Vitalik Buterin

https://vitalik.eth.limo is an excellent resource. You’ll see that his thinking, and the thinking of people like him, is a lot more advanced than the thought processes of the armchair experts who seem to have dedicated their lives to “exposing” this industry to be “one giant scam.” I can’t think of a better resource off the top of my head.

Yes, as long as the passports implement a signing scheme, and the set of valid public keys (the electorate) can be agreed upon. If you can sign arbitrary data, then you can sign other public keys, including whatever the voting system requires. Vitalik has a great blog post about blockchain voting. https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/05/25/voting2.html You probably wouldn't want to use the cryptography on the passports themselves to implement the voting system. You probably want to use one of the general purpose zkSTARKs or multi-party-computation systems.

Vitaliks intro to ZK snarks article is great: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/01/26/snarks.html

I recommend Alan Szepieniec's series of posts for a clear, direct mathematical description of how they work - https://aszepieniec.github.io/stark-anatomy/ Vitalik also has this more informal series of explainer posts - https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2017/11/09/starks_part_1.html

There's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Marxism Which I feel is the "best take" >Karl Marx... only criticizing the freedom in the great inequality of wealth and power.[3] Confucianism is more like CPC marketing; it's heart is more like Legalism, though some still hope for the "tail wagging the dog, peacefully", just like we'd want "civic individualism" (now represented by Mamdani) to wag the corporatist dog in the US. I'm glad it's not tied to the DPP, because I'd rather support this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_People%27s_Party#Policy Sorry, it's just immoral to me to sow discord against CPC in a US-based forum. If you want we can continue this on a PRC forum (where I'd think it would be immoral to cast aspersions on US :) Anyways, regarding Taiwan and a fix for liberalism, at least Audrey Tang (and Glen Weyl are trying): https://newpublic.substack.com/p/how-taiwan-is-leading-the-way-in https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/08/21/plurality.html

Vitalik Buterin, one of Ethereum’s co-founders, is credited with this trilemma, and this (AFAICT) is where he first posted about it: The trilemma claims that blockchain systems can only at most have two of the following three properties: * Decentralization (defined as the system being able to run in a scenario where each participant only has access to O(c) resources, i.e. a regular laptop or small VPS) * Scalability (defined as being able to process O(n) > O(c) transactions) * Security (defined as being secure against attackers with up to O(n) resources) In the rest of this document, we'll continue using c to refer to the size of computational resources (including computation, bandwidth and storage) available to each node, and n to refer to the size of the ecosystem in some abstract sense; we assume that transaction load, state size, and the market cap of a cryptocurrency are all proportional to n. The key challenge of scalability is finding a way to achieve all three at the base layer. * https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2017/12/31/sharding_faq.html#this-sou…

All good questions! We are discussing them regularly. We take an adversarial approach to the protocol and constantly try to come up with ways it might be gamed. We want to design it in a way that achieves something like this: https://xkcd.com/810/ Some points regarding your questions: The protocol will be fully open source so nobody can gain an advantage through information asymmetry. We choose the best replies by measuring how much a reply "changes minds" (difference in voting behavior on a post given users have also voted on that reply). We adjust for biases using a technique called bridging-based ranking [1, 2]. The algorithm chooses the reply that had the highest impact on voting behavior after adjusting for biases. We do realize that truth is a loaded term, so to elicit "truthful" posts and replies, we incentivize honesty with a technique called the Bayesian Truth Serum [3]. This will be linked with a reputation system that determines a user's impact. If you spin up a bunch of bots, they will have low reputation in the beginning and therefore little impact. If you coordinate people (or bots) to vote manipulatively, their impact will be minimized by the bias correction because their votes are correlated. Our hope is that it would take considerable effort to build reputation on many accounts (by being honest and helpful over an extended period of time) and maintaining an attack over the lifecycle of a discussion would be infeasible because it works against the…

Zk-Snark means Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge. It's fairly cutting edge cryptography. It is very fragmented as the industry is rapidly evolving. If I may recommend, a good article on zk Snarks from Vitalik: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/01/26/snarks.html ZK proofs allow you to prove you know the answer to something without revealing the answer itself. You may not need to know how these things work at a low level. If you're interested, feel free to dig into zk proofs and the cryptography behind them. The subject is quite deep and rapidly evolving. Ultimately, the important thing to know at a high level is that you can post a zk proof with just a few bytes of data, and that zk proofs, while computationally expensive to generate, are computationally cheap to verify. So they are being used as a blockchain scaling technology, since data storage is expensive on blockchains. If you're just interested in crypto as a user, I would generally recommend getting a Metamask wallet and interacting with some applications like Uniswap, Aave, or OpenSea.

1) I'm hosting a blog on my ENS domain - this cannot be censored and this exact version will always be available for anyone to access (as long as someone's pinned it on IPFS). So it solves a real problem that DNS does not. For example, you can checkout Vitalik's blog at https://vitalik.eth.limo/ 2) I was in Budapest and had lost my debit card and was in need for Euros - I literally looked up the closest Bitcoin ATM, which was 10 mins walk from my hotel and instantly had access to cash (global borders, international payments can be a nightmare). On a similar note - I often make payments in crypto to international contractors. 3) I regularly use Poap (https://poap.xyz/) as proof of participation in various events like hackathons / workshops, etc and this has in turn helped me in the space. All three of these are not speculative investments. And as I keep repeating, this is literally the start. We're builders, we can see where the space is heading and where it will be in 5 years.

This is part 3. I found it hard to figure out what was going on without first scanning part 1: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2026/06/29/obfuscation1.html

Vitalik recently wrote about vibe-coding in Lean and assembly language, using proof verification in Lean, saying "if done right, this has potential to both output extremely efficient code, and be far more secure than the way programming has been done before." https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2026/05/18/fv.html

Others wrote their own NYT editorials in response to Romney: https://archive.ph/iPN3E On a related note: I was intrigued to see Vitalik Buterin talk about wealth taxes in a post today. He favors "diffusing not dollars, but the means of production." So he favors somehow distributing capital and investment more broadly? At any rate, I think it's a sign of strength in the Ethereum community that Vitalik is engaging with these ideas. https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/12/30/balance_of_power.html

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/06/28/zkid.html Counter Points

Anyone have a good explanation on the intuition of non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs? For example, I thought the "paint-mixing" analogy for Diffie-Hellman key exchange (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie–Hellman_key_exchange#General_over… really helped me handwave the math into "mixing easy, unmixing hard". https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/11/27/zero-knowledge-pro… was a good intro for interactive ZK proofs but I haven't been able to find something for non-interactive ones. This blog post comparing ZK-STARKs to erasure coding is in the right flavor but didn't quite stick to my brain either: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2017/11/09/starks_part_1.html

a more plain-english explanation from Vitalik's blog: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html

Or you could use Bluesky where all the public data can be replicated, by design. Someone is working on showing how a live replica can be implemented on a Raspberry Pi. [1] (The scale is much smaller than Twitter, though.) Since it's public anyway, it's hard to say if being able to copy all the data is good or bad. There are tradeoffs. We allow it for a public git repo. Is social media different? [2]. [1] https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3lkwg2djrfk23 [2] The tree ring model of culture and politics - https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/03/29/treering.html

While it's not here yet, Vitalik's future plans for Ethereum involve making it possible to run validators on smartwatches[1], which is far more accessibly decentralized than BTC could be and far more possible with Ethereum's PoS consensus as opposed to PoW, without needing to cripple transaction speed to boot. [1]: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/23/futures4.html

Smart contracts are a primary example of this: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2019/05/09/control_as_liability.html

Some areas you might want to consider looking into. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/06/15/using_snarks.html Obviously this requires companies to embrace said technologies.

You are describing a forum with some polymarket style integration; very closely aligns with Vitalk's latest: `In short, I believe that (i) prediction markets even as they exist today are a very useful tool for the world, but furthermore (ii) prediction markets are only one example of a much larger incredibly powerful category, with potential to create better implementations of social media, science, news, governance, and other fields. I shall label this category "info finance".` https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/11/09/infofinance.html https://polymarket.com/trump

> vitalik didn't credit him in his article You mean this article? https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/06/18/verkle.html > Verkle trees are still a new idea; they were first introduced by John Kuszmaul in this paper from 2018[link to [0]], 0: https://math.mit.edu/research/highschool/primes/materials/2018/Kuszmau…

Proof of stake is superior. The downside others are saying has been proven false time after time but bitcoiners continue to spread the misinformation because Bitcoin relies on people not understanding it's downside. https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

Ignoring the half baked truths about Austrian economics (I'm not a fan of Austrian economics, but at least try to have valid criticism about them). > Bitcoin has debasement, it's called altcoins and hard forks. > The way you debase Bitcoin is by inventing new kinds of Bitcoin Please read https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html

> The lack of a formal market for land has not made land any cheaper, it has simply shifted the price from being denominated in money-dollars, to time-dollars and pain-in-the-butt-dollars. Vitalik writes about this too: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/08/22/prices.html

He never specifies but when he says "crypto" he's referring to cryptocurrency (the field dominated by scams, charlatans, get rich quick schemes and fake internet money), not real cryptography. I simply refuse to believe this Venn diagram is not a parody. https://vitalik.eth.limo/images/cryptoai/ueth.png

> it is not technically decentralized, it is Twitter (a centralized platform) Community notes are generated by users and not the platform it's not perfect but better than having a mainstream media oligopoly deciding what is truth and what isn't. > If it were truly fully decentralized, it would be vulnerable to such attacks even more, right? The algorithm tries to prevent this kind of abuse. "the Community Notes rating algorithm explicitly attempts to prioritize notes that receive positive ratings from people across a diverse range of perspectives". See Vitalik analysis: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/08/16/communitynotes.html. But from what you're telling it looks CCP found a way to game it.

Author here, not of the post, but the linked article, making the case for bridging-based ranking, https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/bridging-based-ranking and the related https://bridging.systems/ which lays out a set of open problems and approaches. It's great to see this exploration. Those interested might also want to check out https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/08/16/communitynotes.html and https://knightcolumbia.org/content/the-algorithmic-management-of-polar… (and how aspects of this might be applied to AI governance https://reimagine.aviv.me/p/governance-of-ai-with-ai-through ).

Your text-container width could be a little wider, but your main problem is that your colors are terrible. Day-mode background could be anything from off-white to financial-times color (ft.com). Text color should be a dark grey. If you want a nightmode, fire up Visual Studio Code and take notes. vitalik has a pretty decent day and nightmode. https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/12/28/cypherpunk.html sam altman demonstrates how nice grey text is. https://blog.samaltman.com/

A lot of people here are questioning how this works. Vitalik went through a pretty good analysis of the mechanics recently [0]. What is it with founders named Sam who are scammers? [0] https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html

In my opinion Vitalik's post[0] about it was much more thoughtful and interesting. [0]: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html