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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a comprehensive essay warning that civilization faces a growing concentration of power across governments, corporations, and populist movements while proposing mandatory technological diffusion as the solution.
The blog post titled “Balance of Power” argues that economies of scale now outpace natural counterbalancing forces, creating unprecedented risks of hegemonic control that threaten democratic institutions and individual liberty.
Buterin’s framework addresses what he calls the “dense jungle” where Big Government, Big Business, and Big Mob simultaneously strengthen.
“We like progress — whether in technology, economy or culture — but we fear the three historically most powerful generators of such progress,” he wrote, identifying the central tension driving modern anxieties about concentrated authority.
Economies of Scale Threaten Traditional Checks
The essay contends that historical safeguards against power concentration no longer function effectively.
Rapid technological progress, automation that reduces coordination costs, and proprietary systems that prevent reverse-engineering now enable super-exponential growth curves that traditional diseconomies of scale cannot counteract.
Buterin argues corporations demonstrate this pattern through both capability increases and size expansion.
Video games transformed from “fun and fulfillment” focused experiences into “built-in slot machine mechanisms to maximally extract money from players,” while crypto token allocations to insiders climbed steadily from 2009 to 2021.
Large corporations gain disproportionate ability to reshape regulatory environments, with monopolists pricing above marginal cost creating “societal deadweight loss.”
Meanwhile, governments risk becoming “players” rather than neutral “games” that establish rules without imposing predetermined outcomes.
Buterin endorses principles including libertarianism’s minimal intervention, Hayekian liberalism’s goal-setting over method prescription, civil liberalism’s protections for speech and association, and subsidiarity’s preference for local decision-making.
He notes recent research showing authoritarian governments classified as “personalistic” consistently underperform economically compared to “institutionalized” counterparts, suggesting institutional structures matter regardless of political system.
The vulnerable world hypothesis presents theoretical risks, suggesting technological advancement could enable catastrophic harm from increasingly accessible actors.
However, Buterin counters this with defensive acceleration (d/acc), advocating “defensive technology that keeps pace with offense, in a way that is open and available to everyone.”
Mandatory Diffusion Strategy
Buterin proposes “mandate more diffusion” as the solution, forcing technology sharing to prevent concentration while maintaining innovation benefits.
The essay champions adversarial interoperability, which Buterin defines through Cory Doctorow’s explanation as creating “new products or services that plug into existing ones without permission.”
Recommended implementations include alternative social media clients with customizable filtering, browser extensions that block AI-generated content, and decentralized cryptocurrency-fiat exchanges that circumvent centralized financial chokepoints.
“Alternative interfaces that are still interoperable with the platform and its other users” enable network participation while opting out of value capture, Buterin explained, citing how web2 platforms concentrate control at the user interface level.
He highlighted Sci-Hub as exemplifying “mandatory diffusion that has arguably done a lot to improve fairness and open access in science.”
Buterin also proposed mechanisms inspired by EU carbon border adjustments, charging taxes proportional to the level of proprietary restrictions while reducing levies to zero for open-sourced technology.
Warning Against Elite Consolidation
The timing follows Buterin’s broader campaign addressing Ethereum’s complexity and centralization concerns.
He stated on December 18 that “when a protocol becomes so complex that only a small group of experts can grasp it end to end, users are still forced to trust that group in practice.”
Counterintuitively, former Geth developer Péter Szilágyi’s revelations support Buterin’s warnings, exposing how five to ten people around Buterin maintain “complete indirect control” over Ethereum through attention allocation and funding decisions.
Szilágyi warned that Ethereum created a “ruling elite” that controls the ecosystem through investment or advisorship roles.
In fact, Buterin specifically criticized recent Silicon Valley alignment with government power.
“I much prefer the thing on the left (2013) to the thing on the right (2025),” he wrote comparing libertarian exit strategies to current tech CEO government engagement, “because the thing on the left is an expression of balance of power, whereas the thing on the right represents two extremely powerful factions who should be balancing each other instead merging together.”
Network Activity Reaches New Heights
While Buterin advocates for decentralized infrastructure, Ethereum mainnet activity shows growing adoption with 2.2 million transactions recorded yesterday, December 29.
Transaction fees dropped to an average of 17 cents, down from over $200 in May 2022, following the Pectra and Fusaka upgrades that expanded gas limits and improved validator efficiency.
