Vitalik Buterin Gives Answers to the Internet

There has been no answer from him during the first 10 minutes of the interview, however, he then finished choosing the most interesting questions and firstly told about the upcoming Plasma solution: it will be developed along with other projects that will optimize the work of each other in the future and improve scalability. After its whitepaper was published, tells Mr. Buterin, different teams became interested in its development. As for Metropolis and Raiden implementation, Vitalik can say for sure that Metropolis is now in its testing phase (a couple of months left before implementation) and Raiden, “a layer-2 network on top of Ethereum”, is being developed by a separate team, so he can’t state with certainty at what stage it is right now. The ZKSnarks project, although expensive, will have to wait before Metropolis rolls out and then the team is going to build the needed infrastructure – so it will take longer than Metropolis. He stressed that he and his team will not add any master nodes to Ethereum, as the whole project is aimed at decentralization.

Talking about the PoS technology and sharding solutions, Vitalik Buterin once again mentioned Plasma as a means to avoid withdrawal attacks – miscreants, it appears, can cheat on chains and channels in order to withdraw someone else’s funds. Sharding technology in Plasma will help to avoid this in the future.

He also explained how the Ethereum protocol is updated: firstly, someone invents something new, a tech solution or a system fix, then this idea evolves in a full-fledged Ethereum Improvement Proposal, or EIP, it’s discussed and commented and when it’s approved, it’s tested with mostly C++, although sometimes they use Python. Developing Smart Contracts on modern popular compilers, however, requires attention to security.

The potential of blockchain technology, the creator of Ethereum believes, will be fully demonstrated few years later when this technology becomes cheaper so that everybody could easily implement it for their business needs. He predicts that public chains will merge with private chains into “consortium chains” and get more fraud protection as the time goes. Stablecoins are important for Buterin too, and he is interested in MakerDAO and Seignorage Shares.

While answering about what mistakes he made during developing Ethereum, he stated he would focus more on parallelizability from the very first day of development.

Mr. Buterin told that his views on cryptocurrency have greatly improved since the time he first became interested in the topic. First it was something like “programmable money”, now he sees cryptocurrency as a “world computer” for financial operations. Back then, he did not expect such a big interest from different big institutions – governmental and financial.

There were questions on other fields and topics: Vitalik expressed his view on a “P vs. NP” computer science problem, telling he thinks P is likely not NP. He likes both cats and dogs, but dislikes iguanas. And, lastly, while answering to a very serious question on how he likes his steaks cooked, he stressed that he prefers fish instead.

Bitnewstoday.com asked Vitalik Buterin on money laundering countermeasures, he did not respond directly, although he told that Plasma is going to contain some anti-hacking protection in its structure. Our website hopes to ask him again on this matter during the next session.