Vitalik Buterin urges open-source infrastructure as antidote to monopolistic control

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has called on governments, corporations, and researchers to adopt open-source and verifiable technology in areas such as healthcare, finance, and governance, warning that reliance on proprietary systems could erode trust and security.

In a blog post published on his forum on Wednesday, Buterin wrote that societies benefit most not from consuming technology, but from producing it where there is broad access and transparency. He warned that reliance on centrally controlled systems is placing too much trust in institutions that may fail or act in self-interest.

“This future involves a lot of trust being put in technology. If that trust is broken, we get really big problems. Even the mere possibility of that trust being broken forces a fallback to fundamentally exclusionary social trust models,” he explained.

According to Buterin, this could be mitigated by building software, hardware, and biological infrastructure with “genuine openness” through free licensing, open-source development, and verifiability, all accessible even to end users.

Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic

Buterin used the COVID-19 crisis as an example of the consequences of unequal access to technological production. The Russian programmer was distraught because wealthy countries were able to secure vaccines in 2021, while most third-world countries were left waiting for more than 2 years after.

“Vaccines were produced in only a few countries, which led to large disparities,” he wrote. Because the vaccines depended on capital-intensive proprietary processes, the global initiative to distribute doses more equally “could only do so much.”

The Ethereum Foundation co-founder said there is a similar problem in digital biotechnology, where personalized, data-driven medicine depends on large-scale data collection. 

“When you talk to longevity researchers, one of the first things that you will universally hear is that the future of anti-aging medicine is personalized and data-driven…This is much more effective if there can be a large amount of data digitally collected and processed, in real time,” he surmised.

Buterin advocated for real-time data sharing, which he believes, in cases such as pandemics, could slow the spread of disease. He propounded that these advances need sensors and seamless communication across networks, but without openness, such infrastructure would only be under the control of a few companies, who can misuse the data.

“If personal health data is insecure, it can be exploited for blackmail, predatory insurance pricing, or even physical threats,” Buterin warned. “If your brain-computer interface gets hacked, that means a hostile actor is literally reading, or worse, writing, your mind.”

Governance and digital authority

The Russian-born developer also spoke on the vulnerabilities of governance and legal systems, recalling his difficulties when attempting to sign paperwork for a legal function while abroad. 

According to Buterin, on that same day, he had to sign a digital transaction to perform an action on the Ethereum blockchain, in which he used 5 seconds and it cost him only $0.10. He mentioned the inefficiencies extended to corporate governance, intellectual property management, and nonprofit administration. 

Buterin cautioned that while proprietary systems can be secure, citing commercial aviation as an example, they cannot provide the common knowledge of security necessary for situations involving mutually distrusting actors.

He posted an excerpt of a Massachusetts case in which breathalyzer evidence was thrown out after investigators revealed that state crime labs had withheld details of faulty tests.

Justice Frank Gaziano ruled that defendants’ due process rights had been violated, even though most breathalyzer results were technically valid. 

Buterin proposed the development of a fully open-source, verification-friendly technology stack for high-security applications in consumer and institutional contexts. He admitted that not all areas need maximum openness and security, and that performance must sometimes take precedence. 

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