Conversation with Vitalik: Personal Regrets, Industry Reflections, and Future Outlook
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Conversation with Vitalik: Personal Regrets, Industry Reflections, and Future Outlook
"I expect ZK-SNARKs to penetrate the mainstream world within the next 10 to 20 years, becoming a major revolution."
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsNote: This article was written on September 2, 2021.
Today, Ethereum founder Vitalik tweeted about conducting an experiment: the 268 Twitter accounts he follows were invited to reply with questions—on or off-topic—and he would respond. So far, Vitalik has answered at least thirty questions covering personal reflections, industry insights, and future outlooks. The following is a compilation of his responses by TechFlow:
On Personal Matters:
Q: What made you decide to do this experiment?
A: I wanted to see if there’s any format under which Twitter could still be a useful conversation platform for me.
Q: What was the hardest lesson you learned from your experience with Ethereum?
A: People are harder to coordinate closely in small groups than I expected. You can't just get everyone into a circle, have them see each other's inner goodness, and get along—especially when there are significant incentive conflicts.
Q: What’s your biggest non-technical regret during the Ethereum journey?
A: The whole “eight co-founders” thing (and selecting them so quickly and indiscriminately).
Q: Now that you're famous, do you enjoy it more, or would you prefer to be less well-known?
A: I plan to keep wearing a mask long after Covid is no longer an issue.
Q: If you weren’t in crypto, what would you be doing? What excites you most outside the field?
A: I’d probably work on some kind of new social media platform… something involving mechanism design.
Q: What’s something you’ve recently changed your mind about significantly?
A: Ten years ago, I thought markets for resources, property rights, trade, etc., were the most important processes in the world. Today, I think more about ecosystems of memes/culture/ideas—their discussion and dissemination. The latter follow very different rules from the former!
Q: What’s something you were very confident about but turned out to be wrong?
A: “Ethereum will switch to PoS within 1–2 years.”
Q: Are there any non-crypto rabbit holes you’re diving into lately? Anything interesting you're exploring?
A: I want to better understand parts of the world I’ve spent little time in so far—Latin America and Africa definitely, Japan too, and let me think what else...
Q: You used to live on airplanes with Australian airlines. Has that changed, especially with the pandemic? Do you now have a home where people, animals, and plants would miss you if you were away too long?
A: I think I’ve transitioned from “fast nomad” to “slow nomad”—I’ll still spend lots of time in different places, but prefer staying 1–2 months rather than 2–4 days. Lately, I've been in Singapore quite often.
Q: What place is or will be your favorite to live in, and why?
A: Singapore and Toronto are known for interesting cultural blends and beautiful parks. Mexico for friendliness, food, and governments that welcome you instead of bothering you. Berlin has an interesting hacker culture. So many trade-offs!
Q: Do you read fiction? If so, which authors or books do you like?
A: I sheepishly admit my recent favorite novel is @ESYudkowsky’s http://hpmor.com.
Q: Are you doing okay? All of this seems hard to handle for one person.
A: Good news is, I feel Ethereum depends on me less than ever before! @dannyryan, @drakefjustin, @dankrad, @pipermerriam, EF (Ethereum Foundation) admins, and many others continue taking over tasks I previously had to do myself.
Q: How do you cope with stress?
A: Enough life experience tells me “everything will be okay.” Of course, not sure how generalizable that is. I think different advice applies to different people.
Q: Do you have any favorite podcasts?
A: @BanklessHQ, @juliagalef, @HardcoreHistory.
Q: What excites you most about the future?
A: I think I still agree with everything in my pinned tweet from last year: cryptography + blockchain, life extension, new governance models, better online education, city building, global poverty reduction, space.
Q: What exactly do you do, in a very "physical" sense, to study monetary theory and deepen your understanding of it?
A: I feel like I actually do less of what I'd call “monetary theory” itself than I did a few years ago! I just don’t see it as close to the most important problem in the world as I did ten years ago or as many BTC believers do today.
That said, I’ve recently been thinking about the long-term future of unit-of-account (UoA) stability. My research so far includes talking to people who seem smart, reading what they suggest, and observing what’s happening in the crypto space.
The latter is because I’m considering stablecoins. Some believe stablecoins are purely transitional, and that post-hypercrypto, BTC or ETH will be stable. I think that’s likely wrong—even post-hypercrypto we may still need explicit stablecoins.
On the Crypto Industry:
Q: Do you think any major government will truly embrace private electronic payments? And if not, what should we do?
A: No government “embraced” torrent networks. Yet they thrived, and governments spent far less effort attacking them than they could have, partly because torrents retained significant legitimacy. I think that’s an easily achievable middle outcome.
I definitely think the crypto space needs to seriously consider how to engage more existing stakeholders to win more allies. Of course, you can phrase that statement in weaker, more legitimizing language, but...
Q: Should governments play a role in protecting crypto from manipulative trading behaviors (e.g., social media hype)?
A: I’d say the best regulatory strategies should avoid mechanisms like “you need complex licenses to participate,” and instead make requirements scale more with size.
Also, if there’s a trade-off between making crypto harder to exist versus harder to access by “mainstream” users, I’d prefer the latter over the former—at least in the short-to-medium term.
Q: As blockchains grow increasingly dependent on centrally controlled assets (like USDC), economic fork-as-a-last-resort governance becomes impossible. Is this good or bad?
A: Game theory looks less like peaceful separation and more like mutually assured destruction. I’d say this is a strong argument for L1s becoming more rigid over time, while more active governance happens on L2s.
Q: Based on credible estimates, Earth faces +1.5°C warming, which will destroy many important, complex, and beautiful ecosystems. Beyond PoS, do you think we Ethereum folks can look the next generation in the eye and say we were part of the solution?
A: I hope so! Though I think generally, switching crypto to PoS is only a small part of the solution. Ultimately, we also need many brilliant minds working on long-term fixes (solar? fusion? carbon capture? dust in the atmosphere?)
Q: What promising ideas exist around Ethereum/Doge collaboration? What interests you about this project?
A: Personally, I hope Doge switches to PoS soon, maybe using Ethereum code. I also hope they don’t cancel the annual 5-billion PoW issuance, but instead route it into a DAO funding global public goods. Fits Doge’s non-greedy, health-positive spirit well.
Q: How can crypto help support public goods globally? In what ways can Ethereum-based mechanisms better solve coordination problems (like public goods) than traditional institutions?
A: We need to shift from one-time donations by individuals and organizations to entire mechanisms enabling long-term commitments to public goods. I think over time, expanding beyond Ethereum-native public goods will happen naturally.
Traditional institutions pretend to be “public,” but since they’re bound to nation-states, they’re essentially “private,” serving only specific nations. Does anyone really think the U.S. government fairly considers the interests of Afghans?
Another recent example: when India faced a massive Covid wave earlier this year, the U.S. government delayed acting until Twitter outrage became so loud they couldn’t afford to ignore it anymore. Very frustrating...
Q: Many people, including you, understand that our institutions are broken and how to sketch better alternatives. But where are the audiences or customers who want to buy and use these products?
A: The path I’m currently trying is hoping the transition to crypto is a big enough environmental shift to overcome common resistance to new ideas, allowing us to add better mechanisms—like Uber successfully introduced surge pricing.
Q: Which privacy-preserving technologies do you expect will be widely adopted by internet users (intentionally or unintentionally!) by 2050?
A: I expect ZK-SNARKs to penetrate the mainstream world within the next 10–20 years, creating a major revolution.
Q: What is the ontology of crypto? On one hand, it’s about definite truths. On the other, it seems virtual and detached from material reality—creation from nothing. So... is it metaphysically grounded in truth and reality, or does it transcend them?
A: I think @lootproject got it right: almost anything created by almost anyone “exists”—what matters is how much others build upon it.
There are absolute truths—once an object exists, what you can do with it is limited by the rules coded into it—but which objects matter is decided by murkier forces.
Q: Many people, including you, understand that our institutions are broken and how to sketch better alternatives. But where are the audiences or customers who want to buy and use these products?
A: The path I’m currently trying is hoping the transition to crypto is a big enough environmental shift to overcome common resistance to new ideas, allowing us to add better mechanisms—like Uber successfully introduced surge pricing opportunities.
Q: How do you define the metaverse?
A: As far as I can tell, people use it to mean either internet + highly immersive VR, or internet + shared state (so objects can move across platforms). In the latter case, Ethereum is clearly positioned as a central piece.
On Ethereum:
Q: How do you envision Ethereum maintaining a universal basic income mechanism that helps create a level playing field for everyone?
A: Proof of Humanity (PoH) is already doing this! The challenge is that UBI tokens need “sinks,” not just issuance. Ultimately, it comes down to the same issue as public goods funding: we need to go beyond individual donations and achieve sustained commitment through *mechanisms*.
Q: What obvious applications in crypto haven’t people fully grasped yet?
A: The ENS ecosystem and the whole idea of users and objects with cross-platform names.
Q: Which Ethereum use case surprised you the most?
A: NFTs.
Q: What’s your favorite application of game theory?
A: Arguably, EIP 1559 is a real success story in applying mechanism design principles.
Q: After the Merge goes live on mainnet, which protocol upgrades do you see as high priority?
A: Account abstraction, statelessness, and sharding.
Q: Will sharding come first? Or are the others listed earlier because their paths are less clear and require more work?
A: They’re all being worked on simultaneously. Whichever is ready first gets implemented first.
Others:
Q: What is your current default/mainline/MAP assumption about AGI (artificial general intelligence)?
A: GPT-3 made me slightly more optimistic. If it turns out human-level AI can be created by bootstrapping from large samples of existing human behavior, then alignment feels more manageable: AI is just... magically predicting what humans would do.
Q: Have you recently followed the latest developments in life extension research? If so, are you optimistic about reaching longevity escape velocity in the near future? What do you think about recent experiments with life-extension DAOs like VitaDAO?
A: Definitely feeling more optimistic—seems like senolytic therapies and other approaches are making great progress. VitaDAO is great, but I’d love to see more innovation in funding mechanisms (why can’t we fund life extension with $3.4M worth of ETH?!)
Q: What activities or habits do you think are most beneficial for anti-aging?
A: The low-hanging fruit is cutting out excess sugar entirely. An underrated theory on why tea is healthy: it replaces other sugary drinks that contain much higher levels of sweetened water.
Q: Do you believe humans have free will?
A: Yes.
Q: If you saw this prompt, what question would you ask yourself?
A: I think my personality avoids answering questions, still satisfying my clever self-image through recursion—just like you.
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