🎧 01:54 - 04:47 (02:53)

People are at their morally worst out of fear, not greed. Fear is the driving force behind various crises and political decisions, such as the Russia-Ukraine crisis. Fear is used to justify actions like the Patriot Act and COVID-19 lockdowns. Even leaders who are greedy use fear to manipulate others. The Bitcoin and Ethereum communities also demonstrated their morally worst behavior driven by fear during the Bitcoin Cash small vs. big block war crisis and the DAO hack incident. Fear led to the abandonment of principles and the advocacy of unethical actions. Despite the fear-driven decisions, the situation eventually worked out well for Ethereum, as there hasn't been a violation of immutability since then.

Vitalik: of the things that I feel like I've learned over the last decade is that people are at their morally worst, not out of greed, but out of fear. And this is true in mainstream politics, and this is true in geopolitics and in crypto as well. COVID showed that. That was all fear-driven.

Naval Ravikant: The Russia-Ukraine crisis shows that. Russia is not attacking Ukraine to get oil fields. It's out of fear. The responses are all fear-based. And fear is used to justify all the horrible things from Patriot Act to the COVID lockdowns. fear drives it all. Because greed is always done in your own name and nobody wants to do it in their own name. Fear is always done in everybody else's

Vitalik: name. So you end up with a whole bunch of self-style white knights battling each other. Right. And even when the leader actually is greedy and medial maniacal, fear is what they use to sell it to everyone else. The times when I thought both the Bitcoin and the Ethereum community were both at their morally worst would probably be in the Bitcoin cash small versus big block war crisis, where people felt like there was this very zero-sum struggle between one vision of what Bitcoin would be and another vision of what Bitcoin could be. A lot of principles got thrown out. People behaved terribly in a bunch of ways. In the case of Ethereum, there was this big application called the DAO, and the DAO got hacked, and a big portion of all of the ETH was stuck in the DAO. If nothing had been done, the attacker would have been able to get it out after a couple of months. And this was less than a year into Ethereum's history. So a decision was made to make a change to the rules of the Ethereum protocol to bail out the users of that application. And there was this big debate. Some people thought this is fine one time because it was early days. And some people thought that it should be a principle that we never interfere. And it's best to start those principles from day one. We did end up hard forking to fix the DAO. And a lot of people disagreed. That ended up splitting Ethereum into two chains, Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, where Ethereum Classic refused to implement the hard fork, so they let the attacker get away out of principle. The way that both communities behaved at the time was not good. People were openly advocating that we should use trademark law to try to not allow Ethereum Classic to exist. And then people were advocating 51% attacks and all kinds of things. I think the reason why people were okay with things that they would totally not have been okay at any other time is because they were afraid. Ethereum people were afraid that Ethereum Classic would replace and completely destroy Ethereum. And Ethereum Classic people would be afraid that their principles were being destroyed by Ethereum, which could then grow and overtake the version of the chain that stuck to its principles. The situation did end up working out well for most people. There hasn't been a violation of that kind of immutability on Ethereum since, which is something that a lot of people are not predicting. A lot of people did think that if you violate the principles once, then it would be open season to do it many times.

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