DEBRIEF - Endgame with Vitalik

Transcript

hey guys welcome to debrief this is our episode after our episode with vitalik buterin uh david is that the fifth sixth time vitalik's been on oh gosh oh man that i was not prepared with this trivia yeah sorry it's just popped into my mind we've had him on uh we've reflections on 2021 coinbase um uh roll-ups uh oh god we've had them on so many times uh i want to say five or six but i'll look in archive we'll confirm this anyway unimportance uh but it's always awesome when vitalik comes on because i just feel like he remains one of my favorite people if not my favorite person in this space besides you of course david

likewise yeah my uh co-host and partner um he's just he's he's very deep very wise very considered i don't think many have the kind of the breadth and depth that he does anyway it was a great podcast um the the degree of specificity with which he is able to articulate ethereum's roadmap actually blows me away like he can go into the the deep deep details of like you know very esoteric eip uh like he's very much part of ethereum's roadmap and very much part of um the development of this thing and he's in the details of this in a way that uh

always surprises me so i mean that first part we covered maybe we should talk about that first what are your thoughts on ethereum's roadmap right now yeah the it's when you become an expert about something you can pull in so many different details and relate them to each other in ways that like a beginner or an intermediate person cannot and i feel like when i asked about the question of like meta development which is something i kind of want to unpack further um uh just further in this in this year uh when i when i talk about meta development it's really about that like in in 2015 ethereum people were talking about the possibility of zk roll upping the whole entire chain as a concept in 2015. we also were talking about proof-of-stake

and charting as like ideas and concepts and like now with this uh my answer to where ethereum's meta development is is we have all these concepts and now we actually have technical details about how all of these things a actually get implemented and b relate to each other because i i think if if you notice that as you we progress further in vitalik's proposed roadmap there's a lot of like hyper hyperlinking like this thing relates to this thing this is a dependency here in order to do this we need to do that uh and this this is a phase of ethereum development where like in order to do this we have to do this and in order to do that we have to be here and this unlocks this for us that was that level of detail was never

ever something we've ever been able to have before before now i would say um and that's a combination of ethereum development just getting better they're being more talented and more developers working on ethereum and actually also putting progress behind us actually getting stuff done which helps us lay out a much more clear and formalized roadmap and so like people that are in this industry watching this industry be born like we're as an industry we're kind of making it up as we go and it's really just a matter of like can we actually concretely project out like what our action items are for the next like three years crypto has always been a game of like rnd in order to actually like

project into the future as far as possible and the fact that like vitalik says that we can project um three to six years of ethereum's development roadmap is the longest foresight we've ever been able to have not only in ethereum but as an industry uh and so and also if there's anyone listening out there it's like oh like you know well like i'm going to find a a project or team that can that's mapping out a 10-year roadmap no no it doesn't work like that because your 10-minute 10-year roadmap is going to change because all roadmaps and crypto change they're like the the fog of war in crypto is so thick that's a good analogy yeah and and and if ethereum's with it it's cryptographic first road map uh is finally piercing through this fog of war

do you know what's the the vision i had in my head i know you used to used to build um uh computers at home right um basically i know you had like gpu farms that sort of thing that's how you got into ethereum right um i used to build machines too a little bit like um as a kid be projects that my dad and i would work on together and that's kind of the visual i had as we were talking to vitalik about this the road map in particular like kind of the you know just the the visual of a motherboard and all of these various parts that we are like you know snapping into the motherboard right and the idea that this um this world computer is being built

like in the way it's being built is so incredible to me like completely open source from all corners of the world at the very beginning of the development of um ethereum it's like there were some concepts that didn't have clear execution ability right it's like we want scalability while preserving decentralization well how are we going to do that well we think there's this thing called starting we want in theory we know we can do it yeah it's very completely unknown yeah and then and then and then like um we want this thing called proof of stake right because we think it's more economically efficient you know better way to you um to essentially provide the same guarantees that bitcoin does but we don't exactly

know how to do it and so like how are we going to do it well as an open source community we're going to build this thing piece by piece and the concept of assembling a new computer like a new you know chip a new cpu a new motherboard in that way in this distributed fashion without clear like knowing exactly how you're going to build it you just know what needs to be built and um you know vitalik has been a brain behind this but he hasn't been the person pulling all of the strings here right it's totally been this massive worldwide community organization open source project that has brought this as far as it's

it's come and that to me was just um it's so fascinating i've never seen a project like this um i've never witnessed it firsthand and it's like a multi-year thing like i've been involved with lots like software development projects that sort of thing and usually you have a clear set of requirements and you know that you know team builds and iterates against this but like it's um very it's still very top-down right it's not very like bottom-up and just the way this thing is constructed as well is part of the the meta development story here and uh it's just uh it just struck me in talking to metallica's like how cool is this that we get to be part of the early stages of this and like you and i

believe that this world computer that's being built is going to be one of the most important institutions like digital institutions of this century like that's how important that's an institution right that's yeah it's a meta institution too and that's how important ethereum is and bitcoin some of these other things that we're building um so it yeah i feel very just privileged to be here to be honest and to witness this thing taking shape is um is truly incredible yeah it's it's quite immaculate right um i i think immaculate is is a great word there's the uh remember the whole loot phenomenon where people would just people birthed loot and they were like all right like now you guys build it now you guys build it like the reason why

like that doesn't fall flat on its face when it feels like it should is because there's actual actual precedent behind that strategy yeah and that precedent is is a combination of bitcoin and ethereum yeah totally and ethereum even more so just because of how much more development ethereum needed like all right like vitalik released this like yellow paper in the world into the world and he's like all right world like i need help building this thing uh and the world answered uh and that's why that's the ethereum client teams and ethereum researchers and and all that stuff it's an incredible story um should we get into like some of the specifics here so like what do you think of um i okay so i had somebody um tweet out recently when i was talking about

ethereum's layer 2 roadmap and uh ethereum scalability strategy and the tweet said something like did vitalik and the ethereum foundation just get lucky here like was it happenstance that layer twos worked out for them and that caused me to kind of like you know consider so basically the idea that going in ethereum really didn't have a scalability strategy let's say i mean there was this concept called sharding but like how do you actually achieve it right this was some of the main critique of bitcoiners and then it almost felt like over the last 18 months or so that um from one vantage point ethereum kind of got lucky with layer twos

like it seems like you can build um evm compatible general purpose layer twos on top of ethereum and this this wasn't um obvious at the very beginning when ethereum promised you know massive scalability so what do you think of that question did vitalik and crew just get lucky here i think um i think if we re-round back to 2017 and 2018 and like if you asked me how is ethereum going to scale i would absolutely say sharding and it's like oh yeah how do we get super fast block times with super low transaction fees my answer would be sharding and i think in the back of my mind i kind of figured that like you know

maybe that's i didn't know enough 2017 2018 i was in the crypto novice right but and i didn't know enough so maybe in the back of my mind to be like well can that really can that really go from just like this small niche blockchain to supporting the whole world just with sharding and maybe in the back my mind i was like no maybe i didn't know but i wouldn't i didn't really know i didn't really know i think when if you ask a question um and to your point what that means is that like sharding wasn't ever going to do it and i think maybe if we asked vitalik maybe he wouldn't have known either back in that that early like would sharding be able to scale to the whole entire world uh uh un unknown um but i think now i think when you ask like the question

when did ethereum get lucky with layer twos um well having surface area for luck is also really important yes and uh and so no i would say because layer twos are a blockchain agnostic construction they can go anywhere um and all ethereum has to be is be open to that and that is what ethereum is designed for is to be maximally open maximally expressive so that any sort of crypto thing that is useful can come and be built on it that's what the evm for it's a going back to your your motherboard thing the evm is a universal serial bus a usb port it's like oh you built the thing plug it in uh and and so no it didn't get lucky

it's been designed to be able to absorb all good technology well that that that's that was kind of my insight after after kind of thinking about this for a bit it's like we really create our own serendipity don't we i mean use the term uh surface area right for like you know so vitalik high level sharding was going to be a path and high level that's kind of right i mean we're doing sharding but like all the serendipity all of the um research like and kind of the the the road map that has resulted from that could not have been foreseen but ethereum kind of embraced a culture of openness to these sorts of things i mean the amount of work that went into the ethereum research forms those are like highly active and highly useful forms

those are built out during the early days also the social layer let's be open to this experimentation this this creation our high level goals are a decentralized uh trust computer for the world now how do we incorporate the best ideas and build that out that's all been not luck but almost designed yet it creates the conditions for the serendipity for this luck that led to the roadmap that we have today so that's been fascinating to see also and it's you know i think that rule can be applied elsewhere it's like yeah there is definitely a concept of luck out there right but there's also um like equally the truth that we oftentimes create our own serendipity we

create our own surface area to sort of attract these lucky events that's one thing's like that's one thing i love about twitter is i feel like it's sort of a a serendipity creation engine i mean at some way you and i met over twitter didn't win like it was very much like you i saw your writings like it was a twitter sort of interaction and you know the entire bankless podcast everything like we've done together probably wouldn't have come to be without that surface layer for serendipity so there's there's also a meta lesson there uh that i took away from this yeah i remember the shout out to michael wong who first coined the term or implanted the term in my brain luck surface area that's good you can optimize for luck that is something yeah isn't that weird

yeah it's definitely a life lesson okay so we've got this road map um we've got the merge coming which is awesome we've got the surge so so this is all related to our modular blockchain thesis right it's going to supercharge rollups the merge is coming next year i think the the surge is probably going to be like a 2023 thing don't you think i mean we might sneak some eips in there that that sort of start to execute on the early stages of the surge but i don't think we'll see sharding data shorting until 2023 i didn't want to ask vitalik about dates because that's just uh he wouldn't want to he wouldn't have wanted

you to yeah it's kind of a gotcha question if you noticed on his roadmap there were zero there were zero dates there were zero dates they were very yeah um so we get the surge and then we've got some of these other things like the verge and the purge that you know some of these things are um developing in tandem i suppose but vitalik's take was i thought this was interesting we're 50 done now and if we got the merge and the search stuff together you know not calling it a day with ethereum but like he feels like that would be enough to like keep ethereum uh as a trust compute player for the entire world like even just two of these

things on the roadmap would be enough to kind of call it a success not fully successful but do you know what i mean and i thought that was an interesting observation like we don't maybe actually need the verge and the purge and the splurge and some of these other things in order to have ethereum do what it needs to do for the world what are your thoughts on that yeah i know i think i think that is pretty pretty interesting uh having the merge and this and the surge happen and vitalik saying like all right that that could that could be enough that could do it that might be the his future of crypto if ethereum calcifies after that it wouldn't be the worst case in the world um and obviously vitalik has way more insight than i do but when i see all of

these urges these one through five urges merge surge verge purge splurge what i when i what i've the theme that i'm seeing is this is ethereum or crypto economics really cryptography scaling more and more and more to the whole world this is a this is a scalability plan and not it's not just uh transaction scalability it's not just throughput it's not just cheapness of transactions that's one version of scalability that's the more uh like obvious and more like you know socially referred version of scalability but these other ones stateless clients eliminating historical data and then all the extras in the the splurge that's social scalability that is how do you

scale the blockchain to in order to replicate itself and put it on as many computers as possible as easily as possible and as securely as possible which is a different kind of scalability uh but in my mind it's actually the much more important version of scalability uh and bitcoiners uh lean into this a lot where like bitcoin the blockchain doesn't scale very well it's got very slow block times with very limited data caps but it is socially scalable bitcoin can replicate itself it's easy to copy it's it's secure to download uh and so there's this other component of scalability and so every single one of these things in my mind is increasing ethereum's uh social scalability it can as a blockchain as a

an ecosystem as in as an organism it is more scale to envelop more of the world with every one of these steps one of those steps includes actual data scalability actual data throughput but that is just only one of the many components that make a blockchain a scaled blockchain and i think especially with these last ones the verge the purge and this splurge these are things that like all the other alternative layer one chains i don't think that they will put attention towards them until they become problems and that's kind of the big difference between like ethereum meta development and development on any other chain we've noticed that like a lot of the other chains are short-term thinking and that they need to gain traction right here right now because they are in

the alt layer one competition they are in in that that crucible of competition and uh and so they don't have the luxury of being able to look out into long term and like thinking about eliminating historical debt or uh and granted they might actually have less because they're newer um but uh it's still like stateless clients is something that is not again ethereum specific it's for everyone right uh and so and also pruning and state expiry and all that stuff these are not things these are things that only ethereum is as an ecosystem is looking at from from far as far as i can tell uh and it's it's really just optimizing ethereum to be far more scalable in ways that and because ethereum has that luxury of uh being um first in its in or in the lead with regards to development

uh because it has that foresight and it has that developer attention to be able to expand over the horizons of the short term um that's kind of my take there well let's talk about that a little bit more with the alt layer ones conversation because i thought that was a very interesting uh point in the conversation and it strikes me as you were talking david like all layer ones need aetherium um a lot like much more than ethereum needs alt layer ones ethereum wrote their road map this is half of this podcast was a road map for alternative layer ones who whichever ones whichever ones want to take it well it's it and it's interesting to me that many of the alt layer ones actually use ethereum technology right so like you know avalanche you know binance chain they're

all using geth under the hood for a lot of this and and making their own tweaks so uh but like a success it's funny because oftentimes these are painted as like very competitive but they need a successful ethereum right even like think about the roll-up technology that exists right now so like if they want a starkwear to start deploying on a you know arbitrum or or salon or something like the reason starkware is what it is today is because of ethereum right so it's mainly that that ecosystem that is anyway so let's talk a little bit about alt layer ones though um because this was an interesting point in the conversation and uh maybe i want to just dig into that to the heart of it which is uh vitalik's endgame blog post

which um basically states that it's possible that um big block chains the high performance layer one chains and ethereum long term might end up in a similar place right at least the ones that decide to you uh you know revert back and build in some decentralization into their protocols to the extent that they can patel called this critical fortification which i think in of itself is an interesting term um and so like yeah you have a question protocol armor is called armor that's right i said fortification but critical armor yes and so like um these alt layer ones

like might be on the same path in a way and this is similar to a uh i think a i guess an insight maybe you could say or an argument that suzu from three era's capital makes right you know which is basically like hey um all of these chains will converge and i think you made the point in the podcast you just said like big block chains are choosing a different point in the uh scalability trilemma and they're starting from that point and some will stay there some will just fake decentralization and ultimately i'm going to use the term very broadly i don't like this term but like ultimately kind of exit scam not achieve the vision

of what a blockchain is supposed to do it's just going to remain a centralized successful in the short and measure yeah exactly but some might be able to pivot and start moving more towards the the other angle in the uh in the triangle here towards decentralization in fact vitalik kind of put together like if i was you know king of these chains here's what i would do here's sort of an approach i would take to make them more decentralized but the interesting outcome is all of these chains could end up in the same place where you have block production that is centralized uh and um block validation block verification that is decentralized that could be a possible outcome in which case we sort of ask the question to vitalik like

well then what of it like are these are are these better paths to take why not start with the big bat you know block approach where you're trying to onboard the world and you just trade off decentralization for performance and then double back and try to build in more decentralization more political armor later what was your take on that part of the conversation yeah vitalik said that uh he's skeptical that some of these chains even actually do care about decentralization he said they they just pay lip service to decentralization um and so my take on this is that that could be a very valid outcome where uh ethereum and these alter ones are all in a race to con another race to get to the same end zone into the same end game and which is what vitalik's article was more or less

about if you read through the lines um but what that would require is that some of these chains actually do care about decentralization like they actually do have to care about that uh and vitalik said that like in this podcast and we've said it a number of times before is this whole entire space is built on decentralization and like that's i i think that's the only belief that i hold in crypto that i will not ever budge on and that's your maxi belief that's my maxi belief right like this whole thing is based on decentralization and if you disagree with me then we cannot see ever eye to eye and i will die on that hill um that hill does not belong to ethereum ethereum does not control or own or co-opt the concept of decentralization that is a concept decentralization is a concept for everyone to uphold if they

so choose but in order to actually get to this end state these alt layer ones that have compromised on decentralization have to uncompromise on it that's the hard part that's the hard part and and then and then it turns into a story of like say say we have three different layer ones one is ethereum and two other alt layer ones and they all got to this end game state in different ways now is now at that point it's a competition of how fast did they get there and the story of how they got there how they navigated the waters to design their blockchain to maximize for all three uh points on the blockchain trilemma and the story of how it got there i think is really crucially important and i think that is still what will always separate ethereum from

everything else because ethereum started by compromising on scale and not decentralization and others compromise on decentralization and not scale and i think when we exist inside of an ecosystem that is built entirely on decentralization of all the three points on the blockchain trilemma decentralization is the one that you do not compromise on at all or do you think i do i do totally agree i i think decentralization is the hard part right it's you're kind of asking like um a big government to get smaller which is always very difficult like that yeah it doesn't work like that unless there's some kind of a revolution or an authoritarian regime to like convert to uh democracy right like

that generally doesn't happen the uh decentralization is political yes whereas scalability and throughput and data throughput is technical totally angry political fights are way harder than technical fights yeah and so that's that's why there's like this very much kind of this like very strong rejection of centralization in ethereum because it's like this slippery slope thing and people and ethereum people kind of know it right like no no no we can't compromise on decentralization because then it turns into a bunch of political fights left and right we can compromise on scalability because that is a technical argument that we can reason about without having to worry about politics and that's right that's why uh compromising on uh scalability is so much easier than compromising on

decentralization right which is which is why i think many of the alt layer ones eventually like just won't they won't try to follow fast fall like follow ethereum towards that uh that corner of the trilemma towards decentralization you know because one it's politically infeasible it's very difficult to do and also requires like a deep culture shift at the layer zero and then number two like why do that ethereum already has that market cornered what i think will probably be easier for many of these alt layer ones is to use the the other tactic which is like basically why does decentralization matter that much right and that in decentralization right but but there's also a case for that too right so we when we ask the question

about um you know uh about decentralization all layer ones metallic uh said hey what do you think when i was in argentina what do you think is the most popular crypto tool crypto solution that average citizens used to use the term l1 yeah he did and it was like finance not finance chain it was like actual exchange it was the binance the exchange and so that that is the argument from a centralization perspective uh it's just like you know basically like users don't care about decentralization they just care about some features that will make their lives better and i totally understand that and i totally get that but it strikes me as like okay then we're building very different

things like categorically these are different you know end state games and in bankless terminology phraseology it'd be more like you're building a fintech thing okay uh you're building a new bank a neo bank what we're trying to build is a decentralized bankless system for the world and these are separate categories of things but what do you make of that point like high level users don't care about decentralization that is often the other alt one uh alt layer one argument right it kind of begs the question like if you do if you a lot of a lot of people will say uh shout out tasha will say that users don't care about decentralization uh

and so then why use a crypto system at all just going to use finance like we actually don't need crypto to do all the things that exist on crypto you can just fake it on a centralized platform so why even bother with any amount of decentralization then um maybe that's the slippery slope fallacy of like you know like no no no there is a goldilocks zone of decentralization centralization and rather than having one entity it's best that we have 20 entities that's the optimum level i i just don't agree with that goldilocks zone though right and i i just i think people are mistaking um real layer ones they're they're conflating real layer

ones with applications right so finance would not have even been possible without real layer ones without bitcoin and ethereum as you know token economies basically right and so the fact that finance exists as an app is because of these decentralized systems that that you know came before it and that underpin it you can't build ethereum on binance but you can build binance as an app on ethereum and i think this of which it is right so i think sometimes some of these alternative layer ones like for instance uh to me tara comes to mind tara to me looks a lot more like a fintech type of um solution

than it does a layer one right i mean it has like um dpos style validators the cosmos chain right it's like maybe it it's across the spectrum somewhere between you know fully fintech and centralized and a layer one but it's not in the same category as something like a bitcoin is is trying to be and something like an ethereum is trying to be and i think they're often conflated and the reason they're conflated is because you kind of want to be valued you want the performance the scalability performance of an application but you want to be valued like like uh like a layer one you want to be valued as a percentage of ethereum so the narratives get conflated in that

way um but yeah that's an interesting discussion uh what else you got well one one thought i have is like uh a a possible a very possible 2020s decade is um one of increased uh uh strictness uh uh the the three letter agencies coming after crypto protocols we already saw this with tara and dokwan uh and um just like imagine just a more hostile regulatory environment for all of crypto um ethereum as this maximally decentralized settlement layer and also talking about the concept of protocol armor one of the best protocol armors for some of these centralized layer ones that look and feel like apps like you said

if those if they start getting uh attacked by the nation state by regulators and say hey you gotta shut down your stuff uh and that actually does work uh because of the they're because they're weak towards that kind of attack because they are centralized the best protocol armor for these things is to turn into a roll-up a roll-up is protocol armor for anything that's centralized and so hey our like is for for terra terra is like a synthetic asset platform that's a that's a layer one but if it's weak to external political attacks it can use ethereum and ethereum roll up as protocol armor to shield its state from anything right and so it just settles on ethereum it rolls up its state and puts it in a

bundle and settles it on the l1 and like ethereum is this like safe zone did you ever play like tag in when you were young yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's like safe like once you put the state on ethereum it's safe like it's safe can't touch it and then so like the only thing that's actually at risk is the next block which is only one block uh and everything else is safe and so that is protocol armor if we do get into a very hostile regulatory environment i would imagine it would make sense a logical conclusion for all of these at-risk centralized platforms to use ethereum as protocol armor i just i i agree with that and i i also think in general we have kind of um bull market goggles on with all of these like alternative layer ones so i think what

what could also happen another driver to convert all layer ones into roll-ups is a bear market you know to be honest right so one advantage that i don't know why but people often overlook of a layer two is it doesn't have to pay for network security right and it doesn't have to fund its military budget which is so expensive it's so expensive l1 is to find security is the most expensive thing you can do i just look today solana pays 18 million dollars a day on issuance on its security budget basically right 18 million dollars a day okay on ethereum it's there's there's no maintenance costs you basically pay per usage and that's based on users actually

paying the economic fees the taxes to ethereum as it were so none of this is obvious when we have our bull market goggles but like during the bear run when during the bear run i hope there's not a bear run but during the bear market when token prices go down and people are like oh my god we're inflating so much money look at how much remember this happened with ethereum look at how much we're paying miners look at how much we're paying our validators for this system that could convert some to take a a roll-up-based approach where you basically get the military budget from ethereum uh for free at cost there's there's no cost to that so that's something that that's been in the back of my mind too

uh anything else any other takeaways from this episode david i think just a really great episode to kick off the year yeah man it's gonna be a good year really excited about it we'll have vitalik on a few more times i'm sure you know he just always writes great things and then we're like hey you know you should come on and talk about them yeah and he's like yes i will yeah so this is no exception uh first episode of the year guys first debrief of the year thanks for hanging with us bankless subscribers we appreciate you we'll talk to you soon