I see the AGI final again like goal being from a protocol standpoint and then the challenge is like you know how do we figure out all these different five strands that'll actually get us there sure sure one of the big pieces of news that happened at this Devcon was the

acquisition of uh pry Labs Prismatic Labs by arbitrum and there's a there's there's two takes here there's one where yes we've solved funding of client teams like we figured it out where we can have a relationship between a layer two perpetually fund the development of layer 1 clients and so that's always been a problem that's plagued ethereum taught as history is how do we fund our client teams how do we find our open source public goods developers the other half of that equation is there's now this commercial entity that is operating a very important piece of the ethereum layer one client when you saw this news what did you think how do you think about these two things yeah I mean I think on the funding aspect I mean it's obviously great that there are kind of non-etherian foundation sources of funding for these projects and obviously

this will give any future client teams a story that they can tell to investors for why Alicia get seat around so it's I'm going to help people in all kinds of second order ways from a governance capture viewpoints I guess uh I mean I think there's like multiple different uh things that it's important to keep in mind right like one is that like arbitrary is not kind of you know uniquely threatening or kind of you know scary or whatever is here right so you know like optimism had been helped we're going to participate in eap44844 and put a couple of developers toward it uh consensus has you know literally funded entire client teams right and then the question is like what's the difference between buying a

client team and just incubating a couple of them yourself um right there's a long history of you know all kinds of uh projects uh I mean obviously yeah you know the parity running the parity clients and also having the polka dot Network right so like this isn't unprecedented though I mean at the same time you know like obviously what our average problem did is kind of bigger than them and what optimism has done and so forth but it's so it's not like you know we're entering a scary new unknown or anything right but at the same time like it is it's definitely important for us to be vigilants right like the yeah sort of dystopia that you have in mind is a traditional internet governance right if you look at you know the depth we see

and and so forth um there's a lot of precedent for organic public goods organizations where their funding model basically is you know we we get funding by uh people who who are buying governance leverage and that does funds them but that also leads to some often not very nice governance outcomes right like there have been a bunch of scandals about like introducing uh you know sort of the equivalent of um you know protocol layer DRM into you know various internet protocols and uh you know that's you know that gets pushed by the yellow bars corporations again that have seats at some of these organizations uh so the Asians you know the concern here

basically is like can we avoid that right and uh yeah I'm not I mean I'm not sure I have a a good answer like I think it's like it's important for us to start thinking about the question like it is important to not be catastrophist about it right and like also just remember the reality that like all of these uh people who are participating and even you know the people signing the checks and buying these like things up and find uh finding the client teams you know they are uh and you know well-meaning people and um you know they are still aligned with the ethereum ecosystem but you know we have seen how like divergences of alignment uh you know happen over time and uh you know how even the internet itself sort

of um you know felt like hey yeah you know crypto idealistic happy family in the early 2000s and then it uh you know split into all kinds of things that ended up having you know often bitterly opposing objectives and uh yeah that's it's time to kind of start you know thinking and being vigilance and you know at least asking the question of like what it means to have a governance process that's robust against these kinds of things sure and my a positive second order consequence of this be an actual uh a stronger incentive mechanism for more client diversity if we we have shown to the world that hey if you build a client you might get Acquired and and have a Payday yeah I mean that's uh absolutely I think um

the yeah you know the question is like how like what part of all the client uh teams and developers get funded in this way right like I think uh you know zero to twenty percent is an improvement but like 75 to 95 would I think be a like a massive threat right yeah so it's uh one of uh you know those kinds of situations where you know we want to kind of cheer the first step of the of the journey but kind of recognize that we don't want to over rely on this which is like something that has happened in the internet and that has lots of problems there at uh roll-up day which was hosted by scroll on Monday before Devcon you talked about how historically almost everything about crypto and software in general is showed us a slow to ship uh

you know the the proof of State came much later than expected and you know I could repeat seven other examples of the same thing but then you said that it's been the ZK teams the ZK roll-up teams that have really astounded uh the trajectory of development why is that the case like what was the magic secret sauce that has really accelerated the zke evm because we saw two ZK evm test Nets announced by scroll and polygon zksync announced their layer 3 test net and Main net is like in 15 days or so how did this happen so quickly what what do you credit the success of all of these teams I think I there's some things that are slow and there's some things that are faster right and like it feels like different types of Technology it's just like

natural we have different speeds right um you know if you even compare like the rate at which AI has been progressing over the last year um versus um you know supersonic flight where you know we're gonna looks like we're gonna have it again but we're gonna have to wait until you know close to the end of this decade right and look that's obviously a big difference between kind of atoms and bits but you know within the world of bits there's uh there's different kinds of bits and it does feel like once the tools are there and uh once kind of you know the basics of zero knowledge stuff get abstracted enough then the rest of it is just like something that can you know just like start running pretty quickly right so I'd say yeah pluck up probably has been really important right like five years

ago the attitudes where these avms is probably you know we're not gonna even try because we just know that the overhead of uh literally sticking an evm into a snork is going to be totally infeasible but um you know since said then you know we've had Planck and we've had to look up and we've had all of these uh theoretical improvements and like that's actually gotten us to the points where like it makes sense for people to start writing the circuits and you know the circuits start getting written right so that's a nice um and but then you know it is important to be cautious and remember like it is very possible that we're going to have uh zika avms with bugs within a year but getting to ZK VMS without bugs is going to take I mean another five to ten years

uh so uh but you know still it's a it's a huge amount of progress and it's definitely really something that we should all be taking advantage of certainly at conferences there's always two parts right there's the conference during the day and then there's the fun activities at night people go off and have dinner sometimes small dinners large dinners sometimes they go to parties what does vitalik do after the conference day is over and the sun goes down generally have been trying to have like fairly quiet dinners and go to sleep fairly early yeah I don't know I yeah I'm realizing like I'm definitely not a fan of the late night stuff possibly because I'm just like totally out of energy from talking to people that like I don't want to do any more of that you know is it draining to be at a

conference where everyone is hounding you absolutely yeah yeah how have you managed this have you learned to juggle this I mean realistically just like try to be aware of when I have the energy for this stuff and when I don't and like when I don't hide you know I don't know it's probably better to hide than to like just go out anyway and have um you know have some risk of accidentally being mean to someone so uh vitalik yesterday on our account instruction panel uh I asked you to introduce yourself because every single time uh you introduce yourself in a different era theory of ethereum you have a different way of doing it uh who are you in ethereum in 2022 well I mean yes uh yesterday I said I'm a fashion

influencer and travel blogger it's uh I don't know what'll I be in 2023 who knows you know might uh well Circle back to being a white paper author I don't know well I don't know what we you know there's always more white papers to write you know metallic thank you so much for joining me appreciate it thank you too bam [Music]