Vitalik Buterin on Farcaster

Vitalik Buterin pfp

Vitalik Buterin

Make Ethereum cypherpunk again https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/12/28/cypherpunk.html

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Freddy Mertens pfp

Everything built should be built to not depend on the social layer. No matter how strong and effective the social layer is the probability of it degrading is non 0 and only increases with time.

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Vitalik Buterin pfp

Vitalik Buterin

The problem is that building things to rely solely on incentives is in many cases impractical. A purely in-protocol automated system has no way to "pay people to be decentralized".

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parseb pfp

"has no way" your mind seems made up about it. The forces at play are knowable quantities. A problem to consider with the virtuous ethereum non-financialized governace is that it lacks analytical transparency. You can't prove that it is not a cartel. It is objectively indistinguishable from decentralization theater.

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Vitalik Buterin pfp

Vitalik Buterin

I feel like I've been trying for a decade to solve centralization issues with in-protocol economic means, and it always end up coming up short. Meanwhile, core devs yelling at people for using [overly powerful thing here] plus Twitter sentiment pointing in the same direction... actually works.

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Freddy Mertens pfp

Works for now but how about 100 years from now? Is something as fragile as social checks and balances really robust enough to uphold the values ethereum is trying to solve for? The least that can be done is to aspire to minimise the dependence on the social layer. Which is a paradox lol but still should be done

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Vitalik Buterin pfp

Vitalik Buterin

My worry is that incentives are also fragile. Read https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2020/09/11/coordination.html Basically, most things that use "incentives" make hidden assumptions about lack of coordination between groups of participants. And rapidly improving communication technology breaks those assumptions.

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Vitalik Buterin

eg. "market competition" is becoming a less and less accurate model of how actually-existing capitalism works, because everyone is partially owned by blackrock, and even if they're not it's so easy for all the top companies to get into the same signal chat

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Freddy Mertens pfp

Black rock is a custodian and has influence but not the amount you are portraying here but I get your point. It seems you doesn’t have much faith in reward mechanism solutions being robust enough to solve for anti collusion long term and have turned to fighting collusion with collusion as a result.

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asdf pfp

Damn... I guess everything eventually fall apart

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Vlady pfp

Vitaliy, maybe not by theme but what was your inspiration when you mentioned $TMNT meme? A fan of ninja turtles haha?

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