Fortune favors the brave poster full#

He writes long, thoughtful essays on new governance strategies. He’s Ethereum’s benevolent dictator, and he’s become something like the philosopher king of crypto. The founder, or founders, of Bitcoin, Satoshi - totally unknown - we have no idea who he is, she is, they are.

And Buterin himself is a big part of that. Its cryptocurrency, Ether, is the second most valuable behind only Bitcoin.Īnd Ethereum is just much more central to the grand visions of how crypto can change or rebuild society than Bitcoin is. It can be the structure - a binding structure - of how people cooperate online. Bitcoin can be digital money, but Ethereum can be digital infrastructure. 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.Īnd that meant that it could do almost anything. He wrote the white paper for the ideas behind it when he was just a teenager. The central figure on the set of crypto is Vitalik Buterin. These are the people who are trying to make a future for crypto that is more interesting than: it’s just some payment infrastructure operating in the background of the internet. And it’s only when you spend a lot of time talking to people that you realize that that complexity, that inefficiency, that level of participation and creation is actually what is so obsessing about it.Īnd these are the people who stick through crypto’s low periods, like the one we’re in now. And when you’re looking at these things, they often seem really complicated and inefficient. They obsess over quadratic voting mechanisms, and coins tied to city governance, and decentralized autonomous organizations.

Fortune favors the brave poster full#

But 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.Īnd it’s full of people interested in the processes crypto can enable, the way it can decentralize decision making, or create new forms of transparency, or bind a whole community, or project, or even company to rules and protocols that can never be broken. And that’s object crypto, and it gets most of the press and, I think, is more comprehensible. Success there is judged by what the final crypto object ultimately does. They want this financial tool to make them a lot of money or to help a lot of people. They want their Bitcoin holdings to make them rich or to be really useful. They want their ape cartoon to be worth $5 million. Some people, they’re interested in crypto, because of the thing crypto creates at the end of the chain. But I think it’s actually a very good way of thinking about this divide in crypto. He makes a distinction between object arts where the value of the art lies in the object itself, how beautiful it is, how intricate it is, what we think of it, and process arts where the value of the art lies in the audience’s appreciation of what the art makes them do, of the process it gets them to engage in or allows them to engage in.Ĭ. Thi Nguyen who’s been a guest on the show, actually. But 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. You can go see my conversation a few months ago with Dan Olson for more on that. I find that crypto pretty easy to have an opinion on. Crypto as an investment where the promise or the hope is that, over time, the line just keeps going up, and anyone with the wealth, and the courage, and the foresight to hang on will become a millionaire many times over. So there’s crypto as this frothing, speculative, hyper financialized market. It is a conversation about crypto, but it is not really about the part of crypto people are most familiar with. So forgive me, I’m going to take a moment to set this conversation up.

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