Golden Observation | Vitalik: I have ten major contradictions that I have never figured out

After Vitalik publicly praised Bitcoin on April 1 , Vitalik expressed his envy for Bitcoin again on May 17, 2022. Vitalik tweeted that he hopes to see Ethereum become a more Bitcoin-like system, especially for long-term stability, including cultural stability.

In addition, he also disclosed ten contradictions in his thinking and values. He said that he has been thinking about it and has not completely resolved it. The ten contradictions are as follows:

1. I would like to see Ethereum become a more Bitcoin-like system, especially the tension between long-term stability, including cultural stability, and short-term changes that I realize will require a lot of active coordination to achieve this goal.

2. I tend to lean less on individuals and try to build fixed systems that stand the test of time, and I'm conflicted about my appreciation for "active players" and their role in helping the world move forward.

3. I would like to see Ethereum become an L1 that can survive truly extreme situations and I realize that many critical applications on Ethereum already depend on something more fragile than anything we think is acceptable in the Ethereum protocol design Many conflicts between security assumptions.

4. There is a conflict between my love of things like decentralization and democracy and my realization that in practice I agree with intellectual elites rather than "the people" on many (though definitely far from all) specific policy issues.

5. I would like to see more countries adopting radical policy experiments (e.g. Crypto Nation!) vs. I realize that the governments most likely to go all the way on these things are more likely to be centralized and less friendly to diversity internally , there is a contradiction between the two.

6. My desire to see more diversity in interesting cultures is similar to my realization that maintaining a culture that is different from the mainstream often seems to require some type of madness or artificial barriers or whatever I don't like ideologically contradictions between things.

7. I don't like many modern financial blockchain "apps" (a $3 million monkey, etc.) that I begrudgingly recognize as an essential part of keeping the cryptoeconomy running, and for my favorite Pay for all the cool DAO/governance experiments.

8. The conflict between my desire for cryptocurrencies to transcend the financial sector and my realization that finance (including payments + SoV) remains by far the most successful category of crypto applications, especially among 3rd world residents, human rights activists and in general disadvantaged groups.

9. The contradiction between my desire to minimize L1 and my desire to minimize the entire ecosystem (because a simple L1 often "exports" its complexity to higher layers of the stack that users must adopt)

10. The contradiction between my desire to be a friend to everyone and a mediator of "right and harmony" and my desire to firmly stand for good against evil in the times we face.