Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, along with Ethereum core developers Karl Floersch and David Knott, came to the Neutrino blockchain shared office space at Rafflex Square in Shanghai’s Changning District. QJ Wang, founder of Queschain and executive Director of ECF Ethereum Community Fund, was the moderator. Talk to blockchain technology developers on site.

Participants answered questions on the content of Ethereum 2.0 roadmap, Casper, Plasma, Sharding and other technologies.

The following is an excerpt from the technical live AMA of God and V.

Guest: QJ Wang/ David Knott/ Karl Floersch/ Vitalik Buterin

QJ Wang: Founder of Queschain and executive Director of ECF Ethereum Community Fund

David Knott: Core developer of the OmiseGo project, currently working on Plasma and OmiseGo decentralized exchanges

Karl Floersch is the core developer of Ethereum Casper. He led the development of UjoMusic, a purely commercial music platform based on blockchain. He is the core developer of the software side of Ethereum platform

Current developments in ethereum scalability

Karl: Ethereum 2.0 is a major development event

Vitalik: Several teams are working on Casper. Prysmatic Labs has been working on Casper for almost half a year now and it’s doing well. Pantheon is doing well. I feel like we’re almost done from a research standpoint at this point, and the rest is just checking and making sure we don’t make mistakes. This involves a lot of work, including auditing and formal validation. These are about to begin. So there’s been a lot of progress on Casper and sharding.

David: The thing about Plasma is that it started with a big vision and worked its way through. The researchers face some limitations when they make it concrete. First there was Plasma MVP, then there was Plasma Cash. With them, users don’t have to validate the entire chain.

Karl: I particularly want to recommend Plasma Debit because it uses a similar mechanism to Plasma Cash, but much more so. The limitation of Plasma Cash is that you can send specific coins, but compared to Plasma Debit, coins are like a state channel. Like now you can send infinitesimal coins.

Vitalik: Plasma debit is interesting because it has some of the advantages of combining Plasma and state channels.

What are the salient challenges of implementing smart contracts on Plasma?

Karl: The biggest problem is that if you use state channels, you’re actually off the main chain, so Plasma actually guarantees you that your assets are still on the main chain, but if you have arbitrary states like this, who has arbitrary states like that? It can’t be very complicated. It could be a game with 10 players. Can anyone say if we can move to the main chain now for added security? There is complexity in terms of hierarchies and exits. It’s technically possible to some extent, but it’s still a bit complicated.

David: Plasma is actually recoverable on Ethereum. When you get into general-purpose computing and complex smart contracts, first you need to know who will quit, but once you understand the complex execution logic, it gets very complicated. Especially if you write a contract that depends on other contracts. That’s because if all of a sudden the plasma chain doesn’t work, it gives you an urgent auction of contracts. It’s a time-sensitive option. All of a sudden when you quit, it takes time. And everything went wrong.

Karl: I think there are other technologies such as state channels that are suitable for some games in the short term, and there are also non-traditional frameworks for plasma and state channels that can combine or attract a small number of players. This is a very interesting area to study and we are very interested in implementing token transfer in the first place, which will positively affect many people, and once there will be a lot of exciting research.

Q: Will Plasma replace other state channels?

Vitalik: The question is like we have Swiss Army knives, why do people use ordinary knives? Simple tools are still useful. Simple tools reduce complexity and make it easier to do one-room things. So there are a lot of applications. I definitely believe there’s a lot of work to be done on Plasma and state channels.

This article is published exclusively by Aether Chinese network. More video highlights review