cryptocurrency
Open Contradictions By Vitalik Buterin; Ethereum’s $1 Billion Founder
Contradictions are a combination of ideas or statements that oppose each other. A funny example is from someone who said ‘Laziness is our biggest enemy and We are taught to love our enemies’.
The thoughts are different though when they come from the founder of the second-largest cryptocurrency in the world according to market capitalization.
- Who Is This Guy?
Who Is Vitalik Buterin?
Vitalik Buterin is a 28-year-old Russian-born Canadian-Montenegrin writer. He is best known as one of the co-founders of Ethereum.
He’s on the Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Hall of Fame and is currently estimated to be worth $1 billion.
Why Do His Contradictions Matter?
Understanding the team behind a project, their roadmap, and how they think is important for fundamental analysis.
Most comments under the thread kept pitching Cardano as a solution to Vitalik’s Contradictions.
Here Are The Open Contradictions Vitalik Shared
He said:
Some still open contradictions in my thoughts and my values, that I have been thinking about but still don’t feel like I’ve fully resolved.
vitalik
Contradictions On Ethereum And Blockchain
- Contradiction between my desire to see Ethereum become a more Bitcoin-like system emphasizing long-term stability and stability, including culturally, and my realization that getting there requires quite a lot of active coordinated short-term change.
- Contradiction between my desire to see Ethereum become an L1 that can survive truly extreme circumstances and my realization that many key apps on Ethereum already rely on far more fragile security assumptions than anything we consider acceptable in Ethereum protocol design.
- Contradiction between my dislike of many modern financial blockchain “applications” ($3M monkeys etc), and my grudging appreciation for the fact that that stuff is a big part of what keeps the crypto economy running and pays for all my favorite cool DAO/governance experiments.
- Contradiction between my desire to maximally simplify the L1 and my desire to maximally simplify the whole ecosystem (as a simple L1 often “exports” its complexity to higher layers of the stack that users have to adopt anyway)
- Contradiction between my desire for crypto to grow beyond finance and my realization that finance (incl payments+SoV) is still by far the most successful category of crypto apps, especially among third-world residents, human rights activists, and vulnerable people generally.
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Contradictions On Governance And People
- Contradiction between my preference for reducing reliance on individuals and trying to build fixed systems that can stand the test of time and my appreciation of “live players” and their role in helping the world move forward.
- Contradiction between my love for things like decentralization and democracy, and my realization that in practice I agree with intellectual elites more than “the people” on many (though definitely far from all) specific policy issues.
- Contradiction between my desire to see more countries adopting radical policy experiments (eg. crypto countries!) and my realization that the governments most likely to go all the way on such things are more likely to be centralized and not friendly to diversity internally.
- Contradiction between my desire to see more diversity in interesting cultures and my realization that maintaining a culture that’s distinct from the mainstream seems to often require some kind of insanity or artificial barrier or similar thing that I ideologically dislike.
- Contradiction between my desire to be a positive-sum mediator figure that can be everyone’s friend and my desire to stand strongly with good against evil those times when true evil is what we face.
Conclusion
Vitalik is arguably the public face of cryptocurrency and is looked up to by many in the space. Admitting that he has these contradictions might stir different reactions. There has been no swift price action in Ethereum though.
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