Thread by @balajis

There's a simple explanation.

For the purely verbal, crypto appears too technical. What's all this about zero knowledge?

For the mainly technical, crypto looks unnecessarily verbal. What's all this about the state?

We usually hear from the former. That post is from the latter.

https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1489998900438077441

You can understand gradient descent without understanding history, but you can’t understand Bitcoin without understanding history.

Note that this doesn't mean modern ML/AI isn't important. I spent years doing it, it's awesome.

It's more that "AI ethics" is a bolt-on to AI. The CCP has their own notion of AI ethics, for example!

But in web3 & especially in BTC, the social is inseparable from the technical.

The issue tech faced during the techlash of 2013-19 is that it didn't actually run a full stack. The determination of what was true & good had been outsourced to media corporations.

As they lost economically, those media corporations predictably retaliated by calling tech evil.

We now encode the implicit ethical values of tech in explicit code.

- pseudonymous
- decentralized
- internationalist
- capitalist
- networked
- encrypted
- risk-tolerant
- voluntary

Media corporations oppose these values. So they'll lose the rematch.

https://twitter.com/mdudas/status/1489996326679068673