Vitalik, I want to ask you a little bit about how your role has evolved since it began

in Ethereum.

So, in the very beginning, before all of this, of course, you were once the uppity young

entrepreneur.

It's been, what, six, seven years now?

You've moved on from being the entrepreneur to being the chief technologist to being the

politician.

You're now the elder statesman of smart contract blockchains.

What have you learned about protocol politics?

How do you know politics is less different from regular politics than you might think?

It's all this emergent phenomenon of what happens when you stick many thousands of people

together and you have incentives that are aligned in some cases.

So, you have some competition in other cases and you have different groups of people that

have different opinions and they have to fight it out.

Sometimes within one protocol and sometimes between different protocols where there's

competition.

A lot of the dynamics that you get are surprisingly familiar.

The kind of religious fervor that you get when people defends their opinions isn't better

to have blockchains that have smaller blocks so they're easier to verify versus bigger

blocks so that more people can afford to use them.

People have very strong opinions in the same way that people have strong opinions about

either religion or democracy or freedom of speech or the welfare state or any other mainstream

...