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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Agreed, I'm also not invested in crypto but Vitalik seems like one of the genuine people in the space.

It's the unfortunate attraction of the Ponzi grifters and get-rich-quick influencer types that tainted the whole ecosystem.

I'd say "co-opted" more than "tainted".

I'd argue it's the design of crypto, the "crypto values" themselves, that make the space so welcoming to grifters. Emphatically including YC.

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 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.

> 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?

Many engineers question thier own systems more than anyone else. How can you sag that with a straight face?

If your arguments rest on projecting internal states, beliefs, and motivations on people you disagree with, they're worthless.

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.

You can omit the crypto stuff while reading, the post is still useful without it. For one, I didn't know that Community Notes work this way.

Quadratic funding is also interesting in its own way, you don't have to use crypto to implement it

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.

I’m assuming the dead ox is crypto

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