Top all-time · #559
Vitalik Buterin
Personal blog · vitalik.eth.limoeconomicsphilosophymath
Vitalik Buterin's personal blog at vitalik.eth.limo covers economics, philosophy and math. Since 2021, 106 different Hacker News readers have linked it 166 times, most often “From prediction markets to info finance”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-31, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 10 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Vitalik Buterin's blog as a reference on Ethereum, zero-knowledge proofs, prediction markets and blockchain governance. Commenters call it an excellent resource and a good, plain-English treatment of several topics.
- Recommended for · 10 comments
- Called an "excellent resource", "a good treatment of the topic" and "great"; one commenter says another explanation is less plain-English than his.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- From prediction markets to info finance6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2024-11-09
- Why I support privacy6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2025-04-14
- What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-07-24
- Galaxy brain resistance5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-11-08
- What do I think about Community Notes?(Vitalik Buterin)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-08-16
- Plurality Philosophy in an Oversized Nutshell4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-08-21
- The Three Transitions3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-06-09
- Vitalik.eth: An overview of different types of ZK-EVMs and ZK-EVM-like projects3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-08-04
- Obfuscation: Building the Final Boss of Cryptography3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-06-29
- I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-07-07
What Hacker News says?
While it's not here yet, Vitalik's future plans for Ethereum involve making it possible to run validators on smartwatches[1], which is far more accessibly decentralized than BTC could be and far more possible with Ethereum's PoS consensus as opposed to PoW, without needing to cripple transaction speed to boot. [1]: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/23/futures4.html
Comment linking /general/2024/10/23/futures4.html
on “El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender”Submitted Digital minimalism as a story · 343 points
HN discussionhttps://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/01/31/end.html#section... Vitalik touched upon this briefly in an other-wise long and wide-reaching essay. I think its a good treatment of the topic that the author is talking about. He categorizes the ecosystem broadly into 4 cohorts- [token holders] (which includes investors, speculators, etc.), [pragmatic users] (actual end-users who spend crypto to buy stuff), [intellectuals…
Comment linking /general/2024/01/31/end.html
on “I wasted years of my life in crypto”Submitted Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here? as a story · 271 points
HN discussionhttps://vitalik.eth.limo is an excellent resource. You’ll see that his thinking, and the thinking of people like him, is a lot more advanced than the thought processes of the armchair experts who seem to have dedicated their lives to “exposing” this industry to be “one giant scam.” I can’t think of a better resource off the top of my head.
Comment linking /
on “Twitter’s founder admits that shutting down the API was “worst thing we did””Submitted Memory access is O(N^[1/3]) as a story · 189 points
HN discussion> it is not technically decentralized, it is Twitter (a centralized platform) Community notes are generated by users and not the platform it's not perfect but better than having a mainstream media oligopoly deciding what is truth and what isn't. > If it were truly fully decentralized, it would be vulnerable to such attacks even more, right? The algorithm tries to prevent this kind of abuse. "the Community Notes rati…
Comment linking /general/2023/08/16/communitynotes.html
on “"If nothing changes, all remaining Nitter instances will go down eventually"”Submitted I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft as a story · 134 points
HN discussionZk-Snark means Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge. It's fairly cutting edge cryptography. It is very fragmented as the industry is rapidly evolving. If I may recommend, a good article on zk Snarks from Vitalik: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/01/26/snarks.html ZK proofs allow you to prove you know the answer to something without revealing the answer itself. You may not need to know h…
Comment linking /general/2021/01/26/snarks.html
on “Tim Berners-Lee: Web3 is not the web”Submitted Possible futures for the Ethereum protocol, part 2: The Surge as a story · 95 points
HN discussion1) I'm hosting a blog on my ENS domain - this cannot be censored and this exact version will always be available for anyone to access (as long as someone's pinned it on IPFS). So it solves a real problem that DNS does not. For example, you can checkout Vitalik's blog at https://vitalik.eth.limo/ 2) I was in Budapest and had lost my debit card and was in need for Euros - I literally looked up the closest Bitcoin ATM,…
Comment linking /
on “Do kwon sent $80M a month to secret wallets?”Submitted How do layer 2s differ from execution sharding? as a story · 90 points
HN discussion> The lack of a formal market for land has not made land any cheaper, it has simply shifted the price from being denominated in money-dollars, to time-dollars and pain-in-the-butt-dollars. Vitalik writes about this too: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/08/22/prices.html
Comment linking /general/2021/08/22/prices.html
on “Land value tax in online games and virtual worlds (2022)”Submitted The End of My Childhood as a story · 82 points
HN discussionThats why we need to go even further: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/06/28/zkid.html
Comment linking /general/2025/06/28/zkid.html
on “Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology”Submitted Against choosing your political allegiances based on who is "pro-crypto" as a story · 78 points
HN discussionAnyone have a good explanation on the intuition of non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs? For example, I thought the "paint-mixing" analogy for Diffie-Hellman key exchange ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie–Hellman_key_exchange#Ge... ) really helped me handwave the math into "mixing easy, unmixing hard". https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/11/27/zero-kno... was a good intro for interactive ZK proofs bu…
Comment linking /general/2017/11/09/starks_part_1.html
on “Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology”Submitted Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again as a story · 70 points
HN discussion> The lack of a formal market for land has not made land any cheaper, it has simply shifted the price from being denominated in money-dollars, to time-dollars and pain-in-the-butt-dollars. Vitalik writes about this too: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/08/22/prices.html
Comment linking /general/2021/08/22/prices.html
on “Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns”Submitted Let a thousand societies bloom as a story · 37 points
HN discussionhttps://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/06/28/zkid.html Counter Points
Comment linking /general/2025/06/28/zkid.html
on “The future is not self-hosted, but self-sovereign”Submitted Glue and Coprocessor Architectures as a story · 35 points
HN discussionhttps://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/08/04/zkevm.html "Type 1 aims to replicate Ethereum exactly, and so it has no way of mitigating these inefficiencies. At present, proofs for Ethereum blocks take many hours to produce. This can be mitigated either by clever engineering to massively parallelize the prover or in the longer term by ZK-SNARK ASICs." ... "Personally, my hope is that everything becomes Type 1 over tim…
Comment linking /general/2022/08/04/zkevm.html
on “The Merge”Submitted Plinko PIR Tutorial as a story · 22 points
HN discussionYes, as long as the passports implement a signing scheme, and the set of valid public keys (the electorate) can be agreed upon. If you can sign arbitrary data, then you can sign other public keys, including whatever the voting system requires. Vitalik has a great blog post about blockchain voting. https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/05/25/voting2.html You probably wouldn't want to use the cryptography on the passp…
Comment linking /general/2021/05/25/voting2.html
on “The cryptography behind electronic passports”Submitted Glue and Coprocessor Architectures as a story · 21 points
HN discussionThe irony here is that long term, ETH will use ASICs for zk-snarks. Vitalik just published a document where he said that is his preference [1]. "Type 1 aims to replicate Ethereum exactly, and so it has no way of mitigating these inefficiencies. At present, proofs for Ethereum blocks take many hours to produce. This can be mitigated either by clever engineering to massively parallelize the prover or in the longer ter…
Comment linking /general/2022/08/04/zkevm.html
on “Ethereum Goerli testnet merge goes live before move to proof-of-stake”Submitted I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft as a story · 12 points
HN discussionSome areas you might want to consider looking into. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/06/15/using_snarks.htm... Obviously this requires companies to embrace said technologies.
Comment linking /general/2022/06/15/using_snarks.html
on “Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry”Submitted A simple explanation of a/(b+c) + b/(c+a) + c/(a+b) = 4 as a story · 11 points
HN discussion
