Vitalik Buterin

@vitalik.ca

8782 Followers 214 Following

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The risk of politician coins comes from the fact that they are such a perfect bribery vehicle. If a politician issues a coin, you do not even need to send *them* any coins to give them money. Instead, you just buy and hold the coin, and this increases the value of their holdings passively. Furthermore, there is deniability: holding the coin is, in terms of financial effect, a linear combination of donating to the issuer and gambling. Hence you can have the intention of doing the former but when challenged claim that you are doing the latter. You can even hold the coin privately, and show that you are holding it to whoever you need to show; you do not need any zero knowledge proofs, you just send a test transaction. This is all risky to democracy, for reasons very similar to what I wrote in https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html , https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2020/09/11/coordination.html and elsewhere. TLDR: the economic arguments for why markets are so great for "regular" goods and services do not extend to "markets for political influence". I recommend politicians do not go down this path.
There is perhaps an analogy with weed here. Ten years ago, to many weed represented freedom, and rebellion against sclerotic old order that denied self-sovereignty over our bodies. Then, weed became legalized, and "official". On that day, I remember my personal interest in weed dropping by > 2x overnight. And since then, public discourse is moving toward a balanced view of weed: it is much less harmful than alcohol and smoking, and has valuable medical uses, but it is also far from harmless, especially in its modern corporate hyper-optimized versions. Crypto finance is similar. In the old order, @GaryGensler created a regime where tokens that give investors clear indication of what their rights are and where their revenue comes from is a "security", but obfuscated "governance tokens" are potentially in the clear. This was a perverse distortion of incentives, and it is a key reason why @GaryGensler must never be christened as a hero, even among crypto skeptics. Everything that happened in crypto was in part a response, part compliance part rebellion, to these pressures. Over the last year, we have been entering a new order. Now, the most powerful people in the world are cheering on the idea of anyone creating tokens for anything, at any scale.
We are indeed currently in the process of large changes to EF leadership structure, which has been ongoing for close to a year. Some of this has already been executed on and made public, and some is still in progress. What we're trying to achieve is primarily the following goals: * Improve level of technical expertise within EF leadership * Improve two-way communications and ties between EF leadership and the ecosystem actors, old and new, that it is our role to support: users (individual and institutional), app devs, wallets, L2s * Bring in fresh talent, improve execution ability and speed * Become more actively supportive of app builders, and make sure important values and inalienable rights (esp privacy, open source, censorship resistance) are a reality for users including at the app layer * Continue to increase our use of decentralized and privacy tech and the Ethereum chain, including for payments and treasury management Explicit *non-goals* are: * Execute some kind of ideological / vibez pivot from feminized wef soyboy mentality to bronze age mindset * Start aggressively lobbying regulators and powerful political figures (esp in USA, but really anywhere, especially large powerful countries), and risking compromising Ethereum's position as a global neutral platform * Become an arena for vested interests * Become a highly centralized org, or even more of a "main character" within Ethereum These things aren't what EF does and this isn't going to change. People seeking a different vision are welcome to start their own orgs.
One terabyte USB key
Small at-home PCR-equivalent test