vitalik on snowmoon ness
vitalik buterin on snowmoon ness
[intro’d to snowmoon via devansh on snowmoon ness as he was quote tweeting vitalik]
so.. via vitalik tweet [https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/2104216824258932907?s=20]:
Also this thing is done now https://vitalik.eth.limo/snowmoon/
notes/quotes from ch 32 (last chapter):
“We might have that peace, we might not. We can hope for the best, but we have to be ready for all possibilities.”
“Zei, what do you think?”
“AI is the start of the conversation, not the answer. What kind of AI is it? How do we train it? Who trains it? What instructions do we give it? Who feeds the AI information, and who intervenes in the AI’s thought process to assist it?“
this is why we need tech/ai w/o judgment
“How would you answer that?”
“*I would first take a step back and ask what the problems are. And I think **I have noticed one. Veridian institutions, as they exist today, don’t really have a built-in concept of predicting the future. It‘s all about the present, and public opinion in the present.”
*huge.. and we’re missing it.. ie: taleb center of problem law; gupta roadblock law; et al.. by not letting go of all the irrelevant s/cancerous distractions.. ie: predict\able ness et al.. graeber unpredictability/surprise law.. graeber can’t know law.. et al
if we want the dance to dance.. we need a problem deep enough to resonate w/8b today.. via a mechanism simple enough to be accessible/usable to 8b today.. in an ecosystem open enough to set/keep 8b legit free
ie: org around a problem deep enough (aka: org around legit needs) to resonate w/8b today.. via a mechanism simple enough (aka: tech as it could be) to be accessible/usable to 8b today.. and an ecosystem open enough (aka: sans any form of m\a\p) to set/keep 8b legit free
“There’s no position where you have to stand up and say – if we do X, then Y will happen – and you rise up if you’re right, and fall if you’re wrong. The closest is Acolytes, that have to predict the Sentinels. But even there, they’re not predicting the real world. They’re predicting Sentinels. So they’re still just predicting *other people’s opinions. You’ve **aligning people to each other, but you’re not aligning people to reality.”
rather *other people’s whalespeak
rather *to other whales.. so no possibility of ‘reality’ ness.. ie: hari rat park law et al
“That’s where AI could do very well – it’s where AI already has done very well for us. But I don’t think we should pick one AI, we should have some kind of open competition of them. AI should be a player, not the game. Let different people choose different AIs and different ways of working with them, and hold them accountable to the goals.”
only done ‘well’ at predicting/perpetuating same song
“Should a society have goals?”
to me. no. just itch-in-the-soul.. graeber unpredictability/surprise law et al
Zei stared at Verdow.
“What do you mean?”
“The Arctics are better at having goals than any of our nations. They know exactly what they want, and are single-minded about achieving it. If you make a perfect goal-executing machine, the Arctics are what you get.”
“That’s why you need the other piece – being able to gather together different people’s goals and add them up, so you know that you’re achieving the actual goals of the people, and not just one emperor.”
if mathing them.. not about people (organism as fractal) anyway
“But what if any goal you come up with and write down on a piece of paper ends up looking like that?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if *part of the human condition is that we don’t fully know what we want, and any attempt to crystallize it into one piece breaks down if you push it far enough? We see this with our rubrics: they work for some time, then eventually they get gamed, and then we adjust the rubrics, and repeat. What if that’s unavoidable?”
rather.. *the whale conditions is that we don’t grok legit needs..
“Then what’s the alternative?”
“Think of a lake, full of water. Every molecule of water in the lake acts independently. There is no master plan. There are only trillions of molecules dreaming trillions of dreams. The lake has a harmony and balance to it, we can all see that. But it’s not because anyone forces that balance to happen, it’s because if any one part of the lake’s surface ends up lower than the other parts for even a brief moment, then gravity will attract water to flow in, and the height everywhere will be the same again.”
glimmers here of the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]
“But also, when winter comes, the molecules come together, into thick crystalline structures of impenetrable ice.”
“You understand physics well.”
“My daughter is starting to study chemistry, she has been telling me a lot about it. Her friends think she’s over-working, but I’ve been encouraging her – I told her that if she studies hard, one day she can be just like you.”
Zei blushed.
“So that’s what I think the ideal is. A society that can do the good of ordinary life but not the evil of empire and conquest. One that can both resist the Arctic Empire, and avoid becoming one, and instead prosper peacefully one step at a time.”
no legit peace if still talking prosper ness
“It’s hard to agree on what we want, it’s easier to agree on what we don’t want. I think that’s the asymmetry that we build everything on top of. In the winter, we all align in the same direction, and we can form the crystal, and defend and strike back. In the summer, we flow like water. Decentralized forces – markets, open intellectual discourse, open science, culture and law – passively make the trillion forces of our trillion dreams add more often than they subtract. We adjust their rules over time, but only carefully and slowly. The natural, gentle progress we make from decades upon decades of that is worth more than satisfying any goal.”
if intell/science/law/market/et-al.. not legit dream (itch-in-the-soul)
“What if sometimes different parts of the lake have to be water and ice at the same time?”
“That may be.”
“And what if a lake where every point is at the exact same height as every other point is also a kind of uniformity that we don’t want, and sometimes it’s better if we form snowballs and let them float?”
“That too may be.”
“Seila, what do you think we should do more?”
“The Arctics have competition – they care about who’s better and who’s worse, and they encourage people to challenge each other and strive and try to rise to the top – but they do not understand cooperation. They are ice without the water. Veridia has cooperation, but maybe we do not understand competition. We can be water, but we don’t yet know how to be ice – and even our water does not always flow as well as we would like. Actually I think it’s Dzego that’s figured out how to have both, and make them serve each other. We should learn from them more.”
oi.. same song.. any form of m\a\p
She sighed deeply. After a few moments, Verdow replied again.
“These are all good thoughts.”
“Zei, would you be interested in staying back and helping us figure out some of these issues?”
Zei thought for a moment.
“I’m sure Mu and Su can handle the Kungaupei well”, Gladias interjected.
“Of course! Though you might find Fin will be even more helpful than I am.”
“Well I appreciate it. You know, Parliament realizes now that their current ways of thinking have hit their limits. Many senators have resigned. The ones who are still there – like me – we want new ideas. We’re open to listening.”
the new/diff idea is that it’s all about listening .. or rather.. that we need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening – so we can hear what’s already on each heart as global detox in order to org around legit needs
ie: imagine if we listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
Verdow stood up, and walked over slowly to a map of the world that was printed on the side of the office wall.
“This is our world. Ninety million people. Gladias, Seila, Zei, have you ever wondered what things might be like if it was nine hundred million, or nine billion?”
“I have not. Why do you ask?”
“The larger the population, the faster new technologies get invented. That’s why the medieval era was so stagnant, and why things are moving so much faster today. But no matter how large the population, everyone still adapts to the technology at the same rate. Maybe we’ve done so well at adapting – eradicating computer viruses, adding so much privacy and verifiability to everything, optimizing our society to be so beautiful and healthy – only because we don’t have nine billion people pushing technology forward even faster and increasing the complexity of the society that has to accept it.”
makes no diff if we keep inventing ie: mufleh humanity law
“That’s interesting. Do you think we will have nine billion people one day?”
“Not one day. Very soon. And not people. Bots. And not nine billion. Nine trillion.”
“That’s what I worry about. AI is going to really change everything. So far, progress has been moderate, nobody has lost their jobs, it feels more like everyone has been promoted to being a manager – or sometimes a repairman. But at some point, once the AI can do almost everything that humans can do, even if at a few percent the efficiency, our human population won’t be a constraint anymore.”
only if we try ai as augmenting interconnectedness
“So what do we do?”
“Well, we don’t really have much power to be the ones to answer that question if the Arctics continue to stay further ahead.”
“If we want to get back into balance, we have to get better at penetrating them. Have more of a view into their society and their technology, make sure that for any advance they make, we learn about it. Privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful. Having those people from Thaldur helping us is great, and hopefully Deluin is far from the only person from Redshire who pretended to join the Arctics but would be interested in passing more information to us.”
“There’s a known result from game theory”, Zei interjected. “If two players are locked in a game that has some mixture of cooperation and competition, then you can unlock strictly higher levels of cooperation if those players can at least partially read each others’ minds. Maybe that’s the right outcome to hope for. As time passes, we’ll learn more about each other, we’ll learn from each other, and we’ll come to actually understand each other better.”
“I’m not so optimistic. The Arctic Emperor is upset. He can’t do anything to us right now, but he’s definitely scheming. There will be a next round. It could be five years from now, it could be twenty years from now. If we can at least keep pace on technology, we can survive.”
“Do you think we should try to slow them down?”
“Do the same thing to them that they have been doing to Dzego for a century? It’s not the worst idea.”
Zei sighed.
“If we were able to keep advancing under their pressure, they’ll definitely be able to keep advancing under any pressure we can bring to bear against them.”
“You know, the later stages of all this are going to get crazy. At some point, eventually we’ll have drones the size of worms and flies burrowing under the ground, flying through the air and swimming under the sea. We’ll have new forms of genetically engineered life that we can’t even imagine – both for peace and for war. Some of us might be uploaded and living inside computers. Not this year. Not the next few years. But definitely in the next hundred years.”
“Maybe in two hundred years it will be stable. We’ll have figured out exactly the ideal type of drone at every scale, the largest as large as aeroplanes or even hollowed-out asteroids floating in space, and the smallest so tiny that there’s no more gap between them and viruses. Once we hit the ceiling, there would be nothing else even stronger that could defeat them. Just big distributed immune systems protecting our planets, our animals and our trees, and ourselves. We will be wiser, almost everyone will choose peace over war, and those who don’t will have no path to impose their will. And everyone will just live the kind of life they want to live.”
“I just hope we have peace”, Seila added. “All these questions: genetic engineering, uploading, going to the stars, I don’t think we can get the right answers if we take every step in a rush because we’re scared. I’m not sure I want to upload. But a year ago I was not sure if I wanted to live for more than a hundred years. These things should all be a choice we make carefully, and have respect for people who choose not to take the same choice as we do, not an urgent decision we make to survive in a war.”
legit freedom/peace will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
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summary via google:
Vitalik Buterin’s Snowmoon (《雪月》) is a completed 32-chapter, speculative science-fiction novel published in September 2026.
Key Details
- Setting & Plot: The story takes place in a future, encrypted decentralized society, focusing on an ideological conflict between Veridia and the Arctic Empire. It pits a privacy-first, cryptographic city-state against a larger surveillance empire.
- Core Themes: The novel explores ideas long championed by Buterin, including zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs), quadratic voting, reputation-backed loans, local AI, privacy robes, and content-based or order-steering tax mechanisms. It also features local currencies like Zipcoin (zc).
all the forms of m\a\p.. aka: cancerous distractions to the dance ie: verifiability law; quadratic voting funding; vitalik on dao ness; reputation; ai; et al..
- Creation: The text was written primarily by Buterin himself, with AI tools (such as Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8 Flash Next) used strictly for editing, proofreading, and consistency checks rather than core writing.
- Licensing: It is released under the GPL v3 open-source license. Anyone is permitted to adapt it into films, animations, or other derivative works, provided they open-source their entire creative pipeline (including AI prompts and scripts)
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