Here is a short summary regarding many of the criticisms and issues Vitalik addressed at a fireside chat with Tech Crunch a few days ago which many of you may find interesting. We've written them as notes, but if you would like to see the full interview, you can find it online at your favorite video channel. Enjoy!
Vitalik on Ethereum Hacking
• We need continued ongoing development of programming languages.
o Example: Viper language released designed to be more restrictive.
• Gave grant to another group trying to create more restrictions and safety measures.
• Safemath library stricter checks.
• Multiple prongs happening on programming languages side to address hacking.
Vitalik on Privacy
• Byzantium release in October opens up the ability for elliptical curve mathematical operations that basically optimize the math behind privacy preserving cryptographic and zero knowledge proof constructions
• Already projects that use them to build privacy preserving applications
• Long-term road map is to increase raw virtual machine optimizations.
o Virtual machines are currently not optimized for cryptography. If it gets faster, it means more cryptographic primitives could be implemented.
o The current VM could be good for 256-bit items but is currently not good for a wide range of things.
• Vitalik speaks highly of ZCash and zksnarks and zkstarks. What may be possible in the future is that they can prove arbitrarily complex computations in a single proof that is very compact and verified in a few milliseconds.
Vitalik on Tokens as Part of Games
• Generally excited to see how it works.
• Believes there may be an issue when an intersection between how efficient markets interacts with psychology of fun and challenge. If you can dodge challenge by paying money to someone that owns a human farm, there seems some complexities there.
• In contest of asset trading happening, he believes it’s a good idea. It creates a mutual playing ground and you don’t need centralized operators.
• Allows new games to plug themselves in.
• An interesting thing will happen when a game server gets hacked and we see how it is resolved.
Vitalik on Authentication Gaps
• Interesting to see solutions for figuring out what happens when you lose your password or your account gets hacked.
• If this gap (authentication for average consumer) cannot be met, then blockchain my fail to meet mass adoption or may not be able to meet part of the promise of blockchain technology.
• Has seen several ways of dealing with authentication such as social recovery or multi key recovery.
o Example of Social Recovery: In a WeChat account, you can try to login and select which of these people are your contacts. WeChat sends some to confirmation codes and it tells them offline to reply back confirming the confirmation codes.
• If all else fails we could use Coinbase custody but its considered not a great solution.
Vitalik on Security like ICOs
• Tokenizing assets very interesting. The question is what value one gets from putting such an item on blockchain whether it be art or pixels from a Banksy creation.
• There is a huge future for this, such as using them as collateral, used for payments, storage, financial contracts, etc.
• An ERC20 token could work on any application – overall excited for tokenizing assets.
Vitalik on Decentralized Exchanges
• Iconic quote, “Personally hope centralized exchanges burn in hell as much as possible.”
• Decentralized exchanges today already have nice usability gains.
• Happy if there are more decentralized power
• Wants to remove “kings” or large centralized exchanges because they have the power to make a new cryptocurrency suddenly gain attention and have huge valuations just by paying a large fee to the operator of the exchange
Vitalik on Building Community
• Vitalik was asked the question why everyone in the Bitcoin world was full of fury and hatred/fueds while Ethereum has less strife.
o Vitalik answered generally that everyone involved in a disagreement is convinced that whatever is adapted is vastly better than the current technology in its pure form. Everyone is aligned with moving forward and is aware what the sacrifices are to get there.
• Growth of a community depends on what its earlier members believe. The perceived “high priest” of promoting is what everyone pays attention to.
• Ethereum founders try to make a deliberate effort to promote the right values and attract the right people on both the inclusive and exclusive sense.
o Vitalik mentioned he tried to exclude people that take themselves way too seriously probably as half joke.
Vitalik on Private Blockchains
• There doesn’t seem to be a lot of promise.
o Example: IBM helped reduce fees by $200 million using blockchain. However, what they accomplished was to put something that was using paper into something that was computerized. Mentioned as a joke / jab at IBM for making their accomplishment seem larger than it actually was.
• Used another example where a separate Ethereum based consortium chain created an Ethereum fork and controlled all 7 nodes, a very bad sign since it is against decentralization.