Vitalik Exclusive Interview：Finding the Cypherpunk Spirit in th Era Of AI and Centralization.

CypherPunk：Freedom and Openness

BlockTempo：Lots of people know about Ethereum, but not too familiar with Plurality. Could you answer the following question, how people connect the dots between Ethereum and Plurality, which is, tell us why you like cyberpunk and what’s the definition of cyberpunk in your mind, and what role does cyberpunk play in Plurality?

Vitalik：

 I think cyberpunk ideas are basically around freedom and openness, creating things that are as accessible, open, and fair for people to participate as possible. And, what people’s rights are protected and all of these things, but just adapted to and implemented using the digital world.

I think this has been the dream of people who have been trying to do a cyberpunk thing for decades. Yeah. And, I think it’s been the dream of people for decades, right? Trying to build things like digital cash, digital systems for private property rights, digital voting systems, and do all of these things in a way where security is guaranteed through cryptography instead of being guaranteed through having to trust centralized authorities, right?

Because once your security depends on a centralized authority, then the centralized authority can easily abuse that power, right? And in the physical world, of course, sometimes centralized authorities are difficult to avoid because, in the physical world, often attacking is easy and defending is hard, right?

But, you know, it still causes a lot of problems. But the more that happens in the digital world, in the digital world, it’s the opposite, right? And you can have things like cryptographic keys where you can make signatures, but breaking those signatures is impossible for even the most powerful attacker, right? And so the more things that you can do that build off of building those kinds of building blocks in the digital world, the less we can rely on and be vulnerable to the failures of centralized authority in general. So, the goal from the beginning has been to just see how far it is actually possible to take that direction.

And, you know, this started with digital cash systems from David Chom in the 1980s, a lot of anonymous mailing systems and mix nets in the 1990s. Then, of course, we saw Bitcoin that created the first fully decentralized digital currency. And I think now in 2024, we have a very big array of different tools with which to build all of these constructions, right? And, we’ve seen how we can build decentralized currencies, we can build voting systems, we can build all kinds of different things. And at the same time, though, we need to have some kind of organized movement that’s dedicated to actually doing that, right? It’s like if there isn’t a self-conscious and dedicated movement trying to do these things, then what you get is people inside the crypto space just try to make money off of speculating on the crypto space. And everyone outside the crypto space tries to make money by collecting everyone’s data and just trying to get people to buy pointless products by selling them ads, right?

And so trying, basically, I think the thing that I want to see Ethereum do more in is actually try to create that organized movement, and that tries to create at least a collection of organized software tools that can follow these principles and work well with each other and just show people what a better and more open and more secure and more privacy-preserving, you know, software world could look like. And with the recent efforts of developing more public goods and laying the groundwork of integrating civic technologies, Ethereum aspires to achieve high-resolution democracy.

Different definitions of the term”democracy”

BlockTempo：So what are the similarities and differences between Paradi’s digital democracy and Ethereum’s high-resolution democracy?

Vitalik：Yeah, I think when I think about high-resolution democracy, I mean, I think of the idea that because we have things like modern information technology, we have the ability to extract a much higher and much richer amount of information about people’s preferences than was even possible 20 or 30 years ago, right?

Like, traditionally, we think about just having an election every four years, and that’s basically maybe one bit, maybe two bits of information every four years, right? Less than one bit per year. That’s a very low-bandwidth channel. But, of course, if all you have is paper and you have the kinds of systems that we had 200 or even 50 years ago, that might be the best that you can do. But then now, we actually have all these very powerful information technologies. And the question is, can we use that to actually get a lot more information about people’s preferences through these mechanisms, right?

And in our modern internet, we have a lot of examples of what I call micro-democracy. So, take Twitter, for example. You can make a tweet, and then people can like the tweet, retweet it, and you can see how many likes. On Reddit, you can see upvotes, you can see downvotes. These are all forms of micro-democracy. It’s a real-time referendum on basically if the thing that this person said is good or bad. And these referendums happen millions of times a day, and their results influence who sees what content. So, we have lots of these examples of micro-democracy. And we also have macro-democracy. But at the same time, there’s this challenge that macro-democracy is inefficient and micro-democracy is insecure, right? In social media cases, there are lots of fake accounts and all kinds of different problems.

There’s also the issue that voting is not anonymous in micro-democracy. So, if you like a tweet, there are many ways how that might be discovered. And, if you live in the wrong country, you might even be punished for that. So, that’s the challenge with plurality. Just to basically see if we can create forms of voting that are both micro and macro and secure and actually good at extracting a lot of information and the right kind of information about our preferences at the same time. And even do it in ways that people haven’t even done before. One of the big successes that I think we’ve seen in social media in the last two years is community notes. It’s this new algorithm on Twitter where it tries to identify notes that are agreed to by people who normally even disagree on other things.

And basically, try to show clarifying information or context beside a lot of different tweets. This is the sort of thing that people obviously want for political content because you have one side that’s concerned about misinformation and the other side that’s concerned about a dictator or a small elite trying to silence them by just arbitrarily deciding that they are misinformation. So having this more democratic mechanism that avoids being controlled by a small elite and even tries to be cross-tribal, so even tries to avoid being taken over by one tribe is something that’s really powerful and that a lot of people clearly want. And so the goal, I think, is to find at least 10 to 20 other things that are in that spirit across all kinds of spaces, whether we’re talking social media, whether we’re talking funding decisions, local government, national government. And also, applications inside of blockchains and actually roll them out.

How to make humans trust web3 technology

BlockTempo：Alright. So we’re going to segue to the second section, which is trust in infrastructure. Glenn, Audrey, and Pluralist have hinted that the most important infrastructure is the power division of Parati. And for Parati, its goal is to be popularized by NGOs, nation-state governments, while the national government is not. So how does Ethereum plan to persuade these counterparties to trust and integrate Ethereum?

Vitalik：Yeah. Institutional applications of Ethereum and blockchain technology is something that people have tried to do for a long time. Obviously, so far, it’s been unsuccessful. I remember five to 10 years ago, the big trend that everyone was excited about was private blockchains or sometimes consortium blockchains, private chains, enterprise chains.

This idea that you can try to create something that’s more decentralized than servers but obviously not totally decentralized and scary like public blockchains and try to create a compromise in the middle. But the compromise ended up failing. We just haven’t seen many of these enterprise blockchain applications actually work. I think the reason is that they ended up creating the wrong kind of compromise because by not working with the public chain, they basically abandoned the ability to benefit from the really largest community’s network effects.

There was this phenomenon that I personally noticed when I tried talking to a lot of these teams where they would first create a consortium, and then the first five maybe clients would show up, they’d be very happy, they’d be very excited, but then it would never grow past five because if you’re the first five, then you have a lot of control, you can set the direction. But then if you’re number six, you’re number 13, then you have no power, and you’re joining a system that’s at the whims of these other groups. So, the kind of compromise between centralization and decentralization that I think makes a lot more sense is combining blockchains and zero-knowledge proofs. So, you use blockchains potentially not even as a way to publish all of the data but maybe as a way to publish hashes of the data. And then you use zero-knowledge proofs and publish the proof along with every hash to prove that whatever happens to update the hash, it was updated correctly.

What’s interesting about this approach is that the tie to the blockchain from a level is pretty minimal, but you still get the benefits. You still get the ability of a user’s ability to have a Merkle proof and actually prove that they have an entry in the database and it was calculated correctly. One of the first and most interesting applications of this in the short term is proof of solvency for exchanges. Exchanges have always had the problem of the question: What if they’re actually a fractional reserve and they’re stealing people’s money? In the past, it was Mt. Gox; this decade, it was FTX. If nothing changes, next decade it will be something else.

With proof of solvency, you can create a proof that proves that for every coin of user assets that are in people’s balances, you actually have an underlying coin that is being stored somewhere that you control. What’s interesting about this is that you can describe it as being a proof of solvency application based on zk-SNARKs, or you can describe it as the exchange turning into a type of layer two of Ethereum. From a technical perspective, both ways of understanding it are valid. That just is an institutional application of Ethereum that makes a huge amount of sense right now. That’s kind of the beginning, and I think the nice thing about this kind of approach is that you basically can keep the way that your application already works. You have a server; you can keep your server. You just add an extra piece of software on the side that reads the database, does some extra computation, generates some proofs, and publishes them onto the chain. If you do that, then you’re just bolting extra security onto an existing system and you’re giving users the extra ability to make the exchange into a security.

So, I think part of the reason why this has not happened yet really is just technical capability. So much depends on zero-knowledge proofs. Blockchains give you guarantees of guaranteed execution, openness, censorship resistance, but they give you these guarantees at the cost of scalability and privacy. Scalability and privacy are both very big deals. What zero-knowledge proofs do is they give you back scalability and privacy. Five years ago, zero-knowledge proofs were still mostly a theoretical academic thing. Now, Zcash, the zero-knowledge proof-based cryptocurrency that does privacy, launched at the end of 2016. I remember the very first version to generate a proof, you needed to have a laptop; you could not do it on a phone at all, and even on a laptop, it would take 90 seconds to generate a proof. Today, to do the same thing, you can generate a proof on a phone in less than four seconds.

So, that’s the user experience. Then, the developer experience to make a zero-knowledge proof application before about 2021, you basically would have to be a cryptographer yourself. But today, you can just write code in Circom; it gets compiled; you don’t actually have to understand or interface with the cryptography yourself. User tools, developer tools, it all is just becoming more powerful very quickly. So, from a technical standpoint, a lot of the problems actually are being solved. So, now I think it’s the time to really start figuring out what are the specific things that really make sense and just actually start implementing them. And the gas fees of Ethereum are still high, and the transaction speed is not necessarily the fastest.