Contradictions..
In light of the recent Ethereum merge (plus, I have been swamped all day), allow me to indulge you with a tweet thread penned by Vitalik Buterin earlier this year.
Insightful in its entirety and enlightening of the struggles and self debates one of the leaders of the blockchain technological movement faces and has with himself in this pivotal moment.
The point is, we all face contradictions but the struggle many face is to match their words with actions.
Not an easy road to travel but we can share his contemplations with lessons we can draw from his plight.
So here goes,
Contradiction between my desire to see Ethereum become a more Bitcoin-like system emphasizing long-term stability and stability, including culturally, and my realization that getting there requires quite a lot of active coordinated short-term change.
Contradiction between my preference for reducing reliance on individuals and trying to build fixed systems that can stand the test of time and my appreciation of "live players" and their role in helping the world move forward.
Contradiction between my desire to see Ethereum become an L1 that can survive truly extreme circumstances and my realization that many key apps on Ethereum already rely on far more fragile security assumptions than anything we consider acceptable in Ethereum protocol design.
Contradiction between my love for things like decentralization and democracy, and my realization that in practice I agree with intellectual elites more than "the people" on many (though definitely far from all) specific policy issues.
Contradiction between my desire to see more countries adopting radical policy experiments (eg. crypto countries!) and my realization that the governments most likely to go all the way on such things are more likely to be centralized and not friendly to diversity internally.
Contradiction between my desire to see more diversity in interesting *cultures* and my realization that maintaining a culture that's distinct from the mainstream seems to often require *some* kind of insanity or artificial barrier or similar thing that I ideologically dislike.
Contradiction between my dislike of many modern financial blockchain "applications" ($3M monkeys etc), and my grudging appreciation for the fact that that stuff is a big part of what keeps the crypto economy running and pays for all my favorite cool DAO/governance experiments.
Contradiction between my desire for crypto to grow beyond finance and my realization that finance (incl payments+SoV) is still by far the most successful category of crypto apps, *especially* among third-world residents, human rights activists and vulnerable people generally.
Contradiction between my desire to maximally simplify the L1 and my desire to maximally simplify the whole ecosystem (as a simple L1 often "exports" its complexity to higher layers of the stack that users have to adopt anyway)
Contradiction between my desire to be a positive-sum mediator figure that can be everyone's friend and my desire to stand strongly with good against evil those times when true evil is what we face.
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.
I think some of the positions stated above is already public knowledge judging by recent actions. It is humanizing and gratifying that he struggled with these contradictions but IMHO, landed on a wrong conclusion/solution as we see today with the state of ETH.
See you tomorrow!
- Ope