Vitalik says a lot of work was done in the 2010s, but at the same time the crypto space remained quite small, and if we look even today at the status quo of Ethereum usage, in many places very few people have found uses for it. for Ethereum outside of digital monkey trading. So the number of use cases people can see in many contexts is not very large, but in many other places many people have already found uses for Ethereum, Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and blockchains , and in many countries around the world. Worldwide, more than 10% of people use and hold it for their personal savings, and for many people even today, cryptocurrency is a lifeline. So in many places, many people have found uses for Ethereum, but they largely use centralized exchanges because CEXs are cheap, convenient, and protect users from errors. This is the status quo today. But sometimes centralized exchanges fail. So if we want a truly robust crypto ecosystem that actually delivers on its promises, Vitalik says we need to have true decentralization. But why don't we yet have real decentralization? He says it's because decentralized technology isn't good enough, and that's basically what Vitalik is really hoping for and a lot of people are really working towards solving the problem over the next 10 years.
Vitalik goes on to highlight the big problems with Ethereum, saying the problems are pretty much the same as 5 years ago in 2017: privacy, consensus security, smart contract security, and scalability, but we have some solved one (consensus security), since Ethereum moved from proof of work to proof of stake. He says another thing people might notice is that 5 years ago he focused a lot on smart contract security, and here he focuses more on user account security, because at At the time, it was still much less clear what types of apps people wanted to use. and today it's still a little fuzzy, but a lot more categories have become quite well defined, and right now it's a lot easier to do the things we want to do just by reusing code, User account security continues to become even more important. He believes that user account security is still not good enough today and even hardware wallets are, in his opinion, far from a perfect solution, and one of the things he realized over the over the years is that the true core use cases of Ethereum are actually very important. So without user account security, nothing else really works.
Vitalik continues to talk about the remaining 3 issues. The first is fees and scalability. He says the demand for using Ethereum has grown significantly over the past 10 years, but in general Ethereum L1 hasn't increased scalability that much and the problem is fundamental. But we're making progress: about 3 years ago, Vitalik wrote an article talking about the idea of an Ethereum roadmap focused on rollups, and rollups are systems that aren't inside the blockchain but who use the blockchain for security and only provide lighting. little data in the blockchain, and the rest of the data and all the calculations are done off-chain. And once The Merge was complete, all the published work to make scalability work made huge strides. EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding) is a feature of the Ethereum protocol whose goal is to create more space on the chain so that rollups have much more space to store their data, and with full danksharding, the rollups will have even more space. Vitalik also explains the other two issues, which are security and privacy of user accounts, as well as the progress made and the solutions proposed to resolve them. You can learn more about Vitalik's ideas on these 3 issues via his presentation at EDCON 2023!
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