Vitalik Buterin wants to ‘remake Ethereum cypherpunk’
Ethereum should revive the “cypherpunk” revolution that was envisioned for blockchain in its early days, said Vitalik Buterin, one of the network's founders.
According to Buterin, Ethereum was initially envisioned as a “public decentralized shared hard drive” that could use peer-to-peer messaging and decentralized file storage, but the vision began to turn to financialization on Ethereum in 2017. A December 28 post.
Remake Ethereum Cypherpunkhttps://t.co/qEiOcZLEeg
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) December 28, 2023
Decentralization, open participation, censorship resistance and credible neutrality are among the “cypherpunk” values Buterin wants to strongly return to in Ethereum's future, and hopes that non-financial applications can flourish on the blockchain.
Scrolls, zero-knowledge authentications, authentication, and second-generation privacy solutions are becoming more mainstream, highlighting the potential for some of the cypherpunk values.
Cypherpunk refers to the use of encryption when entering a computer network, especially to ensure privacy from government officials.
This is Ethereum.
That's why we're here pic.twitter.com/onMU20q9w2
— sassaal.eth/acc (@sassal0x) December 29, 2023
Participating in polls without revealing one's privacy and implementing methods like quadratic voting and cross-tribal consensus to help organizations govern themselves are among the cypherpunk-like activities Buterin wants to see more of on Ethereum.
“The goal of the stack is to enable this diversity, but at the same time strive to promote solidarity among this diversity.” pic.twitter.com/2IXkHMf5b7
— dr3a.eth (@dr3a_eth) December 28, 2023
“It's very possible to build things in the crypto ecosystem that don't follow these values,” Buterin said, citing specific examples.
For example, building a highly centralized and multi-signature secured layer with no switching plan or NFT ecosystem where NFTs are stored on a centralized web site as opposed to a decentralized file storage platform like IPFS.
“One could build an interface that unnecessarily diverts users to the already large container pool.” Buterin added:
“Resisting these pressures is difficult, but if we don't, we will lose the unique value of the crypto ecosystem and recreate the existing web2 ecosystem with more efficiency and more steps.”
That said, Buterin said he was impressed with the solutions that came up with some of the industry's biggest problems.
Related: Vitalik Buterin Warns of Overloading Ethereum's Consensus Layer
Decentralized exchanges have provided a solution to hacking on centralized exchanges, Cowswap, Flashbots Protect and MEV Blocker have helped limit the severity of sandwich attacks on Ethereum users with highly scalable price players.
Earlier this week, Buterin proposed to make Ethereum's verification chain “simpler” and “simpler” by Dec. 27 by reducing the number of signatures required by validators to keep the network running.
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