Collection of Buterin's essays from Bitcoin magazine, his blog, and other sources

Introduction / by Nathan Schneider -- Markets, institutions, and currencies -- a new method of social incentivization -- Ethereum : a next-generation cryptocurrency and decentralized application platform -- Self-enforcing contracts and factum law -- On silos -- Superrationality and DAOs -- The value of blockchain technology -- Why cryptoeconomics and X-risk researchers should listen to each other more -- A proof-of-stake design philosophy -- The meaning of decentralization -- Notes on blockchain governance -- On collusion -- On free speech -- Control as liability -- Christmas special -- Credible neutrality as a guiding principle -- Coordination, good and bad -- Prediction markets : tales from the election -- The most important scarce resource is legitimacy -- Against overuse of the Gini coefficient -- Moving beyond coin-voting governance -- Trust models -- Crypto cities -- Soulbound

"After Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin dropped out of college and launched Bitcoin Magazine, he wrote the Ethereum white paper, which proposed an open source system that would take what Bitcoin did for money and do it for everything else: contracts, social networks, and sharing economies. Now, less than a decade later, his idea is valued at about half a trillion dollars, and it is the foundation for the weird new world of NFT artworks, virtual real estate, and decentralized autonomous organizations. Understanding and engaging with Buterin's ideas will be of growing importance as the consequences of his invention continue to unfold and inspire debate worldwide. These writings, collected from his essays before and during the rise of Ethereum, reveal Buterin to be a vivid and imaginative writer, and this edition includes context from media studies scholar Nathan Schneider. While many around him were focused on seeing the value of their tokens rise, Buterin was working through the problems and possibilities of crafting an Internet-native world"--