V神30岁生日“小作文”：我的童年走向终结

Original author: Vitalik Buterin

Original compilation: Deep Chao TechFlow

Introduction:

Standing at thirty.

Today is Vitaliks 30th birthday. At this important life node, he published a long article called The end of my childhood.

Throughout the text, Vitalik expressed his insights on many topics such as Ethereum technology, the current situation of the encryption world, the Russia-Ukraine war, survival and death, growth and experience, and he also said bluntly:

I play a different role now and its time for the next generation to take over the mantle that once belonged to me.

As a core figure in the encryption world, Vitalik has also traveled around the world in the past time, practicing his technical concepts in a digital nomad way. At the same time, he has gained more knowledge when facing different cultures around the world. Awareness and responsibility.

“Cryptocurrency is not just a financial story, it can be part of a broader story of creating better technology.”

This long article can be said to be a comprehensive review and outlook of Vitalik’s personal experience and the entire encryption world when he was standing at the age of 30. It is rich in content and emotionally true.

DeepChao TechFlow compiled the full text and shared it with readers.

Over the past two years, one of my strongest memories is speaking at hackathons, visiting hacker houses, doing Zuzalu in Montenegro, and seeing people a full decade younger than me taking leadership roles on various projects, As an organizer or developer: crypto auditing, Ethereum layer 2 scaling, synthetic biology, and more. One of the memes on the Zuzalu core organizing team is 21-year-old Nicole Sun, and a year ago she invited me to visit a hacker house in South Korea: a party of about 30 people, and I remember it was the first time I was The oldest person in the room.

When I was the same age as the current Hacker House residents, I remember a lot of people praising me as one of the world-changing, awesome, young prodigies like Zuckerberg.

Now I cringe a little at this, both because I dont like the attention and because I dont understand why people have to translate Wonderboy into German when it works just fine in English. But watching all these people who were further along than me and younger than me made it clear to me that if that was my role, it wasnt it anymore. I play a different role now and its time for the next generation to take over the mantle that once belonged to me.

August 2022, the path to Seoul Hacker House. Taking pictures because I couldnt tell which house I was supposed to enter and Im communicating with the organizers to get this information. Of course, the house ended up not on the road at all, but in a more prominent spot about twenty meters to the right of it

1 

As a proponent of life extension (meaning, conducting medical research to ensure that humans can actually live thousands or millions of years), people often ask me: isnt the meaning of life closely tied to the fact that it is finite? : You only have a small part so you have to enjoy it?

Historically, my instinct is to dismiss this idea: while from a psychological perspective we tend to value things more if they are limited or scarce, the idea that long-standing grudges can be so bad that Worse than literally no longer existing, its just ridiculous. Furthermore, I sometimes think that even if immortality turns out to be that bad, we could always simultaneously increase our high and decrease our longevity by simply choosing to have more wars. The fact that the non-sociopaths among us today reject this option strongly suggests to me that once it becomes an actual option we will reject it as well, as it does in terms of biological death and suffering.

However, as I get older, I realize I dont even need to argue this.

Whether our lives as a whole are finite or infinite, every good thing in our lives is finite. What you thought was an eternal friendship slowly disappears into the mists of time. Your personality can completely change in 10 years. Cities can completely change, for better or worse. You can move to a new city on your own and start over the process of familiarizing yourself with the physical environment from scratch. There are limits to political ideology: you might build an entire identity around your views on top marginal tax rates and public health care, and then, ten years later, once people seem to stop caring about these topics altogether and instead spend all their time talking about On Awakening, Bronze Age Mentality, and e/acc, youll feel completely lost.

A persons identity is always tied to their role in the wider world they inhabit, and over a decade not only does a person change, but so does the world around them. One change in my thinking that Ive written about before is that it involves less economics than it did a decade ago. The main reason for this shift is that I spent a good portion of the first five years of my crypto career trying to invent mathematically provable optimal governance mechanisms, and I ended up discovering some essentially impossible results that Make it clear to me:

(i) what I am looking for is not possible, (ii) in practice the most important variable that determines the success of existing flawed systems (often the degree of coordination between subgroups of actors, but also the degree to which we often Other factors that reduce it to culture) are variables that I havent even modeled.

Previously, math was a major part of my identity: I was heavily involved in math competitions in high school, and soon after I entered the cryptocurrency space, I started doing a lot of coding in Ethereum, Bitcoin, and elsewhere, and I was fascinated by every new While cryptographic protocols are all exciting, it seems to me that economics is also part of a broader worldview: it is a mathematical tool for understanding and figuring out how to improve the social world. All parts fit together neatly.

Now, the pieces fit together less often. I still use mathematics to analyze social mechanisms, although the goal is more often to come up with rough first guesses about what might work and mitigate worst-case behavior (in the real world, this is usually done by robots rather than humans), rather than explaining average-case behavior. Now, I write and think more, often using very different arguments, even when supporting the kind of ideals I espoused a decade ago.

One thing that fascinates me about modern AI is that it allows us to mathematically and philosophically engage in different ways with the hidden variables that guide human interactions: AI can make “vibes” legible

All these deaths, births and rebirths, whether collections of ideas or people, are the way life is finite. These deaths and births will continue to occur in a world where we live for two centuries, a thousand years, or as long as the main sequence. If you personally feel that life doesnt have enough finitude, death and rebirth, you dont have to wage war to add more: you can also make the same choice I did and become a digital nomad.

2 

"Grads are falling in Mariupol".(Translator’s Note: Literally translated as artillery raining down on the city of Mariupol, which should allude to the Russo-Ukrainian War)

I still remember looking anxiously at my computer screen in my hotel room in Denver at 7:20 pm local time on February 23, 2022. I had spent the past two hours simultaneously scrolling Twitter for updates and repeatedly reaching out to my dad, who shared my thoughts and fears, until he finally sent me that fateful reply. I sent out a tweet making my stance on the issue as clear as possible, and Ive been following it. I stayed up very late that night.

The next morning, I woke up to see the Ukrainian government’s Twitter account desperately asking for donations in cryptocurrency. At first, I thought this couldnt be true, and I was very concerned that the account had been hacked opportunistically: someone, perhaps the Russian government itself, taking advantage of everyones confusion and desperation to steal some money. My “safety mindset” instincts took over and I immediately started tweeting warning people to be careful while looking through my network for people who could confirm or deny whether the ETH address was real. An hour later, convinced that it was in fact true, I publicly conveyed my conclusion. About an hour later, a family member sent me a message stating that given what I had done, it was best for my safety not to return to Russia.

Eight months later, I see the crypto world going through a very different kind of turmoil: the public demise of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. At the time, someone posted a long list of crypto protagonists on Twitter, showing which ones had fallen and which ones were still intact. This list has a high casualty rate:

The SBF situation is not unique: it is a mix of MtGox and several previous major upheavals that have engulfed the crypto world. But this was the moment when I realized, all at once, that most of the people I had considered as guiding lights in the crypto world, that I felt comfortable following since 2014, were no longer there.

People who look at me from a distance often think of me as a high-motivation person, presumably because thats what youd expect from a protagonist or project founder who is a college dropout. However, in reality, I am anything but. The virtue I valued as a child was not the virtue of being creative when starting a unique new project, or showing courage when it was needed, but rather the virtue of showing up on time, doing homework, and getting a 99% average. The virtues of a good student.

My decision to drop out of school was not a courageous step of faith. It started in early 2013 when I decided to take a paid internship over the summer to work for Ripple. When US visa complications prevented this, I instead spent the summer working with my Bitcoin Magazine boss and friend Mihai Alisie in Spain. At the end of August I decided I needed to spend more time exploring the crypto world, so I extended my vacation to 12 months. It wasn’t until January 2014, when I saw hundreds of people cheering for my talk introducing Ethereum at BTC Miami, that I finally realized I had chosen to leave college for good. Most of my decisions in Ethereum involve responding to pressure and demands from others. When I met Vladimir Putin in 2017, I didn’t try to arrange a meeting; instead, someone else suggested it and I pretty much said “sure.”

Now, five years later, I finally realize that: (i) I had been complicit in legitimizing a genocidal dictator, and (ii) I no longer have the luxury of sitting back and letting those mysterious people in the crypto space The other has the luxury of taking charge.

Both incidents, although they differed in the type and scale of their tragedies, burned similar lessons into my mind: I actually have responsibilities in this world, and I need to be intentional about how I Mode of operation. Doing nothing, or living on autopilot and allowing yourself to simply become part of someone elses plan, is not an automatically safe or even blameless course of action.

I am one of the mysterious others who play this role. If I dont and the crypto space either stagnates or is dominated by opportunistic money grabbers, then I have only myself to blame. So I decided to be cautious about accepting other peoples plans and be more vocal about the plans I made myself: have less ill-conceived meetings with random powerful people who were only interested in me as a source of legitimacy, and do more Something like Zuzalu.

Zuzalu flag in Montenegro, spring 2023

3 

Let’s move on to happier things – or at least challenges that feel more like a math puzzle than the kind where you fall while running and need to walk 2 kilometers with bleeding knees to seek medical attention. The author isnt going to share any more details, noting that the internet is already very good at turning a photo of a rolled-up USB cable in his pocket into an internet meme suggesting something entirely different, and he certainly doesnt want to give those people any more ammunition. .

Ive talked before about the changing role of economics, the need to think about motivation (and coordination: were social animals, so the two are actually closely linked) in a different way, and the idea that the world is turning into a jungle : Big government, big business, the big mob, and almost any big XX will continue to grow, and the interactions between them will become more frequent and complex. I haven’t talked much about how many of these changes will impact the crypto space itself.

The crypto space was born in late 2008, in the wake of the global financial crisis. The genesis block of the Bitcoin blockchain quotes this famous article from the British Times:

Bitcoin’s early memes were heavily influenced by these themes. Bitcoin is about abolishing banks, which is a good thing because banks are unsustainable monoliths that constantly create financial crises. Bitcoin exists to abolish fiat currency, because the banking system cannot exist without the underlying central banks and the fiat currency they issue—plus, fiat currency makes it possible to print money to fund wars. But in the fifteen years since then, the broader public discourse as a whole appears to have largely moved beyond concerns about money and banks. What is considered important now? Well, we can ask about a copy of Mixtral 8 x 7 b running on my new GPU laptop:

Once again, AI can make resonances legible

There is no mention of currency and bank or government control of currency. Trade and inequality are listed as issues of global concern, but as far as I can tell, the problems and solutions being discussed occur more in the physical world than the digital world. Is the original “story” of cryptocurrency increasingly behind the times?

There are two sensible responses to this conundrum, and I believe our ecosystem will benefit from both:

• A reminder that money and finance still matter, and serving the world’s underserved in this niche

• Looking beyond finance to use our technology to build a more comprehensive vision of an alternative tech stack that is freer, more open and democratic, and how to build a better society more broadly, or at least help those who have been excluded Tools for people outside mainstream digital infrastructure.

Its important to note that I think the crypto space is uniquely positioned to provide value there. Cryptocurrency is one of the few tech industries that is truly highly decentralized, with developers spread across the globe:

Source: Electric Capital’s 2023 Cryptocurrency Developer Report

Having visited many new global cryptocurrency hubs over the past year, I can confirm that this is indeed the case. Increasingly, large crypto projects are headquartered all over the world, or nowhere else. Additionally, non-Western developers often have a unique advantage in understanding the specific needs of crypto users in low-income countries and being able to create products that meet those needs. When I talk to a lot of people from San Francisco, I get the distinct impression that they think AI is the only thing that matters, that San Francisco is the capital of AI, so San Francisco is the only place that matters. “So, Vitalik, why haven’t you settled down in the Gulf with an O 1 visa”? Cryptocurrencies don’t need to play this game: it’s a big world and it only takes a visit to Argentina, Turkey or Zambia to remind yourself that many people still have important issues related to access to money and funding, and that there are still opportunities to balance Complex work on user experience and decentralization to truly solve these problems in a sustainable way.

Another vision is the one I outlined in my recent post, “Let Ethereum become a cypherpunk again”. Rather than just focusing on money, or becoming the “Internet of Value,” I think the Ethereum community should broaden its horizons. We should create a complete decentralized technology stack — one that is independent of the traditional Silicon Valley technology stack to the same extent. For example. Chinas tech stack is - and competing with centralized tech companies at every level.

Let’s repost this technology stack comparison table again:

After I published that article, some readers reminded me that an important missing piece of the system is the technology of democratic governance: the tools through which people collectively make decisions. This is what centralized technology is really trying to provide, since each company is assumed to be run by a CEO, with oversight provided by...well...a board of directors. Ethereum has benefited from very primitive democratic governance techniques in the past, when a series of controversial decisions, such as the DAO fork and several rounds of issuance reductions, were made in 2016-2017, produced by a team from Shanghai Created a platform called Carbonvote where ETH holders can vote on decisions.

ETH votes on DAO fork

The vote is advisory in nature: there is no hard and fast agreement that the outcome will determine what happens. However, they help core developers have the confidence to actually implement a range of EIPs, knowing that the wider community will support them. Today, we have access to much richer proof of community membership than token holdings: POAP, Gitcoin Passport points, Zu stamps, and more.

Taken together, we can begin to see a second vision of how the crypto space can evolve to better meet the concerns and needs of the 21st century: creating a more comprehensive, trustworthy, democratic, and decentralized technology stack. Zero-knowledge proofs are key to expanding what this stack can offer: we can move beyond the false binary of “anonymous and therefore untrusted” versus “verified and KYC’d” and prove everything about who we are and what we have A more fine-grained statement of which permissions are available. This allows us to simultaneously address concerns about authenticity and manipulation – protecting against “Big Brother outside” – as well as concerns about privacy – protecting against “Big Brother within”. In this way, cryptocurrency becomes more than just a financial story and can be part of a broader story of creating better technology.

4 

But how do we achieve this, beyond telling stories? Here we return to some of the issues I raised in my post three years ago: the changing nature of motivation. Often, those who focus too much on a theory of financial motivation – or at least a theory of motivation in which financial motivation can be understood and analyzed, while everything else is treated as a mystery we call “culture” Black Box – Be confused by this space because many actions seem contrary to financial motivations. “Users don’t care about decentralization”, but projects still often strive to be decentralized. “Consensus is built on game theory” However, successful social campaigns that drive people out of dominant mining or staking pools work in Bitcoin and Ethereum.

I recently realized that no one Ive seen has attempted to create a basic, functional map of cryptospace that works as expected in an attempt to include more actors and motivations. So let me try this quickly now:

The map itself is an intentional mix of 50/50 idealism and depicting reality. It aims to demonstrate the four main components of an ecosystem, which can support each other and have a symbiotic relationship. In practice, many crypto agencies are a mixture of these four.

Each of these four components provides something critical to the overall machine:

• Token holders and DeFi users contribute heavily to the financing of the whole thing, which is key to bringing technologies like consensus algorithms and zero-knowledge proofs to production quality.

• Intellectuals provide ideas to ensure that the space is actually doing something meaningful.

• Builder bridges the gap and tries to build applications that serve users and bring ideas to life.

• Pragmatic users are the people we ultimately serve.

Each of the four groups has complex motivations, and these motivations interact with the other groups in a variety of complex ways. There are also “dysfunctional” versions of each group: apps may be exploitative, DeFi users may inadvertently reinforce the network effects of exploitative apps, pragmatist users may deepen their reliance on centralized workflows, intellectuals may Getting too caught up in theory, focusing on trying to solve every problem by blaming people for being inconsistent, without recognizing that financial incentives (and the disincentives of user inconvenience) are also important and can and should be addressed.

Often, these groups have a tendency to laugh at each other, and sometimes I do play a part in that. Some blockchain projects are openly trying to move away from what they see as childish, utopian, and distracting idealism and focus directly on applications and usage. Some developers belittle their token holders and their dirty love for making money. There are also developers who belittle pragmatic users and their sordid willingness to use centralized solutions when its more convenient for them.

But I think there is an opportunity to increase understanding between these four groups, with each party understanding that it is ultimately dependent on the other three groups, working to limit its own excesses, and recognizing that in many cases, their dreams are less than they imagined. So far away. I think this is a form of peace that is actually possible, both within the “crypto space” and between neighboring communities with whom it aligns strongly with its values.

5 

The beauty of the global nature of cryptocurrency is that it provides me with a window into a variety of fascinating cultures and subcultures around the world and how they interact with the crypto world.

I still remember my first visit to China in 2014 and seeing all the signs of light and hope: exchanges scaling to hundreds of employees even faster than in the US, massive GPU and later ASIC mining pools , and projects with millions of users. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley and Europe have long been the main engines of idealism in the field, with two distinct flavors. Almost from the beginning, Ethereum’s development was de facto headquartered in Berlin, and it was within Europe’s open source culture that many of the early ideas for how to use Ethereum for non-financial applications emerged.

Diagram of Ethereum and two proposed non-blockchain sister protocols, Whisper and Swarm, which Gavin Wood used in many of his early talks

Silicon Valley (and, of course, I mean the entire San Francisco Bay Area) was another hotbed of early cryptocurrency interest, mixed with ideologies as diverse as rationalism, effective altruism, and transhumanism. In the 2010s, these ideas were new, and they felt crypto-adjacent: many people who were interested in them were also interested in crypto.

Elsewhere, letting ordinary businesses use cryptocurrencies for payments is a hot topic. You can find people accepting Bitcoin in a variety of places around the world, including Japanese waiters taking Bitcoin as tips:

Since then, these communities have gone through a lot of changes. In addition to other broader challenges, China has experienced multiple cryptocurrency crackdowns, resulting in Singapore becoming the new home for many developers. Silicon Valley is divided: Rationalists and artificial intelligence developers were essentially different factions of the same team until 2020, when Scott Alexander was doxxed by the New York Times. Dueling factions on the question of optimism versus pessimism about artificial intelligence’s default paths. Ethereum’s zone makeup has undergone significant changes, especially during the introduction of entirely new teams for proof-of-stake in 2018, although more by adding new teams than by killing old ones. Death, birth and rebirth.

There are many other communities worth mentioning.

When I made my first of many visits to Taiwan in 2016 and 2017, what struck me most was the combination of self-organizing capabilities and willingness to learn from the people there. Whenever I write a document or blog post, I often find that within a day, a study club will form on its own and start excitedly annotating every paragraph of the post on Google Docs. Recently, members of Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs were equally excited about Glen Weyl’s ideas on digital democracy and “pluralism,” and quickly posted a complete mind map of the field on their Twitter account (This includes many Ethereum applications).

Paul Graham once wrote about how every city sends one message: In New York, You should make more money. You should really read all these books in Boston. In Silicon Valley, You should be stronger. When I visited Taipei, the message that came to mind was You should rediscover your inner high school student.

Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang spoke at a study session at Nowhere Bookstore in Taipei, where I gave a talk on community notes four months ago

When I visited Argentina several times over the past few years, I was struck by the desire and willingness to build and apply the technology and ideas that Ethereum and the wider crypto world have to offer. If places like Silicon Valley are the frontier, full of abstract thoughts about a better future, then places like Argentina are the frontier, full of positive motivation to meet the challenges that need to be addressed today: in Argentinas case, ultra-high inflation and Limited connections to the global financial system. Cryptocurrency adoption there is off the charts: I get recognized on the street in Buenos Aires more often than I do in San Francisco. There are also a number of local builders, with a surprisingly healthy mix of pragmatism and idealism, working on peoples challenges, whether its crypto/fiat conversions or improving the state of Latin American Ethereum nodes.

I was in a coffee shop in Buenos Aires with a friend and we paid with ETH

There are many others worth mentioning: the cosmopolitan and highly cosmopolitan crypto community in Dubai, the growing ZK community across East and Southeast Asia, Kenya’s dynamic and pragmatic builders, Colorado’s public goods-oriented solar The punk community, and so on.

Finally, Zuzalu ended up creating a very different, beautiful mobile sub-community in 2023 that will hopefully flourish on its own in the coming years. This is a big part of what attracts me to the Cyber ​​Nation movement: culture and community are not just things to be defended and protected, but also things that can be actively created and developed.

6 

A person learns many lessons as he grows up, and different people learn different lessons. For me, some are:

• Greed is not the only form of selfishness. Cowardice, laziness, resentment and many other movies can do a lot of harm. Moreover, greed itself can come in many forms: Greed for social status is often as harmful as greed for money or power. As someone who grew up in my tender Canadian upbringing, this is a major update: I feel like I was taught to believe that greed for money and power is the root of most evil, and if I make sure Im not greedy for those things ( For example, by repeatedly fighting to reduce the ETH supply share of the top 5 “founders”), I fulfilled my responsibility to be a good person. This is of course not true.

• You are allowed to have preferences without having to have a complex scientific explanation for why your preferences are truly, absolutely good. I generally like utilitarianism and find it often unfairly maligned and wrongly equated with callousness, but here I think ideas like excessive utilitarianism can sometimes lead humans astray: you can change your There are limits to the degree of preference, so if you push it too hard, youll end up making up reasons for why everything you like actually objectively best serves the general flourishing of humanity. This often results in you trying to convince others that these anachronistic arguments are correct, leading to unnecessary conflict. A related lesson is that a person may not be right for you (in any situation: work, friendship, or otherwise) without being a bad person in some absolute sense.

• The importance of habits. I intentionally limit many of my daily personal goals. For example, I try to run 20 kilometers once a month and otherwise do as much as I can. This is because the only habits that work are the ones you actually keep. If something is too difficult to maintain, you abandon it. As a digital nomad who regularly hops continents and takes dozens of flights per year, any kind of routine is difficult for me, and I have to deal with this reality. Although Duolingos gamification, which pushes you to maintain a winning streak by doing at least something every day, actually works for me. Making positive decisions is difficult, so its best to make positive decisions that will have the most long-term impact on your mind, by reprogramming your mind to default to a different pattern.

Everyone will learn these very long tails and in principle I can go longer. But there are limits to how much you can actually learn just from reading about other people’s experiences. As the world begins to change at a faster rate, the lessons learned from other people’s narratives become outdated more quickly. So, for the most part, theres also no substitute for simply doing things the slow way and gaining personal experience.

7 

Every good thing in the social world—a community, an ideology, a “scene,” a country, or a very small company, a family, or a relationship—is created by people. Even in the rare cases where you can write a reasonable story about how it has existed since the birth of human civilization and the Eighteen Tribes, at some point in the past, someone had to actually write the story. These things are finite—both the thing itself, as part of the world, and the thing you experience it as, a fusion of underlying reality and your own way of conceiving and interpreting it. As communities, places, scenes, companies and families disappear, new ones must be created to replace them.

For me, 2023 is a year of watching many things big and small fade into the distance of time. The world was changing rapidly, the framework I was forced to use to try to make sense of the world was changing, and so was the role I played in influencing the world. There is death, a truly inevitable type of death that continues to be with us even after the blight of human biological aging and death has been purged from our civilization, but there is also birth and rebirth. It is the task of each of us to continue to be active and to create new things wherever we can.