Vitalik Buterin

Vitalik Buterin (born 1994) is the Russian-Canadian programmer who conceived Ethereum at 19 and launched it in 2015, creating the world’s second-largest blockchain and the substrate for smart contracts, DeFi, and NFTs. He is also one of tech’s most idiosyncratic public thinkers — and a longtime donor to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and other AI-safety causes, years before the topic went mainstream.

d/acc and the soft pause

In November 2023 Buterin published “My techno-optimism,” coining d/acc — defensive, decentralized acceleration — as a middle path between effective accelerationism and degrowth: build technology aggressively, but favor tools that defend and distribute power rather than concentrate it. In his January 2025 follow-up, “d/acc: one year later,” he confronted superintelligence directly, writing that it may arrive in five years or fifty, that the default outcome is not automatically positive, and sketching a “soft pause” of last resort: industrial-scale AI hardware fitted with chips requiring weekly sign-off from international bodies, capable of throttling global compute if catastrophe loomed.

Buterin was careful to frame the mechanism as conditional — he would push for it only if convinced the world needs something more “muscular” than liability rules. His other stated fear points the opposite direction from most doomers: not just rogue AI, but AI cementing an irreversible concentration of human power. That dual worry keeps him estranged from both camps — accelerationists read the pause as betrayal, while hard-line safetyists like Eliezer Yudkowsky find his timelines and remedies too gentle.