Vitalik, I want to ask you a little bit about how your role has evolved since it began in a theory. So, in the very beginning before all of this, of course, you were once the uppity young entrepreneur. It's been what six seven years. Now you've moved on from being the entrepreneur to being the chief technologist, to being the politician. You're now the Elder Statesman of smart contract blockchains. What have you learned about protocol politics? Protocol politics is less different from
Regular politics than you might think. What's all this emergent phenomenon of what happens when you stick many thousands of people together and we have incentives that are aligned in some cases. So you have some competition in other cases and you have different groups of people that have different opinions and they have to fight it out. Sometimes more than one protocol in sometimes between different protocols where there's competition. A lot of the Dynamics that you get are surprisingly familiar. The kinds of religious fervor.
That you get when people defends their opinions, is it better to have large hands that have smaller blocks? So they're easier to verify versus bigger blocks. So that more people can afford to use them. People have very strong opinions in the same way that people have strong opinions about either religion or democracy or freedom of speech, or the welfare state or any other mainstream political topic. You build your career as a response to bitcoin maximalism and you've now live long enough to see the rise of ethereal maximalism.
34 years ago. It didn't seem like something like that existed. And now, it's become very clear that as you have all these alternatives to a theory of a rising. There's a strong need for people within a 3, mm, to set apart their identity from other people. So, I'm curious how you think about how to keep etherium healthy and not see it. The Italian Community degrade culturally and religiously the way that you saw at the Bitcoin Community to grade, one of the things that I feel like I've learned over the last decade, is that people are at their more
Worst not out of greed but out of fear, and this is true in mainstream politics and this is true and geopolitics and a crypto as well covid
showed that that was all fear driven. The russia-ukraine crisis shows that Russia is not attacking Ukraine to get oil fields. It's out of fear. The responses are all fear-based and fear is used to justify all the horrible things from the Patriot, Act to the covid lockdowns, fear drives at all because greed is all this done, your own name and nobody wants to do it in their own name. Fear is always done in
He else's name. So you end up with a whole bunch of cell style, white Knights battling each other,
right? And even when the leader actually is greedy and megalomaniacal, fear is what they use to sell. Whatever, run out the X one. I thought both the Bitcoin and the etherium community were both at their morally. Worst would probably be in the Bitcoin cash. Small versus big block war crisis where people felt like there was this very zero-sum struggle between One Vision of what Bitcoin would be in another vision of what Bitcoin core.
A lot of principles got thrown out, people behaved terribly in a bunch of ways. In the case of etherium. There was this big application called the Dow, and the Dow got hacked and big portion of all of the eith was stuck in the Dow. If nothing had been done, the attacker would have been able to get it out after a couple of months. And this was less than a year into a theory and history. So, a decision was made to make a change to the rules of the etherium protocol to bail out the users of that application. And there was this big debates.
Some people thought this is fine one time because it was early days and some people thought that it should be a principle that we never interfere, and it's best to start those principles from day one. We did end up hard for working to fix the Dow and a lot of people disagree. It, that ended up splitting etherium into two chains. It's very many theorem classic worth around, classic refused to implement the hard Fork. So they'll let the attacker get away out of principle. The way that both communities behaves at the time was not good. People were openly advocate.
And get that we should use trademark law to try to not allow aetherium classic to exist and then people were advocating 51% attacks and all kinds of things. I think the reason why people were okay with things that they would totally not have been. Okay, at any other time is because they were afraid. If you're in, people were afraid that etherium, classic would replace it, completely destroy theorem. And if there are classic people will be afraid that your principles were being destroyed by a theorem, which could then grow into.
In overtake, the version of the chain that stuck to its principles. The situation did end up working out. Well for most people, there hasn't been a violation of that kind of immutability on aetherium sense, which is something that a lot of people were not projecting. A lot of people get think that if you violate the principles once it would be open season to do it many times. But no people are valued, not fixing the parity wallet. A year later in order to set the counter precedent that we actually do take this serious.
There was a bug in the multisig wall and call the parity while it was caused a massive.
Funds. But to be clear, I think the Dow hack was much larger in magnitude than anything. Subsequently,
correct? Yeah, it was much larger and it was very unique and that it was even possible to fix it with a fork because normally when a hack happens, if you'd ever gets the money instantly and there isn't a way to fix it, even if you want to. So the down was really special and unique in that way. As a protocol politician. What do you feel has been your finest moment and your worst moment of blockchain statecraft least proud moments. Definitely.
Don't lie, handling, the Dell Fork situation. A lot of people did feel betrayed as a result of the down Fork. The lot of people did feel like their expectations got violated and a lot of people who felt like their opinion was disrespected, especially people who opposed to Fork. A lot of them did feel like there was this social environment where if you oppose the fork, then your evil because you're Pro hackers stealing, millions of dollars. That environment ended up turning. A lot of people off, there is a lot more that we could have done.
It's not create that environment and still make people feel. Welcome. Despite the disagreement. Do you regret the decision or you read the way in which the decision was made? I don't think I regret the decision. I think the decision did have a lot of positive consequences to in how would put a controversial stake in the ground and the people interpreted the stake in the ground in different ways. The way I interpret that snake in The Growlers that it was a moral statement that said that you can believe in principles without assigning those principles. Infinite amount of weight.
Without saying that we're going to stick to those principles in? Absolutely all possible circumstances. And that kind of moderation is something that's very morally important. To me personally. It's very pragmatically for it to be personally too because most people that try to take a more purist approach ends up hitting Us in aerial, that is Extreme enough that you have to compromise. And if you committed too hard to never compromising, then your rhetorical posture becomes even more screwed up, it's better to be transparent about these things early on.
Folk who are pragmatic and people who were willing to look at things in a more moderate way. They're definitely very happy as a result of that. But there are also the purists and there were even people who believe in moderation, that actually opposed to delaford which was interesting to most people and ended up sticking with etherium, despite the Dow Fork happening, but there weren't a lot of people for whom the Del Fork was this watershed moments where like they were curious about etherium before then they realized. Oh wow. No, this is a centralized evil chain.
Which is unfortunate that we can satisfy everyone, but on the other hand, satisfying everyone is expensive, and satisfying, everyone, so hard. I sometimes even think how do we successfully satisfy. Everyone's during the down Fork? Then might we not have had much harder politics getting proof. Stake out the
door.
I see you taking an incredible slings and arrows on Twitter and being very good-natured about it. Something that Zuko seems to also do the visible leaders of protocols or creators are protocols because I'm not even sure if earrings really LED anymore. They tend to have this ability to operate in public. Either with a certain nonchalance or with certain combativeness that normal humans. I don't think could sustain. How did that come about? Do you wish you just remain anonymous. Did you have to go through a learning curve to learn how to deal with all the trolls?
Rolls and all the haters and all the Bitcoin Max. He's attacking. You. Do you wish you could just press a button and disappear from Ethan. Then eith goes into the foundation's
hands. There's definitely a learning curve. There's big mistakes that I made in my twittering and years past especially times when I would let myself get carried away in a particular discussion and I'd say something, and I feel like I'd have to justify myself and I'd go into a deeper hole.
You wish you didn't argue as much on Twitter. Is that what you're saying?
Yeah, you learn over time. There is a good Style.
It accepts the criticism with Grace dealer and what to respond to your and what to let slide because realistically no one's going to see it. Anyway, there's definitely like subconscious intuitive art to being a good Twitter mean, Lord, and being a good crypto. Be moored in general.
How much influence do you have any today, especially compared to the Dow Fork time? Because my sense was in the Dow Fork. We were very involved. But if something of that magnitude came up today, how much influence would you have relative? What you had then
if you want more info on sanitarium, keeps decreasing, every six months. It has less now that I did six months.
It's ago. Six months ago. I had a lesson. I had a year ago and a year ago. I had was that I had 18 months ago, these days. The number of people all day, even I have to convince to push in a particular direction. Is significant watch. Some of the EAP is that I personally promote, some of them don't even make it in for a lot of the media have to try pretty hard to satisfy on people's concerns.
What's the biggest thing you've pushed that prison getting adopted?
VIP 4488 is one example, if I had more control of would have been in a CRM already. What does that one? This is the one to do.
Short-term decrease in the gas cost of called Data. It's purely technical change that makes Roll-Ups cheaper in the short term. It seems to me like a lot of your evolving role within a theory of shows ways in which block, chains are like religions. Imagine the etherium started off as a sect that you found it as a charismatic leader. And you were like, Hey, we're going to break off from the religion of Bitcoin or break off religion of Master of coin. I believe that in these new principles of Turing, completeness, once upon a time, you were the sect leader and as
The second becomes a church, there becomes more bureaucracy, more of autocracy. There's more and more mechanisms that are developing behind the scenes and pretty soon you might be the charismatic voice of etherium. But the formal leadership of a theorem has taken on its own life force. What is your observation of how the theory? Mm has become more systematized as a culture. Compared to what it was five years ago today, the protocol decisions tends to be done through this mechanism called the old cord of squall know. This is a
Call that happens once every two weeks, as the name implies all over, the core developers come online and talk about all the proposed protocol changes and everything that people agree on gets accepted and if people disagree, then it doesn't get accepted. So there's this fairly complicated pipeline. That changes have to go through. Step One is the idea making stage then, step two was the refining stage, and then there's a stage of convincing more and more people making a test implementation eventually turning it into a fully formalized, proposal that we call it.
VIP and a theorem and prove it proposal. And then finally, God said to all chords outs and then if all korjev's accepts it, then it eventually goes into a hard Fork, which is what we call a protocol upgrade to a theorem which includes changes to the protocol that everyone has to download to get accepted to the network. So there is this long process. There's many points along the way, we're different people have to agree. You're the beginning, the research team has to agree. And then in the later stages, the core developers, the people actually writing the code have to, uh,
As well, so it's definitely more Vita Craddock considerably than it was three years ago. And definitely much more than it was six years ago when we could get a change accepted, it would get included very quickly. And even now I feel the window was closing on substantial things. It's getting harder to do big things even today. How do you feel about that in some ways relieved, if you're in becoming more Vita? Craddock gives me more freedom to retire. Well, retire is a complicated word. I feel like I'll keep doing things forever, but what kinds of things as you mentioned in my role as chair?
Changing in complicated ways that are hard to describe.
What would you be working on if you weren't working on?
'If good question. I'd have my big long list of things that I think need to happen. And I would do some combination of writing about it, explaining them and probably putting some of my own money into making them happen to Idol four teams together and make them happen. This will be things like account security. Like what we talked about with social recovery wallets ideas around privacy. Some of the secure blockchain based voting stuff that I've been pushing.
Entire road map of what do we need to do to make this ideal? Trustless decentralized Society work.
You've already had that the aforementioned AMS that has the abuses automated market makers. That was an idea that came out of one of your blog posts. And then you got Implement is Eunice swap any of the low-hanging fruit their social recovery wallets. I heard that one blockchain voting. If you're a young hacker listening to this podcast and let's say you're not Schilling eith, but you're like, hey the world needs this. So one should build it. What would they
build right now? Decentralized clients is one important thing.
Thing ways to access the ethereum blockchain that are cheaper than running a full node, but they're still decentralized of do. It depends on a server. It's something that's going to become much more possible with this much to prove snake. And there are some people working on it, but we could use more people working on it. There are things at the application layer, that could be useful. I've seen people working on decentralized vpns, which are cool.
Do you feel like there's any applications of blockchains that haven't taken off yet, because of scalability? Or it's not ubiquitous, not everybody has a wallet yet. What's the extreme case?
Could people be doing with blockchains a decade from now? That seems like science fiction today.
Some kind of decentralized watching based social media would be adjusting. The thing that would be valuable to do with social medias, to put the layers between content and user. Interface content should all be on one shared layer and people should compete on providing different interfaces Twitter and Reddit, its users, make on that side, users big votes, the only real differences. What are the interfaces that people use to show it? So why not create an ecosystem where anyone can go?
Oh stuff. And people can post things that link to other things that people can make messages that are up votes and down votes. And people can post other people's posts and just have 10 different ways of viewing yet. They might have different presentation. They might have different styles of moderation. You might have different sub Community, as some might be more. Free-for-all, some might be more restrictive. Somewhat people are focused on specific areas, some might be free speech zones and some might be venues for like highly focused scientific discussion, but things would still end up sharing the network effects of having.
Same common standards of contents being published, 21, decentralized Network,
people have tried to do it somewhat but nothing's taken off. Why is that
if we have a super scalable auction where we can afford to stick these kinds of actions on by defaults then what could happen? Who do you look up to? Who are your heroes in the crypto space? Might have a lot of respect for Zuko. Is he cash? It's just a wholesome an honorable project. It values privacy and it's just working really hard at achieving it in this fiery.
Only
way he's incredibly front of the amount of abuse. He puts up with is unbelievable. And he's one of the ogs and crypto. He's been in it forever for all the right reasons. I remember talking to Zuko in the early days and I was like, hey, if you build this thing is that even legal what if they arrest you. He said I'll miss my kids but I'll go to jail. He's a real believer. He also has this habit of retweeting people, even when they attack him. One of my favorite Twitter moments was years and years ago where somebody tweeted him and said Zuko stop retweeting useless crap. So of course, is who career.
Did this person who became an accidental genius.
Now? I'm trying to remember whether or not I picked that up from Zuko. I
do think Zuko's set the tone for how you build a community with a smile. For example. Now Zuko's talking about taking Z cash to proof of stake and he still keeps getting attacked or things like the founders award and people say, why did you have to go build an altcoin? Why don't you support a Bitcoin? I remember originally he wanted to do it as part of Bitcoin, but they said no go implemented as an altcoin first. And then if we like it, we'll adopt
it vitalik knows that.
Story.
Well, exactly. Bitcoin is trying to be a certain thing. I do think Bitcoin is incredibly valuable. It is the OG it does fall short in two ways. One is this not programmable and the second is not private. Can those be fixed not without severe trade-offs to what Bitcoin is? So it occupies a very important part of the ecosystem, probably. The most important part of, it doesn't mean that that's the entire thing. There's a lot more to it. And Bitcoin may have nailed the basic, protect your money, Austrian economics style use case, but
There are many more use cases, the thousand flowers that are bloomed on etherium and other smart contract blockchain since has been incredible. And as hasib said, we're going to see a proliferation of blockchains one. The incentives are just too strong second. There are different, trade-offs, you're making between decentralization and security and programmability. There are people coming up were saying? Well, we're more programmable. A gorik is saying, you can write JavaScript a smart contracts. There are people who are saying that. We've asked her and simpler out of the box. You have to deal with layer twos and Roll-Ups and sharding, it all that you
Just right, and it's easy to run. There's some parts in the Spectrum out, understand things like buying a smart change. The level of decentralization is so low. They just stick their name in it, but it's obviously for the people who care a lot less about decentralization, a lot more about cost and performance. And so on. It's going to be a very rich. Ecosystem blockchains are a fundamental shift into a new form of computing and I think you do have to be good-natured about it because they're all these disingenuous attacks on it. Like the Berkeley Professor who wrote this long piece about how his Raspberry Pi has more.
Put in there for me for Bitcoin will fail. I was just a nonsense. Comparison is just apples and oranges. You're comparing an airplane to a car. Just two different things. Yet people pages and pages of this like only a Berkeley Professor. Could I guess these are what Nassim taleb calls the II's. The seam has the completely opposite Twitter strategy of italic where. If somebody attacks him you just executes
them. Speaking of weird metallic. Who would you say are your enemies? Unfortunately, a lot of your Putin's, lovely Russian government is one of my enemies now. I did too.
Talk to him, five years ago. I believe in talking to people, I talk to Putin. I talked to the vice premier of Taiwan, at one point. I talked to the people and government of Singapore are talk to people and Canada the UK and lots of places. But at the same time, you're definitely our times. We use make the judgments that you have given someone enough latitude and as much as it would be good to give someone even more love. Unfortunately, at the present time. There are cities that are being bombs. There are millions of lives and people's families and Futures that are being potentially.
I didn't cut short and I beautiful country that risks being turned into Syria. Ultimately first priority has to be doing all that we can to help people affected by that situation. So that's a really unfortunate thing, and I've been very public and speaking out that I do fully support Ukraine and I do strongly oppose, all of the characters that are complicit in trying to destroy Ukraine as a country, and as a nation. And I used a Russian profanity of that some Ukrainian Soldiers made famous because of
How to use it as a brave show of defiance against Russian soldiers that demanded, they surrender. And I repeated it to the head of Russia today. So my general approach is that I don't believe it being me and zero percent of the time. I believe it being me and like maybe 0.5 percent of the time. If you're me and only 0.5% for the time then that actually makes that mean this more effective. Whereas here, the sort of person that being me and as your default mode of discourse that at some point, people just stopped paying attention to it. Bitcoin Community
can learn from that a little bit.
Although they're definitely kind people live in Bitcoin to is we just have to be a little quieter because the Maxis dominate. I'd like to talk a little bit about the unusual aspects of your life and not because we are celebrity chasing your navel gazing here. But because it points towards where you can live your life right? One unusual thing about your life is that you don't seem to have large collections of houses and cars, and you're not doing the standard wealth thing. Another is you're still working, is this leader of this decentralized organization? You speak some very large.
Number of languages. Would you mind giving us an idea a week in the life of italic or a month life of italic? And you might be saying interesting to look at where it's different than the normal person's
life. The last six months of my life. I was in San Francisco Toronto, Argentina, Costa, Rica, Mexico, Singapore. So a big long assortment of places. I've been a nomad for about eight years. Now. I started doing that as part of my Bitcoin trip in 2013 and then if you are, am started.
It's like my Bitcoin trip, never stopped. I just kept on going to different places because I was the person that was willing to travel to any particular events to talk to people. People just kept on piling more places for me to visit eventually that part of my lifestyle, just became permanent
and you've given away ridiculous amounts of money, right? If I remember correctly, had seven Founders and you probably been among the most generous of them. Do you plan on giving it all away? Or most of it away, this money, not matter to you.
I plan on putting the money to work, things that are
the most important in meaningful to the world.
How many languages do you
speak? It depends on what account somewhere between four and six
and pretty fluently, right? I saw you on an airplane. Once speaking fluent Chinese, which caught me off guard a little bit. Was that something you learned
recently? All Chinese over the last five years, English and Russian, I grew up with French horns in school, and Cheney is, and then some German, and some Spanish. I was going to ask. You said you're still on your Bitcoin trip. When is your Bitcoin trip going to be finished? It might never be
Years ago, I thought that guy would settle down eventually but then during covid I spent about six months in Singapore and I realized that wow at this point. My brain is rewired and I'm just not meant to stay in one place. The nomadic is probably never going to end. It was liberating realizing no time off the standard track for good and I'm fine with that.
I got one last question, which will be useful for my audience. A lot of people who listen to these kinds of podcast. They're just trying to be the best version of themselves. Whether it's the
Restore the most successful or the healthiest or the fittest. And I'm wondering if you have any philosophy, that helps you make decisions that you think contributed to where you are today. Conscious philosophy were, you'd like, should I put time into my own education? Or should I travel? Or what have you? Is there? Any advice you would have for a young person who sort of going down the standard track? The standard track is I went to high school. I go to college and get a degree that I'm gonna get a job La. Is there any advice you would give them given where the world is today?
And what you have learned
strive to be a better person at the end of every week than you were at the beginning of it, what better means can be very different. It could mean learn something. It could be an exercise and get better at running than you were before. It. Could me in. Improving your ability to interact positively with other people. It could mean try something new, visit a country that you haven't visited before and add some experience live every week. So you don't feel like at the end of the week you wasted it keep on moving forward and you'll be fine.
Don't live life on autopilot. I'll see if you got, any closing questions or remarks for
thoughts. I know that I'm not alone in saying that the crypto world owes you an enormous debt and having moved it for. There's a great man theory of history that feels more and more outdated over time. But you're one of the few examples of a living person who has massively and single-handedly moved forward history. And I know it probably is difficult for you to have the sense of everything that a theorem has done in the world and feel it, but I can.
Either all of us owe an enormous amount of what we're doing with our lives to what you started.
I would Echo that by saying it was remarkable how young you are, and you're already a multi act person because you contributed significantly to telling people a Bitcoin, you contributed, obviously by creating eith and then you've also contributed through the creation of Yuna Swap and M&Ms and not pushing social recovery wallets and privacy. And so on you have a multi act career in front of you and I look forward to seeing the future act as you were talking about improve every week.
It's compound interest and compound interest is a function of the number of iterations not time. So as you keep iterating, and iterating, I'm curious to see the metallic that comes out the other side and a huge huge impact that he has. And honestly for someone like you politics is a waste of time and yes, you have to engage in it because you have to coordinate people. But I'm sure at some point, you're going to have some great idea. And this time, instead of having to create yourself Against All Odds, you'll be able to recruit a great team and finance them and Shepherd them into building something as impactful.
Parallel domain. So looking forward to that. I know you do a lot of these. We try to make it a little different. Keep a little more high-level. Keep it a little more Timeless. Your tireless on the podcast circuit. So thanks again and hope to be helpful to you in the theorem community.
