I've long envisioned a glue architecture around a scalable SmallTalk core. The ST bytecode can be run on various size compute cores from 8-bits to 64-bits. All the ST does is handle code flow. All compute is handed off to co-processors (Integer, floating-point, matrix, GPU, etc). The compute functions can be correspondingly scaled based on family design. The general goal is to allow thousands of cooperating compute processors with edge processors for communication.
It will be interesting to see if the original commenter comes back and says what their criticism of Buterin is, but it seems to me that he gets more criticism from cryptocurrency die-hards (especially the more bitcoin-inflected kinds) at this point, because they increasingly see him as an out-group liberal, than from cryptocurrency haters.
As someone closer to that second group, I think he's been the most consistently interesting person in that whole space. He essentially never writes or talks much about the speculative asset side of the industry (which unfortunately comprises like 99.99% of what it is), but rather focuses on the computer science of it, which (IMO) continues to be interesting, even as (IMO) the fruits of that technology have continued to not be very interesting.
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