PANews reported on December 15 that Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin responded to a tweet from user X @yishan, "Reply to something you once believed in very much but changed your mind when you learned more." He said: One change in thinking that I wrote about before is that I think less about economics than I did ten years ago. The main reason for this shift is that I spent a lot of time in the first five years of the crypto world trying to invent a mathematically provable optimal governance mechanism, but ultimately found that what I was looking for was impossible to achieve. These results made me realize clearly that:
(i) What I seek is impossible;
(ii) The most important variables are the difference between whether an existing flawed system succeeds or fails in practice (usually the degree of coordination between subgroups of actors, but also other things we often black-box as “culture”), which I don’t even model.
Math used to be a big part of my identity: I was active in math competitions in high school, and soon after I got into crypto, I started writing a lot of code. In the crypto space, I got excited about every new crypto protocol, like Ethereum, Bitcoin, and so on, and I saw economics as part of this broader worldview: it was a mathematical tool for understanding and figuring out how to improve the social world. All the pieces fit together neatly. Now, the pieces fit together less tightly. I still use math to analyze social mechanisms, although the goal is more to make rough guesses about what might work and mitigate worst-case behavior (in the real world, this is often done by robots rather than humans) than to explain average-case behavior. Now, I often use very different arguments in my writing and thinking, even when I’m arguing for the same ideals I espoused a decade ago.
