Vitalik Buterin

The Programmable Cryptography CLS hosts a series of talks exploring how advanced cryptography can reshape digital infrastructure beyond blockchain and trust infrastructure. 
SCHEDULE: 10:00–10:20 AM, Justin Glibert / 10:20–10:45 AM, Vitalik Buterin / 10:45–11:10 AM, Albert Ni / 11:10–11:35 AM, Barry Whitehat / 11:35 AM–12:00 PM gubsheep

Breakout 3

[CLS] Programmable Cryptography

A one-day summit focusing on the theme of d/acc: emphasizing the values of decentralization, democracy, differential accelerated progress, and defensive tech including crypto security, public epistemics, bio defense,  neurotech/longevity, decentralized ai and physical resilience.

d/acc closing panel

Vitalik Buterin, Founder of Ethereum, opens Devcon with a comprehensive overview of Ethereum’s evolution as a decentralized “world computer,” explaining its layer 1 trust machine and layer 2 scaling solutions for security and scalability, emphasizing improvements in decentralization and client diversity, and encouraging developers to build innovative applications that leverage Ethereum’s robust and evolving ecosystem.

Main Stage

Keynote: Ethereum in 30 minutes

One of the core themes of this panel is how Programmable Cryptography synergizes with Ethereum. Panelists will discuss questions such as ''Why have we not been able to do everything we've wanted with Ethereum?'' and ''Why have certain kinds of applications - from decentralized social to decentralized games to decentralized finance - not been able to reach their full potential with only consensus technology?''

Programmable Cryptography and Ethereum, Panel

Proof of personhood panel

 Hello, hello. Great. So we just had a nice overview of the three protocols. And what I want to do in this small amount of time we have is just challenge each one. I think there's something to learn from each approach here and see if we can come to some greater synthesis. So I'll start with Remco. So Remco, I actually wrote a critique of proof of personhood. It's called Compressed to Zero, The Silent Strings of Proof of Personhood. And what I did is I looked at a parallel protocol to WorldCoin, a different authentication mechanism. But they had succeeded in verifying unique individuals through cognitive tests. And they had avoided the problem of account trading, which WorldCoin has had to grapple with because each account has money. And then, of course, there's an incentive to sell accounts early on and so that's something you're grappling with. They had solved that with this novel mechanism called sublinear identity staking, which I'm happy to talk to you about later. But they were still left with this information game theoretic problem around puppeteering, which is that when you have an account and it has monetary value, it has a UBI stream coming towards it, which is one of the goals of WorldCoin, you create incentives for other people to try to control those accounts and extract from them. And so the kind of pithy way to put it is when you try to differentiate humans from bots and use UBI incentives, you actually create an unintended consequence of humans trying to control other humans as if they were bots, right? And so the control problem becomes an information problem, and it's an information game theoretic one. So I want to know how you think about this challenge, because there are two goals that are very explicit with WorldCoin. One is both UBI and a kind of rails for democratic governance and even maybe even AI alignment. But if ultimately, you know, pursuing both of those goals ends up in coalitions and oligopolies and basically politics, right? And one person, one vote breaks down very quickly in a coalition. It's like, how do you deal with that? How are you thinking about that? So we're at 16 million users now. 16? 8 million in the highest tier or verified unique human. And in the process of growing to this scale and being active in dozens, if not nearly 100 countries right now, you kind of see everything that people can throw at you. And while the vast majority of people is honest, there are some very dishonest actors out there and you have the Byzantine generals' problem of you need to make your system resistant against malicious actors. I think this is not, as you mentioned, this is for every proof of personhood primitive out there. There is this issue. As I said, proof of personhood is not a CAPTCHA. So there is this idea that you can delegate an account. This is not something I think we should prevent, but it is something that you need to give the user the tools to properly manage, which means that it needs to be explicit, it needs to be consensual, it needs to be revocable, and so on. So I think the emphasis is on developing those tools, empowering the user to control their world ID in the way that they want to control it. Blockchains as a whole are not particularly good at the moment at these kinds of things because a lot of decisions you make on chain are one-way streets. But there are a number of things we are already doing here, like allowing you to recover your account by going back to an orb. One thing we've rolled out that is very powerful is using the phone's front camera to do additional interactive face authentications to make sure that the wallet hasn't been stolen. It's still in the possession of the original human that signed up and so on Right Maybe I can Comment there directly so I made in this presentation my claim that I think this absolute identity They're actually not that many use cases for it and kind of just to give the extreme example Why I'm making this claim is let's say somehow North Korea does get hold of one of those orbs and and can can we are properly authenticate they're all there 25 million I'm not exactly sure how many people they have probably no one knows but 25 million people so let's just say in WorldCoin now you go from 8 million fully verified to now 32 but 25 of them are just people from North Korea where it's not even clear whether they have control of their key or probably it's somehow centrally organized that someone ultimately has full control of those keys. Now you have 32 million properly verified actual humans. The question is, for what application would that set be useful? So my claim is, in absolutely most applications, and probably actually this gas subsidy that you're doing is one of the few where I think it is useful, but in absolutely most applications, I would say you need more context than just being human. If you want to go even more extreme, we can think of this Matrix movie where they're literally, I mean, in the Matrix movie where they're literally farming humans, or it kind of has those farms of humans that basically just sit there and yes, they might have an eyeball, you might be able to scan that, but that's really not what you want. Right, and even just to add on, as long as there's money at stake, I mean, we have synthetic biology, it could also be just sort of synthetic eyeball forms to hack the system. Okay, hold on, there's like a couple different things going through each other here. Static eyeballs don't work because with biometrics it's critical that you verify that it's actually part of a real live human body. If you get possession of an orb and you abuse it, while the signup process between the user is absolutely anonymous and privacy preserving, the orbs themselves are not. Their behavior is public and there are methods you can use to actually revoke the fake accounts that might be... But there are no fake accounts. Okay actually revoke the fake accounts. But there are no fake accounts. Okay, that's the second part. If they are not fake accounts, then the system works as intended, in a way. And you make a very good point that proof of personhood is just a primitive, and you need a richer ecosystem of things around it. The example I like, a very simple one, is let's say you have an on-chain DAO. You want to implement one person, one vote. If you just do this and allow all of the world ID verified users to vote on this and your social community is only 5,000 people, you can easily get swamped. You don't have a very strong governance system that way. So you do need to incorporate this in more complex systems. Lascha? I 100% agree. Lascha? Can I add something? I kind of like... I get all the points, but I think like forgetting the orb or the eyes and stuff. So I agree that overall identities, and I don't believe in universal identities, because identities have to be built for the governance purposes. So we should come up with frameworks that increase the coordination quality among the humans and then decide the depths of the identity, how it should be built. When we talk about the proof of personhood, it has like two dimensions, right? One is the proof of uniqueness. And I agree for the real world and especially in multiple cases, just uniqueness proof and badge does not guarantee the quality of decision making or coordination. And then we have to rely on passports or like citizenship or the age or like all the other stuff. And the thing is that like if we, like for example for voting, refer to the passports, the dependency on these document is so big that we can generate the uniqueness based on data and we might not need any type of biometrics additional to it. And I think, in a way, that's the purpose of identity. So I don't believe in universal identities. I believe of defining whether we like fighting AI or we like fighting the misinformation stuff. The only systems that are dynamically evolving and improving are the ones that have this kind of fluid identity aspects and not just the universal ones. Like on the example of Twitter and the community nodes. So just labeling is just creating this very low barriers in terms of defining the permissions. What you can do or or you can't do as a human or not. And like you said, yeah, there's a kind of North Korea scenario. There's kind of a dystopian scenario where we might be like creating market, right, for the eyeballs and stuff. And like you got two kidneys, you got two eyes, and then what happens next, right? Well, what you raised is an interesting point about governance, right? Because in some sense, the point Martin was making is highlighting an enforcement problem, right? And this gets back to the information problem. Yeah. Right? And so even if you do succeed in authenticating unique individuals in North Korea, how do you actually enforce that? And what you're saying is, well, you need richer governance mechanisms. We need to express identity in different ways, right, as a complement. And if you just have that one identity system, ultimately enforcement would require surveillance. And, of course, surveillance results in everyone becoming informationally the same. So I want to shift gears, Martin, and poke a little holes at circles. I think it's a great experiment. But one of the things I noticed on your slides is, you know, you're talking about currency and money. I think of them almost as community currencies and like nested networks of cooperation building in a nation states and like, you know, even the globe. But, you know, not everybody in a community should receive the same amount, blood, sweat, and tears, and contribution. It shouldn't just sort of be like an hourly rate. That's another kind of UBI that has its own pitfalls because it's not tied to incentives. And you mentioned a 7% interest rate. These things seem arbitrary, and they don't seem to leverage incentives or people's voice, choice, and stake in a community. So how do you think about that? Yeah, I mean, should they receive the same amount? I would say if a bunch of people together comes together and decides to use something as money, then just that coordination effort to some extent creates value to whatever they decide is money. And I would argue that the fairest form of distributing this value that has been created by just this coordination effort would be to distribute it equally among those that join this coordination effort. Super important to understand that that doesn't mean that everyone needs to work for the same hourly rate or doesn't need, I mean, that's absolutely not the case. So it's just that the coordination effort is in a way or the benefit of that is equally distributed. Sorry, there was a second question that I... Just, you know, non-equal distributions within, you know, acknowledging that there's different levels of contribution. I believe it's the 7%. Yeah, 7%, right. So that is probably the only parameter in circles that has been set and that's therefore debatable. And yes, you could say every community should be able to set that themselves. That would make coordination much, much, much harder. Why? Well, because then you would need to, or in circles, it is meant to be so simple that I issue circles, and then I know I can kind of trust that other account. I can exchange my money to their money one-to-one because we are issuing under the exact same rules. If everyone could define their own rules it would be much harder to negotiate of how much should my money worth compared to yours. So I would say for a stable equilibrium, the goal of circles is to have the stable equilibrium where the exchange rates between circles are just one-to-one. The goal would be to say one circle is one circle, and it's kind of abstracted away the fact that under the hood, we have all those different... Just like in the dollar system right now, technically speaking, if you have a dollar at one bank and a dollar at another bank, those are not the same dollars. But the system is built in such a way that usually it feels like one-to-one because if everything goes well, you can exchange them one-to-one. But if it breaks, you will realize, oh, the dollar at the bank that just went bankrupt is different from the other one. But the US and Euro have floating exchange rates. Why can't you... Say again? The US and Euro have floating exchange rates. Oh, no, no, for sure, for sure. So, in circles, yes. I mean, the expectation is they are within a connected cluster, the exchange rate is one-to-one. But, yeah, there can be different clusters where within the clusters the exchange rate is one to one but between the clusters there are floating exchanges. Why not just rely on supply and demand? Well it will be I mean the price between those clusters will be defined by supply and demand and what we are actually supposing in our upcoming relaunch I'd say, or restart, or reactivation, it's a continuation of the system, is that people or groups can back their very own circles with reserve assets they want, Bitcoin, dollar, whatever they want, and then there will be a free floating exchange rate for those circles, so defined by supply and demand. But as long as people trust each other, then they are essentially creating additional one-to-one demand between those currencies. Maybe we need to go back to the identity topic. No, but you're expressing identity in a different way, and so I just want to dig on that. But I want to turn to Lasha now. So how do you see yourself and Rarimo in this constellation of identity protocols? What like differentiation do you see that you're bringing? I think we try to use the both sides of the world, such as passports as an instance first, but then extended with graph and capture more depths of the interactions. What I would say is how we try to solve the identity problem or enable the buildup is very use case centric and like I said, the identity problem or enable the buildup is very use case centric. And like I said, the governance centric. The fact that we understand this voting stuff has to be done that way, it gave rise to solving the uniqueness problem in a certain way. But this doesn't mean that the same uniqueness should be reused universally across other use cases. And so going at a primitive level of these kind of registries and the building blocks and having more like this kind of flexible framework, I think that's the way forward. And as well as we've seen mostly on the regulatory pressure or this kind of collusion risk, I think the permissionlessness and empowering of the users going forward should be this kind of collusion risk. I think the permissionlessness and empowering of the users going forward should be like this kind of core principle that no one should kind of violate or cross the line for. So we only have three minutes left. I want to quickly do one minute each on where, you know, AI is a part of identity is helping us leverage AI to communicate with each other, also to govern AI. So starting with you, Remco, where do you see the most immediate use case with WorldCoin in the near future? And world or world ID interfacing with AI will, you know, open AI, for example, grant free access if you have a world ID. What is the sort of immediate near-term goals on that interaction? I mean, I can't speak for open AI, but we do share some money in common, so we'll see what happens there. Regarding AI, I think we need to embrace the fact that it's going to be some sort of human-AI hybrid operator. I'm a big believer of AI is just making humans better versions of themselves. So this is why I think it's so important that you distinguish between a CAPTCHA and a proof of personhood, which are different primitives with different use cases. And we might not even be that interested in the CAPTCHA use case. What is going to be a very important problem is distinguishing real world sensory data from faked data and authenticity. I don't think proof of presence alone is a solution there, but I do think it can be an important part of a functioning solution that allows us to authenticate content and information. Lascha, any immediate applications? Yeah. In my world, I don't have this like us humans and AIs and kind of like the separate camps of the camp. I more see and question like, okay, what is the first thing? Like I own multiple AIs. So the first dimension is how do I control it so how do we build this my me my AI and identifying these relations and control and then zooming out like all the AIs of individuals or like the systems how do they coordinate and what are the mechanism for us so I don't know like lower down the computational capacity or shut certain things down and abstract them. This is the next level of governance problems that we should be figuring out. That's where the identity aspects will be born uniquely. Martin, I know you're thinking a lot about AI? Yeah, I think it's certainly good to have a robust identity framework in place that also is relational because, yeah, for the reason in the very beginning. So I like to see a version of something like Circles that's completely permissionless as a base layer built on this trust graph. But then, yeah, projects like DK Passport permissionless as a base layer built on this trust graph, but then projects like DK Passport or WorldID that can essentially provide additional attestations, what I would call it, to those open base layer identities can bring us a very robust system overall where humans can coordinate if necessary maybe against AI. Will each circle have its own AI agent? That's a good question whether AI agents will also use circuits or not. I don't know yet. They could. Alright, let's give them a round of applause everybody. Thank you.

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The d/acc Vision: Balancing Progress and Protection

 I will get straight into the one slide that I have today. So last year I wrote this post that introduced this concept of DIAC and in general was basically responding to a lot of the discussion that was happening at the time around techno-optimism, the need to be more optimistic about technology and to appreciate the very positive impact that technology actually has had over the past 10 millennia, and also the extremely positive potential that it has over the next century. And at the same time take seriously some of the risks and also really focus on which technologies are going to do the best possible job of giving us the kind of future that we want while at the same time minimizing and even actively fighting against the risks. One of the arguments that I made is basically that there is this important phenomenon which is the offense-defense balance, right? Basically is it easier to attack or is it easier to defend? And if you have an environment where it's easy to attack, then you almost inevitably have this kind of dark Hobbesian choice between a very powerful sovereign and a very destructive state of anarchy. And it just inherently creates all kinds of very bad political effects on top of creating constant ongoing risk of suffering, right? And at the same time, this is all happening under this backdrop of this discussion about is AI itself, and particularly super intelligent AI, this very big and massive risk? If it is, should we try to slow it down? But then if we do slow it down, then slowing it down forever basically just creates a world that becomes more and more unstable. And so what is the actually resilient and actually long-term stable future that we could be aiming for? And I think this to me is a near and mid-term part of the answer. So in the post that I made last year, I split up defensive technology into four categories. So the first split was the split between the world of atoms and the world of bits. So very famous distinction, might as well just grab it and use it. And within the world of atoms, split it up between macro and micro. And so macro defense, basically you think about physical resilience. And we'll have some very interesting talks later today, including topics on how to massively reduce casualties if some kind of extremely terrible disaster happens to humanity. Micro-defense basically means biodefense, so anti-pandemics. And both myself and a huge number of other really fascinating people will be talking about how we can make our environments vastly more resilient against actually existing and even potential pandemics all without requiring significant changes in individual behavior so you might be pleased to know that this room is actually already passively airborne disease resistant so for example over here you have this i mean box, and the box is HIPAA filter. We have a bunch of these all around the room. And so basically this room becomes vastly more safe against COVID, against any kind of future airborne virus that comes up without requiring anyone to actually notice. And this is one example of the kinds of open and widely accessible, easily deployable, and freedom-preserving technologies that we can deploy that can give humanity an orders of magnitude boost in its resistance against these kinds of threats. These are things that we are not doing today, and these are things that with a surprisingly low amount of investment we could actually do a much better job at. So then on the other side we have the world of bits. And the world of bits, this is a distinction that is I believe unique to me. But I talk about the distinction between cyber defense and info defense. Cyber defense is defense against threats where all reasonable people agree who the attacker is, right? So if a DeFi protocol gets hacked, then obviously the DeFi smart contract doesn't agree that it got hacked, because if it did, it wouldn't have sent any money out. But all reasonable people looking at the situation will agree that, well, yes, there is a hacker, or at the very least, someone who used a very unintended mechanism to get coins out of that system. And so we can talk about cryptography, we can talk about formal verification, blockchains, zero-knowledge proofs, what I call the Egyptian God Protocols, FHE and obfuscation, and also another important thing, hardware security, and actually deploying all of those technologies and actually even applying them at the level of operating systems and making sure that things are much safer than they would be today. And then info defense. So this is where reasonable people can actually disagree on who the attacker is. So one man's misinformation is another man's unjustly suppressed valid point and we need technology to actually help filter through this information and help people identify what kinds of content are more likely to be actually positive and what kinds of content are more likely to be misinformative, misleading, things that even they themselves, if they better understood it, would not want to see, and do so in a way that does not involve empowering a centralized elite that decides on behalf of everyone else what is good and true and what is bad and false. Now, that is all a vision of defense. I think one thing that is also important to talk about here is I added a third dimension in the year since then, right? And I call this the survive-thrive dimension. And here we talk about not just the technologies to protect against the bad stuff, but also actually enabling the positive future, right? So in the bio side, we have longevity. Who here is excited about longevity? So now longevity, and then beside longevity, we also have BCI, and BCI is kind of conveniently beside longevity and open decentralized compute, right? So on the left is making sure a compute is safe, or at the top, making sure a compute is safe. At the bottom is making sure a compute is amazing. And compute and biology together, we get BCI acceleration. And I think one of the really important points that we're going to make is that there's actually a lot of ties between these different spaces. It's all one very big integrated field. A lot of the viral persistence research that's being done in the context of long COVID right now actually has a lot of tie-ins that are very applicable to aging, right? So there's recent new theories that viral persistence actually is a thing that's a very big contributor to Alzheimer's. And then BCI, better medical technology, it contributes to fighting diseases, it can contribute to living longer under, quote, normal conditions, and it's also a BCI accelerator. Now, physical abundance. So we want the big silver punk cities, we want housing to be affordable. We want, you know, housing to follow Moore's Law instead of following Eroom's Law, for those who know what those are. And then, you know, we want to go to space. We want everything about our physical environments to not just be resilient but also be affordable and amazing. And finally, collaboration technology. So even in situations where people are not attacking each other, where you actually do have reasonable people and communities that have high trust between each other but they do want to be able to more quickly and more effectively agree on things and come to new consensus if we want agree on things and come to new consensus if we want decentralized collectives to like actually be able to act like life players and make bold choices and keep adapting themselves to rapidly changing circumstances without that collapsing into a dictatorship then much more powerful collaboration technology. So this includes all of the stuff we've been doing around public goods funding. It includes quadratic voting, other forms of voting, futarchy, all kinds of different governance ideas. So basically I think there are natural tie-ins at all sides of this between technologies that can create an environment where everything is much more safe and much more resilient by default and an environment where we have open, distributed and widely available progress for everyone. And so this is what all of the speeches that we're going to see today are going to be about. And I'm very excited to be with you and listen to them. Thank you. And so now I'll introduce our next speaker, Eli Dorado.

https://streameth-develop.ams3.digitaloceanspaces.com/transcriptions/67356cb99dbb7a90e15f86d1.vtt

This panel will dig into the delicate balance of Ethereum's rollup-centric future. We'll talk about the "frenemy" dynamic between competing L2 ecosystems, and how this can lead to a fragmented user experience. We'll strategize on ways to maintain diversity while making interoperability easy for users—including a discussion on the pros/cons of supporting standards like ERC-7683. Can we get the best of both worlds: the innovation and diversity of many L2s, with the UX of a unified Ethereum?

“Unified Ethereum” vs “L2 Ecosystem Competition”: Can we have both?

Visions of a Viable d/acc Biosafety Strategy

 Okay, so welcome to DEAC Biodefense. So I think I'll start off by just briefly recapping how the hell I even got here. Because basically, I started off being the Ethereum guy, and I'm historically not a bio person and more of a math and computer and economics person. I was definitely interested in longevity almost since the beginning. I read Aubrey de Grey's book, Ending Aging, back when I was 13, and that just really impressed me, both the sheer importance of solving aging, but also the fact that there is a roadmap to actually get us there. And so I was excited about longevity the whole time ever since. But then for DEAC Biodefense in particular, in 2021, there was this big meme coin mania that I'm sure you guys all remember. So first in 2016, there was Dogecoin, and Dogecoin went up really high. And then during the 2020-21 bubble, a bunch of people basically started like copycatting Dogecoin and making their own dog-themed coins and hoping that they'll go up to. And so some of these people decided as a strategy that they would put a large portion of their supply into my wallet balance and then publicly say Vitalik Buterin supports this coin, even though I never touched it. And some of these coins just like went up way higher than they should. And so one of those big coins was called Chiba Inu. There were also others. And I sold a bunch of them. And I donated some to a couple of organizations, one of which is Crypto Relief India. So at the time in India, there was this big COVID crisis that was happening. Lots of people were getting sick. It looked very bad from outside. It looked like no one was really caring about the situation, so I came in and donated to this group that originally Baljie introduced me to. First I donated a little bit, and I donated a amount of Shiba tokens that I thought would be worth a few million dollars at most, but then they ended up managing to cash out like literally $470 million dollars and so after that we yeah so 470 million ended up being like more than crypto and relief india needs for its whole roadmap and i was also started researching and understanding COVID and pandemic-related topics more heavily. And Balvi, between myself and some of my science advisors, basically slowly formed and ended up spending a significant chunk of that meme coin funding on basically moonshot topics that deal with all kinds of anti-pandemic related efforts in general. So biodefense is important, right? So compared to the natural environment, population density is way higher than before. Urbanization continues to increase. We have very easy worldwide air travel. In the best case scenarios, we might even have like rockets that will take us from New York to Bangkok in one hour but I mean Eli Dorado told me that like that's probably not going to be commercialized anytime soon because rockets are a little too dangerous but we have supersonic jets they might take us there in like four or five hours and so I expect air travel to just to be even more ubiquitous. Factory farming creates lots of pandemics, man-made pandemics so gain-of-function research

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