Vitalik Buterin wants the internet to unmask him. Or rather, to unmask one specific anonymous document he claims to have written, using nothing but AI-powered text analysis.
On June 22, the Ethereum co-founder posted a challenge on X, revealing that he authored an anonymous Ethereum-related document published somewhere between 2020 and 2026. He’s now inviting anyone with access to AI stylometry tools to figure out which one it is.
Buterin framed the exercise with characteristic bluntness, stating he was willing to “cannibalize a piece of my own anonymity to do an experiment.” The document, he estimates, ranks among 200 to 2,000 Ethereum-related publications of similar or greater importance within the ecosystem.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Stylometry, the statistical analysis of linguistic style, has been around for decades. Academics have used it to settle debates about Shakespeare’s co-authors and identify the writers behind anonymous political pamphlets. But modern AI has supercharged the technique, turning what used to require painstaking manual analysis into something a large language model can attempt in seconds.
