Thursday links: Vibecoding, detotalization, a golden path, prediction markets

Ethereum as sanctuary technology

Vitalik has a new north star for the Ethereum community: detotalization.

Rooted in Jean-Paul Sartre’s ideas on “totalization,” “detotalization” pushes back against the tendency for society to coalesce into a single, all-encompassing whole.

For Sartre, that was mostly about resisting the suffocating weight of social norms and bureaucratic structures.

For Vitalik, it’s about building technology that empowers people to opt out of centralized control.

So far, he doesn’t think Ethereum has done a very good job of it: “Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better.”

He even excludes it from a shortlist of the world’s liberating technologies: Starlink, Signal, Community Notes, and locally-run, open-weight LLMs.

But he thinks Ethereum can do better — by aiming a little lower: “Let's stop trying to win the whole game and instead build a new game that can’t be rigged by whoever happens to be winning at the moment.”

I think that should resonate with anyone who doesn’t like the current or any future winning side (aka, everyone).

Crypto’s Golden Path

Evgeny Gaevoy, founder of Wintermute, has put out a call-to-arms for crypto builders that aligns with Vitalik’s vision: “The means to escape will be the only things worth building.”

Gaevoy thinks crypto “learned exactly the wrong lessons” from the opposition it faced during the Biden administration: “Instead of doubling down on being free we thought we would win by getting the right people in the right places.”

The crypto industry has gotten everything it lobbied for and more: Stablecoins are regulated, the SEC is staffed with crypto advocates, and the President has a memecoin.

But Gaevoy would prefer if we had never asked for the government’s permission: “Our fight should be to create something that simply cannot be controlled.”

This leads him to some out-of-fashion opinions.

On governance: “DAOs were the right way and I am actually talking about the ones that DIDN’T work.”

On crypto dollars: “Make algo stablecoins great again.”

Yes, he even means Terra-Luna: “DAI and UST were not the wrong approaches, per se.” 

Like Vitalik, he thinks crypto has mostly failed as a liberating technology, bemoaning that it’s “impossible to completely scatter into the ‘better’ parallel crypto world even if it existed.” 

But he also agrees that it’s not too late: “We can at least (re)start building something for others to escape into.”

He doesn’t mind if this is a minority opinion: “Most of us will choose to coexist with the Leviathan,” Gaevoy concludes. “The ones left will build the exits, and (maybe) get back what we lost.”

I’d argue that would be good for the majority, too: All of crypto will be better off if it rebuilds the cypherpunk credibility that originally drew people in.

Polymarket drops the bomb (market)

Bowing to criticism, Polymarket has stopped people from betting on the probability of a nuclear detonation occurring.

At the time it was pulled, the market put the odds of a nuclear detonation before year’s end — deliberate, accidental, or in testing — at 24%.

That does seem like good information to have. I’d like to think that if the market was, say, 80%, it would get the attention of the intelligence agencies, who would then go find out why and, ideally, stop it from happening. 

That would be the best possible example of George Soros’ dictum that financial markets are constantly anticipating things that fail to happen “exactly because they have been anticipated.”

But the opposite might happen, too: You don’t want to give someone with the ability to cause a nuclear detonation a financial incentive to do so.

Seems unlikely in this case, but with nuclear weapons, it’s probably best not to risk it.

It’s also not a risk worth taking for the prediction markets themselves.

In 2003, the Defense Department asked researchers to create prediction markets on “things we care about,” as Robin Hanson tells it.

Before the markets even launched, two US Senators accused the project of creating “terrorism futures” — prediction markets on the likelihood of individual terrorist attacks.

No such market was planned, but the accusation stuck and the entire program was canceled almost immediately.

To avoid cancellation of today’s much-bigger prediction markets, Polymarket should be more careful what kinds of bets they offer.

Stablecoins are for vibecoders

Noah Levine of a16z explains why most existing businesses won’t use stablecoins and why many new businesses will.

The great hope for stablecoins has always been about disrupting the credit-card business by undercutting the interchange fees they charge. Levine, who works in crypto and wanted that thesis to be right, says it isn’t. 

Crypto advocates underestimated the enemy, because credit cards do more than move money: They extend credit, pre-authorize transactions, and absorb the risk of fraud and chargebacks.

Stablecoins can’t compete with those services. 

But they can offer some services that credit-card companies cannot.

Stablecoins enable merchants to get paid with no application, no approval, no credit history, and no waiting for a processor to say yes.

"These merchants will not be choosing stablecoins over cards,” Levine says. “They will be choosing stablecoins over nothing."

The AI-coding boom is creating new kinds of businesses that aren’t really businesses — no website, no legal entity, no track record. Just a person who built a tool that other people’s agents keep calling.

There will soon be millions of these non-business businesses.

“I see vibe coders build tools like this every week,” Levine says. “The first question is always, ‘How do I get paid?’ For most of them, the answer right now is that they cannot.”

So the killer app for crypto rails might not be the harder-than-expected task of disrupting banks. 

Just giving AI agents a wallet should be enough.

— Byron Gilliam

The building blocks for a new, composable financial system are here. Digital cash and wallets are poised to rewire the global payment stack, but how will it all unfold?

Join this live Blockworks Roundtable to hear frontier takes from experts across the revamped global payments stack including Canton, Hifi and Dfns. Happening March 10th!

^{In partnership with Canton}