Vitalik Buterin

“A four-year-old Vitalik Buterin's favorite toy was already the computer... experimenting with shapes and colors in Microsoft Paint and plugging different formulas into Excel.”

“I think Vitalik came up with this term, defensive acceleration. The idea is simply that you, the good guys get the AIs first, and then you kind of patch up the world such that it's very robust.”

“There's a good Vitalik tweet, which was some version of what we thought was going to happen: crypto will become sane and start resembling normal markets. What actually happened? Normal markets look like crypto.”

“Whether the uncle in the sky is Palantir or some super intelligence AI company or some equivalent in the foreign country of your choice — it's like there is this vision of safety that's very disempowering.”

“I signed up to take an off term working at Ripple. And then, thanks to the wonders of U.S. immigration law, it turns out that for the category of visa I needed, the company needed to have existed for a year and Ripple had only existed for nine months.”

“Whether the uncle in the sky is Palantir or some super intelligence AI company or some equivalent in the foreign country of your choice — it's like there is this vision of safety that's very disempowering.”

“AI tools like Claude are making people more productive in measurable ways while quietly degrading core cognitive abilities — particularly spontaneous, verbal reasoning.”