If you are curious Vitalik Buterin about the problems faced by the blockchain, created five years ago, in response, he will quickly give a lecture, do not skimp on Ethereum-specific terminology. But if you ask about his role in the future of the project, it will behave more discreetly.
There is no doubt that the 24-year-old Buterin remains a landmark for the community of Ethereum. This week thousands of developers, investors and entrepreneurs gathered in Prague’s Devcon IV, an annual event held under the auspices of the Ethereum Foundation (non-profit organization that supports the development of the Ethereum Protocol).
The most discussed topic was the concept of Buterin called Ethereum 2.0, the implementation of which in the future should make the platform more scalable and attract a wider audience of users. In an interview with MIT Technology Review on the sidelines of the Devcon Buterin said he now is the time to recede into the background as is necessary for the development of the community.
Why? Put simply, it is really a decentralized system has no single component whose failure would be able to destroy it. In this respect, the influence Buterin could potentially have negative consequences. According to him, now this is changing, partly due to natural growth of the community, but also because of his deliberate attempts to reduce its role. Referring to comments on Twitter, he said:
I think people really see it. There was even one comment, which explicitly said, like, wow, it seems that the community really works and not just rely on a few responsible people.
Hudson Jameson from Ethereum Foundation recognizes that Buterin not make decisions in many aspects. According to him, this is what is really important for the development and decentralization of the Ethereum ecosystem.
This transition occurs at the critical platform-a time when developers are struggling to overcome a number of difficult technical hurdles standing in the way of more widespread adoption of Ethereum. Buterin for many years he headed the research project, aimed at implementing the ambitious plan for the transition from energy-intensive consensus algorithm Proof-of-Work to alternative Proof-of-Stake. He also played a leading role in the development of such new techniques like sharding or Plasma, which will allow networks to handle a much larger volume of transactions, partly due to the elimination of the need to include each of them in the blockchain.
All of these improvements must be submitted to Ethereum 2.0 — specification, in which Buterin played an important role. However, according to the programmer, his involvement in the project was “significantly smaller proportion of the work than he did two or three years ago.” Vitalik adds that the decline in its influence — “this is something we certainly have made great progress.”
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