Q&A: @audreyt & @VitalikButerin Ethereum’s priorities for the next decade – first priority is surviving. institutions appreciate Ethereum not for speed, but for the fact the chain has never gone down. if Ethereum is not secure, it can’t make anyone else secure. if it’s not private, it can’t help anyone else be private. if it’s not open source, nothing built on top is open source – stop doing: chasing 5% improvements when AI is turning everything over every year. chase the 5x instead. “helping people get 4.8% APY instead of 4.2% APY is fundamentally not interesting”. the applications that matter reduce the chance of a negative 100% APY. make simple and basic things good rather than hyper-optimising everything fragmentation – core R&D participation still has elements of being a social game. AI competitions may help: everyone who contributes is technically a core dev. anything that can be measured gets accelerated through AI; the things that can’t become the hard problem, but at least a smaller one – privacy is the clearest example of taste-level fragmentation: data confidentiality, anonymity, metadata privacy, short-term privacy (front-running resistance), payment privacy, DeFi privacy... all different trade-offs with provable upper limits. sometimes different positions on the impossibility triangle are legitimate; sometimes a bigger solution turns the tribal warfare into a slider (even presenting the slider as common knowledge is progress, right now it feels zero-sum) AI agents managing community treasuries –a special case of the alignment problem, or “the ultimate problem facing humanity”. expects not one answer but a hundred answers each solving 1% of the problem – any agent governing community assets sits in a sandbox, even when it has the keys: who picks the AI, who controls training, who decides on upgrades, who defines what counts as a big decision, what’s the process for feedback. those sandbox rules still have to be decided by people – alignment by process: agentic systems earn trust by trusting the community more, not by a single designer setting rules from above privacy vs transparency – it’s about power asymmetry. concentrated power owes more transparency; lesser power is owed more privacy. the North Star is de-totalisation – in practice, lines don’t get drawn by philosophers, they get drawn when two factions fight long enough, get tired, and need a peace settlement they can live with. that’s how the Magna Carta and the Peace of Westphalia happened – influence it by building practical solutions that give more of the good kind of transparency and more of the good kind of privacy at the same time – “be the agent you want to see in the world” agents onchain – audience question: if everyone can see how my agent works, scammers can too - does openness actually make it safer? answer: “I don’t think we want to put our agents on-chain” P(doom) – Audrey: “my P(doom) is NaN” - current model interpretability can’t read the neurons of very large models. visibility is zero; zero divided by zero is Not a Number – on cyber apocalypse: it’s already happening. “assume breach” used to be a slogan; now anything you collect is probably already breached. the real apocalypse is the day all that leaked PII comes back to bite everyone AI meets Ethereum (Vitalik) – most excited: speed-running cryptography. the zero-knowledge proof singularity - a single ZKP verifying everything. indistinguishability obfuscation was always “30 years away”; AI is accelerating things he thought wouldn’t arrive for a quarter century – most worried: “it’s like the dog-in-a-fire meme. we are the dog. the fire is creating diamonds that could go into chips and make everything awesome, but it’s also burning the house, and we have to take care of the house” which phone does Vitalik have? does he use hot or cold wallets? which fridge does he have in his house? what does he think of India? watch the stream of @EFDevcon to find out! https://t.co/PMVHZAqdPb Retweeted by @ethereumfndn from @sonkiski