Why does Vitalik insist on thinking about technical philosophy?

With the conclusion of Devcon7, the future development direction of the Ethereum ecosystem has once again attracted widespread attention. This inevitably brings to mind the proposal made by economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok in a recent podcast episode: Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin should be a strong candidate for the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Tyler Cowen praised, “Vitalik Buterin has created a platform and a new asset, and his achievements can be said to refute Mises’ regression theorem. Although Ethereum was developed on the basis of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin, Vitalik Buterin’s achievements undoubtedly reach the level of the Nobel Prize.”

Why doesn’t Vitalik have a little philosophical thinking?

At the age of 19, Vitalik Buterin began to devote himself to building a new economic infrastructure for the Internet. According to author Nathan Schneider’s account in the book ‘Proof of Stake’, Vitalik Buterin’s initial ambition was writing. When he became curious about BTC with his father’s encouragement, Vitalik Buterin posted on a forum in 2011 asking: If he wrote an article about Bitcoin, would anyone pay for it with BTC?

The result is indeed someone paid for it. So, Vitalik Buterin was able to continue writing, and then co-founded “Bitcoin Magazine” with others, detailing Bitcoin, which was still a niche culture at the time.

From writing magazines, to founding Ethereum, to today, 10 years later, Vitalik Buterin has been writing continuously, sharing his views on blogs, forums, and various social platforms, and actively interacting. It is thanks to this communication that Ethereum has attracted a group of loyal supporters in its development over the past 10 years, and its roadmap is also gradually becoming clear.

In the future, if Ethereum’s roadmap is to be finally implemented, the views of founder Vitalik Buterin still need to be more widely understood. Of course, these views may also be controversial, but controversy and questioning are also sources of driving Ethereum towards a better future.

In the second half of 2024, along with the conduct of the US presidential election, the discussion about asset appreciation in the encryption industry continues to heat up, sparking the ‘wealth creation dream’ of many users. It seems that technological iteration is no longer the most followed target. On August 21, 2024, Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform, jokingly responding, 'I was told that I need to ‘think less about philosophy and post more bullish posts about Ethereum.’ Therefore, the following is a bullish post about Ethereum, jointly completed by the AI-generated image tool Stable Diffusion 3 and GIMP.

This is the difference of the Ethereum ecosystem

In the atmosphere of ‘everyone talking about getting rich, and you still talking about technology’, Vitalik Buterin is still firmly spreading the technical and philosophical goals of Ethereum. Since October 14, 2024, Vitalik Buterin has published 6 blog posts, analyzing the future technological development and solutions of Ethereum based on the review of Ethereum’s roadmap: Depth.

The Merge***: Released on October 14, 2024, it explores the direction that ETH Fang needs to improve after moving to the PoS Consensus Mechanism, which is divided into two parts: technical optimization (such as stability, performance, accessibility of small validators) and economic change (addressing the risk of centralization, which is included in this part). The former belongs to the field of “The Merge”, and the latter is included in the field of “The Scourge”.

Among them, the goals of technical optimization include: improving the finality of single slots, that is, confirming and finalizing transactions as soon as possible while maintaining the ability of Decentralization; enhancing the feasibility of individual stakers; enhancing the ability of the ETH chain to resist 51% attacks. In addition, it also includes research areas such as accelerating transaction confirmation.

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Read the article The Merge:

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*The Surge: Released on October 17, 2024, it discusses the development of ETH’s expansion strategy, from ‘Sharding’ to ‘Layer2 protocol’, and then the integration of the two paths, finally forming an extension plan with Rollup as the core, which has greatly improved data bandwidth, but still faces many challenges, such as ensuring the robustness and Decentralization of Layer1, while also ensuring the maximum interoperability between Layer2 implementations.

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Read the article The Surge: *

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*The Scourge: Released on October 20, 2024, it discusses the centralization risks and value extraction risks faced by ETH Block Layer1 after adopting the PoS Consensus Mechanism, emphasizing that the risks are specifically concentrated in two aspects: Block construction and stake assets. It also introduces the progress made in addressing these two risks since 2024, such as implementing a dual-layer stake model, reducing asset issuance, and other solutions.

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Read the article The Scourge: *

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The Verge: Released on October 23, 2024, it discusses the challenges and solutions under the stateless verification of Ethereum, focusing on how technologies such as Verkle Tree and STARK enhance the Decentralization and efficiency of the blockchain.

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Read the article The Verge:*

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*The Purge：*Released on October 26, 2024, the article discusses how Ethereum faces the challenge of dropping complexity and storage requirements in the long term, while maintaining the persistence of the chain. Decentralized applications need to ensure that their dependencies do not cause functional interruptions due to upgrades, especially the Layer1 protocol itself. The proposed solutions include cleaning unnecessary protocol features and dropping the burden of client storage through the strategies of ‘historical data expiration’ and ‘state data expiration’.

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Read the article The Purge:

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The Splurge: Released on October 29, 2024, the article discusses the concept of “Splurge” in the 2023 Ethereum development roadmap, aiming to bring the Ethereum Virtual Machine into an efficient and stable “final state” in the protocol, implement account abstraction, allowing all users to enjoy a more secure and convenient account, optimize the economics of Money Laundering, increase scalability, and reduce risk, explore advanced cryptography to improve the long-term performance of Ethereum, etc. Specific implementation steps include the EIP-1559 technical proposal, etc.

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Read the article The Splurge: *

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Perhaps, while others are talking about getting rich, Ethereum is still focusing on the current technological aspects, which is the biggest difference between Ethereum and other blockchain ecosystems.

The large developer community and attraction to developers are the foundation of the establishment of Ethereum and the foundation for future development. Compared to the ecosystems of other chains, Ethereum has more toolchains and frameworks (such as Truffle, etc.) to support the development of more types of smart contracts and DApps.

At the same time, the tools and frameworks of Ethereum (ETH) take into account both performance and Depth. It is not only designed as an infrastructure for developing single high-performance ‘trading tools’, but also, after years of development, the proposed technical standards of Ethereum (ETH) have been widely adopted. Asset standards such as ERC-20, ERC-721, etc., have been applied to the entire encryption industry.

How to forecast the future more accurately?

So, what is the future that technology can envision? Vitalik Buterin once wrote in his blog that he has a fondness for technological optimism, but this feeling is rather subtle. He believes that fundamentally transformative technologies will bring a brighter future than the present.

Vitalik Buterin advocates that the best thing people can do is to keep the world roughly the way it is today, just by reducing some greed.

At the same time, Vitalik Buterin believes that it is not only the quantity, but also the direction that matters in technology. If certain types of technology can be developed well and have a higher reliability in making the world better, they can mitigate the negative impact brought by other types of technology.

Because in the current real world, the development direction of some technologies is overemphasized, but not enough attention is paid to the development direction of others. This requires human beings to consciously choose the direction we want, after all, the formula of “profit maximization” does not automatically reach the destination that people want.

How to see the future direction more accurately? In a blog post by Vitalik Buterin on November 9, 2024, he reviewed and extended an innovative concept, mentioning that the most exciting feature in Ethereum applications is the ‘prediction market’.

Vitalik Buterin believes that the “prediction market” is actually a very useful tool for the world, not just a place where people bet, and from a higher dimension, the “prediction market” is just one use case in a certain more macroscopic category of future applications. This application category has the potential to become an important method for improving various fields such as social media, science, news, governance, etc. - this application category is called “Info Finance”.