Proof of Stake: The Making of Ethereum and the Philosophy of Blockchains

by Vitalik Buterin, Nathan Schneider (Editor)

Overview

The new book from one of TIME's 2021 most influential people
Author was in Forbes 30 Under 30 Hall of Fame

"A crucial contribution to development of a new technology that will impact all of our lives.” –Laura Shin, host of the Unchained podcast and author of The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze

“Vitalik Buterin is one of the most influential creators of our generation....Like most of his work, it is sure to become a must-read.”–Camila Russo, author of The Infinite Machine, founder of The Defiant

The ideas behind Ethereum in the words of its founder, describing a radical vision for more than a digital currency—reinventing organizations, economics, and democracy itself in the age of the internet.

When he was only nineteen years old, in late 2013, Vitalik Buterin published a visionary paper outlining the ideas behind what would become Ethereum. He proposed to take what Bitcoin did for currency—replace government and corporate power with power shared among users—and apply it to everyday apps, organizations, and society as a whole. Now, less than a decade later, Ethereum is the second-most-valuable cryptocurrency and serves as the foundation for the weird new world of NFT artworks, virtual real estate in the metaverse, and decentralized autonomous organizations.

The essays in Proof of Stake have guided Ethereum’s community of radicals and builders. Here for the first time they are collected from across the internet for new readers. They reveal Buterin as a lively, creative thinker, relentlessly curious and adventuresome in exploring the consequences of his invention. His writing stands in contrast to the hype that so often accompanies crypto in the public imagination. He presents it instead as a fascinating set of social, economic, and political possibilities, opening a window into a conversation that far more of us could be having.

Media scholar Nathan Schneider provides introductions and notes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644212486
Publisher:	Seven Stories Press
Publication date:	09/27/2022
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	480,540
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

VITALIK BUTERIN is a Russian-Canadian programmer and writer who co-founded Bitcoin Magazine in 2011 and launched Ethereum in 2014. In 2021, he was named as one of TIME magazine’s most influential people. NATHAN SCHNEIDER is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His most recent book is Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy. He first interviewed Vitalik Buterin in 2014.

Table of Contents

Introduction 9

Part 1 Premining 15

Markets, Institutions, and Currencies-A New Method of Social Incentivization 17

Ethereum: A Next-Generation Cryptocurrency and Decentralized Application Platform 25

Self-Enforcing Contracts and Factum Law 41

On Silos 51

Superrationality and DAOs 63

The Value of Blockchain Technology 75

Part 2 Proof of Work 93

Why Cryptoeconomics and X-Risk Researchers Should Listen to Each Other More 97

A Proof-of-Stake Design Philosophy 103

The Meaning of Decentralization 111

Notes on Blockchain Governance 123

On Collusion 143

On Free Speech 161

Control as Liability 171

Christmas Special 177

Part 3 Proof of Stake 187

Credible Neutrality as a Guiding Principle 189

Coordination, Good and Bad 201

Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election 213

The Most Important Scarce Resource Is Legitimacy 235

Against Overuse of the Gini Coefficient 253

Moving Beyond Coin-Voting Governance 265

Trust Models 289

Crypto Cities 295

Soulbound 313

Appendix 323

Ethereum Whitepaper: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform 325

Glossary 379

Editorial Reviews

"With this book, Vitalik Buterin establishes himself as the full-stack philosopher of our age — with enormous insight  in political philosophy, economics, game theory, organizational design and, oh yes, technology. If you believe, as I do, that web 3 has the potential to deliver enormous justice and good, this is an essential text. If you don’t understand what that potential could even mean, then this is an essential text. To find such wisdom in this critical field is a relief — and joy." 
—Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons co-founder, Harvard Law School professor, and author of The Future of Ideas: the Fate of the Commons In a Connected World

"Vitalik Buterin is unique in his robust, technical, and perspicacious approach to good intentions. He is one of the principal 'good guys' in the epochal, if uncertain, emergence of a world-to-come in which digital networks become as useful as they ought to be. This book is nerdy on the surface, but read with an open mind it is dramatic. It’s about the quest to figure out how the world can be better. There is no greater game and nothing more suspenseful or more filled with love."
—Jaron Lanier, computer scientist and author of You Are Not a Gadget

"Over the last decade, Buterin has become arguably the core public intellectual on the nonfinancial side of crypto. His new book, “Proof of Stake,” is a collection of long, thoughtful essays that taken together lay out a vision of crypto as a truly transformative technology — one with the potential to revolutionize everything from city governance to voting systems to online identity."
—Ezra Klein, New York Times podcast "Ezra Klein Show"

"Vitalik Buterin is one of the most influential creators of our generation primarily thanks to Ethereum, of course, but also because of his written work, which until now, has come in the form of white papers, blog posts, and tweets. But here we have the privilege of reading Vitalik's first book! Like most of his work, it is sure to become a must-read in the cryptocurrency space, as it dives into the heart of Ethereum—its consensus mechanism—which will be key to understanding the heart of the internet itself as web3 grows."
—Camila Russo, author of The Infinite Machine, founder of The Defiant

"Vitalik Buterin is one of the most important thinkers in crypto. His creation, Ethereum, has been the platform that launched nearly all of the big crypto trends of the last several years. He is also one of the field’s clearest communicators, which is why this compendium of his writing is a crucial contribution to development of a new technology that will impact all of our lives."
—Laura Shin, host of the Unchained podcast and author of The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze

“Vitalik Buterin is not only a great innovator, he is also a great and important thinker. The essays collected in this book prove that, and so many of them have more real substance than entire books by many other people.” 
—Tyler Cowen, Professor of economics, George Mason University

"I’ve never been more excited about the potential of the Internet, and that’s largely thanks to Vitalik Buterin."
—Alexis Ohanian(co-founder, Reddit), TIME  

"[Vitalik] Buterin is an extremely thorough and complex thinker: He’s trying to solve both problems that exist today and those that might exist in 20 years, with regards to privacy, housing, city planning, voting systems, and much more. And he’s still only 28, and growing into his role as a public figure. To me, it seems highly likely that this story only marks the start—as opposed to the peak—of his influence on the world."
—Andrew R. Chow on his March 2022 TIME cover profile of Vitalik Buterin

"Vitalik Buterin, creator of the fast-growing new cryptocurrency network Ethereum, wants to use his technology to disrupt, well, everything."
—Fortune

"[Vitalik Buterin's] vision has become a rallying cry. . . a technological crusade for increased access, transparency, and accountability. . . . A new economy in which anyone can participate on their own terms." —Wired

 “I saw him on the commuter train and he was wearing mismatched Hello Kitty socks. . . . And this is the person building the infrastructure that is challenging the power structures of the most important financial institutions out there.” —Wired
 
"An indispensable voice of authority with a great talent for untangling and explaining the technicalities of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies." —Wired

From the Publisher

2022-08-11
A wonky excursion into the world of cryptocurrency and computer-generated governance.

Bitcoin uses an elaborate set of algorithms to provide “proof of work,” showing that a computer has been active in its role of “mining” digital coinage. Ethereum, founded by Buterin (b. 1994), aims for “proof of stake”—i.e., that participants in its digital realm demonstrate their legitimacy by virtue of their holdings alone, buying and selling them ethically without trying to game the system. In this collection of writings, mostly blog posts and talks, the famed billionaire who sleeps on other people’s couches takes on heady matters: the nature of the blockchain mechanism that safeguards crypto transactions and that may have broader uses as furthering a “way to pool together our money and support public projects that help create the society we want to see”; the seigniorage aspect of cryptocurrency; the extensibility of crypto techniques to develop decentralized business agreements and contracts. Blockchains, the be-all and end-all in some cryptolibertarian systems, are in Buterin’s eyes merely convenient means to ends, “simply marginally better than the next available tool for the job.” Nevertheless, they have allowed the author to reimagine Ethereum as not just a marketplace, but a platform for social change: more equitable justice provided by a kind of open-source judiciary, a means of decentralizing power to put it into the hands (and keyboards) of ordinary people, not governments or corporations. Buterin is an earnest and decidedly technical writer; it helps to know mathematics, economics, and computer science to follow some of his denser arguments. Yet he has a playful side, too, as when he unveils a game called 1.58-dimensional chess,” so named “because the twenty-seven open squares are chosen according to a pattern based in the Sierpinski triangle.”

Numerate computer whizzes are the key audience, but there’s something for lesser mortals on most pages.

Kirkus Reviews