In the latest podcast Into the Ether, Vitaly Buterin discussed the Ethereum control model. Eric Conner (Eric Conner) asked Buterin about the control model of the Ethereum blockchain.
Buterin replied that the current Ethereum control model works quite well, given the problems that were described in the protocol.
In fact, I believe that the control of Ethereum is now underestimated. We can not take a cool name and advertise it. And, frankly, moderation is less exciting for people than voting in a chain, maximum attraction of coin owners or immutability. We as a community have never rushed to extremes. But in fact, on the one hand, people complain about management as a process. On the other hand, from the point of view of the concrete results that the control of Ethereum has achieved, it has been done really well.
Implemented emission reduction. Reducing emissions seems to be what most people agree with. When the DOS-attack took place in 2016, we managed to implement, go through, compose, test and deploy the hard fork for 6 days. This is not what we want to repeat, but this is clearly what we can do if the need really arises.
When a bug was found in Constantinople, we managed to hold the fork in a few hours. This is really an accomplishment of what you want the protocol to be managed. The only thing he doesn’t achieve is resolving disputes or recovering funds or something like that in this category. And the rest, what management has not achieved, is decentralized financing of public projects.
Buterin said both of these things can do more harm than good. In the context of resolving disputes and refunds, he says that you open a Pandora’s box. Where can you draw a border if transactions lose their immutability? He also says that decentralized financing of public projects can easily be contrived - in an anonymous context you cannot distinguish between the rich owner of Ethereum or someone who legitimately wants to do good.
Later in the podcast, Buterin spoke about privacy in Ethereum. He said that he is currently working on a patch that will complicate the definition of whether the same wallet interacts with several decentralized programs. The host claims that he uses different Ethereum wallets for each dApp that he uses as a way to protect his privacy. Buterin agreed that confidentiality is paramount to the long-term viability of Ethereum.
When it comes to financing the development of Ethereum, Buterin is in favor of allowing wallet developers to charge 1 gvei for a transaction made through their software. He says it will bring in $ 2 million a year, which is much more than nothing. Despite other financing opportunities for development in the long run, he believes that there is only one option: "so-called inflationary financing."
If financing is insufficient, the only option is the so-called inflation financing. I watch Zcash carefully as an alternative. The Zcash community has a very similar vision with Ethereum in many cases, but they are ready to be more active in somewhat more centralized decision making. They decide where 20% of the Zcash inflation fund goes. And while the inflation fund went only to the fund Zcash and other developers. And I know that they are interested in other things. I would be against going straight to some kind of centralized organization. I would personally advocate for something like this, but only to pump money into something like Gitcoin.
Another important result from the interview is that Buterin considers the current size of the blockchain of Ethereum as a serious problem in moving forward. He believes that only two large-scale solutions are viable in size of the blockchain.
One of them is a change in the way smart contracts exist for the stateless model. The other charges the smart contracts for rent when they commit transactions based on storage. However, according to him, the latter option has a serious vulnerability to attack.
