Vitalik Buterin on crypto regulation, privacy and zero-knowledge proofs

Should I publicly blab my opinions about crypto regulation more? Feels unfair to let other people get attacked by CT but never actually poke my own head out.

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Well actually here's my moderate take on mixers and privacy that I already gave in the @coinbase podcast two months ago:

youtube.com/watch?v=GUhDXU…

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Another maybe-controversial take of mine is that I don't think we should be enthusiastically pursuing large institutional capital at full speed. I'm actually kinda happy a lot of the ETFs are getting delayed. The ecosystem needs time to mature before we get even more attention.

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Basically, especially at this time, regulation that leaves the crypto space free to act internally but makes it harder for crypto projects to reach the mainstream is much less bad than regulation that intrudes on how crypto works internally.

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The "KYC on defi frontends" idea does not seem very pointful to me: it would annoy users but do nothing against hackers. Hackers write custom code to interact with contracts already. Exchanges are clearly a much more sensible place to do the KYC, and that's happening already.

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Basically, there's two main classes of regulatory policy goals: (i) consumer protection, (ii) making it harder for baddies to move large amounts of money around. The issues around (ii) are concentrated not in defi, but in large-scale crypto payments in general.

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Regs on defi frontends that could be more helpful may include:

(i) limits on leverage
(ii) requiring transparency about what audits, FV or other security checks were done on contract code
(iii) usage gated by knowledge-based tests instead of plutocratic net-worth minimum rules

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Also, I would love to see rules written in such a way that requirements can be satisfied by zero knowledge proofs as much as possible. ZKPs offer lots of new opportunities to satisfy reg policy goals and preserve privacy at the same time, and we should take advantage of this!