Every post I read by Vitalik reeks of political science 101. It's like these people (I'm including Ezra Klein here) haven't bothered to read Plato's Republic or

Every post I read by Vitalik reeks of political science 101. It's like these people (I'm including Ezra Klein here) haven't bothered to read Plato's Republic or Hobbes' Leviathan. A few points: > The case for vetocracy in these contexts is clear: it gives people a feeling of safety that the platform they build or invest on is not going to suddenly change the rules on them one day and destroy everything they've put years of their time or money into. This is simply wrong. Vetocracy is the game equivalent of a stalemate. It's definitionally an inept form of governance. There are no pros to vetocracy, and no case to be made for it. I'm not going to cite the Vox article here, but Ezra Klein has no idea what a vetocracy is, either. (Actually, he's a pretty smart guy, he's probably just being purposefully obtuse.) Vitalik is just messing up definitions here, he's not saying anything even remotely interesting. > Ethereum protocol research is sometimes bulldozery in operation This sentence (and the following paragraph) means nothing. Research is definitionally done by one dude in his garage (barring edge cases like weapons, viruses, human testing, etc.). Why would you even need sign-off for it? His point just makes no sense. > The physical world has too much vetocracy, but the digital world has too many bulldozers, and there are no digital places that are truly effective refuges from the bulldozers (hence: why we need blockchains?) What he's trying to say here is that big actors can act "too unilaterally" in the digital space, but small actors can "veto too much" in the real world. This is not true. Small actors cannot veto in the real world (or in the web2 digital world, for that matter), and I'd strongly suggest he reads Madison's Federalist 10 (where this is a major worry), but who am I kidding, these people think they just discovered sliced bread.