vitalik.eth Profile picture
Aug 15, 2020 5 tweets 2 min read Read on X
It's interesting how in the last few weeks I've argued with both pro-BTC *and* anti-BTC people who think BTC will utterly cripple nation state funding (pro-BTC ppl wanting to defund the militaries), while I disagree with both: I just don't think it will have that kind of effect.
My theory is more moderate. Money printing is only a small portion of governments' budgets, and furthermore it's very naive to think that if govts were forced to shrink their revenue by 10-20% it's the militaries that go first.
And there's plenty that governments can effectively tax even in a hypothetical extreme world of zero financial surveillance; property, physical sales, transactions in large organizations, natural resources, lots of urban anti-congestion regs can be turned into Pigovian taxes...
Rather, things I focus on are:

* Freedom to transact+organize for marginalized people
* Escaping the tyrannies of weaponized interdepedence mitpress.mit.edu/blog/weaponize…
* Minimizing excessive power of gatekeepers
* Freedom of exit

etc etc
(I recognize that some people in the thread I linked to above said things other than "govts having 10-20% less funding will lead to utopia", I definitely commend those with the more diverse viewpoints)

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More from @VitalikButerin

Jan 24
Scaling Ethereum L1 and L2s in 2025 and beyond

vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/0…
Ethereum distinguishes itself in two ways: a principled technological and social philosophy committed to decentralization, and real value already brought to millions of users. Image
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L2s have made great progress, and this is a testament to Ethereum's ecosystem and development philosophy working in action. Image
Read 6 tweets
Jan 21
No. This is not how this game works.

The person deciding the new EF leadership team is me. One of the goals of the ongoing reform is to give the EF a "proper board", but until that happens it's me.

If you "keep the pressure on", then you are creating an environment that is actively toxic to top talent. Some of Ethereum's best devs have been messaging me recently, expressing their disgust with the social media environment that people like you are creating. YOU ARE MAKING MY JOB HARDER.

And you are decreasing the chance I have any interest whatsoever in doing "what you want".

Milady.

x.com/coinmamba/stat…
BTW your attempted scapegoat attack against Aya is not even correct. Left: the wired English version. Right: AI translation of the Japanese original.



You may of course still disagree with her approach, but it is NOT "competing and winning are bad". wired.jp/article/the-ne…Image
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Pure evil. Image
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Read 7 tweets
Apr 29, 2024
BInius: highly efficient proofs over binary fields

vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/0…
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SNARKs rely on "arithmetization": a way of converting a statement about a program into an equation involving polynomials (or sometimes vectors and matrices) Image
To keep numbers within reasonable sizes, the arithmetic must be done not over regular integers, but over structures called "finite fields". Modular arithmetic is the simplest example of a finite field, but there are others. Image
Read 18 tweets
Mar 28, 2024
Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/0…
The Dencun hard fork has activated, and thanks to Blobscriptions the blob fee markets are now in "price discovery mode". Image
It has been well-understood for years that the future of Ethereum scaling depends on rollups backed by data space secured with data availability sampling. EIP-4844 is a key change that lays the groundwork for this future. Image
Read 13 tweets
Dec 30, 2023
By popular demand, an updated roadmap diagram for 2023! Image
Here was the one from last year. Notice that it's actually quite similar! As Ethereum's technical path forward continues to solidify, there are relatively few changes. I'll go through the important ones.

The role of single slot finality (SSF) in post-Merge PoS improvement is solidifying. It's becoming clear that SSF is the easiest path to resolving a lot of the Ethereum PoS design's current weaknesses.

See:



eprint.iacr.org/2023/280
ethresear.ch/t/sticking-to-…
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Read 9 tweets
Nov 27, 2023
New monster post: my own current perspective on the recent debates around techno-optimism, AI risks, and ways to avoid extreme centralization in the 21st century.

vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/1…
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First of all, technology is amazing, and there are very high costs to delaying it. Image
Climate change is an important exception to an "everything is getting better" story. I'm optimistic, but pessimistic outcomes could be quite bad so the problem is really worth our attention.

It's a reminder that tech solving problems is not automatic: we have to work for it.
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Read 23 tweets

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