V God's first interview after PoS: centralization is "overhyped"

22-09-26 10:50

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Original title: "Post-merge and beyond—the next era of Ethereum begins"

Original source: BanklessHQ

Original compilation: Mary Liu , Derrick Chen, BitpushNews

After the merger of Ethereum is completed, Vitalik Buterin (hereinafter referred to as V God) accepted an exclusive interview with Bankless and shared his views on mergers, Ethereum routes, pledges, etc., and the editorial department of Bitui sorted out the key points in the interview for you.

Moderator: After comprehensive consideration of various parties, we feel that the final PoS design is a simplified version of the design, which cannot satisfy everyone's ambitions. So do you think if you wait a little longer, will you find a new design, or is the current design the final, logically optimal design?

V God: I feel that you have raised two questions. The first question is, is there a better form of PoS chain in the long run? The second question is whether there is a better way to transition if our research team spends more time on research.

For the first question, we are still far from the state of the best PoS chain, and there are still many improvements that can be made. The second question, is this the best form of Merge? I think it is. If I had the chance to go back to 2014, I would probably use a simpler design and move to PoS in 2018. We have now completed some of the goals we set at the beginning, but there are also some security issues that we are working on. So if there were any changes I would say, I would probably say a simpler PoS and merge earlier. Of course, I also hope that other PoW chains will migrate to the PoS mechanism in the next four years.

Moderator: The merger is coming too late for everyone. There must have been some attacks and disagreements in the community, and of course some benefits; the PoW mechanism has benefited a lot from miners and many other entities. So, is there anything particularly important that you would like to do over and change?

V God: It would be best if we can avoid those attacks and disagreements. I think the Layer 2 roadmap can be more optimized, and we can spend more resources on Optimism and Arbitrum.

I think a lot of what we do is "find a hundred wrong ways to make light bulbs". We spent a lot of resources exploring different paths and trial and error. Regarding the matter of capacity expansion, it took us a long time from realizing the matter of capacity expansion to developing a plan, such as Plasma and Rollup, and we also found that there are many people whose purpose is not so complicated, and capacity expansion may not be so necessary for them .

Bankless Moderator: Where are we now on the Ethereum roadmap?
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V God: If we look at the merge roadmap, The Merge has been completed, and the unfinished part of the merge includes the post-merge hard Fork, which is obviously one of the next big priorities after the merge, it's a very simple hard fork, and I think the main debate at this point is to do it at the same time as EIP-4844, or do the fork first, and then Do 4844. Distributed validators (distributed validators) are still under development, although not 100% complete, I guess they have made considerable progress (like the validator project DVT aka SSV).

If you take a longer view, we've done some great work on Single Secret Leader Election (SSLE), and the underlying cryptographic principles have taken shape .

Next is Single-slot finality, which is a much bigger project that I think started really early in the roadmap project, because people recognize more value and importance of it, and I think it's one of those things that we're going to have to have a massive open discussion with the community at some point, because there's a huge benefit to single-slot finalization, but at the same time There are also some costs like what finality can be expected with a deposit size of 32 ETH, we would like to be able to reduce the finality time to a single slot also at 32 ETH or similar.

Then The Surge, things have obviously been reshuffled, the new sharding design EIP-4844 has more advantages, and is basically waiting to be deployed. Next up is The Verge -Verkle Tree (further decentralizing the network, allowing individuals to run nodes), I think a lot of progress has been made in implementing Verkle Trees, the main sticking point right now is the transition from our existing tree structure to Verkle Trees would be a huge development challenge, and there is still debate about how to do it. I think in general, it has been deprioritized over achieving scalability, because scalability is very important to Ethereum.

Regarding The Purge, History Expiry EIP-444 has made a lot of progress, Ban-self-destruct I think we can open deployment anytime, State expiry is lowered A lot of priority, because of the proposer Builder separation, basically if you have PBS and you have Stainless, the number of participants that actually have to hold the entire state is very small, normal validators don't have to hold (state), because normal validators Those who only need to verify other blocks instead of creating their own blocks, the lower priority of State expiry does give us a lot of freedom to figure out other things first, like making the Ethereum protocol more concise, getting rid of rlp, Clean up the block structure, but it may take another year or so to pave the way for this.

Moderator: Is the economics of staking planned to change at some point, and what would it look like if it did?

V God: I can see one of the possibilities is that there are some ways to make deposits and withdrawals easier, at least under normal circumstances Faster, for example, if the chain is finalized, allowing large deposits and withdrawals to occur, will make the experience easier for validators, will also reduce the incentive to participate in stake pools, and make it easier to have smaller and more decentralized stake pools , so this is the first one.

The second is that changes to the Miner Extractable Value (MEV) architecture will obviously affect the economics of staking, we will add Mev The smoothing mechanism basically forces the Mev revenue to be redistributed to all ATF validators instead of being concentrated in one, then this will reduce the variance of staking revenue and also reduce the incentive to be part of the staking pool. So I think the economics of staking will change a lot because of some of the changes that can happen to staking, like I think the long-term dream for ethereum is basically that all a staker has to do is download and verify a bunch of data, and then sign. If that's the case, then things like staking on mobile phones will be very feasible, but I think it's going to take five to ten years to get there.

Moderator: After the transfer of Ethereum to PoS, is there any concern about centralization of pledges?

V God: I do think this issue is overhyped, let's look at Bitcoin, three mining pools control More than half of the Bitcoin network, five mining pools control 80%, no lower than the Ethereum Proof of Stake is doing now, many people in the Ethereum research team are critical of some aspects of LIDO, I know because It's important to like Ethereum and defend it, but Lido is definitely not a single centralized actor, not the owner/admin/developer you imagine with the ability to pull the plug and become some kind of attack actor, it's a Protocol, like some quite a few sub-validators, each of us sub-validators has only a few percent of the stake.

Obviously adding up Lido and Coinbase and Kraken and some of the other players does add up and it's a concern and I think short term is good The message is that these players are people who love ethereum, and they really want ethereum to prosper, so I think the risk of them doing something terrible in the short term is low. So I mean obviously we should make the ecosystem welcoming to every centralized asset collateral provider obviously good intentions of people is not something we can rely on long term because we are going to be a decentralized ecosystem I think In the long run, there are some good solutions that are right.