Ethereum distinguishes itself in two ways: a principled technological and social philosophy committed to decentralization, and real value already brought to millions of users.
L2s have made great progress, and this is a testament to Ethereum's ecosystem and development philosophy working in action.
Today, there are two primary challenges:
1. Scale 2. Challenges of heterogeneity (standards, interoperability, proof system security, user experience, economics ....)
We could give up on L2s and try to do 2016-era-style L1 sharding. But this would be a mistake.
Instead, we should double down on our work on interoperability, ZK-EVMs, etc, and get the benefits of independent innovation and a unified Ethereum at the same time.
This means:
Summary: raise the blobs, work hard on interop and security, think about economics. See the post for more details on each topic.
Ethereum's future is bright.
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The person deciding the new EF leadership team is me. One of the goals of the ongoing reform is to give the EF a "proper board", but until that happens it's me.
If you "keep the pressure on", then you are creating an environment that is actively toxic to top talent. Some of Ethereum's best devs have been messaging me recently, expressing their disgust with the social media environment that people like you are creating. YOU ARE MAKING MY JOB HARDER.
And you are decreasing the chance I have any interest whatsoever in doing "what you want".
SNARKs rely on "arithmetization": a way of converting a statement about a program into an equation involving polynomials (or sometimes vectors and matrices)
To keep numbers within reasonable sizes, the arithmetic must be done not over regular integers, but over structures called "finite fields". Modular arithmetic is the simplest example of a finite field, but there are others.
The Dencun hard fork has activated, and thanks to Blobscriptions the blob fee markets are now in "price discovery mode".
It has been well-understood for years that the future of Ethereum scaling depends on rollups backed by data space secured with data availability sampling. EIP-4844 is a key change that lays the groundwork for this future.
By popular demand, an updated roadmap diagram for 2023!
Here was the one from last year. Notice that it's actually quite similar! As Ethereum's technical path forward continues to solidify, there are relatively few changes. I'll go through the important ones.
The role of single slot finality (SSF) in post-Merge PoS improvement is solidifying. It's becoming clear that SSF is the easiest path to resolving a lot of the Ethereum PoS design's current weaknesses.
New monster post: my own current perspective on the recent debates around techno-optimism, AI risks, and ways to avoid extreme centralization in the 21st century.
First of all, technology is amazing, and there are very high costs to delaying it.
Climate change is an important exception to an "everything is getting better" story. I'm optimistic, but pessimistic outcomes could be quite bad so the problem is really worth our attention.
It's a reminder that tech solving problems is not automatic: we have to work for it.
Today I'll take a break from my break from twittering and do another twitter AMA.
Feel free to ask questions about any crypto or non-crypto topic. People I follow can reply (to minimize spam), everyone can quote, I'll check both!tauday.com
@AISafetyMemes One big reason my p(doom) is not higher is that I am unconvinced of fast takeoff and the "there is no fire alarm for AGI" thesis (I know fast takeoff is not a prereq for doom, but it's a big push in that direction!)
If I get convinced of those things, my p(doom) goes up.
@trentmc0 @AISafetyMemes ... which invariably implies ideas with varying degrees of spookiness, eg: brain-computer interfaces, swapping specific components of brains, brain uploading, etc.