Vitalik Buterin reminisces about the early days of cryptocurrency, reflecting on the vibrant atmosphere surrounding Bitcoin in Berlin’s Bitcoin Kiez and New Hampshire’s PorcFest, a libertarian gathering. These memories serve as a foundation for Buterin’s call to revive the underlying vision of crypto: creating a freer, more open society.
Buterin traces the roots of “web3” to Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood’s broader perspective, which views Ethereum not just as “Bitcoin plus smart contracts,” but as a fundamental technology for a more open internet. The concept revolves around creating a public, decentralized shared environment that allows for collaborative, large-scale projects while adhering to open-source principles.
Since 2017, this vision has been overshadowed by rising transaction fees and a decline in the appeal of non-financial blockchain applications. The rise of certain groups as dominant users during peak fee periods has altered the public perception of the crypto space.
Looking ahead to 2024, Buterin sees positive developments on the horizon, including rollups for scaling solutions, second-generation privacy solutions like Railway and Nocturne, growing interest in account abstraction, and zero-knowledge proofs becoming developer-friendly and nearly ready for consumer applications. These advancements offer an opportunity to shift the narrative and transform part of the Ethereum ecosystem into a truly permissionless, decentralized, and open-source environment.
Buterin emphasizes fundamental values that should guide the crypto community, including open global participation, decentralization, censorship resistance, auditability, trustless neutrality, building tools not empires, and a collaborative mindset. He acknowledges challenges but insists on resisting pressures that could compromise these values, preventing the crypto ecosystem from becoming a clone of current centralized systems.
Despite its challenges, the crypto space serves as a testing ground for security technologies. Buterin highlights the potential to experiment with and incubate solutions using robust technologies like zero-knowledge proofs, formal verification, and hardware-based key security. Ethereum envisions a future where users can interact seamlessly in a decentralized atmosphere, competing with traditional centralized systems across various domains to create a pluralistic and interoperable technology stack.