Vitalik does not particularly follow the ETH price

Ethereum founder Vitalik recently published two blog posts, sparking speculation about his current thoughts. Despite the drop in ETH price, Vitalik does not seem to be overly concerned about it.

On March 29, Vitalik published two articles reflecting his current line of thinking.

The Year Wheel Model of Culture and Politics

Vitalik proposed the "political and cultural cycle model" in his first article. He pointed out that a culture's attitude towards new things arises from the prevailing ideas and incentive mechanisms of a specific period, while its attitude towards old things is mainly influenced by status quo bias.

Each period forms new growth rings on the cultural "tree", while shaping people's views on new things. Once these boundaries are set, it is difficult to change them, and new growth rings grow accordingly, influencing the attitudes towards the next wave of topics.

Vitalik used this model to explain multiple phenomena, including the trend of deregulation in the United States, tax policies, attitudes towards dangerous activities, social media regulation, and the differing strategies of China and the United States in the field of artificial intelligence.

He believes that changing a culture's attitude towards existing things is very difficult. A more straightforward approach is to invent new behavioral patterns to surpass the old ones and strive for good norms. This can be achieved by developing new technologies or trying out new social norms in online communities.

Vitalik stated that this is also one of the attractions of the crypto space: it provides an independent technological and cultural foundation to do new things without being overly constrained by existing biases.

From Public Goods Funding to Open Source Funding

In the second article, Vitalik suggests shifting the focus of the discussion from "public goods funding" to "open source funding."

He pointed out that the term "public goods" is often misunderstood in public discussions as "products produced by the government," rather than based on the characteristics of the project itself. Moreover, it is commonly believed that the funding of public goods lacks rigor and is easily influenced by social games.

In contrast, the term "open source" has a clear and widely recognized definition. Most obvious digital public goods are open source, such as academic research, documentation tutorials, and open source software.

Vitalik believes that although there are some differences between "open source" and "public goods", focusing on "open source" may be more effective in the digital realm. Even for public goods in physical space, the most effective way to provide them globally often involves open source.

He emphasized that open source does not mean "anything built as long as it is open source is equally noble." It is important to build and open source projects that are most valuable to humanity. Distinguishing which projects are worth supporting remains a primary task of the public goods financing mechanism.