Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has warned about the perils of closed technology. In a Sept. 24 blog post, Buterin said that private infrastructure in areas like health, digital identity and civic technology may result in monopolization, exploitation and the concentration of power toward a small number of actors. He cautioned that progress in this direction could be detrimental to society.
Vitalik Buterin argued for a move toward “full-stack openness and verifiability,” in other words, transparency across software, hardware and biological systems. He thinks that a civilization that encourages its citizens to produce open technology, not simply consume it, will win the future.
His opinion is quite the reversal from what he previously stood by -permissive licensing. His position now is in favor of stronger “copyleft” licensing, which forces developers to share improvements they make on open-source code.
Vitalik Buterin also attacked on his blog the move by the crypto industry towards more competitive and commercial practices. The increasing emphasis on commercialism, he said, has rendered voluntary code sharing undependable. He considers the open-source movement critical not only in moving forward with the industry, but also for the world.
Buterin’s call for openness spreads to hardware verification and even biological systems. He imagines a world in which personal devices like smartphones possess the same capabilities and security as crypto wallets but are also inspectable, like mechanical watches.
Buterin’s philosophy found a supportive ally in the Ethereum Foundation, which donated $500,000 to help fund the legal defense for Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm. The Solana Policy Institute also donated $500,000. Both groups maintain that the prosecution of open-source coders is an alarming precedent and could prove to be criminalizing for other developers working to create privacy tools.
He also singled out health tech as a sector where closed systems might contribute to perpetuating global disparities. He cited as an example the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine. There was a bottleneck in the vaccine production among some countries and this resulted in huge inequalities between rich and impoverished countries.
Source: Vitalik
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Buterin was also concerned about personal health tracking systems. When health data is the private property of big companies, this can create dangers such as extortion, location surveillance and price gouging by insurance companies. He urged companies to build open-source designs for tools like biomonitors and air-quality sensors — hardware that communities could test on their own.
His vision even contains open-source, verifiable public surveillance systems which serve as a kind of “digital guard dogs.” Such systems would add transparency, allowing the public to audit the equipment at any time. Vitalik Buterin pointed to the importance of legal frameworks that preserve public right to inspect such surveillance tools.
Buterin also spoke about civic tech, and lambasted proprietary electronic voting systems. He maintained that closed “black box” software used in such systems is incompatible with democratic participation. Examples of the need for transparency would include the Massachusetts court ruling that struck down evidence from breathalyzers due to undisclosed lack of accurate calibration, Vitalik Buterin said.
Source: Vitalik
Vitalik Buterin’s grand vision even extends to national security, and he believes open alternatives could help make defense better. Given the continuous evolution of both technologies, he recommended relying on open-source security systems so that the collection could be narrowed to specific threats and by extension prevent surveillance when unnecessary.
He conceded that pushing for verifiability might involve trade-offs, like less optimization and business model headaches. But he believes such trade-offs are worth it, especially for high-security uses.
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