Vitalik Buterin Should Let Ethereum Be Ethereum
Every time I come across Vitalik Buterin, Im impressed by his intellectual curiosity and underlying earnestness.
The former is rare; there arent many folks who can hold their own with Tyler Cowen. The latter, fortunately, is something he shares with other high-achieving folks, many of whom work in Washington, D.C., and other areas considered intellectual power centers, like Silicon Valley.
Eric Seal is a professional real estate developer and amateur Bitcoin advocate.
Despite what you hear in the media, most of them dont care primarily about building their financial and reputational wealth; the majority strive to do the right thing and work to create products and services that better the lives of others, often for underserved communities. Thats a good thing.
(Now comes the however you knew was coming.)
However, what happens time and again is that unquestionably well-intentioned and decent folks like Buterin become uncomfortable when the interests and judgments of others collide with their own. They doubt the free market when it begins to take something they created in a direction they didnt foresee and dont particularly like.
Read more: Vitalik Buterin’s Dad on Ukraine, Censorship and Decentralization
And heres whats most important for folks like Buterin. Individual interests, the decisions they underlie and the actions they cause are what make free markets work, and free markets as ugly, unpredictable and unfair as they can often be are what drive human progress. Billions of people making their own decisions as to how they spend their time, energy and resources are the best way to allocate the worlds time, energy and resources. Bitcoin and Ethereum are tremendous new technologies that offer unparalleled opportunities to improve this allocation.
Bitcoin accomplishes this through its unstoppable and uncaring process of block verification. A simple process of 1s and 0s grinding forward every 10 minutes without human interaction or influence. Bitcoin takes all comers equally and doesnt stop to assess the merit of individual blocks or the direction those blocks are taking things. Quite literally, it aggregates the private decisions of all who participate and doesnt ask, Well, gee, do I really like where this block is headed?
As is clear in his recent Time interview, Buterin favors impersonal decentralization in concept, but not so much in practice. Intellectually, he understands the power of a decentralized network like Bitcoin, but in his heart he wants it to do the right things that matter to him. Thats why he helped create Ethereum, as he believed that using [Bitcoin] purely for currency was a waste (a belief that many bitcoiners probably share). Ethereum is great technology, an awesome platform for individual human creativity to flourish.
But it may not stay that way forever. According to Buterin, we cant wait years, and we cant allow crypto, generally, and, by inference, Ethereum, to be implemented wrong. We cant allow the focus to be on things that are immediately profitable, so we must exercise our voice. After all, [there] definitely are lots of people that are just buying yachts and Lambos. (Sorry to anyone who works for yacht and Lambo manufacturers; Im sure you can find jobs providing other goods and services on the approved list.)
More generally, in Buterins own words, [t]he goal of crypto is not to play games with million-dollar pictures of monkeys; its to do things that accomplish meaningful effects in the real world. (Sorry, again, if youre an artist who has figured out a way to support yourself by creating pictures of monkeys or other unapproved content that folks want to buy.)
Read more: Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Touts Essay Collection in ETHDenver Talk
Buterin and his Ethereum brethren have brought immense opportunity and created great prosperity for the world and will likely continue to do so for many years. Were lucky to have them around. Seriously.
But they must stop thinking they know whats best for everyone. They must stop judging what everyone else is doing with the platform they created. Humans dont advance in a straight line up and to the right, and it probably doesnt appear like a line at all if you live through the twists and turns of innovation. Those intellectual power centers referred to above are full of smart, well-intentioned folks who think they know how everyone elses time, energy and resources should be allocated to maximize human flourishing. They dont. They cant. No one can.
Buterin and his Ethereum supporters have already shown themselves willing to put their collective thumb on the scale to effect an outcome they viewed as right. Moving forward, I hope that wont be repeated. I hope theyll let Ethereum develop unfettered and go wherever its user base takes it. Based on everything were hearing from Buterin, however, I wouldnt bet on it:
Good crazy is when theres tech work and research and development and public goods coming out of the other end. So theres this battle. And we have to be intentional, and make sure more of the right things happen.
Read more: Vitalik Buterin Calls Canada’s Use of Banks to Stifle Protestors ‘Dangerous’
