Vitalik Buterin on the future of Ethereum

Last week, in his tour to Southeast Asia, Vitalik Buterin visited the National University of Singapore (NUS) and had a two-hour lecture on how the internal structure of Ethereum is composed, which elements ensure the safe performance of transactions and what is yet to be done.

Stake protocols of Ethereum and the Proof of Stake technology were the main topic, however. He provided an overview of Casper, a consensus algorithm that is currently under development. The system of validators and checkpoints (each checkpoint being a 100th block) within the concept of hybrid design was another issue raised by Mr. Buterin. The protocol version he and his developer colleagues are now making has slashing conditions pre-installed, which means that validators will never do the job they are not supposed to do.

The safety of Casper is divided into two key points in the lecture. Nobody should lose the deposit due to conflicting blocks. Approximately one third of validators triggering an accountable safety should help to avoid this trouble, and this was point one in the list of measures they will use to make Casper safe. Point two – positive liveness, in other words, the set of solutions aimed at safe performance of this algorithm. It won’t get stuck, Buterin assured.

Then came sophisticated schemes of validation process and its optimization, with different case scenarios described along the presentation slides. He also explained some matters concerning data unavailability attacks – it’s when hackers convince network to accept invalid blocks, without the network even acknowledging the blocks are corrupt.

The range of issues discussed during this lecture was indeed wide and leaves the impression that Ethereum is under safe care.

The full video of the lecture is available here. Developers and programmers who are interested in the internal structure of Ethereum will no doubt find many useful information from one of the most successful programmers the world has known.