Vitalik 2049 Speech Transcript: Ethereum needs to maintain its values of openness and decentralization while meeting demand

整理：律动 BlockBeats

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech titled "What Excites Me About the Next Decade" on the first day of the TOKEN2049 main stage, discussing how he believes the current crypto space differs from the past. He stated, "The current crypto space is no longer in its early stages; Ethereum now needs to meet the demands of mainstream adoption while maintaining its values of open source and decentralization." Below is the original text of Vitalik's speech, organized by Rhythm BlockBeats:

People often say that crypto is still in its early stages, and we are still building infrastructure. Indeed, it took a long time for something like the internet to materialize; I think people have been saying this almost since Bitcoin was launched. And the reality we face now is that the crypto space today is no longer in its early stages.

Ethereum as a project has existed for over 10 years, and in the 15 years since Bitcoin's inception, we have seen things like ChatGPT develop from being completely nonexistent to suddenly emerging and fundamentally changing people's understanding of artificial intelligence.

So we must ask ourselves a question: how should we view all of this? Are we really still in the early stages? My answer to this question is that I don't think we are in the early stages of crypto, but we are indeed in a special phase.

What has happened? We can delve a little deeper. I recall my experience visiting Argentina in 2021. It was my first time in Argentina. The first thing that caught my attention was a population across the country that was not only incredibly excited about cryptocurrencies but was also actively using them on a large scale.

However, in reality, I was walking around on Christmas Day, and the first coffee shop I noticed that was open allowed me to pay for coffee and dessert with ETH. But they were not using decentralized technology.

This is similar to what ultimately led me to believe that the reason for the initial failure of "getting everyone to accept Bitcoin as currency" was fees. If you remember the early marketing, why Bitcoin was so great was often mentioned alongside PayPal and some credit card companies, which charged customers exorbitant fees. The fees they charged were very high, simply terrible, but the fees for Bitcoin itself were between $1 and $50.

Ethereum's transaction fees have also risen.

The highest fee I paid on Ethereum was actually for a privacy-protecting transaction. You could say that gas fees have been rising, and there are many comments on Twitter every time I perform an operation. Therefore, privacy protocols have a very good market fit. Some transaction fees were around $800. Many projects fail due to fees. So what new changes are coming in 2024?

This is a fee chart about the strange phenomenon of Ethereum. Fees have dropped from between $10 and $0.50 to less than 1 cent, essentially approaching zero. Meanwhile, the two major Ethereum Layer 2 solutions, OP and ARB, have reached an important security milestone known as Phase 1, and several ZK-based rollups have also told me that they plan to reach Phase 1 soon. Therefore, rollups will also become more secure soon.

Fees have finally become affordable. But that’s not the only area of improvement. I clearly remember another frustration I encountered while traveling in Argentina was trying to transfer funds to someone using the Ethereum mainnet, where the transaction fee was about $4, and the transaction confirmation took about 5 minutes. Although EIP-1559 had already been implemented by then, this particular wallet had not actually been upgraded.

Bitcoin blocks are generated every 10 minutes, so you might have to wait 10 minutes or even an hour for a transaction to be confirmed. Ethereum's theoretical block time is 13 seconds, but due to the inefficiency of the gas market in the past, sometimes if you were unlucky, you might have to wait a completely random time, possibly 5 minutes or even longer for a transaction to be packed. EIP-1559 has essentially solved this problem.

So, in reality, these two things have led to today's transaction confirmation times stabilizing between 5 to 15 seconds. If you use Layer 2 solutions with fast free confirmations, it can often be reduced to one second. Therefore, fundamentally, these two main issues were the biggest factors that caused the centralized user experience in 2021 to far exceed the decentralized user experience.

We can also simply assess the quality of user experience in applications. You can see (presentation slide) a tweet from 2015, which was a demonstration at a hackathon. And next to it, you can see Firefly, a client for Farcaster and Twitter, Lens. If you look at the quality of the user interface, it seems to be on par with Web2 products, but it is a decentralized application.

This year we have also seen progress in account abstraction. We see more and more people using security tools. We have seen EIP-7702. We are starting to see mainstream applications of ZK-snarks and various different applications. Therefore, we have new and better privacy protocols.

Even existing usability improvements, a few years ago, people were still complaining about having to manually switch networks. Today, I feel that at least in the past year, I have not actually had to switch networks manually. Therefore, the limitations of technology were once a hindrance. I even remember that moment when CryptoKitties seemed like it might become a real hit application. But what happened then? The success of CryptoKitties drove Ethereum's gas prices to extremes.

Ethereum became essentially unusable, which in itself limited its growth. This is no longer the case today, but it basically means that there are no longer reasons not to use cryptocurrencies. So what about the reasons for entering initially? I think one mistake people sometimes make is viewing cryptocurrencies as an efficiency technology. This is something many people talked about ten years ago.

Let’s look at how people evaluated Bitcoin in 2013— the benefits of accepting Bitcoin included simpler payments, security and control over funds, zero or lower fees, and protection of personal identity. Among the first four, two are what I consider to be very unique features of cryptocurrencies. The other two used to be unique to cryptocurrencies, but are they still? Nowadays we have Venmo and some better payment methods, as well as WeChat Pay.

Centralized systems are continuously improving, but there are still issues in some areas.

Access to payments and financing is still very difficult. Why are they still difficult? It is not due to issues with access to technology. It is fundamentally due to global political constraints. Therefore, I think it is important to remember that the benefits that cryptocurrencies bring to the world are not related to similar technological improvements. Switching from conventional jets to supersonic jets is a technological improvement, but it is a different type of improvement.

Regarding technology, what kind of technology specifically? One perspective is to reference a blog post written by Josh Stark at the Ethereum Foundation, published about two years ago. The article is titled "Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains." Its argument is that blockchains enable us to create a form of digital solidity, essentially any form of social solidity, which allows us to create durable digital structures that are difficult to change.

And this can resist destruction, just as you can create solid physical structures with materials like concrete. If you consider how blockchains differ from other things.

Some early cyberpunk technologies, like mix networks, Tor, BitTorrent, etc. You will realize that the core of blockchain is to create persistent and extremely robust structures. So if your file-sharing network collapses, it doesn't matter; you just switch to another network. A week later, everyone will forget. If a locking mechanism collapses, and you switch to another, everyone will lose all their money. This is a fundamental difference.

Therefore, blockchains allow the internet not only to bypass the weaknesses of old-world structures but also to build better alternatives that can solve similar problems.

Blockchains are like digital concrete. So what is digital concrete used for? Digital concrete is used to build virtual sky castles. So who here has seen the movie "Castle in the Sky"? Come on, raise your hand if you have seen it.

The interesting reason for this movie is that, first of all, I really think it’s great. I believe it is absolutely a masterpiece of Studio Ghibli, and I have seen it at least five times. But it turns out that this movie unexpectedly became an inspiration for Ethereum, and I didn't even realize it. Basically, what happened was that in 2013, while browsing the list of fictional elements on Wikipedia, I discovered Ethereum.

It sounded like a nice name, reminding me of a scientific theory from the 19th century that there was a medium (ether) permeating everything. So I chose the name "Ethereum." Then, two months later, a designer from the Ethereum Foundation, before this organization was even called the Ethereum Foundation, decided to use this diamond as the logo for Ethereum. I thought it was cool at the time, which is why I like this logo; it’s beautiful.

The serious and fun aspects of cryptocurrency come together, which is what I hope people remember. Castles are things that can protect you, your family, and your tribe. Castles can also be the castles in Disneyland, bringing fun to your community. Castles can also be a museum preserving the millennia of your culture. Castles can be all of these things, as well as various types of digital councils. Anything we can build on Ethereum.

After completing the digital castle, what should our key goal be? My long-standing view is that we need to meet the demands of mainstream adoption while maintaining our values of open source and decentralization. What does this mean? For example, wallet security. Historically, there have basically been two ways to safeguard your funds.

One method is essentially to take a crazy self-sovereignty extremist approach. You write down a mnemonic phrase, and all operations are done offline. You engrave the mnemonic on a piece of titanium and then put the titanium in a more robust titanium safe, burying this safe 10 meters underground so that your coins are safe. That’s one method.

The other method is to say, I’m just an ordinary person, and I don’t want to be bothered. You hand your coins over to a trusted person, a "good guy" named Sam, who attends events with Clinton, so he must be trustworthy. But two years later, it turns out you were a bit wrong in your judgment of who is trustworthy and who is not. So I don’t think these are the only two choices. If you want to protect yourself from the bad actors of centralization, then you have to take traditional self-protection measures.

What if you are a centralized exchange and want both? That’s where multi-signature smart wallets come into play. Multi-signature means you have multiple keys; for example, you might have 6 keys, and you need 4 to send a transaction. You can even set a rule that only one key is needed for small transactions. These keys can be any combination that you can control.

Friends and family, etc., you can actually create an Ethereum account, which is a smart contract wallet that can only send transactions if you generate proof that you control a specific email address, right? So you can basically bring the trust anchors of Web 2.0 into the world of Web 3.0, where you can even diversify your trust. Personally, I trust my multi-signature wallet more than any single centralized account.

For example, this is a demo wallet (PPT content), entirely based on Ethereum, but its user experience is the same as Venmo. Through a special mechanism, users can prove that their withdrawals come from a certain deposit without revealing which one specifically, but can prove that their deposits do not come from illicit sources.

This is a way that allows ordinary users to have a high degree of privacy while meeting many important compliance requirements, but in reality, there are no backdoors.

You can have both privacy and trust. On the Ethereum mainnet, many technological improvements are happening that make Layer 1 more decentralized and verifiable while reducing final confirmation times and increasing capacity. These things are already happening.

This is the direction of the Ethereum ecosystem and what I believe the entire cryptocurrency space will head towards in the next decade.