Ethereum founder talks about digital currency management issues

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin recently participated in the latest episode of the podcast Epicenter Bitcoin. In the show, Buterin talked about the next development plan of Ethereum and also talked about the topic often mentioned by the community, that is, how to manage the development of digital currency, such as how to reach consensus on protocol changes without deviating from the original intention of decentralization, so that the network can handle more transactions.

In view of the endless debate on the block expansion issue, people began to think about the issue of community management. There is no effective solution to the problem of how to reach a consensus. Computer scientists阿文德•纳拉亚南and安德鲁•米勒proposed the establishment of a technical advisory committee, but this suggestion was opposed by艾力•多拉多(Director of the Technology Policy Center) and others. These people believe that although miners, exchanges, payment processors and developers can provide a good direction for the development of Bitcoin, this violates the principle of Bitcoin decentralization because no one has the right to guide the future direction of Bitcoin.

In response, Buterin expressed his views on decision-making and described some of the things he has learned from his two years of work on Ethereum:

“I think the various theoretical studies we’ve been doing in the Ethereum testing phase may have some implications for the discussion of Bitcoin block size. People have a lot of concerns about Bitcoin. If you increase the block size, the propagation time will increase and there is a risk of centralization.”

The inherent tradeoffs of Bitcoin's block size expansion also affect Ethereum, although Ethereum uses a different parameter called the "gas limit" from Bitcoin. When Ethereum Frontier was first released, the gas limit was too small to support a single Ethereum transaction. But now that the "thawing process" is over, miners can vote to increase the gas limit over time, which will make the blocks larger and hold more transactions.

To prevent the fuel limit from leading to high centralization, Buterin proposed the uncle rate method. An "uncle block" is like a valid orphan block in the Bitcoin network. Although the orphan block is valid, it cannot enter the main chain. Buterin explained that if the target uncle rate is 0.4, it means that the network strives to only generate 4% of uncle blocks. If the probability of the network generating uncle blocks increases, such as 0.6, then miners will need to reduce the fuel limit. The fuel limit has this effect because smaller blocks propagate faster, and in a network with relatively stable propagation time, the probability of uncle blocks is lower.

Buterin said that while bitcoin developers are debating whether to increase the block size from 1MB to 8MB, ethereum is more concerned with mechanisms, such as the target uncle rate approach, rather than numbers.

“Choosing institutions, rather than choosing outcomes, is a much more powerful way to govern.”

After listening to Buterin’s remarks, host布瑞恩•法比安•科恩said:

“You can certainly say ‘we’re going to talk about institutions and mechanisms,’ because you have more control, whereas in Bitcoin, no one has that control.”

Buterin nodded in agreement, explaining that Ethereum did benefit from centralized management in its early days. But he didn’t want that to last forever.

“In the long run, a high degree of decentralization is necessary.”

Epicenter Bitcoin is a program that explores decentralized technology. In each episode, some influential figures in the field of digital currency are invited to talk about the projects they are working on and discuss some recent events in the cryptocurrency circle. The purpose is to allow people in the digital currency community to keep abreast of some project development information and understand the ideas of developers.