Thoughts on Vitalik’s 30th birthday: My childhood is coming to an end

Author: Vitalik Buterin Compiler: Shenchao TechFlow

One ​​of my strongest memories over the past two years is speaking at hackathons, visiting hacker houses, doing Zuzalu in Montenegro, and seeing people a full decade younger than me doing... Taking on leadership roles as organizer or developer in various projects: crypto auditing, Ethereum layer 2 scaling, synthetic biology, and more. One of the memes (MEME) of the Zuzalu core organizing team is 21-year-old Nicole Sun. A year ago, she invited me to visit a hacker house in South Korea: a gathering of about 30 people. I remember it was my first time. Be the oldest person in the room for the first time.

When I was the same age as the current Hacker House residents, I remember many people praising me for being a world-changing, world-changing person like Zuckerberg. One of the most powerful young prodigies.

Now I cringe a little at this, both because I don't like the attention and because I don't understand why people have to translate "Wonderboy" into German, And it works very well in English. But watching all these people who were further along than me and younger than me made it clear to me that if that was my role, it wasn't it anymore. I play a different role now and it's time for the next generation to take over the mantle that once belonged to me.

August 2022, the path to Seoul Hacker House. Taking pictures because I couldn't tell which house I was supposed to enter and I'm communicating with the organizers to get this information. Of course, the house ended up not on this road at all, but in a more conspicuous place about twenty meters to the right

1 

As a proponent of life extension (meaning, medical research to ensure that humans can actually live thousands or millions of years), people often ask me: the meaning of life Isn't it closely related to the fact that it's finite: you only have a small part, so you have to enjoy it?

Historically, my instinct is to dismiss this idea: although from a psychological perspective, if things are limited or scarce, we tend to would take them more seriously, but it's simply ridiculous to think that a long-standing feud could be so bad that it's worse than literally no longer existing. Furthermore, I sometimes think that even if immortality turns out to be that bad, we could always simultaneously increase our "high" and decrease our longevity by simply choosing to have more wars. The fact that the non-sociopaths among us today reject this option strongly suggests to me that once it becomes an actual option we will reject it as well, as it does in terms of biological death and suffering.

However, as I get older, I realize I don’t even need to argue this.

Whether our lives as a whole are finite or infinite, every good thing in our lives is finite. What you thought was an eternal friendship slowly disappears into the mists of time. Your personality can completely change in 10 years. Cities can completely change, for better or worse. You can move to a new city on your own and start over the process of familiarizing yourself with the physical environment from scratch. There are limits to political ideology: you might build an entire identity around your views on top marginal tax rates and public health care, and then, ten years later, once people seem to stop caring about these topics altogether and instead spend all their time talking about On "Awakening," "Bronze Age Mentality," and "e/acc," you'll feel completely lost.

A person's identity is always tied to their role in the wider world they inhabit, and over a decade, not just one person will change , the world around them will change. One change in my thinking that I've written about before is that it involves less economics than it did a decade ago. The main reason for this shift is that I spent a good portion of the first five years of my crypto career trying to invent mathematically provable optimal governance mechanisms, and I ended up discovering some essentially impossible results that It became clear to me that:

(i) what I was looking for was impossible, (ii) in practice deciding between the success of existing flawed systems and No, the most important variable (often the degree of coordination between subgroups of participants, but also other factors that we often simplify as “culture”) is one that I haven’t even modeled.

Previously, math was a major part of my identity: I was heavily involved in math competitions in high school, and soon after I entered the cryptocurrency space, I started working on Ethereum. Doing a lot of coding in , Bitcoin and elsewhere, I get excited about every new cryptographic protocol, and it seems to me that economics is also part of a broader worldview: it's the mathematics of understanding and figuring out how to improve the social world. tool. All parts fit together neatly.

Now, the pieces fit together less often. I still use mathematics to analyze social mechanisms, although the goal is more often to come up with rough first guesses about what might work and mitigate worst-case behavior (in the real world, this is usually done by robots rather than humans), rather than explaining average-case behavior. Now, I write and think more, often using very different arguments, even when supporting the kind of ideals I espoused a decade ago.

One ​​of the things that fascinates me about modern artificial intelligence is that it allows us to mathematically and philosophically engage in different ways with the hidden variables that guide human interactions: artificial intelligence Intelligence can make "resonance" legible

All these deaths, births, and rebirths, whether collections of ideas or people, are the way life is finite. These deaths and births will continue to occur in a world where we live for two centuries, a thousand years, or as long as the main sequence. If you personally feel that life doesn't have enough finitude, death and rebirth, you don't have to wage war to add more: you can also make the same choice I did and become a digital nomad.

2 

Grads are falling in Mariupol. (Translator's Note: Literally translated as artillery Landing in the city of Mariupol should allude to the Russo-Ukrainian war)

I still remember the local time 2022 year 2 month 23  At  7 20 that evening, I was anxiously looking at the computer screen in my hotel room in Denver. For the past two hours, I'd been simultaneously scrolling Twitter for updates and repeatedly contacting my dad, who had the same thoughts and fears as me, until he finally sent me that fateful reply. I sent out a tweet making my stance on the issue as clear as possible, and I've been following it. I stayed up very late that night.

The next morning, I woke up to see the Ukrainian government’s Twitter account desperately asking for donations in cryptocurrency. At first, I thought this couldn't be true, and I was very concerned that the account had been hacked opportunistically: someone, perhaps the Russian government itself, taking advantage of everyone's confusion and desperation to steal some money. My “security mindset” instincts took over and I immediately started tweeting warning people to be careful while looking through my network for people who could confirm or deny whether the ETH address was real. An hour later, convinced that it was in fact true, I publicly conveyed my conclusion. About an hour later, a family member sent me a message stating that given what I had done, it was best for my safety not to return to Russia.

Eight months later, I see the crypto world going through a very different kind of turmoil: the public demise of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. At the time, someone posted a long list of "crypto protagonists" on Twitter, showing which ones had fallen and which ones were still intact. The casualty rate of this list is very high:

SBF The situation is not unique: it mixes MtGox and the previous major turmoil that engulfed the crypto world. But this was the moment when I realized, all at once, that most of the people I had viewed as guiding lights in the crypto world, that I had felt comfortable following since 2014, were no longer there.

People who look at me from a distance often assume that I am a highly motivated person, probably because that is your "protagonist" for "college dropout" Or the expectations of the "project founder". However, in reality, I am anything but. The virtue I valued as a child was not the virtue of being creative when starting a unique new project, or showing courage when it was needed, but rather the virtue of showing up on time, doing homework, and getting a 99% average. The virtues of a good student.

My decision to drop out of school was not a courageous step of faith. It started in early 2013 when I decided to take a paid internship over the summer to work for Ripple. When US visa complications prevented this, I instead spent the summer working with my Bitcoin Magazine boss and friend Mihai Alisie in Spain. At the end of August I decided I needed to spend more time exploring the crypto world, so I extended my vacation to 12 months. It wasn’t until January 2014, when I saw hundreds of people cheering for my talk introducing Ethereum at BTC Miami, that I finally realized I had chosen to leave college for good. Most of my decisions in Ethereum involve responding to pressure and demands from others. When I met Vladimir Putin in 2017, I didn't try to arrange a meeting; instead, someone else suggested it and I pretty much said "sure."

Now, five years later, I finally realize: (i) I had been complicit in legitimizing a genocidal dictator, and (ii) ) In the crypto space, I no longer have the luxury of sitting back and letting those mysterious “others” take charge.

Both incidents, although they differed in the type and scale of their tragedies, both seared similar lessons into my mind: I To actually have responsibilities in this world, I need to be intentional about how I operate. Doing nothing, or living on autopilot and allowing yourself to simply become part of someone else's plan, is not an automatically safe or even blameless course of action.

I am one of the mysterious others who play this role. If I don't and the crypto space either stagnates or is dominated by opportunistic money grabbers, then I have only myself to blame. So I decided to be cautious about accepting other people's plans and be more vocal about the plans I made myself: have less ill-conceived meetings with random powerful people who were only interested in me as a source of legitimacy, and do more Things like Zuzalu 

Zuzalu flag in Montenegro in spring 2023

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Let's talk about happier things next - or at least ones that are more challenging like math puzzles than falling down while running and walking with bleeding knees 2  The challenge of traveling kilometers to seek medical treatment. The author isn't going to share any more details, noting that the Internet has become very good at turning photos of a rolled-up USB cable in his pocket into memes suggesting something entirely different, and he certainly doesn't want to give those people more "ammunition".

I've talked before about the changing role of economics and the need to think about motivation (and coordination) differently: we are social animals, so the two are actually closely connected), and the idea that the world is turning into a "jungle": big government, big business, the big mob, and pretty much anything "big" will continue to grow, and the interactions between them will become more frequent and complex. I haven’t talked much about how many of these changes will impact the crypto space itself.

The crypto space was born in late 2008, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. The Bitcoin blockchain's genesis block quotes this famous article from the UK's The Times:

Bitcoin's early memes were heavily influenced by these themes Impact. Bitcoin is about abolishing banks, which is a good thing because banks are unsustainable monoliths that constantly create financial crises. Bitcoin exists to abolish fiat currency, because the banking system cannot exist without the underlying central banks and the fiat currency they issue—plus, fiat currency makes it possible to print money to fund wars. But in the fifteen years since then, the broader public discourse as a whole appears to have largely moved beyond concerns about money and banks. What is considered important now? Well, we can ask about a copy of Mixtral 8 x 7 b running on my new GPU laptop:

Once again, A.I. Can make the resonance clear and legible

There is no mention of currency and banks or government control of currency. Trade and inequality are listed as issues of global concern, but as far as I can tell, the problems and solutions being discussed occur more in the physical world than the digital world. Is the original “story” of cryptocurrency increasingly behind the times?

There are two sensible responses to this dilemma, and I believe our ecosystem will benefit from both:

• Remind people that money and finance still matter and serve the world’s underserved in this niche

• Go beyond finance and use our technology to build a more comprehensive vision of a freer, more open and more democratic world Alternative technology stacks, and how to build a better society more broadly, or at least tools to help those excluded from mainstream digital infrastructure.

Importantly, I think the crypto space is uniquely positioned to provide value there. Cryptocurrency is one of the few truly highly decentralized tech industries, with developers spread across the globe:

Source: Electric Capital's Cryptocurrency Year 2023 Developer Report

Having visited many new global cryptocurrency hubs over the past year, I can confirm that this is indeed the case. Increasingly, large crypto projects are headquartered all over the world, or nowhere else. Additionally, non-Western developers often have a unique advantage in understanding the specific needs of crypto users in low-income countries and being able to create products that meet those needs. When I talk to a lot of people from San Francisco, I get the distinct impression that they think AI is the only thing that matters, that San Francisco is the capital of AI, so San Francisco is the only place that matters. "So, Vitalik, why haven't you settled down in the Gulf with your O 1 visa"? Cryptocurrencies don’t need to play this game: it’s a big world and it only takes a visit to Argentina, Turkey or Zambia to remind yourself that many people still have important issues related to access to money and funding, and that there are still opportunities to balance Complex work on user experience and decentralization to truly solve these problems in a sustainable way.

Another vision is the one I outlined in my recent post, "Making Ethereum Cypherpunk Again." Rather than just focusing on money, or becoming the “Internet of Value,” I think the Ethereum community should broaden its horizons. We should create a complete decentralized technology stack - one that is independent of the traditional Silicon Valley technology stack to the same extent as e.g. China's tech stack is - and competes with centralized tech companies at every level.

Repost this technology stack comparison table again:

After I published the article After the article, some readers reminded me that an important missing piece of the system is the technology of democratic governance: the tools for people to make collective decisions. This is what centralized technology is really trying to provide, since each company is assumed to be run by a CEO, with oversight provided by...well...a board of directors. Ethereum has benefited from very primitive democratic governance techniques in the past, when a series of controversial decisions, such as the DAO fork and several rounds of issuance reductions, were made in 2016-2017. A team from Shanghai has created a platform called Carbonvote where ETH holders can vote on decisions.

ETH’s vote for the DAO fork

The vote is advisory in nature: there is no hard and fast agreement that the outcome will determine what happens. However, they help core developers feel confident to actually implement a range of EIPs, knowing that the wider community will support them. Today, we have access to much richer proof of community membership than token holdings: POAP, Gitcoin Passport points, Zu stamps, and more.

Taken together, we can begin to see a second vision of how the crypto space can evolve to better meet the concerns and needs of the 21st century: creating a A more comprehensive, trustworthy, democratic and decentralized technology stack. Zero-knowledge proofs are key to expanding what such a stack can offer: we can move beyond the false binary of “anonymous and therefore untrusted” versus “verified and KYCd” and prove everything about who we are and what permissions we have A more fine-grained statement. This allows us to simultaneously address concerns about authenticity and manipulation – protecting against “Big Brother outside” – as well as concerns about privacy – protecting against “Big Brother within”. In this way, cryptocurrency becomes more than just a financial story and can be part of a broader story of creating better technology.

4 

But beyond telling stories, how do we achieve this? Woolen cloth? Here we return to some of the issues I raised in my post three years ago: the changing nature of motivation. Often, those who focus too much on a theory of financial motivation – or at least a theory of motivation in which financial motivation can be understood and analyzed, while everything else is treated as a mystery we call “culture” Black Box – Be confused by this space because many actions seem contrary to financial motivations. “Users don’t care about decentralization”, but projects still often strive to be decentralized. “Consensus is built on game theory” However, successful social campaigns that drive people out of dominant mining or staking pools work in Bitcoin and Ethereum.

I recently realized that no one I've ever seen has attempted to create a basic, functional cryptographic space map that works "as expected", Try to include more participants and motivations. So let me give it a quick try now:

This map itself is idealistic and An intentional mix of 50/50 "describing reality". It aims to demonstrate the four main components of an ecosystem, which can support each other and have a symbiotic relationship. In practice, many crypto agencies are a mixture of these four.

Each of these four components provides something critical to the overall machine:

• Token holders and defi users have contributed greatly to the financing of the whole thing, which is taking technologies like consensus algorithms and zero-knowledge proofs to key to production quality.

• Intellectuals provide ideas to ensure that the space is actually doing something meaningful.

• Builder Bridges the gap and attempts to build applications that serve users and bring ideas to life.

• Pragmatic users are the people we ultimately serve.

Each of the four groups has complex motivations, and these motivations interact with other groups in various complex ways. There are also “dysfunctional” versions of each group: apps may be exploitative, DeFi users may inadvertently reinforce the network effects of exploitative apps, pragmatist users may deepen their reliance on centralized workflows, intellectuals It's possible to get too caught up in theory and focus on trying to solve every problem by blaming people for being "inconsistent" without recognizing that financial incentives (and the disincentives of "user inconvenience") are also important and can and should be addressed.

Often, these groups have a tendency to laugh at each other, and sometimes I do play a part in that. Some blockchain projects are openly trying to move away from what they see as childish, utopian, and distracting idealism and focus directly on applications and usage. Some developers belittle their token holders and their dirty love for making money. There are also developers who belittle pragmatic users and their sordid willingness to use centralized solutions when it's more convenient for them.

But I think there is an opportunity to improve understanding between these four groups, with each party understanding that it is ultimately dependent on the other three groups and working to limit its own excesses behavior, and recognize that in many cases, their dreams are not as far away as they think. I think this is a form of peace that is actually possible, both within the “crypto space” and between neighboring communities with whom it aligns strongly with its values.

5 

The beauty of the global nature of cryptocurrency is that it provides me Provided a window into a variety of fascinating cultures and subcultures around the world and how they interact with the crypto world.

I still remember when I first visited China in 2014 and saw all the signs of light and hope: the exchanges expanded to hundreds employees, even faster than the United States, large-scale GPU and later ASIC mining pools, and projects with millions of users. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley and Europe have long been the main engines of idealism in the field, with two distinct flavors. Almost from the beginning, Ethereum’s development was de facto headquartered in Berlin, and it was within Europe’s open source culture that many of the early ideas for how to use Ethereum for non-financial applications emerged.

Diagram of Ethereum and two proposed non-blockchain sister protocols Whisper and Swarm, Gavin Wood used them in many of his early speeches

Silicon Valley (and by that I mean the entire San Francisco Bay Area, of course) was an early adopter of cryptocurrency interest Another breeding ground for , mixed with ideologies as diverse as rationalism, effective altruism, and transhumanism. In the 2010s, these ideas were new, and they felt "crypto-adjacent": many people who were interested in them were also interested in crypto.

Elsewhere, letting regular businesses use cryptocurrencies for payments is a hot topic. In all kinds of places around the world, one can find people accepting Bitcoin, even including Japanese waiters tipping with Bitcoin:

Since then, These communities have gone through a lot of changes. In addition to other broader challenges, China has experienced multiple cryptocurrency crackdowns, resulting in Singapore becoming the new home for many developers. Silicon Valley is divided: Rationalists and artificial intelligence developers were essentially different factions of the same team until 2020, when Scott Alexander was doxxed by the New York Times. Dueling factions on the question of optimism versus pessimism about artificial intelligence’s default paths. Ethereum’s zone makeup has undergone significant changes, especially during the introduction of entirely new teams for proof-of-stake in 2018, although more by adding new teams than by dying off old ones. Death, birth and rebirth.

There are many other communities worth mentioning.

When I visited Taiwan for the first time in 2016 and 2017 what impressed me most was the self-organization ability And a combination of willingness to learn from the people there. Whenever I write a document or blog post, I often find that within a day, a study club will form on its own and start excitedly annotating every paragraph of the post on Google Docs. Recently, members of Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs were equally excited about Glen Weyl’s ideas on digital democracy and “pluralism,” and were quick to post a full update on the field on their Twitter account Mind mapping (which includes many Ethereum applications).

Paul Graham once wrote about how every city sends a message: In New York, "You should make more money." . You should really read all these books in Boston. In Silicon Valley, "You should be stronger." When I visited Taipei, the message that came to mind was "You should rediscover your inner high school student."

Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang spoke at a study session at Nowhere Bookstore in Taipei, where I gave a talk on community notes four months ago< /p>

Over the past few years, as I have visited Argentina several times, I have been fascinated by building and applying the technologies and ideas that Ethereum and the broader crypto world have to offer Struck by desire and willingness. If places like Silicon Valley are the frontier, full of abstract thoughts about a better future, then places like Argentina are the frontier, full of positive motivation to meet the challenges that need to be addressed today: in Argentina's case, ultra-high inflation and Limited connections to the global financial system. Cryptocurrency adoption there is off the charts: I get recognized on the street in Buenos Aires more often than I do in San Francisco. There are also a number of local builders, with a surprisingly healthy mix of pragmatism and idealism, working on people's challenges, whether it's crypto/fiat conversions or improving the state of Latin American Ethereum nodes.

My friend and I were in a coffee shop in Buenos Aires, and we paid with ETH

There are many others worth mentioning: the cosmopolitan and highly cosmopolitan crypto community in Dubai, the growing  ZK community across East and Southeast Asia, the dynamic and pragmatic builders in Kenya, Colorado state public goods-oriented solarpunk community, and more.

Finally, Zuzalu has finally created a very different, beautiful mobile sub-community in 2023 that will hopefully flourish on its own in the coming years. This is a big part of what attracts me to the Cyber ​​Nation movement: culture and community are not just things to be defended and protected, but also things that can be actively created and developed.

6 

A person will learn many lessons as he grows up, and different People will also have different lessons. For me, some are:

• Greed is not the only form of selfishness. Cowardice, laziness, resentment and many other movies can do a lot of harm. Moreover, greed itself can come in many forms: Greed for social status is often as harmful as greed for money or power. As someone who grew up in my tender Canadian upbringing, this is a major update: I feel like I was taught to believe that greed for money and power is the root of most evil, and if I make sure I'm not greedy for those things ( For example, by repeatedly fighting to reduce the ETH supply share of the top 5 “founders”), I fulfilled my responsibility to be a good person. This is of course not true.

• You are allowed to have a preference without having to have a complex scientific explanation for why your preference is real and absolute good. I generally like utilitarianism and find it often unfairly maligned and wrongly equated with callousness, but here I think ideas like excessive utilitarianism can sometimes lead humans astray: you can change your There are limits to the degree of preference, so if you push it too hard, you'll end up making up reasons for why everything you like actually objectively best serves the general flourishing of humanity. This often results in you trying to convince others that these anachronistic arguments are correct, leading to unnecessary conflict. A related lesson is that a person may not be right for you (in any situation: work, friendship, or otherwise) without being a bad person in some absolute sense.

• The importance of habits. I intentionally limit many of my daily personal goals. For example, I try to run 20km once a month and otherwise do “whatever I can”. This is because the only habits that work are the ones you actually keep. If something is too difficult to maintain, you abandon it. As a digital nomad who regularly hops continents and takes dozens of flights per year, any kind of routine is difficult for me, and I have to deal with this reality. Although Duolingo's gamification, which pushes you to keep up a "streak" by doing at least something every day, actually works for me. Making positive decisions is difficult, so it's best to make positive decisions that will have the most long-term impact on your mind, by reprogramming your mind to default to a different pattern.

Everyone will learn these very long tails, and in principle I can go longer. But there are limits to how much you can actually learn just from reading about other people’s experiences. As the world begins to change at a faster rate, the lessons learned from other people’s narratives become outdated more quickly. So, for the most part, there's also no substitute for simply doing things the slow way and gaining personal experience.

7 

Every good thing in the social world - a community, a An ideology, a "scene," a country, or a very small company, a family, or a relationship - are all created by people. Even in the rare cases where you can write a reasonable story about how it has existed since the birth of human civilization and the Eighteen Tribes, at some point in the past, someone had to actually write the story. These things are finite—both the thing itself, as part of the world, and the thing you experience it as, a fusion of underlying reality and your own way of conceiving and interpreting it. As communities, places, scenes, companies and families disappear, new ones must be created to replace them.

For me, 2023 is a year of watching many things big and small fade into the distance of time. The world was changing rapidly, the framework I was forced to use to try to make sense of the world was changing, and so was the role I played in influencing the world. There is death, a truly inevitable type of death that continues to be with us even after the blight of human biological aging and death has been purged from our civilization, but there is also birth and rebirth. It is the task of each of us to continue to be active and to create new things wherever we can.