Vitalik Buterin

Why I support privacy:

vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025...

A simple L2 security and finalization roadmap Special thanks to various EF, Optimism, Taiko, Flashbots, Surge and other researchers who helped form my thoughts on this. Today, the state of L2 security and L2 finality guarantees is improving: we ...

A simple L2 security and finalization roadmap

ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-simple-l...

The tree ring model of culture and politics

vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025...

We should talk less about public goods funding and more about open source funding

vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025...

EF Treasury has deployed:

- 10,000 ETH into Spark
- 10,000 ETH into Aave Prime
- 20,800 ETH into Aave Core
- 4,200 ETH into Compound

We're grateful for the entire Ethereum security community that has worked diligently to make Ethereum DeFi secure and usable!

The risk of politician coins comes from the fact that they are such a perfect bribery vehicle. If a politician issues a coin, you do not even need to send *them* any coins to give them money. Instead, you just buy and hold the coin, and this increases the value of their holdings passively. Furthermore, there is deniability: holding the coin is, in terms of financial effect, a linear combination of donating to the issuer and gambling. Hence you can have the intention of doing the former but when challenged claim that you are doing the latter. You can even hold the coin privately, and show that you are holding it to whoever you need to show; you do not need any zero knowledge proofs, you just send a test transaction. This is all risky to democracy, for reasons very similar to what I wrote in https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html , https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2020/09/11/coordination.html and elsewhere. TLDR: the economic arguments for why markets are so great for "regular" goods and services do not extend to "markets for political influence". I recommend politicians do not go down this path.

On the risks of politician coins:

There is perhaps an analogy with weed here. Ten years ago, to many weed represented freedom, and rebellion against sclerotic old order that denied self-sovereignty over our bodies. Then, weed became legalized, and "official". On that day, I remember my personal interest in weed dropping by > 2x overnight. And since then, public discourse is moving toward a balanced view of weed: it is much less harmful than alcohol and smoking, and has valuable medical uses, but it is also far from harmless, especially in its modern corporate hyper-optimized versions. Crypto finance is similar. In the old order, @GaryGensler created a regime where tokens that give investors clear indication of what their rights are and where their revenue comes from is a "security", but obfuscated "governance tokens" are potentially in the clear. This was a perverse distortion of incentives, and it is a key reason why @GaryGensler must never be christened as a hero, even among crypto skeptics. Everything that happened in crypto was in part a response, part compliance part rebellion, to these pressures. Over the last year, we have been entering a new order. Now, the most powerful people in the world are cheering on the idea of anyone creating tokens for anything, at any scale.

And so now is the time to talk about the difference between sugar-high short-term fun that is unwise to recommend to newbies, and long-term fulfillment and wealth-building. It is not about "fun is bad", it is about the equivalent of modern hyperaddictive cellphone games, versus chess or World of Warcraft. Now is the time to talk about the fact that large-scale political coins cross a further line: they are not just sources of fun, whose harm is at most contained to mistakes made by voluntary participants, they are vehicles for unlimited political bribery, including from foreign nation states. This is in a sense the essence of d/acc: the goal is not to indiscriminately accelerate everything, including superintelligent AI and fentanyl, the goal is to selectively accelerate defense so that it can keep up with offense. Sometimes, that defense is a matter of cultivating our own sense of virtue. Sometimes, that defense is a matter of creating better alternatives. In defi, we are already starting to see a return toward honest token-based fundraising that gives users clear understanding of what they are buying, bringing us the best of pre-2020-era ICOs while addressing their downsides. The @infinex_app patron sale, and the @Truemarketsorg NFT sale, are two examples of this, and I personally know of other examples that are soon to come. There is a bright future of capital allocation mechanisms that can be built. Potentially, we can come up with ways to ensure alignment with community wishes as well as safeguarding important values like privacy, security, open standards and open source, that could be part of the incentive structure itself. Acceleration is coming either way; it is our task to choose the brightest possible vector.

Reposting a large post from the other app.

We are indeed currently in the process of large changes to EF leadership structure, which has been ongoing for close to a year. Some of this has already been executed on and made public, and some is still in progress. What we're trying to achieve is primarily the following goals: * Improve level of technical expertise within EF leadership * Improve two-way communications and ties between EF leadership and the ecosystem actors, old and new, that it is our role to support: users (individual and institutional), app devs, wallets, L2s * Bring in fresh talent, improve execution ability and speed * Become more actively supportive of app builders, and make sure important values and inalienable rights (esp privacy, open source, censorship resistance) are a reality for users including at the app layer * Continue to increase our use of decentralized and privacy tech and the Ethereum chain, including for payments and treasury management Explicit *non-goals* are: * Execute some kind of ideological / vibez pivot from feminized wef soyboy mentality to bronze age mindset * Start aggressively lobbying regulators and powerful political figures (esp in USA, but really anywhere, especially large powerful countries), and risking compromising Ethereum's position as a global neutral platform * Become an arena for vested interests * Become a highly centralized org, or even more of a "main character" within Ethereum These things aren't what EF does and this isn't going to change. People seeking a different vision are welcome to start their own orgs.

d/acc, one year later:

vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025...

I remember visiting Table Mountain in Cape Town and seeing a sign saying something like "this route is extremely dangerous, proceed at your own risk"

But the route was still open. My respect for the country instantly shot up significantly.

(yes it actually was pretty challenging)

Now there's a mini-contest!

x.com/TheDevanshMe...

I recently spoke at Ethereum Devcon about PopVax (@popvax.com)'s work developing novel mRNA vaccines to save 1 million lives each year, as part of a series of talks organized by Vitalik Buterin (@vitalik.ca) around his d/acc vision – defensive, differential, and decentralized accelerationism. (1/4)

Introducing deep funding. Two key ideas:

1. Value as a graph: instead of asking "how much did X contribute to humanity?", ask "how much of the credit for Y belongs to X?"
2. Distilled human judgement: an open market of AIs fills in all weights, human jury randomly spot-checks them

deepfunding.org

What I would love to see in a wallet:

vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024...

Inequality as in "poor people don't have enough money", and inequality as in "concentration of economic power at the top", are different problems.

(See also vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021... ; which goes into this in detail, though focusing more on why Gini is bad in contexts other than countries)

One terabyte USB key

See also:

warpcast.com/vitalik.eth/...

... the discrepancy between their exponent (~0.5) and mine (~0.6 for travel time, so ~0.4 for velocity)

Interesting!!!

Though their average speeds for the longer-distance modes seem to not take into account overhead (eg. airports). A trip to the moon takes ~3 days plus overhead (I put 84 hours), so that's ~4000 km/h, whereas they put numbers over 10000 km/h. Seems like that accounts for...

Interesting phenomenon. I found this paper investigating it in more detail:
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Reposting this post of mine from 1.5 years ago... I still find this fascinating

vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023...

My brain is made out of neurons. They're connected via a net of synapses. Not sure if they work though 🥺

vitalik.ca

Confirmation from my farcaster account (which is linked to my public ENS):

warpcast.com/vitalik.eth/...

I'm still here!

warpcast.com/vitalik.eth/...

right now morning in east asia

I appreciate it! You get a reply from me instead 🙂

"Is X made by AI or humans?" is a spectrum, not a binary. I want to see more advances on the tech doing the half-and-half part of the spectrum so that it can continue to outcompete "fire a prompt and you're done" stuff in real-world use.

I don't really agree with esp the second part, at least with current-stage tech.

I've been using locally running models to draw images extensively, and making anything serious requires like 20 rounds of editing and inpainting; plenty of human skill involved.

Unfortunately I was not there in person!

Small at-home PCR-equivalent test

My understanding is that antigen tests have pretty low sensitivity these days against the more modern variants?

Really need these, and in an even easier to use form.

If we want to go after nihilistic zero-sum financial games (which we do... the average ethereum person definitely hates those projects), tea.xyz is not an enemy, they're someone to work with and help improve.