Vitalik's Twitter AMA Full Record: Personal Regrets, Industry Thoughts, and Future Outlook

Today, Ethereum founder Vitalik stated on Twitter that he is conducting an experiment where 268 Twitter users he follows can reply to his tweet and ask questions, and he will respond to both crypto-related and unrelated inquiries. So far, Vitalik has answered at least thirty questions, covering personal regrets, industry thoughts, and future outlooks, and he is still continuing to respond. Chain Catcher has compiled Vitalik's replies as follows:
Talking Personal:
Q: What made you do this experiment?
A: I wanted to see if there was any format that could make Twitter a useful conversation platform for me again.
Q: What is 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 get everyone to sit in a circle, see each other's inherent goodness, and get along, especially when there are huge incentive conflicts.
Q: What is your biggest regret on the Ethereum journey? (Non-technical)
A: The whole "8 co-founders" thing (and choosing them so quickly and indiscriminately).
Q: After becoming famous, do you like it more, or would you rather be less known?
A: I plan to continue wearing a mask for a long time after Covid is no longer an issue.
Q: If you weren't in the crypto industry, what job would you be doing? What excites you the most outside of it?
A: I might be making some kind of new social media platform… basically something involving some mechanism design.
Q: What have you recently changed your mind about or updated a lot?
A: Ten years ago, I thought resource markets, property markets, trade markets, etc., were the most important processes in the world. Today, I think more about the ecology of discussions and dissemination of memes/culture/thoughts. The latter follows a completely different set of rules than the former!
Q: What is something you were very confident about, only to find out you were wrong?
A: "Ethereum will switch to PoS in 1-2 years."
Q: What rabbit holes unrelated to cryptocurrency are you currently diving into? What interesting things do you have going on now?
A: I want to better understand regions of the world where I've spent little time so far, Latin America and Africa definitely come to mind, as does Japan, and I’m thinking about what else…
Q: You used to put your residence with Australian Airlines. Has that changed, especially with the pandemic? Do you now have a place you can call home that you would miss if you were away too long?
A: I think I've transitioned from a "fast nomad" to a "slow nomad," and I still end up spending a lot of time in different places, but I prefer 1-2 months instead of 2-4 days. Although I have been in Singapore a lot recently.
Q: Where is/ will be your favorite place to live, and why?
A: Singapore and Toronto are known for their interesting cultural blends and beautiful parks. Mexico is friendly, with great food and a government that welcomes you rather than bothers you. Berlin has an interesting hacker culture. So many trade-offs!
Q: Do you read novels, and if so, which authors/books do you like?
A: I shamefully admit that my recent favorite novel is @ESYudkowsky's http://hpmor.com.
Q: Are you okay? It feels hard to handle all of this for one person.
A: The good news is that I feel less dependent on Ethereum than ever! @dannyryan, @drakefjustin, @dankrad, @pipermerriam, EF (note: Ethereum Foundation) admins, and many others continue to take over tasks I previously had to do myself.
Q: How do you cope with stress?
A: I have enough life experience to know that "everything will be okay." Of course, I'm not sure how to summarize that. I think different advice applies to different people.
Q: Do you have any favorite podcasts?
A: @BanklessHQ, @juliagalef, @HardcoreHistory.
Q: What excites you the most about the future?
A: I think I still agree with everything in my pinned tweet from last year: Cryptography + blockchain, longevity, new governance, better online education, urban development, global poverty alleviation, space.
Q: What exactly do you do, in a very "physical" sense, studying monetary theory and deepening your understanding of it?
A: I feel like my "monetary theory" work itself has diminished compared to a few years ago! I just don't think of it as close to the world's most important issues like I did 10 years ago or like many BTC believers do today.
To be fair, I've been thinking about the long-term future of UoA (note: unit of account) stability recently. So far, my research has included talking to people who seem very smart, reading what they suggest, and observing what's happening in the crypto space.
The latter is because I'm considering stablecoins. Some people think stablecoins are purely transitional technology, and that BTC or ETH after the hyper-crypto era will be stable. I think that's likely wrong, and that we will still need clear stablecoins even after the hyper-crypto era.
Talking Crypto Industry:
Q: Do you think any major government will truly embrace private electronic payments? If they don't, what should we do?
A: No government "embraces" torrent networks. However, they thrive, and the efforts governments put into attacking them are far less than what they could do, partly because torrent networks still have a lot of legitimacy. I think this is an easily achievable middle outcome.
I absolutely think the crypto space needs to seriously consider how to court more existing stakeholders to win more friends. Of course, you can express that statement in terms of weak legitimacy, but…
Q: Do governments play a role in protecting cryptocurrencies from manipulative trading behaviors (like social media hype)?
A: I would say the best regulatory strategy needs to avoid a "you must get complex licenses to participate" mechanism and instead allow more requirements to work at a larger scale.
Additionally, if there is a trade-off between making the crypto space harder to exist in and making it harder for "mainstream" users to access, I would prefer the latter over the former, at least in the short/medium term.
Q: As blockchain becomes increasingly dependent on external control of assets (like USDC), governance as a last resort becomes economically impossible. Is this good or bad?
A: Game theory seems less like peaceful separation and more like mutually assured destruction. I would say this is a good reason for L1 to become more rigid over time and for more active governance to happen on L2 over time.
Q: According to many credible estimates, the Earth faces +1.5°C warming, which will destroy many important, complex, and beautiful ecosystems. Besides PoS, do you think we Ethereum people can look the next generation in the eye and say we are part of the solution?
A: Hopefully! Although I think generally, switching cryptocurrencies to PoS is just a small part of the solution. Ultimately, we will also need many very smart people to contribute to long-term fixes (solar? fusion? carbon capture? spraying dust into the atmosphere?).
Q: What promising ideas are there for Ethereum/Doge collaboration? What interests you about this project?
A: Personally, I hope Doge can switch to PoS as soon as possible, perhaps using Ethereum's code. I also hope they don't cancel the 5 billion PoW issuance per year, but instead put it into some DAO that funds global public goods. It fits the non-greedy, health-promoting spirit of Dogecoin.
Q: How can crypto help support the world's public goods? In what ways do Ethereum-based mechanisms solve coordination problems (like public goods) better than traditional institutions?
A: We need to shift from one-time donations from individuals and organizations to a whole mechanism of long-term commitments to public goods. I think over time, the scope will naturally expand from Ethereum to public goods beyond Ethereum.
Traditional institutions pretend to be "public," but because they are bound by nation-states, they are essentially "private," as they only serve specific nation-states. 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 doing anything until the Twitter discussion became so loud they could no longer afford to ignore it. It was very frustrating…
Q: Many people, including yourself, can understand that many of our institutions have collapsed and how to sketch better alternatives. But where is the audience or customer who wants to buy and use the product?
A: The path I'm currently trying is hoping that the transition to crypto is a sufficiently large environmental change to eliminate some common resistance to new ideas, and we can add better mechanisms, like Uber successfully launching surge pricing.
Q: What privacy-preserving technologies do you think will be widely adopted by the general public (knowingly or unknowingly!) by 2050?
A: I expect ZK-SNARKs to permeate the mainstream world in the next 10 to 20 years, becoming a major revolution.
Q: What is the ontology of crypto? On one hand, it concerns determined truths. On the other hand, it seems virtual, disconnected from material reality. A creation out of nothing. So… is it a metaphysics that relies on truth and reality, or does it transcend them?
A: I feel like @lootproject is right: almost anything created by anyone "exists," and what matters is to what extent others build upon it.
There are absolute truths, and once an object exists, what you can do with it is limited by the rules encoded into that object, but which objects are important is determined by more nebulous forces.
Q: Many people, including yourself, can understand that many of our institutions have collapsed and how to sketch better alternatives. But where is the audience or customer who wants to buy and use the product?
A: The path I'm currently trying is hoping that the transition to crypto is a sufficiently large environmental change to eliminate some common resistance to new ideas, and we can add better mechanisms, like Uber successfully launching surge pricing opportunities.
Q: How do you define the metaverse?
A: As far as I know, people use it to refer to the internet + super immersive virtual reality, or the internet + shared state (thus objects that can move between platforms). In the latter case, Ethereum is certainly positioned remarkably as a central part.
Talking Ethereum:
Q: How do you envision Ethereum maintaining a universal basic income mechanism that helps create a fair competitive environment for everyone?
A: PoH is already doing that! The challenge is that UBI tokens need to "sink," not just be issued. Ultimately, it comes down to the same issue as public goods funding: we need to move beyond individual donations and achieve sustained commitments through mechanisms.
Q: What are some obvious applications of the crypto industry that people still haven't realized?
A: The ENS ecosystem and the whole concept of users and objects with cross-platform names.
Q: Which Ethereum use case surprised you the most?
A: NFTs.
Q: What is your favorite application of game theory?
A: You could say EIP 1559 is a true successful application of mechanism design thinking.
Q: After the merge on the mainnet, what protocol upgrades do you think are high priority?
A: Account abstraction, statelessness, and sharding.
Q: Will sharding be first? And the others are listed earlier because the path to them is less clear and requires more work?
A: They are all happening simultaneously. Whoever gets it done first, executes first.
Others:
Q: What is your current default/mainstream/biggest posterior assumption about AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)?
A: GPT-3 makes me a bit more optimistic. If it turns out that it is possible to create human-level AI by guiding it from a large sample of existing human behavior, then the calibration feels easier to handle: AI is just… magically predicting what humans will do.
Q: Have you kept up with the latest developments in longevity research? If so, are you optimistic about us reaching longevity escape velocity in the near future? What do you think about the recent experiments with longevity DAOs like VitaDAO?
A: Definitely feeling increasingly optimistic; it seems that technologies for removing aging cells and other things have made significant progress. VitaDAO is great, but I would like to see more innovation in funding mechanisms (why can't we use $3.4 million in ETH to fund longevity?!).
Q: What activities or habits do you think are most beneficial for anti-aging?
A: The easiest goal to achieve is to completely reduce excess sugar in life. This is an underrated theory explaining why tea is healthy: it replaces other forms of sugary water, which are much higher in sugar content.
Q: Do you think humans have free will?
A: Yes.
Q: If you saw this prompt, what question would you ask yourself?
A: I think my character is to avoid questions while still recursively satisfying my clever self-image, just like you.