Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin: The emergence of ETC was anticipated long ago, and he supports the development of "letting a hundred flowers bloom"

About 3 months ago, I said in an interview: I support any other chain that breaks away from the main chain. If Ethereum really splits in the future, I will be happy even if Ethereum A and Ethereum B develop in completely different directions.

Of course I have principles, and I have always adhered to them. If I had criticized Bitcoin’s “authoritarianism” in 2014 while clamoring for “single-chain rule”, I would have been truly hypocritical. In my 2014 blog post, I mentioned:

Assuming that there can only be one consensus mechanism, why don't we develop as many projects as possible under this consensus mechanism? In this way, we can use decentralized computers to promote the development of the crypto economy in the same system. In a way, this development model is quite noble. After all, no one likes division, and unity is always good. Real life has also proved the advantages of unity, but this article will explain in detail why extreme cooperation or winner-takes-all is wrong. Division is not only a good thing, but also inevitable. Division is even the only way for the cryptocurrency field to thrive.

I admit that I am dissatisfied with the existence of the ETC social contract and community, and my feelings towards ETC are completely different from my feelings towards ETH. But this is just my personal opinion. If someone is really so opposed to forking, I support you joining the ETC chain. Whether it will succeed remains to be seen.

This is just my personal opinion. So how do we know that the saying "let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend" is justified? We can see some clues from certain real situations. First of all, we can see that in the past two and a half days, the price of ETH+ETC has stabilized at around 14.3美元. Although it is not appropriate to make a conclusion about the development of the two now, after all, this can also show to some extent that monopoly is not a good thing.

In addition, from many aspects (data from exchanges and Barry Silbert, founder of Digital Currency Group, Twitter, etc.), it can be seen that most people who are interested in ETC are from the Bitcoin community rather than the Ethereum community. This is the core principle of blockchain pluralism: providing everyone with the opportunity to freely choose the system can meet the needs of most people.

As for my opinion on hard forks, I can only say that relying on hard forks to solve the problem of attacks or unethical applications is not a long-term viable solution. This hard fork was successful because the stolen ether was transferred to a known address and there was a 35-day buffer period. If the attacker transfers the funds to an exchange to sell before the incident is exposed next time, we will have to roll back. However, due to the economic finality mechanism of Casper (Ethereum protocol), any form of transaction rollback is not feasible.

"Evil" dapps can easily avoid hard forks, so we should find more "soft" (compared to hard) solutions to minimize the harm.

The Ethereum blockchain is still far from the ultimate goal of a highly scalable, efficient, and secure world computer, so we will encounter many similar incidents in our development process. If you regard Casper as a completely independent blockchain that can maintain the state of ETH before the hard fork, then the hard fork may indeed be a more thorough solution. I agree with executing the fork with this mentality.

In the early and even mid-term development of Ethereum, I think there will be more small applications (apps) than large applications, so the failure of a certain application is not enough to affect the entire ecosystem. Therefore, I think it is unlikely that apps will be deployed to save the hard fork.

However, it is possible to app-save the hard fork in two cases:

In the first case, a serious vulnerability in the Solidity compiler puts 5 to 10 million ETH at risk.

In the second case, a user misused the buggy ethereum-js (JavaScript) library to create an unspendable address with a public key, which eventually led to more than half of all ether being transferred to this address. Metropolis has added a new transaction type that can convert an unspendable address into a spendable address as long as you prove that you are the holder. (But I would only agree to this approach if there is general consensus, even if it is technically possible.)

I think these two situations are very likely to happen in the future.

There are a lot of technical uncertainties in the early or mid-term development. For example, Vlad and I have been discussing whether a fixed money supply can maintain the security of the network simply by providing sufficient rewards (transaction fees). Suppose we fix the issuance at 100 million ether, and then research shows that low inflation (or more complicated situations, such as the expected low deflation rate does not appear, but low inflation rate occurs, accompanied by low Casper participation rate) is the only safe way to develop, we are digging a hole for ourselves. Similarly, it is dangerous to make a promise to "create a permanent contract" easily. Therefore, the principles on this part of the problem need to be further resolved.

The issue of moral hazard is overblown in my opinion. I am very impressed by some recent projects that have done a lot of formal verification and secure contract writing. I am confident that in the future, Ethereum will have fewer and fewer code vulnerabilities.

This means that developers will be under high pressure. I personally do not have the time or ability to maintain Serpent (Ethereum contract writing language). But I will continue to use Serpent to study Casper, and I also welcome everyone in the community to create a diverse development environment for Serpent.