Ethereum founder Vitalik: The vision of blockchain expansion is no joke

“Okay, ethereum is done, let’s go back to ethereum classic.”

The joke came from Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin during his keynote at the Devcon2 developer conference in Shanghai. Despite the complex technical changes facing the Ethereum project in the future (and its recent controversial hard fork), Buterin conveyed a confidence and personality on stage that made him stand out among the day’s speakers.

The theme of his speech was titled “The Mauve Revolution.” It is not surprising that blockchain network problems frequently occur. As more and more banks and companies seek to use blockchain systems, the inefficiency of this nascent technology is exposed to the world, and it urgently needs to solve scalability issues.

Buterin featured a slide titled “What’s so appealing about Ethereum?” where he compared it to the web “on a smartphone in 1999.”

First, Buterin expressed a series of problems he sees in blockchain-based decentralized application platforms today, including transaction throughput issues.

However, he told the audience:

“We have solutions for most of these problems.”

For the rest of his speech, Buterin discussed how Ethereum could address scalability issues in the coming months and years. While he didn’t discuss any specific timelines or execution plans, the speech seemed to resonate with the audience.

“Buterin has a very special ability to come up with theoretical solutions to very pressing situations today. He can be very critical of himself,” Kesem Frank, COO of Toronto-based blockchain company Nuco, told CoinDesk.

Next, Buterin talked about Ethereum’s sharding plan, a concept that would lead to the creation of multiple blockchains, and also delayed the release of the third version of the “Mauve paper” that was announced before the meeting.

‘Virtual mining’

The major change that the Ethereum network is about to face is that its consensus algorithm will be converted from Proof of Work ( PoW ) to an alternative Proof of Stake ( PoS ) consensus algorithm called Casper.

Buterin explained that this consensus algorithm will seek to virtually replicate the Bitcoin mining process without wasting electricity .

Essentially, consumers need to purchase Ethereum in exchange for virtual mining machines, which then virtually replicate the Bitcoin mining verification process.

“The virtual miners keep track of the state of the protocol,” Buterin explained.

However, Buterin went further than that and offered some fixes for what he called a “supposed fundamental flaw.”

First, he noted, if those who purchase virtual mining machines need to wait to join a validation pool, it could make the system more difficult to participate.

Buterin also envisions limits on withdrawals and transactions to ensure that validating participants don’t harm the computational network.

“If you’re mining, you can call this function called ‘start withdrawal.’ And then after a period of time, like a few months, you can do a withdrawal and get your ether out,” he said.

Solving the problem of virtual mining

The most critical issue is the possibility of virtual mining operations being malicious.

The key to solving this problem, he expects, is that the PoS algorithm will incentivize participants to continue to support the “winning” version of transaction history. One feature of his proposed solution is the inclusion of so-called “dark uncles” or “dunkles” in the protocol.

“Making a block on another chain means you get penalized, and that hurts you,” he explained.

He foresees severe penalties for dunkles, which are blocks that have not been added to the valid blockchain, or orphaned blocks in Bitcoin, which could be 10 times greater than the reward.

Buterin believes that under this PoS protocol, validators will bet on the blockchain they believe will win.

“The bets will start out conservative, but over time validators will see that the bets are 10:1 on a particular block, then 20:1, then 40:1, and the loss of value to the blockchain by losing that particular block becomes exponentially larger,” he said.

While the speech was highly theoretical, Buterin’s goal was actually quite simple.

He concluded:

“The dream is to be able to scale on-chain while also being able to run Ethereum on a regular laptop without needing anything else.”