Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) co-creator Vitalik Buterin jumped on a Twitter thread discussing nuclear weapons and "network weapons" on Sunday, saying that the asymmetry prevalent in the latter made it hard to reduce conflict “by agreeing on limiting principles.”
What Happened: Buterin’s comments came in response to a Twitter thread from former Coinbase Global Inc (NASDAQ: COIN) Chief Technology Officer Balaji Srinivasan.
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Srinivasan said network technology, much like nuclear, found "dual use" during peacetime and wartime.
What recent events make clear to all is that digital technology, like nuclear enrichment, is very much dual use.
— Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis) March 20, 2022
There is a legitimate, important peacetime use. And then there is a second use as a weapon of war. pic.twitter.com/U3hbKv79Rt
Srinivasan, a former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and founder of 21.co, noted that network weapons, unlike nuclear weapons, have an “intrinsic asymmetry.”
He cited the example of South Korea, where many people use Alphabet Inc's (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) Google as a search engine, but few Americans use the Korean web portal Naver in comparison.
This, according to Srinivasan, means that Google “can exercise more digital power over Koreans than Naver can over Americans.”
Buterin said that asymmetry makes it “hard to reduce conflict by agreeing on any limiting principles.”
One big reason why this is a problem is that asymmetry makes it hard to reduce conflict by agreeing on any limiting principles.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 20, 2022
"X seems bad, how about we all stop doing X"
"That's easy to say coming from YOU, you benefit more than anyone else from X being as rare as it is!"
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Why It Matters: Earlier this month, Buterin urged compassion for Russians and Belarusians resisting the war and President Vladimir Putin’s “Z-ombie Regime.”
Ethereum co-creator Joe Lubin last week said that the Russia-Ukraine conflict had pushed cryptocurrency adoption to a point of “no return.”
Benzinga’s Take: The global asymmetry in network weapons is readily apparent.
Google accounts for 92% of global web searches, according to Statcounter data.
Of the nearly 4 billion email users worldwide, more than 1.8 billion use Gmail alone, according to Statista data from 2020.
American companies dominate the internet, be it email and search or social networking and mobile technology companies. Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ: FB) or Apple Inc (NASDAQ: AAPL) are prominent examples.
Srinivasan's words that “digital power is much cheaper to project abroad than analog hard power" resonate.
If foreigners are on your servers, digital power is much cheaper to project abroad than analog hard power. No aircraft carriers needed, just hit a key and it’s everywhere.
— Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis) March 20, 2022
It’s much more surgical than analog hard power too. Target specific users with exact penalties.
Decentralization could thus act as an antidote to network technology’s weaponization in the future, provided it gets an adoption rate similar to today’s highly centralized internet services.
Price Action: At press time, Ethereum spiked 10.1% to $2,843.23 over 24 hours.