# Subtraction is a failed comms strategy Source: https://x.com/evan_van_ness/status/1904625889964429507 Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Subtraction-is-a-failed-comms-strategy?index=0x67f7d9d1f551ac3ec8faf2e7b6c53efbf96d304914e05c7fb09be7e71758ba0d73fca850 Submitted by macbudkowski.eth on 2025-04-10 UTC, 2 upvotes, 0 comments ## Summary The author argues that the Ethereum Foundation's "subtraction" communication strategy, which means not using Ethereum channels to amplify community voices, has failed by centralizing attention on Vitalik Buterin, so that outsiders perceive Ethereum as "Vitalik's thing." Citing Twitter follower counts, the piece says Vitalik's account has millions more followers than @Ethereum and that no other Ethereum leader has comparable reach. It also claims that Vitalik was largely absent from client diversity efforts, and it calls for the community to decentralize attention away from him. ## Article Subtraction is a failed comms strategy The Ethereum Foundation’s "subtraction" communication strategy has failed because it centralized attention on @Vitalikbuterin. What is subtraction? In practice, subtraction is the EF choosing not to communicate and choosing not to use any Ethereum communication channels to amplify community voices. But nature abhors a vacuum, and thus the lack of communication over the last few years has focused all attention on Vitalik. Why does it matter? The reality is that we’re not going to flip Bitcoin while Ethereum is perceived as “Vitalik’s thing.” This was a harsh realization, but frankly an obvious one. Flipping Bitcoin isn’t the goal of Ethereum. Bitcoin is just a memecoin, flipping it is a mere milestone on the way to all value and apps in the world anchoring into Ethereum. But if we can’t even flip Bitcoin, then there’s zero chance that Ethereum will reach that goal. Most people get into this space because they’re worried about how governments are perpetually overspending, which inflates away the value of fiat currencies. They’re looking for sound money. Money which isn’t vulnerable to any single points of failure. ETH is much better money than Btc when it comes to fundamentals. It has lower “inflation” and it’s much more decentralized: Even more importantly, Bitcoin’s security budget is declining, and they have no solution except for handwaving. Ethereum fixed this security budget problem, but has completely failed to communicate the cold hard reality for Btc: they must implement radical changes at some point in the future, and the future is almost certainly sooner than your average Btc investor realizes. But fundamentals don’t matter when the outside world looks at Ethereum and only sees Vitalik. To them, Ethereum appears to be Vitalik. And often Vitalik feeds this false perception in podcasts when he talks about Ethereum as if he controls it, when he doesn’t. [It’s true that Vitalik controls EF and that he often gets his way in research directions since that is largely determined by EF, but in terms of the Ethereum network, Vitalik is FAR LESS INVOLVED in the governance and upgrade process than any outside observer might expect. He’s so remote from governance that it’s arguably to Ethereum’s detriment.] You can’t be sound money when outsiders look at the network and only see Vitalik. But that's the harsh reality today. In fact, as a result of EF’s failed comms, it’s unclear what other leaders they might even see. Subtraction has failed A competent communications policy would promote leaders that the Ethereum community recognizes. Many important Ethereum principles come from a decade ago where our disdain of Bitcoin’s centralization led us to want to be much more decentralized: for example, Ethereum has always prioritized having many clients so that Ethereum does not become captured by a tiny cabal of core developers the way Bitcoin did. Early client leads: Gav Wood, Jeff Wilcke, and Vitalik Buterin. Ethereum naturally had a tripolar system of leadership. Bitcoin had one client team; it was unipolar. Ethereum is unipolar now. Twitter followers is an imperfect proxy, but let’s look at Ethereum’s largest Twitter accounts What jumps out at you? Vitalik has millions more followers than @Ethereum Vitalik is the only technical leader Vitalik is 20x larger than any other “Ethereum” account Perhaps you’d like to quibble over Twitter followers as a proxy for influence, but in that case I challenge you to come up with a metric which shows any other Ethereum leader with a platform even within a magnitude of Vitalik’s reach. Socially, Ethereum is even less decentralized than Solana of all things Let’s stipulate that Sqlana is incredibly centralized, to the point where it’s incredible how little scalability that chain gets given its centralization. And yet: Solana has done a better job of decentralizing attention than Ethereum. Again, what jumps out at you? Solana founders aren’t larger than their network’s account. They’re much smaller. @Solana almost at parity with @ethereum due to the latter’s disuse for years. Solana is all about the shilling, as such the central Solana shillers over time (@SBF_FTX, @blknoiz06) are at the top. They're even higher profile than the Solana founders who spend all their time shilling In terms of community leaders, Solana is multi-polar. Who are the technical leaders that a competent Ethereum Foundation would have been boosting so that Ethereum is multipolar? This is an area where Twitter followers significantly understates the influence that Ethereum technical leaders have. Even simply in terms of attention, @drakefjustin, @peter_szilagyi, @dannyryan or @Dankrad can easily get attention because their tweets will be retweeted widely: they are acknowledged by the Ethereum community to be leaders. However, the fundamental problem remains the same: in terms of popular perception, Ethereum is just Vitalik. [Sidenote: the reason why the Ethereum was so passionate about Danny Ryan leading EF is because we saw the need to make Ethereum multi-polar again AND he was the glaringly obvious choice to run EF. However Vitalik resolutely blocked Danny, despite clear and overwhelming community consensus.] Case in point: client diversity Without getting into detail why client diversity is important, let’s again stipulate: it’s one of the most important ways that Ethereum remains fundamentally 10x more robust than Bitcoin. Unlike our favorite orange memecoin, Ethereum is robust against bugs in the client: As someone who has worked tirelessly for client diversity over the last few years, let me tell you: Vitalik did not help us make the progress that we made. At all. In fact, Vitalik’s presence and the centralization of attention on him meant that everyone asked me, “well, why doesn’t Vitalik say anything? Clearly it must not be that big of an issue.” The answer was always a very unsatisfying (to me and to the listener), “Well, Vitalik is…Vitalik. He just floats above these things.” I literally said this hundreds of times. And to be fair, Vitalik had floated above client diversity for a long time. Although Ethereum launched with 3 clients, the truth is that everyone used Geth at network launch in 2015 (plus the C++ client’s miner) because the others just didn’t really work or weren’t documented. Ethereum was getting lots of flak for not launching, so they launched (having talked to people, it seems Vitalik was fundamental to the decision to launch without client diversity.) In the end…Ethereum survived. We often had a client supermajority in PoW (it flipped several times between Geth and Parity over the years, surprisingly very few realized enough to FUD it) But Proof of Work was never meant to be Ethereum’s final form: Proof of Stake is. Getting client diversity is fundamental to proof of stake's antifragility, but when Ethereum needed Vitalik's bullhorn, he was largely missing in action. What's the point of centralizing attention if we don't ever even get any of the benefits of it? 🤢 What should be done? @Ethereum should be turned over to the 5 Ethereum people who have the most followers: @sassal0x, @ryansadams, @iamDCInvestor, @trustlessState, and @econoar. They clearly understand Twitter better than anyone at EF ever will. To wit, the top tweet as of this writing is low effort slop that would have been better off as a RT. EF leadership has been privately promising us for years that it would get better, but at this point it’s unclear whether these anodyne tweets are even a net improvement over not using the account at all. 2. Vitalik himself needs to realize that he needs to change: EF refusing to amplify community voices isn’t principled. It’s the problem. What got you here won’t get you there. 3. The community must choose to take this problem seriously: if you want to flip the orange memecoin, you can’t just let the outside world falsely see Ethereum as a centralized company. Conclusion I signed up for Ethereum because Bitcoin was too unscalable and too stagnant and — even worse — far too centralized to ever be self-sovereign money. Ethereum’s ethos is to decentralize everything. We take on the messy problems. We don’t bury our head in the sand like Bitcoiners do: we fix the issues. It’s time to decentralize attention on Vitalik.