Buterin's Strategy Against Heartless Power

In a major blog post published this week, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined his long-term strategy to combat the relentless centralization of power. Through “Balance of Power,” he offered a critical perspective on three main threats: Big Business, Big Government, and Big Mob.

The Problem: Power Without Checks and Balances

Buterin started with a clear observation: the historical mechanisms that balanced societal forces have almost entirely disappeared. Rapid technological growth and automation have enabled powerful organizations to accelerate their control at unprecedented speeds. He pointed out the rapid consolidation of power among tech giants and government agencies, both leveraging economies of scale to boost their influence.

The landscape of Silicon Valley has also changed. Leaders who once held strong libertarian ideas have pivoted and actively seek to gain more power from the government. This demonstrates how innovation is becoming a tool of centralization.

Mandatory Diffusion: The Strategy of Openness

Natural friction is no longer sufficient to prevent full centralization. Therefore, a strategic approach is needed: the promotion of diffusion or openness. This is the core of his proposal.

The strategy revolves around “adversarial interoperability” — creating tools that can be integrated into existing platforms without permission. This includes ad blockers, AI filters, and systems that enable value transfer without relying on centralized financial chokepoints. Sci-Hub is one of the best examples of this approach: by being “open,” it has delivered justice to science through voluntary diffusion.

The strategy is simple but powerful: the puzzle is “how can we build a thriving civilization in the 21st century without excessive concentration of power?” Buterin’s answer: “Implement broader diffusion.”

Pluralism Morality and the Role of Crypto

Buterin does not seek to concentrate all power into large entities. Instead, he advocates for a “pluralism morality” — a set of morals that encourage participants to be powerful but prevent them from becoming hegemonic.

He used Lido, the Ethereum-based liquid staking protocol, as an example of this strategy in action. Despite holding about 24% of the staked ETH supply, Lido is less feared than a centralized entity of similar size because of its internal decentralized DAO structure. “Lido is not monolithic: it is an internal decentralized DAO with dozens of operators,” Buterin wrote. But he also emphasized that the community carefully guards against Lido controlling the majority of the stake.

This is the strategy: not complete power accumulation, but its balance. Crypto and blockchain provide tools to implement this strategy within the digital economy, enabling individuals to fight consolidation of power through transparency and open architecture.