Vitalik Buterin on Warpcast

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Ferran 🐒 pfp

Really interesting and in-depth article. I’ve been reading about for-profit cities for a couple of years now, and the concept just sounds really wrong to me. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/magazine/prospera-honduras-crypto.html

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Vitalik Buterin

I would not want the average city to be a profit-making corporation, but also I feel a strong default negative instinct against anyone arguing that there should be exactly zero of a thing in the entire world. Institutional diversity is good.

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I completely support the idea of diversity of social arrangements, for me we need even more diversity in the world (or more freedom to experiment). But it’s difficult to me to see profit-driven cities accountable to their inhabitants and not to profit margins. If the goal of a city shifts from public interest to maximizing shareholders and investors value, I can imagine that in the mid-long term there will be a big disconnection between the city’s leadership and the citizens real needs. Especially in moments of stress/change/crisis. Universality is key and to me it’s hard to see how it can exist in a city controlled by shareholders rather than its citizens. When governance is driven by those who have a speculative interest holding shares of the project (and lots of times the peoele with vision gets replced by investment groups) the interests of the broader community are typically in a second term. Do you have any thoughts on how a for profit city could find this balance?

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Vitalik Buterin

I actually think Prospera itself is underrated on how much it already has some serious olive branches to non-financialized governance. Far less than many would like, but far more than what one might think would come out of a crew of private-cities people. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prospectus-on-prospera

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Thanks for such a complete article, is sometimes hard to find content like this Many of the ideas are very interesting and even some appealing to me, especially the reduction of bureaucracy & having more room to implement social experiments. And even if I have many criticisms on this project in many sides (and I strongly believe that capitalism is incompatible with democracy and the common good, unlike the free market, which can be), I still like that these experiments exist and I'm interested in seeing how they evolve. In any case, I also see these projects like oases in many ways, like as bottle gardens. So even if Próspera succeeds in many ways, I will remain critical if it’s used as flagship propaganda to suggest that this model can be expanded globally. (eg, in Spain, there’s a “communist” town called Marinaleda often used as a model, but I also see it as a bottle garden) I actually visited Liberland a few years ago as I'm fascinated by social projects. It's a shame it hasn't been successful.

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Vitalik Buterin

Yeah I agree with that, one single instance of something succeeding is much easier than many instances of it succeeding. Often because single instances get subsidized by an inherently non-scalable limited global supply of enthusiasts. I agree with your intuition that capitalism is less compatible with democracy than markets, and that the two are separable to a larger degree than most people realize.

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