V God's AMA Highlights: Are Rollups a Good Thing or a Vampire for Ethereum? What is the ultimate narrative of ETH? Progress of 3.0...

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin (V God) was invited to conduct a text AMA interview with Mable Jiang, Chief Revenue Officer of FSL on the community media platform Tako yesterday (19). In this interview, V God provided detailed responses to several questions of concern to the community, including Ethereum's positioning and L1 vs L2. (Previous context: Vitalik: I once wanted to give up Ethereum! Do retail investors in the crypto world think 'meme gambling' is the best, will I be happy?) (Background: EthereumPectra upgrade will be launched in March, Vitalik: can double the capacity of Layer 2! Gas Limit increased for the first time in the PoS era) Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin (V God) was invited to conduct a text AMA interview with Mable Jiang, Chief Revenue Officer of FSL on the community media platform Tako yesterday (19). In this interview, V God provided detailed responses to several questions of concern to the community, and the key points are summarized below. Question: Is the current Ethereum closer to BTC, or does it exist as a world computer? What is the ultimate narrative of ETH? V God: I think these two ways of thinking are compatible with each other. If you need to distinguish which Blockchains are 'truly Decentralized', you can have a simple idea: if its foundation disappears, can the chain survive? I feel only BTC and Ethereum can answer this question clearly: of course. Most of Ethereum's development is outside the foundation, and client teams have independent business models. Now, many researchers are not in the foundation, and almost all activities are independent except for Devcon. It was very difficult to reach this stage, which Ethereum didn't have five years ago. It's a big mistake to give up these advantages for the sake of TPS, because there will always be new chains appearing with suddenly higher TPS than yours. But Decentralization and resilience are valuable, and few Blockchains can achieve this. These features are conducive to creating a digital currency with long-term value and to building an excellent world computer. However, the world computer also needs to solve the scaling problem. The meaning of 'world computer' is not 'a computer that can support every application in the world at the same time', but 'a place where global applications can interact with each other'. High-performance computing can be placed in L2, no problem. But this structure still needs L1 to have sufficient scale. The specific details can be found in an article I recently wrote. ETH is suitable for global applications (including finance, as well as others such as ENS, etc.) as a digital asset. ETH also doesn't need every transaction to be on L1, but it needs sufficient throughput so that anyone who wants to use L1 can occasionally use L1. So these two directions are also compatible: helping Ethereum achieve better world computer features, and making ETH a better digital currency. Question: In the past few years, where did rollups perform better? What's different from the expectations? Overall, are rollups good for Ethereum or do they suck L1? Does Ethereum really need L2? V God: Ethereum needs hybrid L1 + L2. So far, our scaling method can be understood as hybrid L1 + L2, but I don't think there is a clear enough definition of which transactions should be on L1 and which should be on L2. 'Putting everything on L2' is a difficult answer to accept, because: It's easy to lose the position of ETH as a medium of exchange, store of value, etc. on L1. If you are worried that L2 will take away L1 users without giving anything back to L1, this problem will be more serious in the case of 'L1 hardly doing anything'. Operations across L2 still need L1. If an L2 has problems, users still need a way to move to another L2. So there are some situations where L1 is difficult to avoid. I wrote an article about this topic here. 'Putting everything on L1' is also a difficult answer to accept, because: If L1 supports too many transactions, it is easy to become centralized, even with technologies like ZK-EVM. The world's demand for on-chain transactions is unlimited, no matter how high L1's TPS is, there will always be an application that needs more than 10 times the TPS (such as artificial intelligence, micro payments, micro prediction markets, etc.). L2 is not just for scaling, L2 can also provide faster confirmation speeds through preconfirmations, and can also avoid MEV problems through sequencers. So we need hybrid L1 + L2. I think the role of L2 will continue to change, for example, it seems that EVM-equivalent L2 is already sufficient now, and we may see more privacy-focused L2 (such as aztec, intmax, etc.), and there may be more application-specific L2 (if an application wants to control its own MEV situation, there are benefits here). So in the short term, I think we should continue to improve L1's ability, increase blobs to give L2 more space, promote interoperability across L2, and then the market will decide which scaling method is suitable for which application. Question: The rollups roadmap has been proposed for a long time, but due to the inability to truly resist censorship, do you think that the current centralization of sequencers like Arbitrum, Base, and OP is a major challenge for future regulation? Do you think they will move towards a Decentralization sequencer solution? If your answer to the previous question is yes, then how do you view the centralization sequencer solution of MegaETH? V God: Centralized sequencers also have many advantages. Centralized sequencers actually have many advantages: Centralized sequencers can ensure that user funds are not stolen through methods like frontrunning. Instant preconfirmations. It is very easy to turn a traditional application into a Blockchain application, because the server directly becomes a sequencer. The risk of centralized sequencers can be avoided by utilizing the Decentralization features of Blockchain: the forced inclusion mechanism does not allow sequencers to censor users, and the optimistic or zk proof mechanism does not allow sequencers to change or violate the rules of the application. But centralized sequencers still have risks, so we cannot rely solely on centralized sequencers to solve the problem. The ability based on rollup or trading directly on L1 is also very important. So I support the simultaneous promotion of these two parts of the ecosystem, and then we can see which method is more suitable for which application. It is crucial to maintain the ability for ordinary users to make censorship-resistant transactions. Question: What are the differences between the technical roadmap of ETH 3.0 and the goals it hopes to achieve, and the goals of the rollup era announced at Devcon in November last year? ...