Vitalik: Security and user experience are not separate domains; the goal is to minimize intent deviations and system behavior discrepancies.
Foresight News reports that Vitalik Buterin stated on Farcaster that the goal of security is to minimize the deviation between user intent and the system’s actual behavior. “User experience” can be defined similarly, so security and user experience are not independent fields; security is more focused on tail risks (where deviation costs are high) and tail risks caused by adversarial behavior. Perfect security is impossible because “user intent” itself is extremely complex, and users find it difficult to clearly express (for example, “send 1 ETH to Bob”—Bob cannot be mathematically defined). More complex goals like “privacy protection” are also hard to define (metadata leaks far exceed encryption itself). This is similar to early AI safety issues: objectives are difficult to specify robustly.
An excellent security solution should include features such as: users expressing intent in multiple, overlapping ways, with the system only executing when multiple perspectives align. Examples include type systems in programming, formal verification, transaction simulation, post-transaction assertions, multi-signature / social recovery, spending limits, and anomaly confirmation, all of which reduce risk through redundancy. Additionally, LLMs can serve as intent simulators (general LLMs approximate human common sense, and user fine-tuning LLMs approximate the user themselves), but should never decide intent alone; they are only supplementary from different perspectives to enhance redundancy effectiveness.
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