Vitalik Buterin: Immutability is worthless in the face of blockchain development

Money 20/20 is considered the highest level event in the financial field. It covers topics ranging from cross-border payments to payment management solutions, and aims to "pioneering innovation in payments and financial services for mobile, retail, marketing services, data and technology."

Money 20/20 provides a wealth of innovative ideas and emerging technologies for the financial sector. The blockchain ecosystem was a hot topic at this year's conference, as more and more banks are beginning to test these technologies and believe that they have the potential to simplify existing payment systems. The conference included multiple discussions to popularize the potential of blockchain systems to the financial professionals present. One of the discussions was named "ETH: Developing Advanced Applications, Today's Challenges & Tomorrow's Opportunities", which demonstrated the potential of Ethereum (fork), a leader in blockchain, in the Internet field.

In this discussion, ETH founder Vitalik Buterin appeared as a guest, and Don Tapscott, the author of "Blockchain Revolution" and CEO of Tapscott Group, served as the moderator. Tapscott said that Buterin is a typical example of erudition, with knowledge of social sciences, economics, global affairs, etc. In the interview, Buterin talked about why he chose to enter the cryptocurrency field and how he developed ETH. He said:

I was thinking: 'The cryptocurrency space encourages permission-less innovation, so why should I need permission from others?'

Tapscott asked Buterin, what is the difference between ETH and Bitcoin? He replied:

In contrast, the programming language in the ETH protocol is more expressive. This allows every ETH node to understand the corresponding programming language, and users can also code arbitrarily, set complex rules to create contracts, send transactions, and interact with each other to understand how transactions change the state of the blockchain.

Buterin pointed out that with the scripting language based on ETH, almost all applications developed by users can conform to business logic. He also described in detail how the financial and non-financial fields can benefit from ETH. In addition, he also talked about the controversial hard fork of the DAO incident.

Before Buterin explained the hard fork decision, Tapscott first clarified one thing - it was DAO that was attacked at the time, not ETH, because the outside world has always been confused about the relationship between the two. This summer, the Ethereum Foundation made the decision to fork the protocol in order to fix network errors. This decision caused great controversy in the community, because forking the protocol is equivalent to overturning all the codes written and executed before; and "code is law" is an iron law in the blockchain field. The blockchain is immutable, but Buterin responded:

The claims that blockchain is absolutely immutable are ridiculous because the fact is that at the time, as long as you had $40 million, you could launch a 51% attack on ETH.

You have to be realistic and take the limitations of your system seriously. Second, if immutability is about putting everything 'at risk', then the feature itself is worthless.

For blockchain principles to be valuable, they must align with certain social goals. Obviously, immutability is valuable, but in order for it to align with social goals, other related structures must be built to reduce the risk of system errors and the means to repair system errors, so as to effectively prevent the system from crashing.

One thing that made me regain confidence in the community a month or two after the attack and fork happened was the emergence of a number of teams (at least 5 so far) working on automatic verification tools, bug fixes, and various high-level architectures to prevent the same mistakes from happening again in the future.

In short, the blockchain system is still in the early stages of development. For me, ETH is not ready for mainstream applications because to meet this condition, our system must be able to process at least 50,000 to 100,000 transactions per second. But ETH can only process 15 transactions per second at present.

Buterin also expressed his concerns about ETH switching to the PoS mechanism. At that time, a large amount of ether may be used for network attacks. But he believes that from a long-term perspective, the network has the responsibility to maintain stability.

ETH should be viewed as a flexible ecosystem, not a work of art.