Ethereum's New Radical: Glen Weyl Isn't Vitalik But He's Its Next Best Hope

Dr. Glen Weyl speaks with the calm of a man who has history on the mind.

In an email to ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, one he republished on Medium, Weyl went so far as to suggest a tax to penalize "Using standard white English." Elsewhere, he's tweeted about "Tax[ing] masculinity to subsidize femininity." And following his talk at Devcon, he explicitly asked for questions from female or minority groups first.

According to Weyl ethereum can be seen as having encountered the pitfalls of centralization.

The sell-off, through this lens, is an opportunity, a chance to get it right next time, a chance that maybe systems like the Web never had. With this second chance, Weyl believes the project needs to overcome its attitude to private property.

To protect against this, Weyl argues that ethereum - and the ideology of its leading figures - can play a crucial role.

Coupled with the powerful ideology of its community, Weyl says, ethereum can help society sidestep emergent totalitarianism.

With a new problem to address - one that wasn't purely due to its trading price or immediate technical aims - word about Weyl began to spread. Vitalik Buterin, the creator of ethereum himself, first publicly discussed Weyl's work in April.

Later in May, Buterin and Weyl made their first written appearance together, in a blog post titled "Liberation through Radical Decentralization," written in the style of a manifesto.

Within this, Weyl says ethereum - and blockchain more broadly - have the opportunity to gain a level of legitimacy that the technology has yet to achieve.

Within it, Weyl swaps out the idea of a self-sovereign identity for a new kinds of community-based identity systems.