Survey Spotlight #3: Vitalik Buterin
Welcome to Survey Spotlight, where we take responses to the
ETHGlobal developer survey and expand them into a blog post.
Spotlight #3 features Vitalik Buterin and a few of his survey responses.
Vitalik is the inventor and one of the cofounders of Ethereum. Currently, he works with the Ethereum 2.0 (Serenity) team as a protocol researcher.
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When the lightbulb goes off and you have a great idea for something to build, what are your next steps?
Write a spec for it!
Where do you usually hear about word-of-mouth technology trends?
Usually either in person or in online discussions with developers or on twitter.
Where do you publish or get validation for your side projects?
What is the most valuable non-Ethereum conference you have attended or would like to attend?
Outside ethereum but within crypto, Zcon. Outside crypto entirely, Economics and Computation 2018 was very valuable in improving my understanding of the economics community and what econ people are thinking about.
What is the last technological development that got you pumped and where did you discover it?
Efficient range proofs inside PLONK. Heard it from the PLONK team.
What is the best tutorial you’ve ever worked through?
I occasionally come across very good tutorials on technical topics, eg. this one on bulletproofs was excellent.
Where do you go for general tech news?
Twitter, reddit, news.ycombinator.com, sometimes specific blogs, and also discussions online and offline with other people.
How did you first learn about Ethereum?
A friend told me.
What aspects of Ethereum made you excited enough to get more involved?
Greater individual freedom, the technology is interesting, the people in the community, positive impact on the world, censorship resistance, decentralized finance.
Were there any aspects of Ethereum that turned you off at first?
I thought it could never work.
Who within the Ethereum ecosystem has helped you the most? How?
There’s too many to count. Early on, the contributions of Jeffrey Wilcke and Gav Wood on the development side, and Vlad Zamfir on the research side, were crucial. Joe Lubin’s contributions to developing the ecosystem on the application side at an early stage was also immensely valuable. Many local community leaders helped a lot in building out the Ethereum ecosystem, there’s too many to name at this point.
How would you convince a developer friend that Ethereum is worth checking out?
Depends on what their interests are! Someone interested in the tech aspects would have a different path from someone interested in social implications, and even there there is a lot of variation.
What do you currently use Ethereum for in your day to day life?
- ENS (eg. my name on Status)
- Payments (including privacy preserving via tornado.cash)
What do you think is the best way for a developer to get involved with Ethereum?
- Try building an application, going through the whole process (writing a contract, building an interface). This gets you acquainted with how the platform works and feels
- Go to a hackathon, meetup or other event to get acquainted with the community.
Have you ever rage quit a decentralized application? Why?
I sold all my BSV as soon as it split off from BCH; but not sure if BSV counts as decentralized :(
If you hosted an Ethereum meetup, what would be the theme/structure?
For theme, either new tech or applications, along with some discussion about broader questions about what ethereum is for and where it’s going, depending on what and who is available.
For structure, we should consider more interactivity. I really like ethereum magicians’ “anyone can join the circle” approach for example.
If you wanted to see if someone has already built something you were thinking about creating, how would you do so?
Search for it online, ask other developers in chats, or ask publicly on ethereum forums or twitter
If you had 3 months everything-paid-for but you had to build something interesting related to Ethereum, what would it be?
Some form of decentralized social network that uses ZKPs to achieve interesting combinations of privacy and persistent reputation.
Have you ever had a goose-bumps moment with Ethereum? Like that moment the lightbulb goes off and your mind races with implications and possibilities. What was it?!
Learning about recent improvements to ZKPs was a big one! Realizing that we could actually put SNARKs and polynomial commitments in a lot of places very soon made me realize that a lot of things will be possible in eth2 quickly.
What “intangible” elements attract you to ethereum?
Very intelligent and interesting people.
What do you think will cause the next 10x growth of Ethereum developers?
At this point, our ability to get many more people into the ecosystem on hype and anticipation alone has hit its limits; large portions of the world know about crypto. The next wave will have to come from some applications that make ethereum clearly and obviously useful to people.
If you could show the world one great Ethereum demo or experience what would it be?
Interpreting the question as “what current ethereum applications are most effective as a great demo to show people”
Possible options: status, DAI, decentralized websites via ENS+IPFS, Sablier, Forbes’s “pay in crypto” option
What do you think is your biggest blind spot in Ethereum development?
There’s certainly plenty of sub-communities doing important things that I am less close to than I would like. One year ago this was eth1.x, though this has since improved. Now it’s possibly some types of application developers.
Thank you Vitalik for your perspectives and taking the time to fill out the survey. 🙏
Join the rest of the Ethereum dev community and share your perspective here.