Interview with Vitalik Buterin on ETH2, Scaling Plans, NFTs, etc.

Sure, "the academics politics game" may often be an issue. But I don't see how "blockchain!" suddenly solves the problem of deciding where research funds should go in a better way.

Someone I follow who is always right is big on them. Their argument is that people buy expensive and rare shit just to have it and project superiority.

Thus “owning” the HD Clíp of Lebron slam dunking is like cred they are willing to pay USD for.

Not at all the case. All the artist needs to do is publicly declare that they listed their art on an NFT platform, such as Rarible or Zora or what have you and that's enough. Direct communication with the fans is all that's needed, no central authority required.

Not all NFTs are created equal. Some have all the data necessary to reproduce the work of art embedded right on the blockchain, such as Euler Beats: https://eulerbeats.com/ . Others use IPFS hashes and embed the hashes on the NFT itself, so all you need is a single server in the world serving up that file and you can validate authenticity.

An NFT is sort of like a signed, autographed copy of something. Sure, I can have a reproduction of the Mona Lisa printed for about $50, but can I have the original canvas that Da Vinci himself painted on for $50? Of course not.

When I was a kid, I liked to collect baseball cards. I knew a mint condition Mickey Mantle rookie card was exceedingly rare and valuable. A signed and rare card can go for tens of thousands or more dollars. Signed baseballs or gloves can also have additional value compared to the underlying physical item. What is it about the signature that changes the value of something? You know that the player themselves interacted with that item.

That is the case with NFTs. They won't be going away. You can try to mint a copy of an NFT, but it will always have a later timestamp than the first one, and it won't have the original block number, so it's quite easy to root out counterfeits.

Unless there is a clever crossover to convert from digital verification to physical and back... seems worthless to me.

Nike could just publish a public key in an SEC filing and you could use that to verify that you're actually talking to the company. That would be exactly as good and much simpler.

"A simple Ethereum transaction (to send ETH) takes ~110 bytes. An ETH transfer on a rollup, however, takes only ~12 bytes"

But the 12 byte number makes some assumptions that will probably not be true or only be true if many transactions are made by the same addresses.

Computationally there didn't appear to be any scaling since checks still need to be made by someone and verified by other nodes that fraudulent transactions aren't in a roll up.

https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chaindefault

You can buy a 1 TB SSD for about a hundred bucks. There are various reasons people use Infura, but inability to run a full node locally is not one of them. (The devs are working on removing some of the reasons for using Infura, by improving light clients.)

Now if you want an archive node, that will use a lot more space. But a full node already has the entire transaction history and entire current state. An archive node adds the ability to do fast queries of historical states, like "how much of this token did that address own in block number X last year."

If you have a full node, then you can generate an archive node from local data, but if you don't need fast historical queries there's no need for it.

Transactions getting stuck because of gas prices spiking: This was one of the main drivers of the 1559 improvement proposal which was recently accepted for the summer upgrade. Hopefully it fixes the UX around transactions and estimating gas fees.

On demand for blockspace: as the linked interview goes into, scalability has been the main point of research for the past 5 years and has come on remarkably, we should hopefully see improvements over the next few months and the rest of the year leading up to pos.

On making things more expensive than they should be: the goal is always make it as cheap as possible whilst maintaining security. Now, you may not value that security of the ledger, but others do. It will be cheaper than it is use right now, but it will always cost more than mysql. Some people value that, others don't. I would argue the constant demand for blockspace (and so the high prices) show pretty clearly there is significant demand for that security.

The decentralisation is about resilience of the system, security of the information, and transparency (but not surveillance). We cant fix money and centralised forces of money and power overnight (through id argue theres a decent number of ethereum devs working on projects around UBI etc) but we can try create systems that allow people to work together with infrastructure they know wont be pulled out from under them when they need it. There are payment networks for sex workers who get relentlessly hassled and accounts blocked by banks, there are ubi scripts that you can adapt for your own community, there are quadratic funding mechanisms that can help us fund public goods. Beyond the stigma of the hype-moon-kids hustling money and crypto-scammers that seems to get most of the media attention, there is good work being done to actually help people. CryptoKitties is silly, but it proved something. the nft hype is a bit silly now, but it is creating interesting royalty and distribution ideas that allow me to e.g. sell my music without needing a stripe account and a bank account either of which could decide they dont want we anymore and screw me over. That is valuable to me.

RocketPool would be the preferred method once it is live as it maintains the decentralised ethos letting people run rocketpool nodes and anyone pool any amount they want, like how mining pools work today (except running on a raspberry pi, rather than maxing out gpus).

That we’re seeing NFTs trading well isn’t an indication that it’s the art behind them that matters rather than the popular view of it as an asset.

How is that going to fit in with tax assessment and ownership transparency legislation without making things complicated enough you haven't gained anything?

Art NFTs are digitally native. Like Bitcoin, the blockchain entry is the thing you own. That is why they are seeing the success that they are.

The strength of smart contracts are also their greatest weakness - they're code, so any bug in the code is a de facto rule of the contract.

The problem with this line of thought is that the Venn diagram of cases where there is a potential natural fit for NFT and the cases where there is both a need for them and likelyhood of adoption may well have an empty intersection.

Property deeds are a good example. They can't practically replace the current system without radically rethinking that system, and it's unclear that the stakeholders would find any compelling reason to consider that.

Do you have a compelling example?

What advantage is gained by tying it one-to-one with an NFT or storing it on a blockchain at all?

This perspective is blunt, but correct. Crypto is successful primarily by virtue of its unregulated rube goldberg casino revenue model, with just enough of a plausible tech veneer to allow people to rationalize behavior otherwise indistinguishable from naked gambling.

Crypto does not solve the centralization of leverage over liquidity (and thus the ability of a few to manipulate the wealth of many), which is the sole centralization "problem" that matters to the vast majority of people who would use it.

Take away the Potemkin decentralization apparatus known as a blockchain (the premise of which holds that The State and its central bank minions are the only centralizing agents capable of public harm) and you are left with plain old unsexy digital currency.

It seems to me to be a way to say “put your money there and it will eventually become more”, which is just speculation, and not a store of anything.

Edit: to add to that, how is Bitcoin a store of value if a bear market is >90% lower than a bull market?

That seems to be a meme that people repeat to justify their Bitcoin bet, but I don’t see how that makes sense.

But beside that, I can buy things with it, and I regularly do buy things with it. I pay people with it, and get paid with it. So that makes it money to me. Peoples experience with it make it something else to them. ether is more useful to me than $ (as a european).