Vitalik Buterin — The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy (2021)
Buterin argues that in decentralized systems, legitimacy — the intersubjective belief that a decision or allocation is correct, valid, and worth honoring — is more fundamental than technical mechanisms or economic incentives. Legitimate systems function because participants believe they should function; illegitimate systems collapse regardless of their technical properties.
He identifies several sources of legitimacy: brute fact (what actually happened), conformity (everyone expects others to follow it), process (it followed a legitimate procedure), performance (it works well), participation (people had voice in it), and time (it has been around long enough to be trusted). Different systems draw on different legitimacy sources.
For OM: the essay underpins the claim that Ethereum’s legitimacy is “thermodynamic” rather than coercive — it arises from the convergent choices of participants rather than from state enforcement or network effects alone. This is precisely the kind of non-coercive coordination infrastructure that OM identifies as adequate to extitutional values: it coordinates without banning.