Vitalik Buterin Says Artificial Intelligence Could Straighten Out Ethereum’s Biggest Technical Risk

February 20, 2024 The Daily Hodl

Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin on Tackling Deepfake AI Risks: ‘Ask Security Questions’

February 12, 2024 Bitcoin.com

Ethereum-Based Altcoin Explodes As Vitalik Buterin Says Project Is ‘Super Important’

January 3, 2024 The Daily Hodl

Ethereum Leaps As ETH Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin Shares Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Simplification Proposal

December 28, 2023 The Daily Hodl

Bitcoin maxis vs. multichains: Two opposing visions of crypto’s future

December 4, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Vitalik Buterin thinks AI may surpass humans, community responds

November 28, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

Members of the AI and blockchain community have shared their views on the concerns posted by the Ethereum founder; some concur, while others disagree with the points laid out by Vitalik Buterin.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin’s blog post highlighting the threats he sees artificial intelligence (AI) could pose to humanity has attracted many fiery responses from AI and blockchain community members.

On Nov. 27, Buterin published a blog post titled My techno-optimism, which discussed how AI is “fundamentally different” from other inventions like guns, airplanes and social media. Furthermore, Buterin explained that it could develop a new form of “mind,” which could work against humans and become the new apex species.

The blog post attracted discussions on various fronts and sparked different sentiments on X (formerly Twitter). Some voiced their agreement with the Ethereum founder, while others shared their criticisms of the post.

An X account called Emergent Perspective, which focuses on events in the internet age, replied that they agree with Buterin’s thoughts on the blog post. According to the X user, people who argue that positive intentions can guarantee that AI “can do no harm” scare them. “That has been true of absolutely nothing in human history, and this will not be the first exception,” they added.

I'm with @VitalikButerin on this one.

The only people whose opinions on #AI scare me are the people who argue that "Positive Intentions = guarantee that AI can do no harm."

That has been true of absolutely nothing in human history, and this will not be the first exception. https://t.co/BVGwPjIbMg
— Emergent Perspective (@_emergent_) November 27, 2023

Another X user expressed other worries about AI. A community member who goes as “Wei Dai” on X said that one of their concerns is that AI may inherently disfavor defense, decentralization and democracy. According to the user, AI could accelerate the “wrong intellectual fields,” and humans pushing against it may not be enough.

Not everyone agreed with Buterin’s sentiment. Another community member criticized Buterin and claimed that technology specialists like Buterin “seem to have a complete disregard or immature view” of human psychology. The community member argued that the motivation behind building “morally poor” human experiences is always money. The X user urged the community to understand both things and people and not just one or the other.

the problem with Vitalik's post imo:
he has a predefined idea of 'humanitarian values'
but i dont think those are a priori
i believe the values come after and with the tech

cfr horse-carriage riders when the motorcar made its intro

in general i think he's a gud guy tho https://t.co/6ZWjWT9fdZ
— 0xBlixa (@0xBlixa) November 28, 2023

Meanwhile, a community member also argued on X that one of the problems with the blog post is Buterin’s predefined idea of humanitarian values. The community member explained that these should not be predefined and must come after and with the technology.

While many expressed their agreement and disagreements, others simply sat on the fence, saying they look forward to participating in humanity’s collective effort to find the answers.

Magazine: Real AI use cases in crypto, No. 1: The best money for AI is crypto

CZ, Buterin, Dorsey top crypto social media popularity charts as SBF clings to 10th place

November 21, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Changpeng Zhao

MicroStrategy co-founder Michael Saylor and Cathie Wood, the founder and CEO of ARK Investment Management, complete the top 5 rankings for most followed crypto entrepreneurs on social media.

A mix of highly influential and controversial entrepreneurs make up the latest list of the ten most popular crypto entrepreneurs based on their social media presence, with Binance CEO Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao leading the pack in first place and convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried trailing

The top 10 list was compiled by CoinLedger after shortlisting CryptoWeekly’s 30 most influential people in cryptocurrency in 2023, combined with their respective social media followings to determine the most widely followed crypto personality worldwide.

Sitting at the cool kids' table with CZ are Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Twitter co-founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey, occupying the top 3 spots, in that order. In CoinLedger's study, CZ emerged as the most popular personality in cryptocurrency, with nearly 9.1 million followers on X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram combined.

Buterin and Dorsey followed CZ with combined Twitter and Instagram followers of 7.7 million and 6.4 million, respectively.

*The 10 most popular personalities in cryptocurrency. Source: CoinLedger*

MicroStrategy co-founder Michael Saylor and Cathie Wood, the founder and CEO of ARK Investment Management, sit in 4th and 5th place respectively. Saylor has around half of Dorsey’s following at nearly 3.25 million, while Wood has just over 1.6 million followers.

Venture capitalists Chamath Palihapitiya and Marc Andreessen reached 6th and 7th place with 1.6 million and 1.3 million followers, respectively. Digital Currency Group CEO Barry Silbert and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong nabbed the next two spots with 1.25 million and 1.2 million followers.

The last ranking in the list was bagged by Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of the defunct crypto exchange FTX. SBF still has a following of 1.06 million across X and Instagram, even a year after the FTX collapse.

*Gained followers, following, and tweets graphs for @SBF_FTX. Source: Socialblade*

During the FTX implosion, SBF’s overall followers increased from roughly 780,000 to over 1.1 million and have settled at the 1 million mark ever since, according to Socialblade data.

Magazine: Breaking into Liberland: Dodging guards with inner-tubes, decoys and diplomats

Ethereum layer 2’s will continue to have diverse approaches to scaling — Vitalik Buterin

October 31, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin pens an analysis of Ethereum’s layer-2 ecosystem, highlighting diverse approaches to scaling the smart contract blockchain.

The Ethereum layer-2 ecosystem is likely to continue evolving with diverse technological approaches, according to co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

The co-founder of the smart contract blockchain unpacked the current landscape of Ethereum’s scaling ecosystem on his personal blog, with several layer-2 protocols differing in their approaches to bring greater scaling capacity, lower costs and increased security.

As Buterin highlighted, Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) rollups pioneered by Arbitrum, Optimism, Scroll and more recently, Kakarot and Taiko, have drastically improved the respective security of their solutions.

Different types of layer 2shttps://t.co/ry4VTtWhJ1
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 31, 2023

Meanwhile, “sidechain projects” like Polygon have also developed their own rollup solutions. Buterin also highlights “almost-EVMs” like zkSync, extensions like Arbitrum Stylus and zero-knowledge proof pioneers Starknet as important players driving scaling technology for the ecosystem:

“One of the inevitable consequences of this is that we are seeing a trend of layer 2 projects becoming more heterogeneous. I expect this trend to continue, for a few key reasons.”

Buterin notes that some projects currently existing as independent layer 1s are looking to bring themselves closer to the Ethereum ecosystem and potentially become ecosystem layer 2s.

This type of transition remains difficult, as an “all at once” approach would cause a decrease in usability given that technology is not at a stage where it can be completely included in rollup technology. Meanwhile, postponing such a transition runs the risk of “sacrificing momentum and being too late to be meaningful.”

Buterin also notes that some centralized, non-Ethereum projects want to give users greater security assurances and are looking to blockchain-based solutions. Historically, these types of projects would have looked to “permissioned consortium chains” to achieve this:

“Realistically, they probably only need a “halfway-house” level of decentralization. Additionally, their often very high level of throughput makes them unsuitable even for rollups, at least in the short term.”

Lastly, Buterin considers non-financial applications like games and social media platforms that want to be decentralized but do not need high levels of security. Highlighting a social media use case, Buterin notes that different parts of the app would require separate functionality:

“Rare and high-value activity like username registration and account recovery should be done on a rollup, but frequent and low-value activity like posts and votes need less security.“

He adds that a chain failure leading to a user’s post disappearing would be an “acceptable cost,” while a similar failure leading to the loss of an account would be far more serious.

Buterin also notes that the costs associated with paying for rollup fees might not be acceptable for non-blockchain users, while previous blockchain users are used to paying far higher prices for on-chain interactions.

*An excerpt from Buterin’s latest blog post on the Ethereum ecosystem titled “Different types of layer 2s.” Source: vitalik.eth.limo*

The Ethereum co-founder then delves into the trade-offs between different rollup solutions and systems that offer varying scaling capabilities to the ecosystem. The “connectedness” to Ethereum hinges on the security of withdrawing to Ethereum from layer 2s and the security of reading data from the Ethereum blockchain.

Buterin notes that high security and tight connectedness are important for some applications, while others require something looser in exchange for greater scalability:

“In many cases, starting with something looser today, and moving to a tighter coupling over the next decade as technology improves, may well be optimal.”

Ethereum’s next scheduled hard fork is set to introduce EIP-4844, commonly referred to as “proto-dank sharding.” The EIP is expected to drastically increase the amount of data availability of the network. Buterin also notes that improvements in data compression enable greater functionality.

Magazine: Ethereum restaking: Blockchain innovation or dangerous house of cards?