Vitalik Buterin

@vitalik.eth

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Vitalik Buterin

It's dangerous to encourage people to believe false things (or quietly fail to correct false beliefs) if they lead to correct conclusions though. Such strategies may work in the short term, but the world is chaotic, and generally a wrong-but-helpful belief today will become a wrong-and-harmful belief tomorrow. We learned this with the whole 2020-era attempt to try to convince people that covid is not airborne so that people would not hoard masks and leave them for emergency staff. It ended up leading to really harmful misconceptions that are still persisting.

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Sometimes you can believe the right thing for the wrong reason.

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Losing the key, at a time when it did not yet enter my usual backup protocol because it was recently generated.

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Katakana would not fix this particular problem, it would just make the next generation confused about why ハルチ does not mean ハルトーヘルシ 😀

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ok I'm actually surprised that, at least on one specific issue, these guys seem to have read my blog and taken the ideas seriously

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Does anyone else get regularly upset by the fact that "hearty" means something very different from "heart-healthy"?

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I suspect there's also hidden parts of the challenge, like having a "realistic" mouse movement pattern. Though AI can probably ace that too.

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(I've been betrayed by google once, betrayed by mismanaging self-custody once, and betrayed by badly-designed MPC solution once ... I don't think any of the risks are zero)

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Yeah this is unavoidable unfortuantely. I think the right tradeoff is: The wallet should have a signing key (or multiple signing keys with different permissions), and an M-of-N guardian setup For new users, do 1-of-1 zkemail, because a google (or other email) account is the thing they have already, and the risk that google betrays them is lower than the risk that they will screw up with any kind of key self-custody solution. For more advanced users, give the option to set their own guardians, which could be either keys that they self-custody, or some zk-email-like wrappers around various centralized IDs, or other people, or a mix of all three.

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Why don't people who casually say things like this on the other app realize that prediction markets exist? You can have words backed by genuine risk of meaningful personal consequences there, and it's much more peaceful. https://x.com/thinkingwest/status/1830617990192124332

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The version that I had is: you lock up $N into a box that specifies parameters for a popup that they would join (this could be just a list of specific popup manifest files that specify organizer, location and time slot, or it could be more complex), and the funds can be grabbed once a popup reaches some threshold. The funds then pay for the popup, and also serve as an incentive to actually come. This can be naturally combined with some involvement from the host city, or any other functionality.

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Glue and coprocessor architectures: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/09/02/gluecp.html

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I think this stuff is good and ideal for these kinds of use cases where you're solving a lender-to-borrower trust problem. It's less ideal for _governance_ use cases (which is a term I use broadly, eg. I include social media voting as governance). In those cases, there are mathematical reasons why you explicitly want to count people, and not just count dollars available. Granted, there _are_ graph-theoretical approaches to try to do that too.... the core difference is that instead of the key building block being "A trusts B to honor their commitments", it's "A trusts B and C to be different"

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I suspect (4) is a bigger category than (3). The reason is that to use a network to _send_, it has to work only once, but to use a network to _hold_, you have to be confident that it will keep working for a very long time.

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3) Intra-country payments in cases where the local financial system is too corrupted / collapsed 4) Any payments in cases where either the sender or the recipient is using crypto as SoV, which is something that makes sense to do for a number of reasons (eg. also having to do with limited/unstable banking options)

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So... I think it would be good for cities to have some kind of asset and even for that asset to have some governance power, and at the same time to adopt higher land value taxes, which reduces the property-ness of land ownership. The argument is that this creates better incentive alignment with the whole city's success, and land value taxes in particular give government the best incentives to affect what they can change (local public goods, which affect land value), while leaving the full value of anything built on the land in the hands of the local owner, who is the one who can affect that.

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.... we have goals for cities that don't align with making investors happy, or making people happy in proportion to their willingness to pay investors. We want public infrastructure to work well for all income levels, we want cities to be positive-sum for the nation and the world, we have humanitarian values, we don't want homelessness "solved" with "give them one-way bus tickets to other cities", etc. And I do think that democracy is good at achieving a lot of those objectives.

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Ideally a hybrid model (note: we have a hybrid model today, because of land ownership; I'm going to argue that we should have more opportunities for individuals to make profit from shares in the city, *and* weaker property rights in land!) I think both for-profit and non-profit models have advantages. The key advantage of having an investor class is that, if the economics are designed right, they represent the interests of the class that democracies perenially exclude: people who are not yet here. Existing residents often respond to newcomers with YIMBYism, at both national and local levels, while investors are aligned to welcome newcomers. In addition to the myopic question of "do we welcome new person X and let a developer build a bigger apartment to house them", this also covers bigger-picture questions like "do we make a big thematic pivot and reimagine San Francisco's Sunset district as a new Hong Kong?". Meanwhile...

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