Thursday, December 29, 2022

Vitalik Buterin: The Ezra Klein Show

Ethereum’s Founder on What Crypto Can — and Can’t — Do Vitalik Buterin explains digital currency’s potential to transform our world. .

there’s this other side too, this more idealistic side, the side of crypto that is not just interested in, but truly obsessed with blockchains and protocols as a way of bringing governance and community into the digital era, as a way of unlocking new forms of cooperation. ........ there’s this other side of crypto that is really important to why the ecosystem has been so vibrant for so long through so many crashes. .......... They obsess over quadratic voting mechanisms, and coins tied to city governance, and decentralized autonomous organizations. .......... The central figure on the set of crypto is Vitalik Buterin. Buterin co-founded Ethereum. He wrote the white paper for the ideas behind it when he was just a teenager. And his insight — and it was a big one — was that, if you could program a currency like Bitcoin that cut out the need for a central authority, then you could use that same cryptographic technology to make almost a programming language that could then program any kind of digital agreement or contract and bind anybody who agreed to it in almost any digital way. .........

Bitcoin can be digital money, but Ethereum can be digital infrastructure. It can be the structure — a binding structure — of how people cooperate online. And Ethereum took off.

........... He’s Ethereum’s benevolent dictator, and he’s become something like the philosopher king of crypto. ......... He’s a digital nomad who lives out of a backpack and seems to think about really nothing but blockchains and what can be built on them.

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