Vitalik's Reflections on Turning 30: The End of My Childhood

Written by: Vitalik Buterin

Compiled by: Shenchao TechFlow

Introduction:

Thirty and standing tall.

Today is Vitalik's 30th birthday, and at this important life milestone, he has published a long article titled "The end of my childhood."

Throughout the article, Vitalik shares his reflections on various themes, including Ethereum's technology, the current state of the crypto world, the Russia-Ukraine war, survival and death, growth, and experience. He also candidly states:

"I am now playing a somewhat different role, and it is time for the next generation to take over what once belonged to me."

As a core figure in the crypto world, Vitalik has traveled around the globe over the past years, practicing his technical philosophy as a digital nomad while gaining more insights and a sense of responsibility when facing different cultures worldwide.

"Cryptocurrency is not just a financial story; it can be part of a broader story of creating better technology."

This long article can be seen as a comprehensive review and outlook on personal experiences and the entire crypto world from Vitalik's perspective at the age of 30, rich in content and genuine in emotion.

Shenchao TechFlow has compiled the full text to share with readers.

One of my most profound memories from the past two years was giving a talk at a hackathon, visiting a hacker house, doing Zuzalu in Montenegro, and seeing people a full decade younger than me taking leadership roles in various projects as organizers or developers: crypto audits, Ethereum Layer 2 scaling, synthetic biology, and so on. One of the memes from the core organizing team of Zuzalu is 21-year-old Nicole Sun, who invited me to visit a hacker house in Korea a year ago: a gathering of about 30 people, and I remember it was the first time I was the oldest person in the room.

When I was the same age as the current residents of the hacker house, I remember many people praised me as one of those world-changing, brilliant, young prodigies like Zuckerberg.

Now I feel somewhat shy about this, both because I don't like that kind of attention and because I don't understand why people have to translate "wonder kid" into German when it works perfectly well in English. But seeing all these people go further than I have, being younger than me, makes it clear to me that if that was my role, it is no longer so. I am now playing a somewhat different role, and it is time for the next generation to take over what once belonged to me.

In August 2022, the path to the hacker house in Seoul. I took the photo because I couldn't tell which house I should enter, and I was communicating with the organizers to get that information. Of course, the house was ultimately not on this road at all, but about twenty meters to the right in a more prominent location.

1

As a supporter of life extension (meaning conducting medical research to ensure that humans can truly live for thousands or millions of years), people often ask me: Isn't the meaning of life closely related to the fact that it is finite: you only have a small portion, so you must enjoy it?

Historically, my intuition is to refute this idea: while from a psychological perspective, if things are finite or scarce, we tend to value them more, the notion that long-term grievances could be so bad that they are worse than literally not existing is absurd. Moreover, I sometimes think that even if immortality proves to be so terrible, we can always increase our "excitement" and decrease our lifespan simply by choosing to wage more wars. The fact that non-antisocial people among us reject this choice strongly indicates to me that once it becomes a practical option, we would also reject it, as it is also the case with biological death and suffering.

However, as I grow older, I realize that I don't even need to argue these points.

Whether our lives as a whole are finite or infinite, every beautiful thing in our lives is finite. You think it is eternal friendship, yet it slowly fades into the mists of time. Your character can change completely in ten years. Cities can change entirely, for better or worse. You can move to a new city and restart the process of familiarizing yourself with the physical environment from scratch. Political ideologies are finite: you might build a complete identity around your views on the highest marginal tax rate and public healthcare, only to feel completely lost a decade later when people seem to no longer care about these topics and instead spend all their time discussing "wokeness," "Bronze Age mindset," and "e/acc."

A person's identity is always tied to their role in the broader world they inhabit; over the course of a decade, not only does a person change, but the world around them changes as well. One change in my thinking that I wrote about previously is that, compared to ten years ago, my thoughts involve less economics. The main reason for this shift is that during the first five years of my crypto career, I spent a significant amount of time trying to invent mathematically provable optimal governance mechanisms, only to ultimately discover some fundamentally impossible results that made it clear to me:

(i) What I was looking for was impossible, (ii) The most important variable that determines the success or failure of existing flawed systems in practice (often the degree of coordination among subgroups of participants, but also including other factors we often simplify as "culture") is a variable I hadn't even modeled.

Previously, mathematics was a major part of my identity: I participated extensively in math competitions in high school, and shortly after entering the cryptocurrency field, I began coding extensively in Ethereum, Bitcoin, and elsewhere. I was excited about every new cryptographic protocol, and to me, economics was also part of a broader worldview: it was a mathematical tool for understanding and figuring out how to improve the social world. All the pieces fit together neatly.

Now, the instances of these pieces fitting together have decreased. I still use mathematics to analyze social mechanisms, although the goal more often is to make rough first guesses at what might work and mitigate worst-case behaviors (which in the real world is often done by robots rather than humans), rather than explaining average-case behaviors. Now, I write and think more, often using very different arguments even to support the ideals I supported ten years ago.

One thing that fascinates me about modern AI is that it allows us to engage with the hidden variables guiding human interactions in different ways: AI can make "resonance" clear and readable.

All these deaths, births, and rebirths, whether of thoughts or collections of people, are finite ways of life. These deaths and births will continue to happen in a world where we have lived for two centuries, a thousand years, or as long as main-sequence stars. If you personally feel that life lacks enough finiteness, death, and rebirth, you don't have to wage wars to add more: you can also make the choice I did, to become a digital nomad.

2

"Grads are falling in Mariupol." (Translator's note: Literally translated as "shells are falling in the city of Mariupol," likely referring to the Russia-Ukraine war.)

I still remember at 7:20 PM local time on February 23, 2022, I was anxiously staring at my computer screen in a hotel room in Denver. For the past two hours, I had been scrolling Twitter for updates while repeatedly contacting my father, who shared the same thoughts and fears, until he finally sent me that decisive reply. I tweeted as clearly as possible to express my stance on the issue I had been following. That night, I stayed up very late.

The next morning, I woke up to see the Ukrainian government's Twitter account desperately requesting cryptocurrency donations. At first, I thought it couldn't be real, and I was very worried that the account had been opportunistically hacked: someone, perhaps the Russian government itself, was trying to exploit everyone's confusion and desperation to steal some money. My "security mindset" instinctively took over, and I immediately began tweeting warnings for people to be cautious while searching through my network for someone who could confirm or deny whether the ETH address was real. An hour later, I was convinced it was indeed real, and I publicly conveyed my conclusion. About an hour later, a family member messaged me, pointing out that given what I had done, for my safety, it would be best if I didn't return to Russia.

Eight months later, I witnessed a completely different upheaval in the crypto world: the public demise of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. At that time, someone posted a long list of "crypto protagonists" on Twitter, showing which had fallen and which remained intact. The casualty rate on this list was high:

SBF's situation was not unique: it mixed MtGox and several previous upheavals that had engulfed the crypto world. But it was a moment of realization for me, suddenly understanding that most of the guiding lights I had once viewed in the crypto world, those I could freely follow since 2014, were no longer there.

People looking at me from a distance often think of me as a high-energy person, probably because that's what you expect from a "college dropout" or "project founder." However, in reality, I am far from that. The virtue I cherished as a child was not the creativity of starting a unique new project, nor the courage to show it when needed, but the virtue of being a good student who shows up on time, does homework, and gets a 99% average.

My decision to drop out was not a brave step taken out of conviction. It began in early 2013 when I decided to take a paid internship working for Ripple that summer. When the complexities of the U.S. visa prevented this, I instead spent the entire summer working with my friend and Bitcoin Magazine boss Mihai Alisie in Spain. By the end of August, I decided I needed to spend more time exploring the crypto world, so I extended my vacation to 12 months. It wasn't until January 2014, when I saw hundreds of people cheering for my talk introducing Ethereum at BTC Miami, that I finally realized I had chosen to leave university forever. Most of my decisions in Ethereum involved responding to the pressures and demands of others. When I met Vladimir Putin in 2017, I didn't try to arrange a meeting; rather, it was suggested by others, and I almost said "sure."

Now, five years later, I finally realize: (i) I had once been complicit in legitimizing a genocidal dictator, and (ii) within the crypto space, I can no longer afford the luxury of sitting idly by while those mysterious "others" dominate everything.

These two events, although differing in the type and scale of tragedy, left a similar lesson etched in my mind: I actually have responsibilities in this world, and I need to be conscious about how I operate. Doing nothing, or living on autopilot, simply becoming part of someone else's plan, is not an automatically safe or even blameless course of action.

I am one of those mysterious others, and it is up to me to play that role. If I don't, the crypto space will either stagnate or be dominated by opportunistic money predators, and I can only blame myself. Therefore, I decided to cautiously accept others' plans while being more vocal about my own: to have fewer thoughtless meetings with random powerful people who are only interested in me as a source of legitimacy, and to do more things like Zuzalu.

Zuzalu flag in Montenegro, Spring 2023

3

Next, let's talk about something happier—or at least those challenges that feel more like mathematical puzzles rather than needing to walk two kilometers with bleeding knees to seek medical help after falling while running. The author does not intend to share more details, noting that the internet has become very adept at turning a photo of a rolled-up USB cable in his pocket into a meme suggesting something entirely different, and he certainly does not want to give those people more "ammunition."

I have previously discussed the changing role of economics, the need to think about motivations in different ways (and coordination: we are social animals, so the two are actually closely linked), and the idea that the world is becoming a "dense jungle": big government, big corporations, big mobs, and almost any "big XX" will continue to grow, and their interactions will become increasingly frequent and complex. I have not yet talked much about how much of these changes will affect the crypto space itself.

The crypto field was born at the end of 2008, after the global financial crisis. The genesis block of the Bitcoin blockchain references this famous article from The Times:

The early memes of Bitcoin were heavily influenced by these themes. Bitcoin was created to abolish banks, which is a good thing because banks are unsustainable behemoths that continually create financial crises. The existence of Bitcoin is to abolish fiat currency because without the central banks and the fiat currencies they issue, the banking system cannot exist—furthermore, fiat currency enables money printing, which funds wars. But in the fifteen years since then, the broader public discourse as a whole seems to have largely moved beyond concerns about money and banks. What is now considered important? Well, we can ask the copy of Mixtral 8x7b running on my new GPU laptop:

Once again, AI can make resonance clear and readable.

There is no mention of money and banks or government control over money. Trade and inequality are listed as global concerns, but as far as I know, the discussions and solutions are happening more in the physical world than in the digital world. Is the original "story" of cryptocurrency increasingly falling behind the times?

For this dilemma, there are two wise responses, and I believe our ecosystem will benefit from both:

Remind people that money and finance are still important and serve the underserved in the world in this niche market.

Go beyond the financial realm and leverage our technology to build a more comprehensive vision of a freer, more open, and more democratic alternative tech stack, as well as how to build tools for a broader and better society, or at least help those excluded from mainstream digital infrastructure.

An important point is that I believe the crypto space has a unique advantage in providing value there. Cryptocurrency is one of the few truly highly decentralized tech industries, with developers spread across the globe:

Source: Electric Capital's 2023 Cryptocurrency Developer Report

In the past year, I have visited many new global cryptocurrency hubs, and I can confirm that this is indeed the case. More and more large crypto projects are headquartered around the world, with no single place to go. Moreover, non-Western developers often have a unique advantage in understanding the specific needs of crypto users in low-income countries and can create products that meet those needs. When I talk to many people from San Francisco, I have a clear impression that they think AI is the only important thing, that San Francisco is the capital of AI, and therefore San Francisco is the only important place. "So, Vitalik, why haven't you settled in the Bay Area with an O1 visa yet?" Cryptocurrency doesn't need to play this game: it's a big world, and just one visit to Argentina, Turkey, or Zambia can remind you that many people still face significant issues related to obtaining money and funding, and there are still opportunities to do the complex work of balancing user experience and decentralization to truly address these issues sustainably.

Another vision is one I outlined in a recent post, "Make Ethereum Crypto-Punk Again." Rather than just focusing on money, or becoming the "value internet," I believe the Ethereum community should broaden its horizons. We should create a complete decentralized tech stack—one that is independent of the traditional Silicon Valley tech stack to the same extent as, for example, China's tech stack—and compete with centralized tech companies at all levels.

Let me repost this tech stack comparison chart:

After I published that article, some readers pointed out that an important missing part of this system is democratic governance technology: tools for collective decision-making. This is what centralized technology truly attempts to provide, as it assumes that every company is run by a CEO, with oversight provided by… um… a board. Ethereum has previously benefited from very primitive democratic governance technologies, when a series of controversial decisions, such as the DAO fork and several rounds of issuance reductions, were made in 2016-2017, a team from Shanghai created a platform called Carbonvote, where ETH holders could vote on decisions.

Voting on the DAO fork by ETH holders

The voting was essentially advisory: there was no hard agreement that the results would determine what would happen. However, they helped core developers have confidence in implementing a series of EIPs because they knew that a broad segment of the community would support them. Today, we can obtain community member identities that are much richer than just token holdings: POAPs, Gitcoin Passport scores, ZK stamps, and so on.

In summary, we can begin to see how the crypto space can evolve to better meet the concerns and needs of the 21st century with a second vision: creating a more comprehensive, trustworthy, democratic, and decentralized tech stack. Zero-knowledge proofs are key to expanding the scope that this stack can offer: we can move beyond the false dichotomy of "anonymous and therefore untrusted" versus "verified and KYC'd" and prove more granular statements about who we are and what permissions we hold. This allows us to simultaneously address concerns about authenticity and manipulation—guarding against "outside Big Brother"—as well as concerns about privacy—guarding against "inside Big Brother." In this way, cryptocurrency is not just a financial story; it can become part of a broader story of creating better technology.

4

But beyond storytelling, how do we achieve this? Here, we return to some questions I raised three years ago in a post: the changing nature of motivations. Typically, those who overly focus on financial motivation theories—or at least a theory of motivation in which financial motivations can be understood and analyzed while everything else is viewed as a mysterious black box we call "culture"—are often perplexed by this space, as many behaviors seem to contradict financial motivations. "Users don't care about decentralization," yet projects still often strive for decentralization. "Consensus is built on game theory," yet successful social activities that drive people out of dominant mining or staking pools work in Bitcoin and Ethereum.

I recently realized that I have seen no one trying to create a foundational, functional map of the crypto space that works "as expected," attempting to include more participants and motivations. So let me quickly try to do that now:

This map itself is a deliberate mix of idealism and "describing reality" at a 50/50 ratio. It aims to showcase the four main components of the ecosystem that can support and coexist with each other. In practice, many crypto institutions are hybrids of these four.

Each of these four components provides something crucial to the whole machine:

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

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

Builders bridge the gaps and attempt to create applications that serve users and put ideas into practice.

Pragmatic users are the ones we ultimately serve.

Each of the four groups has complex motivations, and these motivations interact with other groups in various complex ways. There are also "dysfunctional" versions of each group: applications may be exploitative, DeFi users may inadvertently reinforce the network effects of exploitative applications, pragmatic users may deepen their reliance on centralized workflows, and intellectuals may become too engrossed in theory, focusing on trying to solve all problems by accusing people of "inconsistency" without recognizing that financial incentives (and disincentives for "user inconvenience") are also important and can and should be addressed.

Typically, these groups have a tendency to mock each other, and sometimes I do play a role in that. Some blockchain projects openly try to distance themselves from what they perceive as childish, utopian, and distracting idealism, and focus directly on applications and usage. Some developers disparage their token holders and their dirty love for making money. Others disparage pragmatic users and their dirty willingness to use centralized solutions when it is more convenient for them.

But I believe there is an opportunity to enhance understanding between these four groups, with each side realizing that it ultimately relies on the other three groups, striving to limit their excesses, and recognizing that in many cases, their dreams are not as far away as they imagine. I see this as a form of peace that is actually achievable, whether within the "crypto space" or between it and adjacent communities that are highly aligned in values.

5

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

I still remember my first visit to China in 2014, where I saw all the signs of brightness and hope: exchanges expanding to hundreds of employees, even faster than in the U.S., large-scale GPU and later ASIC mining pools, and projects with millions of users. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley and Europe have long been the main engines of idealism in the field, each with its own distinct style. Almost from the beginning, Ethereum's development was effectively headquartered in Berlin, where many early ideas about how to use Ethereum for non-financial applications emerged from Europe's open-source culture.

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

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

Elsewhere, getting ordinary businesses to accept cryptocurrency payments was a hot topic. In various places around the world, people would find others accepting Bitcoin, even including waiters in Japan taking Bitcoin as tips:

Since then, these communities have undergone many changes. In addition to other broader challenges, China has experienced multiple crackdowns on cryptocurrency, leading many developers to find a new home in Singapore. There were divisions within Silicon Valley: rationalists and AI developers, essentially different factions of the same team, until Scott Alexander was doxxed by The New York Times in 2020, leading to a duel faction over the optimistic and pessimistic questions about AI's default path. The regional composition of Ethereum has changed significantly, especially during the introduction of entirely new teams for proof of stake in 2018, although more through the addition of new teams rather than the demise of old ones. Death, birth, and rebirth.

There are many other communities worth mentioning.

When I first visited Taiwan multiple times in 2016 and 2017, what impressed me most was the combination of self-organization and the willingness to learn from the people there. Whenever I wrote documentation or blog posts, I often found that within a day, a study club would spontaneously form and begin excitedly annotating every paragraph of the post on Google Docs. Recently, members of Taiwan's Digital Affairs Ministry were equally excited about Glen Weyl's ideas on digital democracy and "plurality," quickly posting a complete mind map of the field (which included many Ethereum applications) on their Twitter accounts.

Paul Graham once wrote about how each city conveys a message: in New York, "You should make more money." In Boston, "You really should read all those books." In Silicon Valley, "You should be stronger." When I visited Taipei, the message I thought of was "You should rediscover your inner high school student."

Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang speaking at a learning session at Nowhere bookstore in Taipei, where I had given a talk on community notes four months earlier.

In recent years, when I visited Argentina multiple times, I was struck by the desire and willingness to build and apply the technologies and ideas offered by Ethereum and the broader crypto world. If places like Silicon Valley are the forefront, filled with abstract thinking about a better future, then places like Argentina are the front lines, brimming with positive energy to tackle the challenges we need to face today: in Argentina's case, hyperinflation and limited connections to the global financial system. The adoption of cryptocurrency there has exceeded the charts: I was recognized on the streets of Buenos Aires more frequently than in San Francisco. There are also many local builders, with a surprising healthy mix of pragmatism and idealism, dedicated to addressing people's challenges, whether it be crypto/fiat conversion or improving the state of Ethereum nodes in Latin America.

There are many other noteworthy communities: the cosmopolitan and highly international crypto community in Dubai, the growing ZK communities across East and Southeast Asia, the vibrant and pragmatic builders in Kenya, the solar punk community in Colorado focused on public goods, and so on.

Finally, Zuzalu in 2023 ultimately created a very different, beautiful fluid sub-community that is expected to thrive on its own in the coming years. This is an important part of what attracts me to the network state movement: culture and community are not only things to be defended and protected but also things that can be actively created and developed.

6

A person learns many lessons as they grow, and different people will have different lessons. For me, some are:

Greed is not the only form of selfishness. Cowardice, laziness, resentment, and many other traits can cause a lot of harm. Moreover, greed itself can take many forms: greed for social status can often be as harmful as greed for money or power. As someone who grew up in my gentle Canadian upbringing, this is a significant update: I feel I was taught to believe that greed for money and power is the root of most evil, and if I ensure that I am not greedy for these things (for example, by repeatedly striving to reduce the share of ETH supply held by the top 5 "founders"), I fulfill my responsibility to be a good person. This is certainly not true.

You are allowed to have preferences without needing a complex scientific explanation for why your preferences are genuinely and absolutely good. I generally like utilitarianism and find it often unfairly slandered and mistakenly equated with being cold-hearted, but here I think excessive utilitarianism and similar ideas can sometimes lead humanity astray: the degree to which you can change your preferences is limited, so if you push too hard, you will end up fabricating reasons to explain why everything you like actually serves humanity's universal prosperity the best. This often leads you to try to persuade others that these outdated arguments are correct, resulting in unnecessary conflict. A related lesson is that a person may not be right for you (in any case: work, friendship, or otherwise), but in some absolute sense, they are not a bad person.

The importance of habits. I intentionally limit many of my daily personal goals. For example, I try to run 20 kilometers once a month, and apart from that, "do my best." This is because the only effective habits are the ones you actually maintain. If something is too difficult to maintain, you will give it up. As a digital nomad who often jumps continents and takes dozens of flights each year, any form of routine is difficult for me, and I have to address this reality. Despite Duolingo's gamification, which encourages you to maintain a "winning streak" by doing at least something every day, it has actually been useful for me. Making positive decisions is very difficult, so it is better to make positive decisions that have the most long-term impact on your thoughts by reprogramming your mind to default to different patterns.

Everyone will learn these long tails, and in principle, I could go on longer. However, how much can actually be learned from reading others' experiences is also limited. As the world begins to change at a faster pace, the lessons learned from others' narratives also become outdated more quickly. Therefore, to a large extent, simply doing things slowly and gaining personal experience is also irreplaceable.

7

Every beautiful thing in the social world—a community, an ideology, a "scene," a country, or a very small company, a family, or a relationship—is created by people. Even in rare cases, you can write a reasonable story about how it has existed since the dawn of human civilization and the eighteen tribes, but at some point in the past, someone had to actually write that story. These things are finite—both as things themselves, as part of the world, and as the things you experience, a fusion of potential realities and the ways you conceive and interpret them. As communities, places, scenes, companies, and families disappear, new communities must be created to replace them.

For me, 2023 has been a year of watching many things, big and small, gradually fade into the distant past. The world is changing rapidly, and the frameworks I used to try to understand the world are changing, as is the role I play in influencing the world. There is death, a truly inevitable type of death that will continue to be with us even after the biological aging and death of humans are cleared from our civilization, but there is also birth and rebirth. It is our task to remain active and create new things as best we can.