#1 - Vitalik Buterin on Starting New Countries, Upgrading Ethereum, and Improving Yourself

My number one advice... is to be intentional about the social environment and to have friends that help you bring out the virtues that you want to see in yourself.

NFTs are probably the one thing that I did not predict, by the way. If you look at the list of applications that were in the Ethereum Whitepaper, and you look at the applications that are popular today, the big thing that's in the second list and not the first is NFTs.

One of the reasons why so many people end up moving to California is that California is, like, literally the only place in the mainland US that has what a lot of people would call a pleasant climate.

Sending a transaction and waiting for it to get included back in 2019 was a very frustrating experience. And today, it's like, click, wait, and check Etherscan, it's done ... Very often, a transaction gets included within only a few seconds. I think, probably, you get a 50% chance after sending a transaction that it'll get included in less than about 7 seconds or so.

There core devs really are these kind of unsung heroes of the ecosystem. And they tend to be more introverted, and they tend to be less 'podcasty' than, you know, myself or Justin. But they've just done a lot to make... the Ethereum clients faster, and to really enable, like, let's say, the 7x capacity increase that the chain has had since it launched.

The other thing that, I've talked to the roll-up teams... They want to start taking off training wheels. So, the roll-ups and layer 2s that exist on Ethereum today, they basically all have what I call training wheels—some kind of backdoor that lets developers come in and say stop and change the protocol if they see that some kind of bug has happened.

What would be nice is a world where there was something approaching complete anonymity for small transactions and... very high privacy for medium transactions but where larger transactions... don't necessarily have that same level of privacy.

One thing that I think network states and social networks have in common is that, especially with just to be able to get them started, it's not about the institutions; it's not about the technology; it's about the people.

Learning and motivation are very social. Being really successful in those things actually depends on having the right social environment.

One of my lessons has been the importance of learning by doing. If you just read and listen, it's just so easy to kind of go in one ear or one eye and out the other.

2023 is going to be the year when roll-ups really come to maturity. We have 4844 that gives roll-ups more space, and we have the training wheels on roll-ups really get weakened a lot.

The cost difference between being in the US and being in basically any other country is getting to be pretty significant at this point.