Astral Codex Ten

Vitalik

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Vitalik

Article

Vitalik is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between November 01, 2021 and March 03, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Vitalik didn’t end with “and we should also replace all lower courts with prediction markets”; “Vitalik: the bulldozer vs. vetocracy political axis”; “And as Vitalik mentions”. It most often appears alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, Google.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: November 01, 2021
  • Last seen: March 03, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

21
November 01, 2021 · Original source
I’d previously missed this 2018 post by Vitalik Buterin proposing prediction markets as a social media moderation plan.
Inline links: this 2018 post by Vitalik Buterin
Merge the system with a prediction market. An upvote invests $1 (Vitalik says 1 ETH, but the post is from 2018 and maybe he didn’t expect that to be worth $4325) in a prediction of “Scott won’t ban this”. A downvote invests $1 in a prediction of “Scott will ban this”. A certain randomly-selected subset of posts with high downvotes come to my attention, I ban/don’t ban them, and everyone collects their winnings/cedes their losses. If the prediction market fits the usual conditions for accurate pricing, it should mimic my judgment as closely as humanly possible - and so I could just have any sufficiently downvoted post get auto-banned. You could have one guy moderating a site the size of Reddit (not a specific subreddit, the whole site) and still have it work pretty well. No more moderator drama!
Vitalik didn’t end with “and we should also replace all lower courts with prediction markets about what the Supreme Court would think”, but I’m not sure why not.
Links For December
December 30, 2021 · Original source
27: Vitalik: the bulldozer vs. vetocracy political axis. This is a really good crystallization of a line of thinking that’s been vaguely floating around the political/economic blogosphere recently.
Inline links: the bulldozer vs. vetocracy political axis
24
February 20, 2024 · Original source
How many residents will live in Prospera, a new special economic zone in Honduras, on Jan 1, 2026? Answer: 600 (80% confidence interval 100-2,000) This seems like a good guess (except that my confidence interval would have included zero because there’s a 20%+ chance that it gets shut down). So overall its forecasts seem pretty impressive. But I was concerned by its reasoning even in some of the questions it got “right”. For example, the Nikki Haley question tried to get a base rate by asking what percent of elections Haley had won before, and found she had won 71% of them - these were mostly elections for South Carolina governor. You can see what the AI is trying to do - but it’s not going to work. Then it got confused and read a lot of news stories about how she’s currently losing the 2024 presidential election, and seemed to think they were about 2028. So either the AI only got a reasonable probability by coincidence, or it was testing many different strategies, throwing out the useless ones, and updating only on the useful ones, in a way that was kind of opaque to the casual reader. Still, if the company says it beats most human forecasters, this doesn’t seem totally impossible based on what I’ve seen. And that would be exciting! An AI that can generate probabilistic forecasts for any question seems like in some way a culmination of the rationalist project. And if you can make something like this work, it doesn’t sound too outlandish that you could apply the same AI to conditional forecasts, or to questions about the past and present (eg whether COVID was a lab leak). I would be most excited if at some point this graduated from its geopolitical focus and was able to answer questions on any topic (eg “what is the chance that Astral Codex Ten gains paid subscribers this year?”), maybe if the questioner gives it links or feeds it some of the appropriate information. FutureSearch is run by a team formerly from Metaculus, including former Metaculus CTO (and Google internal prediction market veteran) Dan Schwarz. They’re looking for potential clients and/or investors; if you’re interested, email hello@futuresearch.ai. Vitalik On AI Prediction Markets Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum-founder-turned-cryptocurrency-public-intellectual, has a blog post on The Promise And Challenge Of Crypto + AI Applications. One of them is a prediction market. He writes: Prediction markets have been a holy grail of epistemics technology for a long time; I was excited about using prediction markets as an input for governance ("futarchy") back in 2014, and played around with them extensively in the last election as well as more recently. But so far prediction markets have not taken off too much in practice, and there is a series of commonly given reasons why: the largest participants are often irrational, people with the right knowledge are not willing to take the time and bet unless a lot of money is involved, markets are often thin, etc. One response to this is to point to ongoing UX improvements in Polymarket or other new prediction markets, and hope that they will succeed where previous iterations have failed. After all, the story goes, people are willing to bet tens of billions on sports, so why wouldn't people throw in enough money betting on US elections or LK99 that it starts to make sense for the serious players to start coming in? But this argument must contend with the fact that, well, previous iterations have failed to get to this level of scale (at least compared to their proponents' dreams), and so it seems like you need something new to make prediction markets succeed. And so a different response is to point to one specific feature of prediction market ecosystems that we can expect to see in the 2020s that we did not see in the 2010s: the possibility of ubiquitous participation by AIs. AIs are willing to work for less than $1 per hour, and have the knowledge of an encyclopedia - and if that's not enough, they can even be integrated with real-time web search capability. If you make a market, and put up a liquidity subsidy of $50, humans will not care enough to bid, but thousands of AIs will easily swarm all over the question and make the best guess they can. The incentive to do a good job on any one question may be tiny, but the incentive to make an AI that makes good predictions in general may be in the millions. Note that potentially, you don't even need the humans to adjudicate most questions: you can use a multi-round dispute system similar to Augur or Kleros, where AIs would also be the ones participating in earlier rounds. Humans would only need to respond in those few cases where a series of escalations have taken place and large amounts of money have been committed by both sides. This is a powerful primitive, because once a "prediction market" can be made to work on such a microscopic scale, you can reuse the "prediction market" primitive for many other kinds of questions: Is this social media post acceptable under [terms of use]?
Inline links: FutureSearch, hello@futuresearch.ai, The Promise And Challenge Of Crypto + AI Applications, back in 2014, played around with them extensively, more recently, Polymarket, tens of billions on sports, LK99, Augur
And as Vitalik mentions, it doesn’t have to be about the future. It can be about any question you’re not sure about, as long as there’s eventually some way to resolve it.
The Pentagon Threatens Anthropic
February 25, 2026 · Original source
Vitalik is the inventor of Ethereum. Deepfates is a weird renegade cyberpunk AI whisperer expert (source) Neil Chilson, former chief technologist at the Trump FTC (source). Dean Ball, previous Trump White House OSTP Senior Policy Advisor on AI (source). Superforecaster Nuño Sempere, maybe as part of his work with Sentinel. He seems to think higher chance of supply chain risk than others, but that supply chain risk might be handled in a way that only affects DoD contracts themselves, which wouldn’t be so bad. I haven’t heard anyone else make this distinction. Tweet here, full document here. And big praise to most other AI companies, including Anthropic’s competitors, for standing up for them and for the AI industry more broadly:
Inline links: source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!N9m5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F772658c0-a86a-481f-a50c-452b052a3d30_581x772.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Pode!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F15a4ab9e-68fb-400f-8304-3ec7222958d3_587x1506.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DrEn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Feaff377e-1f44-450c-82af-fc62d33e0832_1225x1128.jpeg, here,, here
Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day
March 03, 2026 · Original source
Manifold is a great site, and I challenged Grugett on why he’s starting a new project. His answer: hedging. I didn’t transcribe all the details, but that’s fine, because Vitalik coincidentally wrote a pro-hedging manifesto last week.
See the tweet for more, including a suggestion that “the real solution [might be] to go a step further, and get rid of the concept of currency altogether”.
Inline links: the tweet