Vitalik Buterin

Vitalik was a big blocks supporter for a long time. I saw this post as a 180 as well. "Now I personally can see that it’s not axiomatically true that doing nothing is safest, especially in the context of a changing environment (for example I continue to believe that Bitcoin’s failure to raise its blocksize by a significant amount in 2016–17 was a travesty and a great violation of many people’s expectations of the protocol, and one that led to more total losses due to excess txfees than the amount lost in the MtGox hack), but this is the argument that you need to be arguing against."[1] [1] 12/26/2018 https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/he-imagines-a-world-in-which-crypto…

Up until about 7 months ago I was on Freenode and then Libre IRC all the time, for years. I don't remember anything about decentralization on there. This was an import thing for me as I was writing a personal decentralized media sharing application. The best model for decentralization I found was WebRTC. The best explanation on Decentralization comes from Vitalk Buterin: https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c… Before going further you have to understand that decentralized is different than distributed (federated). Distributed means fault tolerant redundancies with various degrees of independence/autonomy. Discord and Bitcoin are distributed as they still have a central point administration whether its a public ledger or username or whatever. Decentralized really means strongly separated. For example if I wanted to communicate privately with my wife ultimate privacy means not through a third party server, but directly from my computer to the wife's computer (but encrypted relays are fine when required to compensate for transmission limitations). Accomplishing this requires decentralized transmission, which is tough to engineer even after solving for NAT. Have fun.

Opensea uses Google as a caching layer. NFTs on OpenSea can either be created by going through their centralized, counterfactual layer (which doesn't cost gas until someone purchases) or by deploying your own ERC721 smart contract to Ethereum or Polygon and hosting the content however you like. If you follow the ERC721 standard, you can take that NFT to any web store. It is not limited to OpenSea, even if that happens to be the most popular at this time. > Proof of stake means the largest stakeholders can unilaterally reject transactions. Technically the chain could fork. Practically, convincing everyone to move to a new chain seems about as difficult as everyone moving off Facebook because a few people get banned. > Proof of work means the richest people can afford more miners and completely control the chain. > So where is the decentralization? The only realistic decentralization I can make out is that its possible to build alternative chains, but that very thing is possible today. Its possible to build an alternate payment processor or social network if Visa bans your business, the really hard part is building it and getting the entire ecosystem to actually use it. On a POW system such as Bitcoin or ETH1, you'd need 51% or more of the hash power on the network, which is more than a hundred Google datacenters worth of hashpower, and you'd have to spend a vast amount of energy in order to execute the attack, and at the end of it all, the community would mount a fork and…

I've tried to explain but the comment was blocked because I was replying too quickly. Decentralisation has three dimensions: Political, Logical and Architectural. In the case of Linux, I argue that the decentralised nature of open-source software development is what guarantees its safety and usefulness and not the individual merits of any one participant (person or company). I think I'm not saying anything contentious when I say that Linus' employer has no special treatment in terms of linux development roadmap, and that most contributions are voluntary and no one needs to ask permission to download the code and fork the project and this is logical and political decentralisation. Here's an article by Vitalik from Ethereum Foundation that I always recommend to those interested in understanding decentralisation: https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c…

This is pretty good! The arithmetic of elliptic curves gets very complex, but I like how you arrived at points on an elliptic curve just by defining groups and fields. It might be a slight improvement to give a short, Rudin-style explanation of the difference between a set and a field. You could do this from first principles of set theory without being so terse as to be incomprehensible or diving into the axioms; I think the stated goal of little math is fine for the audience, but at the same time such an audience might not immediately understand what “field = set with addition and multiplication defined on it” means. I think a small expansion of the treatment on why the ECDLP is hard would also be good. It's intuitively easy to follow that hard problems can exist, but maybe continue on in showing why this particular hardness assumption works for cryptography (because there are many that do not). Places to go from here if you enjoyed reading this and want to learn more about elliptic curves and cryptography related to them: 1. http://blog.bjrn.se/2015/07/lets-construct-elliptic-curve.html?m=1 More on an elliptic curve and constructing a hypothetical one. 2. https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/exploring-elliptic-curve-pairings-c… Elliptic curve pairings. 3. https://www.lvh.io/posts/supersingular-isogeny-diffie-hellman-101.html An intro to supersingular isogeny cryptography, which has a basis in elliptic curves as a mathematical structure, but is fundamentally…

If our standard is cool math, crypto is also full of cool math. (Have you read Vitalik's explanation of Quadratic Arithmetic Programs?) Our standard can't be that low. https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/quadratic-arithmetic-programs-from-…

Vitalik touched on this topic some years ago. "Blockchains are politically decentralized (no one controls them) and architecturally decentralized (no infrastructural central point of failure) but they are logically centralized (there is one commonly agreed state and the system behaves like a single computer)" https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c…

Vitalik Buterin on different axes of centralization: https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c… >>Ethereum is only decentralized in the way that doesn't matter — you're free to join the decentralized system, under the condition that you act in the exact same way as every other actor in that system. This is centralization of logic, that establishes uniformity of the protocol, but it is a decentralized configuration of power, where every party is subject to the same rules for accessing the blockchain. Fees are a limiting factor, but all data is treated the same with respect to fee calculation, irrespective of who submits it for inclusion in the blockchain.

And Vitalik has a good blog post on what kind of decentralisation we are talking of with crypto and blockchain. He says blockchain is logically centralized, which is what this post here is essentially talking about. https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c…

This is a case where I find Vitalik's distinction between different kinds of decentralization useful. [1] Roquerre is talking about political or logical decentralization whereas you are talking about architectural decentralization. [1] https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c…

>He's very good at obfuscating it by appearing very smart: read his articles and tweets, they always sound complex, but can be rewritten in much simpler terms. What? Nothing could be more unfair. His articles on zk-snarks and starks are probably the most approachable explanations available. https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/quadratic-arithmetic-programs-from-… https://vitalik.ca/general/2017/11/09/starks_part_1.html

Further reading: https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/exploring-elliptic-curve-pairings-c…

Vitalik Buterin disagrees with you specifically on the topic of endlessly increasing impractical eth blockchain: https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/because-of-ethereums-exponentially-…

There are different intepretations or definitions of what is decentralized. For example, Vitalik defines the concwpts in a different way https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c…

Huh, was expecting the article to be about different meanings of centralization and how Bitcoin doesn't meet all of them -- to use Vitalik Buterin's terminology[1], it's not logically decentralized (being ultimately based around a single consensus ledger). Instead it's claiming that Bitcoin isn't politically decentralized like it claims to be. [1] https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c…

“Ethereum transactions” and “quantity of ETH transacted” are two very different things. This title (and article) is deceiving. Please see Vitalik Buterin response to this before reading. https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/i-think-this-article-really-deserve…

This is one of the reasons that Vitalik wants to move towards Proof of Stake[1], which addresses the environmental impact of mining by not forcing computers to do complex crypto math to make the system work. [1] https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/a-proof-of-stake-design-philosophy-…

Vitalik (of ethereum) has a pretty good blog post talking about the different types of decentralization: architectural, political, and logical.[0] For blockchains, he says: "Blockchains are politically decentralized (no one controls them) and architecturally decentralized (no infrastructural central point of failure) but they are logically centralized (there is one commonly agreed state and the system behaves like a single computer)" [0] https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c…

I hate to argue from authority but here is @vbuterin saying the same thing about centralization: https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c… “Blockchains are politically decentralized (no one controls them) and architecturally decentralized (no infrastructural central point of failure) but they are logically centralized (there is one commonly agreed state and the system behaves like a single computeR” I think you’re mistaken that I don’t know how Bitcoin works. Not only do I know, but I have spoken to many teams doing work in the last 10 years in various alternative systems, and I have even designed alternatives myself. I used the word server in my analogies. The transactions are, however, all going through one COMPUTER which receives them, puts them in a envelope, and finds the right PoW input to “seal” the envelope, and sends it out to everyone. Whoever does that first, gets the rewards on that chain. If the transactions do not make it into the block, they don’t count on-chain. Therefore, every 10 minutes, ALL TRANSACTIONS IN THE WORLD must be gathered by one computer, the one that will happen to mint the next block. This is a bottleneck, and it is the cause of the skyrocketing fees whenever the system sees any on-chain adoption. But it’s actually worse than centralized — because we don’t know who will mint the next block so we have to send everything to on everyone. Imagine if all BitTorrent nodes seeded every file in the world.…

===== BEGIN SIGNED MESSAGE ===== [ANN] Dogemusk: A New Generation of Meme Token That Exposes Centralized Cabals As Vitalik Buterin once said: "Excessive and naïve reliance on any formalism intended to decentralize authority can inadvertently have the perverse effect of reestablishing monopolies and oligarchies. Only by making technical systems that offer a variety of mechanisms for checking concentrations of power and by simultaneously building social ideologies constantly on the lookout for failure modes of these mechanisms can we hope to succeed where previous attempts at decentralizing authority have failed." While we see first-hand the ridiculous amount of concentrated power platforms such as CoinMarketCap, Etherscan, CoinGecko have and how that may choke many projects which do not belong to their cliques or cabals supported by the same group of VCs. To embrace Vitalik's vision of radical decentralization, no one will own Dogemusk. Dogemusk will grow itself as an embodiment of the radical decentralized future that first attracted me to the crypto sphere. If you want to help contribute to the Dogemusk ecosystem and build fun and meaningful applications with MUSK, send me a message or develop yourself. And if you as centralized exchanges want to list MUSK, do as you wish and check our bulletproof code and simply add MUSK to your exchanges. We will not play your pay-per-play sponsorship game as I know too many ins and outs of this circus show. If we do not embrace…

>> - Architectural decentralisation: how many physical computers the system is made up of? What’s the topology of the network and its geographical presence? >> - Political decentralisation: how many people or entities are in control of the network? >> - Logical decentralisation: does the whole system behave like a single entity? >> The take away from Vitalik article, is that all blockchains combines these three dimensions into one system. Actually, Vitalik states in his article that individual blockchains are logically centralized: https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c… It depends on whether we're talking about a specific blockchain or the set of all blockchains. That's why I don't agree with the position of Bitcoin maximalists; their vision is not fully decentralized. When you factor in the centralization of mining power, BTC is only architecturally decentralized. Bitcoin is not so different from a centralized system which has replicas in multiple data centers.

This reads like a rhetorical question – 'what could possibly be the application for something this deliberately bad?' I won't speak for what "blockchain" can or will become, but you might see the hype more clearly by considering the ideology inherent in asking specifically for the "proper application." You imply that you or someone in a position you understand might "apply blockchain" to a "problem," as you commonly understand it. I see "blockchain" more as a movement, which completely evades "application" in the common sense. People building these technologies, and organizations around them, live in a separate world that makes little reference to the broader world of which most of us are a part. They start with distinct priors, which rule out most existing solutions on the grounds that they demand political centralization (see: https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c… You can summarize this ideology as: 'if there's a sysadmin, the system is broken.' It may very well be the case that they are creating a new world that will be marginalized and outcompeted by incumbent systems and organizations, but that's how I understand what's 'actually going on'.

In the blog post[1], on which Casper PoC4[2] is based, Vitalik writes: > Accountable safety is what brings us this idea of “economic finality”: if two conflicting hashes get finalized (ie. a fork), then we have mathematical proof that a large set of validators must have violated some slashing condition, and we can submit evidence of this to the blockchain and penalize them. Why would the validators, who decide what goes into blocks, willingly include a proof that they have cheated? As far as I can see, these proofs must be communicated out-of-band (not through the blockchain) by nodes, since no validator would ever incriminate itself by including a proof that it has cheated. How do nodes coordinate this, and come to agreement on which chain is the right one? [1] https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/minimal-slashing-conditions-20f0b50… [2] https://github.com/ethereum/pyethereum/pull/809

What you're saying is absolutely nothing new. There's a lot of FUD and confusion in this thread (no surprise) but this has been apparent from the very beginning. "A Proof of Stake Design Philosophy" [1] makes the essential nature of cryptoeconomics very clear. In short: (a) all currencies are social phenomena (b) all the fancy math does is replace the "men with guns" that protect physical currencies -- that is, currencies must be economically defensible and (c) what actually gives real-world currencies their value is the presence of a tax authority who creates the currency and then demands it back at some later point [2]. PoS creates an absolute demand for the currency; it is nothing more than a formalization of currency power. > So, aside from being a geeky toy and new market for gambling, where has cryptocurrency actually succeeded? A better question is -- why are there so many currencies to begin with? Why isn't there a single currency that everybody uses? Once you understand the answer to this question the value of cryptocurrencies become clear. You said it yourself: currency is inherently a contextual and social value construct. Different communities have different values. Communities that develop currency power will always triumph over communities that don't because they can collaborate more effectively. Currencies don't "succeed," communities succeed -- and they do this partly by leveraging currency power. The answer to your question is right in front of you but…

No serious blockchain relies on proof-of-work. Bitcoin (being forked now) doesn't and ethereum (already forked twice) definitely doesn't. Blockchains are a social construct and what ultimately protects them are the participants. Exactly like actual currencies they are subject to market forces; people either believe in and want the currency or they don't. It's this confidence that gives the currency strength. More simply: "On medium to long time scales, humans are quite good at consensus. Even if an adversary had access to unlimited hashing power, and came out with a 51% attack of any major blockchain that reverted even the last month of history, convincing the community that this chain is legitimate is much harder than just outrunning the main chain’s hashpower. They would need to subvert block explorers, every trusted member in the community, the New York Times, archive.org, and many other sources on the internet; all in all, convincing the world that the new attack chain is the one that came first in the information technology-dense 21st century is about as hard as convincing the world that the US moon landings never happened. These social considerations are what ultimately protect any blockchain in the long term, regardless of whether or not the blockchain’s community admits it (note that Bitcoin Core does admit this primacy of the social layer)." [1] [1] https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/a-proof-of-stake-design-philosophy-… The subtlety here is making…