>Is Vitalik like the one sane guy in crypto

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King

Ethereum's main competitive advantage is having a leader like Vitalik.

Another leader but an order of magnitude less known is Andre Cronje from Fantom. It worths a read (so much transparency in a crypto company is unusual): https://andrecronje.medium.com/fantom-an-inside-financial-pe...

Andre is pretty much hated now. He created a shit ton of useless tokens in 2020 and 2021, made multiple millions off them, disappeared, and now has come back to preach to word of regulation to prevent others doing what he got away it.

While Cronje may be a good developer, he is also close to SBF level of scam (and he's more clever). He also knowingly associated with Omar Dhanani / 0xSifu / Michael Patryn, who is another scammer who served time in US prison

But also, one of Ethereum's biggest risks is having a leader.

Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation are a dangerous point of centralization that at least expose it to risk of harsher regulation in the near future for years operating as an unregistered security. The SEC has already hinted at this, while the CFTC has indicated that only bitcoin is likely to be regulated as a commodity.

Beyond the governmental risk of Ethereum having a clear head with a throat to choke, there's the simple "hit by a bus" risk. Vitalik is just a single human, and his unexpected death could lead to a massive collapse of confidence from both investors and developers who have other options. It wouldn't completely die with him, but it would be a major setback, because the cult of Vitalik is a not insignificant part of Ethereum.

> The SEC has already hinted at this, while the CFTC has indicated that only bitcoin is likely to be regulated as a commodity.

I think any token that gains enough prominence in the market is going to eventually fall under government purview. Why? Because when financial crime happens, victims want the government to go after the criminals and recover their lost funds. Crypto fans can't have it both ways: if their goal is to create a financial system that lives entirely outside of government control, then they shouldn't reasonably rely on the government to go after the criminals bringing the entire crypto space down.

The reason that the government winds up stepping in is because the chaos and instability created by this completely unregulated side-chain financial system winds up threatening the Federally backed system as well. Market contagion is real and collapses in one sector or market often reverberate across the entire system.

We're seeing it happen in banking right now: a bunch of banks made small business loans to miners that are now underwater because the price of crypto tanked and the GPU market cooled, so their revenue and equipment value has tanked at the same time.

Vitalik isn't actually Ethereum's "leader" anymore. He's one researcher among many. He's still a very productive researcher but he's not a decision-maker. Anyone who wants to see how decisions are actually made can listen to the biweekly dev calls, where people from all the various independent client teams get together to coordinate changes.

Also, the CFTC chair actually indicated that both BTC and ETH are commodities: https://cryptopotato.com/cftc-chair-reiterates-bitcoin-and-e...

The community has long moved past Vitalik as a central point of failure. He's as central to Ethereum as Bill Gates is to Microsoft. Ethereum has 9 different clients made by different distributed teams that adhere to the same spec.

That spec is drafted online in the open and discussed in weekly calls. The Ethereum Foundation is similar to the W3C in that they help co-ordinate the development of it.

Yes, Vitalik is very good in politics and building effective narratives. edit: Downvoted for stating simple facts? I guess the FTX fiasco didn't change anything

I feel it’s almost a shame he isn’t utilizing his intellect and thoughtfulness in a domain more obviously useful for humanity, but he might have just gone to sell ads for a FAANG if he weren’t a crypto pioneer.

Also, even as someone who’s dabbled in the space and found it lacking in many areas, I can’t say with any degree of certainty that there’s no future in his particular flavor of the blockchain technology.

What are those obviously more useful domains AND one tech person can have a very big impact in them?

Whatever Elon Musk’s shortcomings might be, he applied his intellect and skills to self-evidently useful domains such as EVs and space travel. It seems Vitalik is convinced his tech is beneficial to a similar extent, but I don’t share his enthusiasm, at least not at this point.

Genuine question but how is space travel self-evidently useful?

"Space travel" not so much at present. But reduced cost access to space, for sure.

- geolocation (GPS, GLONASS, etc.) - communications (Starlink, Iridium, etc.) - earth sensing (weather, climate, etc.)

All of these are multibillion $ activities that benefit from lowered launch costs.

Preservation of species, provided you accept that as an axiom. Also more immediate benefits such as reusable rockets, affordable satellite Internet etc.

A couple non contestable points:

1. It has been useful so far as a challenge for technological development that finds other uses on the ground, and this is certainly not about to change;

2. It has been useful so far, in direct applications, and there are still direct uses to be covered (dangerous asteroid avoidance, as an example);

3. It tackles the SPOF we have as a species: living on a single planet;

But the more important one, for me, is one that is contestable. Space faring provides humans with an aspirational goal. Without a long term goal, we are reduced to either an hedonist life, or a never-ending struggle against entropy. We are better, as individuals and as a society, when there is something to long for in the horizon.

The first two points can be said about cryptography

NASA Spinoff Technologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies

20 Inventions We Wouldn't Have Without Space Travel (actual post from NASA themselves): https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/20-inventions-we-would...

Those are evidence that unrestrained spending on scientists will generate incidental, largely unrelated discoveries. If we had poured as much money over as much time into the study of ghosts and psychic phenomena, we'd be able to make a similar list.

Your statements do not follow, much less is your initial premise demonstrably true as a generalized statement about all scientists.

But before doing all that, Elon Musk built an online payment system.

To my understanding, he was less individually influential in that particular company, which is the reason why I omitted it in my examples. Because in my view, developing an online payment system in 2000 is a far more important project than developing a Proof-of-Stake blockchain with Turing-complete smart contracts in 2022.

But your point stands: he may well go on to do much better things.

He was kicked out of if not fired from PayPal is why you left it out.

Not sure what you’re getting at.

And before that, he and his brother built an early precursor to Google Maps.

> Whatever Elon Musk’s shortcomings might be, he applied his intellect and skills to self-evidently useful domains such as EVs and space travel.

The self-evidence of such is unknown to me.

Let me gently point out the irony of you acknowledging Vitalik's intellect while simultaneously assuming that Vitalik, as such a smart person, hasn't puzzled through why the crypto industry will end up being obviously useful for humanity.

Do you think it's more likely that Vitalik is mistaken that crypto is obviously useful for humanity, or that he knows it isn't and doesn't care, or that your assessment of crypto being useless is incorrect?

My original claim was about his particular flavor of the tech, not crypto in general.

But in any case, there’s a difference between good judgement and intellect, and a difference between an idea and its execution. If he’s truly puzzled through Ethereum’s usefulness, he hasn’t offered an argument that’s convincing enough to me. However, I can still admire the thought and skill that went into its implementation.

It is of course entirely possible that I’m thoroughly mistaken.

This.

Vitalik has demonstrated an exhaustively thoughtful approach to building technology, is exceptionally humble, and seems to deeply contemplate the fifth-order implications of decisions being made.

It seems absurd to me that people think someone like this has not sufficiently thought through the societal value of their life's work.

> It seems absurd to me that people think someone like this has not sufficiently thought through the societal value of their life's work.

Is this a friend of yours? Because you have more confidence in him than I have with people I know personally. Sounds parasocial.

pessimizer writes: > Is this a friend of yours? Because you have more confidence in him than I have with people I know personally. Sounds parasocial.

If only! Given you've tied your identity to pessimism, which I assume implied you see it as a virtue, I think you might be somewhat more inclined to misanthropy than me. And that's ok. :)

> pessimizer

I’m guessing there’s an intentional link with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pessary (from Latin Pessarium) as well as the computing term pessimal (same root as pessimism, from French pessimisme, from Latin pessimus “worst”) and optimizer.

Here is a blog post where he claims the halting problem is not undecidable: https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/04/01/cantor.html "patent pending on this research"

He has a dangerous combination of self-delusion + intelligence

That was posted on April fools. That's not the only one he's done, either.

This is an April Fool's Day joke...

Ha, what irony? “I am smart in one area so I am therefore smart in everything” is the original sin of crypto (and, frankly, tech in general).

Go back through HN threads on the countless crypto failures and frauds and count how many times some variation of “I don’t understand, they were so smart!” comes up. Or the threads leading up to those failures where the defenders invariably trot out “there are a lot of smart people involved in this, you seriously think you know better?”

Why do people ask serious questions like this predicated upon some judgment of the guy's character. It's like a spooky kind of hero worship. As if only one of them could be right or wrong

> Do you think it's more likely that Vitalik is mistaken that crypto is obviously useful for humanity, or that he knows it isn't and doesn't care, or that your assessment of crypto being useless is incorrect?

I find it funny that you think this is an answerable or useful question, rather than an appeal to authority.

> Do you think it's more likely that Vitalik is mistaken that crypto is obviously useful for humanity, or that he knows it isn't and doesn't care, or that your assessment of crypto being useless is incorrect?

As the sibling comment says it, succinctly: "“I am smart in one area so I am therefore smart in everything” is the original sin of crypto"

Vitalik is very superficially smart in many areas. Refuting his oftentimes pseudo intellectual takes on what's happening takes too much time because "but he sounds so smart".

In this latest one the most obvious one is the entire "Hybrid applications" section. Which never worked, doesn't work and will never work the way he pretends blockchains will enable them to work. His statement "Voting is an excellent example" is patently, provably bullshit [1], but "he's smart so he's right" is hard to beat. Same goes for everything else he throws in there.

[1] To quote, not in full:

--- start quote ---

the purported advantages for a voting system in a weakly-governed country. “Keep your voting records in a tamper-proof repository not owned by anyone” sounds right — yet is your Afghan villager going to download the blockchain from a broadcast node and decrypt the Merkle root from his Linux command line to independently verify that his vote has been counted? Or will he rely on the mobile app of a trusted third party...

...Instead of relying on trust or regulation, in the blockchain world, individuals are on-purpose responsible for their own security precautions. And if the software they use is malicious or buggy, they should have read the software more carefully.

...

Blockchain systems do not magically make the data in them accurate or the people entering the data trustworthy, they merely enable you to audit whether it has been tampered with. A person who sprayed pesticides on a mango can still enter onto a blockchain system that the mangoes were organic. A corrupt government can create a blockchain system to count the votes and just allocate an extra million addresses to their cronies.

https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...

--- end quote ---

For government registries see this discussion about land registries from two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564

And so on.

I really think cryptographic proof of identity tied to a wallet will become crypto’s killer app in the post-AI era.

Why would I want all of my logins on one easily hackable, publicly available 24/7 by tech requirement, deeply connected system? It's an advertiser's dream to have one ID that will track me through all of the internet. Fuck that.

Most of the OG's are like this, because they are more interested in decentralized technology than money. You'd probably like the writings / videos from these people:

Andreas Antonopoulos, Polynya, Erik Voorhees, Chris Burniske, Kevin Owocki, Chris Dixon

His love of decentralised technology explains the 75% premine of etherium right

Most of which was sold to the general public. The sale was open for six weeks, widely known in the crypto community, and even reported in mainstream press after its first couple days made it one of the largest crowdsales to date.

It sounds very similar to how Russian privatization was done. Perhaps vitalik took inspiration from the oligarchs back home

It sounds more like western IPOs. Russian privatization distributed free ownership vouchers to the Russian population, who mostly weren't interested and sold them to the enterprise managers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization_in_Russia#Vouche...

~weren't interested~ Were busy trying not to starve to death and sold anything they had for whatever price somebody would offer. Ftfy

Valid point...and even less like Ethereum's presale.

Interesting, I didn't know this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16183700 (2018)

Chris Dixon has no business on this list. He is A16z's chief crypto shill on Twitter and blocks anyone who even remotely questions crypto/web3/blockchain.

To say he is more interested in decentralized technology than money is laughable given his complete inability to engage in any sort of healthy discussion about it. He is bad for the space.

Sergey Nazarov. Here's a recent talk he gave: https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=lMHaQGB1Wdc

In case the above doesn't work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMHaQGB1Wdc

snopyta.org doesn't load for me. Here's a (low-res) mirror: https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/lMHaQGB1Wdc

There are many Invidious mirrors other than snopyta.org, here you can get the video link for any of them: https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=lMHaQGB1Wdc

I posted a youtube.com link as well.

> Is Vitalik like the one sane guy in crypto that doesn't actually try to be a bro and simply has an idea of his destiny and is living through it?

They are the same picture.

Everyone is free to indulge in naivety all day long, believing the legend that Vitalik is just a nice independent guy who does all of this for the greater good and does not care about money, but the entities behind him are quite notorious for exactly the opposite:

By May 2017, the nonprofit organization (Enterprise Ethereum Alliance) had 116 enterprise members, including ConsenSys, CME Group, Cornell University's research group, Toyota Research Institute, Samsung SDS, Microsoft, Intel, J. P. Morgan, Cooley LLP, Merck KGaA, DTCC, Deloitte, Accenture, Banco Santander, BNY Mellon, ING, and National Bank of Canada. By July 2017, there were over 150 members in the alliance, including MasterCard, Cisco Systems, Sberbank, and Scotiabank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum

Vitalik's organization is the Ethereum Foundation. The EEA is a separate organization founded later by other people.

(Personally though I don't see anything wrong with corporations using the technology.)

That organization doesn’t have anything to do with Ethereum’s decision making infrastructure.

I can make a “Linux Enterprise Alliance” with those companies and it wouldn’t necessarily have any influence on Linux or Linus.

True that, and I am pretty sure that humble, modest and good-intentioned guys working on a project that attracts the biggest sharks in the business can certainly fight against trillion dollar assets of the latter with their bare scientific rigor and austerity to defend their work from any possible overtake.

I hope everyone else also shares this belief, this is how we create belief systems that outlive their subjects and may go on to float freely among platonic solids and spherical cows in vacuum, forever.

As much as I would like to argue against it, things do degrade over time. It is very much unknown how much Linus' passing will change linux ecosystem as a whole ( and one could argue some of his original vision was distorted already ). It is a king problem. Even if you find one good king among all men, what are the odds whoever follows will be at least as good? Usually not great.

And ethereum is very much new. While I personally think it will exist for a little longer, because there is now real money behind it, I think you are right on that generic point ( if I understood your argument correctly ).

You parsed my sarcasm right.

It's apt that you bring up another leader, whose ostensible independence from big-money-driven agendas went up in smoke with his initial refusal, then embarrassed acceptance of the CoC that was peremptorily imposed on the Linux project.

I think he’s more likely to end up with „suicide” than like SFB

It's easy to paint conspiracy theories and it's hard to actually do the work. Vitalik is not in any way attached to the EEA - he's just some guy doing work because he thinks it will lead to good things. I think relative to most of the cryptosphere, or most of tech even the guy is practically a saint. Remember these are actual people behind the screens when you spew comments like these.

It's easy to gag opponents with "conspiracy theories" when you don't cut through the actual message. Academician Andrey Sakharov also did his work thinking it will lead to good things. Later in his life he had the gut to admit he was wrong. A researcher's good intentions and the actual use of his product when it falls into the hands of those who sponsored the work are orthogonal.

It was mainly "sponsored" by the ICO, i.e. crowd funded. I see your criticism as generally valid but the facts are upside down in that comment. Ethereum was neither founded nor supported by evil corporations, on the contrary for years the established mainstream lobbied against cryptocurrencies until one by one they flipped when they realized what smart contracts could be used for. Take someone like Warren Buffett, he's still doing it even now.

Ethereum and the crypto space are at a crossroads for sure. You have chains like Monero on the one side, many in the Ethereum community walking a tight rope trying to balance grassroots free software development with mass adoption, and on the opposite end of the spectrum you get stuff like Solana, the venture capital bro chain.

Etherium guys, go easy with the damage control, your zealotry gets too obvious :)

> Is Vitalik like the one sane guy in crypto that doesn't actually try to be a bro

> I don't follow crypto almost at all

Well, that would explain it :).

There are tons of brilliant people working in the space. It is the most exciting frontier in tech with the greatest potential to positively impact humanity, imo.

Hence, my question. Who else does this? I was being curios.

Basically everyone who posted in the original P2P Forums with Satoshi back in the day is smart and interesting, imo.

> greatest potential to positively impact humanity

That's a bold claim. So far, I haven't seen much sign of anything even remotely like "positive impact".

I think there are some things that can be seen as having a "remotely" positive impact.

Here's one possible example: https://docs.klimadao.finance/blogs/carbon-faq

Sounds eerily similar to SBF.

Has SBF ever written a line of code?

What's that have to do with it?

Literally, everything.

I certainly don't think anyone is particularly less likely to partake in fraud because they did or didn't program, but I guess you have a really compelling reason why?

What are you even saying? If you have some personal vendetta against Vitalik maybe you should go hash it out with him instead of putting it on other people?

What have I said that's even remotely personal about him? You seem to be really confused. I was replying to a thread where somebody asked if SBF had ever programmed, as if that had anything to do with SBF's perchance for fraud... What point are you making when you say that programming is the entire point?

I'm sorry I think we're just both on completely different wavelengths on this issue.

A few things:

- Contemplate why I made my rebuttal in the first place.

- Look up how many open source contributions either of these guys have made in the last 7 years.

- And when you're done, ask yourself, "What does code have to do with the argument at hand that I am being challenged with but incapable of comprehending?".

>- Contemplate why I made my rebuttal in the first place.

You can feel free to clearly express yourself at any point during this conversation. consider that insisting that people read your mind is why you are having this issue right now.

>- Look up how many open source contributions either of these guys have made in the last 7 years.

who cares? what does it have to do with anything. that was the question... you insist it is relevant but apparently cannot express why

>- And when you're done, ask yourself, "What does code have to do with the argument at hand that I am being challenged with but incapable of comprehending?".

You are hands-down the worst conversant I've chatted with here.

I mean wouldn't the facade of SBF being a generally good guy etc not be to dissimilar to Vitalik being considered a "sane guy"? I'm not saying it's either or but the SBF image portrayed vs reality certainly would make one question the image that Vitalik presents to the world vs what is the real one.

We do, but we're not visible at all. Just grinding along while everybody is bro-ing.

Lefteris who now develops rotki but was part of the white hat DAO team, Justin bons on twitter, @cobie in his own chaotic good way, and Laura Shin with her podcast and and Bennett Tomlin and Cas Piancey at the Crypto Skeptic podcast.

Mostly Everyone else is indeed some level of full of shit.

Andreas Antonopoulos is one of the best (if not the best) Bitcoin proponents out there today. Very informative guy.

For crypto newbies like most on HN are, maybe. To be fair to him he does a decent job explaining Bitcoin so that non-nerds can understand the basics. But beyond that if you get more into it you'll find he's a controversial figure like most are in Bitcoin. There aren't really any leaders and either way leader following is the exact opposite of what cryptocurrency is about anyway. The vast majority of the crypto OGs come from the cypherpunk sphere and are skeptical of centralized power/authorities.

Ironically one common criticism Bitcoin hardcore fanatics have is that Antonopoulos is not a Bitcoin maximalist, he's Ethereum friendlyand wrote an entire book on that together with Gavin Wood.

If you are just looking for brilliant people, then there is Silvio Micali founder of Algorand. He has Turing Award.