Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin's explosive new essay "Balance of Power" warns that humanity faces an unprecedented crisis as governments, corporations, and mob forces simultaneously grow stronger while traditional checks collapse.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a groundbreaking manifesto titled "Balance of Power," warning that humanity faces an unprecedented crisis as Big Government, Big Business, and Big Mob simultaneously grow stronger while traditional checks and balances crumble. The 240,000-word essay challenges conventional thinking about technological progress and societal structure.
According to WuBlockchain on X, Vitalik Buterin published an article, "Balance of Power," where he emphasized that preventing the excessive concentration of power is key to avoiding societal crises while advancing technology, economy, and culture globally.
Buterin argues that centuries-old assumptions about natural limits to power concentration no longer hold true in 2025. Distance once constrained empires, but digital technology erased geographical boundaries. Coordination challenges once limited company size, but automation and AI changed everything. The essay describes this new reality as "the dense jungle" where all powerful forces operate at unprecedented scale.
Decentralization as Humanity's Last Defense Against Monopolistic Control
The Ethereum founder identifies a mathematical inevitability driving concentration: economies of scale create exponential growth advantages. An entity with twice the resources can achieve more than twice the progress, leading to runaway dominance. Historically, two forces counterbalanced this—diseconomies of scale from inefficiency and diffusion of knowledge between competitors.
Modern technology disrupts both safeguards. Buterin explains that rapid automation allows global operations with minimal human coordination costs, while proprietary software and hardware enable distribution without transparency. Companies can deploy products worldwide without revealing underlying technology, preventing reverse engineering that once spread innovation.
The solution centers on what Buterin calls "mandated diffusion"—forcing powerful entities to share technological capabilities or face exclusion from markets. He cites EU standardization mandates like USB-C requirements, China's forced technology transfer rules, and US bans on non-compete agreements as existing examples. These policies make tacit knowledge inside companies partially open source.
Buterin proposes aggressive new mechanisms including carbon-style border taxes proportional to product proprietary levels, Harberger taxes on intellectual property, and most controversially, widespread adversarial interoperability—creating products that plug into existing platforms without permission.
Corporate Evil Meets Government Surveillance in Trillion-Dollar Convergence
The essay sharply criticizes billionaire philanthropy's transformation from counterbalance to government merger. Buterin contrasts libertarian exit-focused tech culture circa 2013 with today's direct political engagement by Silicon Valley executives. He states this represents two extremely powerful factions that should balance each other instead merging together.
This critique extends to cryptocurrency itself. Buterin points to insider allocation percentages in new crypto launches rising from under 10% around 2009 to over 70% by 2021, mirroring marijuana THC concentration increases—both industries starting organic and hobbyist before profit maximization consumed user interests.
The balance of power framework reveals why corporations become simultaneously evil and boring. Commonality of motive drives all large companies toward profit maximization regardless of social cost. Commonality of agency means one billion-dollar company shapes its environment far more aggressively than one hundred ten-million-dollar companies, creating urban homogeneity and cultural sterility.
Video games exemplify this trajectory—transitioning from fulfillment-focused experiences to slot machine mechanisms extracting maximum revenue. Even prediction markets shifted from pro-social governance improvement toward sports betting. Buterin argues this "soullessness" stems from large-scale actors possessing both identical motivations and concentrated power to bend surrounding environments.
The essay champions d/acc—defensive acceleration—as complementary strategy making pluralism safer. Building defensive technology that keeps pace with offensive capabilities while remaining open and accessible reduces the need for protective power concentration. Zero-knowledge proofs, decentralized exchanges, and adversarial interoperability tools form what Buterin calls "the cube of d/acc technologies."
His proposed pluralist morality states: "You are not allowed to be hegemonic, but you are encouraged to be impactful, and to empower others." This synthesizes slave morality's prohibition on power with master morality's command toward power, creating a "power to" versus "power over" distinction.
Buterin uses Ethereum's decentralized staking pool Lido as a practical example. Despite controlling 24% of staked ETH, the platform avoids centralization fears through internal decentralization across dozens of operators and dual governance giving stakers veto power. He credits Lido for significant decentralization efforts while maintaining the Ethereum community's insistence that no single entity should dominate total stake.
The manifesto concludes by rejecting the vulnerable world hypothesis—the fear that technological progress inevitably empowers catastrophic actors, requiring preemptive power concentration. Instead, Buterin argues defensive technology distributed broadly creates safety without surrendering freedom or innovation to centralized controllers.
His vision demands that projects develop explicit "decentralization models" alongside business models, structurally limiting their ability to accumulate dangerous power levels regardless of good intentions. The alternative, he warns, is a world where government monopolies, corporate behemoths, and populist mobs crush the pluralistic civil society that enables human flourishing.
Key Takeaways:
- Vitalik warns economies of scale create exponential power concentration threatening balance between forces
- Mandated technology diffusion and adversarial interoperability proposed as solutions to prevent hegemony
- Silicon Valley's merger with government power criticized as abandoning libertarian counterbalance principles
Stay updated on the latest cryptocurrency news on our homepage.
Explore more in Ethereum News Category.
Related reading:
Key Topics
Crypto New Live
admin@cryptonewslive.org
Vitalik Warns: Big Tech & Government Power Crisis
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin's "Balance of Power" essay exposes how Big Government, Big Business, and Big Mob threaten civilization