An uncharitable but not exactly incorrect summary of this would be: most people love Community Notes; Vitalik really wants some of that goodwill for crypto (which is desperately lacking it), so he insists the two have a common philosophical and/or functional heritage. I think this is nonsense and he's trying to hitch a dead ox to a live one, but it's his blog and he can do as he likes.
A more charitable view is that Vitalik is intellectually curious about areas where math/systems meet governance, and that interest led him both to crypto and to writing this blog post.
I’m a total crypto skeptic but I didn’t find the brief mentions of crypto to detract from the rest of the post.
> All the actors in crypto are bad and you should not trust what they say, even Vitalik.
To someone in good mental health, Vitalik has written 4k words giving an accurate overview of the Community Notes algorithm and its context and was peer reviewed by two others, one of them the lead ML engineer at Twitter. The first sentence in your reply reads like a paranoid delusion and the undertone of anger makes it concerning. You should take a break from whatever echo chambers you frequent and reflect on your mental state, perhaps with the guidance of a specialist.
I don't think the thousands of people who lost their life savings and have been scammed would agree your assessment.
Perhaps those who lost their savings and are affected by ransomware by crypto should they see a specialist for the amount of damage that crypto has caused them in getting their savings wiped out due to the speculative nature of crypto that Vitalik has helped to build.
No amount of technical talk, ad hominems, or you fawning wax lyrical over Vitalik will change this fact and my statement still stands.
That's the thing, it's literally just facts. And yes, even after experiencing loss, it's even more unhealthy to lose one's ability to judge new situations rationally.
> "And yes, even after experiencing loss, it's even more unhealthy to lose one's ability to judge new situations rationally."
So this is what you said when one of your family members persistently begged to you for money because they gambled it all on crypto?
It's a fact that millions of people have lost their life savings, got rugpulled, had to pay extra on 'fees', had their work destroyed due to ransomware and got their 'tokens' drained over Vitalik's creation, Ethereum, he is the one who got rich in this pyramid he orchestrated.
I think he shouldn't be immune from criticism regardless of what he's rambling on about, you seem to think that he is above criticism because he is some sort of technical intellectual with humility. The law and regulations doesn't care.
It's morbidly unhealthy to be blind to a person's bad actions, ignore all the effects and suffering their actions has caused and to take a bullet and defend that said person.
I think you're being overly charitable, because he's not really interested in governance writ large. He long ago decided what he thinks the best government system is, and sees everything political through that lens: is this good for my system, or is it bad.
He never actually questions his own system, because he's ultimately an engineer. He's clueless on social structures or systems.
> He never actually questions his own system, because he's ultimately an engineer. He's clueless on social structures or systems.
I'm sorry, but that is a false dichotomy and downright ridiculous assessment. Being a good engineer does not disqualify you from deeply understanding social organization or dynamic systems.
I am an engineer and those two topics are among the most critical which guide my work. I'm obsessed with these topics. Being an engineer makes thinking about these things easier, not harder.
Are you next going to proclaim that actors are clueless about politics?
He questions his own system constantly, but he's necessarily committed to it (modulo modifications and extremely rare overhauls), because his identity is tied up in what he's built, and he can't just jump to something new without losing a huge amount of himself.
Vitalik has written philosophical posts about technological and economic systems for years now. The idea that he is some sort of Machiavellian mastermind trying to siphon goodwill via an overly-detailed technical analysis blog post is hilariously inaccurate.
I think this is too uncharitable. I'm not a cryptocurrency booster, but Vitalik has consistently been a philosophical explorer of ideas he finds interesting in this space, and this seems genuine, not an attempt to "hitch a dead ox to a live one". Most of the article has nothing to do with cryptocurrency at all.
Here's my take as someone who works in the space: Vitalik is a thought leader. Devs in crypto highly respect him. His blog at vitalik.ca is mostly concerned with crypto and crypto-adjacent topics, it being the active focus point of Vitalik's research and development. He's been writing about crypto for 10+ years. If he wants to draw attention to community notes on his blog, he's probably primarily doing it just for the fun of thinking and writing, but as a nice side effect, I'm sure he wouldn't mind if devs in crypto took inspiration from community notes, particularly when it comes to building crypto-native social networks.
Sure, I had the same thought, but after the initial comparison he mostly stops talking about crypto and examines the topic properly, so worth reading the rest of the article.
