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Guest Talk with Scott Moore | This Session is Not Legitimate: An Exploration of Social Rule-Making

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Scott Moore (GitCoin co-founder) explores Vitalik Buterin's framework on legitimacy, walking through six sources of legitimacy—brute force/coercion, continuity, process, performance, participation, and fairness—and ranking them from weakest to strongest. He applies these lenses to case studies like PGP's path to legitimacy and EIP-1559's contentious adoption, and closes by questioning whether legitimacy itself can be formalized as a protocol, invoking Gödel's incompleteness and Asimov's robotics laws as cautionary analogies.

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Topics

brute-force-vs-process-vs-participation-legitimacy eip-1559-and-pgp-as-case-studies governance guest-talks gödel-incompleteness-and-formalizing-legitimacy legitimacy-as-protocol protocols webers-three-types-of-authority