Vitalik Buterin: belief

Transcript context

…Don’t people trust ether and Ethereum in part because they trust you? In a sense, there’s this Russian tradition of holy men who come along — Dostoyevsky’s Alyosha, Prince Myshkin — like a non-evil Rasputin. The person is innocent and has some very wise message, and people flock to that person. Are you, in a sense, the contemporary version of those figures? I know people have different theories about the kind of influence that I myself have. I think part of it is that, at least I feel like, the innovation in the crypto space isn’t just technological innovation or political innovation. It’s also to a large degree cultural innovation, and even I, with my own behavior, I end up talking to people at different conferences, just reply to random people’s Reddit messages. I try to make myself maximally accessible in a bunch of ways, try to bring different people in different communities together, perform a kind of social coordination function, which is probably, from an economist’s point of view, similar to some aspects of management, but without the aspects of management that evoke images of centralized control in all those different things. And that’s not just myself. That’s the Ethereum community. It’s other crypto communities. I do feel like there definitely is a real sense in which the crypto community is also at the epicenter of all of these different cultural ideas of how projects should organize, what it means to be a leader, what it means to be a developer, what it means to be part of a project, what it means to be part of a team. There’s social dimensions to that. There is ideological dimensions to that. There’s dimensions of how different ideas get spread and become more popular. I definitely do agree that that aspect of things is one that’s very important and probably not talked about enough. If we think of Thomas Schelling’s notion of a focal point, something that people coordinate upon and come to accept as somehow centrally important, doesn’t that mean centralization always reemerges? You look at something like Twitter. We’re both on Twitter. I don’t think Twitter is dominant in its sphere because its AI is so good. It’s just people know the name, and people are used to going to Twitter. Will the crypto space end up as centralized as Twitter, Google, and Facebook?…

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