Vitalik Buterin

Buterin's writing is absolutely phenomenal. It is highly technical and yet accessible, and all-encompassing yet precise and detailed. Buterin's best quality is in understanding complex topics and articulating that understanding. I attribute the quality of his writing to effort and not some inherent skill. Skill only takes you so far. Effort takes you most of the way there. You can find a collection of his articles here: https://vitalik.ca/ An example of one of his high-quality explanations, 'An Incomplete Guide to Rollups': https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html

> preferably books and not random blogs The tech in Blockchain/Web3 world is changing and evolving incredibly fast (as is evident from this historic event today) and so by the time books come out, they already become outdated. I would highly recommend reading Vitalik's blog[1]. He talks about various topics and has a knack for explaining things brilliantly. [1] https://vitalik.ca/

Vitalik! https://vitalik.ca/ obviously eth/crypto-focused but some great dives.

Lots of noise in the crypto space and the HN comments are always bad. BTC and ETH are the interesting and worth putting a small percentage of your holdings into (BTC [0] as an international store of value that has benefits over gold, ETH as the core programmable token that backs anything that stores stuff on chain to manage decentralized state). Vitalik is earnest and his writing is pretty great. Everything else I'd probably avoid (except to play with). ZCash's privacy protections are pretty cool. Outside of that risk is extremely high. Lots of bad actors, but also a pretty cool new technology with a new capability for self-custody. If someone tells you you can make 20% risk free returns, they're lying to you. I feel bad for people that lose everything making dumb bets. It's why all the institutional investor rules exist. It's why there are restrictions on trading with leverage. Still, it's annoying that I'm prevented from making bets (or investing in startups) because of people like this. I understand the purpose of the regulations and clearly there's a need, but it's still annoying. [0]: https://www.matthuang.com/bitcoin_for_the_open_minded_skeptic [1]: https://vitalik.ca/ Somewhat related this article was pretty interesting: https://www.lynalden.com/what-is-money/

I’d suggest looking at the block explorer for any chain to first understand how many validators they have (there are some hot new chains with fewer than 200 validators which may be run by far fewer than 200 people). I’d also take a look at what’s actually being processed - some blockchains have their validators submit regular transactions to vote for the next block, and they can account for 90+% of the TPS the chain claims to have. I’d then look at how their consensus model behaves - if it’s Delegated Proof of Stake, how are they handling voter apathy where users have very little incentive to change who they delegate to even if the validator they delegate to is misbehaving? What happens to misbehaving validator? Is there some mechanism in the protocol that punishes a validator for doing the wrong thing (aka slashing)? I’d then dig into how they are any different from the thousands of existing blockchains. Did they centralize by having a few powerful machines run the chain, did they fork the Ethereum Geth code and simply increase the max gas per block to reduce fees and get a higher TPS? Making short-term decisions like that look great in the short term, but will fail over the long run due to state bloat and centralizing forces (large storage, compute, and/or networking requirements). I’d also recommend reading articles on https://vitalik.ca/ and https://ethresear.ch/. Before you say “won’t those be bias towards Ethereum?” The answer is, sort of… Vitalik writes a lot about…

He does do that from time to time. Most of his stuff is pretty deep in the weeds and decision trees of specific Ethereum implementations (e.g. this article), but occasionally he'll have one that's more legible to a wider audience. I think his essay on blockchain voting is a great example. https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/25/voting2.html

Yeh, I have a lot of problems with Worldcoin but this isn't a great post on it or the issues. You can tell she went in with the intention to write something for an audience that hates crypto and wants to be told they're right. As a comparison, Vitalik wrote a great, even handed analysis: https://vitalik.ca/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html

Fundamentally, cryptography alleviates the need for third-party trust, and opens up for losing your keys. It’s a tragedy that we don’t have social recovery as part of our online networking. I can lose access that my friends and family can not recover on my behalf. I may not give anyone my SSH keys, but surely my iCloud pictures are worth something to my relatives if I should get hit by a car. Vitalik Buterin wrote > One analysis of the Bitcoin ecosystem suggests that 1500 BTC may be lost every day - over ten times more than what Bitcoin users spend on transaction fees, and over the years adding up to as much as 20% of the total supply. https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html

Vitalik recently wrote a great article about this here: https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/12/05/excited.html

This is too cynical of a take for me. I fell down the rabbit hole after reading/watching some of Vitalik's writing years ago. I think it's worth spending a small, insignificant amount to play around with some apps that have a genuine purpose. These days I'm most interested in gitcoin.co grants and the use of quadratic funding to support public goods (eg: open source software). You can read a summary write-up of a previous round [here](https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/10/18/round7.html) if curious.

In that case I suggest https://vitalik.ca/ and dip into articles with titles that appeal to you. He covers a range from high level opinion essays to (imho) good technical simplified explanations of the special kinds of low-level cryptography. I've personally found the articles on how SNARKs and STARKs work very helpful. Note that Ethereum and the other "smart contract" blockchains which link general program execution with transactions, are very different from Bitcoin and the other "money only" blockchains. I also suggest https://ethereum-magicians.org/ if you want to get more into the guts of protocol discussions or just see them, and the Eth R&D discord.

I wouldn't say Vitalik Buterin is anywhere near as legendary as the names you dropped, but he's the closest to what you described, in terms of being as close as possible to the underlying tech rather than just being associated with the hype train (and scam train) riding on top of it. Vitalik's original Ethereum whitepaper, updated to be relevant in 2022 - https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/ Vitalik's blog - https://vitalik.ca/

Regarding algorithmic stablecoins, Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum founder) wrote a great and easy to read blog post about why Terra failed and why a coin that continually beats the economy also isn't possible https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/05/25/stable.html

This is a huge UX issue for anyone that wants to self-custody. In the same spirit as the OP, people are working on solutions for this. Vitalik posted about it last year: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html. I don't know the technical details, but Coinbase is launching a wallet system where the private key is "split" between the user and Coinbase. After explaining improvements to this specific issue, it still feels like way too much friction for the average person to deal with. I think there will be more improvements as time goes on but maybe that's just the cost of doing self-custody. In the end, I guess it's up to the individual to decide whether it's worth it or not.

imo the problem with UST vs DAI was not under vs over collateralisation, but rather that Luna supporting UST had its value tied to UST adoption. On the other hand, DAI is collateralised by things like Eth, which could also in theory crash, but get their value from a much wider ecosystem than just DAI - hence one potentially avoids the circularity. For a great read on this and more, check out Vitalik's post: https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/05/25/stable.html

Which one did the creator use? That's the one that has legitimacy and value. Legitimacy is basically a coordination game, where you get the best payoff by making the same choice as everyone else. To really dig into this, read this piece by Vitalik: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html

Thank you! Those papers are some of the densest ones, so maybe as a starter I would recommend Vitalik’s blog posts on ZK[1]. If folks are interested in a complexity theoretic introduction to ZK proofs, incidentally, in the interest of being self recommending, I authored one myself I’d be curious to hear thoughts on :)[2] [1]: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/26/snarks.html [2]: https://nibnalin.me/dust-nib/a-succinct-story-of-zero-knowledge.html

If you try to borrow 51% of the supply, you'll find the cost to borrow goes up the more you get (until you're paying 10,000%+ apr.) If you successfully pass a proposal to raid the treasury, all the $ENS tokens in there would likely crash in value as the market reacts to the news. Those who already have skin-in-the-game (by holding ENS and voting) would likely be worse off overall, so they wouldn't agree. These are great questions! DAOs are essentially a big experiment in game theory and new forms of organization. I think you'd genuinely enjoy Vitalik's discussion about DAOs: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html

This is already happening; centralized exchanges and staking pools like Kraken make up a high percentage of ETH2 validators (just as PoW seems to gravitate toward large mining pools). Despite that, PoS has the benefit of offering decentralized staking pools like RocketPool, and the fact that they are growing may indicate that the chain will over time become more decentralized and less able to be centrally attacked[1]. The PoS mechanism itself is also perhaps more resilient to these kind of attacks, see [2]. None of this mechanism is as simple as PoW (which has worked quite well for BTC and ETH so far), but the environmental cost makes it worth exploring an alternative mechanism. [1] - https://uk.style.yahoo.com/valid-points-ethereum-2-0-113000527.html [2] - https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

I'm pro-cryptocurrencies, but I also don't really get what's so amazing about DAOs. Are there any references or explanations from people who love them? Here's a piece by Vitalik I found compelling: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html

The answer to every question like this is twitter and podcasts. https://vitalik.ca/ https://twitter.com/DocumentEther https://old.reddit.com/r/defi/ https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=raoul+pal+ethereum Just code some smart contracts on the testnet after you've absorbed the basics.

https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/07/29/gini.html Vitalik answers this much more eloquently than I could. And I would say what is the Gini coefficient for stocks? It isn't great either. Crypto is in its infancy. Bitcoin was created in 2009. What was the Gini coefficient for the first US dollars, the Continentals, in 1775? I'm going to assume most went to those closest to and believing in that new currency. I make no apologies or excuses for crypto. I fully admit it isn't perfect. But I only state what it could be and dream of the future. That future I dream of is a more equitable society.

Central banks use PID controllers to control stability [1]. Stable coin systems can use PID controller systems too [2]. Stable coins are as volatile as their fiat counterparts. Crypto currencies are run by people as much as central banks are. People can have opinions and values. People forked of Ethereum into Ethereum Classic because they had an issue with the main chain's policy. ETC community is alive. Building crypto currencies is all about optimizing for legitimacy [3]. We can build what we want, we just need to want it in the first place. No need to discount a whole field of computer science with a comment. - 1: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11403-014-0127-3 - 2: https://github.com/reflexer-labs/whitepapers/blob/master/English/rai-e… - 3: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html

Here's a comparison of PoS and PoW by Vitalik Buterin (creator of Ethereum): https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html Obviously he's biased in favor of PoS for various reasons, but I think it's a worthy read.

This article would have been interesting in 2014. The idea that energy efficiency and scalability are important problems is not new, and are being worked on for Ethereum and other advanced blockchains; see [1] or Vitalik Buterin's blog [2]. The critique of on-chain economic inequality is valid, yet there's nothing unique to blockchains about that. One great solution is to pass more progressive income taxes, a wealth tax, or a UBI (people pay taxes on crypto gains). Also, many in the crypto space are working [3] on an on-chain UBI, even if they are facing an uphill battle. [1] https://eth.wiki/en/faqs/problems [2] https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/11/22/progress.html [3] https://joincircles.net/

From https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/09/11/coordination.html "A large mining pool publicly showing how they have internally distributed their nodes and network dependencies doesn't do much to calm community members scared of mining centralization. And pictures like these, showing 90% of Bitcoin hashpower at the time being capable of showing up to the same conference panel, do quite a bit to scare people". If you follow the link, you'll see a picture of 7 people that controlled 90% of Bitcoin hashpower at the time. Remind me how that's more fair to an arbitrary holder of Bitcoin, than say, letting the holders have the power with staking?

There is a difference (with the introduction of slashing and user activated soft forks) in 51% attacks that revert finalized blocks. In PoW this type of attack would become cheaper as it persists, in PoS we have some defense that keeps making this attack expensive. On top of that the costs of attack are much greater in PoS than PoW, making these attacks much harder to begin with. https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

This is timely considering Vitalik’s vocal support for Social Account Recovery: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html It’s personally something I love to see.

Vitaliks recent blog post is probably the best place for a quick overview of Pos/PoW attack costs and why PoS looks to be a more secure approach https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

I recommend taking a look at Gitcoin [0] and quadratic funding [1]. [0] https://gitcoin.co/ [1] https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html