Vitalik: The optimal governance mechanism I once pursued is difficult to achieve, and mathematics and economics constitute a broader worldview.

BlockBeats News: On December 15, ETH Workshop founder Vitalik Buterin replied to the tweet on X "Some things that you once believed very much but changed your mind when you learned more". "One of the changes in the way I think is that there are fewer economic factors involved in my thinking than I did a decade ago," he said. The main reason for this shift is that in the first five years of my encryption life, I spent a lot of time trying to invent a mathematically provably optimal governance mechanism, and eventually I found some fundamentally impossible outcomes that made it clear that the mechanism I was looking for was impossible to implement, the most important variable that would make an existing flawed system succeed or fail in practice (usually the degree of coordination between groups of participants, but also other black-box factors that we often think of as "culture") It's a variable that I haven't even modeled." "Previously, math was a major part of my identity: I was very passionate about math competitions in high school, and soon after I entered the encryption space, I started working on a lot of coding, and at ETH Workshop, BTC, and elsewhere, I was excited about every new encryptionprotocol, and economics seemed to me as part of a broader worldview as well: it was a mathematical tool for understanding and figuring out how to improve the social world. All the parts fit together perfectly. Now, the fit between these parts has been dropped. I do still use mathematics to analyze social mechanisms, although the goal is more of a rough initial guess of what might work and mitigate the worst-case scenario (in the real world, this is usually done by robots rather than humans) rather than explaining the behavior of the average situation. Now, in my writing and thinking, even in support of the same ideals as I did ten years ago, I often use very different arguments."