Vitalik Ends Devcon Talk With Sing-a-Long About Failed Ethereum Ideas

Singing on stage alongside songwriter Jonathan Mann, ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin ended his keynote at Devcon4 in Prague on Wednesday, with a song that listed "The graveyard of ideas" from the past five years of ethereum research.

An annual ethereum developer conference, Devcon4 is all about ethereum - past, present and future - and Buterin took his time on stage to touch on all those time periods as it relates to the platform's long awaited switch to a more scalable and ecological paradigm.

Name-calling aside, Buterin continued by saying that the switch is very near fruition.

Introducing "100 percent genuine pure organic Casper" alongside scalability improvements, Buterin expressed excitement about what the switch will mean for the ethereum platform.

According to Buterin, while the switch has taken several years to emerge in any technical detail, improvements that have concentrated over the last two years means it is now closer than ever.

Listing through the history of Casper and sharding development, Buterin detailed several errors and deviations on the roadmap.

"If we worked on one spec, one protocol that would get us the benefit of proof-of-stake and sharding at the same time," Buterin said.

According to Buterin, Serenity will be introduced in four phases.

He suggested "Improvements in privacy" may be possible through anonymized ethereum shards that only share encrypted information on the ethereum blockchain itself.

There are currently around eight different teams working on implementations, Buterin said.