Ethereum’s legendary creator Vitalik Buterin is back with some thoughts on the ever-growing tension between crypto and governance.
For over a decade, crypto has been the playground for rebels, folks who want to keep their freedom and dodge control from power-hungry politicians and corporations.
But as crypto changed, so has its need for governance. Vitalik points out that while the early days were all about building tools to sidestep external control—think torrent networks and encrypted messaging—the game has changed with blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and DAOs coming into the picture.
“These systems aren’t just tools anymore—they’re long-lived and constantly evolving,” says Vitalik. The survival of these systems depends on ongoing research, open-source software, and other public goods that require a new mindset.
In simple terms, the ideology that kickstarted the crypto movement needs to grow up to sustain it.
The battle between freedom and control
Vitalik doesn’t stop at crypto. He’s seeing this struggle play out in other areas of technology too. Take Florida, for example. Earlier this year, Governor Ron DeSantis decided to ban lab-grown meat, saying:
“Global elites want to control our behavior and push a diet of petri dish meat and bugs on Americans.”
The Libertarian Party in New Hampshire didn’t waste time calling out this move as “authoritarian socialism.” But not everyone in the libertarian camp agreed.
For Vitalik, the criticism from the New Hampshire libertarians made sense. Banning a new, potentially more ethical form of meat because it grosses people out is the opposite of valuing freedom. But not everyone saw it that way.
When Vitalik went digging for why, the best explanation he found was from Roko Mijic. Roko argued that once something like lab-grown meat becomes mainstream, society starts to revolve around it, making it harder for those who don’t want to go along.
“It happened with digital cash,” Roko pointed out, adding that even Sweden’s central bank is worried about cash payments becoming less accessible.
Then there’s Google. A couple of weeks after DeSantis’s meat ban, Google rolled out a feature in Android that scans phone calls in real-time and warns you if it thinks you’re being scammed. This might sound like a win—after all, scams are getting worse, especially in places like Southeast Asia.
But not everyone was thrilled. Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, wasn’t on board, despite the fact that the solution is client-side, meaning no personal data is sent to Google or anyone else.
The future of governance
All these tensions made Vitalik ask some tough questions. What exactly should people like him, who see themselves as defenders of freedom, be protecting? He says:
“Public goods are much more important than before, at larger scales than before.”
The internet has made communication cheap and easy, but it’s also given creators new ways to control and influence people. This is about how society deals with these new realities.
Vitalik says that current attempts to handle these issues are often clumsy, treating them as exceptions rather than the rule.
But he wonders, what if there was a way to value freedom and democracy while still addressing these challenges head-on?
At the core of his argument is the idea that relying on a single solution is too risky. We need multi-factor approaches. “For account recovery, it’s easy to see how this works,” he says. Each person decides what they trust, and if they make a mistake, the impact is usually just on them.
But when it comes to things like Universal Basic Income (UBI) or voting, the stakes are higher. These systems seem to need a broad consensus on who belongs to the community. The last thing Vitalik told us was:
“I think Plurality is best understood not as an overarching substitute for your existing frameworks of thinking about the world, but as a complement to it, where the underlying ideas can make all kinds of mechanisms better.”
