Vitalik Buterin wants to ‘make Ethereum cypherpunk again’

According to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, The blockchain’s “cypherpunk” goal was mainly ignored when cryptocurrencies started to overly financialize the network in or around 2017. One of the network’s founders, Vitalik Buterin, believes that Ethereum must rekindle the “cypherpunk” revolution that was once imagined for the blockchain in its early stages. Ethereum intended to “public decentralized shared hard drive” that could take benefit of decentralized file storage and peer-to-peer messaging, according to a blog post by Buterin published on December 28. However, this vision started to wane in 2017 when Ethereum started to become more financialized.

Cypherpunk Values and Vitalik Buterin’s Optimism

The values of “cypherpunk” include decentralization, open participation, opposition to censorship, and credible neutrality. Buterin is still hopeful about the potential for non-financial applications to succeed on the blockchain and wants to see a strong return to Ethereum’s future.

He pointed out how some of these cypherpunk ideals might still upheld by rollups, zero-knowledge proofs, account abstraction, and second-generation privacy solutions, all of which have become increasingly common.

A “cypherpunk” accesses computer networks using encryption to protect their privacy, particularly from government agencies.

Buterin also wants to see more cypherpunk-type activities on Ethereum, such as taking part in polls without disclosing one’s identity and adopting techniques like quadratic voting and cross-tribal consensus finding to enable groups to manage themselves.

Buterin acknowledged that “it is very possible to build things within the crypto ecosystem that do not follow these values,” mentioning a few examples.

Illustrate the creation of a nonfungible token ecosystem by keeping NFTs on a centralized website rather than utilizing a decentralized file storage system like IPFS. Construct a highly centralized layer protected by multi-signature encryption with no intention to modify. Moreover, Buterin added more details to this, he said “One might design a staking interface that unnecessarily directs users toward the largest staking pool currently in place”.

“Resisting these pressures is hard, but if we do not do so, then we risk losing the unique value of the crypto ecosystem, and recreating a clone of the existing web2 ecosystem with extra inefficiencies and extra steps.”

 However, Buterin expressed gratitude for how some of the sector’s major issues have resulted in innovative solutions.

He pointed out that while maximum accessible value exploiters have been able to lessen the severity of sandwich attacks on Ethereum users, Cowswap, Flashbots Protect, and MEV Blocker have helped decentralized exchanges offer a remedy to hacks on centralized exchanges.

On December 28, Buterin suggested that by lowering the number of signatures validators must provide to maintain network uptime, the Ethereum proof-of-stake chain may made lighter and easier to understand.