Vitalik Buterin & Gavin Wood

Jam introduction

Polkadot's original vision was to be like a sharded Ethereum with heterogeneous shards. In other words, a scalable multi-chain system

The shards bring scalability, and heterogenous shards allow specialization for different purposes. But the main problem is ersistent fragmentation of state.

So Gavin introduced Jam, a "less opinionated version of Polkadot" :

• It removes the requirement of having multiple heterogeneous chains/shards
• It doesn't dictate how computation should be organized across persistently fragmented state

The "selfish" narrative (4:00)

A selfish narrative is useful to create a community :

• Bitcoin's selfish narrative: Getting wealthy by being early adopters
• Ethereum's selfish narrative: Being part of an intellectual hub with smart people

Community with core values is key early on, but if the tech only supports one way, it creates a community convinced that's the only right way

Technology enabling that community is also important. The "General purpose platform" narrative avoided Ethereum from pigeonholing into one way of doing things.

Ethereum community may need to adapt to reach wider userbase, and Vitalik's efforts for Layer 2s is an attempt to answer this.

Question now : what are the right community and tech choices for this decade ?

Does conflict breed community ? (8:30)

Arguments for :

• Famous conflicts like Geth vs Parity, Ethereum vs Ethereum Classic, etc. attracted involvement
• People tend to get involved when they have something to fight for
• Competition and debates create motivation to develop better solutions (e.g. SegWit with Bitcoin's blocksize wars)

Arguments against :

• Ethereum's strength came from lack of internal strife/opinionation
• Too much opinionation and conflict can lead to unproductive forks

Neutral points :

• Having more than one option fosters productive discussions (e.g. wallets, DeFi apps)
• The chain/ecosystem must remain neutral to have sane competition

Too little debate leads to lack of motivation, but too much competition creates cost of duplicated work

Interplay between Layer 1s (13:30)

Different legitimate approaches can co-exist and learn from each other. Ethereum and Polkadot share underlying narratives/values despite different paths

Projects with vastly different values target different markets, reducing direct competition. This motivated Vitalik's shift towards specializing Ethereum Layer 2s in different directions

Gavin can't imagine one single path achieving all goals optimally. As long as costs aren't too high, multiple paths are needed

Competition between vastly different values (e.g. Bitcoin vs Ethereum) is maximally acrimonious on social media but minimally competitive in practice. Maybe they aren't truly competing for the same goals/markets

On-chain governance, Off-chain governance and both (18:30)

Gavin believes base layer tech should be kept minimal and opinionless, while Vitalik thinks Ethereum has generally done well with its off-chain approach

That said, Vitalik is interested in adding some formalized DAO-style governance elements :

• Not direct on-chain voting hooks, but better public signaling tools
• Using coin voting, proofs of personhood/participation, etc. for value-driven polls
• To steer things in a more democratic direction beyond just core dev consensus

Even though the base layer tech itself need not be autonomously upgradeable, there should be clear rules for governing base layer evolution.

Governance implementation is not a binary choice. The main goal is that decentralization should happen in social governance as much as validator decentralization

Decentralizing leadership/expertise (24:45)

Writing formal specs helps decentralize expertise from a single coder. Having multiple equal reference implementations prevents over-reliance on any one (like in aerospace industry)

Gavin wants to mechanize this approach with Jam - no "primary" implementation

Need for crypto-economic incentives to ensure expertise remains decentralized. Not just for validator sets, but also for protocol knowledge/development

Decentralizing the "idea layer", aka the people discussing the project's vision. For now, Ethereum's vision is still quite concentrated. We need a developer base and consensus/research layers more decentralized from Vitalik

Vitalik wants to accelerate broadening the group discussing big-picture vision, and get more voices on Ethereum's role and the world they are trying to create

Finding the right incentive (30:55)

Early demo stage can get grants/funding, but scaling up is expensive ($100M+). There is a gap between early "communist bubble" and later reliance on tokens/VCs. Aligning incentives is essential to bridge this chasm

Another approach is market-based : let the market decide value and allocation, as central planning cannot optimally allocate resources for unknowable innovations. But this implies a permissive ecosystem allowing value capture

• Early stage funding is for experimentation without high expectations
• Later stage funding is for significant value capture if providing value

We need a balance between providing runway and aligning incentives for scale. The problem is, bridging the incentive gap between early experiments and sustainable, scalable projects remains an open challenge.

Crypto should embrace the niche (38:20)

There is a relatively low adoption of blockchain/crypto technologies despite significant investment and effort.

For Gavin, it remains a highly technical and financial product, which is not relevant to most people who have zero technical or financial needs/backgrounds.

The natural target market for crypto technology is inherently the "non-average" people. Crypto targets people and situations that are not well-served by existing institutions, such as international payments and developing countries.

In developing countries like Argentina or South America, traditional banking systems and financial services are inadequate or lack resilience.

Web3 technologies, including crypto, offer resilience compared to traditional systems, which is valuable in areas with higher noise, corruption, or less functional structures.

So the crypto space should embrace its natural target market of underserved and non-mainstream users. By improving the technology, infrastructure, and user experience, more of these valuable long-tail use cases can be captured.