A review of Ethereum founder's AMA: Vitalik Buterin: I have 550,000 ETH

On the morning of March 14, 2016, Beijing time, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin held an AMA with Chinese users in the 8btc community that lasted more than two hours.

The founder of Ethereum, known as the "child prodigy", was born in 1994. He worked for the Bitcoin online media "Bitcoin Weekly" throughout 2011. In late 2011, he co-founded "Bitcoin Magazine" and defeated Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to win the 2014 World Technology Award in the IT Software category.

Ethereum is developing rapidly, and the community is looking forward to learning more. Yesterday, Vitalik accepted Babbitt's invitation and had a direct Q&A session with Chinese community users in fluent Chinese. In previous communications, I had offered to provide translation, but he insisted on communicating in Chinese, and even Googled some questions that were not clearly expressed in advance to prepare. He was also very frank during the AMA process, answering almost every question. When asked about the number of Ethereum coins he personally held, Vitalik said without hesitation that he had 550,000.

How do you view emerging and powerful competitors?

Rootstock, which has been developing strongly recently, has been evaluated as the best Bitcoin + the best Ethereum. When asked how he views such a strong competitor, Vitalik believes that every user is free to choose the consensus mechanism he likes:

There are many Bitcoin maximalists (explained here: http://www.8btc.com/jiepanbang) who like Ethereum technology but don't like coins other than Bitcoin; therefore they are interested in such sidechain projects. I am of course against Bitcoin maximalists; they say network effects are so important, but my thought is that if they are right, the network effects of the US dollar and the RMB are a thousand times greater, so how can Bitcoin itself succeed?

But in the long run, after we move to PoS, rootstock has value: if someone likes PoW, I recommend them to use rootstock, if they like PoS, use our Ethereum. The existing Ethereum blockchain is not the only blockchain that uses Ethereum technology, there are also consortium/private chains, rootstock, etc.; each user can freely choose his favorite consensus mechanism.

China's blockchain is developing rapidly

Vitalik mentioned his partners in China, Wanxiang, including Blockchain Labs and Distributed Fund, as well as Beijing-based Aiyi Xinrong, which sponsored Ethereum’s DevCon in 2015.

According to Vitalik's observation, China's industry is developing rapidly:

“I first came to China in May 2014. At that time, I only saw miners and exchanges. The miners and exchanges were already very strong. For example, Huobi and OKCoin had more than 70 people, but there were not many interesting ones besides these companies.

The second time I came to China was in May 2015. At that time, I stayed in Shanghai, in Shen Bo's company; at that time he was working on dacx, a crowdfunding platform on the blockchain (BitShares). I think this was the beginning of the concept of "crypto 2.0" in China.

The third time I came to China was in October 2015. At that time, a blockchain summit was held in Shanghai Wanxiang. More than 300 people came, including representatives from large companies and even the government. Three months later, I went to Beijing and met with four companies in two days. All of them were willing to cooperate with us. So the blockchain situation in China is developing very quickly. "

Methods to control the rapid expansion of block volume

When asked how Ethereum can control the problem of block size expanding too quickly, Vitalik listed several solutions:

“The first is the concept of fast syncing and state tree pruning; fast syncing means that a new node does not need to download and verify the entire blockchain, but only needs to download the block header of each block and verify the workload proof, and then can download and verify the latest state in a Merkle tree mode. This makes synchronization time faster. State tree pruning means automatically deleting branches of the Merkle tree that are no longer valid; this should reduce storage requirements by 5-10 times.

The second is a light client; because each Ethereum block includes the root hash of the Merkle tree of the entire state, it is easier to make a high-performance and secure light client. A light client does not need to download the blockchain or state, only the block headers, and can then download and verify the branches of the Merkle book from the network; in this way even mobile phones and IoT devices can participate.
After Homestead, light clients are one of our top priorities.

The third phase is our sharding plan, described here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QIt3mKLIYU and here https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/53.

You can refer to more information about Ethereum Merkle Tree here: http://www.8btc.com/merkling-in-ethereum

Opinions on the digital currency crowdfunding model

As we all know, Ethereum’s initial funding was $18 million from crowdfunding in 2014, and the Ethereum crowdfunding case is also listed as one of the most successful crowdfunding cases. When asked about his opinion on the digital currency crowdfunding model, Vitalik said:

"The model of digital currency crowdfunding certainly has many advantages: it is easy to publish, easy to participate, and so on. But I think too many projects are interested in doing their own crowdfunding. Now, almost every major application on Ethereum has plans to issue digital currency and crowdfund. The crowdfunding of several projects, such as Augur, certainly makes sense, because the Augur consensus mechanism fundamentally relies on REP, but other projects do not really need digital currency, but they add a digital currency anyway so that they can crowdfund. I think this model affects the quality of the project, and every such project will eventually have a competitor without a built-in digital currency, and this competitor, because there is no built-in currency blocking, will achieve higher efficiency, so it will seize market share. In addition, crowdfunding cannot circumvent the needs of a business model."

Of course, Vitalik was asked about the continued surge in Ethereum prices this year. Vitalik also explained how Ethereum, as the fuel for smart contracts, has been affected by the price surge in actual users:

“Right now, it’s really a problem that the price of ether is rising too fast, because the price of sending transactions is increasing and we need to reduce the minimum transaction fee (initially the transaction fee was 50 shannon per gas unit (a billion shannons is one ether, similar to Bitcoin’s “satoshi”), now it’s 20 shannon and there is a mining pool that accepts 10 shannon). In the future there should be a market for transaction fees, so the price can adjust itself; then the rise and fall of the price of ether shouldn’t be a big problem.”

At the same time, he revealed the current funding situation of the Ethereum team:

“We now have 1.25 million ether and about $20,000 in fiat. Our development costs are now $220,000/month. So we can survive for a few years.”

In addition, Vitalik was also asked why he is so fluent in Chinese:

“There are several reasons:

1. I grew up in Toronto and have many Chinese friends, so I have been interested in Chinese culture for a long time.
2. My father said that learning Chinese is difficult. He tried to learn it himself but failed. I want to prove to him and myself that I am not a coward and I am not lazy. This is also the reason why I study combinatorial mathematics in college.
3. I saw that Bitcoin was developing very fast in China in 2013, so I understood how important China is, so I am interested in learning more about it.”

More details: I am Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum. If you have any questions about Ethereum, please feel free to ask!

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Editor: Meng Dada
Source: Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/vitalik-ama)