Vitalik reflects: The optimal governance mechanism I once pursued is difficult to achieve

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin replied to a tweet on He said: “One change in the way I think is that there are fewer economic factors involved in my thinking compared to ten years ago. The main reason for this shift is that in the first five years of my crypto life, I spent After spending many hours trying to invent a mathematically provable optimal governance mechanism, I eventually discovered some fundamentally impossible results that clearly demonstrated that the mechanism I was looking for was impossible, leaving the existing flawed system The most important variable for success or failure in practice (usually the degree of coordination between groups of participants, but also other black-box factors we often think of as “culture”) is one I don’t even model. ” “Previously, math was a major part of my identity: I was very passionate about math competitions in high school, and soon after entering the crypto space, I started doing a lot of coding, in Ethereum, Bitcoin, and elsewhere, and I was fascinated by every new I'm excited about crypto protocols, and economics seems to me to be part of a broader worldview: it's a mathematical tool for understanding and figuring out how to improve the social world, and all the pieces fit together nicely now. The fit is somewhat reduced. I do still use math to analyze social mechanisms, although the goal is more to make rough initial guesses about what might work and mitigate worst-case scenarios (in the real world, this is usually done by robots instead of explaining average-case behavior. Now, in my writing and thinking, I often use very different arguments, even when supporting the same ideals as I did ten years ago.”