Assembler

8. I liked altcoins before altcoins were cool. See this from Sep 2013 (so, 2 months before Ethereum): bitcoinmagazine.com/business… Three core arguments: (i) diff chains optimize for diff goals (ii) costs of having many chains are low (iii) need outlet in case core dev team is wrong

I got to see the limits of this style of thinking through my work on collusion: vitalik.ca/general/2019/04/0… vitalik.ca/general/2020/09/1… Basically, the problem with pushing everything into a formal system is that almost any formal system with more than 2 participants is attackable.

7. This 2014 piece on self-enforcing contracts: blog.ethereum.org/2014/02/24… Basically, it tries to argue that making all of society more like a formal system is good and we should be excited about it.

This reflects a broader intellectual evolution I've had: from "X is what I must defend, so whatever is favorable to X must be correct" to "I like X, but X has flaws and it seems like Y fixes them, so I support X+Y now" Soldier mindset --> scout mindset. amazon.ca/Scout-Mindset-Peri…

6. In 2012, I was briefly an apologist for PoW energy waste. Though fortunately, by 2013 I got excited about proof of stake as a promising alternative. By 2014, I was sold. bitcoinmagazine.com/business… bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/… blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25…

The core enabling technologies are committees, ZK-SNARKs and data availability sampling: vitalik.ca/general/2021/04/0…

Happy new year! Today, a mini-tweetstorm of some of the things I've said and written over the past decade, and what I think about those subjects today.

4. Though I 100% stand by my comment that "the internet of money should not cost more than 5 cents per transaction". That was the goal in 2017, and it's still the goal now. It's precisely why we're spending so much time working on scalability. reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5i…

5. I should also add that the core *idea* of sharding has survived unscathed. Blockchain 1.0: each node downloads everything, have consensus BitTorrent: each node downloads only a few things, but no consensus Ideal: BitTorrent-like efficiency but with blockchain-like consensus