51 - 2020 Reflections on Crypto and Beyond | Vitalik Buterin
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Bankless
4.7 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 8 February 2021
⏱️ 119 minutes
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51 - 2020 Reflections on Crypto and Beyond
Guest: Vitalik Buterin
We bring on Vitalik to digest the third of his recent posts on his website:
Endnotes on 2020: Crypto and Beyond
https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/12/28/endnotes.html
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.
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Vitalik's Blog:
https://vitalik.ca/
Vitalik on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the front here, internet money and internet finance. |
| 0:11.5 | This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to out of front run the opportunity. |
| 0:16.3 | I'm Ryan Sean Adams, I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more |
| 0:21.8 | bankless. |
| 0:22.8 | David, we have Vitalik on once again, what topics do we cover? |
| 0:28.2 | Yeah, we cover three of his most recent blogs on his Vitalik.ca blog. |
| 0:33.4 | These are all fantastic reads. |
| 0:35.5 | And in order to help amplify Vitalik's message and try and get out what he's trying to get out, |
| 0:40.0 | we go through each of these blog pieces together. |
| 0:42.6 | We start with his recap of 2020 and his forward looking kind of his forward looking |
| 0:48.4 | predictions into 2021. |
| 0:50.6 | That blog was particularly interesting. |
| 0:52.4 | That's how we start the conversation. |
| 0:54.2 | We move into his blog post called an incomplete guide to rollups and he kind of helps us unpack |
| 1:00.7 | what it is to be a rollup, how we as an Ethereum L2 scaling community landed on rollups |
| 1:06.7 | as a construction and why they are so powerful. |
| 1:11.0 | And then we also get into the topic of social recovery wallets. |
| 1:13.7 | So these are all relatively three different topics, but I would say they are all forward |
| 1:18.3 | looking topics that Vitalik sees as kind of like the logical conclusion of a lot of different |
| 1:24.1 | forces, maybe a lot of them social, a lot of them political in his first blog post that |
| 1:30.4 | we get into. |
| 1:31.4 | But then the second to our more technological and about the way that Ethereum, the landscape |
... |
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