From Code Saint to Real Philosopher: The Evolution of Vitalik's Thought

The Ethereum mainnet was launched on July 30, 2015.

Bitcoin seems to grow organically like a myth, depersonalized and unwritten by anyone; Ethereum, on the other hand, is like an unfinished script, with its author never leaving the stage.

Vitalik Buterin, the young and renowned technological idealist, has spent a decade infusing his personal philosophy, values, and struggles into code.

From the initial vision of a "world computer" to the reflections on governance during the DAO crisis, from the Merge to the profound transformation of the foundation... every evolution of Ethereum has left its mark with Vitalik's thoughts.

Ten years of Ethereum, a decade of the evolution of Vitalik's thoughts.

The Utopia of Genius

In 2008, a financial crisis brought an unprecedented storm.

During the collapse of banks and the breakdown of trust, Bitcoin emerged, sounding the trumpet of rebellion against the old world. This new technology not only attracted geeks and cryptography enthusiasts but also changed the life trajectory of a young man—Vitalik Buterin.

Since ancient times, heroes have emerged in youth. At the age when most people encounter love, 17-year-old Vitalik instead met Bitcoin.

In 2011, he learned about Bitcoin from his father—a computer scientist. After giving up World of Warcraft, Bitcoin became Vitalik's new hobby.

He started searching online for Bitcoin forums until he found someone willing to pay him in Bitcoin for his articles. At that time, he could earn 5 bitcoins for each blog post he published.

Vitalik's article quickly caught the attention of Romanian Bitcoin enthusiast Mihai Alisie. The two began to correspond and co-founded "Bitcoin Magazine" at the end of 2011.

In 2013, Vitalik traveled around the world using the bitcoins he earned from his articles, visiting local bitcoin enthusiasts in places like Israel, London, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Upon returning to Toronto, he was utterly convinced that everyone’s understanding of blockchain 2.0 was completely wrong.

Because they all tried to build complex applications on Bitcoin, but the scripting capabilities of Bitcoin are too limited.

Vitalik realized that if he wrote a version of Bitcoin with a Turing-complete programming language, the network could provide all digital services, replicate social networks on the blockchain, restructure the stock market, and even establish fully digital companies, free from the jurisdiction of any government entities.

In November of the same year, 19-year-old Vitalik turned his ideas into a white paper and gave it the name: Ethereum.

This white paper quickly swept through the entire crypto community, and people realized for the first time that blockchain could be more than just currency; it could also be a global decentralized platform.

Multiple co-founders have joined, with some even calling him "the genius alien who brings decentralized gifts."

At that time, Vitalik was an extremely pure idealist. In interviews, he did not shy away from stating that he held a dualistic worldview, believing that most social ills could be attributed to centralization. "I see everything involving government regulation or corporate control as pure evil."

However, there is always a chasm between idealism and reality.

The divergence first erupted within the team. Some co-founders hoped for Ethereum to become a profitable business entity, while Vitalik preferred to adhere to a non-profit, open community model. He even proposed reducing his and the other founders' allocation in Ethereum to avoid future power concentration.

In June 2014, the conflict reached its peak.

Vitalik requested some members to leave the team, and in the same year, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) was established, setting a direction for non-profit governance. In the same year, some members also left due to differences with Vitalik regarding development priorities and the non-profit direction, and they founded another project in 2020.

In an interview, Vitalik admitted that Ethereum's transformative vision risks being overwhelmed by greed:

"If we don't raise our own voices, what can be built are only those things that can generate immediate profits, and they are often not what the world truly needs."

On July 30, 2015, dozens of young developers witnessed the automatic launch of the Ethereum mainnet in a small office in Berlin. There were no lavish celebrations, no large-scale media coverage, just a group of idealists quietly watching the blocks running on the screen.

The vision of "World Computer" is moving from the white paper to reality.

However, behind the halo, the young Vitalik was not prepared to face a more complex and harsher reality.

Ideal Rift

In the early years of Ethereum's birth, Vitalik was more like a pure technological utopian. He firmly believed that the ultimate significance of blockchain lies in decentralization, emphasizing that anyone can freely build applications on Ethereum without the need for approval from a central authority.

At Devcon 1 in 2015, Vitalik repeatedly emphasized the open (Open) and trustless (Trustless) characteristics of Ethereum, painting an ideal world dominated by code rather than power.

But decentralization does not mean that everything naturally tends towards the good. Vitalik opposes centralization, yet inevitably becomes the final arbiter of community opinion. This subtle power paradox was thoroughly amplified in the subsequent DAO crisis.

In 2016, The DAO operated as the world's first decentralized investment fund on Ethereum, raising over 12 million Ether, worth $150 million. However, in June, a hacker exploited a vulnerability in the smart contract to launch an attack, stealing approximately 3.6 million ETH.

That year, Vitalik was only 22 years old and had just gotten used to being called "V God". After the crisis broke out, he communicated with the community almost without sleep every day, drafting plans and trying to find remedies.

The urgent need to protect investors' assets conflicts greatly with the tenets of decentralized technology. Ultimately, Vitalik chose a pragmatic compromise: advocating for a hard fork to recover stolen funds and allowing the entire community to vote on the decision.

This decision successfully stabilized the market and resulted in the split of Ethereum into today's ETH and ETC.

In this crisis, Vitalik lost not only sleep but also his confidence in the "perfect execution" of smart contracts and the originally "perfect" image of a leader. Because of this incident, the "saint" who had 100% trust in technology disappeared, and a more pragmatic Vitalik is now on the path.

After the DAO crisis ended, Vitalik acknowledged the gap between ideals and reality in his blog "Thinking About Smart Contract Security." He proposed the need for stricter security audits and formal verification, and began discussing governance issues in public speeches, emphasizing that "community collaboration" rather than technical absolutism is the key to Ethereum's success.

The crisis has brought reflection, but the market quickly entered a period of speculative frenzy, resulting in a heavy network burden.

In 2017, ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) became a phenomenon in fundraising, with multiple projects easily raising hundreds of millions of dollars on Ethereum. By the end of the year, the NFT game CryptoKitties caused severe congestion on Ethereum due to a surge in users, with Gas fees once exceeding 800 Gwei. Vitalik realized that if the scalability issue was not addressed, Ethereum would struggle to achieve its vision of inclusivity.

In the interview, he did not hide his disappointment with the speculation in the industry:

"Many projects seem decentralized, but in reality, they are just repackaged. We must prove that the reason for the existence of blockchain is truly superior to traditional technologies (such as Excel spreadsheets)."

The craze quickly faded, and in 2018, the overall cryptocurrency market collapsed, with ETH dropping from $1400 to $83, and a large number of ICO projects disappearing.

During this time, Vitalik has been constantly thinking about how to steer blockchain back in a meaningful direction.

In 2018, he co-authored "Radical Liberalism: A Flexible Mechanism Design for Charitable Matching Funds" with Harvard scholar Zoë Hitzig and Microsoft researcher Glen Weyl, proposing a quadratic voting mechanism aimed at allowing truly valuable public goods to receive resource support through a public funding model, rather than being dominated by short-term speculation.

To address issues such as network congestion caused by insufficient scalability, Vitalik and community developers proposed EIP-1559, introducing a dynamic gas fee mechanism to promote Ethereum's transition from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS), in order to reduce energy consumption and improve transaction throughput.

The DAO crisis, speculative bubbles, and price crashes led Vitalik to a profound shift in thinking. He transformed from a "technological saint" pursuing the ultimate decentralization to a builder who must consider safety, governance, and social value.

Ethereum is still his utopia, but it is no longer a pure technological paradise; rather, it is a rugged path of reality that requires compromises, trade-offs, and a broader vision.

Vitalik gradually found his own pragmatic philosophy in the process.

The Battlefield Beyond Code

If Vitalik from 2015 to 2019 underwent a transformation from pure technical idealism to pragmatism, then from 2020 to 2022, he experienced another key turning point in his thinking: he began to confront the complexities of the real world, moving from simple technical idealism to a multidimensional consideration of social governance, public responsibility, and real politics. In particular, the Russia-Ukraine war prompted him to use his influence to confront politics directly.

In August 2020, he proposed in his article "Trust Models" that blockchain can never achieve complete "trustlessness"; the social contracts and power dynamics in the real world cannot be completely dissolved, which stands in stark contrast to his earlier idea of fully replacing human consensus with code.

In 2021, Vitalik criticized the single-token voting governance model in his blog post "Moving Beyond Coin Voting Governance," arguing that capital weight should not be the sole decision-making logic. He called for the establishment of a diverse consensus and soft governance mechanisms, attempting to align blockchain more closely with the decision-making logic of human society.

An idealist, further integrated into reality.

2022 was a year of great challenges for Ethereum and Vitalik - the Merge.

The transition from PoW to PoS in changing the consensus mechanism has not been smooth. A large number of original Ethereum community members criticize that PoS essentially further concentrates power in the hands of large fund holders, while some miners and node operators express dissatisfaction with the abandonment of the PoW mining model that they have worked hard to maintain for many years.

Some founders have described Vitalik as the dictator of Ethereum, criticizing Ethereum as a "dictatorial regime" where Vitalik holds too much power.

Even so, Vitalik and the foundation are still firmly advancing the merge. On September 15, Ethereum officially completed the Merge, and PoW exited the stage of history.

Vitalik emphasized that this upgrade not only dramatically reduces PoW energy consumption (by about 99.95%), but also lays the foundation for future steps such as Sharding and Rollup scaling, making it possible to achieve throughput of thousands to tens of thousands of transactions per second.

Regarding the claim of "dictator," he responded that Ethereum governance relies on community consensus rather than individual decree, and all significant changes go through EIP, core developer meetings, and public discussions.

In February of the same year, the Russia-Ukraine war broke out.

Vitalik, who is of Russian descent and born in Moscow, rarely breaks "neutrality" by condemning Putin in Russian on social media, calling it a "crime against the people of Ukraine and Russia," and wrote the widely circulated phrase: "Ethereum is neutral, but I am not."

Just a few weeks later, Vitalik reached out to Ukraine with cryptocurrency donations, contributing a total of 1,500 ETH (approximately $5 million) to the Unchain Fund and Aid for Ukraine for humanitarian and military support.

In September of the same year, he personally