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Vitalik Exclusive Interview：Finding the Cypherpunk Spirit in th Era Of AI and Centralization.

Vitalik Exclusive Interview：Finding the Cypherpunk Spirit in th Era Of AI and Centralization.

發表於 2024-03-21 17:01 作者：區塊鏈情報速遞pro

Vitalik Buterin accepted exclusive interview with Blocktempo In the first part English-linterview, he discussed the centralized crisis and the resurgence of the cypherpunk spirit in the AI era, and revealed the secrets of Ethereum’s PoS and Dencun upgrade. The second part (Chinese) talked about the unique aspects of the Taiwanese community in relation to Ethereum, and how technologies like ZK and DID could improve modern democratic mechanisms and ensure freedom of speech for the people.

本文目錄

Click here>the transcript of the First part of the video (in-depth English interview).

Click here>the transcript of the second part of the video (exclusive Chinese interview).

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin visited Taiwan to participate in the Plurality Salon《Building Islands from Sand: The Taiwanese Experience of Plural Democracy – How to Advance into the web3 Era?》held by Tempo X.

In the first part of the interview, Vitalik delved into the current lack of “cypherpunk spirit” in the AI era and centralization, also mentioning the recently proposed technological optimism (defensive accelerationism). He revealed for the first time the significant secrets of Ethereum’s transition to PoS and the origin and outlook of its shift towards the Dencun upgrade, and how it relates to the future of humanity – the Plurality (multiverse).

In the second part of the video, Vitalik gave his first interview in Chinese. Apart from extending blessings to the Taiwanese community, he discussed the uniqueness of Taiwan in the Ethereum community. Continuing from his lecture on “Different Voting Mechanisms,” he engaged in a deep discussion with the audience on how blockchain can improve modern democratic mechanisms. Using technologies like ZK and DID as building blocks, he exemplified how these blockchain technologies and materials can be used to construct a more suitable democratic society for humanity.

Both video includes English CC Sub that you can manually turn on. You can read along with the provided transcript below to better understand the details of Vitalik’s interview.

Interview Part I

CryptoPunk：Freedom and Openness

BlockTempo：Lots of people know about Ethereum, but not too familiar with Plurality. Could you answer the following question, how people connect the dots between Ethereum and Plurality, which is, tell us why you like cyberpunk and what’s the definition of cyberpunk in your mind, and what role does cyberpunk play in Plurality?

Vitalik：

I think cyberpunk ideas are basically around freedom and openness, creating things that are as accessible, open, and fair for people to participate as possible. And, what people’s rights are protected and all of these things, but just adapted to and implemented using the digital world.

I think this has been the dream of people who have been trying to do a cyberpunk thing for decades. Yeah. And, I think it’s been the dream of people for decades, right? Trying to build things like digital cash, digital systems for private property rights, digital voting systems, and do all of these things in a way where security is guaranteed through cryptography instead of being guaranteed through having to trust centralized authorities, right?

Because once your security depends on a centralized authority, then the centralized authority can easily abuse that power, right? And in the physical world, of course, sometimes centralized authorities are difficult to avoid because, in the physical world, often attacking is easy and defending is hard, right?

But, you know, it still causes a lot of problems. But the more that happens in the digital world, in the digital world, it’s the opposite, right? And you can have things like cryptographic keys where you can make signatures, but breaking those signatures is impossible for even the most powerful attacker, right? And so the more things that you can do that build off of building those kinds of building blocks in the digital world, the less we can rely on and be vulnerable to the failures of centralized authority in general. So, the goal from the beginning has been to just see how far it is actually possible to take that direction.

And, you know, this started with digital cash systems from David Chom in the 1980s, a lot of anonymous mailing systems and mix nets in the 1990s. Then, of course, we saw Bitcoin that created the first fully decentralized digital currency. And I think now in 2024, we have a very big array of different tools with which to build all of these constructions, right? And, we’ve seen how we can build decentralized currencies, we can build voting systems, we can build all kinds of different things. And at the same time, though, we need to have some kind of organized movement that’s dedicated to actually doing that, right? It’s like if there isn’t a self-conscious and dedicated movement trying to do these things, then what you get is people inside the crypto space just try to make money off of speculating on the crypto space. And everyone outside the crypto space tries to make money by collecting everyone’s data and just trying to get people to buy pointless products by selling them ads, right?

And so trying, basically, I think the thing that I want to see Ethereum do more in is actually try to create that organized movement, and that tries to create at least a collection of organized software tools that can follow these principles and work well with each other and just show people what a better and more open and more secure and more privacy-preserving, you know, software world could look like. And with the recent efforts of developing more public goods and laying the groundwork of integrating civic technologies, Ethereum aspires to achieve high-resolution democracy.

Different definitions of the term”democracy”

BlockTempo：So what are the similarities and differences between Paradi’s digital democracy and Ethereum’s high-resolution democracy?

Vitalik：Yeah, I think when I think about high-resolution democracy, I mean, I think of the idea that because we have things like modern information technology, we have the ability to extract a much higher and much richer amount of information about people’s preferences than was even possible 20 or 30 years ago, right?
Like, traditionally, we think about just having an election every four years, and that’s basically maybe one bit, maybe two bits of information every four years, right? Less than one bit per year. That’s a very low-bandwidth channel. But, of course, if all you have is paper and you have the kinds of systems that we had 200 or even 50 years ago, that might be the best that you can do. But then now, we actually have all these very powerful information technologies. And the question is, can we use that to actually get a lot more information about people’s preferences through these mechanisms, right?
And in our modern internet, we have a lot of examples of what I call micro-democracy. So, take Twitter, for example. You can make a tweet, and then people can like the tweet, retweet it, and you can see how many likes. On Reddit, you can see upvotes, you can see downvotes. These are all forms of micro-democracy. It’s a real-time referendum on basically if the thing that this person said is good or bad. And these referendums happen millions of times a day, and their results influence who sees what content. So, we have lots of these examples of micro-democracy. And we also have macro-democracy. But at the same time, there’s this challenge that macro-democracy is inefficient and micro-democracy is insecure, right? In social media cases, there are lots of fake accounts and all kinds of different problems.
There’s also the issue that voting is not anonymous in micro-democracy. So, if you like a tweet, there are many ways how that might be discovered. And, if you live in the wrong country, you might even be punished for that. So, that’s the challenge with plurality. Just to basically see if we can create forms of voting that are both micro and macro and secure and actually good at extracting a lot of information and the right kind of information about our preferences at the same time. And even do it in ways that people haven’t even done before. One of the big successes that I think we’ve seen in social media in the last two years is community notes. It’s this new algorithm on Twitter where it tries to identify notes that are agreed to by people who normally even disagree on other things.
And basically, try to show clarifying information or context beside a lot of different tweets. This is the sort of thing that people obviously want for political content because you have one side that’s concerned about misinformation and the other side that’s concerned about a dictator or a small elite trying to silence them by just arbitrarily deciding that they are misinformation. So having this more democratic mechanism that avoids being controlled by a small elite and even tries to be cross-tribal, so even tries to avoid being taken over by one tribe is something that’s really powerful and that a lot of people clearly want. And so the goal, I think, is to find at least 10 to 20 other things that are in that spirit across all kinds of spaces, whether we’re talking social media, whether we’re talking funding decisions, local government, national government. And also, applications inside of blockchains and actually roll them out.

How to make humans trust web3 technology

BlockTempo：Alright. So we’re going to segue to the second section, which is trust in infrastructure. Glenn, Audrey, and Pluralist have hinted that the most important infrastructure is the power division of Parati. And for Parati, its goal is to be popularized by NGOs, nation-state governments, while the national government is not. So how does Ethereum plan to persuade these counterparties to trust and integrate Ethereum?

Vitalik：Yeah. Institutional applications of Ethereum and blockchain technology is something that people have tried to do for a long time. Obviously, so far, it’s been unsuccessful. I remember five to 10 years ago, the big trend that everyone was excited about was private blockchains or sometimes consortium blockchains, private chains, enterprise chains.

This idea that you can try to create something that’s more decentralized than servers but obviously not totally decentralized and scary like public blockchains and try to create a compromise in the middle. But the compromise ended up failing. We just haven’t seen many of these enterprise blockchain applications actually work. I think the reason is that they ended up creating the wrong kind of compromise because by not working with the public chain, they basically abandoned the ability to benefit from the really largest community’s network effects.

There was this phenomenon that I personally noticed when I tried talking to a lot of these teams where they would first create a consortium, and then the first five maybe clients would show up, they’d be very happy, they’d be very excited, but then it would never grow past five because if you’re the first five, then you have a lot of control, you can set the direction. But then if you’re number six, you’re number 13, then you have no power, and you’re joining a system that’s at the whims of these other groups. So, the kind of compromise between centralization and decentralization that I think makes a lot more sense is combining blockchains and zero-knowledge proofs. So, you use blockchains potentially not even as a way to publish all of the data but maybe as a way to publish hashes of the data. And then you use zero-knowledge proofs and publish the proof along with every hash to prove that whatever happens to update the hash, it was updated correctly.

What’s interesting about this approach is that the tie to the blockchain from a level is pretty minimal, but you still get the benefits. You still get the ability of a user’s ability to have a Merkle proof and actually prove that they have an entry in the database and it was calculated correctly. One of the first and most interesting applications of this in the short term is proof of solvency for exchanges. Exchanges have always had the problem of the question: What if they’re actually a fractional reserve and they’re stealing people’s money? In the past, it was Mt. Gox; this decade, it was FTX. If nothing changes, next decade it will be something else.

With proof of solvency, you can create a proof that proves that for every coin of user assets that are in people’s balances, you actually have an underlying coin that is being stored somewhere that you control. What’s interesting about this is that you can describe it as being a proof of solvency application based on zk-SNARKs, or you can describe it as the exchange turning into a type of layer two of Ethereum. From a technical perspective, both ways of understanding it are valid. That just is an institutional application of Ethereum that makes a huge amount of sense right now. That’s kind of the beginning, and I think the nice thing about this kind of approach is that you basically can keep the way that your application already works. You have a server; you can keep your server. You just add an extra piece of software on the side that reads the database, does some extra computation, generates some proofs, and publishes them onto the chain. If you do that, then you’re just bolting extra security onto an existing system and you’re giving users the extra ability to make the exchange into a security.

So, I think part of the reason why this has not happened yet really is just technical capability. So much depends on zero-knowledge proofs. Blockchains give you guarantees of guaranteed execution, openness, censorship resistance, but they give you these guarantees at the cost of scalability and privacy. Scalability and privacy are both very big deals. What zero-knowledge proofs do is they give you back scalability and privacy. Five years ago, zero-knowledge proofs were still mostly a theoretical academic thing. Now, Zcash, the zero-knowledge proof-based cryptocurrency that does privacy, launched at the end of 2016. I remember the very first version to generate a proof, you needed to have a laptop; you could not do it on a phone at all, and even on a laptop, it would take 90 seconds to generate a proof. Today, to do the same thing, you can generate a proof on a phone in less than four seconds.

So, that’s the user experience. Then, the developer experience to make a zero-knowledge proof application before about 2021, you basically would have to be a cryptographer yourself. But today, you can just write code in Circom; it gets compiled; you don’t actually have to understand or interface with the cryptography yourself. User tools, developer tools, it all is just becoming more powerful very quickly. So, from a technical standpoint, a lot of the problems actually are being solved. So, now I think it’s the time to really start figuring out what are the specific things that really make sense and just actually start implementing them. And the gas fees of Ethereum are still high, and the transaction speed is not necessarily the fastest.

Dencun：Finding the spirit of CypherPunk.

BlockTempo： Do you think this is the main reason why the spirit of cyberpunk cannot be greatly realized? With the upcoming upgrade, to what extent can you solve this problem?

Vitalik：I think high transaction fees are definitely probably the main thing that’s preventing a lot of the most interesting applications of Ethereum from succeeding more. The main way that the Ethereum ecosystem has decided to deal with this problem is layer twos. And layer twos have started to exist, and I think the big accomplishment of last year is that we have at least one layer two, Arbitrum, that has reached what we call stage one, which is basically a stage at which it’s actually giving most of the power to an actual proof system that directly reads and checks EVM computation. So, it’s more secure than putting all of the money in a multisig. Layer twos are making a lot of progress and they’re going to make more progress this year. They still need to put some amount of data on chain with every transaction. The goal of EIP 4844, the blobs, is to create this extra space where you can put extra data on chain and it’s processed in a way that makes it cheaper. In the short term, it’s just basically processed in a way that makes it easier to download in parallel and easier to throw out after some period of time. But then, in the long term, there’s this goal of using a technology called data availability sampling, which you can use to allow nodes on the chain to verify that the data is there without having to download all of it directly. So, the goal of all these things is to increase the amount of data space that roll-ups can use and by doing so, decrease the transaction fees and increase the scalability of roll-ups even further.

Techno-optimism and d/acc

BlockTempo： So we’re going to segue to section three, which is the experience of techno-optimism. So we saw you mention DAOs/DeFi on your blog. Although technology can speed up the advancement of society, we cannot tell if the direction is good or bad. Ethereum’s merge might be the greatest success in the history of blockchain as it transitions from PoW to PoS. As you lead this transition, what were some of the trade-offs and difficult decisions you and the community have made? What contributed to the success of this merge, and were there any open collaboration experiences and insights that have been instrumental to ensure that the direction is good?

Vitalik：Yeah, and I think with the change to proof of stake, one of the important things that we did was this was something that was discussed in the Ethereum community almost from the beginning. And I think when you’re making a big change to a system that lots of people depend on and lots of people have expectations around, really being clear with the community about what you’re doing and respecting the people is something that’s really important.

I mean, the one kind of counter-example that I gave also in that post is with the recent OpenAI situation, right? The board basically tried to fire Sam Altman, but then for a very long time, they just refused to give any kind of public reasoning for why they did it. And a lot of this, obviously, I think offended a lot of people because it’s like on the one hand, you’re trying to get people to believe that you’re doing something that’s good, but on the other hand, OpenAI itself was basically saying AI is super dangerous, we’re going to try very hard to do it responsibly, but then you ended up acting like this very unaccountable and centralized entity, springing this big decision and change in direction on people very suddenly without any warning or explanation. So, in the case of the proof of stake switch, something that we were talking about since the beginning of 2014, people who were in Ethereum knew that the switch to proof of stake was being developed from the beginning.

I think that was one thing that was done well, just making it clear that it’s part of the roadmap. There were definitely things that were done less well, but probably the big one is just underestimating the complexity of the transition. Had we known how complex it would be, we definitely would have picked a much simpler version of proof of stake to start with so that we would be able to get to it quickly and more quickly be able to switch focus and really start working hard on scalability. So, that’s a mistake, and I think it is a mistake that we’ve learned from. Going forward into the future, there’s this Ethereum roadmap doc that I publish every year, basically trying to summarize what the research and dev teams’ direction for Ethereum is and what kinds of things people are trying to do and implement. What’s interesting is that the amount of change in the roadmap has actually gotten smaller and smaller. If you look at the change between 2020 and 2021 and 21 to 22 to 23, and then now this last end of 22 to end of 23, the change there is much smaller. There are still things that are being changed. I think the big one is just the realization that we have to come up with some solution to staking centralization, but aside from that, not that much change. So, I think just handling the community side of all of at least the remaining significant transitions is definitely one of the important things to do well.

The outline of artificial intelligence.

BlockTempo：Alright, so once this was the fourth section, which is the last section, the future of human beings and imagination and contours of the future. AI, AGI, company, what do you think don’t have a human society and how may Plurality play a role?

Vitalik：Yeah, and I think we’re living in a very important time right now. This is basically the last century before just like humanity and our entire world becomes something that’s very unimaginably different from anything that we’re used to right now. And it’s a time when change is already happening, and I could fully expect change to just start accelerating more and more. This is a transition in which there are a lot of challenges. There’s obviously AI itself, which has a lot of risks. If a super intelligent AI gets created that has goals different from humanity, then that could be a big risk to even humanity’s survival. Then, even if that risk gets managed, there’s the whole other risk of will that enable forms of centralized power and totalitarianism that were just totally not possible before. Here, it’s not just a theoretical issue. We’re even seeing the impact of modern machine learning, facial recognition, and surveillance cameras on a lot of countries’ ability to detect and suppress protesters in all kinds of ways. Unfortunately, this is one of those things that was used pretty effectively against the Russian opposition over the last five to ten years. It’s being used more and more in other places. So, the question is, we have technologies that basically allow for an extent of control that once it’s put in place, can’t be escaped from. There are definitely big risks here in all kinds of directions. I think it’s important to think about those risks. It’s one of the reasons why I think maintaining things like open-source principles is so valuable. If you think about even brain-computer interfaces, for example, I’m very bullish on them. It could be amazing, like being able to understand every language and multiply 20-digit numbers in your head. But on the other hand, we’re literally talking about computers reading your mind. Computers are created by large groups of people, including companies like Google and Facebook and Huawei and whatever else. There’s a lot of trust that we’re putting in centralized groups of people. So trying to make those things as security-focused and open as possible is one of those things that’s valuable.

For Plurality in particular, the way that I see this is that in a lot of these cases, there’s a lot of value in being able to uncover consensuses that already actually exist, but people just don’t realize that they exist. Right? And just being able to quickly find points of agreement on even questions like what kind of technology should we really either subsidize or just put a lot of extra effort into at a particular moment? And if there aren’t good ways of getting consensus, then what’s happened historically is that that role gets filled by elites. And the more that role gets filled by elites, the more elites can use that to grab and maintain power for themselves. So, actually having those kinds of consensus happen in a way that is secure and that actually gives us access to information that we did not have before could potentially allow for a higher quality of decision-making. And I think that’s something that could be super valuable for all kinds of decisions, especially as the world just becomes extremely rapidly changing. In the final decade before whatever happens with AI, hopefully, it makes the world unbelievably awesome, or in the worst case, makes it terrible. In the decade before that happens, everything we know about the world will probably overturn every two or three years. That’s something that’s going to be a real challenge to manage well, and being able to preserve a lot of the properties of the world that we care about going through that is something that we’ll have to work together and work hard on. We’re hopeful that these plurality ideas can help there.

（End of the first part of interview.)

Interview Part II (Chinese Interview)

Love self-directed learning of the Taiwan

Vitalik：Hi BlockTempo and readers in Taiwan,I’m Vitalik Buterin, and I’m delighted todayto be here at TempoX to talk with you all about Plurality.Okay, let’s start by talking about some topics related to Taiwan.

Jigglypuff Tsai：First Question，The Ethereum and Plurality communities both really like Taiwan. We want to know why Taiwan? Do you see any potential in Taiwan?

Vitalik：The first time I came to Taiwan was in 2015, when Alex Liu from MaiCoin invited me here to see his company and the community in Taiwan. Then I also got more and more involved with the Ethereum community here. One thing I really enjoy about being here is that so many people love to learn.

I write an article, code something, and the next day, they’ve copied what I’ve done into a Google Docs. There’s a group of maybe 5 to 10 people all making annotations helping each other to understand. I’ve always really liked this (pluralistic collaboration) culture. Since 2017, I started looking for an ethereum local team in Taiwan, and to this day, they are still working with the foundation here. There are also others involved in various ZK projects or in other areas. So, I’ve always really liked them.

It’s Normal not understand Plurality.

Jigglypuff Tsai：The second question is about what you mentioned earlier that Taiwanese love to learn. However, when it comes to Plurality, it seems that many in Taiwan aren’t quite sure what this concept entails and find it quite challenging. Do you have any tips or methods of learning that you could share with us?

Vitalik：Plurality is a very new ideological trend, so it’s completely normal for people to be unfamiliar with it. This is partly because even the inventors of the concept haven’t fully explained it yet. I believe the most important aspect of Plurality lies in viewing things like democracy, open source, as well as topics like open democracy and open government, as forms of technology. A key characteristic of technology is its constant evolution, allowing for extensive research, understanding, and contemplation. We can also start to consider what the most suitable form of democracy for the 21st century might be. Glen has been pondering quadratic voting and quadratic funding, which are new mechanisms for voting and fundraising, respectively. He’s focused on how to best implement these mechanisms. Moreover, the concept of Bridging bonuses is now part of the discussion, , moving beyond just considering these mechanisms (voting and fundraising) to also think about the relationships between people. So, this is what the Plurality concept is about , in broad terms.

Implementing Plurality with blockchain technology

Jigglypuff Tsai：The third question：Ethereum has seen numerous cases of Public Good Funding in the past. We’re curious about the relationship between Plurality and blockchain technology. Could you share some examples in this area with us? This is likely something our readers would want to know. They’re probably interested in understanding how Plurality can be implemented on the blockchain.

Vitalik：Actually, we’ve had this for over three years now, maybe it’s the fourth year already. The platform is called Gitcoin Grants. It’s a platform that adopts Quadratic Funding where users can donate to various public good projects using Ethereum or other tokens. Quadratic funding has a unique matching formula involving a common pool. If many people… many people donate to a project this pool will provide additional Matching Funds to that project. Yes, Gitcoin Grants has been implementing this (Quadratic Funding) mechanism and has conducted at least 18 rounds by now, with many rounds running concurrently. Initially, the amounts were very small. I remember the first round’s matching pool was only about $25,000. But now, it’s common to have a matching pool of $500,000 or even $1 million. The supported projects are all within the Ethereum ecosystem, encompassing areas such as code, research, social issues, community, education or other types of projects. In summary, Gitcoin Grants is, I believe, an excellent and the best implemented example of the Plurality.

Plurality：Important tool in terms of ideology.

Jigglypuff Tsai：The final question is are there any blockchain technologies you are currently tracking, such as ZKProof and DID. that you consider to be important tools for the future development of the Plurality?

Vitalik：Certainly, these technologies can be broken down into two layers. For example, when building a house, the first layer is about what the house will look like— where various things will be located, like the rooms, bathrooms, etc. The other layer concerns the materials you will use, such as what the walls, roof, or windows will be made of. If the materials are not chosen correctly, no matter how good the house looks, it might only seem nice on the first day. But then, it might collapse under rain, snow, or even a minor earthquake. Similarly, in the voting system, the first layer is the mechanism, which is how to create a system that integrates many people’s different ideas and opinions. The second layer is about how to protect the security of this system. Security has many definitions, for instance, one aspect of security is privacy protection. For example, if you want to conduct voting or polls on political or personal life issues, if these votes do not protect privacy, people may be reluctant to express their true thoughts. The second aspect of security is, for example, an issue that Gitcoin has encountered before, where individuals create many fake accounts create many fake accounts and use them to donate to a project simultaneously, and use them to donate to a project simultaneously, pretending to be a community when, in fact, the entire community is controlled by one person. This is where Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZK) technology becomes invaluable. One of its benefits is that ZK can protect individual privacy while addressing security concerns. For instance, it allows you to prove that you are a legitimate participant in the system, meaning you are a valid voter. But beyond the fact that you have this right, But beyond the fact that you have this right, there’s no need to reveal any other personal information about yourself. there’s no need to reveal any other personal information about yourself. In summary, the two layers of technology are inseparably united, forming an integral whole that is vital for us.

（End of the second part of interview.)