Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
I guess I started an accidental AMA on which parts of the crypto space are good and which I'm so far not excited about, along with other big picture vision questions: https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1827583576751181961 You should feel free to ask questions here too! Let's see if Farcaster can come up with higher-quality questions than the other app :)
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tldr (tim reilly)
@tldr
“If we get lots of people using USDC, that creates a situation where it becomes easier for people to move to other more decentralized stablecoins too.” ^ this is a good specific example where a partial compromise of decentralized principles (one of the primary things you don’t support) seems very useful for spreading decentralized systems as a whole, and therefore seems net good. (I would argue that Coinbase is another, on a pretty large scale. But this is not an uncontroversial topic within the deep crypto space.) Do you have any heuristic for when compromises to decentralized principles go too far?
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
My main worry is when they start entrenching network effects that become hard to undo. For example, if we start normalizing "sign in to this crypto social thing with Google", I think that's really bad, UNLESS it's done in an account-abstraction way where under the hood it's using zk-email and individual users can sign in with their ethereum account instead (and convert their account from one to the other). This way, it's not entrenching network effects of centralized web2 platforms, it's actually creating a bridge that lets users join the ecosystem with them, but then more easily migrate away from them.
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Wilson Cusack
@wilsoncusack
Even with ZK-email I worry about giving Google or whoever custody of the signing key, re DKIM.
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
Yeah this is unavoidable unfortuantely. I think the right tradeoff is: The wallet should have a signing key (or multiple signing keys with different permissions), and an M-of-N guardian setup For new users, do 1-of-1 zkemail, because a google (or other email) account is the thing they have already, and the risk that google betrays them is lower than the risk that they will screw up with any kind of key self-custody solution. For more advanced users, give the option to set their own guardians, which could be either keys that they self-custody, or some zk-email-like wrappers around various centralized IDs, or other people, or a mix of all three.
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
(I've been betrayed by google once, betrayed by mismanaging self-custody once, and betrayed by badly-designed MPC solution once ... I don't think any of the risks are zero)
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phil
@phil
Can you say more about mismanaging self-custody? What’s the failure mode - losing one of the shards?
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
Losing the key, at a time when it did not yet enter my usual backup protocol because it was recently generated.
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