GENERAL

2021 May 25 Blockchain voting is overrated among uninformed people but underrated among informed people; 2021 May 23 The Limits to Blockchain

Scalability

AN INCOMPLETE GUIDE TO ROLLUPS In general, my own view is that in the short term, optimistic rollups are likely to win out for general-purpose EVM computation and ZK rollups are likely to win out for simple payments, exchange and other application-specific use cases, but in the medium to long term ZK rollups will win out in all use cases as ZK-SNARK technology improves. WHY PROOF OF STAKE (NOV 2020) There are three key reasons why PoS is a superior blockchain security mechanism compared to PoW. PoS offers more security for the same cost. The easiest way to see this is to put proof of stake and proof of work side by side, and look at how much it costs to attack a network per $1 per day in block rewards.. GPU-based proof of work WHY SHARDING IS GREAT: DEMYSTIFYING THE TECHNICAL PROPERTIES Special thanks to Dankrad Feist and Aditya Asgaonkar for review. Sharding is the future of Ethereum scalability, and it will be key to helping the ecosystem support many thousands of transactions per second and allowing large portions of the world to regularly use the platform at an affordable cost. THE LIMITS TO BLOCKCHAIN SCALABILITY Special thanks to Felix Lange, Martin Swende, Marius van der Wijden and Mark Tyneway for feedback and review. Just how far can you push the scalability of a blockchain? THE MOST IMPORTANT SCARCE RESOURCE IS LEGITIMACYSEE MORE ON VITALIK.CA AN APPROXIMATE INTRODUCTION TO HOW ZK-SNARKS ARE POSSIBLESEE MORE ON

VITALIK.CA

UNDERSTANDING PLONK

Special thanks to Justin Drake, Karl Floersch, Hsiao-wei Wang, Barry Whitehat, Dankrad Feist, Kobi Gurkan and Zac Williamson for review. Very recently, Ariel Gabizon, Zac Williamson and Oana Ciobotaru announced a new general-purpose zero-knowledge proof scheme called PLONK, standing for the unwieldy quasi-backronym "Permutations over Lagrange-bases for Oecumenical Noninteractive QUADRATIC PAYMENTS: A PRIMER EIP 1559 AND FEE STRUCTURE Claim: acceptable short-run limit is higher than acceptable long-run limit In Ethereum, 12.5m gas blocks take ~200 ms to process on average

GENERAL

2021 May 25 Blockchain voting is overrated among uninformed people but underrated among informed people; 2021 May 23 The Limits to Blockchain

Scalability

AN INCOMPLETE GUIDE TO ROLLUPS In general, my own view is that in the short term, optimistic rollups are likely to win out for general-purpose EVM computation and ZK rollups are likely to win out for simple payments, exchange and other application-specific use cases, but in the medium to long term ZK rollups will win out in all use cases as ZK-SNARK technology improves. WHY PROOF OF STAKE (NOV 2020) There are three key reasons why PoS is a superior blockchain security mechanism compared to PoW. PoS offers more security for the same cost. The easiest way to see this is to put proof of stake and proof of work side by side, and look at how much it costs to attack a network per $1 per day in block rewards.. GPU-based proof of work WHY SHARDING IS GREAT: DEMYSTIFYING THE TECHNICAL PROPERTIES Special thanks to Dankrad Feist and Aditya Asgaonkar for review. Sharding is the future of Ethereum scalability, and it will be key to helping the ecosystem support many thousands of transactions per second and allowing large portions of the world to regularly use the platform at an affordable cost. THE LIMITS TO BLOCKCHAIN SCALABILITY Special thanks to Felix Lange, Martin Swende, Marius van der Wijden and Mark Tyneway for feedback and review. Just how far can you push the scalability of a blockchain? THE MOST IMPORTANT SCARCE RESOURCE IS LEGITIMACYSEE MORE ON VITALIK.CA AN APPROXIMATE INTRODUCTION TO HOW ZK-SNARKS ARE POSSIBLESEE MORE ON

VITALIK.CA

UNDERSTANDING PLONK

Special thanks to Justin Drake, Karl Floersch, Hsiao-wei Wang, Barry Whitehat, Dankrad Feist, Kobi Gurkan and Zac Williamson for review. Very recently, Ariel Gabizon, Zac Williamson and Oana Ciobotaru announced a new general-purpose zero-knowledge proof scheme called PLONK, standing for the unwieldy quasi-backronym "Permutations over Lagrange-bases for Oecumenical Noninteractive QUADRATIC PAYMENTS: A PRIMER EIP 1559 AND FEE STRUCTURE Claim: acceptable short-run limit is higher than acceptable long-run limit In Ethereum, 12.5m gas blocks take ~200 ms to process on average

GENERAL

2021 May 25 Blockchain voting is overrated among uninformed people but underrated among informed people; 2021 May 23 The Limits to Blockchain

Scalability

A PREHISTORY OF THE ETHEREUM PROTOCOL After a mini-hackathon between Gavin, Jeff and myself, PoC9 was launched in March, and was intended to be the final proof of concept release. A testnet, Olympic, ran for four months, using the protocol that was intended to be used in the livenet, and Ethereum's long-term plan was established. QUADRATIC PAYMENTS: A PRIMER Special thanks to Karl Floersch and Jinglan Wang for feedback. If you follow applied mechanism design or decentralized governance at all, you may have recently heard one of a few buzzwords: quadratic voting, quadratic funding and quadratic attention purchase.These ideas have been gaining popularity rapidly over the last few years, and small-scale tests have already been deployed: PREDICTION MARKETS: TALES FROM THE ELECTION The main response my Twitter friends gave to this was that blockchain-based markets are highly niche, and very few people, particularly very few people who know much about politics, have easy access to cryptocurrency. FAST FOURIER TRANSFORMS The algorithm runs a loop going through every coefficient and does one thing for each coefficient, so it runs in \(O(N)\) time. Multi-point evaluation involves doing this evaluation at \(N\) different points, so the total run time is \(O(N^2)\).. Lagrange interpolation is more complicated (search for "Lagrange interpolation" here for a more detailed explanation). THE TRIANGLE OF HARM It gets more challenging when we move to talking about two other kinds of attacks - liveness faults, and censorship. A liveness fault is one where a large portion of Casper validators go offline, preventing the consensus from reaching finality, and a censorship fault is one where a majority of Casper validators refuse to accept some transactions, or refuse to accept consensus messages from STARKS, PART 3: INTO THE WEEDS 59, 146, 30, 297, 278, 191, 307, 40 You could have gotten this list by doing something like , though there is a smarter way that works for much larger moduluses: first, identify a single primitive root mod 337 (that is, not a perfect square), by looking for a value x such that pow(x, 336 // 2, 337) != 1 (these are STARKS, PART I: PROOFS WITH POLYNOMIALS Special thanks to Eli Ben-Sasson for ongoing help, explanations and review, coming up with some of the examples used in this post, and most crucially of all inventing a lot of this stuff; thanks to Hsiao-wei Wang for reviewing EXPLORING ELLIPTIC CURVE PAIRINGS This is a mirror of the post at https://medium.com/ @VitalikButerin/exploring-elliptic-curve-pairings-c73c1864e627. Trigger warning: math. One of the key

VERKLE TREES

Verkle state trees Use a Verkle tree to store the state Easy to provide witnesses for stateless nodes Witness verification can be done within a few hundred milliseconds Vitalik Buterin's website

About

POSTS

* Apr 30, 2020

GITCOIN GRANTS ROUND 5 RETROSPECTIVE

* Mar 21, 2020

A QUICK GARBLED CIRCUITS PRIMER

* Jan 28, 2020

REVIEW OF GITCOIN QUADRATIC FUNDING ROUND 4

* Dec 26, 2019

BASE LAYERS AND FUNCTIONALITY ESCAPE VELOCITY

* Dec 24, 2019

CHRISTMAS SPECIAL

* Dec 7, 2019

QUADRATIC PAYMENTS: A PRIMER

* Nov 22, 2019

HARD PROBLEMS IN CRYPTOCURRENCY: FIVE YEARS LATER

* Oct 24, 2019

REVIEW OF GITCOIN QUADRATIC FUNDING ROUND 3

* Oct 1, 2019

IN-PERSON MEATSPACE PROTOCOL TO PROVE UNCONDITIONAL POSSESSION OF A

PRIVATE KEY

* Sep 22, 2019

UNDERSTANDING PLONK

* Aug 28, 2019

THE DAWN OF HYBRID LAYER 2 PROTOCOLS

* Jun 12, 2019

SIDECHAINS VS PLASMA VS SHARDING

* May 12, 2019

FAST FOURIER TRANSFORMS

* May 9, 2019

CONTROL AS LIABILITY

* Apr 16, 2019

ON FREE SPEECH

* Apr 3, 2019

ON COLLUSION

* Apr 1, 2019

CANTOR WAS WRONG: DEBUNKING THE INFINITE SET HIERARCHY

* Dec 5, 2018

A CBC CASPER TUTORIAL

* Nov 25, 2018

CENTRAL PLANNING AS OVERFITTING

* Aug 26, 2018

LAYER 1 SHOULD BE INNOVATIVE IN THE SHORT TERM BUT LESS IN THE LONG

TERM

* Aug 7, 2018

A GUIDE TO 99% FAULT TOLERANT CONSENSUS

* Jul 21, 2018

STARKS, PART 3: INTO THE WEEDS

* Apr 20, 2018

ON RADICAL MARKETS

* Mar 28, 2018

GOVERNANCE, PART 2: PLUTOCRACY IS STILL BAD

* Dec 17, 2017

NOTES ON BLOCKCHAIN GOVERNANCE

* Dec 14, 2017

A QUICK GASPRICE MARKET ANALYSIS

* Nov 22, 2017

STARKS, PART II: THANK GOODNESS IT'S FRI-DAY

* Nov 9, 2017

STARKS, PART I: PROOFS WITH POLYNOMIALS

* Oct 17, 2017

ON MEDIUM-OF-EXCHANGE TOKEN VALUATIONS

* Sep 14, 2017

A PREHISTORY OF THE ETHEREUM PROTOCOL

* Jul 27, 2017

A NOTE ON METCALFE'S LAW, EXTERNALITIES AND ECOSYSTEM SPLITS

* Jul 16, 2017

THE TRIANGLE OF HARM

* Jun 22, 2017

ON PATH INDEPENDENCE

* Jun 9, 2017

ANALYZING TOKEN SALE MODELS

* May 8, 2017

ENGINEERING SECURITY THROUGH COORDINATION PROBLEMS

* Mar 14, 2017

HARD FORKS, SOFT FORKS, DEFAULTS AND COERCION

* Mar 11, 2017

A NOTE ON CHARITY THROUGH MARGINAL PRICE DISCRIMINATION

* Feb 1, 2017

ZK-SNARKS: UNDER THE HOOD

* Jan 14, 2017

EXPLORING ELLIPTIC CURVE PAIRINGS

* Dec 29, 2016

A PROOF OF STAKE DESIGN PHILOSOPHY

* Dec 10, 2016

QUADRATIC ARITHMETIC PROGRAMS: FROM ZERO TO HERO

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