Foresight News reported that Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin replied to X user @yishan's post 'Things you used to strongly believe but changed your mind about after learning more.' He stated, 'I no longer focus on math and cryptographic protocols as I did 10 years ago; now I use math to make rough initial guesses and try to avoid the worst-case scenarios, rather than explaining behavior on average.'
Vitalik's interest in economics is also waning. He wrote, 'I spent a lot of time in my first five years in the crypto world trying to invent an optimally governable mechanism that could be mathematically proven, but ultimately found that what I was looking for is impossible to achieve. The most important variables that determine the success or failure of existing flawed systems in practice (often the level of coordination among participant subgroups, but also factors of 'culture') were variables I did not consider modeling at the time.'