Vitalik's Debut Chinese AMA: Democratic Values from Ethereum's Perspective
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Vitalik's Debut Chinese AMA: Democratic Values from Ethereum's Perspective
The goal of Ethereum is not to be a currency, but rather to explore what else can be achieved with blockchain technology beyond currency.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsCompilation: Kaori, BlockBeats
Editor's Note: On January 31, YouTube channel TechLegislator Ge Ru Jun • Dr. Pao invited Ethereum co-founder Vitalik for a fully Chinese-language interview, with the second part released on February 7. In the first episode, the host and Vitalik discussed the significance of democracy to Ethereum and how Ethereum achieves democratic processes. In the second episode, they explored various voting systems and how these can help reach consensus. Topics also included the Zuzalu experiment, Zupass, Quadratic Funding mechanisms, and the future of democracy and technology. BlockBeats has compiled key insights from Vitalik during the program for readers. For those wishing to listen to the original audio, please refer to the following links: Episode One, Episode Two.
Q: As Ethereum's co-founder, what does democracy mean to you? What is the relationship between democracy and blockchain?
Vitalik: Bitcoin was the first blockchain system. Its initial goal was to create a digital payment system plus digital gold. But Satoshi Nakamoto actually invented two things: one was the payment system that created a valuable asset from scratch on the internet, and the second was blockchain technology itself.
This reminds me of a Swiss Army knife—this single tool contains ten or twenty different functions, but it’s still limited. If you want another new function, you need to buy a new knife. But there’s a better way: creating a blockchain with a general-purpose programming language. That’s when I started diving deeper into this direction, leading to the Ethereum whitepaper.
The purpose of Ethereum isn’t just to build another currency. Rather, it explores what else we can do with blockchain beyond money. Even some of our co-founders didn’t come from Bitcoin into blockchain. So I see Ethereum as Bitcoin plus a general-purpose technical language—an open-source file with shared storage capabilities.
We can think about blockchain differently too. Open-source philosophy has existed for forty years, but twenty years ago the idea was simple—you could run open-source files on your own computer. But most interesting collaborative human activities today haven’t yet been integrated with open source because of persistent centralization issues—whoever controls the server holds all the power.
Blockchain principles are based on decentralization—ensuring no single company, individual, or small group controls what we’re building. When we aim to create complex applications beyond currency, a key question arises: How should such an application be upgraded? We’ve been exploring various democratic methods—can users collectively govern the application?
Many people associate democracy only with nation-states, but democracy is actually a widely used concept in many contexts—for example, social media interactions are also a form of voting. There’s macro-democracy and micro-democracy. In fact, both blockchain ecosystems and social media platforms, as well as large-scale politics, require different forms of democracy.
Q: Are there any real-world examples within Ethereum-related open-source projects where democracy has been practically implemented?
Vitalik: I have a blog, and for many years my articles were posted in two places: one on the traditional website vitalik.ca, and another on vitalik.eth using Ethereum’s ENS domain and the decentralized IPFS storage system. Last month, I discovered that vitalik.ca was no longer accessible. After investigating, I found out the hosting company had shut down.
What I built depended entirely on another company—if that company disappears, so does my content. But with ENS, it's a smart contract: I publish a hash representing my homepage link; and on IPFS, my homepage exists as a link. The actual webpage content resides on IPFS. Although IPFS isn't a blockchain, its technology is similar. With just one node, this content can remain accessible for centuries.
In the realm of public goods, shared infrastructure needs continuous development. For instance, Ethereum’s protocol keeps improving—from PoW to PoS, gas costs have dropped by at least a thousandfold. The benefits of upgrading blockchain protocols are enormous. But two challenges arise: First, if improvements are needed, who decides and implements them? Ethereum has EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals)—so who determines which EIP gets adopted? Second, researching, developing, testing, and securing each EIP requires many developers and substantial resources. Currently, hundreds of people work on these tasks. They need salaries—where does that funding come from?
Initially, both aspects were relatively centralized—myself and a small core team decided testnet versions. But now, many others participate. The Ethereum Foundation, a non-profit organization, initially raised 60 million ETH through a sale—users could buy 2,000 ETH with one BTC. Then 12 million ETH went to the foundation and early developers, while the rest came from mining.
The foundation received a lot of Bitcoin initially, but BTC prices crashed shortly after, nearly wiping out our reserves within a year. Fortunately, ETH’s price rose significantly around that time.
At first, everything relied solely on the foundation. Now, however, many independent organizations contribute. Today, approximately five client implementations exist for Ethereum’s protocol rules—some teams receive support from the foundation, while others operate completely independently. ConsenSys, one of the earliest major companies building on Ethereum, now supports two clients. About one or two years ago, Arbitrum acquired a client development company.
Now, diverse individuals and funding sources back different teams. So even if the foundation dislikes you—or I dislike you—you can still apply to other supporters to join Ethereum’s core ecosystem development. This reflects a gradual democratization of the ecosystem.
Today, many companies run their own experiments on Ethereum. Layer 2 project Optimism runs an experiment called RetroPGF—a form of sponsorship program—but unlike traditional grants where you submit a proposal asking for funds before doing work, RetroPGF rewards contributors *after* they've already delivered value.
Q: Can you tell us about Zuzalu?
Vitalik: This was an experiment I conducted last year in Montenegro. Over the past five to ten years, some people have discussed ideas like creating new cities or even new nations. Balaji’s book Network State sparked interest, and many are curious—but I noticed lots of talk and little action.
So I decided to run an experiment: bring together 200 people from different fields—some Ethereum developers and researchers, some from biosciences, and others passionate about governance. These individuals lived together for two months in Montenegro, a small Eastern European country, forming a Pop-up City—a temporary city. It turned out quite interesting. One of our goals was to deploy technologies we love within such temporary communities.
One example is Zupass, a zero-knowledge proof-based identity system. With Zupass, you can prove you're a community member without revealing your name. Zupass has two components: one allows scanning a QR code, and the other is an online component enabling login to websites. For instance, a voting site could allow anonymous voting while ensuring each person votes only once. This technology could be applied to social media to prevent account bans and fake accounts.
Born in Montenegro, Zupass is now being adopted by many other projects—it has become genuinely usable. I believe zero-knowledge proofs will play a crucial role in future freedom and openness.
Q: What role do you envision technology playing in the real world? Some suggest future elections could use zero-knowledge proofs, but others say that’s too far-fetched. Could you offer a vision or direction?
Vitalik: I agree we don’t need to start with the largest applications. Instead, we could begin with universities, non-profits, or similar domains using Quadratic Funding (QF) mechanisms—"funding public goods through donations and matching funds, encouraging contributions to public projects while considering both donor count and donation size"—to implement practical pilots, observe outcomes, and gradually scale up.
Technology has advanced to the point where we can seriously consider real-world deployment. Five years ago, zero-knowledge proofs barely existed in practice—they were purely academic concepts. For example, when Zcash launched in 2016, generating a transaction proof took two minutes on a computer. Now, we can generate proofs in three to five seconds on a smartphone. In the past five years, user experience has improved dramatically. Developer experience has also evolved greatly: before 2021, building a zero-knowledge proof project required deep cryptography expertise. Today, numerous tools let developers write code and automatically generate proofs.
Technology continues to improve rapidly, so now is the time to explore where in government or public services we might conduct large-scale experiments. Areas include public goods funding and digital identity. Once we take the first step successfully, we can plan the next. Long-term, I’m very optimistic.
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