Vitalik: The optimal governance mechanism I am looking for is impossible to achieve

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum founder Vitalik responded to X user @yishan's tweet asking "Reply with some things you used to strongly believe in but changed your mind about as you learned more" by saying: I no longer focus on mathematics and cryptographic protocols like I did 10 years ago; now I use mathematics to make rough initial guesses and try to avoid the worst-case scenarios, rather than explaining behavior in average cases.

Vitalik's interest in economics is also waning, as he wrote: I spent a lot of time in the first five years of the crypto world trying to invent a mathematically provable optimal governance mechanism, but ultimately found that what I was looking for was impossible to achieve. The most important variables that determine whether existing flawed systems succeed or fail in practice (usually the level of coordination among subgroups of participants, but also factors of "culture") were variables I did not model or consider at the time.