Bankless - 114 - In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism | Vitalik Buterin

Episode Date: April 18, 2022

✨ DEBRIEF ✨ | Ryan & David's Unfiltered Thoughts on the Episode https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/114-vitalik-debrief  ---- Vitalik returns to Bankless once again—this time to defend Bitcoin Maximalism of all things. On April Fools Day this year, Vitalik posted an article to his blog titled 'In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism,' but instead of being a pure troll, the Ethereum Founder approached the piece with truth and crafted a salient & compelling argument. By steel-manning maximalism,  Vitalik lays out a very reasonable case for the merits intolerance and toxicity. Philosophical and contrarian episodes like these help us understand the industry better, encouraging empathy for all sides of the debate. We explore this in context of Ethereum maximalism as well, and Vitalik offers some sage advice to Bankless. This conversation is far more philosophy-based than tech-based, but as we've seen, Vitalik is as comfortable in this setting as he is discussing the latest EIPs or protocol upgrades. Also, Vitalik spills the tea on Twitter's new favorite drink—the VB. ------ 📣 THE GRAPH | Graph Day in San Francisco | June 2-5 https://bankless.cc/GraphDay  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER:          https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/   🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:                 http://podcast.banklesshq.com/   ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALED ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across  🏦 ALTO IRA | TAX-FREE CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/AltoIRA  👻 AAVE V3 | LEND & BORROW CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/aave  ⚡️ LIDO | LIQUID ETH STAKING  https://bankless.cc/lido   🔐 LEDGER | NANO S PLUS WALLET https://bankless.cc/Ledger   ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 8:30 Green Tea and Twitter Hate 15:47 The April Fools Article 22:35 Crypto Grifters and Security 29:22 Taking Responsibility 37:19 Performative Weirdness 43:33 The Culture Stack 49:14 Value Tradeoffs 53:40 Lessons from BTC Maximalism 57:45 Why Maximalism is Good 1:02:30 Why Maximalism is Ridiculous 1:12:16 The Best of Both Worlds 1:16:10 Bored Weird Vitalik NFTs 1:23:05 Spotlights vs Insults 1:29:30 ETH Maximalism 1:39:41 Advice for Bankless 1:45:15 Composability & Onboarding 1:53:00 The Middle Path ------ Resources: Vitalik on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin  Vitalik's Blog Post: https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/04/01/maximalist.html  Time Magazine: https://time.com/6158182/vitalik-buterin-ethereum-profile/  Survive, Thrive Theory of the Political Spectrum: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/  Bored Weird Vitalik Club: https://weirdvitalik.com/  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Welcome to bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Guys, we have a fantastic episode for you today in defense of maximalism, in defense of Bitcoin maximalism. And who's the guest? Someone you'd never expect, Vitalik Buteran is defending Bitcoin maximalism on this episode.

You'll see why in a minute. breaks it down into a few parts, first a defense of Bitcoin maximalism and then a rebuttal. The only person that can debate Vitalik effectively is Vitalik. That's what I realized in this episode, and he does that throughout it. So listen for a few things, a few takeaways. Number one, we go through the case for why Bitcoin maximalism is right. We talk about number two, honest crypto versus Grifter crypto, the difference between the two. Number three, the case for why intolerance is good, at least some intolerance. We talk about that. Number four, Vitalik's advice for bankless about how bankless should talk about Alt Layer 1s.

And number five, and this is actually at the start of the podcast, green tea plus red wine. The best drink you've never had? It's now called the VB. So if you go to your local bar and ask for a VB, they should know what that is by now. Give me a buter in place. One pewter. I'll take one. What did you think of this episode, dude?

Yeah, people thought that Vitalik's article was an April Fool's joke just because he released it on April 1st. Also, fun fact, this is not Vitalik's first article that he's released on April 1st that has raised some eyebrows. Vitalik, in my mind, steel manned the argument for Bitcoin maximalism better than I've ever heard any Bitcoiner argue for why maximalism is good. And he really puts it into perspective as to, it's pretty compelling. It's like, oh, this is why some of the properties of the crypto industry are the way that they are. Every time I talk to Vitalik Buteran, I feel like I understand this industry just a little bit better, a little bit more insightful. and a little bit more empathetic as to why people have made the choices that they've made. And so he still mans the argument for maximalism, but then we flip it around and do the other

side of the debate, as you said. But we also get into other subjects like, okay, well, how is Ethereum maximalism manifesting in your eyes? And how would you rate it on like a healthy versus unhealthy spectrum, especially as it relates to the alternative layer ones? Because, Ryan, I know in the bear market, 2018 to 2020, it was really two cultures. It was the Bitcoin or culture and the Ethereum culture. And it was really the Ethereum culture asking for legitimacy from Bitcoiners, trying to prove ourselves to Bitcoiners like, hey, we're a legitimate thing. We share some of your values. And Bitcoiners were like, no, you guys are all just like, you guys have broken everything. You guys don't get it. On the flip side of things, now that bear market's in the past,

and Ethereum has indeed proven out to be the ecosystem that we all thought it was going to be in that bare market. Now we aren't really arguing with Bitcoiners anymore. Now we're arguing with alternative layer ones. But we're taking the same position that Bitcoiners took to Ethereum's, and now Ethereum's are taking that same position with alternative layer one, saying, hey, you guys are compromising on crypto. You guys are like doing all these bad things, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so we asked Vitalik about like, you know, where is the sweet spot? Like, is there a sweet spot? And we get his perspective on that. And I think that's really the takeaway for this episode. Yeah, it's funny, David. I no longer have arguments with Bitcoin

maximalists. Like, I just don't anymore, but I have those arguments with finance bros now. on the other side of things that don't care about decentralization. It's less arguments. It's more kind of reminders is why we're in this space and why it's important. First, we were arguing with the gold bugs of the crypto industry, and now we're arguing with the fintech people of the crypto industry. Yeah, and that's funny because it does position Ethereum as kind of this middle ground. It's big tent, but it's also intolerant in some ways because it does value a specific set of things

and does not want to compromise on that. And so, I don't know. We'll talk about this more in the debrief, which, by the way, is available to premium subscribers, David, but I'm really enjoying the 2022 version of Vitalik. Spicy Vitalik. It's every, every vintage, every year you get a different vintage of Vitalik, right? And so far in 2022, Vitalik's been a bit more spicy, a bit more, I think he's previously felt his role is to be maximally credibly neutral and understate his true opinions in

2020. I'm starting to see a lot more of Vitalik's opinions. In fact, at one point in that episode, he's like, what would you rather see? a neutral version of Vitalik or a Vitalik that states his opinions, even if they're not correct sometimes. And for me, it's always option B. And so this is the side of Vitalik that we're seeing in Vintage 2022. And I think comes out in this episode. So you guys are really going to enjoy it.

Again, it's like we don't talk too much about tech with someone who's a massive tech brain. He is as much a brain on philosophy and the social layer of crypto as he is on tech. And for me, those are some of the most fun conversations. and some of the most interesting, although we do have to get him on again to talk about like what's in store for the Ethereum roadmap. Maybe next time he comes on, we'll do that. So guys, strap in, enjoy this episode. It's going to be a blast. Grab a VB. Yeah, grab a VB with us. Dude, are you going to try that, by the way? I think I have to try one of those. Yeah. We should do it. Everyone's trying it out on Twitter and they're all saying like, oh, this is better than I expected it to be.

All right. Well, you know what? We're going to record the roll up. And if you got some green tea, we'll do it then. But anyway, guys, grab yourself a Vitalik Buterin drink. and we'll get right in the episode. But first, we want to tell you about these fantastic tools to help you go bankless from our sponsors. AVE is the leading decentralized liquidity protocol. And now AVEV3 is here. AVEV3 has powerful new features

to enable you to get the most out of D5, including isolation mode, which allows for many more markets to be launched with more exotic collateral types, and also efficiency mode, which allows for a higher loan-to-value ratios, and of course, portals, allowing users to port their AVE position

across all of the networks that AVEA operates on, like Polygon, Phantom, Avalanche, Arbitrum, optimism, and harmony. The beautiful thing about AVE is that it's completely open source, decentralized, and governed by its community, enabling a truly bankless future for us all. To get your first crypto-collateralized loan, get started at AVE.com, that's A-A-A-B-E-D-com, and also check out the Avey Protocol governance forums

to see what more than 100,000 Dow members are all robbing about at governance.com. If you're trying to grow and preserve your crypto wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative as trying to find the next hidden gem. Alto IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax advantage ways to help you preserve your hard-earned money. Also, crypto IRA lets you invest in more than 150 coins and tokens with all the same tax advantages of an IRA. They make it easy to fund your alternative IRA or crypto IRA via your 401k or by contributing directly from your bank account. There is no setup or account fees and is all you need to do to invest in crypto IRA. tax-free. Let me repeat that again. You can invest in crypto tax-free. Diversify like the pros and trade

without tax headaches. Open an alto-crypto-I-R-A to invest in crypto-tax-free. Just go to alto-I-R-A.com slash bankless. That's A-L-T-O-I-R-A.com slash bankless and start investing in crypto today. The Brave browser is the user-first browser for the Web3 Internet with over 50 million monthly active users. Control your digital footprint with built-in privacy. and ad blocking. Inside the Brave browser, you'll find the Brave Wallet, the first secure crypto wallet built natively inside of a Web3 crypto browser. Web3 is freedom from big tech and Wall Street, more control and better privacy, but there's a weak point in Web3, your crypto wallet. The Brave wallet is different. Brave Wallet is built natively inside the brave

browser, no extension required, which gives the Brave Wallet an extra level of security versus other wallets. With the Brave Wallet, you can buy, store, send, and swap your crypto assets, and it can even manage your NFTs and connect to other wallets and defy apps, all from the security of the best privacy browser on the market. Whether you're new to crypto or a season pro, it's time to switch to the Brave wallet. Download Brave at brave.com slash Bankless and click the wallet icon to get started. Hey, Bankless Nation, we're super excited to have Vitalik Buren back.

He's the founder of Ethereum. He's a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. You know him very well from previous appearances on Bankless. Vitalik, it's great to see you again. How you doing? It's great to see you too, Ryan. Good to see you, David. You know what? This whole episode is going to be on the topic of maximalism. But before we get in, there was some recent Twitter hubbub Vitalik on beverage cancel culture that I want to get you to weigh in on because you made the case for this green tea and red wine combo that I think sent the world in a tizzy where you said you enjoy 85% green tea with a mix of 15% red wine. Can you give us the case before we begin the regular podcast? I think this needs to be a

to be heard. What is the case for the green tea and red wine combo? And can we cancel you for that? I mean, to be fair, this isn't like a regular part of my life or anything. I only tried it a couple of times. The first time pretty accidentally, basically what happened was sitting on a plane with a friend and he had some green tea and some red wine that he separately ordered and intended to drink separately. And at some point, he went to sleep. And then the stupid tea, people came and they offered me food and I was hungry and I wanted the food. But I wanted to be able to like have the food and also do laptoping at the same time. Right. So I needed two trays. And so okay, I thought I have one tray. My friend has another tray. And like, but this my friend's tray has these two

drinks on it. And so okay, fine. Well, I have to like get rid of them somehow. So, you know, why not just drink them? So they both happened to be half full. And so I decided like, why not? And I just like mixed them together and drank it. And I just realized that like, wait, wow, this is like weird, but like less disgusting than I thought. And I tried this again. And like it was, I don't know, surprisingly better than advertised, I guess. Would you say that this is now your drink of choice? I mean, realistically, my drink of choice is still like 85 green tea, 15 more green tea. But, you know, it's good to have more. more things on your menu. Oh, my God. Are people trying to cancel you for this opinion, or are they more intrigued? I feel like I'm far more intrigued. This is not, I don't know, have someone who cancel you over this, but I guess there's someone out there. Hmm. Oh, yeah. I wonder, like, is the internet, like, angry over that tweet or when I looked like a version of Tom Brady that was on

MEP for two years? That was amazing. We got to talk about that, too. So how did you, first of all, that article in time was absolutely phenomenal. But, God, people are so mean on Twitter. Like, what is up with that? And, like, how do you, like, respond to that and deal with that? I guess you just get used to it. Like, you know, eventually you just kind of, like, realized that, like, okay, you know, you can just think of them as being kind of, like, you know, Vojak NPCs that only really exist on the internet.

And, like, don't really pay too much serious attention about them and just kind of, realize that, you know, the kinds of things that they say are actually a reflection of themselves much more than their reflection of you. And I guess, I don't know, eventually you learn to laugh about it. How long did that, because you've been having to fend off internet trolls for a really long time since before I would say even crypto was even dominant on crypto Twitter, like going through like the whole Bitcoin or movement in the early days of Bitcoin before Ethereum was even a thing, I would imagine was there toxicity back then?

And where was like this first instance of like internet toxicity that you had to contend with? And how have you just dealt with it over the years? Definitely started in 2014. And I mean, it definitely like hurt more in 2014 than it does now. I think because back in 2014, I still had this mindset that like Ethereum is this great new crypto project. And it should become a standard bearer for the space. And it should be kind of like we should try really hard to do it well so that like all parts of the space all of us. And I was just totally not clued in about the extent to which that was

actually completely not possible even then. Right. Like this was then, Bitcoin people started, I think, like, really after Ethereum began, kind of having this line that like, oh, you know, if it's not Bitcoin, it's not legitimate. Well, like, there was a little bit of that in 2013. There was that article from Bitcoin Kravis and I wrote an article against him on a Bitcoin magazine a couple of months before the idea for Ethereum came. But in 2014, it really kind of went to another level. People were kind of very strident about this maximalist viewpoint and starting to kind of take all sorts of things as evidence that Ethereum is a scam. And there's, I mean, some people expressed their viewpoint in, you know, reasonably polite

multi-thousand word blog posts that I could, you know, lob a multi-thousand-word blog post back at. But other people were definitely preferred to use more, I guess, low- IQ means of dialectic. And yeah, I don't know. That definitely made me sad at the beginning. And eventually, I guess, I was able to sort of emotionally write them off. And then, yeah, I don't know. then it has gotten easier. Like, I think in general,

like, people being mean on the internet feels worse when it's people you respect. Like, if it's people you're just able to kind of dismiss and, you know, mentally put them into this kind of box of, you know, like, they're not people, their Voyak NPCs, then, like, it really doesn't hurt at all.

But, like, the feeling of realizing that someone who you thought was someone that you respect, like actually turning out to be in that other box. Like, there's definitely often a shock to it. I don't know. We are currently going through something like this at Bankless, but I think we'll get into that perspective towards the end of this episode, Vitalik. This was a great way to actually start off this episode, because we're loosely talking about the ideas of maximalism to some degree, which properties of maximalism have exuded out beyond Bitcoin and is now part of many,

many, many different ecosystems in many, many different flavors. And you recently put out an article on your blog titled, In Defense of Bitcoin Maximilism, happened to be released on April Fool's Day. And so was this an April Fool's joke? How much of this was satire and what percentage of this was actually serious? And why did you release it on April 1st? I mean, I think I definitely released it on April 1st because it's definitely not a reflection of what I think my primary opinion is. I think in reality, it was, like, there's a collection of things, like, some of which I think, you know, have something to them that the Ethereum community is underrating, and others

of which, like, also have something to them, but in reality, there's a much bigger argument for the other side that I think maximalists are not realizing. Like, my actual position on a lot of those issues tends to be pretty, I guess, concave, but So, you know, like I see the benefits of both sides and like I see the benefit of kind of having some aspects of that culture, but not having it way overboard. So it's definitely kind of intended to be, you know, some combination of like both being fun and being in exposition of kind of the aspects of Bitcoin maximalist culture and kind of how people justify them as I understand it. So let's go through maybe the case for this. Sure. because you gave a fantastic case for Bitcoin maximalism. And I want to start there. Maybe we'll do

kind of a sweep of the case for Bitcoin maximalism first, like Steelman, the argument, and then go back and see where you might actually disagree and be a bit more concave in your thinking on it. But, you know, this blog post was all about the case for Bitcoin maximalism and defense of Bitcoin maximalism and why Bitcoin maximalism is right. So you started, I think, in a really good place and anyone who's been in crypto sees this war of two worlds probably. Maybe it's not as binary as this, but this is how Bitcoin Maximus might paint it, where we have honest crypto on one side. These are well-intentioned networks upholding the values of decentralization and crypto and all of the things, the best parts of our industry. And then we have another whole side of crypto that you call

grifter crypto, which is, you know, scammers who come into the space and do not uphold the virtues of crypto and are just here to kind of pump and dump and exploit the community and are not trying to build something for the long run. Can you talk a little bit about honest crypto versus grifter crypto and the case for Bitcoin maximalism at a high level? Sure. So I think the kind of distinction between the two should be kind of intuitively pretty clear to everyone, right? Like there's cryptocurrencies that are very, kind of both like actually, actually, mission driven and clearly not driven just by a desire to take over the world and make money out of it. Right.

Like plenty of even Bitcoin core developers don't really end up getting very much Bitcoin out of it. And even a lot of early bitcoins who ended up choosing the big block side of the block size war, like Gavin and Drason, right? Like I believe he had a huge amount of like Bitcoin at the beginning. But then like he had, I think either selling a bunch or giving a bunch of it away. right and like this happens to a lot of them and like they were really in it for the mission rather than being in it just as a way of kind of screwing people and getting money like there's a very kind of deep political vision behind what these things are like they know exactly what they're doing

they're trying to create a new form of you know self-sovereign money that's a resistance to confiscation resistant to manipulation resistance to inflation and all of those things And they're kind of pretty deadlocked on trying to make that happen. And grifter cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, like, they tend to sort of virtue signal, you know, general purpose goodness. Like, oh, people love freedom. Well, let's talk about how we're going to bring freedom. Oh, people love social justice. Well, let's talk about how our cryptocurrency brings social justice.

And, you know, oh, people love making money. Well, let's talk about how we're going to make money. and the visions feel very unfocused. The main principles of the cryptocurrencies are often not developers. The project is structured in such a way that the very early principles are going to get a lot of money out of it. And they'll even get a lot of money out of it, even if the project only kind of succeeds for two years and then fails. So, like, if you just scroll down, you know, coin gecko and you're, just to look through the list of cryptocurrencies, right?

I think, like, on the grifter side, there is definitely a spectrum. Like, there's total scams, and then there's projects where, like, the project has no value. And, like, maybe some people honestly believe that it has value, but they really should know better. And there's just no chance that it will really come to much of anything long term. But, like, they just look on inspiring, right? Like, there's, you know, like, payment coin number 34, like, some, like, yet another quote of, like, something else. and like a very large number of cryptocurrencies are that sort of thing, right? I don't know.

I'm trying to like think whether or not I should give examples or whether like I've been spicy enough and used up my current controversy budget for this year already. But there's... You can save that for a different episode, Vitalik, if you want. I want to get into the mindset and like the context of when and how certain projects are built. You alluded to this a little bit. go down this path even more. Some projects seem to be built with a context of, you know,

the world is good, we can build whatever we want, we'll build this future utopia. There aren't any problems in the world, but we have this new solution, so we'll build for that. And then there's a different perspective where the world is a dark, desolate place. We need what you called our file of Galadriel, I think, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, it's a hostile environment, and we need need, by necessity, these solutions that will lead us out of this. dark. And I think people that are building with that mind frame are building something more sustainable and people that are building with kind of perhaps a naivete about how awesome and lovely the world is, are building something that is a little bit closer to the grifter camp just because

they aren't actually incorporating the fundamentals of what this whole industry is all about. Can you just elaborate on this perspective? Yeah. I mean, I think like the link between the kind of naive people and the grifters is that the naive participants kind of often end up enabling the grifters, right? Because a position of, you know, the world is nice and we're this happy community and, you know, you should trust people by default. Like, that's a mindset which, you know, grifters can very easily come in and, like, extract lots of money from people. And at the same time, like, it's a mindset that, like, even in the absence of grifters, you can easily take it to the extreme and end up creating something where,

like you just stop realizing why the blockchain parts are important. And you end up creating a system that's just like becomes more and more centralized in order to be efficient. Because like if the world is this nice, happy friends or everyone's friends, then what's the point of, you know, like the user experience and not like not being as friendly as it could be. And in order to achieve that, you end up adding more and more centralization. And eventually like you just know that at the moment where decentralization ends up actually being required, like the project would not actually be able to survive, right? And then the question is like, well, what was even the point of building a chain for this instead of like building it on AWS, like possibly adding a couple of extra miracle

proofs on top and that's it. And like often the answer even ends up being that if you create something that's a blockchain, you can make and sell a token for it. Right. And if you make and sell a token, then like here kind of we get back in to this idea that like well now this is going to enable grifters because while it's making a token is a very easy way for people to come in and just grab a lot of money you know pretends to work for a couple of years and then all kind of go retire and go on vacations meanwhile you know if you take this kind of more conservative approach that assumes less about the world and like create something that tries to be a light and dark places when all other lights go out, as the file of Galadryl is supposed to be.

Then, you know, you've created something that is less useful a lot of the time that's like less powerful a lot of the time. You know, as I said in the post, it's not a low-cost light. It's not a fluorescent hippie energy efficient light. It's not a high-performance light. It's a light that sacrifices on all of those dimensions to optimize for one thing and one thing only to be a light that does what it needs to do when you're facing the toughest challenge of your life and there's a friggin' 20-foot spider steering at you in the face.

Right. So the idea is that it's not very useful at first, it's not very useful at first, and then, you know, something happens and you realize that like, oh, wait, you know, this thing actually is really useful. And I think especially given kind of the way that the world has gotten much more chaotic in all kinds of very unfortunate ways over the last three years, this idea that, you know, even if the world looks kind of very stable and plain today, it might suddenly be very different. And you might. suddenly have to have scrambled to protect yourself. Like, that should be something that's easier for people to relate to. Yeah, yeah. I think it's very easy for people in the first world who have fantastic access to financial services and banking are like, why do we need this whole decentralization thing? Like, my bank works perfectly fine. Meanwhile, we have a war going on in Eastern Europe where all of a sudden there is

internet censorship and, you know, coercion and all the things of this nature. And in your article, you write, we live in a dangerous world and protecting freedom is a serious business. And you follow with a blockchain at its core is a security technology, a technology that is fundamentally all about protecting people and helping them survive in an unfriendly world. Can you just elaborate on this perspective when it comes to blockchain design? Why should we be prioritizing security above everything else? And what do we have to lose if we don't? I think it's that security is like the thing that a blockchain has that other things don't have. So if you just compare a blockchain to say AWS, for example, right? Like what does a blockchain

have that EWS doesn't have. It just has this very high guarantee of reliability that it's not going to shut down on you. It's not going to disappear because the original operators get bored. And it's not going to disappear just because one particular government gets angry at the original operators. It's like you know that it's going to stay and you can feel comfortable building on top of it. And you can feel comfortable that it's actually going to follow the rules that it says that it's going to follow. So the idea here, right, is that, like the maximalist mindset is that instead of trying to go for, you know, quote, you know, minimal viable decentralization or minimal viable security, it's like, well, no, like blockchains are focused on security and they should try to kind of occupy that part of the design space as well as they can. And then applications, like maybe, you know, individual applications could be kind of part blockchain based part off depending on what their individual security needs are. Vitalik, this is something that I think resonates with me and probably David too, and maybe many of the members of the bankless Ethereum community is kind of a case for maximalism, really, is because we see a lot of newer entrance in the space that are maybe the maximists might argue not taking their responsibility seriously. Right? Like we are trying to build a foundation for a decentralized world. And if that foundation is easily corruptible, is not rock solid.

then everything built on top of it will fall eventually. I guess I'm curious about that. When you look at some of the newer entrance, the Alt Layer 1s and others that are coming to the space, do you think they value the same things that the maximalist value, or do you think this is a massive dilution in the value system of crypto with newer entrance and newer chains? I think there's definitely some value dilution happening.

And, like, part of the, like, maximalist mantra that you see in the wild, right, is this idea of, like, Bitcoin, not crypto. Like, it's actually trying to kind of rhetorically separate, you know, the crypto space as a whole, which they view as being this increasingly diluted morass that, like, keeps on going further and further away from, like, actually being this very secure and decentralized thing. And, like, Bitcoin or kind of their one particular kind of very small group of particular cryptocurrencies that, uh, in their view, stick to much stronger principles and are much better than the rest of the space. One of the themes that I've noticed, Fetalic, is that these newer layer ones that tend to compromise on decentralization, all are, they're all newer. It's really Bitcoin and Ethereum that made it through the bear market of 2018 to 2020. And I think it's mainly just those ecosystems. Like, they're still like coin. There's still Bitcoin cash, but not really. And so all of these newer alternative layer ones, which are made.

made, there are formed in what I would call good times, never went through the bear market. And there seems to be a dividing line between Bitcoin and Ethereum who strongly, strongly prioritized decentralization and then these newer alternative layer ones that come after the bear market that seem to not prioritize. What do you think about the timing of these things? Why does there seem to be both a line in the sand behind the older chains and the newer chains? Why do you think that is? Yeah.

So this gets to a section in the middle of my post where I argue, um, injurial. general, the earliest projects in an industry are the most genuine, right? And like, this is a pattern that you could see in cryptocurrency. This is even a pattern that you could see in the internet as a whole. Like, I think a lot of people have this kind of general mindset that, you know, the quality of like discourse on the internet was higher, like, say, 15 years ago that it is today. You know, back then, it was much more highbrow, you know, there were forums. Like, the highlight was that you would have, you know, libertarians and socialists peacefully. but, you know, passionately arguing with each other in one form with these big five-paragraph things.

And, you know, today, relative to that, like, you know, I open up Twitter right now and I click on my tweet, an attempt at simplified single secret election. And I scroll down first response, who is the richest person on earth? Question mark. Self-poting. Who is the richest person on earth? Question mark. At Elon Musk.

At Jeff Bezos, at Bill Gates, at CZ Binance, at the Binance NFT, at the Binance NFT, at Mobox underscore official. Hashtag NFT art, hashtag rare item for sale. Second response by Pig Pig, Pig, 154. I love Vietnam and baby Zoro Inu. Third one, Guillermo Herboso. Thought it would let you know that they were using an interview you did with Lex Friedman to scam people. I mean, it's fair that he responded with this,

but the thing that he responded to once again is not something that's much common today than 15 years ago. some other Vitalee 87135-965. Silum finance provides Asylum token with automatic staking and compounding capabilities, as well as blah, blah, blah, of 395,67% for the first year. So like this is not what Internet discourse was like 15 years ago, you know, even with rituals. And the, you know, you can see this with not just discourse, also like projects, like a lot of the most successful open open source projects tends to be ones that have this sort of very long history to them. And one of the dynamics that I think make this happen is that when I feel this very new,

like it's still very clunky. It's still very difficult to wrap your head around. The costs to get in are high. And your ability to actually make that much out of it is still fairly low, right? Like even if you make something very successful, then your expected user base is like a few thousand people. And whenever the user base gets bigger, like someone else might end up out competing you on it. using a copy of your ideas anyway, right? So the kinds of people involved at the beginning,

like they tend to be, you know, the idealists, the tech geeks, the activists, the enthusiasts, and like people who are genuinely excited about the technology and the potential of the technology to improve society. But eventually, once the technology kind of becomes more established, then, you know, the audience becomes much larger. It starts kind of diluting. The community starts kind of regressing to the mean a bit. And, you know, you start getting like basically,

business people coming in that actually do see an opportunity to make money out of the space. And the best way to make money out of the space is to basically kind of like piggyback off of the high status of the like genuine enthusiast projects that came earlier by planting yourself in the same category as them, but actually like basically being a money grab, right? Like that would be the arguments for why like, you know, the really terrible money grabs tend to be the more recent ones. Now, I should say that there still are like kind of many very decent and honest kind of cryptocurrencies and projects that are fairly new. And, you know, there are some very good ones that are, like, not even on the chart as well.

A lot of the ones on the chart have a lot of virtues to them. But, okay, now we're kind of getting to the counter arguments already. But, like, the idea is that, you know, if you just kind of get teleported in the middle of a random industry and you have to figure out what to trust, like generally trusting things that have been around for a really long time is a very safe. bet. And like the fact that it is a safe bet, in turn, kind of creates this compounding effect because it means that people who come in who are trustworthy, they tend to be want, they tend to want to be among trustworthy people. And so they go there. And so it kind of becomes this kind of magnet for relatively trustworthy people. And like, that's a very hard dynamic to

unseat. Now, I mean, you could unseat it and like you could have the less trustworthy thing win with just an overwhelmingly powerful network effect. But like even if you do that, like you've won network effects that you haven't really wanted to trust. There's a pattern that I've noticed in crypto that I want to get your check on. And it seems to be kind of unfolding many, many different times in many, many different arenas. But the pattern I've noticed is that first, at the very center of crypto, there are very real fundamentals, right? Talking about security and just like all the true properties that were invented when we invented

blockchain tech. So one, at the center, there's real fundamentals. Two, the real fundamentals bring in the true believers that see the potential of these fundamentals. And so now we have both fundamentals and true believers. But now that there are true believers building these things, step three is that it brings in like the moonboys and the grifters who produce alternative things that are tangential to the real fundamentals but are less about the real fundamentals. And then the next step is four, the rest of the world gets distracted by those things and they can't see, number one, the real fundamentals. And then the last step is that the true believers get really frustrated because all these people are focusing on this industry, but not the right parts of this industry. Do you resonate with this process and this kind of flow of how this industry has developed?

Yeah, I think a lot of that is definitely true. And how do we avoid that? How do we fix this problem? Do you consider this a problem? Yeah. I think so this gets to the section that probably got people riled up the most, where I talk about, you know, how intolerance is good. Like basically the argument there is like if you want to like preserve a particular culture, especially in an environment where the dominant culture is something very different that you don't want to become, then your culture has to be really strong and it has to be able to kind of actively resist and fight assimilation. It has to actively resist and fight entryism like projects that do not reflect what your real values are trying to kind of position themselves as having the same values as you.

and be willing to even offend people, be willing to just, like, tell people, like, no, you're not one of us, and be willing to even say those kinds of things to people who are potentially friends of your friends. Like, basically just fight hard, right? Like, basically just kind of fight hard and kind of keep on reasserting what your values are and keep on preventing things that don't reflect those actual values from, presenting themselves to the space as though they're a genuine part of the space. Now, is this toxic maximalism or is this healthy maximalism? I think this question gets into the tier.

It's where I start arguing against myself. I don't think we're ready for that yet. Let's not go there yet. But is this Vitalik why we sort of see, you know, notable influencer Bitcoiners taking pictures of themselves with guns and talk of citadels and talk of, you know, running nodes on satellite internet connections? And it's almost this celebration of talk. which to outsiders seems kind of bizarre.

But it sort of makes sense when you look at it of the lens of, as you said earlier, we live in a dangerous world, protecting freedom is serious business. So you need an intolerant minority to go protect it. Is that how you explain some of the Bitcoin maximalist culture around guns and, you know, citadels, but even things like running your own node? I think, yeah, here we do probably want to distinguish between, like, performance, toxicity and performative weirdness. And so like this section, I kind of talk about the value of performative toxicity. I mean, in the next section, I think I talk more about the value of performative

weirdness. So the example that I use is the Bitcoin or war against seed oils, right, which are vegetable oils that are high in omega-6 fatty acids. They're kind of everywhere in many kinds of food and especially kind of, you know, foods that we would, you know, quote, consider more artificial. And that, you know, that are actually pretty unhealthy. For the I consider myself part of this crusade. Yeah, but these oils are kind of, you know, they're very accepted in the mainstream, right? So the reason why I think Bitcoiners are attracted to this kind of crusade is because it allows them to kind of have this feeling of, you know, we are in this select group and, you know,

we have these opinions and these opinions are kind of something that binds us together. Or at least, even if we don't agree on the specific opinion, so like just kind of agreeing on the broader principle that kind of there are these like weird things are and that easily can be correct. And the mainstream is not very trustworthy. And just generally the fact that like you don't need a social approval from the wider kind of group outside of, you know, your community in order to be able to do something. Right. So doing things like talking about Bitcoin nodes on satellites, you know, running nodes. I mean, I do think a big part of it like, you know, is genuinely believing that like running a node is important.

importance to prevent people from taking over the network and kind of like 51% in the miners pushing like bad protocol rules through and like running them in space provides a bit of redundancy. But I think like there is this very big secondary kind of aspect of like, we're doing this kind of hobby and we in our in group understands the value of this hobby. You know, you guys in the outgroups and not understand the value of this hobby. And this is kind of a social bonding thing that kind of brings the community even stronger together. I do think this is important because I think many in crypto sort of fail to recognize that there are really two stacks we're talking about. One is a robust and defensible technical stack

you talk about. And Bitcoiners express that in like fixed supply, 21 million hard cap, no smart contracts, low complexity, all of these things. But then what we were just also talking about is number two in a robust and defensible culture. You have to have like this culture stack. And this is also maybe some of the reason for this concentration on currency, like just currency as the use case, just money. What is Bitcoin here to do? It's here to be a money, just one thing, and do it really well, a store of value currency for the world. It doesn't want to get into all of the other crypto use cases. Can you talk about that a little bit? Why does it make sense from a maximalist lens to focus on currency as the app? I mean, one is that I do think it's a pretty important app,

And I do think it's an app that people easily forget because it's not sexy in some ways, right? Like, it's more fun to work on, you know, fancy optimized constant function market makers or weird kind of collateralization math or like decentralized governance mechanisms or whatever. And just making a payment system that's clean and works well is kind of not sexy in the same way. But in reality, like payments are like the largest proven use case of crypto. of people are benefiting from payments today. And so if you have a culture that focuses on payments, then like in some ways you actually do have more universal appeal than, you know, if you start focusing on kind of a hodgepodge of these random other things, right?

Like, well, I mean, I should say, you know, obviously, yeah, you know, you're not going to have a universal appeal because, you know, there's big aspects of maximalist culture that, like, turn huge numbers of people off. but payments are, there's something that people in the U.S. care about. There's something people in Latin America care about, people in Africa care about, and people in Africa care about them, and just like plain and simple payments, you know, they do have this aspect of kind of being this common language, right? And, you know, you don't really have to agree on much else in order to be able to agree on, just like the value and importance of

being able to pay and being able to save money, right? So I think that's definitely one of the aspect. And then there's also this kind of technical aspect where I think a lot of people don't appreciate the technical case for like basically being a payments only blockchain. And like the reason why it's kind of hard to appreciate, right, is that from a technical point of view, the kinds of op codes that you have to add to make a blockchain like Bitcoin general purpose is actually not that high, right? Like there's like a whole bunch of different proposals for adding what they call covenants into Bitcoin. And those

proposals only require adding like a couple of things, right? And adding a couple of things already lets you do some pretty complex things inside of the Bitcoin script protocol. The reason why it's hard is because if you add, like, rich statefulness, if you add the ability to have

this kind of, you know, Cambrian exposure of more complicated applications on and kind of surrounding your chain, then those applications kind of risk like kind of actually interfering with the and interfering with the ecosystem, right? So, like, I talk about minor extractable value as one example of this. Like, basically, when you have these more complicated applications, you're more likely

to have applications that give a large economic benefit to, like, whoever manages to get the next transaction in, right? Like, in Bitcoin, you don't really have much of that, right? You can theoretically make it anyone can spend a transaction, but, like, most UTXOs in Bitcoin, And like basically, you know, like all of the ones that people use with any regularity, they're UTXOs that can only generally be spent by one person. Unless there's like a very exceptional case, like a hacker, and you notice that you've been hacked in real time and you have like a gas price war against them, right?

But when you have more complicated applications, like uniswap, for example, that gives kind of like arbitrage profits, then there's an incentive to be the first one to put in the next transaction. And then that creates an incentive to create these sophisticated algorithms to try to optimize for the ability to collect on these opportunities. And that leads to a centralization of miners and centralization of stakers. And so, you know, because of that, like for the last one and a half years, we've been having all of this NEV in FlashBots discourse. It talks about, like, well, how do we actually prevent the economies of scale in NVV from spilling over into

either like censorship opportunities or centralizing the Ethereum validator ecosystem, right? So, like, if you just are too simple and dumb that, like, the applications that involve MEP can't be built at all, then you're protected against that, right? It's like the simplest and dumbest solution. So do you think that's true that MEV really just can't exist on Bitcoin? You're asking me to rebut to rebut myself. Sorry, don't. Don't. We'll get to that.

We'll get to that. But that is the case is basically MEP is far less possible on Bitcoin. Yeah. And then I also talk about this kind of less technical layer zero form of systemic contagion where like if you have a blockchain that is not just a currency that is also these other things and that is more like appealing to normies, then you're going to get like more normies that become part of the ecosystem. You're going to get more of these like different kinds of people that are part of the ecosystem. And they might have different tradeoffs and values in terms

of governance. Like they might be more willing to make an EIP. So let's say, print another five million ether in the hands of the Ethereum Foundation because that is going to be. to pay for developers to make Ethereum a great system, right? Whereas, you know, if you're Bitcoin, then you're like, you know, yo dog, we barely need any developers. We're just a pet rock. There's also like that aspect of safety as well, right? So like I guess those things together are basically the technical case for why focusing exclusively on being money makes for better money. And then the social case, what basically is that, you know, the more you'll exclusively focus on being money, the more kind of density in your culture you have of these memes that, you know,

21 million is really important. Being sound money is really important. Being censorship-resisted payments is really important. And the more that those memes can resist attempts from the outside or from the inside to change them. There's been sentiment from like, I've seen this expressed by Jack Dorsey as well, right, in this like anti-Web3, anti-Etherium. Like Ethereum is kind of the chain for the VCs, like this pushback against Web3 use cases and sort of this positioning as no, Bitcoin is money. that's the thing the entire world needs, right? Emerging countries, like emerging economies, as well as the West, whereas this Web3 thing is just for a bunch of Fat Cat VCs

who are like blockchain advocates, and it's not something that is actually going to help the world in any way. Do you see that sentiment being expressed here too? Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the aspects of this worldview really are tied together, right? It's like if your blockchain enables, like the grifter stuff from, or it just enables like more stuff at a technical level than like those other things that get enabled are potentially going to be like taken over by grifters more

easily. And, you know, if you have a culture that kind of values, you know, innovation and you start getting like kind of these kinds of actors that care about innovation but don't really, you know, understand kind of other values that make the blockchain as valuable as it is. So I think like all of those things do and have tied them together in some ways. Just to add a little bit more perspective onto this. Bitcoiner culture has always been about how do we reduce, reduce, reduce about the Bitcoin blockchain. It's it's more about soft forking features out of the blockchain rather than soft

forking features into the blockchain. And I think it goes into this conversation of just like, how do we strip all aspects away from Bitcoin that's not about Bitcoin being money? And the perspective is that how do we like reduce the maximum surface area of attack for Bitcoin? How do we just make it a rock solid money? And I think like the merits of this we can definitely contrast, especially when we just had, for example, like the $600 million axi side chain hack. Like you're not going to get hacks like that on Bitcoin simply because you can't have

defy on Bitcoin. I mean, there are centralized exchange hacks and that's kind of the tradeoff that Bitcoin has made. But overall, I think centralized exchange hacks have gone down where, defy hacks has gone up. And this is like one of the liabilities of an expressive blockchain where you have defy attacks. You have defy exploits. You also have people like, you know, losing funds to scammers because there's like, you know, NFT scammers out there. And again, can't do NFTs on Bitcoin. What lessons should we learn from this perspective? Or do you think that we've

already covered it? Yeah. I mean, I think like the perspective can definitely be applied to a lot of cases. Like, there's definitely a big part of me that, you know, does kind of like half think that the world would be better off if defy innovation stopped sometime in 2020. Like, you know, the side of me that's like a like die and rye maximalist. Like probably, you know, die, rye, maybe USC or like the only three stable coins that we really need. And like the others are like, well, come on. Like if the world had an intelligent planner, he would have never hired anyone to build them. At the same time, like, you know, I do see the value in ongoing innovation. And, like, there's definitely, you know, projects that are getting underrecognized that are trying to actually

do something even better in the same spirit as the, um, as those two. But there's also one of these other projects that are just doing kind of insanely risky, you know, undercollateralized, barely collateralized sort of stuff. And that are trying to like basically market themselves on how optimal they are, um, without, uh, really, yeah, caring about, um, you know, uh, caring about, um, the, like, how fat their fat tails are, right? Like, basically, I think the biggest fallacy that people have, uh, in terms of like judging stable coins, for example is that I feel like the way that a lot of like, especially newbies judge a stable coin is there like, if a stable coin's price stays between 0.98 and 1.02, then it's like, okay. If a stable coin's price stays between

0.99 and 1.01, then it's good. And if a stable coin's price states between 0.998 and 1.002, then that's like really good. Right. And like that much. That much. mindset is very wrong, right? Because whether a stable coin like jumps up and down by 2% or 0.2% isn't a function of how good the stable coin is. It's a function of how good the market maker is. And anyone can hire a good market maker for a short period of time. So the way that you should judge stable coins is like how well can they survive really extreme situations. And Maker does have a history of surviving some pretty extreme situations. Like it survives the ether price falling by 93% over the course of a year and a bit.

It survived the ether price falling by 50% in a single day. Remember, this was the COVID Black Monday or Tuesday or whatever. Black Tuesday, yeah. Yeah. Like it dropped from like, was it like 180 to 90? And like no dieholder got hurt. Like the only thing that happened is like the first layer of defense got broken and like 15,000 maker had to get printed as a second layer of defense. And like, you know, that was definitely a bit of a scare.

but still, like, that's what the second way of defense is there for. That was, like, the craziest market price event of, like, possibly Ethereum's entire history aside for maybe the Dow Fork, and it survived it just fine. So that's, like, basically, like, judging systems by how they work during the worst case instead of during the average case. It's something that's, like, very unintuitive to people, especially people coming from a more centralized mind. said, but it is something that is like we do really need to do, especially in the cryptos space.

All right, Vitalik, before we turn the tables around and ask you to, again, argue the other side of the debate, I want you to zoom out and just view this whole entire maximism topic from a holistic perspective. What is your most legitimate steel-maned argument for why maximalism is good? I think the best zoomed-out description of all this is not even from myself. It's from Swayte Star Codex. I'm just looking to stop right now. I think it's called a Thrive, Survive Theory of the Political Spectrum.

Yep, yeah, yep, that's exactly the title. A Thrive, Survive Theory of the Political Spectrum. I'll send it over to you in the gram. It's basically, like, it really, like, it does a great job of kind of describing these two possible worlds where one is, like, a utopia and the other is a zombie apocalypse, and how, like, very bright-leaning values make sense in zombie apocalypse, but are just totally stupid in the utopia, and a lot of loft-leaning values make total sense in the utopia,

but are suicidal in the zombie apocalypse. And, like, I think if you want, like, just a, kind of, like, 30,000 foot view on, like, what the dynamic is, I highly recommend just, you know, reading that post, I find it excellent. But the way that I would basically summarize it is that there is this kind of great divide of, are you acting like the world in which you're operating

is fundamentally fluffy and safe? Or are you acting and thinking, like the world that you live in, is fundamentally a place where if you turn your attention away for even five seconds, the tiger is going to run out of the left side of the visual field, and it'll have its teeth already around your neck by the time you can react. And, you know, the maximalists take one side of that grand civilizational question. The layer two era is upon us. Ethereum's layer two ecosystem is growing every day, and we need bridges to be fast and efficient in order to live a layer two life. Across is the fastest, cheapest, and most occasionally.

your cross-chain bridge. With Across, you don't have to worry about the long wait times or high fees to get your assets to the chain of your choice. Assets are bridged and available for use almost instantaneously. Across bridges are powered by Uma's optimistic Oracle to securely transfer tokens from layer 2 back to Ethereum. A token proposal is being deliberated as we speak in the Across Forum where community members will decide on the token distribution. You can have your part of Across's story by joining the Discord and becoming a co-founder and helping to design the fair, fair launch of Across. If you want to bridge your assets, quickly and securely, go to across.t.0 to bridge your assets between Ethereum,

optimism, Arbitrum, or Boba networks. Arbitrum is an Ethereum layer two scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use Defi and NFTs. Over 300 projects have already deployed to Arbitrum and the DeFi and NFT ecosystems are growing rapidly. Some of the coolest and newest NFT collections have chosen Arbitrum as their home, all the while DeFi protocols continue to see increased usage and liquidity. Using Arbitrum has never been easier, especially with the ability to deposit directly into Arbitrum through all the exchanges, including Binance, FTX, Hobe, and Crypto.com. Once inside, you'll notice Arbitrum increases Ethereum speed by orders of magnitude for a fraction of the cost of the average gas fee. If you're a developer

who wants low gas fees and instant transactions for your users, visit Arbitrum.com.com to start building your DAP on Arbitrum. If you're a DGEN, many of your favorite daps on Ethereum are already on Arbitrum, with many moving over every day. Go to bridge. Arbitrum.com now to start bridging over your ETH and other tokens in order to start to start to build in order to experience defy and empties in the way it was always meant to be. Fast, cheap, secure, and friction-free. Maker Dow is the OG Defi protocol. The Maker Dow produces dye, the industry's most battle-tested and resilient stable coin.

Using Maker, you don't need to sell your collateral if you need liquidity. Instead, you can spin up a Maker vault and use your collateral to mint die directly. With Maker, the power to mint new money is in your hands. The Maker Protocol is extremely hardened and operated by one of the most experienced Dow's in existence. They've been here since the beginning. They've seen it all, and so you can mint dye with the assurance that your collateral is safe. Soon, Maker will be present on all chains and L2s, so minting die can take place on oasis.app, zirion, Zapper, or any other defypiret or any other Dify protocol that you use. Follow Maker on Twitter at Maker Dow and learn from the oldest and most

resilient Dow in existence. Okay, Vitalik, so we've just gone through a steel man argument for why maximalism is good, in particular Bitcoin maximalism. Now I think that's the last thing. Now I think that think it's time for you to tell us where you actually disagree with that. So I know this post was somewhat of a thought experiment, and there are aspects of it you probably agree with and aspects that you disagree with. So how would you address the Steelman Bitcoin maximalist argument? What do you disagree with? Sure. So I think the core of my disagreement, you can think about it as being centered around the title of the first section. The title of the first section in some ways is like the theme of the essay, right?

This idea that we live in a dangerous world and they're protecting freedom is serious business. And I think the way that I would flip that statement around in order to rebut it is to say, we live in a dangerous world, and therefore having friends is more important than ever. So, like, one analogy here is that if you look into, like, geopolitics and how, like, large nation states act, for example, right?

Like, when a nation state feels threatened, like often it does tends to kind of act in ways that we consider evil more often, right? Like, it starts disrespecting human rights more often. It starts, you know, running over the interests or sometimes even the territory of smaller countries beside it. It starts, you know, generally not caring as much about, you know, what people think of it. it says like more willing to act internationally in ways that are more selfish and that like don't really align while with international norms. But at the same time, like the smart ones, they do generally have at least have some sense that like there's a limit to how much they're antagonizing people.

And ultimately, there are some allies that they're trying to get, right? Like generally, you know, they don't literally go out and just like lash out and try to attack everyone, right? Now, you know, yes, you know, there's that crazy Austrian guy that tried to basically attack everyone at the same time about 80 years ago, but, you know, he did get smacked very hard for it, right? And there's even a lot of arguments that, like, the way in which he tried to basically make an enemy and a subhuman out of pretty much everyone, like, really, really did hurt even his military situation. So I think basically, if you, you, wants to kind of act in a dangerous world, like, even if you're willing to use that as an excuse

to not be a nice guy, like, generally you still want to, like, figure out, like, who you really care about keeping us friends, who you really care about keeping neutral instead of making them your enemies, who you want to only be a medium enemy instead of being a complete and total enemy, and kind of acting pragmatically within that light, right? And I guess a big part of my worry about maximalist culture is that it's really just not good at doing that. Like, it is needlessly antagonistic in a lot of ways, right? Like, it antagonizes the U.S. government. It antagonizes, like, all, you know, large country and small country governments to some

extent, except, you know, maybe El Salvador. It antagonizes other cryptocurrencies. It antagonizes, you know, people who like gold. basically, it feels kind of very antagonistic on all sides. And it's even antagonistic against people who really do genuinely wants to be on the same team as them. Right. And this kind of approach, I think it really does run a risk of, like, basically just

giving you much more enemies than you really needs to have. And like, ultimately seriously cutting into your chances of success. I think a lot of it comes from this mentality that if you can convince yourself in your own head that your cause is just and that you're obviously right. And within your own head, the battle for some idea has been won. Then, like, you run the risk of basically assuming that that battle has been won among all people that you care about. And you basically act as though the world is a split between people who unconditionally agree with you and people who you can safely dismiss as enemies,

and then you just proceed from that assumption, right? And, like, sometimes I think that, like, a lot of projects and people who make really serious mistakes actually end up making this kind of mistake. So, like, one totally different example that I might give is Russell Albrook from Silk Road, right? Like, one of the ways in which you could describe the kind of big mistake that he made,

well, he made multiple mistakes, but, like, one of them is basically that, you know, he acted as though what he is doing is clearly 100% legitimate in the eyes of right-thinking people, and therefore he should just kind of go ahead and keep doing it. And his only response to everyone else is basically anonymity and you can't catch me. And it turns out that, you know, hey, if you're still living right in the middle of the United States while doing all of this, like even the you can't catch me thing is actually not that strong, right? So the whole thing about him accepting that, or participating in what ended up being a sting operation that attempts to kill several people, like, just a whole bunch of like small decisions that he made.

They were kind of like very maximally kind of pokey and aggressive at, you know, both the U.S. government and even probably alienated a lot of moderates who, if he had taken a very different strategy, could have possibly considered him as a kind of civil disobedient worthy of. some of protection. And the reason why, like, he made, I think he made that mistake is basically because he had this attitude that, you know, within my own head, clearly, you know, libertarian morality is correct. And the battle for my heart has been won. And therefore, kind of accidentally projecting that assumption to, therefore, the battle for the hearts of all good people has already been won. And, you know, everyone else is basically not convinceable and we might as well just treat them as something that we're 100% fighting, right? And the reality is that the world never works that way, right? In any conflict,

there's lots of neutrals and in any conflict there's lots of mild enemies, there's lots of mild friends, and there's a lot of value to be gained in, you know, convincing a neutral to stay in neutral instead of becoming an enemy, convincing a mild enemy to stay being a mild enemy instead of being an extreme enemy, convincing a, a neutral to become a slight friend instead of being a neutral, and just kind of going all the way along that spectrum, right?

And the way that, like, a maximalist culture really creates these, um, us versus them divides, I think really causes them to basically needlessly sacrifice goodwill among a lot of people. So that would be the core of my criticism, right? that like basically, like having friends is good and having friends is not a luxury good.

In fact, if you live in a dangerous world, then having friends becomes even more important, right? Like, friends aren't just there to, you know, have fun and like seeing rainbows and unicorns with. Like, you actually do need friends. You do need allies. You do need people being neutral instead of being enemies. Ultimately, Bitcoin is a political project that exists in the context of this very complicated global political system. And, like, maximalist culture, I would claim, just, like, makes lots of needless diplomacy sacrifices when it doesn't have to.

Now, one thing I would probably add to that case is that, like, if you go around the world, one of the things that you'll find is that there are lots of people who just, like, totally like Bitcoin and totally understand it, without seeming like they're the sorts of people that would vibe with maximalist culture. And I think what's happening there is that, like, actually, maximalist culture is not very universal. Like, I think it's primarily kind of an American and maybe to some extent sort of U.S. cultural sphere of influence thing.

Like, you know, I remember a few years ago when I went to a Bitcoin meetup in Malaysia, and I spoke at a Bitcoin meetup in Malaysia. And, like, basically, it was just an Ethereum event. And, like, you know, the person who does the Malaysian Bitcoin community also does the Malaysia Ethereum community, right? And so to some extent, it's like the harms of Bitcoin maximalism have been limited by the facts that Bitcoin maximalism had had a hard time getting out of its relatively U.S.-centered cultural bubble. And, you know, there is also this non-maximalist side of Bitcoin land in the wider world.

But, like, you get even better results, I feel, when, you know, you don't have those kinds of downsides at all. Is there a way to blend these things together, Vitalik? Is there a way to get the best of both worlds? Because we have one strength of maximalism, which is just this sort of intolerant minority who is steadfast in their values. And we risk when we go to kind of big tent, the other side of things, possibly an erosion of the values that make this industry so special.

Like, is there some way to blend these two together? What do you think is the best possible outcome for this and the best possible strategy? Sure. So I think one really important thing to keep in mind here is that, like, this isn't just a one-dimensional thing where, like, there's a slider where, you know, zero is, like, totally maximalist and you hate everyone who doesn't totally agree with you. And 100 is like, you know, the standard kind of like, straw man adage of like your mind is so open that your brains fall out. And like, we're trying to pick 50. Like the reality is that it's a very multidimensional space, right?

There's lots of different ways to be more maximalist. There's lots of different ways to be less maximalist. There's a different ways to be maximalist that some of which are more harmful and less beneficial. Others are less harmful and more beneficial. So, like, I'll give one example, right? Like one example of something that I think is relatively low cost and high value to be intolerant of is scams, right? And one example I can give of this is a couple of months ago, I was talking with a friend who was in the non-block chain internet decentralization and freedom space, right? So like, you know the kind of space that really cares about things like tour, iPhone jailbreaking, like open source Android version. BitTorrents, that cluster of things, right? And a lot of people in that cluster of things are very or partially anti-crypto.

And I basically asked him why. And this person replies basically that the people in that community generally consider the crypto community to either be too scummy or to be far too tolerant of scams. So I think basically what's going on here is that the Ethereum community does, I think, think have this vibe of, you know, valuing harmony, valuing friendship, valuing people getting along. And people aren't going to be willing to just like directly point fingers and, like, criticize specific projects and call them scams because, you know, ultimately it's an integrated community and these people are friends of your friends. And like, what's the, you know, there's a high

cost to kind of disrupting relationships that way, especially if, you know, you end up being wrong. Right. So criticizing someone from being a scam is like a big. risk. And a lot of people are not willing to take that risk and kind of that activity is not valorized enough to make up for the risk. So the challenge, basically, if the Ethereum community was better at being intolerance toward the scummy aspects of it, then, you know, it could win friends, ironically enough, among this non-cryptial currency and internet decentralization. space that is currently and somewhat turned off by it.

So, you know, the question is like, how do we actually do this? The problem is that scammingness is always a spectrum. And like the Ethereum community is tolerance toward toil scams. But like, what about things that are, you know, not quite scams in the sense that they don't really lie, but, you know, they are kind of sketchy

and they're basically just money grabs and they don't really align while with the project's values. So I'm going to like poke into just one very random example. So just yesterday, I found out about this NFT project that's called Weird Vitalik.com. This was just totally done without my permission, like someone just did it, right? And I just like found out about it. So meet Vitalik, 10,000, one-of-a-kind drawn collection of Vitalik Bouturin, bored weird Vitalik club.

So this is just totally a rip-off of the board, a Yad Club. It's a collection of 10,000 randomly generated board Vitalik Booderan NFTs. And there's normal Vitalik, which for some reason is weird. wearing some kind of weird red hat. There's zombie Vitalik. There's Alien Vitalik and so forth, right? So I look at this on the page. And one of the things that is in my head is, you know, do I like this project?

And my answer is like pretty decidedly no. Like honestly, you know, these people use my name without my permission. These people are quite honestly making a project that is like very much. not in line with my own values. Because literally, like, within the last four, three weeks, I've had, like, multiple interviews, podcasts, like, everywhere criticizing this idea of, you know, hey, we're just going to use Ethereum in order to make three million dollar monkeys. And, like, I've even publicly talked a lot about, like, what I think good uses of NFTs

would be, right? Like, one simple example is, at least if you're going to make an NFT, you know, donate some portion of the proceeds to charities, right? Like, okay, fine, you know, human beings have an insatiable need to gamble. But, like, if we're going to gamble, like, let's actually, you know, leverage that energy and let's kind of like, like, attach the demand to the supply and let's actually, you know, fund some public goods. So this project, like, if it really wanted to kind of, you know, authentically attempt to

express some, you know, vitalic values, like, it could have sort of really easily done that. But as far as I can tell from the website, there's absolutely no evidence that, like, there's any attempts to fund public goods, funds charities. There's, like, basically no attempt whatsoever to recognize anything about my personality or who I am that's different from, like, say, CZ or Justin's son. So, like, from all of these angles, like, honestly, I, you know, deeply dislike the project. These people should probably be really happy that I'm kind of too, I guess a libertarian and anti-litigious wants to really go after them and sue them.

But isn't this the exact problem, Vitalik? You talk about the challenge of calling out scams. The fact that we're even talking about it right now, right, is like, brings more attention to the project itself. And this is sort of what the troll, what the project actually wants is just, like, not necessarily good press or bad press, but just like somebody paying attention to it

because in crypto, attention equals capital. equals cash out potential. This is why it's so difficult to call out scams in some of these projects. Do you see a solution to this? Yeah, no, it's definitely a good point. Like, I think the question of, like, how we as a community can respond to this sort of stuff more, right?

So the challenge here is basically, like, one definitely is, you know, how can we kind of very strongly signal to the community that, like, if you're into this sort of stuff, you know, you're not really part of like the the kind of community that we wants to see. But then once you start saying those things, then you know, there's the accusation of like,

oh, if you're being opinionated, does that mean you're being centralized or opinionated and centralized synonyms? Like, I think they're not, but, you know, there are people who think that they are. There's definitely this question of like, how do we call out individual scams? Like, I think ultimately calling out is not like the right response, right, in this particular case. So, like, I think calling out is an acceptable response to some specific context. So, like, for example, if you discover that some particular projects that already is well-known actually, like, really seriously compromises on decentralization or compromises on security in some way,

then, like, you know, yeah, maybe, like, some kind of takedown post is really warranted. If this is, like, some, you know, seventh tier nobody thing, then, like, calling them out individually, yes, like, it totally does raise their individual profile. like we need more responses that kind of cover like the whole blanket, right? You know, you want to be really sure that like conferences are not promoting these kinds of things or if conferences are promoting these things and the ecosystem should not be promoting those conferences. Like basically just wants to have a culture where people are more encouraged to kind

of really steer clear of this kind of stuff. And so steer clear of money grabs, steer clear of projects that are much more centralized, then they claim that they actually are kind of much more hawkish about, like, hey, doesn't this thing actually run on a centralized server? And if so, like, is this really even a dab? And this can't be something that kind of comes from on high and kind of like shoots a laser at specific things that it discovers because like, yes, like a laser like on the internet is just a spotlight and you have this dry sand effect and all that stuff, right? So the challenge is like, I think the response has to be one that is.

is more of this kind of cultural change at every level, I guess. And in fairness, I do actually think that many parts of the Ethereum community really do have this, right? Like, there are plenty of high-quality Ethereum events. There are plenty of events that don't highlight this kind of stuff and that actually highlight really meaningful stuff. And there's plenty of people who even, you know, get the in-external vibe of Ethereum being a scammy thing. And then they go to a conference, like, they go to a DefCon or whatever.

And they're like, oh, wow. You know, these people are actually really, you know, amazing, cool and real, and legit people, right? So the question is, like, how to make that experience more scalable. Yeah. I think one strategy I've seen you take in the past, and I think we've tried to take at times, is rather than shooting the laser beam at projects that look like scams, we shoot the laser beam or the spotlight on things that we really love and things that are dissent. And you try to drown out all of the other things by shooting the spotlight on the real, centralized projects, the cool stuff that's going on, the projects that are taking kind of long-term perspectives on the space. And you try to seek to drown out all of the rest. But even that

is so difficult in crypto when so much of this space is driven by attention, narrative, and price, and not some of these like fundamental greater goods that I think many of us are here for. I think that's definitely a very good point. Like actually, yeah, giving the friendly spotlight to projects that are great in a lot of ways that's an excellent. substitute to like kind of trying to go after every single thing that I guess is anti-grade. And that's definitely something that we can do more of too. I think probably the biggest ideological barrier between us and that more of that being

happening is this idea that Ethereum being a neutral platform means that we as people have to be neutral between applications. And that's like totally not true, right? Like, I think there is this kind of healthy dynamic in the Ethereum space where, you know, yes, the bottom layer should be credibly neutral, the bottom layer should not, you know, give discounts to applications that like Vitalik Boudron or Peter Salagi or whoever else, you know, think, I kind of represent the values of Ethereum land and give gas penalties to, you know, weird kind of monkey clubs that misuse my name. But at the same time, like, there needs to be this higher community layer that actually does do those things. Like, figuring out, like, a culture that is both willing to be, like, more positively opinionated in those ways. And also accepts mistakes happening in that opinionatedness is, I think, an important step that we can try to take. I think the accepting mistakes part is very important, right?

because, like, there have been times when, for example, you know, I've been criticized for, like, supporting some projects in the roll-up space and then people are like, oh, why don't you support me as well? And just, like, answer honestly, like, what would you prefer out of Vitalik Buterin? Would you prefer, A, Vitalik Buteran stays neutral and does not talk about, like, specific projects and just says, like, roll-ups are good? Or would you prefer Vitalik Boutrin to, like, mention specific names and mention specific good things that are being done by specific names, I mean, even at risk of sacrificing a kind of some, I guess, neutrality of the persona. Like, what's your preference? Yeah, I think when people ask you

to talk about their projects and they're asking you like, hey, like be more open, name more names, what they're really asking for is, you know, just mention my project's name and not really other projects names, just me. So I think it's coming from a selfish place for the people to request for you to talk about specific areas of crypto. Yeah, I mean, personally for me, I definitely prefer B, right? Which is like, there's so much noise in the space and so many individuals and people who are on kind of the more grifter side of the spectrum in crypto, voices that talk about decentralized values get drowned it out, right? And so even if like you don't highlight all of the potential projects that have these decentralized values, you can

try to spotlight at them and that could be sort of an example. You're almost like social signaling to others outside of crypto, what is important as well. So for me, I think sometimes complete neutrality on these projects is viewed by others outside of the industry as complacency or enablement. And I think that's a greater risk at this point in crypto. Yeah. I mean, I think, as you can probably tell, I've kind of intuited a similar thing, I guess. But, you know, ultimately I'm only one person, like at this point, Ethereum is so big that, like, I can't, you know, track all the industries. And so, like, this isn't just a me thing, right? I think this is a kind of, you know, whole Ethereum culture thing that people should, you know, more actively promote examples of things that are in their values, right?

And, like, that means lots of things. like that might mean, for example, that, you know, if you really value the decentralization, then you should, like, you know, promote, like, which specific applications actually do a really good job of, like, having a fully serverless UI, for example, where, you know, the UI is, like, just a get page on IPFS or whatever. If you value, like, you know, global inclusion, then, you know, you should go and talk about your favorite crypto project from Latin America, from Africa, or from wherever else, you know, if you value, like, inclusion of women, then, you know, talk about your favorite women-run projects.

And it's, like, different people in Ethereum land do have, like, different focuses, which I think is a, yeah, like, a healthy thing. And, like, often those focuses can kind of complement each other, like, even they don't really need to be add-ons. So, yeah, I do think that, you know, the more kind of spotlight we give to projects that, like, really try to just, like, satisfy values in general, then definitely the further away we get from things that are just like completely, you know, corrupt and uninteresting. Betelik, I want to get your perspective on Ethereum maximalism in 2021 and 2022. This is something that Ryan and I have really had to face with because we have the largest

podcast newsletter in crypto. And so there's a lot of attention that goes on to what we cover. And we kind of alluded to our strategy of rather than talking negatively about things that we deem to be too centralized, we'd rather put the spotlight on the things that embody our values. But then other alternative ecosystems, like the newer ecosystems that have arisen, have started to claim that, you know, Ryan and I are just like ETH Maxis, and we only care about Ethereum, and we don't like pay attention to any of these alternative layer ones. And, well, that's in the, if you historically look at the content that we have produced, that's largely been true. But also I've been at

the same time concerned that there is just this malicious branding of a lot of Ethereum people as Maxis in order to discredit them to like kind of say like, oh, like you can't trust these people for their information because they're biased because they're just a bunch of eth Maxis. And so I'm wondering to get your take on how you see Ethereum maximalism manifesting itself in 2021 and 2022. If you think it's good, what about it? Do you think it's bad? And how do you think about like how these alternative layer ones have contended with like this growing hardliners in the Ethereum community. It's definitely a good question and definitely an important question.

So I think the way that I understand how Ethereum maximalism first arose, right, is that for the first few years of Ethereum's history, Ethereum culture was like very open and welcoming and even like supportive of non-ethyrium. blockchains to a very great extent that might even be difficult to fathom today. So, like, you know, there were Ethereum conferences, like, even including DefCon, that would just allow other blockchains to have, you know, presentations at them, like presentations of those other blockchains. And, you know, a lot of people in the Ethereum community also really valued collaboration with those other blockchains, and a lot of people saw themselves as being Ethereum people and, you

know, other chain people at the same time. And things kind of seemed fairly happy. But, But the thing that really kind of shocked and probably hurt a lot of people is that a lot of the other L1 teams, there was this disingenuousness to them. So definitely not all teams, right? There are, I think, definitely layer ones that are not Ethereum that are honorable. And there's quite a few of those. Like, I think Zcash is one of my favorites. I talk about it a lot. There's definitely others, too.

So the problem with these other projects is that, like, when they go to Ethereum conferences and, like, events and speak and, a sponsor, they would kind of virtue signal about how they are, you know, sister chains and friends of Ethereum. But then when they have private discussions with VCs, they would basically tell to the VCs, like, hey, Ethereum is actually just like

a ball of crap and, you know, Vitalik is a dropout who doesn't know anything. And like, we have actual professionals TM and top talents TM from Silicon Valley TM and we're just totally going to own them. Right? Like, there definitely was this

a big divide between the Ethereum-facing posture and the VC-facing posture of a lot of these projects. And ultimately, you know, people talk to each other, and this Dubois and S got discovered. And so the friendliness toward other L-1s got replaced with this more, like, I guess, Ethereum maximalist mentality where other L-1s are viewed as being kind of hostile attempts to drag projects

away from Ethereum by default. So I think there are aspects to that that were just unavoidable. There are aspects to that that I do think are excessive and that lack empathy for a lot of users.

Like I do disagree a lot with, like, for example, what Sergio said in that podcast with Haseo about five months ago. But I do think there is something to this idea that you know, Ethereum culture is optimized around, like, people who are in Ethereum already and doesn't, like, do enough

to empathize with people who are currently not yet Ethereum people. And, you know, they see this kind of relatively closed gatekeeping community. And when those other projects go to other other L-Layer ones because of problems with fees, the response from the Ethereum side is like, hey, those things are scams. And if you like them, then, you know, therefore you are someone who likes scams and you're not one of us. And, like, basically, once moralism becomes a tribe's response to everything, then that's actually a sign that that tribe is really into having serious problems. Like, I think that's a lesson that's true in a lot of cases. Like, you know, once again, this is one of those that's, uh, probably has a lot of truth in geopolitics as well. Uh, so I do think that Ethereum culture needs to be empathetic over the facts that lots and lots of people, especially people in the global south, especially poor people, especially, you know, the kinds of people that we are in theory trying to,

and power, like, lots of people really don't have the funds to be able to pay $24.18 just to move some ether round and make a simple transaction. And if they want to play around with blockchains now, and therefore to them, you know, something like either just having an account on Binance and, you know, trading back and forth inside of Binance or going on Solana or going on BSC or whatever, like, if those are the best choices for them, then like, fine. Like, I think. we like really should even be a kind of happy and I view those places as training rounds rather than you know, viewing those as a kind of hostile countries that are gathering strength and that are going to make a full military assault against, you know, the Ethereum Castle at some point.

Like, we do have to be empathetic about the facts that, you know, Ethereum platform in its current situation does have limits for all of these people. And like the correct response to them is not, oh, if you don't see how Ethereum has this holy factor called decentralization that makes the $24 transactions worth it, then you know, you're not in. Our response should be like, hey, you know, yes, you know, we do believe that the internet of money should not cost more than five cents per transaction. Like, I stand by that statement, and I think lots of people stand by that statement. But the way in which Ethereum is solving that problem as a community is a layer twos. And, you know, here are some layer twos that are already in alpha. You can go use

them and here's like the ETRA roadmap for how those way or tiers are going to get better and for how Ethereum is going to get better to be able to support more of them. So like that's probably an update that I guess Ethereum culture needed to have five months ago. I'm not sure if it needs to have it anymore. Like I feel like in the last few months, I don't know, maybe the fee discourse disappeared on its own for a little bit just because like gas prices went down and like Heath prices went down and like what is it at like 20 or 30 way at this point. I'll actually let's check right now.

It's got a 42 gray average this week. Oh, it's gone up. It's back up to between 50 and 100 now. But, you know, for a long time, and it's a, I think for the last month, it has been much lower than it was, like, say, yeah, in October or November, right? But that's not something that's guaranteed to last is, I guess, one thing that I would say, right? And so, like, really highlight and encouraging, like, good scaling projects and, like, pushing people to build infrastructure to make a lot. roll-ups better, pushing people to actually make good roll-ups, pushing people to move toward, you know, taking off the training wheels when they're ready and actually having full decentralization

and all of these things, pushing wallet providers to continue to take decentralized approaches and, I mean, try to have like clients for Ethereum and so remain decentralized even in the concept of all these way or two platforms. So like, all of these things are important, right? and Ethereum culture that kind of steadfastly values its core values, like that can be done without antagonizing people, right? Or at least without, you know, antagonizing people who don't deserve to be antagonized. And the way that that can be done is through, like, having this kind of positive focus and through, like, giving friendly pushes for people to actually, you know, stick to their principles,

you know, make sure that the decentralized apps stay decentralized, to make sure that the apps that exist today actually become cheap, you know, make sure that roll up projects keep prioritizing and making their fees even while we're in all of those things, right? Like, these things can't happen. And these things do require community pressure to keep happening. And these things do require ongoing education to keep happening.

So I think there definitely is a healthy way for the Ethereum community to, like, both actually solve the problem that causes people to instead go to, you know, finance smart chain or whatever else today. And at the same time, like, by doing those actions, actually kind of collectively reaffirm its values of decentralization and show itself as a community that, like, really seriously and deeply cares about these things. So how do you think that we should be covering this on bankless? And now I'm just straight up, like, asking you for personal advice here. Because on one hand, like Solana, Avalanche, Terra, Binance Smart Chain have done fantastic things in getting more private keys into more people's hands,

which is just fundamentally bullish for humanity. We love having more people have more private keys and all the things that come associated with it. And a lot of people are just interested in those ecosystems. And as content producers, we definitely want to serve those people that are interested in those ecosystems. But I have a hard time squaring it with some of the properties of the actual layer 1 blockchains. For example, like the Avalanche blockchain, you can't see the mempool that's got a private mempool

unless you are staking a very large amount of the Avax token, which makes it prohibitive for the average individual to actually be a part of consensus. And one of the core bankless philosophies is that if you can't participate in consensus, you're the product, right? So like the MEV, the order flow, the transaction flow becomes something

that only high capital AVX token stakers can access. the same property is true for Solana. And then we got Terra, which is delegated proof of stake, which we've seen like the cartelization of delegated proof of stake systems and the centralization of token supply. And these are really complicated subjects that newcomers who are just playing with their low fee and like defy games don't really care about or want to hear about. And so like we struggle with like covering these things when there's totally demand

to hear about these ecosystems. yet it's harder to explain how, in our opinions, the long-term games are not being played by these newer L-1 ecosystems. And Ryan and I are here inherently for trying to find the blockchain that can play the longest-term game possible.

So how do you think we should cover these things? Sure. So I think one part of my answer is that, yes, we want to have a lot of positivity, but also it's okay to be critical. And especially for, like, bigger projects, I think it's important to be critical and to continue, like, saying and making the arguments for why the chains that make sacrifices are making sacrifices that are ultimately unsustainable, and at some point, they're probably going to have to do roll-ups anyway.

So that's one part of the response. The other part of the response is, like, I think for every unit of time that you spend criticizing other people for not standing. up to values that you think are important, you should spend three minutes of time thinking about kind of how your own community can do a better job of sticking up to those values. And so I do think that some internal facing discourse on praising projects within the Ethereum space that help Ethereum maintain those values is something that we absolutely should do a lot more of. And like that's, I think true is that all layers of the stack. Like it's true for applications. I'm like one example that

I mentioned is like one way to tell if an application does a good job of being decentralized is, is the UI fully serverless. And if the UI is serverless, then, you know, you know that they're probably doing things well. So, you know, which projects have serverless UIs? Try to kind of elevate them more and like actually talk about the fact that like, hey, these projects actually have serverless UIs and this is something that we should be celebrating. Vitalik, really quick. Serverless UIs. What do you mean by that for folks that aren't technical? Sure. I'm sorry. This is a this. This is a, this is a, this is something that. is my attempt to kind of capture the language from Amazon AWS and their server listing,

which in my opinion does not deserve the other word. But basically, what I mean is, like, a UI that really does not require centralized servers to operate, right? Like, where generally, the way it works is you just have a static web page that is, you know, has HTML, has JavaScript, and all that it talks to is the blockchain, right? Now, maybe it could talk to other decentralized services as well. But like everything that it talks to should not be dependent on like specific servers existing in order for the UI to function. So it's like if the back, if the developers disappear, if like other kind of key participants in the ecosystem disappear, the DAPs should be able to just keep running. One good example of this is the Uniswap UI. I think right now it's

not fully serverless, but it's kind of serverless backup in that like they do like have a server that does some things like optimizing order routing, but even if all that stuff disappears, there's local algorithms that can do that stuff as well. It basically just is a webpage that can talk to the blockchain directly. There's even an interface to Uniswap v2, Uniswop.Ninja, which is basically just totally not run by Uniswap the organization, and it's a static page. So things like that are kind of examples of how Uniswap actually really does follow the principles of being a good decentralized application. Yeah, so it's things like that. That's kind of your encouragement is highlighting things like that.

You know, I'm wondering, I guess just to tie off this section in a rebuttal to Bitcoin maximalism, there were two other points in the article, which is like, currency is the main app. This whole thing is about money. And also this focus on, I guess, simplicity of the underlying base chain rather than the complexity that Ethereum adds. I'm assuming you think that's not quite the right argument. But how would you rebut that? Where do you think the balance is in terms of complexity, in terms of focus on use cases? Sure. So I think, like, first of all, we do needs to have, I think, a lot of respect for currency as an application.

I'm like, I think we definitely can't go too far in our rhetoric and saying, oh, currency is lame and boring. And if you're am is cool because it does derivatives and ENS and decentralized autonomous organizations and reputation systems. Because, like, ultimately, yes, like, if you look at what people are doing, today, currency is providing more real value to people than all of those other things combined, right? So you do need to have some respect for that. Though with, I guess, one big caveat is that I think there's a lot of synergies between the currency use case and other use cases. So ENS is one very good example, right? Like, if you want to send me, you know, assets on Ethereum, then in your wallet, when you type in who you're sending to, you just have to type in Vitalik.eath. Right. And once you do that,

you're sending me assets. And it's, you don't have to like go copy paste a 40 character address. You don't have to like ask me for an address. You don't have to do fancy stuff. It's like you are just sending your assets to me. Right. So that's like an example of a synergy between, I guess, here, decentralized currency and a decentralized domain name system like ENS.

And like ultimately, you know, currencies are powerful for DAOs. Dow has become more powerful if there are cryptocurrencies. And, you know, there are a lot of ways in which these kinds of applications do interact with each other. And also, to some extent, I think we do want to push back and say, well, actually, applications other than cryptocurrency have had an impact. So, like, for example, one of the benefits of NFTs, I think, is that NFTs actually have brought a lot of people into Ethereum who would not otherwise be in crypto.

So, like, the kinds of people that would be totally turned off by Bitcoin Maximilist mentality, like they love Ethereum because they love NFTs. And I think that's something amazing, right? Like, the facts that, you know, Ethereum community does have these different aspects of itself in order to satisfy the values of different sub-communities is, I think, one of the beauties of the Ethereum ecosystem, right? So that would be one part of my response. And then I think the, in terms of like the question of, like, the question of,

Well, does focusing exclusively on being money make for better money, I actually feel like the Ethereum, a kind of ecosystem, philosophy, like technology, kind of stack, already has a very good response to this line of argument, which is basically Ethereum's two-layer structure, right? Like, the Ethereum layer one is something that strives to be this relatively, you know, simple base layer and that really strives to, you know, be simple in the long term. what's some of the big changes that are made and not changing that much, basically just to move some ether rounds, be able to be verified fully by a regular note

and all of those things. And then there's layer two. And layer two provides the scalability. Layer two is where the applications exist. Layer two is where, you know, people in the future will be playing around with, you know, the prediction markets and the NFTs and the DOS and all of the fun stuff. And so you do kind of have this separation where, you know, you have this layer one. And the Layer 1 culture, I think in the long run, can really be a culture that is protective of, you know,

ETH the money, protective of the simplicity of the protocol, protective of, and even striving to improve the ability to run like a very minimal node that verifies everything within the Ethereum chain. While at the same time, Leisure 2 is this kind of expansive, you know, pie in the sky thing where people are just keep being excited about the new kinds of functionality that you can add on. top of it. And I think the separation is like pretty real in a bunch of ways, right? So like, there's a debate within the MEV community where some people within the MEV community would even argue that like a full move to layer two might be something that makes MEV not a problem anymore because layer twos can capture the MEV. Now, like this, like if that works out, right, then that would be an example of how like the layer one, layer two separation actually does end up kind of protecting the layer one technology.

But I guess, if that doesn't pan out, then the other thing that we're working on is Proposer Builder separation, where, you know, basically you do kind of separate this layer of, like, optimizing to make the best possible blocks from the layer of, like, being a validator, which is supposed to be a dumb functionary that's just running a node, right? So I think Ethereum culture in general, like, it really does have this aspect of trying to create this layer separation between, like, the parts of the ecosystem, that I think in the future really can value simplicity, really can value, like, mathematical purity, beauty,

and all of these things that Bitcoiners like about Bitcoin, while at the same time you have this other section of the ecosystem that does kind of like enjoy Ravelin and get the benefits of the, you know, for power and complexity. And the two, like, do have like kind of enough of a degree of separation between them that they don't interfere with each other, but the two are still sort of part of the same ecosystem. in such a way that they're able to compliment each other, right?

So I think this is, to some extent, like, a metaphor for, like, the Ethereum community's strength, which is, like, the Ethereum community does get its strength from diversity, and it does get strength from the facts that it has these different kind of sub-communities that can have, like, different values. And I think in the long term, and even, like, starting very soon, it would be amazing if Ethereum has a kind of core development culture that really values these ideas of like, you know, safety, security, mathematical simplicity, like making it really easy for every node to count up the total eat supply, if that's what people want and all these things.

And while at the same time, you have these kind of spokes in the ecosystem that focus on the other stuff, right? Like, I think that kind of technical and cultural future really is in sight for us. And I think like that kind of future, like, it can get. the benefits of Ethereum culture, or it can't really get the benefits of, like, maximalist culture in terms of the way, like, it keeps a core protected. But at the same time, also get the benefits of this culture that's more willing to reach out to the outside world, appeal to different groups of people, kind of present itself as, like, actually being able to help many groups of

people and giving them opportunities to participate, and really can't have both. Can to have both. That's a great articulation of it. And I think maybe the full the underlying social philosophy of Ethereum. So we made the case for Bitcoin maximalism and maximalism in general. And then we just made the case against it, the rebuttal of it. And I'm wondering, Vitalik, if we've kind of landed in this place that you've talked about Ethereum before as like moderate Bitcoin values, right? Sometimes it's interesting for myself, I find myself agreeing with like Bitcoiners on

so many things. And then other times I find myself agreeing with like alternative layer one chains on so many other things and finding a unique place maybe in the middle. Is that the path for Ethereum in your mind is this moderate position between communities? I mean, I feel like that's kind of been what I've been saying in a lot of things all along, right? Like that, you know, Ethereum kind of is the decentralized center. And, you know, you have extremes on one side and extremes on the other side. And the Ethereum community is, I think, one whose greatest virtue is really doing it at best to kind of move toward having the best of both? Absolutely. Vitalik, this has been a fantastic

conversation with you. I think we've definitely gone through this topic in every way. Sometime we'd love to have you back to talk a little bit about EIP 4844. That's been in the back of our minds. It's kind of a mystery box that the bankless community wants to unlock as well as dank sharding, but know that's a while off, but we'd love to have you back and talk about that. Also, glad that you got to know Tom Brady recently. So that's been a lot of a lot of fun too. Vitalik, it's been fantastic, as always, to have you on. We appreciate you. Thank you very much. It's been great to be here. Bankless Nation, we have a few resources for you, of course. One is the post that we went through, which is the case for Bitcoin maximalism that

Vitalik wrote. We'll include a link in the show notes to that, as well as the Time Magazine article that we referenced, and the Slate Star Kodax article, survive and thrive, theory of the political spectrum. So you will be able to access all of those links that we referenced in the show notes. As always, none of this has been financial advice. ETH is risky. Crypto is risky. Defi, everything else is risky. You could definitely lose what you put in, but we are headed west.

This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.