Rockstars and Casper: Takeaways from Ethereum Road Ahead 2018 Singapore

A few people who couldn’t attend the recent ‘Ethereum Road Ahead 2018’ talk by Vitalik Buterin in Singapore asked me to share my key takeaways, so I decided to put them down here. There are 4:

(Please read this with the caveat that I am not a technical developer, but more interested in the commercial and libertarian implications of this technology)

1. The road ahead for 2018 is focused on scaling Ethereum, better documentation, and more community-developed high-level programming languages to accelerate adoption.

2. Vitalik gave a status update on 3 key means of scaling:

(i) Moving to Proof of Stake for mining instead of Proof of Work:

(a) ‘We need to get away from so much energy consumption, like NOW!’. Apparently with PoW, Ethereum consumes as much electricity as Singapore!!?) not to mention the ‘egalitarian issue of having in reality one person control half of the mining power’ was simply not sustainable.

(b) ‘Casper FFG’ is the Proof of Stake protocol. FFG stands for ‘Friendly Finality Gadget’ — I’m not kidding, that really is the name. What’s next, ‘Nobby, the nice Node’ ? ‘Sally the sympathetic Shard’ ? Whatever the case, I for one am very pleased that the next generation of Internet protocols will be driven by people with a playful sense of humour. On Casper, Vitalik says they have a good solution that is ‘pretty close’ to implementation but also ‘not extremely close’ So timeline unclear there.

(ii) Plasma however is ready, attack-proof and some teams are already implementing: a way of recording transactions off-chain and then recording on chain later to increase transactions/second. Vitalik’s co-presenter Karl gave a high-energy walk-through of how Plasma works.

(iii) Sharding: a means to split the chain into multiple loosely coupled ‘galaxies’

3. ERC721 — in the Q&A there was further endorsement of the potential of non-fungible tokens and digital ownership.

4. Musings on the modern-day Rockstar: There was a genuine buzz and anticipation in the room for Vitalik’s appearance. Even though the event was announced last-minute, the room was packed. The MC warned the crowd that there would be no time for selfies as Vitalik had to leave immediately for another appointment. The people in the audience who showed up wearing Vitalik’s trademark Rainbow Llama T-shirt were probably disappointed. Having spent 4 years working in Hollywood, I have to say that there is an indescribable aura surrounding Vitalik similar to that of young actors/actresses whose star is rising. No, the thought of trying to get a selfie didn’t even cross my mind. Honest.