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vitalik.eth Profile picture
vitalik.eth
@VitalikButerin
mi pinxe lo crino tcati
217 subscribers
Apr 29 • 18 tweets • 6 min read
BInius: highly efficient proofs over binary fields

vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/0…
Image SNARKs rely on "arithmetization": a way of converting a statement about a program into an equation involving polynomials (or sometimes vectors and matrices) Image
Mar 28 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
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
Dec 30, 2023 • 9 tweets • 5 min read
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.

Nov 27, 2023 • 23 tweets • 8 min read
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…
Image First of all, technology is amazing, and there are very high costs to delaying it. Image
Jun 28, 2023 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
Happy tau day!



Today I'll take a break from my break from twittering and do another twitter AMA.

Feel free to ask questions about any crypto or non-crypto topic. People I follow can reply (to minimize spam), everyone can quote, I'll check both!tauday.com @AISafetyMemes One big reason my p(doom) is not higher is that I am unconvinced of fast takeoff and the "there is no fire alarm for AGI" thesis (I know fast takeoff is not a prereq for doom, but it's a big push in that direction!)

If I get convinced of those things, my p(doom) goes up.
Jun 8, 2023 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
Last year @CryptoRelief_ led by @sandeepnailwal allocated $100m to Covid research projects I wanted to fund

Sandeep and I discussed and jointly concluded these and other projects are high-impact and need follow through grants. Hence we decided to put $100m more to these projects This will be done under my entity Kanro with its multisig

etherscan.io/address/0xB360…

where @CryptoRelief_ and I are going to disburse the funds to.
Nov 21, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
@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...
Nov 9, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
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...
Oct 30, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
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:

Oct 1, 2022 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
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
Sep 8, 2022 • 17 tweets • 6 min read
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.
Sep 5, 2022 • 13 tweets • 1 min read
A thread of random polls about myself: What D&D alignment most accurately describes me?
Sep 4, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Neural networks as philosophy:

Late 20th century philosophical thought was heavily influenced by intuitions from study of computers and algorithms: *we too* are algorithms, what could those insights say about us?

I wonder if the 21st century will do the same with neural nets. When people say things like "human beings are not algorithms", sometimes they're not literally asserting a spirit world not describable with math and physics, rather they're saying: we're different from *computer programs written by humans*. We're more similar to neural nets.
Aug 4, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I continue to find probability distributions with infinite means fascinating. Particularly how their averages *don't converge* as you sample more values.

You can even replicate the behavior deterministically with "tan at integers" as a pseudo-RNG. And if you use tan^2 you get into total crazy land.
Jul 7, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I just remembered a conversation with @AnthonyLeeZhang from pre-covid times on the role of ideology in an intellectual's thinking.

The dichotomy of "idea-driven ideas" vs "data-driven ideas". Framed this way, ideology looks bad, but actually it's not so simple... ... because there are other options. A particularly important option is "data-driven choice of idea-driven ideas". Ideology generates hypotheses and provides motivation, but then you check them against reality, and be prepared to dismiss or de-emphasize some as a result.
Jun 23, 2022 • 8 tweets • 8 min read
There are far more honorable ways to burn $50m to impress people than buying a superyacht.

Like becoming a @gitcoin grants matching partner! Here are the matching partners for the current round: Image @coinbase @0xPolygon @ocelot_labs @UnlockProtocol @graphprotocol @auroraisnear @radicle @anomanetwork @chainlink @Filecoin @ensdomains @blvkhvnd @iearnfinance @kimbal @game7_official @OmidyarNetwork @realMaskNetwork @OPGames_ @0xPARC @AaveAave ...
Jun 18, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I've been thinking about *why* this is true, and I might have an explanation. Basically, I think it comes down to a confusion between terminal goals ("the things we ultimately want") and our strategies for achieving them... By terminal goals I *roughly* mean things like convenience, safety, fun, enjoyment, status, love, health...

Terminal goals aren't "individual" or "collective", they just are. What *is* individual or collective are the strategies for achieving these ends.
Jun 8, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
"Accountability" is viewed by most people as a virtue, but it's interesting to look at cases where *lack of accountability* is an explicit goal of some system.

Examples:

* Voting (secret ballot)
* Juries
* Tenure
* Anonymous complaints
* Privacy norms/rules/laws Anon culture is about having less accountability, with the goal of allowing people to authentically speak their minds.

As an anon, you don't get negative personal consequences for saying things others dislike, but you also miss out on lots of positive personal consequences.
Jun 2, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Some people responded "but technology HAS had few upsides and many downsides!"

I definitely agree there are important problems. But I also think much of the pessimism is narrative, not reality.

[thread] Some amazing technology successes of the last 20y:

* Instant global accessibility of often frontier-level knowledge
* Covid vaccines
* Remote work
* Remote friendship
* Urban navigation (smartphone maps)
* Falling prices of clothing and many other physical items
* Solar power
* Very-low-cost entertainment
Jun 2, 2022 • 24 tweets • 7 min read
A big difference between the "new idealistic movement" scene 10-15 years ago vs today is that back then it felt possible to be on all the good-guy teams at the same time. Today, much more adversarial thinking and conflict.

I've been trying to understand.. where to from here? Many libertarians were excited about direct democracy.

PorcFest (big libertarian event) had lots of carnivore *and* vegan food.

Rick @Falkvinge bridged Bitcoin and the Pirate Party.

Lots of blockchain people and "open source community" people saw each other as natural allies.
May 20, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
One broader sort-of-contradiction I think about is the open-mindedness vs passion tradeoff.

Is it possible to both passionately act on the world based on your current beliefs and be open minded to the possibility that those beliefs are very wrong?

How do yall handle this? It's hard. Eventually you make a mistake in your beliefs, and (especially if you are in politics, but some other domains too) correcting that mistake means acknowledging that a previous version of yourself contributed negative value to the world.