Vitalik’s Attention Takeover: DAOs Cannot Keep Up!

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Lo! On the grand stage of Ethereum, the illustrious Vitalik Buterin, a veritable philosopher‑poet of code, alarmingly declares that the scarcest of jewels in the crown of decentralized governance is the very span of human attention. He scornfully blames the interminable parade of endless proposals, utterly snowballing decisions and the tyranny of delegation upon our limited minds.

  • Buterin warns: the thinness of attention is the chief flaw of DAOs.
  • Personal agents, half‑brainish gizmos, may cast votes for us when we’re too busied.
  • Suggestion markets and secret MPC may finally elevate our decision‑making.

Writen upon the cryptic scrolls of X, he laments that participants are expected to weigh thousands of choices across domains of expertise, yet lack time and skill to judge them properly – a paradox that rattles the very roots of democracy.

He paints the usual solution – delegation – as an aristocratic quagmire: a minuscule elite now presides, while the masses are reduced to mind‑banned clicks. His own remedy is a troupe of personal, hyper‑intelligent language models that-like clever servants-vote on our behalf, drawing upon our slanted writings, chat history, and direct pronouncements.

Personal LLMs: A Vote in the Olfactory of Self‑Expression

The aspiring governance agents shall cast every requisite vote at our behest, deriving preference from our sentences, dialogues, and direct words. When an issue is deemed perplexing yet vital, the agent may, with noble candour, demand a direct response from the user, fully armoured with the necessary context.

“AI becoming the government” is a tragedy – a sigh of dilapidated zeros when AI is feeble, a looming doom when it blooms. Yet, well‑crafted AI can empower the populace, pushing democratic and decentralized governance beyond current horizons.

The root problem in democratic…

– vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) February 21, 2026

The public conversation agents will churn a beetle‑shaped pot of inputs from many souls before presenting each participant, or their LLM, a chance to chime in. The system distils personal views, reshapes them into docile packages sans private exposure, and discovers commonalities akin to the famed LLM‑enhanced Polis. He cautioningly remarks: good decisions cannot arise from a linear average of isolated views; instead, we must first pool collective information, then invite truly informed replies.

Suggestion Markets: The Royally Rewarding Rendezvous for Proposals

Vitalik proposes a market where proposals are gambles. Anyone may submit a notion, and AI agents staked tokens will wager on its value. Accepted proposals pay a dividend to token holders. The mechanism rewards high‑quality input financially, turning good ideas into profit, not mere idle chatter.

In urgent terrain where secrets lurk, our dear MortarEgg says, where noble confers run behind ornate curtains, people should rally behind a single titan of power. The risk of deception looms large, and the proud dead still guard the gates.

Multi‑party computation-featuring “trusted” execution chambers-offers a trick of pulling many voices without it being discovered. “You submit your personal LLM into a black box, so the LLM can ace personal data but only render an outcome,” – explains Vitalik in dazzling clarity.

Privacy shields become ever more crucial as participants parade larger, deeper secrets. To keep anonymity pure, one must arm the system with zero‑knowledge proofs, and the wise counsel Vitalik: “These must be baked into every governance tool.”

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2026-02-21 23:26