Vitalik Chinese Community Talk: Ethereum Needs a New Narrative and New Users; EF Internally Undergoing Reform

On the evening of February 19, at the invitation of FSL Chief Revenue Officer Mable Jiang, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin participated in a special text-based flash AMA in the "Flash Interview Circle" on the Tako App. The interview had collected anonymous questions from the community in advance, aimed at addressing the community's concerns and confusion about Ethereum's future development.

This interview covered topics such as ETH's future adoption and ultimate narrative, views on L2 and Ethereum main chain relationship, and centralization sequencer solutions. Even Vitalik answered a community user's question about whether he is a communist. It is worth noting that this is also the first time in recent years that Vitalik has conducted an AMA in Chinese.

Below is a summary of the content of this AMA:

Q1: In your view, should today's Ethereum be closer to Bitcoin's existence or to a world computer's existence? In a previous X post, you mentioned that many of the negative views on ETH are actually held by short-term speculators, whose frustrations are almost of no constructive help to the ETH community. However, in the OG ETH-Maxi camp, there are also many who loudly promote the idea of "ETH is money" (such as Bankless, the largest ETH Maxi media), comparing ETH to BTC and considering it another competitive form of digital currency (possibly a better form of money). For the future adoption of ETH, what is the ultimate narrative you envision?

Vitalik: I think these two ways of thinking are compatible with each other. If you need to distinguish which blockchains are "truly decentralized," you can use a simple test: if its foundation disappears, can the chain survive? I have a feeling that only Bitcoin and Ethereum can answer this question clearly: of course they can. Most of Ethereum's development is outside the foundation; the client teams have independent business models, and now many researchers are not part of the foundation. Apart from Devcon, almost all activities are independent. It was hard to get to this stage; Ethereum didn't have this five years ago.

It is a big mistake to give up these advantages in pursuit of TPS because there will always be new chains coming out with suddenly higher TPS than yours. But decentralization and resilience are valuable, which few blockchains have.

These characteristics are conducive to creating a digital currency with long-term value, as well as to having a good world computer. But a world computer also needs to address scalability issues. The meaning of a "world computer" is not "a computer that can simultaneously support every application in the world" but "a place where world applications can interact with each other." High-performance computing can be placed on L2, and that's fine. But this role still requires L1 to have sufficient scale. For more details, you can refer to an article I recently wrote: "Vitalik's New Article: Substantially Expanding L1 Still Has Value, Making App Development Simpler and Safer"

ETH is the world's application-specific asset (including finance, as well as others like ENS, etc.) designed for use between various applications. ETH also doesn't need every transaction to be on L1, but it does need enough throughput to allow anyone who wants to use L1 to do so at least occasionally. So, these two directions are also compatible here: helping Ethereum achieve the characteristics of a better world computer and also making ETH a better digital currency.

Q2: Many L2 solutions have emerged today, mainly based on the OP stack, with some attempts at zkRollups. I would love to hear your evaluation of the rollups roadmap over the past few years in as objective a way as possible: What aspects do you think have been done well, what aspects are somewhat different from what was envisioned at the time; overall, do rollups benefit Ethereum or do they leech off it (I recently saw you calling for these L2s to give back to Ethereum)? Does ETH really need these L2 solutions?

Vitalik: So far, our scaling approach can be roughly understood as a hybrid L1 + L2, but I think no one has clearly defined which transactions should be on L1 and which should be on L2.

The answer of "put everything on L2" is somewhat hard to accept because:

* This could easily undermine ETH's position as a medium of exchange, store of value, etc. If you are concerned that L2 will take users away from L1 without giving anything back to L1, this problem will be even more severe in a scenario where "L1 does almost nothing"

* Cross-L2 operations still require L1. If an L2 has issues, users still need a way to move to another L2. So there are some use cases that are hard to avoid on L1. I wrote an article on this topic here: "New Vitalik Article: Substantial L1 Expansion Still Has Value, Making App Development Simpler and Safer"

The answer of "put everything on L1" is also somewhat hard to accept because:

* If L1 supports a lot of transactions, it can easily become centralized, even with technologies like ZK-EVM, etc.

* The world's demand for on-chain transactions is infinite, regardless of how high L1's TPS is, there will always be an application that needs 10 times more TPS (e.g., artificial intelligence, microtransactions, micro prediction markets, etc.)

* L2 does not only focus on scalability, but can also provide faster confirmation speeds through preconfirmations, and can address the issue of Miner Extractable Value (MEV) through sequencers

Therefore, we need a hybrid L1 + L2 approach. I believe the role of L2 will continue to evolve. For example, currently it seems like an EVM-equivalent L2 is already sufficient, but we may see more privacy-focused L2 solutions (such as Aztec, zkSync, etc.), and possibly more application-specific L2 solutions (beneficial for applications looking to control their MEV situation, etc.). So, in the short term, I think we should continue to enhance both L1 capabilities, provide more space for L2 through blobs, drive cross-L2 interoperability, and let the market decide which scaling solution is suitable for which application.

Q3: The rollup roadmap has been around for quite some time. Do you believe that the current centralization of sequencers in Arbitrum / Optimism / StarkEx poses a significant challenge for future regulation because it cannot be truly censorship-resistant? Do you think they will move towards a decentralized sequencer solution? If your answer to the previous question is yes, how do you view the centralized sequencer approach of MegaETH?

Vitalik: Centralized sequencers actually have many advantages:

* Centralized sequencers can ensure that user funds are not stolen through front-running or similar methods

* instant pre-confirmations

* It is very easy to transform a traditional application into a blockchain application since the server directly becomes a sequencer

We can leverage the decentralization feature of blockchains to mitigate the risks of centralized sequencers: mechanisms like forced inclusion prevent sequencers from censoring users, optimistic or zk-proof mechanisms prevent sequencers from changing or violating the application's rules (such as suddenly inflating a token or an NFT collection).

However, centralized sequencers still pose risks, so we cannot rely solely on centralized sequencers to solve the problem. The ability to transact directly on L1 or use rollups is also crucial. Therefore, I support a multi-faceted ecosystem that promotes both approaches, and then we can see which method is more suitable for which application. It is, of course, essential to maintain the ability for regular users to conduct censorship-resistant transactions.

Vitalik responded to a comment saying, "In fact, my starting point was that US regulators might go after them, although the probability of this happening is not very high": Single sequencer anti-censorship potential solution and attempt. If this were to happen, there are two possibilities:

1. The DAO will choose a sequencer and backup sequencer, and will keep moving to a new sequencer

2. We will use base layer rollups

I think the first one is worth researching, I know some L2 teams have thought in this direction. The second one is a backup, and there may be other reasons we think base layer rollups are better, so we just start using base layer rollups more. The advantage of Ethereum is that we can try several directions at the same time.

Q4: The technical roadmap of ETH 3.0, the goals to be achieved, and the difference between the rollup era's goals? In the 3.0 design proposal announced at Devcon in November last year, did it take into account that the current stage of rollup has not really provided practical value to the Ethereum mainnet?

Vitalik: There is currently nothing called ETH 3.0. Some people would say Justin Drake's 5-year plan is, but that plan is only the consensus layer, not the execution layer, so it's just part of Ethereum's blockchain's future.

The relationship and balance between L1 and L2 is an execution layer issue. There is another route here: Strengthening the capabilities of L1 (increasing gas limit, adding stateless verification (such as Verkle), and other features, etc.), improving cross-L2 interoperability, increasing blobs, etc. I also think the issue of whether L2 is paying enough transaction fees to L1 cannot be overly viewed from a short-term perspective. For example:

* Before EIP-4844, everyone's complaint was the opposite: Is L1 sucking blood from L2?

* Now, the recent 30-day blob fee is 500 ETH

* If the blob target is increased from 3 to 128, according to our plan, if the blob gas price remains the same, it will burn 21,333 ETH per month, and 256,000 per year.

So here the narrative twists quite quickly, and now we need to strengthen L1 so that what should happen on L1 can happen on L1, add blobs, and then maintain the adaptability of our community.

Q5: You have decided to step up your leadership at EF. I believe that after much consideration, this was a very difficult decision, showing a courage of leaping into the abyss. I deeply admire that. Would you mind sharing with us today your entire thought process? Meanwhile, I am curious if you acknowledge Chinese characteristics socialism? My starting point for this question is related to the "proper board" mentioned in your discussion with Ameen: before stepping onto the right development path, do you think an organization needs a strong leader to guide and correct the direction?

Vitalik: I feel that right now the blockchain community, and the world as a whole, is in a rather dangerous state. There are a lot of things happening that have no long-term value, or even malicious activities. These events and the individuals behind them are getting a lot of attention. But we should not just oppose these actions without proposing a better alternative. Therefore, our goal should be to create this alternative, to demonstrate that a stable, brighter future is possible.

Here I refer both within the blockchain community (if a memecoin that drops 97% in a day is not our future, then what is?) and in a macro social sense: right now many people think that democracy is impossible and that things can only be done by strongman leadership. But at devcon, a political scientist told me that he respects Ethereum a lot because we are truly an open and decentralized ecosystem. We have succeeded at this scale, which gives him hope. So if we can succeed in this way, the positive impact on the world could be significant, providing many people with a bright and successful example to follow.

However, "decentralization" does not mean "doing nothing." The Ethereum Foundation's philosophy of subtraction does not mean "reduce the Foundation to 0," but rather a way to maintain ecosystem balance. If there is an imbalance in an ecosystem (for example, part of the ecosystem is too centralized or there is an important public good that others are not doing), we can help counterbalance. After resolving this issue, the Foundation can retreat from that area. If a new imbalance emerges, we can move resources there, and so on.

In Chinese culture, the way we pursue may be closest to the philosophy of the Tao Te Ching, but walking this path requires intelligence and the ability to enhance the foundation in certain areas. It is not a matter of "succeeding without doing anything." Therefore, in the short term, more effort is needed to make some important pivots.

Q6: I do not belong to the core Ethereum community, so I am not very clear on some of the more detailed political issues. From your own perspective, what do you understand to be the main reasons why some ETH Maxis OGs have left the Ethereum community? When I recorded a podcast with shuyao, she mentioned a very interesting point: Ethereum needs to reset before it can rebuild (half-joking). In the current stage of Ethereum, do you believe that it is indeed facing a major reshuffle of existing holders and community members in order to find its own path?

Vitalik: There are many different people with different stories. For example, many in the blockchain community would have said 10 years ago that the goal of blockchain is to create a globally neutral system, protect individual freedoms, and counterbalance government hegemony. Now, if a president releases a memecoin, they would say, wow, this is real-world adoption, that's great, but why didn't it happen on our chain? If we could be a bit friendlier to those politicians, next time it will happen on our chain! I personally think these people have gone astray. Of course, they will say I am too idealistic, not realistic, etc. Each side has its own story.

There are also some who say that Ethereum's ecosystem is too OG-controlled, leaving little room for newcomers. But this criticism is in another direction, with different groups making these arguments.

I think there is only one right path to get us out of these dilemmas: we need some updated storytelling to explain why Ethereum is what it is, what the ETH coin is for, what L1 and L2 are for, and so on? It is no longer the era of infra, it is the era of applications, so these stories cannot be abstract "freedom, openness, anti-censorship, solarpunk public goods, etc.," we need some clear application layer answers. I plan to support more in the near future: info finance (which also serves as the AI + crypto direction), privacy preservation, high-quality public goods financing methods, as well as continue to do well in the part of building a truly open global financial platform, which must also include real-world assets. There are many things here that are valuable to many users at the same time and align with the values we have always had, we need to re-support this direction to give new people more opportunities to join in.

Q7: Do you think Ethereum needs a more corporate-like management? Do you think the current difference between ETH and SOL is essentially an efficiency difference between different "organizational forms," as well as a difference in goals? What are the goals to achieve?

Vitalik: I think Ethereum is a decentralized ecosystem, not a company. If Ethereum were to become a company, we would lose much of the essence of Ethereum's existence. Running a company is the role of a company. In fact, the Ethereum ecosystem has many large companies: ConsenSys, various client teams (Nethermind, Nimbus, etc.), Coinbase, L2 teams (including, for example, Aztec and Matter Labs; their privacy technologies are very interesting and underestimated by many). The best approach is to find ways to give these companies more opportunities to realize the benefits of being a company, with the foundation playing a coordinating role.

Q8: You have always been focused on the application of ZK technology in the web3 field. In addition to ZK applications in asset trading scenarios, in social media networks, what scenarios do you think can introduce ZK to achieve privacy protection?

Vitalik: I am very interested in many non-financial ZK use cases, such as:

* Anti-sybil verification. Many services require you to log in with KYC not because they want to know who you are, but because they just want to know you are not a bot, or if you are banned, you cannot come back with 100,000 new accounts. To achieve this use case, only a ZK proof of personhood, or proof of reputation, is needed. Sometimes, proof of tokens is also sufficient, as in AnonWorld.

* Using cryptography to protect privacy in AI applications. Here, ZK may not be the most suitable technology; Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) might be. FHE has progressed a lot recently, and if we can further reduce the overhead of FHE, there may be an opportunity.

* Wrapping any Web2 account with ZK-SNARK to use it in Web3. ZKEmail, Anon Aadhaar, ZKPassport, ZKTLS, etc., are good examples.

I think this technology has many opportunities to address security, governance, and other issues in social and other areas through protecting individual freedoms and privacy.

Q9: Do you encourage more developers to join Ethereum, incentivize and retain existing developers (compared to some new L1 or even L2 developers with more generous incentives, Ethereum certainly has a more complex situation), is this currently a priority? Accelerating decentralization, improving scalability, exploring more application scenarios. In these three aspects, which one do you think is the highest priority for Ethereum at the moment?

Vitalik: Actually, here we need to find a way to solve three problems simultaneously:

1. Attract more developers

2. Encourage developers to develop applications that are more open-source, secure, compliant with public standards, have long-term value, etc.

3. In the process of addressing (2), avoid the ecosystem becoming a closed circle ("we are aligned because we are good friends of developers")

So I recently said that Ethereum alignment should be a technical game, not a social game. I want to emphasize this issue because I think that now in terms of decentralization, the most pressing centralization issue is often not an L1 problem, but an L2 or wallet or application problem. So the entire ecosystem needs to work together to both expand and attract new developers and progress in these decentralized and trustless aspects.

There are several ways we can help achieve this:

1. Education, making it easier for developers to understand what blockchain is for, what should be on-chain, what should not be on-chain, what to care about in the blockchain field, etc.

2. If some blockchain-specific technology is too difficult for application developers, the foundation can do it themselves to make it easier for developers to integrate. For example, zk programming language, as well as a16z's Helios, etc.

3. Provide clear standards for developers. For example, if you are developing an Ethereum client, there are many tests available that you can run to see if your client can pass. If you are working on L2, there are frameworks like l2beat's stage 1, stage 2, and so on. This should also apply to zk applications, wallets, etc.

Q10: In today's AI-accelerated technological evolution, you have previously mentioned the concept of d/acc (decelerationism / or defense against accelerationism). Now, regarding the effective acceleration of the decentralization/technological rights process, does it meet your expectations? Do you have any concerns in this regard? Personally, I feel a bit powerless, as I know that "The Beijing Folding" may be a future scenario. From a humanistic perspective, I do not want it to happen, but I feel it is getting closer and closer to us.

Vitalik: Here, it is necessary to make an important statement: d/acc is not about deceleration but about decentralized defensive acceleration. This is important because there are indeed people in this world who support deceleration and degrowth, but I believe this direction is wrong. In a peaceful world, it would delay essential advancements in healthcare and infrastructure and cause more harm. In today's more dangerous world, if we do not accelerate, we will be overtaken by those willing to accelerate.

Decentralization and defensive acceleration must compete with other technologies. If the sword advances rapidly but the shield does not, the world will become increasingly dangerous. If centralized technology advances quickly but decentralized technology does not, the world will become more centralized. Therefore, we need to counterbalance these trends. Blockchain is part of this story, but only a part. There is decentralization beyond blockchain (such as p2p networks), software and hardware security (the "shield" of the digital world), many things in the biotech field, and more.

Q11: Does the Ethereum Foundation's staff, including the leadership team, have KPI/OKR-like performance evaluation mechanisms? Non-profit organizations generally face efficiency issues. Do you think EF has such problems? If so, how would you address them?

Vitalik: The Ethereum Foundation has recently started many internal reforms, so any answer I can provide now will soon be outdated. This question might be better to ask in 6 months.

Q12: How do you understand Crypto as a counter-cultural infrastructure and its role in achieving de-growth communism? Do you think current Memecoins (I am referring more to those rapidly launched on Solana) play a "beneficial chaos" role in achieving de-growth communism? (This term originates from your blog) Couldn't find the anonymity feature, so I just sent it, and at the same time, I highly recommend you play "Disco Elysium"; I believe you will enjoy it.

Vitalik: Chaos is not necessarily beneficial or harmful; it depends on the situation. An interesting question is how to establish "the rules of the game" that cause naturally occurring chaos within a community to have positive effects. For example, civil wars have negative effects unless they aim to overthrow a malevolent regime. However, market chaos often has positive effects, eliminating old, inefficient companies and giving opportunities to new ones. But sometimes the market can also lead to the issues we see in the blockchain community. So, this is actually very complex.

So how can better rules be made? I feel that memecoins are now far from ideal. I wrote this article last year to see if there is a better direction to take"Vitalik on memes: What other possibilities are there for memecoins?"

Q13: You should be aware of Simon de la Rouviere's "This Art is Always on Sale" Harberger Tax experiment (sponsoring as an asset class - patronage as an asset class). Do you think such experiments can lead to new developments in decentralized social networks in the future? Are there any mechanisms you are looking forward to seeing being used for experimentation in decentralized social networks?

Vitalik: Yes, I think decentralized social media is a great opportunity to try out many new mechanisms. Harberger tax is one example, and some other examples are:

* Mechanisms similar to community notes https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/08/16/communitynotes.html

* Creator payouts, similar to Twitter and YouTube but fairer and more transparent. One can try retro funding, deep funding, quadratic funding, etc.

* Integrating social media and DAO governance

Q14: (Tako question) What is your view on the fact that we, as a group of people from the crypto world, still heavily rely on centralized social applications like Telegram and Twitter for communication and collaboration? Building decentralized social media and true encrypted communication tools does not seem to have received as much attention and recognition. So far, does their development meet your expectations? What advice do you have for teams exploring building in this field?

Vitalik: This is also a concern of mine. Personally, in the last 2 years, I have been working on moving most of my conversations from Telegram to Signal. However, Signal is not perfect either. Although it is secure, it is still centralized, lacks interoperability, requires a phone number to log in, exposes many of your metadata to the server, and so on.

However, creating a higher-quality messenger is challenging. Every year I try Status; they strive for full decentralization, which they do well, but they still have some reliability issues. Currently, there are various small teams working on their own messengers, but they are not united, making it easy for each one to fall short.

I recently started using Fileverse for all my documents, and I found that its user experience is already good enough, with many people in the foundation now using it. If a decentralized, encrypted messenger with similar quality could be achieved, I would definitely work hard to help the community transition to that messenger.

Q15: I have heard people in the Milady community mention possible reasons why you chose Milady, but I am still curious how you, personally, would explain your sense of belonging to Milady?

Vitalik: I think Milady can attract many people because this online community manages to do two things at once:

1. It is not boring.

2. It is not malicious.

If you look at the mainstream world's circles today, you will find that achieving both of these conditions simultaneously is quite challenging, and Milady is one of the most successful examples.

Q16: Are you a communist?

Vitalik: No, I am not. I am also not a capitalist. Both are ideologies of the 20th century. (These terms have been stretched and misused to the point of meaninglessness: remember, in the 1990s, Microsoft referred to Linux as "communism": https://www.theregister.com/2000/07/31/ms_ballmer_linux_is_communism/)

I support freedom, global equal opportunity, kindness and cooperation, human welfare and progress. These are eternal principles. The question is how to use our existing tools to realize these values against the backdrop of the 21st century. I have elaborated on various mechanisms I personally support, but I absolutely do not consider myself the sole source of good ideas. I believe that finding the best way forward is a collective project that requires both thought and increasingly realistic world experiments.

Q17: (Community Question) Can you systematically elaborate on how to accelerate Ethereum's development from all aspects? Ethereum has been around for ten years, with updates once a year, and the development progress feels slow, requiring significant acceleration. Ethereum/ACC

Vitalik: Ethereum's current core development focus is on increasing the number of blobs. The primary goal right now is to increase the number of blobs, and here are the details:

* pectra, increase blob target from 3 to 6

* fusaka, add peerdas, then further increase blob target

* Continue optimizing peerdas in 2026 and 2027

* Add 2D data availability sampling, then further increase blob target

There is also a roadmap to increase the L1 gas limit, but this is more complex, involving concepts such as delayed execution, statelessness, and more.

Q18: (Community Question) Today's Vitalik has grown golden claws and silver scales, transforming from a Dragon Slayer youth into a dragon. During the Ethereum mining era, it was a democratic consensus, but now, in V's governance system, it seems to be a dictatorial management style. After transitioning to PoS, it has become a system of a people's representative assembly. Should we suspect that you've secretly joined a political party?

Vitalik: PoS in Ethereum is not a governance model. PoW can only be democratic in the short term. Due to economies of scale, larger miners become more efficient over time, leading to increasing centralization. I believe that we likely didn't see ASICs before PoS because people knew we planned to move to PoS, so no one invested in ASICs. If we had declared from day one that we were always going to be PoW, ASICs would likely have emerged between 2016-19 unless we had regularly forked and changed the algorithm, but that would also lead to centralization.

Therefore, I think our approach of spending 7 years distributing through PoW and then transitioning to PoS is the best. PoS has its own fairness: if you have ten times more wealth, you can produce ten times more blocks. In ASIC PoW, due to economies of scale, ten times more wealth might only produce eleven times more blocks.

Another point is: PoS in Ethereum is not a governance model. Ether holders do not have the right to choose which EIPs go into the next fork, etc. If we used PoS to make these decisions, it would indeed be too plutocratic.

Q19: (Community Question) It is said that one of the reasons for launching the Beacon Chain was for Casper Sharding. In my personal view, the decision to create the Beacon Chain is one of the most critical moments in Ethereum's history. However, events like the DAO fork or Shanghai attacks seem to have received more attention. (It could also be that I missed relevant discussions; if so, please provide links.) I would like to ask Vitalik: 1. When was the decision for the Beacon Chain made? Was it in 2018? 2. What were the circumstances at that time? Was it a unanimous decision, or were there controversies? 3. Was there serious consideration at that time to upgrade eth1 to PoS instead of creating a new Beacon Chain?

Vitalik: My sense is that after the DAO fork, there were few people in the Ethereum community who were against moving to PoS; everyone felt that this was a decided matter. Initially, there were more people who were against PoS, but opposition to PoS was highly correlated with opposition to the DAO fork, so after the fork, most of them moved to ETC. After 2016, at least among the core developers, I have not heard any core developer suggest that we should cancel the chain and make it permanently PoW.

The decision to make the Beacon chain was because we thought that before moving Ethereum to this new consensus algorithm, we should give it a chance to run for a while to ensure there were no obvious flaws or issues. So, we decided to make the PoS chain an independent chain, let it run on its own, and then merge it with the existing Ethereum chain to reduce risk. This decision was made around the summer of 2018. We had previously considered other roadmaps, such as PoW -> hybrid PoS -> PoS, but ultimately, we decided that opening an independent Beacon chain was simpler and safer.

Q20: (Community Question) How do you think Ethereum's success should ultimately be measured—by technological breakthrough, breadth of user adoption, or its impact on social equality and power distribution?

Vitalik: The breadth of user adoption is currently the most important. Technological breakthroughs have already occurred: zero-knowledge proofs, consensus algorithms, virtual machines, and so on. User adoption is present, but the most attention is paid to those meme coins that fall 97% in a day (I'm not against all meme coins here, I was an early buyer of DOGE anyway, but now this is a completely different type). I think the applications we need should pass three tests:

1. Can you imagine yourself or someone you know actually wanting to use it? That is, the difference between theoretically interesting (decentralized uber! Great!) and actually usable

2. Can it make money? If it can't make money, it is difficult to bring the application to the highest standard of quality

3. If you are neither a user nor an investor, would you be happy to know that this thing exists? That is, does it have real value to the world

Passing all three at the same time is difficult, perhaps only payment and value storage applications, maybe prediction markets, have passed now. We need another 10 successful examples.

Q21: (Community Question) When I first entered the circle, I read a book you wrote, "The Ideal: The Blockchain Genesis of Ethereum." Its preface was written by your father, David, and you were just 25 at the time. Through the lines of the book, one could feel that you and your father get along very well. It has been fourteen years since you started with Bitcoin, and the intense fluctuations in the cryptocurrency industry and work pressure—how have they affected your relationship with your family?

Vitalik: My dad and my mom bought ETH from the very beginning, and they have always been following and supporting me. Even before the birth of Ethereum, they bought me a lot of materials to learn to code. My dad's second wife has also supported me a lot. I have always admired them.

Q22: (Community Question) I have seen the term "Bronze Age mindset" many times, as a Chinese reader of Vitalik, I don't quite get the connotation of this term. Curious how Vitalik would explain "Bronze Age mindset" to Chinese readers.

Vitalik: "Bronze Age mindset" is a book written around 2018. The general topic is: against the concept of equality among people, against rational thought, seeing kindness as weak, and promoting an extreme male perception. Everyone can take a look at the book: https://kyl.neocities.org/books/ (or copy the content into a bot to summarize). I think this book represents a set of values that have been quite dominant in the Western world recently, but I am very much against this kind of value system because, in my eyes, the worst things humans have done were done by people who hold this value system. So when I see many people in the American Bitcoin community, the tech industry, and so on, beginning to espouse this idea, I am quite concerned.

Q23: (Community Question) You have warned about the complexity of "crypto politics" (such as The DAO incident, miner voting disputes), and today the Ethereum Foundation, core developers, L2 teams, and whale holders have formed an implicit power structure. Do you think "protocol-level minimal governance" is sufficient to address the interest game in future hard forks? When governance needs at the social layer (such as ENS, Gitcoin) conflict with the protocol layer, are there "constitutional-level" coordinating principles?

Vitalik: Whether "protocol-level minimal governance" is sufficient to address the interest game in future hard forks—here I don't think there will be a serious problem. This is because almost all L1 protocol decisions are rather complex technical decisions and rarely have a characteristic of "good for application A, bad for application B." Sometimes there is a bit of that, such as if there's an EIP adding a new EVM feature, some projects will use it, some won't, but these issues are not major, and we have already resolved them many times.

Q24: EIP-1559 Do you think the ideal balanced design has been achieved so far? What is your personal opinion on proposals/ideas within the Ethereum community regarding network inflation adjustment and the goals they hope to achieve?

Vitalik: I think EIP-1559 has been widely misunderstood. The main goal is not to burn Ether but to increase market efficiency. Prior to EIP-1559, when you sent a transaction, sometimes you had to wait 1-15 minutes for the transaction to be confirmed. Now, transactions are almost always confirmed within 1-2 blocks.

This mechanism has been quite successful, so now we are thinking about some optimizations, such as multidimensional gas (https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-7706), and this mechanism https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1889013890291318838

Q25: (Community Question) In the Web3 ecosystem, some projects implement large incentive programs, such as the 'Odyssey' task, to attract a large number of users. Recently, projects like Bera Chain and Story Protocol have conducted lengthy testnet activities, seemingly involving hundreds of thousands or even millions of users. However, after the token launch, the actual active user base has significantly decreased, usually to less than a thousand people. This difference is concerning: how many users are truly engaged versus simply joining for incentives? Additionally, this may lead project teams to draw misleading conclusions based on statistics. Given your emphasis on decentralization and genuine community building, how do you view such practices? Do you believe that purely pursuing a large user base—regardless of their true activity—aligns with the essence of Web3? Or should projects focus more on nurturing a relatively small but highly active user base to ensure sustainable growth and real adoption?

Vitalik: I think these plans are suitable for experimentation, sometimes resulting in failure and sometimes in success. For Ethereum, firstly, our resources are not sufficient to support Ethereum's scale to implement such plans. Secondly, we are not only concerned about users, but also developers. Thirdly, the type of developers we attract is a crucial question. So, I believe in attracting developers through a community approach and providing some specific field sponsorship when needed. However, it is best not to rely too heavily on this.

Q26: (Community Question) Web3 was supposed to be an equal space for everyone, yet Warpcast introduced a ranking and automatic comment/private message folding mechanism, creating a clear hierarchy. It has effectively turned into an exclusive social circle for a few influencers, and ordinary users like myself, no matter how valuable their contributions, cannot get the attention they deserve. How do you view this growing centralization of attention in Web3 social platforms? Shouldn't we strive for a system driven by ideas rather than social status?

Vitalik: Designing a social media algorithm that is both fair and resistant to spam attacks is a challenging problem. The advantage of Farcaster is that there is a network with different clients all on one network. So if one client does a bad job, anyone can create their own client and chat with the entire Farcaster network from day one. So I'm glad to see Tako, Firefly, and other clients in the Farcaster ecosystem, and it would be even better if they can solve some of the problems that Warpcast has not addressed.

Q27: Have you experienced moments of frustration and disappointment in the past year with the EF, the community, or the industry? Looking back on this year, what are some things that have disappointed or even discouraged you? Have you ever thought about taking a break?

Vitalik: Of course. Probably the most recent time I felt disappointed was when someone said Ethereum is not good, not tolerant because we don't respect the "casino" on the blockchain, while other chains are willing to accept any application, so they are better. If the blockchain community has this kind of moral inversion, I have no interest in being part of it. But I found an interesting point: on the Internet, many people may say those things, but when I personally chat with the community, everyone's values are still the same as before. So I feel I have a responsibility to this community, can't abandon them, and Ethereum needs to work together to create the world we want to see. This will require some changes, such as the foundation may not be too neutral at the application layer, needing to deliberately support certain things, but this project is worth doing.

Q28: (Community Question) In the current ecosystem's "let a hundred flowers blossom" state, do you think Ethereum needs to enhance interoperability (not just asset bridging) to connect various ecosystems actively through standardized cross-chain protocols (such as ERC-7281)?

Vitalik: I think our first priority should be to improve interoperability between Ethereum L2s because there are not many validators, and everyone has a lot of shared interests, so the process will be much simpler. Then we can expand to do more interoperability between cryptos, even involving interoperability between crypto and fiat.

欢迎加入律动 BlockBeats 官方社群：

Telegram 订阅群：https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram 交流群：https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Twitter 官方账号：https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia