Strive to be a better person at the end of every week than you were at the beginning of it ... 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.

To me, it's not an either/or. ETH the asset and Ethereum the application layer ecosystem are synergistic with each other. The stronger the application layer ecosystem is, the stronger ETH is. And the stroger ETH is as an asset, the stronger the application layer ecosystem.

One explanation that I heard one person give is that Bitcoin is like a spreadsheet where everyone only controls their own five squares of the spreadsheet, but Ethereum is a spreadsheet with macros ... Everyone kind of controls their own accounts, which is kind of their own little piece of this universe, but then these pieces of the universe can have code and they can interact with each other according to pre-programmed rules, and you can build a lot of things on top of that.

I don't believe in being mean 0% of the time; I believe in being mean, like, maybe 0.5% of the time. If you're mean only 0.5% of the time, then that actually makes that meanness more effective.

I remember, when Ethereum first launched, that a lot of computer scientists I spoke with privately said it would never work—because it's kind of this crazy idea that the way we're going to get a trusted computer in the cloud is we will each run a copy of all the computations on all of our computers, and then we'll sink it up, and make sure it matches. That's the recipe for building the slowest computer in the world, but somehow we've gotten away with it. And so I think the big debate now about Ethereum has shifted from 'Will it work?' to 'Will it scale?'

The incentives aren't there for developers to build on somebody else's blockchain. I got in trouble for saying this in 2017, but I still stand by it: There is a free-rider effect on blockchains. There is a strong incentive to fork a chain and build your own rather than to build on an existing chain.

Some kind of decentralized blockchain-based social media would be interesting. The thing that would be valuable to do with social media is to split the layers between content and user interface. Content should all be on one shared layer, and people should compete on providing different interfaces.

My number one advice... is to be intentional about the social environment and to have friends that help you bring out the virtues that you want to see in yourself.

NFTs are probably the one thing that I did not predict, by the way. If you look at the list of applications that were in the Ethereum Whitepaper, and you look at the applications that are popular today, the big thing that's in the second list and not the first is NFTs.

Every generation, there is some hustle that, if you're really smart, very aggressive, and looking for edges, and not afraid of looking weird, there are ways to get ahead early or to make a lot of money in a way that's not obvious to most people and is maybe even slightly subversive.

There core devs really are these kind of unsung heroes of the ecosystem. And they tend to be more introverted, and they tend to be less 'podcasty' than, you know, myself or Justin. But they've just done a lot to make... the Ethereum clients faster, and to really enable, like, let's say, the 7x capacity increase that the chain has had since it launched.

I've always taken the point of view that the most decentralised coins will win in the end, because the whole point of blockchains is decentralization. Otherwise, you wouldn't need them in the first place.

One of the things that I feel like I've learned over the last decade is that people are at their morally worst not out of greed but out of fear—and this is true in mainstream politics, and this is true in geopolitics and in crypto as well.

I feel like my influence on Ethereum keeps decreasing every six months. I have less now that I did six months ago. Six months ago I had less than I had a year ago. And a year ago I had less than I had 18 months ago.

Smart contracts are castles made of math freely trading with each other.

The larger the number of users that are verifying by default, the more secure a blockchain is.

You can put money into Bitcoin and ETH and forget about it for a long time. I'm not convinced you can do that in a lot of the other protocols that are not completely decentralized.

Today, Ethereum [does], on average, about 15 to 20 transactions a second. But if we just move to layer 2s, then we could go up to about 5,000 transactions a second.

The other thing that, I've talked to the roll-up teams... They want to start taking off training wheels. So, the roll-ups and layer 2s that exist on Ethereum today, they basically all have what I call training wheels—some kind of backdoor that lets developers come in and say stop and change the protocol if they see that some kind of bug has happened.

What would be nice is a world where there was something approaching complete anonymity for small transactions and... very high privacy for medium transactions but where larger transactions... don't necessarily have that same level of privacy.

I actually think, eventually, all Internet traffic will be encrypted and all of it will require cryptocurrencies to kind of just allocate scarce resources. Like, even today, there are things that we do on the Internet that are centralized, like caching and routing and spam filtering, that should be decentralized and involve crypto payments for efficiency.

Learning and motivation are very social. Being really successful in those things actually depends on having the right social environment.

I think of Ethereum as a general-purpose blockchain. So, instead of being a blockchain for one application, it's a blockchain that you can build any application on top of.

One of the things that's important to mention is that the scalability of blockchains is improving, and it's going to improve pretty rapidly.

2023 is going to be the year when roll-ups really come to maturity. We have 4844 that gives roll-ups more space, and we have the training wheels on roll-ups really get weakened a lot.