đšWhat Snowmoonâs 32 Chapters Say About Vitalikâs Crypto Vision
Iâve been reading Snowmoon, and it imagines a society where cryptography becomes part of everyday life.
Some of the ideas feel surprisingly close to what crypto is building today:
1/ ZK proofs â prove without revealing
A drone can prove itâs safe without exposing its private code.
Thatâs basically the idea behind Zero-Knowledge Proofs: prove something is true without revealing the information behind it.
2/ Reputation â crypto-native credit score
People can use reputation scores to access hotels, loans and other services.
Think of it as a credit score, but built from verifiable on-chain reputation instead of relying entirely on banks.
3/ Quadratic voting â influence without whales
Instead of simply giving everyone one vote, voting power becomes more expensive the more you try to influence the result.
The idea: someone with 100x more money shouldnât automatically get 100x more influence.
4/ Quadratic funding â communities fund what matters
If 1,000 people each support a public project with a small amount, it can receive more matching funding than a project backed by one large whale.
This is the same basic idea behind crypto-native public goods funding.
5/ Random selection â fair participation
Cryptographic sortition can randomly select people to participate in civic decisions.
The important part is that the selection can be verified mathematically instead of controlled by one authority.
6/ Privacy â protection, not just anonymity
The book treats cryptography as infrastructure for resisting surveillance.
Hidden messages, encrypted communication, hardware verification and tamper-proof records all follow the same principle:
Donât blindly trust the system. Make the system prove itself.
Thatâs what makes Snowmoon interesting from a crypto perspective.
Itâs not really predicting another token or blockchain.
It asks a bigger question:
What happens when cryptography becomes part of how society votes, pays, proves identity, protects privacy and coordinates?
In that sense, Snowmoon feels like a fictional version of the crypto thesis:
Replace âtrust meâ with âverify it.â
