30 theses from a speech by Vitalik Buterin in Moscow

We share with you the theses of the performance of Vitalik Buterin, a young IT legend, the creator of Ethereum , who came to Moscow to meet with the Russian blockchain community.

Sberbank Technologies acted as a partner of the Open Conversation in Skolkovo, where Buterin shared his views on the future of the blockchain and cryptoindustry - themes that are of interest to the entire global financial community.

About the future of blockchain and ethereum

• I was the first person who did not believe in Ethereum;
• The most advanced states in the blockchain research and testing: England, Russia and Singapore;
• Bank of England has released several white papers, which speaks about the possibility of blockchain technology and even made an internal test of the use of the ether as a state cryptocurrency;
• The largest clusters of Ethereum nodes: North America, Canada, Europe, Moscow, there are clusters in Asia;
• The community in the world and in Russia is growing very fast. The quality of projects is growing, people are increasingly aware of the blockchain and its features;
• Since last year, real projects have been created, i.e. there are blockchain scripts that create value, new characteristics;
• Cryptoeconomic consensus applies cryptography and economic constraints. It limits the degree of human participation, rewards or punishes for correct / incorrect participation;
• Proof of work is the first consensus of the algorithm on which the blockchain runs. The idea is this: there is a network with 1000 computers. They manage the network, blocks and transactions. To participate in the development of the block, each computer needs to use 100% of its time and solve math problems. The tasks themselves are useless, they are designed to prove that a person has a unit of calculated power. Roughly speaking, 1 computer = 1 computer, not 1 million virtual machines with one hacker. It takes a lot of energy and electricity;
• From Proof of work we want to come to Proof of stake. The level of human participation in the system depends on its calculated strength, which it can provide and on the number of coins that it invests in the system. If you have air, the system will give you some kind of right to participate. This is interesting, because then you will not need to have real hardware, to spend a lot of electricity. The cost of participation can be reduced by 10-100 times, it will be possible to become a validator and verify transactions from a laptop or a smartphone (if this is enough air);
• Next year, miners will have nothing to do;
• The next stage (in a few months) of Ethereum is Metropolis. Smart contracts will be much easier to integrate with cryptographic algorithms;
• After the story of The DAO, I realized that code is not an infinitely strong principle. In some extreme cases, extreme measures have to be taken;
• Every hack can not be solved hardforkom. To avoid hacks, you need to greatly increase the security of smart contracts and protocol;
• An important criterion for success of Ethereum is the scalability of the platform;
• Capitalization of Ethereum is based on the belief in the blockchain idea and the emerging ecosystem;
• There are several approaches to ensure interoperability between blockchain systems, for example BTCRelay (communication between Bitcoin and ethereum networks), the principle of the Hush Timelock contract (the transaction takes place simultaneously in both blockchain systems) and smaller approaches. Everyone is waiting for use case, i.e. need to use two different blockchains;
• Ethereum is a complete open source. Open source software is useful, but it has always been difficult to monetize. The peculiarity of open source is that it helps many people, but only slightly. In this sense, the situation can change the ICO, Ethereum due to this and there. ;
• Ethereum courses: an online course on blockchain and Stanford cryptocurrencies, our blogs and articles, wikis. I strongly advise you to look at existing blockchain projects and if they have open source, copy it from there and try to make something of your own;
• Putin knows about the blockchain - this is the peak of HYIP;
• Plasma is a new solution to Ethereum scalability. The basic idea is to move from a model in which all transactions are recorded in the blockchain (this is the bottleneck) to the structure of exchanging two-way messages confirming the transfer of value.

About myself and the team

• I do not have time to watch projects now. I am maximally immersed in the work on the platform, so that each participant has the opportunity to work with it. I think this is the best help to any blockchain project;
• That part of the Ethereum community, which is developing the protocol, is growing. Initially, 3 people worked on Ethereum, the main one of which was me, but soon the team would reach the stage when people could work on their own. I need less and less;
• At the very beginning we thought to make a commercial organization. If we did that, the first participants in the project would now have a billion dollars. In the end, we decided to go the other way: to make a public and open blockchain, a neutral platform accessible to the whole world;
• The Ethereum Foundation is a non-profit organization that funds Ethereum and pays developers. The first fund was raised by crowdfunding - 30 thousand bitcoins, which were enough for us for 2 years. Then we had another 6 million units of ether, which we used as a reward to programmers for development assistance. Now we have 3 million units of air left, which we either pay directly to programmers for work, or we sell them on the exchange.

About ICO

• If your team is a crook, please do not make an ICO;
• ICO is worth doing if: the project will bring real benefits to the token, will play an important role (for example, in the form of business scalability), the project's economy works and has logic;
• Now, many companies, going to ICO, do not understand the logic and economics of the business model. The token must be filled with commercial sense, otherwise it all risks turning into a bubble;
• Cryptobank is a dangerous thing because of the volatility of cryptocurrency. If I promised someone five years ago to give 5 Bitcoins now, it would be difficult for me;
• Investments should be made under the idea, not under the team. To implement this idea, you need to connect several teams, funding them in tranches for a certain stage and based on the results of the team. In essence, this is a competition.

Meeting video
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