114 - Vitalik Buterin DEFENDS Bitcoin Maximalism?

Transcript

offend people uh be willing to uh just like tell people like no you're not one of us um and uh be willing to even say those kinds of things to people who are potentially friends of your friends uh and like basically just fight hard right like basically just uh kind of fight hard and kind of keep on reasserting what your values are um and uh keep on preventing um things that don't reflect uh those actual values from presenting themselves to the space as though they're a genuine part of the space welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance this is how to get started how to get better and how to front run the

opportunity this is ryan sean adams i'm here with david hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless guys we have a fantastic episode for you today in defense of maximalism in defense of bitcoin maximalism and who's the guest someone you'd never expect vitalik buterin is defending bitcoin maximalism on this episode uh you'll see why in a minute but the episode breaks it down into a few parts first the defense of bitcoin maximalism and then a rebuttal the only person that can debate vitalik effectively is vitalik that's what i realized in this episode and uh he does that throughout it so listen for a few things a few takeaways number one we go through the case for why bitcoin maximalism is right uh we talk about

number two honest crypto versus grifter crypto the difference between the two number three the case for why intolerance is good at least some intolerance we talk about that number four vitalik's advice for bankless about how bankless should talk about alt layer ones and number five this is actually at the start of the podcast green tea plus red wine the best drink you've ever had it's now called the vb so if you go to your local bar and ask for a vb they should know what that is by now give me a butter in place i'll take one uh what'd you think of this episode david yeah people thought that vitalik's article was an april fool's joke just because he released it on april 1st also fun fact this is not vitalik's first article that he's

released on april 1st that has raised some eyebrows vitalik in my mind uh steel manned the argument for bitcoin maximalism better than i've ever heard any bitcoiner argue for like why maximalism is good and he really puts it into perspective as to it's pretty compelling it's like oh this is why some of the properties of the crypto industry are the way that they are every time i talk to vitalik buterin i feel like i understand this industry just a little bit better a little bit more insightful and a little bit more empathetic as to why people have made the choices that they've made and so we go through he still manages the argument for maximalism but then we flip it around and do the other side of the debate as you said but we also get into other subjects like okay well how

is ethereum maximalism and maximalism manifesting in your eyes and how do you think how would you rate it on like a healthy verse unhealthy spectrum especially as it relates to the alternative layer ones because ryan i know in the bear market 2018 to 2020 it was really two cultures it was the bitcoiner culture and the ethereum culture and it was really the ethereum culture asking for for legitimacy from bitcoiners trying to prove ourselves to bitcoin years like hey we're a legitimate thing uh we share some of your values and bitcoiners were like no you guys are all just like you guys have broken everything you guys don't get it uh on the flip side of things now that now that that bear market's in the past and ethereum has indeed proven out to be the ecosystem that we all thought it was

going to be in that bear market now we aren't really arguing with bitcoiners anymore now we're arguing with alternative layer ones but we're taking the same position that bitcoiners took for uh two ethereums and now ethereums are taking that same position with alternative layer one saying right hey you guys are compromising on crypto you guys are like doing all these bad things blah blah blah blah uh and so we asked vitalik about like you know where is the sweet spot like is there a sweet spot and we get his perspective on that and i think that's funny to take away for this episode i no longer have uh arguments with bitcoin maximalists like i just don't anymore but i i have those arguments with finance bros now on the other side of things that don't uh care about decentralization it's less arguments it's more kind of reminders is

why why we're in this space and why it's important so first we were arguing with the gold bugs of the crypto industry and now we're arguing with the fintech people of the crypto industry yeah and that's funny because it does position uh ethereum as kind of this this middle ground it's it's big tent but it's also uh intolerant in some ways because it does value a specific set of things and uh does not want to compromise on that and so i don't know we'll talk about this more in the debrief uh which by the way is available to premium subscribers david but um i'm really enjoying the 2022 version of italic it's every every every every vintage every year you get a different vintage of metallic right and uh so far in 2022 vitalik's been a bit more spicy a bit more um i think he's

previously felt his role is to be maximally credibly neutral and uh understate his his true opinions in 2020 i i'm starting to see a lot more of vitalik's opinions in fact at one point in that episode he's like what would you rather see a neutral version of italic or like a vitalik that states his opinions even if they're not correct sometimes and for me it's always it's always option b and so this is the side of vitalik that we're seeing in vintage 2022 and i think comes out in this episode so you guys are really going to enjoy it again it's like we don't talk too much about tech with someone who's a massive tech brain he is as much a brain on philosophy and the social layer of crypto as he is on tech

and uh for me those are some of the the most fun conversations and some of the most interesting although we do have to get him on again to talk about like what's in store for the ethereum roadmap maybe uh maybe next time he comes on we'll do that so guys strap in enjoy this episode grab it's gonna be a blast yeah grab a vb with us dude are you gonna try that by the way i think i try one of those yeah everyone's trying it out on twitter and they're all saying like oh this is better than i expected it to be well you know what we're going to record the roll up and if you got some green tea we'll we'll uh we'll do it then but anyway guys grab yourself a vitalik buterin drink and uh we'll get right in the episode but first we want to tell you about

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uh you know what this this whole episode is gonna be on the on on the topic of uh maximalism uh but before we get in there was uh some recent twitter hubbub uh vitalik on beverage cancel culture that i want to get you to weigh in on because you made the case for this green tea and red wine combo that i sent i think sent the the world in a tizzy where you said you enjoy 85 green tea with a mix of 15 red wine can you give us the case before we begin the regular podcast i think this needs to be heard what is the case for the green tea and red wine combo and can we cancel you for that i mean to be fair this isn't like a

regular part of my life or anything i only tried it a couple of times um the first time pretty accidentally uh basically what happened uh was that i was just like sitting on a plane with a friend um and um i i i was sitting on a plane with a friend and he had some a green tea and so and uh some red wine that he separately ordered and um intended to drink separately and at some point he went to sleep um and then the steward people came and they offered me food and i was hungry and i wanted the food but i wanted to be able to like have the food and also do laptoping at the same time right so i needed two

trays and so okay i thought i have one tray my friend has another tray and like but this my friend's tray has some like these two drinks on it and so okay fine well i have to like get rid of them somehow so you know why not just drink them um so they both happen to be half full and so i decided like why not um and i just like mixed them together and drank it um and i just realized that like wait wow this is like weird but like less disgusting than i thought um and i yeah i tried this again um and like it was uh i don't know surprisingly better than advertised i guess would you say that this is now your drink of choice um i mean realistically my drink of

choice is still like a green 85 green tea 50 and more green tea but you know it's good to have more things on your menu oh my god are uh are people trying to cancel you for for this opinion or are they more intrigued i feel like i'm far more intrigued this is not uh i don't know i have someone to cancel you over this but i guess there's someone out there oh yeah i wonder like is the internet um like um angry over angry or over that tweet um or when i uh looked like a version of tom brady that was on meth for two years that was amazing by the like we got to talk about that too so how did you that first of all that the article in time was was absolutely phenomenal but um

god people are so mean on twitter like what is up with that and like how do you how do you like respond to that and deal with that i guess you just get used to it um like uh you know eventually you just kind of like realized that like okay you know you can just think of them as being kind of like you know voyage npcs that only really exist on the internet um and uh like you know don't like don't really pay too much serious a serious attention of them about them and just kind of realize that uh you know the kinds of things that they say are actually yeah a reflection of themselves much more than their reflection of you yeah okay

i guess i don't know eventually you'll learn to laugh about it and how how long did that because you've been having to fend off internet trolls for a really long time since since before i would say even crypto was even dominant on crypto twitter like going through like the whole um you know bitcoiner movement in the early early days of bitcoin before ethereum was even a thing i would imagine was there toxicity back then and then where was like this first instance of like internet toxicity that you had to contend with and how have you just dealt with it over the years definitely started in 2014 um and i mean it definitely like hurt more in 2014 than it does now um i think because back

in 2014 i still had this mindset that like ethereum is this great new crypto project um and it should become a standard bearer for the space um and it should be kind of like we should try really hard to do it well so that like all parts of the space love us and i was just totally not clued in about the extents to which that was actually completely not possible even then um right like this was then bitcoin people started um i think like af really after ethereum began uh kind of having this line that like oh uh you know if uh it's not bitcoin it's not legitimate um and uh well like there was a little bit of that in 2013 um there was that article from

uh bitcoin kravis and i wrote an article against him on a bitcoin magazine a couple of months before the idea for ethereum came uh but um in 2014 it really kind of went to another level uh people were kind of very strident about this maximalist viewpoint and and starting to kind of take all sorts of things as a evidence that ethereum is a scam and there's i mean some people expressed their viewpoints in um you know reasonably polite multi-thousand word blog posts that i could you know lob a multi-thousand word blog post back at uh but uh other people uh were definitely preferred to use more um i guess uh low

iq means of uh dialectic and yeah i don't know that that definitely made me sad at the beginning um and eventually i guess i was able to sort of emotionally write them off um and then yeah i don't know since then it has gotten easier like i think in general um like people being mean on the internet feels worse when it's people you respect like if it's people you're just able to kind of dismiss and um you know mentally put them into this kind of box of you know other like they're not people their voyage npcs then like it really doesn't hurt at all um but like

the feeling of realizing that someone who you thought was someone that you respect like actually turning out to be in that other box like there's definitely often a shock to it i don't know yeah we are um currently going through something like this at bank list but i think we'll get into that perspective towards the end of this episode vitalik this was a great uh way to actually start off this episode because we're loosely talking about the ideas of maximalism uh to some degree which properties of maximalism have exuded out beyond bitcoin and is now part of many many different ecosystems of and in many many different flavors uh and uh we you recently put out a blog on your uh an article on your blog titled in defense

of bitcoin maximalism happened to be released on april fool's day uh and so was this an april fool's joke how much of this was satire and what percentage of this was actually serious and why did you release it on april 1st um i mean i think uh i definitely released it on april 1st because like it like it's definitely not a reflection of kind of what i think my like primary opinion is um i think uh in reality it was like there's a collection of things like some some of which i think you know have something to uh to them that the ethereum community is underrating um and others of which like also have something to them but in

reality there's a much bigger argument for the other side that i think uh maximalists are not realizing um so i think uh like my actual position on uh on a lot of those ish those issues tends to be pretty i guess uh concave um but so you know like i see the kind of benefits of both sides and like i see the benefit of kind of having some um aspects of that culture but not having it way overboard um the uh so it's uh definitely kind of intended to be you know some combination of like both being fun um and being in exposition of uh kind of the aspects of uh bitcoin maximalist culture

um and kind of how people justify them as uh as i understand it so so let's go through uh maybe the case for this uh because you gave a fantastic case for bitcoin maximalism and i want to start there maybe maybe we'll do kind of a sweep of the case for bitcoin maximalism first like steel man the argument and then go back and see where you might actually disagree and be a bit more uh concave in your thinking on it um but you know this blog post was all about the case for bitcoin maximalism in defense of bitcoin maximalism and why bitcoin maximalism is right so uh you you talk about you started i think in a really good place and anyone who's been in crypto

sees this war of two worlds probably and it maybe it's not as binary as this but this is how bitcoin maximalists might paint it where we have honest crypto on one side these are well-intentioned networks upholding the values of decentralization and crypto and all of the things the best parts of our industry and then we have another whole side of crypto that you call grifter crypto uh which is you know uh scammers who come into the space and uh do not uphold the virtues of crypto and are just here to kind of pump and dump and exploit uh the community and are not trying to build something for the long run uh can you talk a little bit about honest crypto versus

grifter crypto and uh the case for bitcoin maximalism at a high level sure um so i think the kind of distinction between the two should be kind of intuitively pretty uh pretty clear to everyone right um like there's uh cryptocurrencies that are very kind of both like actually mission driven and clearly not driven um just by a desire to take over the world and make um and make money out of it right like plenty of like even bitcoin core developers don't really end up getting very much bitcoin out of it um and even um a lot of early bitcoiners who ended up choosing the big block uh side of the block size war like gavin

anderson right like i believe he had a huge amount of like bitcoin at the beginning but then like he and i think either selling a bunch or giving up or giving a bunch of it away right and like this happens to a lot of them uh and like they were uh really in it for the before the mission uh rather than being in it just as a way of kind of screwing people and getting money um they yeah like there's a very kind of deep uh political vision behind what these things are like they know exactly what they're doing they're trying to create a new form of uh you know self-sovereign money that's a resistance to confiscation resistant to manipulation resistance to inflation and all of those things um and they're

kind of pretty deadlocked on uh trying to make that happen and uh grifter cryptocurrencies on the other hand like they tends to sort of virtue signal um you know general purpose goodness like oh people love freedom well let's talk about how we're gonna bring freedom oh people love social justice well let's talk about how our cryptocurrency brings social justice and uh you know oh people love making money well let's talk about how how uh we're going to make money uh and divisions feel uh very unfocused the uh the main kind of principles of the cryptocurrencies are often uh not developers the project like it really is really is structured in such a way that the kind of very early principles are going to

get a lot of money out of it and they'll even get a lot of a lot of money out of it even if the project only kind of succeeds for two years and then fails um so the like if you just scroll down um you know coin gecko and you just look through the you know like the list of cryptocurrencies right i think like on the grifter side there is a definitely a spectrum like there's total scams and then there's projects where like the project has no value and like maybe some people honestly believe that it has value but they really should know better and and there's just no chance that it will really come to come to much of anything long term um but like they just look uninspiring right like there's

you know like payment coin number 34 like yet another quote or something of like something else uh and like a very large number of cryptocurrencies are that sort of thing right um i know i'm trying to like think whether or not i should give examples or whether like i've been spicy enough and used up my current controversy budget for this year already but there's uh we can we can save that we can save that for uh for a different different episode vitalik if you if you want i want to get into the uh mindset and like the context of when and how certain projects are built uh it's and you alluded to this a little

bit i want to go down this path even more um some projects seem to be built with a context of you know the world is good we can build whatever we want we'll build this future utopia uh and we can build what you know we can just there there aren't any problems in the world but we have this new solution so we'll build for that and then there's a different perspective where the world is a dark desolate place we need what you called our file of galadriel i think if i'm pronouncing that correctly um and we and we it's a it's a hostile environment and we need these we need need by necessity these solutions that will lead us out of the dark and i and i think people that are building with that

mind frame are building something more sustainable and people that are building with kind of perhaps a naivete about how awesome and lovely the world is are building something that uh is closer to something that is um a little bit closer to the grifter camp just because they aren't actually incorporating the fundamentals of the uh what the this whole industry is all about can you just elaborate on this perspective yeah i mean i think like the the link between the kind of naive uh people and the grifters is that the naive participants kind of often end up enabling the grifters right because a position of uh you know the world is

nice um and uh we're this happy community and um you know you should trust people by default like that's a a mindset which uh you know grifters can very easily come in and like actually extract lots of money from people um and at the same time like it's a mindset that like even in the absence of grifters you can easily take it to the extreme and end up creating something where like you just stop realizing why the blockchain parts are important and you end up creating a system that's just like so becomes more and more centralized in order to be efficient uh because like if the world is just nice happy friends or everyone's friends uh then what's the point of uh you know like the

user experience uh not like not being as friendly as it could be um and in order to achieve that you end up adding more and more centralization and eventually like you just know that at the moment moment where decentralization ends up actually being required like the project will not actually be able to survive right and that and then the question is like well what was even the point of building a chain for this instead of like building it on aws like possibly adding a couple of extra miracle proofs on top and that's it and and like often the answer even ends up being that if you create something that's a blockchain you can make and sell a token for it right and if you make and sell a token then like that like

here kind of we get back in to this idea that like well now this is gonna enable grifters because while it's uh making a token is a very easy way for people to come in um and just grab a lot of money you know pretends to work for a couple of years and then all kind of go go retire and go on vacations uh meanwhile um you know if you take this uh kind of more uh conservative approach then it assumes less about the world that and like creates something that tries to be a light and dark places when all other lights go out um as the file of godrail is supposed to be then you know you've created something that is uh less useful a lot of the time that's like less powerful a lot of the time you

know it doesn't i guess i said in the post it's not a low cost light it's not a fluorescent hippy energy efficient light it's not a high performance light it's not it's a light that sacrifices on all of those dimensions to optimize for one thing and one thing only to be a light that does what it needs to do when you're facing the toughest challenge of your life and there's a freaking 20-foot spider staring at you in the face right so the idea is that um you know you you it's not very useful at first it's not very useful at first and then uh you know something happens and you realize that like oh wait you know this thing actually is really useful and and uh i think uh especially given kind of the way that the world has gotten much more chaotic in all kinds of uh

very unfortunate ways over the last three years this idea that you know even if the world looks kind of very stable and plain today it might suddenly be very different and you might suddenly have to scramble to protect yourself like that should be something that's easier for people to relate to yeah yeah i think it's very easy for people in the first world who have financial access to or to have fantastic access to financial services and banking or like why do we need this whole decentralization thing like my bank works perfectly fine um meanwhile we have a war going on in eastern europe where all of a sudden there is internet censorship and you know uh coercion and all things of this nature and in your article you write um we live in a dangerous world and protecting

freedom is a serious business and you follow with a blockchain at its core is a security technology a technology that is fundamentally all about protecting people and helping them survive in an unfriendly world can you just elaborate on this perspective when it comes to blockchain design why should we be prioritizing security above everything else and what do we have to lose if we don't i think it's that security is like the thing that a blockchain has that other things don't have um so if you just compare a blockchain to say aws for example right like what does a blockchain have that aws doesn't have it just has this very high guarantee of reliability that like it's not going to shut down on you it's not going to disappear because the original operators get bored and it's not going

to disappear just because one particular government gets angry at the original operators right it's uh like you know that it's going to stay um and you can feel comfortable building on top of it um and you can feel comfortable that it's actually going to follow the rules that it's uh that it says that it's going to follow um so the um idea here right is that like the maximalist mindset is that instead of trying to go for you know quote you know minimal viable decentralization or minimal viable security it's like well no like blockchains are focused on security and they should try to kind of occupy that um part of the design space as well as they can um and

then applications like maybe um you know individual applications could be kind of part blockchain based part off depend uh depending on what their individual security needs are vitalik this is something that i think um you know resumes resonates with me and probably david too and maybe many of the members of the bank listen uh ethereum community is as kind of a a case for maximalism really is because uh we see a lot of newer entrants in the space that are maybe um the maximus might argue not taking their responsibility seriously right like we are trying to build a uh foundation for a a decentralized world and if that foundation is easily corruptable is not

rock solid then everything built on top of it uh will will fall eventually and um i i guess i'm i'm curious about about that when you look at some of the the newer entrants the the alt twos or the the alt layer ones and others that that are coming to the space do you think they value the same things that the the maximalist value or do you think this is a a massive dilution in the value system of of crypto with newer entrants and and newer chains um um i think uh like there's definitely some uh valued dilution happening um and like part of the um you know com like maximalist

mantra that you see in the wild right is this idea of like bitcoin not crypto like it's actually trying to kind of rhetorically separate um you know the crypto space as a whole which they view as being this increasingly diluted more ass that like keeps on uh going further and further away from like actually being this very secure and decentralized thing um and like bitcoin or kind of their one particular kind of very small group of particular cryptocurrencies that uh in their view like stick to much stronger principles and are much better than the rest of the space one of the the themes that i've noticed vitalik is that these newer layer ones that tend to compromise on on decentralization all are no they're all

newer it's really bitcoin and ethereum that made it through the bear market of 2018 to 2020 and i think it's mainly just those ecosystems like they're still litecoin they're still bitcoin cash but not really and so all of these um newer alternative layer ones which are made there are formed in what i would call good times never went through the bear market and that scene there seems to be a dividing line between bitcoin and ethereum who strongly strongly prioritize decentralization and then these newer alternative layer ones that come after the bear market that seem to not prioritize what do you think about the timing of these things why does there seem to be a both a line in the sand behind the older chains and the newer

chains why do you think that is um yeah so this uh gets to a section in the middle of my post where i argue um in general the earliest projects in an industry are the most genuine right and like this is a pattern that uh you could see in cryptocurrency this is even a pattern that you could see in the internet as a whole like i think a lot of people have this kind of general mindset that uh you know the quality of like discourse on the internet was a higher like say 15 years ago than it is today um you know back then it was much more highbrow you know there were forums like the the highlight was that you would have you know libertarians and uh socialists peacefully um but you know passionately arguing with each other in in one form

with these big five paragraph things um and uh you know today um relative to that like you know i uh open up uh twitter right now uh and i click on my tweet um an attempt at simplified single secret election and i scroll down first response who is the richest person on earth question mark self quoting who is the richest person on earth question mark at elon musk at jeff bezos at bill gates at ccbinance at the binance nft at mobox underscore official nfc art hashtag rare item for sale second response uh by pigpig154 i love vietnam and baby zorro inu um third one guillermo urboso um thought

i would let you know that they are using an interview you did with luxury but to scam people uh i mean it's fair that he that he responded with this but you know the thing that he responded to once again is that not you know something that's much common today than 15 years ago um some other vitaly um eight seven one three five nine six five asylum finance provides asylum token with automatic staking and compounding capabilities as well as blah blah blah of 395 677 percent for the first year right so like this is uh not what internet discourse was like 15 years ago you know even with the trolls um and uh the you know you can see this with uh not just discourse also like projects um

like uh a lot of the most successful open source projects tends to be ones that have this kind of very long history to them um and the one of the dynamics that i think make this happen is that when i feel this very new um then like it's still very clunky um it's still very difficult to wrap your head around the costs of um to get in are high and your ability to actually make that much out of it is still fairly low right like even if you make something very successful uh then your expected user base is like a few thousand people and whenever the user base gets bigger like someone else might end up out competing you and uh using like a copy of your ideas anyway right uh so the kinds of people involved at

the beginning like they tend to be you know the idealists the tech geeks the activists the enthusiasts and like people who are genuinely excited about the technology and the potential the technology to improve society but eventually the tech once the technology kind of becomes more established then um you know the audience becomes much larger uh it starts kind of diluting the community starts kind of regressing to the mean a bit um and you know you start getting like basically business people coming in that actually do see an opportunity to make money out of the space and the best way to make money out of this space is to basically kind of like piggyback off of the high status of the like genuine enthusiast projects that came earlier by

planting yourself in the same category as them but actually like basically being a money grab right um and that's like what we definitely see out of a lot of cryptocurrencies uh and uh you know that that that's uh basically yeah like that would be the the arguments for why like you know the the really terrible money grabs tend to be the more recent ones now i should say that there still are like kind of many very decent and honest kind of cryptocurrencies and projects that are fairly new um and uh you know there are some very good ones that are like um not even on the chart as well you know

a lot of the ones on the chart um have uh you know a lot of rich history with them but okay now we're kind of getting to be getting to the counter argument already right but uh like the idea is that uh you know if you just kind of get um teleported in the middle of a random industry and you have to figure out what to trust like generally trusting things that have been around for a really long time is a very safe bet and like the fact that it is a safe bet in turn kind of creates this compounding effect because it means that people who come in who are trusted worthy they tend to be want the tends to wants to be among trustworthy people and so they go there and so it kind of becomes this kind of magnet for relatively trustworthy people um and like that's a

very hard dynamic to uh unseat now i mean you could unseat it and like you could have the less trustworthy thing when was just an overwhelmingly powerful network effect but like even if you do that like you've won network effects that you haven't really wanted to trust there's a pattern that i've noticed in crypto that i want to uh get your check on uh and it seems to be kind of unfolding many many different times in many many different arenas um but the pattern i've noticed is that first at the very center of crypto there are very real fundamentals right talking about security um uh and just like all the true properties that were invented when we invented blockchain tech so that's one at the center there's real fundamentals two the real fundamentals

bring in the true believers that see the potential of these fundamentals and so now we have both fundamentals and true believers but now that there are true believers building these things step three is that it brings in like the moon boys and the grifters who produce alternative things that are tangential to the real fundamentals but not but are less about the real fundamentals and then the next step is for the rest of the world gets distracted by those things and they can't see number one the real fundamentals and then uh the last step is that the true believers get really frustrated because all these people are focusing on this industry but not the right parts of this industry do do you resonate with this process and this like kind of flow of how this industry has developed

yeah i think a lot of that is definitely true yeah and how do we avoid that is this how do we fix this problem do you consider this a problem yeah um i think uh so this gets to the uh you know the section that probably got people riled up the most which where i talk about you know how intolerance is good um and like basically the argument there is like if you want to like preserve a particular culture um especially in an environment where the dominant culture is some is uh something very different that you don't want to become then you're like your culture has to be really strong and it has to be able to kind of actively resist and fight assimilation um it has to actively

resist and fight entry-ism like projects that do not reflect what your real values are trying to kind of position themselves as as having the same values as you um and uh base you know stand kind like be willing to um even uh like offend people uh be willing to uh just like tell people like no you're not one of us um and uh be willing to even say those kinds of things to people who are potentially friends of your friends uh and like basically just fight hard right like basically just uh kind of fight hard and kind of keep on uh reasserting what your values are

and keep on uh just like preventing um things that don't reflect uh those actual values from presenting themselves to the guest base as though they're a genuine part of the space now is this toxic maximalism or is this healthy maximalism i think this question gets to uh gets into the territory where i start arguing against myself okay i don't think we're ready for that yet but let's not go there yet but but is this vitalik why we sort of see you know a bitcoiner's um notable influencer bitcoiners taking them pictures of themselves with with guns and talk of citadels and talk of you know running uh nodes on satellite internet connections

and uh this this almost this celebration of uh toxicity which to outsiders seems kind of bizarre but it sort of makes sense when you look at it of the lens of as you said earlier we live in a dangerous world protecting freedom is serious business so you need an intolerant minority to go protect it is is that how you explain some of the uh bitcoin maximalist culture around guns and you know citadels but even things like running your own node i think uh yeah here we do probably want to distinguish uh between like performative toxicity and performative weirdness and so like this section i kind of talk about the value

of performative toxicity i mean in the next section i think i talk more about the value of performative weirdness so the example that i use is the bitcoin or war against seed oils right which are like vegetable oils that are that are high in omega-6 fatty acids they're kind of everywhere in many kinds of like food and especially kind of you know foods that we would you know quote consider more artificial um ants that you know that are are actually pre um a pretty unhealthy um for the record i consider myself part of this crusade yeah i know but but um you know these are or but these oils are kind of you know they're very accepted in the mainstream right um and uh

so the the reason why i think bitcoiners are attracted to this kind of crusade is because it allows them to kind of have this feeling of you know we are in this select group um and uh you know we have these opinions and these are these opinions are kind of something that bind binds us together um or at least uh even if we don't agree on the specific opinions like just uh kind of agreeing on the broader principle that kind of there are these like like weird things are uh are and that easily can be correct um and the mainstream is not very trustworthy um and just uh generally the fact that like you don't need uh social approval from the wider wider kind of group outside of uh you know your community in order to be

able to do something right uh so doing things like talking about bitcoin nodes on satellites um you know running nodes i mean i do think like a big part of it like you know is like actually you know genuinely believing that like running a node is important to prevent uh people from taking over the network and kind of like 51 of the miners pushing like bad protocol rules through and and like running them in space provides a bit of redundancy but i think like there is this very big secondary uh kind of aspect of like we're doing this kind of hobby and we in our in group understands the value of this hobby you know you guys in the out groups do not understand to the age of the value of this hobby and this is kind of a social bonding thing that kind of brings the community even

stronger together i i do think this is important because i i think uh many encrypted sort of fail to recognize that there are really two stacks we're talking about one is a robust and defensible technical stack you talk about and bitcoiners expressed that in like fixed supply 21 million hard cap no smart contracts low complexity all of these things but then what we're just also talking about is number two in a robust and defensible culture you have to have like this this culture stack and um this is also maybe some of the reason for this this concentration on currency like just currency as the use case just money what is bitcoin here to do uh it's here to be a money just one thing and do it really

well a store of value currency for the world it doesn't want to get into all of the other crypto use cases can you talk about that a little bit why why is it does it make sense from a maximalist lens to focus on currency as the app i mean one is that i do think it's a pretty important app and i do think it's an app that people easily forget because like it's not sexy in some ways right like it's more fun uh to work on um you know fancy optimized constant function market makers um or um you know like weird kind of collateralization math or like decentralized governance mechanisms

or whatever um and just making a payment system that's clean and work well and works well is kind of not sexy in the same way but in reality like payments are like the largest proven use case of crypto and lots of people are benefiting from my payments today um and so if you have a culture that focuses on payments then like in some ways you actually do have more universal appeal than you know if you start focusing on a kind of a hodgepodge of these random other things right like well i mean i should say yeah you know obviously yeah you know you're not going to have a universal appeal because you know there's big aspects of maximalist culture that like turn huge numbers of people off but

like it's payments are um you know they're they're not they're something that people in the u.s care about there's something people in latin america care about people in africa care about them people in china care about them um and just like plain and simple payments you know they do have this aspect of kind of being this common language right and you know you don't really have to agree on much else uh in order to be able to agree on just like the value and importance of uh being able to pay uh and being able to save money right so i think uh that's uh definitely one of the aspects um and then there's also this uh kind of technical um aspect where i think uh a lot of people don't appreciate the

technical case for like basically being a payments only blockchain um and like the reason why it's uh kind of hard to appreciate right is that from a technical point of view at you like the kinds of op codes that you have to add to make a blockchain like bitcoin general purpose is actually not that high right like there's uh like a whole bunch of different uh proposals for adding what they call covenants into bitcoin um and those uh proposals only require adding like a couple of things right and adding a couple of things already lets you do some pretty complex things um inside of the bitcoin script protocol the reason why it's hard is because if you add like rich statefulness if you add

the ability to have this kind of you know cambrian explosion of more complicated applications on and kind of surrounding your chain then those applications kind of risk like kind of actually interfering with the chain and interfering with the ecosystem right so like i talked about minor extractable value was one example of this like basically when you have more complicated applications they're more likely to have these mechanics where they uh benefit um the um [Music] when um you have these more complicated applications uh you're more likely uh to um have the um

applications that uh give a large economic benefit to like whoever manages to get the next transaction in right like in bitcoin you don't really have much of that right you can theoretically make it anyone can spend a transaction but like most ut exos and bitcoin like basically you know like all of the ones that people use with any regularity their utxos that can only generally be spent by one person unless there's like a very exceptional okay so like a hacker and you notice that you've been hacked in real time and you have like a gas price war against them right but when you have more complicated applications like uniswap for example that gives kind of like arbitrage profits then there is an incentive to be the first one to put in the next transaction and then that creates an incentive to um

be you know a create these sophisticated algorithms to try to optimize uh for the ability to collect on these opportunities and that leads to a centralization of miners or centralization of stakers and so you know because of that like for the last one and a half years we've been having all of this mev and flashbots uh discourse um to uh that talks about like well how do we actually prevent the economies of scale in nav from spilling over into like um either like censorship opportunities or uh centralizing the ethereum uh validator ecosystem right so like if you just are too simple and dumb with that like the applications that involve mev can't be

built at all then you're protected against that right it's like the simplest and honest solution so do you think that's true like do you think that's true that mev really just can't exist on bitcoin you're asking me to read to to rebut myself sorry don't don't we'll get to that we'll get to that uh but but that is that is the case is basically mev is exactly that's less possible on bitcoin yeah um and then i also talk about this kind of less technical layer zero form of systemic contagion where like if you have a blockchain that is not just a currency that is also these other things and that is more like appealing to normies then you're going to get like more normies that become part of the ecosystem you're

going to get more of these like different kinds of people that are part of the ecosystem and they might have different trade-offs and values in terms of governance like they might be more willing to make an eip until let's say print another 5 million ether in the hands of the ethereum foundation because that is going to pay for developers to make ethereum a great system right whereas um you know i think there's an element of developers or just about rock um so there's also like that that aspect of uh safety as well right so like i guess those things together are basically the technical case for why focusing exclusively on being money makes for better money um and then the social case what basically is that uh you know the

more you exclusively focus on being money the more kind of density in your culture you have of these memes that you know 21 million is really important being sound money is really important uh being censorship resistant payments is a really important and uh the more that kind of those memes can you know resist attempts from the outside or from the inside to change them there's been sentiment from like uh i've seen this expressed by jack dorsey as well right in this like anti-web 3 anti-ethereum like ethereum is kind of the the chain for the vcs like this push back against web web3 use cases and sort of this positioning as no bitcoin is money that's the thing the entire world needs right uh emerging countries like

emerging economies as well as the west whereas this web 3 thing is just for a bunch of fat cat vcs uh who are like blockchain advocates and uh it's not it's not something that is actually going to help the world in any way do you see that sentiment being expressed here too yeah i mean i think like a lot of the aspects of this worldview really kind of are tied together um right it's like if your blockchain enables like the grifter stuff from or it just enables like more stuff at a technical level than like those other things that get enabled are potentially going to be like um taken over by grifters more easily um

and [Music] you know if you have a culture that kind of values you know innovation and you start getting the kind of these kinds of actors that care about innovation but don't really um you know understand kind of other values that make the blockchain as valuable as it is um so i think like all of those things do and tie them together in some ways just to add a little bit more perspective on to this bitcoiner culture has always been about how do we reduce reduce reduce about the bitcoin blockchain it's it's more about soft forking features out of the blockchain rather than uh soft forking features into the blockchain and i think it goes

into this conversation of just like how do we strip away all aspects away from bitcoin that's not about bitcoin being money uh and uh the the perspective is that how do we like to reduce the maximum surface area of attack for bitcoin how do we just make it a rock solid money uh and i think like the merits of this we can definitely contrast especially when we just had for example like the 600 million dollar axi sidechain hack like you're not going to get the hacks like that on bitcoin simply because they're you can't have defy on bitcoin i mean there are central centralized exchange hacks and that's kind of the trade-off that bitcoin has made but overall i think centralized exchange hacks have gone down where defi hacks has gone up uh and this is like one of

the liabilities of an expressive blockchain where you have d5 attacks you have defy exploits uh you also have people like you know losing losing funds to scammers because there's like you know nft scammers out there and again can't do nfts on bitcoin um what what lessons should we learn from this perspective or do you think that we've already covered it yeah i mean i think there's like the perspective can definitely be applied to a lot of cases like there's definitely a big part of me that really that you know does kind of like half think that uh the world would be better off if defy innovation stopped uh sometime in 2020 um like you know like like the you know the the side of me that's

like a yeah like a kind of like die and rhyme a maximalist like probably you know die rye maybe usdc are like the only three stable coins that we really need um and uh like the others are like well come on like if if the world had an intelligent planner he would have never hired anyone to build them um the them i mean like at the same time like you know i do see the the value in ongoing innovation um and like there's definitely yeah minnow projects that are getting under recognized that are trying to kind of either in the same sp like trying to actually do something even better in the same spirit as the um as those two but there's also these other projects that are just doing kind of insanely risky um you know under collateralized barely collateralized

sort of stuff um and that are trying to like basically market themselves on how optimal they are um without uh uh really caring about the and like how fat their fat tails are right it's like you like basically again i think the biggest fallacy that people have uh in terms of like judging stable coins for example is that i feel like the way that a lot of like especially newbies judges stablecoin is they're like a st if a stablecoin's price stays between 0.98 and 1.02 then it's like okay if a stablecoin's price stays between 0.99 and 1.01 then it's good and if a stablecoins price states between 0.998 and 1.002 then that's like really good

right and like that mindset is very wrong right because whether a stable coin like jumps up and down by two percent or zero point two percent isn't a function of how good the stable coin is it's a function of how good the market maker is and anyone can hire a good market maker for a short period of time the so the way that you should judge stable coins is like how well can they survive extremely extreme situations and maker does have a history of surviving some pretty extreme situations like it survives the ether price falling by 93 percent over the course of a year and a bit um it survives the bitcoin the e the ether price uh did i say bitcoin that first time i didn't use it either um okay yeah it survived the ether price following like 50 percent in a single

day remember this was uh with the the covet uh black monday or tuesday or whatever yeah yeah the like it dropped from like was it like 180 to 90 um and uh like no die holder got hurt like the only thing that happened is like the first layer of defense got broken and like 15 000 maker had to get printed as a second layer of defense and like you know that was definitely a bit of a scare but uh you know still like that's what the second wave of defense is there for uh that was like the craziest market price event of like pretty possibly uh ethereum's entire history aside from maybe the dow fork uh and uh it survived it just fine uh so

that's like basically yeah like judging systems by how they uh work during the worst case um instead of uh during the average case it's something that's like very unintuitive to people especially people coming from a more centralized mindset but it is something that is uh like we do really need to do especially in the crypto space all right vitalik i think we've covered almost every single section in your article so i just want to zoom out and summarize holistically the argument for why maximalism is good before we turn things around if you don't mind while it came while you talk for the next two minutes if is it okay if i go around and get a t

sure yeah totally sure yeah you're going to add some red wine add some wine in it if you feel like it alright vitalik before we turn the tables around and ask you to again argue the other side of the debate i want to i want you to zoom out and just view this whole entire maximalism topic from a holistic perspective what is your most legitimate steel manned argument for why maximum maximalism is good um i think i'm actually the best zoomed out uh description of all this is not even uh from myself it's from suede star codex um it is i'm just looking this up right now um i think it's called a thrive survive theory of the political

spectrum um that's exactly the title it thrives through uh thrive survive theory of the political spectrum i'll send it over to um to you in the gram um it's uh basically like it really yeah like it does a great job of kind of describing these two possible worlds where one is like a utopia and the other is a zombie apocalypse and how like very bright leaning values make sense in zombie apocalypse but are just totally stupid in the utopia and a lot of loft-leaning values make total sense in the utopia but are suicidal in the zombie apocalypse and like i think if you want like just a view a yeah kind of like 30 000 foot view on

like what the dynamic is um i yeah highly recommends just uh you know reading the um that post and i don't know i find it excellent um but you know the way that i would basically summarize it is that there is this kind of great divide of uh you know do you um are you acting like the world in which you're operating as fundamentally fluffy and safe um or are you act uh acting uh and thinking like the world that you live it is uh fundamentally a place where you uh um if you uh turn your attention away for even five seconds the tiger's gonna run out of the left side side of the visual field and it it'll have its uh teeth already around your neck by the time you can react

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hardware wallet go to ledger.com grab a ledger and take control over your crypto okay vitalik so we've just gone uh through a steel man argument for why maximalism is good in particular bitcoin maximalism now i think it's time for you to tell us where you actually disagree with that so i know this post was somewhat of a thought experiment and there are aspects of it you probably agree with and aspects that you disagree with so how would you address the the steel man bitcoin maximalist argument what do you disagree with sure so i think the core of my disagreement uh you can think about it as uh being um centered around the

kind of title of the first section right the title of the first section in some ways uh is like the theme of the essay right this idea that we live in a dangerous world and protecting freedom is serious business and i think the way that i would flip that statement around in order to rebut it is to say we live in a dangerous world and therefore um having friends is more important than ever um so like one analogy here is that if you look into geopolitics and how like large nation states act for example right like when a nation state feels threatened like often it does tends to kind of act in ways that we consider evil more often

right like it starts disrespecting human rights more often it starts uh you know running over the interests or sometimes even the territory of smaller countries beside it um it starts uh you know generally not caring what the um uh like as much about you know what people think of it um it says like more willing uh to act internationally in ways that are more selfish and that like don't really align well with international norms um but um at the same time like the just the smart ones they do generally have at least have some sense that like there's a limit to how much they're antagonizing people and ultimately there are some

allies that they're trying to get right like generally yeah you know they don't literally go out and just like lash out and try to attack everyone right now you know yes you know they're like there's uh that uh crazy austrian guy that uh tried to basically attack everyone at the same time about 80 years ago but um you know he did get smacked very hard for it right and uh there's even a lot of arguments uh that uh like the way in which he tries to basically make a an enemy and a sub-human out of pretty much everyone like really really did um hurt even his military situation uh and uh so i think uh if you basically if you one wants to kind of act in a a dangerous world like even if

you're willing to use that as an excuse to not be a nice guy like there generally you still wants to like figure out like who you really care about keeping us friends who you really care about uh keeping neutral instead of making them your enemies who you wants to only be a medium enemy instead of being a complete and total enemy um and kind of acting pragmatically within that light right and i guess uh a big part of my worry about maximalist culture is that it's really just not good at doing that like it is needlessly antagonistic in a lot of ways right like it uh antagonizes the us government uh it antagonizes like all you know large country and small small

country governments to some extent except you know maybe el salvador it antagonizes um other cryptocurrencies it antagonizes you know people who like gold basically it feels kind of very antagonistic on all sides and it's even antagonistic against people who really do genuinely wants to be on the same team as them right and this kind of approach like it i think it really does uh run a risk of uh like basically just uh giving you much more enemies than you really needs to have and like ultimately

yeah cut seriously cutting into your chances of success uh i think like a lot of it comes from this mentality that if you can convince yourself in your own head that your cause is just and that you're obviously right and within your own head the battle for some idea has been won then like you run the risk of basically assuming that that battle has been won among all people that you care about um and you basically act as though the world is a split between people who unconditionally agree with you and people who you can safely dismiss as enemies and then you just proceed from that assumption right and like sometimes i think that like a lot of uh projects and people who make really serious

mistakes um actually end up making this kind of mistake so like one totally different example for exa that i might give is uh russ albrecht from silk road right like one of the ways in which you could describe the kind of big mistake that he made well he made multiple mistakes but like one of them is basically that you know he acted as though what he is doing is clearly 100 legitimate in the eyes of right thinking people and therefore he should just kind of go ahead and keep doing it um and his only response to everyone else is basically anonymity and you can't catch me and it turns out that you know hey if you're still living right in the middle of the united states while doing all of

this like even though you can't catch me thing is actually not that strong right uh so like even things like the whole thing about like him accepting that again like or participating in that what ended up being a sting operation that attempts to kill several people like just a whole bunch of like small decisions um that uh that he made they were kind of like very maximally kind of pokey and aggressive at you know both the us government and even uh probably alienated a lot of moderates uh who if he had taken a very different strategy could have possibly considered him as a kind of civil disobedience worthy of osama protection and the reason why like he may i think he

made that mistake is basically because he had this attitude that you know within my own head clearly you know libertarian morality is correct i mean and the battle for my heart has been won and therefore kind of accidentally projecting that assumption to therefore the battle for the hearts of all good people has already been won um and uh you know everyone else is uh basically not convincible and you know we might as well just like treat them as something that we're kind of 100 fighting right and the reality is that the world never works that way right in any conflict there's lots of neutrals and in any conflict there's lots of mild enemies there's lots of mild friends and there's a lot of value to be gained in you know convincing a neutral to stay in

neutral instead of becoming an enemy uh convincing a mild enemy to stay being a mild enemy instead of being an extreme enemy convincing a yeah you know a neutral to become a slight friend instead of being a neutral and just kind of going all the way along that spectrum right and the way that like a maximalist culture really creates these um us versus them divides i think really causes them to basically needlessly sacrifice goodwill among a lot of people so that would that would be the core of my uh of my criticism right that like basically yeah like having friends is uh good and

having friends is not a luxury good in fact if you live in a dangerous world then having friends becomes even more important right like friends aren't just there to you know have fun and like saying rainbows and rainbows and unicorns with like you actually do need friends you do need allies um you do need people being neutral instead of being enemies ultimately bitcoin is a political project that exists in the context of this very complicated global political system and it's uh like maximalist culture i would claim just like makes a lots of needless kind of diplomacy sacrifices when it doesn't have to now one thing um and i would probably add to that case is

that like if you go around the world one of the things that you'll find is that there are lots of people who are just like totally like um like bitcoin and totally understand it um without um seeming like they're the sorts of people that maximize culture or that would vibe with maximalist culture and i think what's happening there is that like actually maximus culture is not very universal like i think it's uh primarily kind of an american and maybe to some extent sort of u.s cultural sphere of influence thing like you know i remember a few years ago when i went to a bitcoin meetup in malaysia and i spoke at a bitcoin meetup in malaysia and like basically it was just an ethereum event and like you know the person who does the malaysian bitcoin community also

just malaysia ethereum community right and so to some extent it's like the harms of bitcoin maximalism have been limited by the facts that bitcoin maximalism kind of has had a hard time um getting out of its uh in a relatively u.s centered cultural bubble uh and uh you know there is this route also non-maximalist side of uh bitcoin lands in in the wider world but like you get even better results i feel when uh you know you don't have those kinds of downsides at all is there a way to blend these things together vitalik is that like is there a way to get the best of both worlds because we have one strength of maximalism which is just this sort of intolerant minority who is steadfast in their values and we we risk

when we go to kind of big tent the other side of things possibly an erosion of the values that that make this industry uh so special like is there some way to blend these two together what what do you think is the the best possible uh outcome for this and the best possible you know strategy sure so i think um one really important thing to keep in mind here is that like this isn't just a one-dimensional thing where like there's a slider where um you know zero is uh like totally maximalist and you hate everyone who doesn't totally agree with you and uh 100 is like you know the standard kind of like straw man adage of like yours your mind just so open that your brains fall out um and like we're trying to

pick 50. uh and like the reality is that it's a very multi-dimensional space right there's lots of different ways to be more maximalist there's lots of different ways to be less maximalist there's uh different uh ways to be maximalist that some of which are more harmful and less beneficial others are less harmful and more beneficial um so like i'll give one example right like one example of something that i think is relatively low cost and high value to be intolerant of is uh scams right and uh one example i can give of this is a couple of months ago i was talking with a friend um or something like who was in the non-blockchain internet decentralization

and freedom space right so like you know the kind of space that really cares about things like tour um iphone jailbreaking like um open source android versions bittorrent you know that cluster of things right and a lot of people in that cluster of things are very or or partially anti-crypto and it basically asked him why and uh this person replies basically that the the people in that community are generally consider the crypto community to either be too scammy or to be far too tolerant of scams so i think basically what's going on here is that the ethereum community does i think have

this vibe of you know valuing harmony valuing friendship valuing people getting along and you know people aren't going to be willing to just like directly point fingers and like criticize specific projects and call them scams because you know ultimately it's an integrated community and these people are friends of your friends and like what's the uh you know there's a high cost to kind of disrupting relationships that way especially if you know you end up being wrong right so criticizing someone for being a scam is like a big risk and you know a lot of people are not willing to take that risk and kind of that activity is not valorized enough to make up for the risk uh so

the challenge um basically if the ethereum community was uh better at uh being intolerant toward the scammy aspects of it then you know it could win friends uh ironically enough among this uh non uh cryptocurrency and internet decentralization uh space that is uh currently and if somewhat turned off by it uh so the yeah but you know the question is like how do we actually do this right the problem is that scamming us is always a spectrum and like the theorem community is tolerance toward toil scams but like what about things that are you know not quite scams in the sense that they don't really lie

but you know they are kind of sketchy and they're basically just money grabs and they don't really align well with the project's values so i i'm gonna like poke into just one very random example um so yeah just yesterday i found out about this nfc project that's called uh weird vitalik.com this was just totally done without my permission like someone just did it right uh and i just like found out about it so meet vitalik 10 000 one of a kind drawn collection of italic butter and bored weird vitalik club um so this is just totally a ripoff of the board uh yacht ape club or uh is it bayc or byac like whichever one of those yeah yeah it's a collection of ten thousand randomly generated board vitalik booter

and nfts and there's normal vitalik which for some reason is wearing some kind of weird red hat there's zombie vitalik uh there's alien metallic and then and so forth right uh so i look at this uh section um kind of page um and one of the things that uh is in my head is uh you know do i like this project and my answer is like pretty decidedly no like honestly you know these people use my name without my permission uh these uh people are quite honestly making a project that is like very not in line with my own values uh because literally like within the last four three weeks i've had like multiple

interviews podcasts like everywhere criticizing this idea of uh you know hey we're just uh going to use ethereum in order to make three million dollar monkeys and like i've even publicly talked a lot about like what i will i think good uses of nfts would be right like one simple example is um like at least if you're going to make an nft you know donate some portion of the of the proceeds to charities right like if okay fine you know human beings have an insatiable need to gamble but like if we're going to gamble like let's actually um you know leverage that kind of energy and let's kind of like complete attach the demands of the supply and that's actually yeah you know fund some public goods uh so this project like if it really wanted to

kind of you know authentically attempt to express some you know vitalik values like it could have really easily done that but as far as i can tell from the website there's absolutely no evidence that like there's uh any attempts to um you know fund public goods funds charities uh there's like basically no attempt whatsoever to recognize anything about kind of my personality or who i am that's different from like say cz or justin's son so like from all of these angles like honestly i you know deeply dislike the project these people should probably be really happy that i'm kind of too uh i guess libertarian and leticia just like wants

to really go again um go after them and sue them um but but but isn't this isn't this the exact problem vitalik you talk about the uh the challenge of calling out scams the fact that we're even talking about it right now right is like brings more attention to the project itself and this is sort of what the troll what the what the project actually wants is just like not necessarily good press or bad press but just like somebody paying attention to it because in crypto attention equals capital equals cash out potential it's this is why it's so difficult to call out uh call out scams in in some of these projects do you see a solution to this yeah no it's definitely a good

point like i think just the question of like how we as a community can respond to this sort of stuff more right um and uh so the the challenge here um well is basically like one definitely is um you know how can we kind of very strongly signal to the community that like this sort of stuff like if you're into this sort of stuff you know you're not you're not really part of like the the kind of community that i um that we wants to see um but then once you start saying those things then you know there's the accusation of like oh if you're being opinionated does that mean you're being centralized or

opinionated opinionated and centralized synonyms um like i think they're not but um you know there are people who think that they are um there's uh definitely this question you know the question of like how do we call out individual scams like i think ultimately calling out is not like in the the right response right in this particular case so like i think calling out is an acceptable response to some specific context so like for example if you discover that some particular projects that already is well known um actually like really seriously compromises on decentralization or compromises on security in some way then like you know yeah maybe like some kind of takedown post is really warranted if this is like some you know seventh tier nobody thing

then um like calling them out individually yes like it totally does raise their individual profile like we need more um like responses that kind of cover the like the whole blanket right like you know you want to be really sure that like conferences are not uh promoting these kinds of things or if conferences are promoting these things and the ecosystem should not be promoting those conferences like basically you know just wants to have a a culture where people are more encouraged to kind of really steer clear of this kind of stuff and so steer clear of money grabs steer clear of uh projects that are

much more centralized than they uh then they claim that they actually are kind of much more hawkish about like hey does doesn't this thing actually run on a centralized server and if so like to what is this really even a dab and this can't be something that kind of comes from on high and kind of like shoots a laser at specific things that it discovers because like yes like a laser like on the internet is just a spotlight and you have the streisand effect and all that stuff right um so the uh challenge is like i think that the response has to [Music] be one that is more of this kind of cultural change at

every level i guess and in fairness like i do actually think that uh many parts of the ethereum community really do have this right like there are plenty of a high quality ethereum events there are plenty of events that don't highlight this kind of stuff and that like actually highlight really meaningful stuff and there's plenty of people who even you know get the inexternal vibe of ethereum being a scammy thing and then they go to a conference like they go to def con or whatever they're like oh wow you know these people are actually really you know amazing cool and real and legit people right so the question is like how to make that experience more scalable yeah i don't know i mean i think this is definitely i agree i i think one strategy i've seen you take in the past and i think we've tried to take at times

is right rather than uh shooting the laser beam at projects that look like scams we shoot the laser beam at like to the or the spotlight on uh things that we really love and things that are descent and you try to drown out all of the other things by shooting the spotlight on the real decentralized projects the cool stuff that's going on that the the projects that are taking kind of long-term perspectives on the space and you and you try to seek to drown out all of the rest but even that is so difficult in crypto when so much of the space is driven by attention narrative and price and uh not some of these like fundamental greater goods that i think many of us are here for i think that's

definitely a very good point like actually yeah being like giving the friendly spotlight to uh projects that are great um is in a lot of ways it's a an excellent substitute to like kind of trying to go after and uh every single thing that i guess is that anti-grade and and that's definitely something that we can do more of too i think probably the biggest ideological barrier uh between us and that more of that being happening is this idea that uh ethereum being a neutral platform means that we as people have to be neutral between applications and that's like totally not true right like i think

there is this kind of dynamic healthy dynamic in the ethereum space where you know yes the bottom layer should be credibly neutral the bottom layer should not um you know give discounts to applications that uh like vitalik buterin or peter solagi or whoever else you know think uh kind of represent the values of ethereum land and give gas penalties to um you know weird kind of monkey clubs that misuse my name uh but uh at the same time like there needs to be this higher community layer that actually does uh do those things uh so that's um like figuring out like what it actually like a culture that is uh both willing to be like more positively

opinionated uh in those ways um and uh at the same um also accepts uh mistakes um happening in that opinionatedness um is uh i think an important step that we can try to take i think the accepting mistakes part is very important right uh because like there have been times when for example you know i've been criticized for like supporting some projects in the roll-up space and then people are like oh why don't you support me as well um and just like answer honestly like what would you prefer out of italic butter and would you prefer a vitalic mutant stays neutral and uh does not talk about like specific projects and just as like roll ups are

good um or would you prefer uh vitalik buterin to like mention specific names and mention specific good things that are being done by specific names i mean even at risk of sacrificing a kind of some i guess neutrality of the persona like what's your preference yeah i think when people ask you to talk about their projects and they're asking you like hey like be more open name more names what they're really asking for is you know just mention my project's name and not really other projects names just me and i so i think it's coming from a selfish place for the people to request for you to talk about specific specific areas of crypto yeah and i mean personally for me i like

i definitely prefer uh a b right which is like there's so much noise in the space and so many individuals and people who are on kind of the the more grifter side of the spectrum in crypto that um voices that talk about decentralized values get drownded out right and so even if like you don't uh highlight all of the potential projects that have these decentralized values you can shine a spotlight at them and that could be sort of an example uh you're almost like socially signaling to others outside of crypto what is important as well it's like for so for me i think sometimes uh complete neutrality on these projects

is viewed by others outside of the industry as uh complacency or enablement and uh i think that's a that's a greater risk at this point in crypto yeah i mean i think um as you can probably tell i've kind of intuited a similar thing i guess but you know ultimately i'm only one person like at this point ethereum is so big that like i can't you know track all the industries and uh so like this isn't just a me thing right i think this is a kind of you know whole ethereum culture thing um that people should you know more actively uh i guess promote examples of

of things that are um in their values right and like that that means lots of things like that might mean for example that uh you know if you really value like um decentralization then you should like you know promote like which specific applications actually do a really good job of like having a fully serverless serverless ui for example where you know the ui is like just a web page on ipfs or whatever um if you value like uh you know global inclusion then you know you should go and talk about your favorite crypto project from latin america from africa or from wherever else you know if you value like inclusion of women then you know talk about your favorite women run projects um and it's like different people in ethereum

land do have like different focuses which i think is a yeah like a healthy thing and like often those focuses can kind of complement each other like even um and they don't really need to be at odds um so yeah basically i i do think that um you know the more kind of spotlight we give to projects that like really try to just like satisfy values in general then like definitely the um the further away we uh we get from things that are just like completely you know corrupt and uh uninteresting um i want to get your perspective on ethereum maximalism in 2021 and 2022

this is something that me and ryan and i have really had to face with because we have uh we have the largest podcast newsletter in crypto and so a lot of there's a lot of attention that goes on to what we cover and we kind of alluded to our strategy of rather than talking negatively about things that we think deemed to be too centralized we'd rather put the spotlight on the things that embody our values but then other alternative ecosystems like the newer ecosystems that have arisen have started to claim that you know ryan and i are just like eth maxis and we only care about ethereum and we don't like pay attention to any of these alternative layer ones and well that's in the

if you historically look at the content that we have produced that's largely been true but also i've been at at the same time uh concerned that there is just this malicious branding of a lot of ethereum people as maxis in order to like discredit them right rather than in order to like kind of say like oh like you can't trust these people for their information because they're biased because they're just a bunch of eth maxies and so i'm wondering wanting to get your take on how you see ethereum maximalism manifesting itself in 2021 and 2022 if you think it's good what about it do you think is bad and how do you think about like how these alternative layer ones have contended with like this growing uh

hardliners in the ethereum community it's definitely a good question and definitely an important question so um i think the way that i understand how bitcoin maximalism or how ethereum maximalism uh first arose right is that uh for the first few years of ethereum's history ethereum culture was like very open and uh welcoming and even like supportive of uh non-um ethereum blockchains to a very a great extent that might even be difficult to fathom today so like there are you know there were ethereum conferences like even including defcon that would just allow other blockchains to have you know presentations at them uh like

presentations of those uh uh other blockchains um and uh the uh you know a lot of people in the ethereum community also really valued collaboration with those other blockchains and a lot of people saw themselves as being ethereum people and you know other chain people at the same time and things kind of seemed fairly happy um but the thing that really kind of shocked and probably hurt a lot of people is that a lot of the other l1 teams there was this uh disingenuousness to them like so definitely not all all teams right there are i think definitely um layer ones that are not ethereum that are honorable there's quite a few uh there's quite a few of those like i think zcash is one of my favorites i talk about it a lot there's definitely

others too um so the problem with these other projects is that like when they go to ethereum conferences and like events and speak and sponsor um they would kind of virtue signal about how they are you know sister chains and friends of ethereum but then when they have private discussions with vcs they would basically tell to the vcs like hey ethereum is actually just like a ball of crap and uh you know vitalik is a dropout who doesn't know anything and like we have actual professionals tm and top talent cm from silicon valley tm and we're just totally going to pone them right like there definitely was this side of big divide between the

ethereum facing posture and the vc facing uh posture of a lot of these projects and ultimately you know people talk to each other and the this uh and scott discovered um and so the friendliness toward other l1 got replaced with this more uh like i guess ethereum maximalist mentality where other l1 are viewed as being kind of hostile attempts to drag projects away from ethereum by default uh so i think there are aspects to that that were just unavoidable there are aspects to that that i do think are excessive um and that are like

lack empathy for a lot of users like uh like i do disagree a lot with like for example what surgeon uh said in that uh podcast with hasu about five months ago um but i do think there is something to um this idea that uh you know ethereum culture is uh optimized around like people who are in ethereum already and doesn't like do enough to empathize with people who are currently not yet ethereum people um and you know they see in this kind of relatively close gatekeeping community um and when those other projects go to other layer ones because of problems with fees the response from the ethereum side is like hey those things are scams and if you like them then you know therefore you

are someone who likes scams and you're not one of us um and like basically once moralism becomes a tribe's response to everything then that's actually a sign that that tribe is really into having serious problems like i think that's a lesson that's true in a lot of cases like you know once again this is one of those that's uh probably has a lot of truth in geopolitics as well uh so like i do think that ethereum culture needs to be empathetic over the fact that lots and lots of people especially people in the global south especially poor people especially you know the kinds of people that we are in theory trying to empower like lots of people really don't have the funds to be able to pay 24 and 18 cents just to move some

ether around and make a simple transaction they yeah and if they want to play around with blockchains now and therefore to them um you know something like uh either just having an account on finance and you know trading back and forth inside of binance or going on on solana or going on bsc or whatever like if those are the best choices for them then like fine like i think we like real should even be uh happy and view those places as training rounds rather than uh you know viewing those as a kind of hostile countries that are gathering strength and that are going to make a full military assault against you know the ethereum castle at some point like we do have to be empathetic about the fact

that you know ethereum platform in its current situation does have limits for all of these people uh and uh like the correct response to them is not um you know oh if you don't see how ethereum has this holy factor called decentralization that makes the 24 dollar transactions worth it then you know you're not in our response should be like hey you know yes you know we do believe that the internet of money should not cost more than five cents per transaction like we you know like i stand by that statement and i think a lot of people stand by this statement but the way in which ethereum is solving that problem as a community is a layer twos and you know here are some layer twos that are already in alpha you can go use them and here's like the road map for how those layer tiers are gonna get

better and for how ethereum is gonna get better to be able to support more of them so um like that's the probably an update that i guess ethereum culture needed to have five months ago i'm not sure if it needs to have it anymore like i feel like in the last few months i don't know maybe the fee discourse disappeared uh on its own for a little bit just because like gas prices went down and like east prices went down and like what is it at like 20 or 30 way at this point uh actually let's check right now with the uh 42 right now oh it's gone up it's back up to like uh something to between 50 and 100 now but you know for for a long time and it's uh i think for the last month it has been

much lower than it was like say yeah in october and november right but that's not something that's guaranteed to last is i guess so one thing that i would say right um and so like really highlighting and encouraging like good scaling projects and like pushing uh people to build infrastructure to make roll-ups better pushing people to actually make good roll-ups pushing people to move toward um you know taking off the training wheels when they're ready and actually having full decentralization and all of these things pushing wallet providers to continue to take uh decentralized approaches and you know try to have like clients

for ethereum and so retained remain decentralized even in the con the concept of all these lawyer two platforms like all of these things are important right um and an ethereum culture that kind of steadfastly values its core values like that can be done without antagonizing people right and or at least without ant um you know antagonizing people who don't deserve to be antagonized and the way that that can be done is through like having this kind of positive focus and through like giving friendly pushes uh for people to actually yeah you know stick to their uh their principles um you know make sure that the decentralized apps stay decentralized make sure that the

apps that exist today actually become cheap um you know make sure that roll-up projects out you know keep prioritizing and making their fees even more and all of those things right like these things can happen and these things do require community pressure to keep happening and these things do require ongoing education to keep happening so i think there definitely is a healthy way for the ethereum community to like both actually solve the problem that causes people to instead go to um you know binance marching or whatever else today and at the same time like by doing those actions actually kind of ref collectively reaffirm its values of

decentralization and show itself as a community that like really seriously and deeply cares about these things so how do you think that we should be covering this on bank list and now i'm just straight up like asking you for personal advice here because i i'm on one hand like solana avalanche tara binance smart chain have done fantastic things in getting more private keys into more people's hands which is just fundamentally bullish for humanity that uh we love having more people have more private keys and all the things that come associated with it and so we and a lot of people are just interested in those ecosystems and as content producers we definitely want to serve those people that are interested in

those ecosystems but i have a hard time squaring it with some of the properties of the actual layer one block chains for example like the avalanche blockchain you can't see the mempool that's got a private mempool unless you are staking a very large amount of the avax token which makes it prohibitive for the average individual to actually be a part of consensus and one of the core bankless philosophies is that if you can't participate in consensus you're the product right so like the mev the order flow the transaction flow becomes something that only high capital avax token stakers can access and this same property is true for uh for solana and then we got terra which is delegated proof of stake

which we've seen like the cartelization of delegated proof of stake systems and the centralization of token supply and these are really complicated subjects that newcomers who are just playing with their low fee and like defy games don't really care about or want to hear about and so like we struggle with like covering these things when there's totally demand to hear about these ecosystems yet uh it's harder to explain like how in our opinions the long-term games are not being played by these newer l1 ecosystems and and rhino and i are here inherently for trying to find the blockchain that can play the longest term game possible so how do you think we should cover

these things sure um so i think uh one part of my answer is that like yes you know he wants to have a lot of positivity but also it's okay to be critical and especially for like bigger projects i think it's important to be critical and to continue like saying and making the arguments for why the chains that make sacrifices are making uh sacrifices that are ultimately unsustainable and at some point they're probably going to have to do rollups anyway um so that's one part of the response the other part of the response is like like i think for every unit of time that you spend uh criticizing other people for not standing up to values that you

think are important you should spend three minutes of time thinking about kind of how your own community can do a better job of uh sticking up to those values um and so i do think that um like some you know like internal facing discourse on like you know praising projects within the uh within the ethereum space that that help uh if ethereum maintain those values is a something that we absolutely should do a lot more of um and like that's i think true is at all layers of the stack like it's true for um applications um like one example that i mentioned is like apple one way to tell if an application does a good job

of being decentralized is is the ui fully serverless and if the ui is serverless um then you know you know that they're probably doing doing things well um so you know which projects have serverless uis try to kind of elevate them more and like actually talk about the fact that like hey these projects actually have server serverless uis and this is something that we should be celebrating um like really quick serverless uis what do you mean by that for folks that aren't technical sure i'm sorry this is uh this is my attempts to kind of capture the language from amazon aws and their serverless thing which in my opinion does not deserve the the word but basically what i mean is like a ui that really does not require centralized

servers to operate right like where generally the way it works is you just have a static web page um that is uh you know kids has html has javascript and all that it talks to is the blockchain right now maybe it could talk to other decentralized services as well but like everything that it talks to should not be dependent on like specific servers existing um in order for the ui to function right so it's like if the bat if the developers disappear if like other kind of key participants in the ecosystem disappear the dap should be able to just keep running um one good example of this is um like the uniswap ui i think right now it's not fully serverless but it's kind of

serverless backup in that like they do i like have a server that does some things like optimizing order routing but you know even if all that stuff disappears there's like local algorithms that can do that stuff as well uh it basically just is you know a web page that can talk to the the blockchain directly um there's even an interface to unit swap v2 uh uniswap.ninja which is basically just uh you know totally not run by uniswap the organization and it's a static page so things like that are kind of examples of how uniswap actually you know really does like follow the principles of being a good decentralized application yeah so it's things like that that's

that's kind of your encouragement is is highlighting things like that i you know i i'm wondering i guess just to you know tie off this section in a rebuttal to bitcoin maximalism there were two other points in in the article which is like currency is the main app this whole thing is about money uh and also um you know also this this this focus on um i guess simplicity of the underlying base chain rather than the complexity that ethereum adds i'm assuming you think that's not quite the right argument but like how would you how would you uh rebut that where do you think the balance is in terms of complexity in terms of focus on use

cases sure so i think like first of all we do needs to have um i think a lot of respect for currency as an application i'm like i think we definitely can't go too far in our rhetoric and saying oh currency is lame and boring and ethereum is cool because it does derivatives and ens and and decentralized autonomous organizations and reputation systems because like ultimately yes like if you look at what people are doing today currency is providing more real value to people than all of those other things combined right so you do need to have some respect for that um though with i guess one big caveat is that i think there's a lot of synergies between the currency use case and other use cases so ens is one very good example right um like if you want to send me you

know assets on ethereum then in your wallet when you type in the who you're sending to you just have to type in vitalik.eth right and once you do that you're sending me assets and it's you don't have to like go copy paste a 40k to character address you don't have to like ask me for an address you don't have to do fancy stuff it's like you are just sending your assets to me right so that's like an example of a synergy between i guess here a decentralized currency and a decentralized domain name system um like ens and and uh like ultimately um you know currencies are powerful for dows dows become more powerful if there are cryptocurrencies um and uh you know

there are a lot of ways in which these kinds of applications do interact with each other um and also to some extent i think we do wants to push back and say well well actually applications other than cryptocurrency have had an impact so like for example one of the benefits of nfts i think is that nfts actually have brought a lot of people into ethereum who would not otherwise be in crypto like the kinds of people that would be totally turned off by bitcoin maximalist mentality like they love ethereum because they love nfts and i think that's uh something amazing right like the fact that you know the ethereum community does have these uh different aspects of itself in order to kind of satisfy the values of different sub-communities

is i think one of the beauties of the ethereum ecosystem right so that would be one part of my response um and then i think the in terms of like the question of well does focusing exclusively on be on being money make for better money i actually feel like the ethereum a kind of ecosystem philosophy like technology a kind of stack already has a very good response to this line of arguments which is basically ethereum's two-layer structure right like the ethereum layer one is this uh something that strives to be this relatively you know simple base layer um and that really strives to you know be

simple i in the long term uh once uh some of the big changes that were are made um end up not changing that much um basically just uh you know move some ether around be able to be verified fully by a regular node and all of those things and then there's a layer two and layer two provides the scalability layer two is where the applications exist layer two is uh where the um you know people are playing around with uh or in the future will be playing around with um you know the prediction markets and the nfts and the dallas and all of the fun stuff and so you do kind of have this separation where you know you have this layer one and the layer one culture i think in the long run can really be a culture that is

uh protective of uh you know eat the money uh protective of the simplicity of the protocol protective of and even striving to improve the ability to run like a very minimal node that that verifies everything within the ethereum chain while at the same time lawyer two is this kind of expansive um you know pie in the sky uh thing where people are just keep being excited about what kind of the new kinds of functionality that you can add on top of it and i think like the separation is like pretty real in a bunch of ways right so like there's a debate within the mbv community where some people within the mbv community would even argue that like a a a full move to layer two might be something that makes mev not a problem

anymore because what your twos can capture the mev now like this like if that works out right then that would be an example of how like the layer one layer two separation actually does end up kind of protecting the layer one technology uh but uh i guess you know if that doesn't uh pan out then the other thing that we're working on is proposer builder separation um where um you know basically you do kind of separate this layer of like optimizing to make the best possible blocks from the layer of like being a validator which is supposed to be a dumb functionary that's just running a node right so i think uh ethereum culture in general like it really yeah does have this aspect of uh trying to create this layer separation between like the parts of the ecosystem that i think in the future really can value

simplicity really can value okay like mathematical purity purity beauty and all of these things that bitcoiners like about bitcoin while at the same time you have this other section of the ecosystem that does kind of like enjoy revel in and get the benefits of the you know power and complexity and the two like do have like kind of enough of a degree of separation between them they don't interfere with each other but the two are still sort of part of the same ecosystem in such a way that they um that they're able to complement each other right and so i think this is a some extent like a metaphor for like the ethereum community's strength which is like the ethereum community does get its strength from diversity um and it does get strength from the fact

that it has these different kind of sub-communities that can have like different values and in the world i think in the long term and even like starting very very soon it would be amazing if ethereum has a kind of core development culture that really values these ideas of like you know safety security mathematical simplicity like making it really easy for every node to count up with the total east supply if that's what people want uh and all these things uh but while at the same time you have these kind of spokes in the ecosystem that focus on the other stuff right like i think that kind of kind of technical and cultural future really is uh insight for us uh and i think like that kind of future

like it can get the benefits of ethereum culture uh or it can't really get the benefits of like maximalist culture um in the in terms of the way like it it keeps a core protected but at the same time also get the benefits of this culture that's more willing to reach out to the outside world appeal to different groups of people uh kind of present itself as uh like actually being able to help many groups of people and giving them um opportun opportunities to participate and really can't have both can i have both that's a great articulation of it and i think maybe the the philosophy underlying uh social philosophy of ethereum so we made the case for bitcoin maximalism and maximalism in

general and then we just made the case against it the the rebuttal of it and i'm wondering vitalik we've kind of landed in this place that uh you've talked about ethereum before as like moderate bitcoin values right sometimes it's interesting for myself i find myself agreeing with like bitcoiners on so many things uh and then other times i i find myself agreeing with like alternative layer one chains on so many other things and finding a unique place maybe in the middle is that the the path for ethereum in your mind is this moderate position between communities i mean i feel like that's kind of been what i've been saying in a lot of things all along right like that you know ethereum kind of is the the decentralized center

and you know you have extremes on one side and extremes on the other side and the ethereum community is i think one whose greatest virtue is uh really doing its best so to kind of move toward having the best of both absolutely um vitalik uh this has been a fantastic conversation with you um i think we've uh we we've definitely gone through this topic in uh in every way sometime we'd love to have you back to talk a little bit about uh eip4844 that's been in the back of our minds is kind of a mystery box that the bankless community wants to unlock as well as dank sharding but know that's a while off um but we'd love to have you back and talk about that um also glad

that you got to know tom brady recently so um that's been a lot of fun too vitalik it's been fantastic as always to have you on we we appreciate you no thank you very much it's been great to be here bankless nation we have a few resources for you of course uh one is the post that we went through which is the case for bitcoin maximalism that vitalik wrote we'll include a link in the show notes to that as well as the time magazine article that we referenced uh and this uh slate star codex article survive and thrive theory of the political spectrum uh so you will be able to access all of those links that we referenced in the show notes as always none of this has been financial advice eth is risky

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