A discussion with Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin on his recent blog post “Endnotes on 2020: Crypto and Beyond.”

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51 - 2020 Reflections on Crypto and Beyond

Guest: Vitalik Buterin

Vitalik wrote this post from Singapore, noting that 2020 was an extremely interesting year in which we faced “humanity’s first boss-level enemy since 1945.” However, it was also a year that brought much hope in areas like transportation, medicine, AI, and blockchains.

We have observed a transition in the Political economy from physical to digital – 2020 served as a high-octane accelerant for these changes. A key piece of this change is shifting emphasis from physical private goods to digital public goods. This transition requires creative solutions to the challenges of effective governance.

The phrase “digital nationalism” refers humanity’s recent tendency to polarize and how this extends to the internet. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum have undergone great schisms, resulting in hard forks like BCH and ETC. These phenomena in the rising political economy will likely continue.

Vitalik walks through the tricky relationship between our financial and non-monetary social motivations. Culture and narrative can be incredibly powerful tools for innovation, but altruistic people are not the only ones with access to these things.

Vitalik concludes with thoughts on the Big X - Big Government, Big Business, Big Tech, etc. This multidisciplinary “dense jungle” is populated by a variety of powerful groups with dynamic interrelationships, and blockchains & cryptocurrencies are set up to play a vital role.

Resources:

Vitalik’s Blog

Endnotes on 2020: Crypto and Beyond

Vitalik on Twitter

Transcript

Ryan  

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 get out and front run the opportunity. I'm Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman. And we're here to help you become more Bankless. David, we have Vitalik on once again, what topics do we cover?

David Hoffman  

Yeah, we covered three of his most recent blogs on his vitalik.ca blog, these are all fantastic reads. And in order to help amplify Vitalik's message and try and get out what he's trying to get out, we go through each of these blog pieces together, we start with his recap of 2020 and his forward looking predictions into 2021. That blog was particularly interesting. That's how we start the conversation. We move into his blog post called an Incomplete Guide to Rollups. And he kind of helps us unpack what it is to be a rollup how we as an Ethereum, scaling community landed on rollups as a construction and why they are so powerful. And then we also get into the topic of social recovery wallets. So these are all relatively three different topics. But I would say they are all forward looking topics that Vitalik sees as kind of like the logical conclusion of a lot of different forces, perhaps maybe a lot of them social, a lot of them political in his first blog post that we get into, but then the second two are more technological and about the way that Ethereum the landscape is going to manifest and mature over time. So again, a wide ranging conversation, but still with a lot of awesome throughlines.

Ryan

Absolutely. If you're listening on the podcast, of course, we have this on YouTube as well, where we actually go through the articles visually. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can check it out on the podcast and get it directly into your ears, make it more portable that way. David, we should just get right into the interview. But before we do, guys, we want to talk about the sponsors that made this episode possible.

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Ryan

Okay, Bankless nation we have Vitalik Buterin with us once again, who needs no introduction to Bankless. Vitalik, how are you doing today?

Vitalik Buterin

I'm great. How are you?

Ryan

I'm doing great. Good morning to you sir. You know we wanted to talk about three of the recent articles you put out and I think the the one to start with, maybe the one you kind of bookmarked on the end of 2020. 2020 was a crazy year, at least for me, it did not go the way I had thought it would go. And I think that's probably true for for a lot of people. So let's start with that article. We're also going to talk about your rollups article and then social recovery after that. But let's talk about 2020. Why was it such a strange year?

Vitalik Buterin

Lots of things were strange. First of all, you know, the virus was strange, then, politics, and a lot of countries were strange. Life moved onto the internet very quickly. And that made things that were already strange, even more strange. So, I mean, first of all, just a whole bunch of things have happened at the same time. It was also this year that I think really accelerated a lot of the trends that we've seen already moving pretty quickly over the last couple of decades, right. So some of the more important ones that I talked about, I mean, one of them is just to the internet becoming this much more important and quickly, primary force in our lives. I mean, I know you had [inaudible] on your podcast earlier. And, you know, he talks about, like, the primary in the mirror. And this was kind of the flipping where the internet became the primary. And I think that was completely true. But I also think it's important to really think through some of the consequences of what that being true means. Because for a long time, you know, people have talked about things like post scarcity economics, and zero marginal costs. What does a world where most value is virtual and most th