Vlad Zamfir is one of the smartest people you will come across in the Ethereum world, and that’s saying something. He’s almost as elusive as he is intelligent, but he has never been shy with his opinions on Ethereum and how it can be made better. We talk all about that here as well as his early life in Canada, how he approaches blockchain governance ideals with a philosophical bent, his views on Nick Szabo and how he thinks requiring blockchain transactions to be unchangeable is absurd. Vlad is probably best know within Ethereum for his work on the Casper consensus mechanism that hasn’t yet come to fruition. He’s still working on it, however, as we get into. He also filed a lawsuit earlier this year against CapserLabs, his former employer, for what he claims are trademark infrigements. CasperLabs has denied the accusation.

Matt Leising: Where were you born and where did you grow up?

Vlad Zamfir: I was born in Brasov, Romania, and I grew up in Canada, mostly in Ottawa, but I went to school for a long time in Guelph. Growing up I was kind of a nerd in Canada, spending a lot of time on my computer and with nerdy interests that eventually set me up to get interested in crypto.

ML: How old were you when your family moved to Canada?

VZ: I was five.

ML: Do you remember Romania?

VZ: I have like, stills kind of in my head, but not really.

ML: Do you have brothers and sisters?

VZ: I've got a younger sister and an older half-sister. I don't really talk to my half-sister.

ML: What was it like growing up in Ottawa? What were you like as a kid?

VZ: I was nerdy trying to be cool, kind of like I am now, I guess in many ways <laughs>

ML: Things haven't changed, in other words <laughs>

VZ: In many ways they haven't. I used to be in many ways more calm and level headed. Now I'm more stressed and emotional. I used to be always feeling great, now I go through a lot, it's a relatively more volatile life. I had a nice stable childhood and now I have like a hard crypto life.

ML: How were you in school? What did you like?

VZ: I kind of grew up doing math. My grandfather was a math professor, my parents believed in Kumon, which is like a math thing. I particularly excelled in kind of like mathy sort of fields and did particularly poorly in literature and art and stuff like this.

ML: Has math always come easily to you?

VZ: Yeah, although I wouldn't say that like I'm amazing or anything, I'm just good enough to do what I need to do. I'm not like a professional mathematician, I'm not a Math Olympics winner.

You can hear this podcast I did in 2017 with Vlad here

ML: Growing up in Ottawa, were you required by the Canadian government to play hockey?

VZ: No <laughs> Jesus I was never into it. I think I might have had to play hockey once or something, but I would always resist and avoid. I always like too much of a nerd for that kind of thing.

ML: Did you do any sports at all?

VZ: No, I was never really good at team sports. I was good at, like, extreme sports, you know, snowboarding and stuff.

ML: As a kid what were you thinking Vlad was going to do as an adult? Did you have a plan or a path? What were you thinking as you went through high school?

VZ: It's interesting. I got really into philosophy really early in life and I kind of felt like I was going to do philosophy. But you know, kind of on the side while my mainstay would be math and maybe physics, and then I got into economics a little bit. And then statistics a lot.

VZ: I was going to end up doing algorithmic trading, like quant kind of stuff before I got roped into the crypto world. That was like my plan. So it went from being math and philosophy to economics and statistics and then math and philosophy. And then through crypto I got into computer science.

ML: I can definitely see your philosophy background with the way you interact on Twitter and talk with people. That makes a lot of sense to me.

belief is a poor crutch, whether for practice, perception, protest, or politics

— Vlad Zamfir (@VladZamfir) November 24, 2021

VZ: Yeah. I mean, it's kind of absurd to say, but I still do philosophy, so to speak <laughs>. It's definitely part of the main sort of thing that I do still because basically for better or for worse, crypto has had some shaky philosophical foundations and I work a lot on that, on that kind of philosophical problem.

ML: What I mean to say is I think you take a very philosophical approach to what you've been doing with consensus mechanisms and other work.

VZ: I think it's important to understand what you're going through.

ML: That might be the root of some of your epic tweet threads with Dima [Dmitry Buterin, Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin’s father].

VZ: Yeah. Well, you know, I think that's interesting. For me, it's more to do with moral responsibility and a willingness to do what's right in the face of adversity, despite all prior experience leading you to do the wrong thing.

VZ: Dima has a philosophy on Twitter that doesn't really inspire the kind of obligation and rising above and, not interventionism, but the path to redemption for crypto that I see as necessary. He wants people to feel good and take this leap of faith without feeling so burdened and that they have to struggle so much.

VZ: And so we have a real philosophical difference in posture vis a vis the Ethereum community and blockchain governance. It kind of comes out on Twitter but for the most part, for me, I'm hung up on our shared responsibility in blockchain governance and when Dima shares philosophy that does the opposite of inspire responsibility, I find it really kind of offensive. I like to you go and make my feelings heard.

ML: Do you get along with him personally? Is this just a philosophical difference?

VZ: Yeah, totally. We get along very well personally, basically every time we ever hung out. The only kind of real contention that we have is around these questions about, are we responsible for what's happening in Ethereum? You know, like things more to do with public blockchain governance and public blockchain politics where we disagree.

ML: What did your parents do when you were growing up?

VZ: They're both software engineers. Computer scientists, information systems kind of people. And they never wanted me to get into this kind of thing. So they never helped me with it, even though our bookshelves were always stacked with this stuff. I never really picked it up from them. They encouraged me to do math and physics, and didn't want me to get into the corporate sort of software development life. It's just not a healthy lifestyle and so they wanted me to have like healthy lifestyle <laughs>.

ML: Hold on. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Why do you feel like they didn't want you to follow them into software development?

VZ: I mean, software development is a lifestyle that involves a lot of sitting down and a lot of nerdy – it's a nerdy sort of lifestyle. It's not a very healthy, social, happy life, you know? So I think they just like wanted me to be well <laughs>.

ML: Did that cause any problem with them or was there any tension?

VZ: No, there wasn't any tension from that really. There was more tension when I decided to drop out of school and didn't have a convincing plan for them in some way.

ML: Did you first discover crypto through Bitcoin?

VZ: Yep. I discovered it during the Cypress financial crisis bail-in situation where Cypress banks used customer funds in order to pay back government debts. And it was a whole situation where Bitcoin went up a lot because people were scrambling to find a way to get the money out.

ML: What year was that?

VZ: 2013.

ML: What did you think of Bitcoin? Once you wrapped your head around it?

VZ: I basically thought it was the future of money.

ML: Like a lot of people, did you feel Bitcoin was limited and that you were hoping for something more, and then Ethereum came along?

VZ: Kind of. I mean, I was already into blockchain, not Bitcoin. Like, what are these other protocols like Master Coin, Colored Coins, all the different stuff that Bitcoin unlocked. I'd already gone through being a Bitcoiner to being a blockchain-not-Bitcoin-person before Ethereum came on to my radar.

ML: When did you first meet Vitalik?

VZ: I met him at a Bitcoin meetup I think in March or February 2014.

ML: So he had just presented in Miami the month before [at the Miami Bitcoin Conference].

VZ: And then in April, Charles Hoskinson offered me a job that became like volunteer position after.

ML: Oh, wow. Charles offered you a job at the foundation?

VZ: Yeah. Me and my friend, Ethan, after we did a hackathon and impressed him a little bit.

ML: What was your initial impression of Ethereum when you first learned about it and were working with it?

VZ: Well, I mean, I thought it was great. I’ve always loved Ethereum even if all of the things we tried at first didn’t work. The ability to conceive and imagine and see where things are going, Ethereum really helped spark our imagination.

ML: I remember when we met in Cancun in 2017, you said to me that you were working on the consensus mechanism because you wanted to use Ethereum and you didn't feel like you could use it at that point. You really wanted it to get to a place where it was much more usable. Has that changed recently? How are you feeling about that?

VZ: I'm still feeling totally the same way. My understanding about what that means broadened. I don't feel like it’s scalable.

ML: What's it been like to see the different developments in different parts of Ethereum? Like the defi summer stuff, NFTs have gone crazy this year. There was obviously the ICO boom back in 2017 and 18. Has any of that surprised you? What's your view on that?

VZ: Not too surprising. We kind of talked about all this stuff before. These aren’t really new topics, although the names are new, you know. We had non-fungible tokens before people called them non-fungible tokens.

VZ: The thing that is surprising is how much and how fast and the magnitude of the scale that has happened. We always imagined that it would happen, but, it's all happened much faster than we would've expected.

VZ: In the context of thinking about software timelines everything is moving really at a kind of breakneck speed.

ML: How do you look back on your time at Casper and what you did with all that work on the consensus mechanism?

VZ: Sorry, when you say at Casper, my suspicion rise, that you might be thinking about CasperLabs and the trademark dispute.

ML: Oh, I mean, when you were working on the Casper sort of solution.

VZ: I mean, I still work on Casper.

VZ: I'm still very much working on it. And, you know, [regarding telling] people, I'm like keeping them in the dark because I want them to focus on how bad blockchain immutability is. Because I'm not going to contribute to the immutability regime.

ML: How are you envisioning your work on Casper getting integrated, are you envisioning it getting integrated into the main net in some way?

VZ: Yeah, of course. That's my plan and I'm going to keep working on it until I have amazing things to show, that people will be like, ‘oh my God, we need this.’ And I'm going to be publishing pretty soon.

ML: Can you explain a little bit more about what you mean by the immutability issue?

VZ: So we have this whole association of blockchains with this legal norm that we don't change the protocols in our disputes. This is something that came from Nick Szabo’s legacy and participation in Bitcoin. For the most part he's the architect behind the blockchain immutability, permission less smart contracts – all this kind of stuff.

VZ: It's all basically his sort of Frankenstein horrible creation that never should have been created.

ML: Okay. You've been through so much in, in Ethereum over the years. How, where do you see it now? Do you feel optimistic about it, or pessimistic? How would you characterize where the broader industry is at this moment?

VZ: Well, I would say I have a lot of faith in Ethereum and a lot of faith in the people who are participating in this space. I think this space is necessary. I don't think we can kill Ethereum. And I think it has to be governed well and move beyond this whole immutability thing, which is unfortunately a very insecure and aggressive strategy that's not going to work and [will lead] many, many people straight into the line of fire.

ML: This has been great, Vlad. I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much.