CaptainZ

Author: @VitalikButerin

Translation Editor: @hiCaptainZ

Original Address: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/01/31/end.html

0#

One of my most impressive memories from the past two years was speaking at a hackathon, visiting hacker enclaves, and participating in the Zuzalu event in Montenegro. I saw some people there who were a full ten years younger than me, taking on leadership roles in various projects, whether as organizers or developers, including crypto audits, Ethereum Layer 2 scaling, synthetic biology, and more. In the core organizing team of Zuzalu, there was a 21-year-old named Nicole Sun, who invited me to visit a hacker enclave in South Korea a year ago: a gathering of about 30 people, where I distinctly remember being the oldest person in the room.

When I was as young as those residents of the hacker enclave, I remember many people praising me as one of the young geniuses changing the world, like Zuckerberg. I felt somewhat uncomfortable with that attention, both because I didn't like it and because I didn't understand why people wanted to translate "wunderkind" into German when it could be expressed perfectly well in English. But looking at all these younger people who have gone further than I have, I clearly realized that if that was once my role, it is no longer so. I now play a different role, and it is time for the next generation to take on the responsibilities that once belonged to me.

A path to the Seoul hacker enclave, taken in August 2022. I took the photo because I couldn't determine which house I should enter, and I was communicating with the organizers for that information. Of course, it turned out that this house was not on this path at all, but about twenty meters to the right in a more prominent location.

1#

As a supporter of life extension (meaning ensuring that humans can live for millions of years through medical research), people often ask me: Isn't the meaning of life closely related to its finiteness? You only have a short time, so you must enjoy it? Historically, my intuition has always rejected this view: while from a psychological perspective, we often cherish things more if they are finite or scarce, the idea that a long existence could become so bad that it is worse than not existing at all is simply absurd. Moreover, I sometimes think that even if immortality turns out to be that bad, we can always choose to start more wars to simultaneously increase the "stimulation" and reduce our lifespan. The fact that today's non-antisocial people reject this choice strongly suggests to me that once it becomes a viable option, we would also reject doing so with biological death and suffering.

However, as I grow older, I realize that I don't even need to argue this point. Whether our lives are finite or infinite, every beautiful thing in our lives is finite. You think that eternal friendship will eventually fade away in the mists of time. Your personality can change completely in ten years. Cities can change entirely, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. You might move to a new city and have to start the process of familiarizing yourself with your physical environment all over again. Political ideologies are also finite: you might build an entire identity around your views on the highest marginal tax rate and public healthcare, only to feel completely lost a decade later when people seem to care about those topics no longer and instead spend all their time discussing "wokeness," "Bronze Age mindset," and "e/acc."

A person's identity is always closely tied to the role they play in the broader world, and over a decade, not only does a person change, but the world around them changes as well. One change in my thinking that I wrote about previously is that the economic factors I think about have become less than they were ten years ago. The main reason for this shift is that in the first five years of my crypto life, I spent most of my time trying to invent mathematically provable optimal governance mechanisms, only to ultimately discover some fundamental impossibility results that made it clear to me that: (i) what I was looking for was impossible, and (ii) the most important variables that determine whether existing flawed systems succeed or fail in practice (often the degree of coordination among subgroups of participants, but also other things we often think of as "culture") are variables that I didn't even model.

Previously, mathematics was a major part of my identity: I participated in many math competitions in high school, and soon after entering the crypto space, I began coding extensively, involving Ethereum, Bitcoin, and elsewhere, and I was excited about every new cryptographic protocol, and economics seemed to me to be part of that broader worldview: it was a mathematical tool for understanding and improving the social world. All these parts fit together perfectly. Now, the degree to which these parts connect has slightly weakened. I still use mathematics to analyze social mechanisms, although the goal is more to propose preliminary guesses about potentially effective and worst-case mitigating behaviors (often executed by machines rather than humans) rather than explaining average-case behavior. Now, even while supporting the same types of ideals as ten years ago, much of my writing and thinking often employs very different types of arguments.

One aspect of modern AI that fascinates me is that it allows us to engage with the implicit variables guiding interpersonal interactions in different ways: AI can make "emotional atmospheres" readable.

All these deaths, births, and rebirths, whether of thoughts or collections of people, are ways in which life is finite. These deaths and births will continue to occur in a world where we live for two centuries, a millennium, or the lifespan of a main-sequence star. If you personally feel that there isn't enough finiteness, death, and rebirth in life, you don't have to start wars to add more: you can also make the same choice as I did and become a digital nomad.

2#

"The sounds of artillery in Mariupol are incessant."

I still remember sitting in a hotel room in Denver, anxiously staring at my computer screen at 7:20 PM local time on February 23, 2022. For the past two hours, I had been browsing Twitter for updates while repeatedly trying to contact my father, who shared my thoughts and fears, until he finally replied to my fateful message. I tweeted to express my position on the issue as clearly as possible and then continued to follow the news. I stayed up late that night.

The next morning, I woke up to see the Ukrainian government's Twitter account desperately seeking cryptocurrency donations. At first, I thought this couldn't be real, and I was very concerned that the account had been opportunistically hacked: perhaps by the Russian government itself, trying to steal some money amid all the chaos and despair. I quickly took the instinct of "safety thinking," immediately tweeting to warn people to be cautious while looking through my social network for someone who could confirm or deny whether the ETH address was real. An hour later, I was convinced it was indeed real, and I publicly conveyed my conclusion. About an hour later, a family member messaged me, pointing out that considering what I had done, it would be best for my safety not to return to Russia.

Eight months later, I watched the crypto world experience a very different turmoil: Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX collapsed. At that time, someone posted a long list of "crypto major players" on Twitter, showing who had fallen and who remained intact. The casualty rate was very high:

SBF's situation was not unique: it mixed and matched various aspects of the previous upheavals surrounding the crypto industry, like MtGox. But at that moment, I suddenly realized that most of the guiding lights in the crypto industry that I had once looked up to since 2014, the people I had followed, were now gone.

People looking at me from afar often think of me as a highly effective person, perhaps because that is the expectation of "major players" or "project founders" and "dropouts." However, that is not the case. What I admired as a child was not the creativity of creating a unique new project, nor the courage displayed in a once-in-a-lifetime moment, but rather being a good student who showed up on time, completed assignments, and achieved a 99% average score.

My decision to drop out was not a bold move made out of conviction. It began with my decision in early 2013 to participate in a co-op internship at Ripple during the summer. When U.S. visa issues prevented this plan, I instead worked with my Bitcoin Magazine boss and friend Mihai Alisie in Spain over the summer. By the end of August, I decided to spend more time exploring the crypto world, thus extending my vacation to 12 months. It wasn't until January 2014, when I saw hundreds of people cheering and applauding in support of my presentation introducing Ethereum at BTC Miami, that I finally realized I had made the choice to leave university forever. Most of my decisions regarding Ethereum were responses to pressure and requests from others. When I met Vladimir Putin in 2017, I did not try to arrange that meeting; rather, it was suggested by others, and I was almost like, "Okay, sure."

Now, five years later, I finally realize that (i) I was once complicit in legitimizing the actions of a genocidal dictator, and (ii) within the crypto space, I can no longer sit on the sidelines and let the mysterious "others" dominate the situation.

These two events, while differing in their tragic types and scales, left me with a similar lesson: I actually have responsibilities in this world, and I need to act consciously. Doing nothing, or living on autopilot, simply allowing myself to become part of someone else's plan, is not a safe or even a blameless way to act. I was once one of those mysterious "others," and I have a responsibility to play my role. If I don't, and if the crypto space stagnates or is increasingly dominated by opportunists, I can only blame myself. Therefore, I decided to carefully consider whether I participate in others' plans and to formulate my own plans more efficiently: reducing unplanned meetings with random powerful people who only see me as a source of legitimacy, while increasing participation in events like Zuzalu.

The flag of Zuzalu flying in Montenegro in the spring of 2023.

3#

Now let's talk about more pleasant things, or at least things that are challenging in a way similar to solving mathematical problems, rather than challenging in the sense of falling while running and needing to walk 2 kilometers to seek medical help (no, I won't share more details; the internet has already proven excellent at turning photos of me tangled in a USB cable into entirely different internet memes, and I certainly don't want to give those people more ammunition).

I have previously discussed the changing role of economics, the need to think about motivations (and coordination: we are social animals, so these two are actually closely linked) in different ways, and how the world is becoming "overgrown": governments are large, businesses are large, crime syndicates are large, and in fact, any "large" X is continuously growing, with interactions between them becoming increasingly frequent and complex. But I haven't talked as much about how these changes affect the crypto space itself.

The crypto industry was born at the end of 2008, right after the global financial crisis. The genesis block of the Bitcoin blockchain contains a reference to a famous article in The Times:

The early memes of Bitcoin were greatly influenced by these themes. The existence of Bitcoin was to abolish banks, which is a good thing because banks are unsustainable behemoths that continuously create financial crises. The existence of Bitcoin was to abolish fiat currency because the banking system cannot exist without a central bank and the fiat currency they issue—and fiat currency enables monetary inflation that can fund wars. But in the fifteen years since then, the entire broader public discourse seems to have largely moved beyond caring about currency and banks. What is now considered important? Well, we could ask the AI running on my new GPU laptop (Mixtral 8x7b):

Once again, AI can make "emotional atmospheres" readable.

There is no mention of currency and banks, nor of government control over currency. Globally, trade and inequality are listed as concerns, but from what I understand, the issues and solutions discussed are more about the physical world than the digital world. Is the original crypto story becoming increasingly outdated?

For this dilemma, there are two wise responses that I believe our ecosystem could benefit greatly from both:

1. Remind people that money and finance are still important and provide quality services for the globally underserved in this area.

2. Go beyond the financial realm and leverage our technology to build a more comprehensive, alternative, freer, more open, and more democratic vision of a tech stack, and how to move toward a broadly better society, or at least tools to help those currently excluded from mainstream digital infrastructure.

The financial realm is still important, and I believe the unique position the crypto industry offers there is distinctive. Crypto is one of the few truly highly decentralized tech industries, with developers spread across the globe:

Data source: Electric Capital's 2023 crypto developer report

In the past year, I have visited many emerging global crypto hubs, and I can confirm this. More and more of the largest crypto projects are headquartered in various remote locations around the world, even ubiquitous ones. Additionally, non-Western developers often have a unique advantage in understanding the specific needs of crypto users in low-income countries and can create products that meet those needs. When I talk to many people from San Francisco, I strongly feel that they believe AI is the only important thing, and since San Francisco is the capital of AI, it is the only important place. "So, Vitalik, why haven't you applied for an O1 visa to settle in the Bay Area?" Crypto doesn't need to play that game: it's a vast world, and just one visit to Argentina, Turkey, or Zambia can remind us that many people still face important issues related to accessing currency and finance, and there are still opportunities to sustainably address these issues by balancing user experience with the complexities of decentralization.

Another vision is what I outlined in my recent article "Making Ethereum Punk Again." Instead of just focusing on money, or becoming a "value internet," I believe the Ethereum community should broaden its horizons. We should create a complete decentralized tech stack—one that is independent of the traditional Silicon Valley tech stack, just like China's tech stack—and compete with centralized tech companies at all levels.

Here is the content of that table:

After I published this article, some readers reminded me that an important missing part of this tech stack is democratic governance technology: tools for people to make decisions together. This is something centralized tech has not even attempted to provide, as it assumes each company is run by a CEO, with oversight provided by... well... a board. Ethereum has previously benefited from very primitive democratic governance technology: when a series of controversial decisions, like the DAO hard fork made in 2016-2017 and several rounds of issuance reductions, were made, a team in Shanghai created a platform called Carbonvote where Ethereum holders could vote on decisions.

Voting on the DAO hard fork in Ethereum.

These votes were essentially advisory in nature: there was no explicit protocol stating what would happen based on the results. But they helped core developers gain confidence in actually implementing a series of EIPs because they knew that the majority of the community would support them. Nowadays, we can obtain richer proofs of community membership than just token holding: POAPs, Gitcoin Passport scores, ZU stamps, and so on.

Considering all these factors, we can begin to see a second vision of how the crypto industry can evolve to better meet the concerns and needs of the 21st century: creating a more comprehensive, trustworthy, democratic, and decentralized tech stack. Zero-knowledge proofs play a key role in expanding the range that this stack can offer: we can move beyond the false binary of "anonymous therefore untrusted" versus "verified and KYC'd" and make more nuanced statements about who we are and what permissions we have. This allows us to address concerns about authenticity and manipulation—guarding against "external big brother"—as well as concerns about privacy—guarding against "internal big brother"—simultaneously. In this way, crypto is not just a financial story; it can become part of a broader narrative of technological improvement.

4#

However, to achieve this, what else do we need to do besides telling stories? Here, we return to some questions I raised three years ago: the nature of incentives is changing. Typically, incentive theories that focus too much on financial incentives, or at least a version in which financial motivations can be understood and analyzed while everything else is seen as a mysterious black box we call "culture," feel confused by this field because many behaviors seem to contradict financial motivations. "Users don't care about decentralization," yet projects often still strive to decentralize. "Consensus relies on game theory," yet successful social movements in Bitcoin and Ethereum have tried to drive people away from major mining or staking pools.

Recently, I thought that I hadn't seen anyone attempt to create a basic functional map describing how the crypto space "works as expected," trying to include more of these participants and motivations. So let me quickly try:

This map itself is a deliberate blend of idealism and "describing reality" in a 50/50 mix. It aims to showcase the important components of the four main supporting and symbiotic relationships within the ecosystem. In reality, many crypto entities are a mix of these four.

Each of these four parts makes significant contributions to the whole system:

1. Token holders and DeFi users contribute greatly throughout the process, which is crucial for pushing technologies like consensus algorithms and zero-knowledge proofs to production quality.

2. Intellectuals provide the ideas that ensure this field makes meaningful contributions.

3. Builders bridge the gap, trying to create applications that serve users and put ideas into practice.

4. Actual users are the people we ultimately want to serve.

Each of these four groups has complex motivations, and they interact with the other groups in various intricate ways. There are also "failure" versions of each group: applications may have extractive features, DeFi users may unwittingly reinforce the network effects of extractive applications, actual users may reinforce centralized workflows, and intellectuals may be overly enthusiastic about theory, too focused on trying to solve all problems by blaming people for being "inconsistent," without appreciating that financial motivations (and the demotivating aspects of "user inconvenience") are also important and can and should be fixed.

Typically, these groups have a tendency to mock each other, and I have sometimes participated in this in my history. Some blockchain projects openly try to distance themselves from the idealism they see as naive, utopian, and distracting, focusing directly on applications and usage. Some developers look down on their token holders, dismissing their dirty motivations for making money. Others look down on actual users, dismissing their dirty desire to use centralized solutions when more convenient.

But I believe there is an opportunity to improve understanding between these four groups, with each side realizing that it ultimately relies on the other three, striving to limit its excesses, and appreciating that in many cases, their dreams are not as far apart as they imagine. This is a form of peace that I believe can actually be achieved, both within the "crypto space" and between adjacent communities that are highly aligned in values.

5#

One of the wonderful aspects of the global nature of cryptocurrency is that it provides me with a window into the fascinating cultures and subcultures around the world and how they interact with the crypto universe.

I still remember my first visit to China in 2014, seeing all the signs of brightness and hope: exchanges scaling up, rapid increases in staff numbers, even faster than in the U.S., massive GPU, and later ASIC mining farms, and projects with millions of users. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley and Europe have long been key engines of idealism in this field, each with its unique characteristics. Ethereum's development has almost from the start had Berlin as its de facto headquarters, as Europe's open-source culture nurtured many early ideas about how Ethereum could be applied beyond finance.

Over the years, I have seen various cultures and subcultures in the cryptocurrency space, coming from all over the world, with different traditions, values, and approaches. The diversity and inclusivity of this field make it a global community that attracts people from different backgrounds. These exchanges and interactions not only foster the development of technology and innovation but also help promote understanding and cooperation, providing a strong impetus for the continued evolution of cryptocurrency.

A diagram of Ethereum and its two proposed non-blockchain sister protocols, Whisper and Swarm, used in many of Gavin Wood's early presentations.

Silicon Valley (of course, I mean the entire San Francisco Bay Area) is another hotbed of early crypto interest, mixing various ideas such as rationalism, effective altruism, and transhumanism. In the 2010s, these ideas were emerging, and they felt closely related to crypto: many people interested in these ideas were also interested in crypto, and vice versa.

Elsewhere, getting conventional businesses to use cryptocurrency for payments is a hot topic. In various places around the world, people accept Bitcoin, even including waiters in Japan who accept Bitcoin as tips:

Since then, these communities have undergone many changes. China has experienced multiple crackdowns on crypto, along with other broader challenges, leading Singapore to become a new home for many developers. Silicon Valley has fractured internally: rationalists and AI developers, who were essentially different factions of the same team before Scott Alexander was doxxed by The New York Times in 2020, have now become independent factions at odds over the optimistic versus pessimistic questions about AI's default path. The regional composition of Ethereum has changed significantly, especially with the introduction of entirely new teams for proof-of-stake work in 2018, although more through additions than the disappearance of the old. The cycle of life and death.

There are many other communities worth mentioning.

When I visited Taiwan multiple times in 2016 and 2017, I was most impressed by the combination of self-organization and willingness to learn there. Whenever I wrote documents or blog posts, I often found that a learning group would form independently within a day, excitedly annotating every paragraph of the article on Google Docs. Recently, members of Taiwan's Digital Affairs Department expressed similar excitement about Glen Weyl's ideas on digital democracy and "pluralism," quickly posting a mind map of the entire field on their Twitter account (which included many Ethereum applications).

Paul Graham once wrote that each city conveys a message: in New York, "You should make more money." In Boston, "You really should start reading all those books." In Silicon Valley, "You should become more powerful." When I visited Taipei, the message conveyed to me was "You should rediscover your inner high school student."

Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang speaking at a learning meeting at the Nowhere bookstore in Taipei, where I introduced "community notes" four months ago.

In recent years, I have visited Argentina multiple times and have been struck by the desire and willingness to build and apply the technologies and ideas offered by Ethereum and the broader crypto world. If places like Silicon Valley are the forefront of abstract forward-thinking about a better future, then places like Argentina are the front lines, filled with positive energy to meet challenges that need immediate solutions: in Argentina's case, extreme inflation and limited connections to the global financial system. The level of cryptocurrency adoption there is incredible: in Buenos Aires, I am recognized more often than in San Francisco. There are also many local developers who remarkably blend pragmatism and idealism, striving to address the challenges people face, whether it's crypto/fiat currency conversion or improving the state of Ethereum nodes in Latin America.

Me and friends at a café in Buenos Aires, where we paid with Ethereum.

There are so many other communities worth mentioning: the international and highly cosmopolitan crypto community based in Dubai, the growing zero-knowledge community in East Asia and Southeast Asia, the vibrant and pragmatic builders in Kenya, the public-interest-oriented solarpunk community in Colorado, and so on.

Finally, I hope Zuzalu created a very different, beautiful floating sub-community in 2023, and I hope it can thrive independently in the years to come. This is one of the greatest appeals of the network state movement to me: the idea that culture and community are not just things to be protected and preserved, but also things that can be actively created and developed.

6#

Everyone learns many different lessons in the process of growing up, and these lessons vary from person to person. For me, some of these lessons include:

1. Greed is not the only form of selfishness. Many behaviors such as cowardice, laziness, resentment, etc., can also cause harm. Moreover, greed itself has many forms: greed for social status is often as harmful as greed for money or power. As someone who grew up in moderate Canada, this is an important update: I feel I was taught to believe that greed for money and power is the root of most evils, and as long as I ensure I am not greedy for those things (for example, repeatedly trying to reduce the proportion of the top five "founders" in the initial distribution of ETH supply), I have fulfilled my responsibility to be a good person. Of course, this is incorrect.

2. You can have preferences without needing to make complex scientific explanations for why your preferences are truly absolutely good. I generally like ethics and find it often receives unfair disparagement, being wrongly equated with cold-heartedness, but this is where I think ideas like ethics can sometimes mislead people: your preferences have a limit, and if you emphasize them too much, you will end up inventing reasons for why everything you prefer is actually to better serve the prosperity of ordinary people. This often leads you to try to convince others that these post-hoc arguments are correct, which can trigger unnecessary conflict. A related lesson is that a person may not fit you in any situation (work, friendship, or otherwise) and is not a bad person in some absolute sense.

3. The importance of habits. I intentionally limit many daily personal goals to a certain range. For example, I try to run 20 kilometers once a month and then "try to run more." This is because the only effective habit is one that you actually maintain. If something is too hard to stick to, you will give up. As a digital nomad who often crosses continents and takes dozens of flights each year, any form of routine is difficult for me, and I have to work around this reality. Using Duolingo's gamified approach to push you to do something every day to maintain a "winning streak" works well for me. Making active decisions is hard, so it's best to always make proactive decisions that have the most significant long-term impact on your thinking by reprogramming your mind to default into different modes.

There are many other lessons, and everyone learns different things; in principle, I could continue listing them. However, there are also limits to what can be learned from reading about others' experiences. As the world begins to change at a faster pace, the lessons learned from others' experiences will also become outdated more quickly. Therefore, to a large extent, nothing can replace the way of doing things through slowly accumulating personal experience.

7#

Every beautiful thing in the social world—a community, an ideology, a "scene," a country, or on a very small scale, a company, a family, or a relationship—is created by people. Even in those rare cases where you can write a reasonable story to explain how it has existed since the dawn of human civilization and eighteen tribes, at some point in the past, someone had to actually write that story. These things are finite—whether as part of the world itself or as experiences you have, they are a fusion of underlying reality and your own conception and interpretation. As communities, places, scenes, companies, and families disappear, new ones must be created to take their place.

For me, 2023 has been a year of observing many things, both large and small, gradually fading into the distance of time. The world is changing rapidly, and the frameworks I am forced to use to understand it are also changing, as is my role in influencing the world. There is death, a truly inevitable death, which will continue to exist even after the troubles of human biological aging and death have been removed from our civilization, but there is also birth and rebirth. It is our task to remain positive and strive to create new things.