Q&A with Vitalik Buterin on state of Ethereum and future of regulations

I recently did a fireside chat with Vitalik Buterin in San Francisco. The reason why I hosted the panel with Vitalik is that I believe the industry needs a correction of course, as too much money comes too quickly. I feel too much focus is on the price of crypto and not on executions of projects. I’ve got to know Vitalik for over a year and see him as guardian of Ethereum. In fact he gave me the nickname “Crypto Congressman,” which now becomes my mandate in Taiwan’s Parliament. I invited Vitalik for a deep conversation to express his concern and give an update on the development of Ethereum. It’s important to think the force driving cryptocurrency shouldn’t just be money-seeking, but rather we should think how blockchain technology will bring about a fundamental shift in the way our trust system is built.

Below are the questions I collected for the fireside chat with Vitalik. I used some of them and skipped some and merged the similar ones. Questions are mostly contributed by Blockchain at Berkeley Club, Origin Network and online forums.

Forbes’s Rachel Wolfsan did a writeup here.

Taiwan’s techblog INSIDE ran a translation piece here.

Also, from Taiwan, Blocktempo did a piece by adding some correpsonding policies by recent annoucement of FSC. Another tech blog Blockcast did one as well.

Here are the questions:

1. It has been several years since the release of Ethereum and yet we still don’t have any major dapps on Ethereum. What will it take for Ethereum to see dapps that actually have a significant number of users?
2. What do you hope to see from the blockchain space before the end of 2019?
3. What would the blockchain community like to see from regulators? To be specific, what would a perfect technology and finance sandbox look like to you?
4. What are your thoughts on the security tokens trend? Why would having a security issued on blockchain actually be beneficial versus the traditional method?
5. You wrote a great article on stable tokens in 2014 and an incredibly funny post about the WTF parody token earlier this year. What are your thoughts on the current stable token landscape and the multitude of different stable tokens being created right now? Do you see there being one token to rule them all or rather a multi-stable coin universe.
6. Given that this past year has been scalability and protocol focused and the easy answer for next year is security tokens/ tokenized commodities, what else do you see that’s new rising for 2019?
7. As the community has focused on projects that are years from delivery, how do you think we can incentivize and make actual impact in places that need crypto like Venezuela ?

From Origin

1. There were rumors a few months ago that Google was trying to hire you. I take it you’re in town for your job interview? ;)
2. When you first started Ethereum, did you have any idea of what it would become today?
3. Why is Ethereum important to you? To the world?
4. Besides money, what are the most compelling use-cases for blockchain technology?
5. Decentralized marketplaces, stablecoins, privacy coins, decentralized exchanges — which of these do you see getting mainstream adoption first? And what are the barriers stopping us from getting there?
6. How do we scale from ~15 transactions a second to millions of transactions a second? Casper, State channels, Plasma Cash — which of these scaling solutions is going to move the needle the most?
7. How is progress coming along with the transition to proof of stake? What’s the timeline for when we should expect to see it in the wild?
8. Explain Merkle trees to me as if I were a five-year-old.
9. Let’s talk about gas prices… they’re predicted to hit $4 / gallon here in SF this summer! ;) You’ve been working on a new paper about Blockchain Resource pricing (just pushed commits to it today!). Can you tell us a bit about that?
10. What is your most controversial belief? What is something you believe that most people in this room probably do not?
11. You recently tweeted “A very large portion of “gig economy” startups are at the core basically just a dispute resolution system, a reputation system and a search engine. If you’re looking to build a decentralized version of one, maybe consider focusing on one component.” What are your thoughts on decentralized “gig economy” marketplaces? Any particular ideas you find most compelling?
12. What are Token Curated Registries? When are they useful?
13. You tweeted back in 2016 (and recently retweeted) that “cryptocurrencies get *much* more value from their development.

Open for everyone’s feedback and your response is welcome.