Vitalik Buterin: evaluation

Transcript context

…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? I wrote this blog post a couple of years ago where I talk about different kinds of decentralization. One I talk about is architectural decentralization, which is basically the difference between a system being based on one computer and, say, a system being based on lots of computers and being fault tolerant. Lots of things are architecturally decentralized already, like large parts of Amazon AWS, and lots of military hardware, traditional airplanes. Lots of things have aspects of architectural decentralization. Another one is political decentralization, which is the thing . . . And blockchains are trying to achieve the architectural side of decentralization — it’s not run on one piece of hardware. In political decentralization, it’s not run by one single person or small cabal of people at the same time. The third kind of decentralization I talk about, though, is logical centralization versus decentralization. One example I gave in my post is the English language. The English language is architecturally decentralized because there’s no one single dictionary. It’s politically decentralized: there’s no one who really has the ability to practically regulate new words into and out of existence. But it is logically centralized in the sense of there is one thing, which is the English language, and if you start deviating from that one thing, then you’re going to have a harder time. The conclusion of my post, or at least part of it, is that I do think that blockchains are logically centralized, basically because there is one blockchain. It is a shared ledger. It is a canonical history. You’re either part of it or you’re not. I argue that this logical centralization is actually good. If you’re looking to hire someone — either for Ethereum or to collaborate with — what quality or qualities do you look for that maybe other people underrate? Because you’ve also built a successful company, right? You’re not just chief scientist.…

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