Published 6 consecutive blog posts reviewing the Ethereum roadmap. Why does Vitalik insist on philosophical thinking in technology?

Author: imToken

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

Tyler Cowen praised, "Vitalik Buterin has built a platform and created an asset; his achievements can be said to refute Mises' regression theorem. Although Ethereum was developed on the foundation of Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin, Vitalik Buterin's accomplishments undoubtedly reach the level of a Nobel Prize."

Why does Vitalik have some philosophical thoughts?

At the age of 19, Vitalik Buterin began working towards building a new economic infrastructure for the internet. According to author Nathan Schneider in the book Proof of Stake, Vitalik Buterin's initial ideal was writing. After becoming curious about BTC with his father's encouragement, Vitalik Buterin posted on a forum in 2011 asking: If he wrote an article about Bitcoin, would anyone pay him in BTC for it?

As it turned out, someone did pay him. Thus, Vitalik Buterin was able to continue writing and later co-founded Bitcoin Magazine, which detailed Bitcoin, an emerging phenomenon at the time that belonged to a niche culture.

From writing a magazine to founding Ethereum, and now, ten years later, Vitalik Buterin has continued to write tirelessly, sharing his views on blogs, forums, and various social platforms while actively engaging with others. Thanks to such exchanges, Ethereum has attracted a loyal following over the past decade, and its roadmap is gradually becoming clearer.

In the future, if Ethereum's roadmap is to be fully realized, founder Vitalik Buterin's views still need to gain broader understanding. Of course, these views may spark controversy, but controversy and skepticism are also sources of motivation driving Ethereum towards a better future.

In the second half of 2024, as the U.S. elections unfold, discussions in the crypto industry about asset appreciation continue to heat up, igniting many users' "wealth creation dreams." It seems that technological iteration is no longer the most focused goal. On August 21, 2024, Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform, jokingly responding: I was told to "think less philosophically and post more bullish Ethereum posts." Therefore, the following image is a bullish Ethereum post, created using the AI image generation tool Stable Diffusion 3 and GIMP.

This is the difference in the Ethereum ecosystem

In an atmosphere where "everyone is talking about getting rich, and you are still talking about technology," Vitalik Buterin remains steadfast in promoting Ethereum's technical philosophical goals. Starting from October 14, 2024, Vitalik Buterin published six blog posts that deeply analyze the future technological development and solutions of Ethereum based on a review of its roadmap:

The Merge: Released on October 14, 2024, it discusses the directions for improvement that Ethereum needs to take after transitioning to a PoS consensus mechanism. The improvement directions are divided into two parts: technical optimization (such as stability, performance, and accessibility for small validators) and economic reform (addressing centralization risks, which is included here). The former belongs to the discussion of "The Merge," while the latter is included in the discussion of "The Scourge."

The goals of technical optimization include: improving single-slot finality, i.e., confirming and finalizing transactions as quickly as possible while maintaining decentralization; enhancing the feasibility of individual stakers; and strengthening Ethereum's resistance to 51% attacks. Additionally, it includes research areas such as accelerating transaction confirmation.

Refer to the article The Merge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/14/futures1.html

The Surge: Released on October 17, 2024, it explores the development history of Ethereum's scaling strategies, from "sharding" to "Layer 2 protocols," and then to the integration of the two paths, ultimately forming a scaling solution centered around Rollup, achieving significant improvements in data bandwidth, but still facing many challenges, such as ensuring the robustness of Layer 1 and maintaining decentralization while ensuring maximum interoperability between Layer 2s.

Refer to the article The Surge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/17/futures2.html

The Scourge: Released on October 20, 2024, it discusses the centralization risks and value extraction risks faced by Ethereum Layer 1 after adopting the PoS consensus mechanism, emphasizing that the risks are specifically concentrated in two areas: block construction and staked assets. It also introduces progress made since 2024 in addressing these two risks, such as implementing a dual-layer staking model and reducing asset issuance.

Refer to the article The Scourge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/20/futures3.html

The Verge: Released on October 23, 2024, it discusses the challenges and solutions under Ethereum's stateless validation, focusing on how technologies like Verkle Tree and STARK enhance the decentralization and efficiency of the blockchain.

Refer to the article The Verge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/23/futures4.html

The Purge: Released on October 26, 2024, the article discusses how Ethereum faces the challenge of reducing complexity and storage requirements in the long term while maintaining the chain's persistence. Decentralized applications need to ensure that their dependencies do not cause functionality interruptions due to upgrades, especially the Layer 1 protocol itself. Proposed solutions include cleaning up unnecessary protocol features and reducing client storage burdens through "historical data expiration" and "state data expiration" strategies.

Refer to the article The Purge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/26/futures5.html

The Splurge: Released on October 29, 2024, the article explores the concept of "Splurge" in the 2023 Ethereum development roadmap, aiming to bring the Ethereum virtual machine into an efficient and stable "final state," achieving account abstraction in the protocol so that all users can enjoy safer and more convenient accounts, optimizing transaction fee economics, improving scalability and reducing risks, and exploring advanced cryptography to enhance Ethereum's long-term performance. Specific implementation steps include the EIP-1559 technical proposal.

Refer to the article The Splurge: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/29/futures6.html

Perhaps, while others are talking about getting rich, Ethereum is still discussing technology; this is the biggest difference between Ethereum and other blockchain ecosystems.

A large developer community and its appeal to developers form the foundation of Ethereum's establishment and future development. Compared to the ecosystems of other chains, Ethereum has more toolchains and frameworks (such as Truffle, etc.) that can support a wider variety of smart contracts and DApps development.

At the same time, Ethereum's tools and frameworks balance performance and depth, not merely created to develop a single high-performance "transaction tool." After years of development, the technical standards proposed by Ethereum have become widespread, such as ERC-20, ERC-721, and other asset standards that have been deeply applied throughout the crypto industry.

How to more accurately forecast the future?

So, what can we foresee about the future through technology? Vitalik Buterin once expressed in a blog post that he has a favorable view of technological optimism, but this feeling is somewhat nuanced. He believes that fundamentally transformative technologies will have a brighter future than they do now.

Vitalik Buterin advocates that the best thing people can do is to keep the world roughly as it is today, just needing to reduce some greed.

At the same time, Vitalik Buterin believes that technology should not only be viewed in terms of magnitude; direction is also very important. If certain types of technology develop well, they can reliably improve the world, which can mitigate the negative impacts brought by other types of technology.

Because in today's real world, certain technological development directions are overly emphasized, while others are not given enough attention. This requires humanity to consciously choose the direction we want, after all, the formula of "profit maximization" will not automatically lead people to their desired destination.

How can we more accurately see the future direction? In a blog post published on November 9, 2024, Vitalik Buterin revisited and expanded on a very innovative point. He mentioned that the feature in Ethereum applications that excites him the most is "prediction markets."

Vitalik Buterin believes that "prediction markets" are actually very useful tools for the world, not just a place for people to "bet." Moreover, from a higher dimension, "prediction markets" are just one use case within a broader category of future applications, which has the potential to become an important method for improving social media, science, news, governance, and more—this application category is called "Info Finance."