10 ms·

Vitalik Unveils Ethereum 2.0 Roadmap

156 points by jcobber 9y ago

curiousgal 9y ago
Interesting to see how Ethereum pops up whenever technical aspects are revealed and how Bitcoin pops up whenever the price crosses some boundary.
- diegocerdan 9y ago
  David vs. Goliath
- alexmat 9y ago
  Just because you don't know why something is going on, doesn't mean it's arbitrary. In this case it's because of a path to mass adoption: http://coinivore.com/2017/11/26/bitcoin-reaches-time-high-9500-top-south-korea-bank-tests-bitcoin-wallet-vault/ http://coinivore.com/2017/11/26/bitcoin-reaches-time-high-95...
  - nwah1 9y ago
    Mass speculation
    - alexmat 9y ago
      That's like, your opinion, man.
- makomk 9y ago
  Ethereum's selling point has always been its advanced features making more complex applications possible, and its Achilles heel has always been that extra complexity is probably not actually a desirable feature here. Think about the endless problems with buggy smart contracts, even for things as simple as multi-signature wallets which Bitcoin can do in a straightforward way.
lhl 9y ago
For those interested, the videos from the livestream are available here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVmRAQeesq4TA3rdvbz-IkQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVmRAQeesq4TA3rdvbz-IkQ The presented material by Vitalik is largely similar to his Devcon 3 presentation. Most (all?) Devcon 3 videos were just posted today as well: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNOfzGXD_C9YMYmnefmPH0g/playlists https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNOfzGXD_C9YMYmnefmPH0g/pla... For those that don't like watching videos, here's the FAQ which summarizes sharding: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ And here's the actual code for the sharding python poc: https://github.com/ethereum/sharding https://github.com/ethereum/sharding
nope96 9y ago
Any time I read about Ether I think about this - "12 Million ETH were created to the development fund, most of it going to early contributors and developers..." At today's rate that's $5,860,200,000 USD. Who were these early contributors, how much did each get, and why do they get to have 12.5% of the entire economy on day 1? How is that a fair currency? I've read there were only 60 some "early contributors". Where's the list? On their FAQ, under "Is the ether supply infinite?" there are two paragraphs of goobly gook basically saying "we haven't decided yet" ("an area of active research"). How can anyone take this currency seriously? What is so special that makes you invest in this instead of Bitcoin?
- StavrosK 9y ago
  I'm not a fan of Ethereum (because their languages and VMs seem to be designed to maximize bugs), but the answer is "powerful smart contracts".
- marcell 9y ago
  > Who were these early contributors, how much did each get, and why do they get to have 12.5% of the entire economy on day 1? Why does Larry Page or Google Engineer #1 own billions of dollars of Google stock? Because he was there on day 1 and you weren't :)
  - nope96 9y ago
    I know the US Government oversaw the Google IPO and the stocks weren't printed out of thin air. In the Ether ICO, a big whale friend of Vitalik could have sent his Bitcoin in during the ICO sale, got Ether for it, then Vitalik sent him his Bitcoin back. Poof, Ether printed out of thin air - there is no way to prove this did not happen. That is the problem with these ICOs vs. using Proof of Work to fairly distribute the currency.
    - albertgoeswoof 9y ago
      But couldn't exactly that have happened during Google's seed rounds? And even the Google IPO? There's no way to prove that didn't happen either?
Nokinside 9y ago
Protocols like IPFS, BitTorrent produce tangible value for the users. In all fairness it would be nice to see them getting at least something in order of $10 million for their nice effort. These new ICO's are manufactured to give the company that develops them hundreds of millions or even speculative billions in paper. How long until people realize again that these products have near-zero marginal cost? Artificial scarcity can be circumvented by just copying Ethereum and creating cheaper alternative.
- Erlich_Bachman 9y ago
  Ethereum produces tangible value for it's users: transferring money and ability to create ICOs (just to name two). People value transferring money. It's a challenging technological task, which the humanity has been trying to solve for many years. It's a task that many people find useful. You don't mind paying 3% to your credit card company, do you? Even if you do, evidently many people around the world don't. Why is Ethereum (or another cryptocurrency) not considered "tangible value"? It wasn't clear if you were talking about actual Ethereum itself or any of the ICOs that are based on it. If you were talking about ICOs, the answer is even simpler: they are just like stocks. It's like you asking "why are people giving all this money to that company?". It's because some of those companies have a business, or a business idea and people want to support it. (There are scams too, of course, but sometimes it's not easy to know which one is real and which is a scam, and so people take chances.) > Artificial scarcity can be circumvented by just copying Ethereum and creating cheaper alternative. You're welcome to try, if you think it is so simple. Ethereum Classic-people have tried, and they even had an actual legitimate reason (the DAO hack), not just a vague "we want to create a cheaper alternative" motive. Look at the price charts and see how well it went for them.
  - Nokinside 9y ago
    >Ethereum produces tangible value for it's users Yes. I agree. The potential capital efficiency for for these services is vastly greater than credit cards. You are trying to undersell the potential in distributed computing platform and smart contract technology if you defend the current cost structure. The promise of these technologies is to reduce cost of financial transactions almost without limit. Lets look into the future of efficient and revolutionary transaction and smart contact technology. If billion people do 10 transactions per day (alternatively 10 billion 1 transactions per day) with cost $0.01 per transaction, the cost of this service would be only $10 million per day or 3.65 billion a year. Remove the operating costs in competitive markets and the profit margins will be extremely low. The beauty of efficient established markets is that profits will be driven down. Artificial scarcity created by different coin protocols is temporary phenomenon. It dies when the hype dies.
stupidcar 9y ago
It strikes me as an (non-invested) outsider that Ethereum seems to benefit from having a figure like Vitalik who can act as a Torvalds-esque figurehead, setting the project's technical direction. And that, in contrast, the non-participation of Satoshi Nakamoto has left a power vacuum at the heart of Bitcoin, which results in the kind of bloody and attritional battles required to move it forward. Because everybody and nobody can claim to be the heir to Nakamoto's technical vision. Clearly Ethereum has had more than its share of problems, but as things stand, I feel it has a greater chance of becoming a truly disruptive technology than Bitcoin, which seems to have become stuck in a technical quagmire.
- nope96 9y ago
  > Ethereum seems to benefit from having a figure like Vitalik who can act as a Torvalds-esque figurehead If Vitalik got hit by a bus tomorrow Ether price would drop 95%. A currency does not need a leader who directs it. Also it should be very difficult to make changes to a 150 Billion $ currency.
  - albertgoeswoof 9y ago
    I don't see Ethereum as a 150 Billion $ currency, it's more like beta software or an experiment. The learnings made now could shape the future of tech, so it should be easy to make changes to.
  - sambe 9y ago
    It's cryptocurrency. Someone is leading the crypto part (also: smart contracts etc. etc.). You could even argue that traditional currencies to have a leader - those maintaining the fiat.
  - charlesdm 9y ago
    Ethereum is not a currency though. It's a decentralised platform to build apps on, like the App Store. ETH is the oil that pays for the decentralised processing resources used by said apps that are run on the platform. A platform that isn't finished needs a leader, and I would say Ethereum needs a leader a lot more than Bitcoin. If all development on Bitcoin would stop tomorrow, it would still keep running and have a potential future as digital gold. If all development on Ethereum would stop tomorrow, it would most likely fail as a project. The value proposition is very different. Also, since oil isn't very useful without something to use it in (a car, plane, other use cases), it actually makes perfect sense (to me). ETH could very well also become a functional currency once the supply gets capped in a future hard fork. But for now, it's more oil than currency.
SRTP 9y ago
Great vision. Ethereum still has a long way to go but it's great to see this roadmap, together with the increasingly crowded Ethereum developer meetups.

156 points by jcobber 9y ago

Interesting to see how Ethereum pops up whenever technical aspects are revealed and how Bitcoin pops up whenever the price crosses some boundary.

diegocerdan 9y ago
David vs. Goliath
alexmat 9y ago
Just because you don't know why something is going on, doesn't mean it's arbitrary. In this case it's because of a path to mass adoption: http://coinivore.com/2017/11/26/bitcoin-reaches-time-high-9500-top-south-korea-bank-tests-bitcoin-wallet-vault/ http://coinivore.com/2017/11/26/bitcoin-reaches-time-high-95...
- nwah1 9y ago
  Mass speculation
  - alexmat 9y ago
    That's like, your opinion, man.
makomk 9y ago
Ethereum's selling point has always been its advanced features making more complex applications possible, and its Achilles heel has always been that extra complexity is probably not actually a desirable feature here. Think about the endless problems with buggy smart contracts, even for things as simple as multi-signature wallets which Bitcoin can do in a straightforward way.

lhl 9y ago

For those interested, the videos from the livestream are available here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVmRAQeesq4TA3rdvbz-IkQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVmRAQeesq4TA3rdvbz-IkQ The presented material by Vitalik is largely similar to his Devcon 3 presentation. Most (all?) Devcon 3 videos were just posted today as well: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNOfzGXD_C9YMYmnefmPH0g/playlists https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNOfzGXD_C9YMYmnefmPH0g/pla... For those that don't like watching videos, here's the FAQ which summarizes sharding: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ And here's the actual code for the sharding python poc: https://github.com/ethereum/sharding https://github.com/ethereum/sharding

nope96 9y ago

Any time I read about Ether I think about this - "12 Million ETH were created to the development fund, most of it going to early contributors and developers..." At today's rate that's $5,860,200,000 USD. Who were these early contributors, how much did each get, and why do they get to have 12.5% of the entire economy on day 1? How is that a fair currency? I've read there were only 60 some "early contributors". Where's the list? On their FAQ, under "Is the ether supply infinite?" there are two paragraphs of goobly gook basically saying "we haven't decided yet" ("an area of active research"). How can anyone take this currency seriously? What is so special that makes you invest in this instead of Bitcoin?

StavrosK 9y ago
I'm not a fan of Ethereum (because their languages and VMs seem to be designed to maximize bugs), but the answer is "powerful smart contracts".
marcell 9y ago
> Who were these early contributors, how much did each get, and why do they get to have 12.5% of the entire economy on day 1? Why does Larry Page or Google Engineer #1 own billions of dollars of Google stock? Because he was there on day 1 and you weren't :)
- nope96 9y ago
  I know the US Government oversaw the Google IPO and the stocks weren't printed out of thin air. In the Ether ICO, a big whale friend of Vitalik could have sent his Bitcoin in during the ICO sale, got Ether for it, then Vitalik sent him his Bitcoin back. Poof, Ether printed out of thin air - there is no way to prove this did not happen. That is the problem with these ICOs vs. using Proof of Work to fairly distribute the currency.
  - albertgoeswoof 9y ago
    But couldn't exactly that have happened during Google's seed rounds? And even the Google IPO? There's no way to prove that didn't happen either?

Nokinside 9y ago

Protocols like IPFS, BitTorrent produce tangible value for the users. In all fairness it would be nice to see them getting at least something in order of $10 million for their nice effort. These new ICO's are manufactured to give the company that develops them hundreds of millions or even speculative billions in paper. How long until people realize again that these products have near-zero marginal cost? Artificial scarcity can be circumvented by just copying Ethereum and creating cheaper alternative.

Erlich_Bachman 9y ago
Ethereum produces tangible value for it's users: transferring money and ability to create ICOs (just to name two). People value transferring money. It's a challenging technological task, which the humanity has been trying to solve for many years. It's a task that many people find useful. You don't mind paying 3% to your credit card company, do you? Even if you do, evidently many people around the world don't. Why is Ethereum (or another cryptocurrency) not considered "tangible value"? It wasn't clear if you were talking about actual Ethereum itself or any of the ICOs that are based on it. If you were talking about ICOs, the answer is even simpler: they are just like stocks. It's like you asking "why are people giving all this money to that company?". It's because some of those companies have a business, or a business idea and people want to support it. (There are scams too, of course, but sometimes it's not easy to know which one is real and which is a scam, and so people take chances.) > Artificial scarcity can be circumvented by just copying Ethereum and creating cheaper alternative. You're welcome to try, if you think it is so simple. Ethereum Classic-people have tried, and they even had an actual legitimate reason (the DAO hack), not just a vague "we want to create a cheaper alternative" motive. Look at the price charts and see how well it went for them.
- Nokinside 9y ago
  >Ethereum produces tangible value for it's users Yes. I agree. The potential capital efficiency for for these services is vastly greater than credit cards. You are trying to undersell the potential in distributed computing platform and smart contract technology if you defend the current cost structure. The promise of these technologies is to reduce cost of financial transactions almost without limit. Lets look into the future of efficient and revolutionary transaction and smart contact technology. If billion people do 10 transactions per day (alternatively 10 billion 1 transactions per day) with cost $0.01 per transaction, the cost of this service would be only $10 million per day or 3.65 billion a year. Remove the operating costs in competitive markets and the profit margins will be extremely low. The beauty of efficient established markets is that profits will be driven down. Artificial scarcity created by different coin protocols is temporary phenomenon. It dies when the hype dies.

stupidcar 9y ago

It strikes me as an (non-invested) outsider that Ethereum seems to benefit from having a figure like Vitalik who can act as a Torvalds-esque figurehead, setting the project's technical direction. And that, in contrast, the non-participation of Satoshi Nakamoto has left a power vacuum at the heart of Bitcoin, which results in the kind of bloody and attritional battles required to move it forward. Because everybody and nobody can claim to be the heir to Nakamoto's technical vision. Clearly Ethereum has had more than its share of problems, but as things stand, I feel it has a greater chance of becoming a truly disruptive technology than Bitcoin, which seems to have become stuck in a technical quagmire.

nope96 9y ago
> Ethereum seems to benefit from having a figure like Vitalik who can act as a Torvalds-esque figurehead If Vitalik got hit by a bus tomorrow Ether price would drop 95%. A currency does not need a leader who directs it. Also it should be very difficult to make changes to a 150 Billion $ currency.
- albertgoeswoof 9y ago
  I don't see Ethereum as a 150 Billion $ currency, it's more like beta software or an experiment. The learnings made now could shape the future of tech, so it should be easy to make changes to.
- sambe 9y ago
  It's cryptocurrency. Someone is leading the crypto part (also: smart contracts etc. etc.). You could even argue that traditional currencies to have a leader - those maintaining the fiat.
- charlesdm 9y ago
  Ethereum is not a currency though. It's a decentralised platform to build apps on, like the App Store. ETH is the oil that pays for the decentralised processing resources used by said apps that are run on the platform. A platform that isn't finished needs a leader, and I would say Ethereum needs a leader a lot more than Bitcoin. If all development on Bitcoin would stop tomorrow, it would still keep running and have a potential future as digital gold. If all development on Ethereum would stop tomorrow, it would most likely fail as a project. The value proposition is very different. Also, since oil isn't very useful without something to use it in (a car, plane, other use cases), it actually makes perfect sense (to me). ETH could very well also become a functional currency once the supply gets capped in a future hard fork. But for now, it's more oil than currency.

SRTP 9y ago

Great vision. Ethereum still has a long way to go but it's great to see this roadmap, together with the increasingly crowded Ethereum developer meetups.