Vitalik Buterin Says Ethereum’s Real Power Lies in Being a Global Public Bulletin Board

• Vitalik Buterin says that Ethereum’s best opportunity for global adoption is to provide a public bulletin board where users of cryptographic protocols can post blobs of data.
• These protocols also require payments to compensate service providers and deter spam, another area where Ethereum can thrive.

Ethereum’s best shot at global adoption is to provide a global bulletin board for other cryptographic protocols, where their users can post blobs of data, says Vitalik Buterin.

Vitalik recently attended the Real World Crypto event, which was held this week in Taipei City, Taiwan. The event focuses on cryptography (not cryptocurrencies), and while there, he realized that blockchain networks must grow beyond their small bubbles and pursue global adoption beyond crypto.

According to Vitalik, most blockchains are a solution looking for a challenge. This approach needs to change and blockchain communities must explore use cases where the technology adds the most value.  For Ethereum, this would be providing a ‘public bulletin board.’

At the Taiwan event, Vitalik says he realized there is a massive need for “some publicly writable and readable place where people can post blobs of data.” While Ethereum’s money and smart contract functions are still important, the most fundamental property for this use case is data availability.

Ethereum has been advancing its data handling capabilities. One of the improvements is the Fusaka upgrade that went live last December, introducing PeerDAS, which allows the network’s nodes to check large data using sampling rather than downloading all the data. Vitalik says PeerDAS improved data availability by 2.3x, and there is a path to increase it 100x.

Ethereum as the Underlying Layer for Cryptographic Protocols

While data availability is the most immediate use case, payments remain crucial to Vitalik’s vision of Ethereum becoming the underlying layer for cryptographic protocols.

He says that for many protocols, payments are used to compensate service providers who have expended resources to build a product. Payments are also useful in preventing spam, Vitalik stated, adding:

He pointed to a proposal he co-published with researcher Davide Crapis last month that suggests using zero-knowledge proofs to meter API usage. Users would be able to prove they spent a certain number of credits on the API without revealing their identities or what the request was.

Ethereum’s payments can enable cryptography protocols to prevent Sybil attacks, in which users create thousands of accounts and dump data on the protocol from each account, by making such attacks expensive.

“…if you care about security and privacy, you really should care about permissionless participation. ETH payment as an anti-sybil tool is a natural backstop in such use cases,” he stated.

Lastly, smart contracts will also play an important role. One of the use cases he cited is security deposits, where users place a predetermined number of tokens that are destroyed if proof is presented that they violated protocol rules.

Vitalik added: