The cryptographic worldcomputer

We talk about Ethereum as "a blockchain", as though it isfundamentally the same technology as the Bitcoin that Satoshi Nakomotocreated back in 2009. In many ways it is, and in some ways even the"lean Ethereum" of the future that is being built along the lines of theStrawmap retains the core trappingsof a blockchain. But at the same time, the technology has evolvedgreatly over the last fifteen years, and is poised to evolve even moreover the next three - to the point where it becomes fair to call whatEthereum is moving towards a qualitatively different kind of system.

The Ethereum of today has general-purpose computation, proof ofstake, onchain applications using zero-knowledge proofs and L2s thatprovide scaling and privacy. The Ethereum of tomorrow will havecomputation with a tunable dial between extreme scale and fullgenerality, multiple forms of multi-participant block construction, ahighly optimized form of proof of stake, and zero-knowledge proofs bakedin playing key roles at the base layer.

This post will walk through some of the most important fundamentaldifferences between blockchains in 2010 and blockchains in 2030, bothfrom the point of view of the technology and from the point of view ofwhat properties you can expect to have as a user.

To start off, let's go through the original Bitcoin whitepaper,section by section, and see how this compares to Ethereum - in 2015(yellow), 2025(green) and 2030(blue).

There are large changes to basically every section. To make thingsmore compact, let's make it a table:

→ mempool

→ miner

→ block | User

→ mempool with strong privacy properties

→ FOCILer orbuilder

→ builder

→ block

• Signatures/proofs parallel-processed inside the mempool
• Gas rules incentivize parallelization-friendly workflows

                                                                                                                                      |

Option 2: TEE+ORAM, PIRand similar techniques | | Network-layer privacy | Assume most mempoolnodes are honest and not tracking you | Onion routing, mixnets etcavailable |

Pretty much every core property of what it means to be a blockchaineither has fundamentally changed or soon will fundamentally change:

• Verification: download and re-execute → PeerDASsample and verify a SNARK
• Consensus: PoW → PoS → much better optimizedPoS
• Block construction authority: single miner makesblock → multi-party block construction

As an AI might say, the only honest conclusion (ok fine, thehonest punchline) is that a modern cryptographic network likethe post-Lean-upgrade Ethereum is called a "blockchain" to a largeextent for historical reasons. In reality it's a hybrid constructionthat merges together two strands:

1. Core Satoshian ideas
2. New powerful cryptographic machinery that emerged out of 50 years ofacademia and did not even exist (or was not mature) in 2009

How much crypto is incrypto? 2009 vs 2020 vs 2030

Cryptography is not the only science that matters. Also importantare: formalverification, database theory, improvements in peer-to-peernetworking theory, information theory, economics and much more. But allof these things are compatible with the fundamental core of "everyonetries to make the next block with valid PoW, one guy succeeds,broadcasts it, everyone else downloads it and re-executes, repeat". Thecryptographic changes are not.

Now, what does this mean for users?

The most important conclusion is that the set of tradeoffs for usersis radically changing:

When building applications, structure of computationis starting to matter a lot. In a simple blockchain, 1 byte = 1 byte and1 gas = 1 gas. In the architectures of the future, the same amount ofcomputation will cost you much more if you shove it all into oneinscrutable serially-executed transaction, and much less if you put itinto well-encapsulated dependencies that can be parallelized or pruned,ideally before the transaction even enters the final block. This affectsthe incentives of developers, and will over time affect the structure ofall applications using Ethereum: perhaps in the long run, wewill converge toward programming patterns where information directlyrelated to describing non-commutative state changes and ordering isposted onchain, and everything else is aggregated before it even getsincluded into a block.

Structuring computation letsthe blockchain more effectively focus on its job.

Perhaps the most important shift is that the decentralizednature of the network is shifting from being purely a burden incurred inthe name of safety and robustness to at least sometimes, in a fewlimited cases, being a strength even from a performanceperspective. The decentralized network allows larger volumes ofdata to be stored in parallel. It allows a high volume of computation tohappen in parallel, in many cases inside the mempool. In a few cases, itincreases privacy, because only decentralized networks caneffectively hide metadata (eg. where data and requests are comingfrom).

Back in the mid-2010s, this was an early dream of Ethereum: that wecould decentralize not just for robustness but also to increasescale. If centralized systems can split up work between differentparticipants to increase their performance, so should we. Back then,this was not viable for one primary reason: the missing ingredient wasverification. If you split up work, you have to verify thateach unit of work was done correctly. Early designs attempted to patchthis with randomly sampled committees, but they all ran into the samebottleneck: first, committees are complicated to set up and expensiveand greatly increase latency, second, there is no recourse if thecommittee fails. Now, with modern cryptography, this problem is solved,and the overhead factor of that solution is decreasing month bymonth.

Another area to watch for where decentralization can potentiallyimprove performance properties is latency. Ethereum itself will neverhave latency that competes with servers, but infrastructure built aroundit could.

In general, creating a stronger decentralized layer in the middlebetween users and a chain, that is not itself a chain, could makeEthereum very powerful without compromising any of the chain'sfundamental properties.

Later in the future, there is the possibility that Ethereum will gothrough one further shift - thepossible riseof obfuscation(iO). The holy grail here is that viable obfuscation can eliminate thetradeoff between privacy and generalization: you can have fullygeneralized computation involving an unbounded number of (asynchronous)participants in a fully secure and encrypted form. Even weak versions ofobfuscation have many applications in eg. encrypted mempools. But all ofthe conclusions in this post will apply long before any of that becomesavailable.

This is the "cryptographic world computer": a shift from Ethereum assolely a ledger onto which you can indiscriminately dump computation anddata that gets executed, to an architecture that combines blockchainswith cryptographic privacy and verification, and powerful decentralizedoff-chain components.

There are still many challenges in fully building out this design.Making zero knowledge proofs efficient enough and safe enough isdifficult, but it is encapsulatedcomplexity and is already being heavily optimized with AI tools. Themore difficult, and systemically complex, piece will likely be managingand parallelizing access to very large amounts of state. There arealready many ideas on the horizon for how to handle this, though theyneed to be refined especially as we learn more about what applicationswill be running in the future.

If you look at the Strawmap,Hegota - the fork planned for next year - is likely to be Ethereum'slast "normal" fork, with features and technology that would berecognizable to someone in 2015. Everything after that involvesrecursive STARKs, automated formal verification, highly optimizedconsensus algorithms, and making it all quantum-safe. With PeerDAS,Ethereum began its transition from being just a blockchain to beingsomething much more powerful. Starting after Hegota, this transformationbecomes Ethereum's primary story. The final outcome of this:much more cheap, scalable and private high-security computation thananything that could be done with the previous era's technology alone.The cryptographic world computer.

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