Vitalik Buterin, ethereum’s inventor, has given an extensive interview for the Chinese audience on June the 22nd at the Wang Feng’s Ten Questions show.

He said although Hybrid Casper is now designed in alignment with how full casper with sharding will look like, it may still launch before sharding. Buterin said:

“The new roadmap is still ‘Casper then sharding’, but the first version of Casper is modified so that it is ‘along the way’ to a full Casper and sharding implementation.”

He provided no time estimates of when either might be expected, but as the design requires one to be both a casper and a sharding validator, we would think both would have to be finalized before either comes out.

What is more interesting, perhaps, is Buterin’s view on fund recovering forks, similar to the Slockit DAO fork in 2016. He said:

“At this point, I think it is very possible that ethereum will never see any more coin recoveries, because there are enough cases that are politically contentious that any attempt to set a bar will lead to people just below the bar complaining that they were not included.

Though it is also possible that when we move to sharding, there will be some kind of one-time ‘cleanup’ of the public chain that will restore funds to as many people as possible. That said, I do not think it is my place to make that decision or even heavily influence it.”

A wholistic recovery of funds that have been frozen due to a bug or accidentally has been suggested some time ago, but it hasn’t quite gone anywhere so far.

The matter would of course need to be publicly discussed and it might even require a vote, with most probably having in mind Parity’s multi-sig bug that froze 500,000 eth, which itself probably makes it quite controversial.

Yet Buterin is only saying such cleanup is “possible,” and sharding won’t be out for some months, but what is more of a present concern for many is the accredited investors rules which prohibit all from investing in promising start-ups and any other non-publicly traded company unless they are very rich or a bank.

Buterin made it quite clear that he would rather there was no such rule, stating:

“I personally am willing to publicly say that I find current accredited investor rules of many countries, which allow only millionaires to invest in securities, very unfair and plutocratic, and in some cases they can make things actually worse because they mean regular people can only buy in at higher prices and thus more easily become victims.”

Buterin himself received $100,000 from the Peter Thiel Fellowship in 2014. The interviewer seems to think that was raising money, but it was a grant freely given with no equity taken.

Buterin says he did not interact with Thiel much despite receiving the grant, but he further adds:

“I have talked much more with the people that work for his projects, like the Thiel Foundation, Mithril, etc. I know our philosophies have differences; I talk about decentralization, he talks about how great it is to build monopolies.”

He further implicitly criticizes the current Venture Capital (VC) fundraising methods by stating:

“I personally think it is very unhealthy when startups see their main business model as being VC followed by a hope of acquisition by a big company.

It creates something closer to a centrally planned command economy than a freemarket, because the incentives are set by a small group of big companies, and not the customers.”

In other remarks, he said EOS was running on ethereum for a year and no one could do anything about it, but would a competitor be sure that Block Producing supernodes would allow them to run on EOS, he wondered.

Grandma would be very upset if she finds out her pension funds have been invested in Tron, he said. That was as an example to spice his general opinion that pension funds should stay out for now, with the comment being preceded by him stating:

“I expect that over the next few years the industry will stabilize, and we will see fewer new tokens issued and more projects that pay more attention to providing value, and there will be more correlation between fundamental value and price.”

Apparently in China they call him VGOD. Kids. Maybe that’s because he probably spent at least 200 hours playing World of Warcraft:

“I had a level 80 mage and level 80 warlock, a level 73 paladin, and many others that I have since forgotten. I haven’t played in nearly eight years.”

So this was in 2010, which would make him around 15. At that time apparently he managed to get to the max level that can be reached in the game, with it then becoming boring presumably.

Thank god, otherwise we might have never had an ethereum world computer and instead might have been left with some fantasy sports wiz kid.

Perhaps ironically, however, gaming has risen as one popular use case for ethereum’s blockchain, but that of course needs more capacity which is very much a priority going by most of the interview’s technical aspects focusing on sharding and casper as well as Plasma, state channels, and so on.

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