vitalik.eth Profile picture
Aug 15, 2020 5 tweets 2 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
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

Nov 21, 2022
@paulg I wasn't responding to you (I meant it when I say I don't subtweet single examples), just calling out a general pattern on CT I've found insufferable over the past week.
Sigh, I'll explain where I am coming from in more detail.

Basically, there's "a thing" that happens on here where people give out rumors, and many people retweet them, and lots of people start trading on that info...
I felt your tweet yesterday was in that direction, but there were many before, often worse; lots of engagement farmy CT hotshot types

In general, I don't think we should legitimize "trust me" rumor trading. It makes the space ripe for manipulation and may even create volatility.
Read 7 tweets
Nov 9, 2022
Anti-malaria, pandemic response, mitigating extreme poverty, life extension research, mitigating existential risks (including AI) and thinking about the multimillion-year future of humanity are all very important and undervalued issues and will continue to be for quite a while.
I think the effective altruism community's most underrated weakness is not having a good theory of effectively allocating *social* capital.

Especially if you're well-known, you're not just giving out money, but also reallocating public attention, inspiring the next generation...
"Be willing to make big crazy bets, and keep accumulating wealth because you tell yourself you'll donate it later" convex-maxxing makes sense if you only think about the money, but it becomes a lot murkier once you take into account social capital.

vitalik.ca/general/2021/0…
Read 6 tweets
Oct 30, 2022
Should I publicly blab my opinions about crypto regulation more? Feels unfair to let other people get attacked by CT but never actually poke my own head out.
Well actually here's my moderate take on mixers and privacy that I already gave in the @coinbase podcast two months ago:

Another maybe-controversial take of mine is that I don't think we should be enthusiastically pursuing large institutional capital at full speed. I'm actually kinda happy a lot of the ETFs are getting delayed. The ecosystem needs time to mature before we get even more attention.
Read 8 tweets
Oct 1, 2022
The big really valuable and necessary thing that ERC-4337 provides for account abstraction is a *decentralized fee market* for user operations going into smart contract wallets.

eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4337
You should be able to send an op into a public mempool, and if it pays enough fees, reliably expect it to get included. This should NOT depend on ANY:

* Centralized actors
* Reputation systems for op senders
* ETH held in a separate EOA
* External services for account creation
This is the gold standard that the existing public mempool provides. And we absolutely need to provide the same guarantees for smart contract wallets, or else we risk worsening centralization and censorship.
Read 13 tweets
Sep 8, 2022
Second update from Balvi! 🧵

Lots more anti-covid projects funded, thanks to funds from @Shibtoken @CryptoRelief_!

Previous update here:

First, should you still care about covid?

I've seen the full spectrum of opinions from very smart people. I'd say it's not worth overturning our lives over it, but there are plenty of signs that this thing is a tier more dangerous than the cold/flu and we should not ignore it.
The biggest reason to worry about covid is not short-term death rates, but rather long covid. A few links:



mdpi.com/2076-0817/10/1…

science.org/content/articl…

axios.com/2022/08/25/lon…
Read 17 tweets
Sep 5, 2022
A thread of random polls about myself:
What D&D alignment most accurately describes me?
What D&D alignment most accurately describes me?
Read 13 tweets

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