ETHEREUM ROADMAP EXPLAINER FOR THE REST OF US, part 6 The last and final part: The Splurge Grandiose name but Vitalik's tldr is: "fix everything else"

There is perhaps a bit of tension between the name "the Splurge" right after talking about the philosophical and technical need to keep the protocol simple. But hey, some things are worth splurging on

WHAT IS THE SPLURGE REALLY? Well it's a bit of a laundry list: 1. Account Abstraction, which is Ethereum lingo for smart contract wallets 2. Maybe some EVM stuff like modular arithmetic extensions 3. Multidimensional gas markets 4. Being open to cryptographic breakthroughs

FIRST UP: EVM stuff Vitalik dives straight into EOF, a series of many opcode changes to the EVM to make it more flexible and expressive, which we covered yesterday https://t.co/bAt8Ols0TQ

A POINT OF CONFUSION @VitalikButerin says EOF is scheduled to be in the next hard fork. It is not scheduled to be in the next hard fork named Pectra, which is finally coming in ~q2/q3 next year Perhaps he means the fork after that? Pectra has gone from being the smallest

@VitalikButerin EVMMAX and EIP616/SIMD These are ideas that have bounced around for years and have gotten interest but never been included in a fork EVMMAX basically makes it easier to do precompiles without doing precompiles. I sometimes think of it as the GPU - optimized for one type of

@VitalikButerin NEXT: ACCOUNT ABSTRACTION (smart contract wallets) It's probably underrated the extent to which this has long been an interest of Vitalik's. When everyone else was pushing hardware wallets, he was pushing AA And it has happened on Ethereum, but slowly. Definitely slower than

Adding AA INTO ETHEREUM This gets floated every so often, and there's long been resistance between "Ethereum is a simple layer to build on that we keep simple" and "it sure would be nice to have feature X" There are lots of AA wallets now I'm choosing not to get any deeper

NEXT UP: 1559 IMPROVEMENTS/MULTIDIMENSIONAL GAS 1559 has been a huge UX success, but there are minor issues Thus blob market uses slightly different formula, meaning it's a little janky to have two different formulas

MULTIDIMENSIONAL GAS Since we now have gas markets for both execution and for blobs, we already have bidimensional gas The thought is that it makes a lot of since to have more dimensions, since different transactions take up different types of resources in a computer (eg, some

VDFs VDFs are a cryptographic technique, but in Ethereum the idea is that we would have non-biasable randomness that could be usable by apps. It's a great idea, EF has spent a lot on it over the years but we're not particularly close to a solution as I understand it. Vitalik

IT'S CRYPTO ALL THE WAY DOWN Two big potential unlocks: obfuscation and one-shot sigs

Vitalik has a great build up, but I'm cutting to the chase "obfuscation lets you create an "encrypted program" that performs an arbitrary computation, in such a way that all internal details of the program are hidden."

QUANTUM ONE SHOT SIGS

There's a list of interesting things we can *theoretically* do

Don't kid yourself though, one shot sigs are likely still a few decades away.

One great thing about rollups is that they let us battleharden cryptographic advances before it makes sense to deploy them on Ethereum, the world's trust and settlement layer

🙏 if you're still with me, thanks for finishing the thread. I'd appreciate if you considered RTing the top tweet: https://t.co/D8ga0XnzBk We're done Vitalik's explainer series! You now have a various idea of what the different threads of work being done are to upgrade Eth

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