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Comment by philipwhiuk | Hacker News Reader

> But what interests me most about Community Notes is how, despite not being a "crypto project", it might be the closest thing to an instantiation of "crypto values" that we have seen in the mainstream world.

The attempt to argue that any community-consensus system is "crypto" is absurd.

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Read it again. He very explicitly says it's not a "crypto project", and is just saying that it feels close to something with "crypto values", which, to Vitalik, seems to mean decentralized mechanisms for building community consensus.

Reads far more like “oh yes crypto is also like this nice good thing everyone likes”.

Crypto has nothing to do with community notes. Not even tangentially. Trying to attach your pet internet money project just reeks of desperation.

You realize whose blog you're reading right? Maybe you aren't the target audience.

Specifically the part where he downloads the data and runs the algorithm to verify that he gets the same result.

Except this is not about community. Communities are often exclusionary (e.g. "we, who are not those smelly hippy leftists"). This is about credible neutrality, an attempt to soar above tribal politics. Credible neutrality is an important aspect of money. Many (including Vitalik) think that cryptocurrency can't be considered money if it is not credibly neutral.

But cryptography has little to do with neutrality.

Why? It seems that digital consensus building to arrive at the truth has parallels with blockchain.

That sounds far more comparable to Wikipedia than anything blockchain-related.

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