Vitalik Buterin: evaluation

Transcript context

…If you think about economics — what you’ve taught yourself — what do you think of as the central ideas relevant for cryptoeconomics, which is a term I think you coined? I would say that cryptoeconomics, first of all, is economics. It’s not like we’re inventing some completely different parallel society with a different parallel economy and different rules, but it is economics specialized to a particular set of circumstances. Then you have to ask yourself, “Well, what describes those circumstances?” There are a few major parts to that answer. First of all, whatever mechanisms you have in cryptoeconomics land have to be fully specified exactly — not exactly to the standards of a court judge, but exactly to the standards of a computer programmer. What that means is that there’s a lot of things that you can’t do. For example, you can’t say in cryptoeconomics, “It’s illegal to bribe people,” because there’s really no simple way to define what a bribe is. If someone really wants to bribe someone else, he can just go and do that outside of the protocol, and the protocol would have no way to tell. Whatever your rules are for rewarding, penalizing inside of the mechanism, they have to be specified as a piece of Solidity code, Viper code, whatever programming language you’re using in that set. That’s a much tighter constraint than policymakers writing laws have. Another one is, of course, that all of the actors are anonymous, and what that means in practice is that you cannot drag people’s utility down below zero. If I have 70 ether, and I put that 70 ether into a mechanism, the worst thing you can do to me is you can take away that 70 ether. You cannot throw me in jail. You cannot socially ostracize me so I can’t earn any money again because I can always just switch identities. But to the extent that I’m willing to lock that ether up and make it vulnerable to a mechanism, then you have the ability to motivate me to that extent. Cryptoeconomics is basically taking economics with those particular constraints and then adding together insights from fields that are fairly close by to the cryptocurrency space — particularly cryptography, information theory, math, and distributed systems, including all of the research around consensus algorithms, hash functions, signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, and what we know about all of those primitives. Basically we’re trying to figure out, given these constraints and given these building blocks, what kind of systems and what kind of mechanisms can we design to achieve the properties that we want? And under what kinds of assumptions do those properties hold? What’s the contribution or understanding you wish economics could give you that it hasn’t given you yet? What problem do you want it to solve for you?…

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