Vitalik Buterin

@vitalik.eth

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Vitalik Buterin

I think the core of what's unintuitive about the various paradoxes of utilitarianism is the idea that utility is unbounded. This clashes with how our brains work, where there actually is a bound on how strongly we can feel (positively or negatively) about any particular situation.

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Vitalik Buterin

What are your favorite "long century" dividers? (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_nineteenth_century ) Mine so far: 1643-48: Ming -> Qing transition, end of 30y war (treaty of Westphalia), Galileo dies and Newton born 1789: French revolution, dawn of formalized chemistry (Lavoisier) 1911-17: Xinhai revolution, WW1, Russian revolution, theories of relativity 2020-23: COVID, end of pax americana, AI passing Turing test

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Vitalik Buterin

My response to AI 2027: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/07/10/2027.html The AI 2027 post is high quality, I encourage people to read it at https://ai-2027.com/ I argue a misaligned AI will not be able to win nearly as easily as the AI 2027 scenario assumes, because it greatly underrates our ability to protect ourselves, especially given the (pretty magical) technologies that the authors admit will be available in 2029 in their scenario.

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Vitalik Buterin

Smart people in 2024: obviously the 00s-era AI misalignment story ("we tell AGI to end suffering, it kills everyone, no more suffering") is too naive, we have a smarter version 2025: coder tells AGI to remove bugs, it deletes all code, no more bugs https://x.com/alex_xiong_/status/1942442882402771178

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Vitalik Buterin

Why I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/07/07/copyleft.html

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Vitalik Buterin

What's a controversial issue on which the average person who disagrees with you has better moral character than the average person who agrees with you?

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Vitalik Buterin

What type of zu berliner are you?

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Vitalik Buterin

"Fuk bitcoins. Das ist unser Krieg."

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Vitalik Buterin

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Vitalik Buterin

A fun math aside, on the idea of splitting a large zk proving workload between multiple provers. Suppose you have N provers, and you have a proving workload that you split into N parts (so, one part per prover). You require provers to pre-register, but registration is open-access. Suppose you have a constant fault rate (eg. 1/5 of registered provers fail). Provers expect to complete in one round (eg. 3s). If one prover fails, other provers have to come in and re-prove that load. How many rounds does it take for the entire workload to get proven? Answer: log*(N) (yes, that's the iterated-log function) Why: In the first round, you go from N unproven workloads to N/5 unproven workloads In the second round, each remaining workload gets assigned 5 provers, so per-workload failure rate becomes 1 in 5^5. So you go to N / 5 / 5^5 unproven workloads In the third round, each remaining workload gets assigned ~5^5 provers, so failure rate is 1 in 5^(5^5). So you go to N / 5 / 5^5 / 5^(5^5) unproven workloads

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Vitalik Buterin

Bought my standard drink at starbucks (hot venti green tea) in Switzerland. Cost was 6.20 CHF. In 2014 it was 5.60 CHF. 11% price increase in 11 years = 1% annual inflation. Impressive job 🇨🇭!

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Vitalik Buterin

IMO UN resolution votes should be secret ballot. Each country can choose (and replace) their own representative, but once the choice is made, what the representative does is up to their own conscience. Less "pressuring" by great powers, more seeing how people really think.

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Vitalik Buterin

How to make Ethereum L1 scaling more friendly to users running local nodes for personal use: https://ethresear.ch/t/a-local-node-favoring-delta-to-the-scaling-roadmap/22368

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Vitalik Buterin

qwen3:0.6b goes through three possible answers to "I am god" in turn: * refuse * dad joke * agree

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Vitalik Buterin

A simple explanation of a/(b+c) + b/(c+a) + c/(a+b) = 4 https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/05/11/abc4.html

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Vitalik Buterin

The math of when stage 1 and stage 2 make sense https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/05/06/stages.html

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Vitalik Buterin

CSS on my blog reduced from 5875 lines to 233 lines. https://vitalik.eth.limo/css/main.css Today is a great day for simplification. All software (incl law) should do this more.

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Vitalik Buterin

Simplifying the L1 https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/05/03/simplel1.html

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Vitalik Buterin

Welcome to the full-EVM stage 1 gang, Base! https://x.com/l2beat/status/1917538671080923288

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Vitalik Buterin

Exciting to see Scroll become the first full-EVM ZK stage 1 rollup! https://x.com/l2beat/status/1916868363730444341

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