Original subtitles

Vitalik, you're on stage in four minutes.

Sure.

Hey, old dog, I want my tea.

And I'm drinking my tea.

You know why? Because I don't like tea.

So did you know that the word for tea is some version of tea or chai

in pretty much every language in the world, with, like, fairly few exceptions?

Well, tea originated in China,

and the word spread from, like, two different regions.

The Portuguese, I did kind of colonize the area, right?

And, like, the reason why the Taiwan island is called Formosa

is because that's the Portuguese word for beautiful.

OK, thank you.

But then why did Portugal get chai?

Because when Portuguese came from Taiwan...

See, I only remember 80% of the story, but it's fascinating.

But anyway, why am I talking about this stuff?

I should be drinking it.

How are you feeling about your speech?

I definitely can get, like, tired when there's a lot of them.

And, like, yesterday, yeah,

I literally got delivered six speeches.

Vitalik Buterin is the blockchain movement's biggest celebrity.

He's become something like the philosopher king of crypto.

Vitalik Buterin.

Vitalik Buterin.

Vitalik Buterin.

Vitalik Buterin.

I'm ready for you now.

He's one of the most influential people in cryptocurrency

and technology broadly defined.

He's the engineer widely recognized

as the inventor of Ethereum.

Bitcoin can be digital money,

but Ethereum can be digital infrastructure.

It can be a binding structure of how people cooperate online.

Ethereum has the potential to disrupt the giants of the tech world

by giving power to internet users rather than platforms.

Next up, I would like to invite Vitalik Buterin to the stage.

Ethereum has made Vitalik a billionaire,

an iconic figurehead,

to a community of builders and developers from around the world.

So, here I am in 30 minutes.

He has massively moved forward in history.

At a young age, he's thrust into the limelight

as the face of the technology

that may redefine all forms of digital transactions in the 21st century.

Huge round of applause for Vitalik!

How are you feeling?

Excited to be speaking, I guess.

I don't know.

Well, am I excited to be speaking?

Definitely nostalgic.

It's like a mix of excitement and a feeling of like,

oh God, why are people listening to me?

I'm just a guy.

I guess I started the Nomad thing in the middle of 2013.

And I pretty much haven't stopped.

Yeah, go to a place either because I've been invited

by the global Ethereum community

to, you know, either visit them

or go to some event or some purpose like that.

Do you have a room back here?

Oh, cool.

So, this is the bag.

This is the...

There's bags inside bags.

This one has various bathroom supplies.

This one...

I should put this into this one.

This has basically just like vitamins

and sometimes it has tea.

Various snacks.

Oh, this is a lovely Trader Joe's thing.

It's a energy bar that's like actually reasonably healthy.

It has a...

What was it?

16 grams fat, which is mostly nuts.

And then 14 grams carbohydrates, of which seven is fiber.

Oh, okay.

A good find.

And then obviously the 100% chocolate.

You don't have a home, right?

Right.

Maybe I get my sense of home from like Reddit and Twitter

and Telegram.

Okay.

Hey.

Where do you think I can find the Casper FFG testing language?

Wow.

Ethereum slash Casper.

One of the reasons that I started working on Ethereum is that I'm very concerned about

the trajectory of technology.

Oh, and this is a secret room inside the secret room.

Our lives are increasingly on the internet and that can either be done through the rails

of a few megacorps that control what we can do, Facebook, Google.

There's only a block built on here.

The way that these companies are abusing us is pretty messed up.

Like I'm now controlled by this slot machine in my pocket that like is constantly advertising

to me and using like dopamine research to figure out how to get me to open it 10,000

times a day.

I don't know how many times I open my phone a day.

I don't think that we can stop technology from progressing.

I do think that we have to change the trajectory, but with Ethereum, we can shake up the status

quo and the equilibrium.

Vitalik helped set the stage and now there are hundreds of thousands of people across

the world that are building things with Ethereum.

This is a spectacular experiment.

I'm either going to work on this stuff or I'm going to go live in the woods.

Like, I don't think there's much in between for me.

Do you want to take a seat, Vitalik?

Sure, sure.

I'm just like turning my phone off so it doesn't beep and annoy you halfway through.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

How long are we expecting this to take, by the way?

Just because the Ethereum people need me.

Stay on your sticks, please.

Copy you.

Coming down.

Coming down.

Hello, camera.

How are you?

Okay.

We're set.

Yay.

So let's start from the beginning.

Why did you invent Ethereum?

Hmm.

I came upon this interesting Bitcoin thing when I had been halfway through high school.

It fascinated me immediately because of how it combines together all of these economic

and political aspects.

So I started trying my best to join the Bitcoin community.

Yeah.

So welcome to my humble abode, I suppose.

Probably like around three or four square meters.

The main advantage of the tent is that rent is zero dollars per month.

This is what I sleep in because the temperature goes down to eight degrees at night.

Random food supplies.

Bitcoin migs.

Bitcoin is a unique technology.

It has unique properties that no other system in the world has had before.

And, you know, people who have been disenfranchised by the existing financial and banking system will have an alternative.

We are seeing a massive resurgence.

Of these idealist dreams and the cyberpunk sort of crypto-anarchist world in the 1990s.

And these ideals of society and community, I feel, it is through these kinds of technologies that we'll finally realize their benefits.

We need to actually start building new communities together.

We can have lots of different societies operating according to whatever people's own beliefs are.

It really seems like the only practical way forward.

And, you know, any kind of group that's trying to push those ideas forward in a voluntary way has my support.

And I think, you know, we're going to see thousands and thousands of ideas.

Of those, 990 times whatever are going to fail.

But the rest of them are going to end up being the models of life in the 21st and 22nd century.

Awesome.

I definitely philosophically understood that there's something wrong with the way the Internet works and with the way that a lot more things work.

And I wanted to kind of get in and see if Bitcoin could be part of a path to make things better.

I had already been doing the nomad thing for six months.

And I continued my travels.

And then I lived in this sort of anarchist cooperative close to Barcelona.

And this abandoned factory filled Colofo.

There was this self-sustaining community that emerged outside of, you know, existing de facto institutional structures.

There were developers.

There were anarchists.

Definitely a good reflection of just like the kinds of really fascinating mindsets that were everywhere in crypto at the time.

And they were using Bitcoin to live in a way that's like very outside and separate from the world.

And I think that's something that I've learned from society.

Just seeing all of the people come together and collectively create a community just helps me understand many aspects of how the world works.

What are your long-term goals and or vision?

So I think I'm just going to continue working on many things at once, continue learning, see where that and just see where it takes me.

Fantastic.

Yeah.

Wow.

At the same time, I saw, you know, plenty of other crypto users that just organized these like big, really expensive parties.

They just have a mission of making lots of money.

And for them, that's like more important than everything else.

But I was convinced that this is a really powerful technology.

Eventually, I started realizing more and more that like, hey, these are ideas.

They can be applied to more places than just the currency.

And that's the idea that turned into Ethereum.

It's so beautiful.

They're just micro animals.

See, they're harmless.

Okay, that's probably the bravest I've been around bugs in years.

When I first came up with the idea of Ethereum.

I was looking for Ethereum back in 2013.

I went on this walk and I was looking at the natural environment.

Nature is lovely.

You know, it makes all of these structures like literally out of thin air.

More than 99.9% of the mass of any one of these plants or trees comes from air and water.

It's 6 CO2 plus 6 H2O equals 6 CO2 plus 6 H2O.

And then from sugar comes everything else.

Photosynthesis, the reverse of the human breathing equation.

Once you understand a bit of chemistry, it seems obvious.

But the fact that there are just like plants and all plants are just like made of air and water.

And out of that, you just create these, you know, really big and really sturdy things.

And to me, that just feels profound.

If we build an environment like this, then naturally good things just will grow over time.

We can use cryptography and this big global network of computers to build a platform.

And then people can just come and build things on top.

Ethereum could be this invisible infrastructure layer.

Where everyone can just interact with everyone else directly.

And things run ever.

And it would make it much more possible to live a life completely without interfacing with fakes.

Or big evil corporations.

It could be used to build this new internet.

For me, Ethereum is freedom.

Disruptive people doing things to simply break the mold that is already in the world.

That people say, everything is created, we can't do anything anymore.

And the Ethereum community says,

Like this? Look at me.

I've seen banks shut down or take over people's money.

For me as an engineer, being programmable money meant being able to build things.

I wake up thinking about what I can do, what I can build, what I can learn.

I've never had a structure of how I will sell my work.

Artists that haven't been recognized enough are now getting an opportunity.

This radically expands the amount of trust that people can have in working with each other.

Across borders, across faiths, across languages.

It represents this next evolution of coordination for humanity.

Wait.

So what is Ethereum?

That's a very personal question.

I mean, to me, Ethereum has become my life.

It's what I do day in and day out.

And it's a very meaningful project that I think will completely transform society.

The dream of the Internet was to connect everyone without borders or mediation.

But the complexity of what we do now online has made us reliant on middlemen.

Especially giant corporations and governments.

But it doesn't have to be like this.

Think, for example, of a marketplace like eBay, Uber, Airbnb.

At the end of the day, it's just an individual providing another service to another individual.

Why do we have this company in between?

Well, this company provides various trusted services.

It mediates payments.

It handles identity and reputation.

Reviews insurance.

But what if we can rebuild all these services as applications on Ethereum?

We're building infrastructure that the whole world can enjoy.

And on top of these really strong foundations, we can build this infinite garden.

It's a blank canvas, which is permissionless.

Anyone can come in.

And this is where a lot of the power comes from.

All sorts of things could change.

It might mean facilitating identity for people who want to vote, for example.

It might mean, instead of having physical passports, you can have your passport as an NFT on your phone.

It could lead to all sorts of, like, mini revolutions in society.

It probably is, you know, to a large extent, idealistic.

But I think this will become much, much more mainstream

with the creation of totally new products that were almost impossible to imagine

before the existence of this new superpower, which is Ethereum.

So you can have this intuition, this gut feel that this is really world-changing

and yet not know exactly how this infinite garden is going to grow and evolve.

I just noticed that after I made the previous move, I'm like, oh, wow.

Okay.

Vitalik has a mind, you know, that still to this day, it's curious about how things work.

Who are you photographing?

The one you see there is the photographer.

You see us?

Yes.

Who are you photographing?

Who's there?

Vitalik and his mom are photographing.

They're photographing.

Well, are we going to read?

Yes.

Well, let's read.

In one drop of water.

Okay.

Vitalik was born in 94 in Russia.

No!

And that was actually a very scary time for the country.

The Soviet Union was an attempt to create a very artificial centralized structure.

You were just a helpless pawn and the government plans and controls everything.

And then this whole paradigm falls apart and you're left with realizing that nobody cares about you.

Nobody will take care of you and you have no clue what to do.

All the savings of my parents that they saved throughout their life over the night just became worthless.

And you could buy a loaf of bread on it.

It was actually really tragic for the country.

When you're in this environment for some time, you kind of start reflecting on, you know, what do you want for yourself?

And what do you want for your child?

And when Putin came into power, there was a big question mark for many people.

Like, oh, yeah.

So this, you know, KGB guy, what is going to happen under him?

It was clear that we had to leave Russia.

When Vitalik was six, we decided to go to Canada.

And, you know, as you can imagine, for a child to move to another country was a big shift.

We gave him this old ABMPC and he really took to that.

That was his favorite toy.

And the anchor, like, you know, for a child, like, here's this anchor that's something familiar to me, this, like, new place.

You just kind of explore that, a bunch of things, like, you know, from paintbrush, this and that.

But here he loved Excel.

And then when he was about seven, he created Encyclopedia of Bunnies.

It's an encyclopedia about this fictitious universe which is populated by bunnies with lots and lots of detail of, like, how to do this.

How they talk, you know, the math, their banking system.

How can bunnies pass the speed of light?

They have 16,438.79 grams of magic sugar.

Magic sugar is sugar that contains 70% magic, 15% rocks, 9% metal, 4% paper, 1.7% wood, 0.25% leaves.

Let me check if the math checks out.

95, 94, 98.

Yeah, it checks out.

So you can see how fascinated he was with numbers and how easy it was for him to process all that stuff.

It's an amazing creation for a seven-year-old child and also an amazing reflection of his mind.

Growing up, you could see that he's a very unique child.

But for many years, he was not speaking.

His mind was racing so quickly as he would start to speak, his mind was already ahead of that and he would kind of stumble.

Being a parent, trying to figure out, is this okay?

You know, should I do something about this?

Is this a problem?

But things progressed at their own pace.

Can I have a picture with you?

Sure.

Yes.

Okay, perfect.

Okay.

We'll just wait here then.

When Ethereum started, he was not looking to be leader of anything, if you will.

For him, it was more like, hey, I came up with this cool idea.

Let me write about this.

And then maybe some important smart...

People will do something about that.

But then things change and people, they immediately recognize his sincerity.

And lots of people got interested and they basically then told him,

Pedaliki, you should move forward with this.

And people were pushing him into this position of leadership.

It was not something that came naturally, that was outside of his comfort zone.

That's still one of the most challenging things for him.

Okay, great.

So today I am going to be talking about rabbits.

No, rabbits are outside of crypto.

But I'm going to be talking about other things that are outside of crypto and rabbits.

So of all the different voices in the space, you've kind of chosen to focus on Vitalik's writing.

Why Vitalik?

Vitalik was the person who first got me interested in this to begin with.

It was his white paper that I first kind of geeked out on.

In many respects, he fits this almost too perfectly, this mythology that our society has of a tech founder.

This kind of worship of youth.

This obsession with a kind of innocence and yet power.

But at the same time, I always remember that he is above all a writer and a thinker,

asking these questions that we really need to be exploring.

In 2011 and 2012, I'd seen protests around the world.

People seeking a deeper kind of democracy.

In the streets.

In occupied spaces.

Responding to that financial crisis of 2008.

My understanding of what had gone most profoundly wrong in the financial crisis was a lack of democracy.

You know, that there was not real accountability because our system had become so controlled by corporate power.

January 2014, the Ethereum white paper came out.

And as Vitalik described what Ethereum could enable,

it made me wonder, could that work of renewing democracy, of advancing it,

move from the streets into this kind of digital space?

And it attracted the kinds of people who are able to imagine a radically different future than what the present presents itself as.

You know, it started to spread.

So when I wrote the first draft of the white paper, I sent it to about 15 people.

I started getting these replies back from people I had never heard of.

Like, hey, this is a cool project. I would love to be a developer for it.

Ethereum opened the door for systems that could be much more closely governed and monitored and attuned to the people using it.

We cannot assume, however,

that it will just take care of itself.

That the technology has enough decentralization or whatever your favorite buzzword is

to make sure that the good things come out.

We need to be involved.

The next step was welcoming the first 10 people who replied back saying they wanted to help into the team

and making five of them the leadership.

Was that a good idea?

No.

No.

And this was, of course, this, of course, proved to be a big mistake.

What was your instinct to make these people co-founders?

They just seemed like nice guys and they wanted to help.

So, like, why not just, like, make them part of the leadership?

I expected people to just come in, be aligned with the vision, understand why this thing is so valuable,

and just kind of, you know...

kind of selflessly help to move the project forward.

But this did not happen.

And the conflicts between people ended up being one of the biggest problems.

Yeah, there was definitely a lot of tension between...

between many different people.

One of the debates that was constantly happening is whether or not we're going the for-profit or non-profit route.

On one side, you had people that wanted to turn this into the crypto Google.

And on the other side, you had part of the group that wanted to turn Ethereum into a non-profit.

I was kind of temporarily convinced that the more corporate approach...

The whole thing just never sat well with me.

It felt dirty even that, like, we would take money that was intended to build this very public thing

that would go into a corporation where that corporation had shareholders

and would exist for the benefit of shareholders.

But then people started pushing it more and more over time.

Can you hear me?

Yes, I can hear you now.

Okay.

We're about six or seven weeks away from launch.

The issues that still remain are probably much more on the organizational side for us.

So we're planning on having a meeting where everyone from leadership is going to be there.

If I have to bump up against people, I will.

There it is, the spaceship.

This was the origin location and the headquarters for it.

Ethereum.

But it was definitely a battle also of principles, ideologies, and interests.

You know, every person is motivated by different things.

And, you know, the hardest part of building something like Ethereum was having people getting along.

Hey, there.

Hey, can you hear me?

Yeah.

Sorry, the Wi-Fi here is just crazy.

Okay, go really slowly.

I want to know all the details.

You know, initially, my thought process was, you know, I was going here to vote on the new business structure.

But then I find out that basically half of the organization had been in discussions to completely rebuild and reform the project into functionally a not-for-profit.

They want a horizontal power structure.

So they basically want the fucking janitor to be at the same level as the person at the top.

It's just batshit crazy out here.

You know, we're all equal.

We're all going to be this new age open-source project.

It's like I've walked into a goddamn hippie commune.

I was basically trying to abdicate responsibility the whole time because I didn't really want it.

I ended up eating to remove people.

That was definitely the moment when I did realize that, like, you know, hey, not everyone in the crypto space is in it for the ideals the same way that I am.

And a lot of people really do just want to make lots of money.

I definitely had a rude awakening in the reality of difficult human relations.

Here is where Ethereum comes in.

A lot of startups, I think, if you put them in these kinds of situations, you know, they do just, like, break apart and people give up and things stop happening.

And so, you know, we did end up going the nonprofit path.

And I think going the nonprofit path did end up being to everyone's benefit.

And how long have you been working on Ethereum?

Me personally, about four months.

I think the original white paper was authored about five months ago.

What are your immediate plans?

We want to get, we want to demonstrate that it works.

So we have a proof of concept that we want to release quite soon.

Version 1.0 and get people, show people what really is capable with this technology.

Whatever the drama, the developers kept developing.

After 20 months of Ethereum just being Ethereum,

we agreed on the launch date.

We were watching the countdown for the block number when the launch of the network would trigger.

And everyone was kind of anxiously, you know, eagerly waiting for the launch of the chain.

Then, you know, about a few seconds later, we got the confirmation.

You know, yes, the chain exists and yes, the chain is growing.

Finally, you know, we can breathe easy.

Ethereum actually exists now.

You know, there is no off switch.

Like, you know, you've created life.

Thanks to the power of modern communication,

we have the ability to create technologies that are decentralized,

removing middlemen and allowing users to interact with each other directly through a global network.

Now the question is, what will you build on top of Ethereum?

We're at the Ethereum developer conference.

And they're saying this is the way the internet was meant to be.

Something that's not run by anybody,

but actually is sort of run by everybody because no one person can control it.

Our mission is to create the blockchain applications of the future.

And that's where you guys come in.

It's a community that's like just really cool to be a part of.

Not taking yourself too seriously,

being able to be casual and relaxed,

but also really nerding out over the details.

How we can use this technology to deploy democracies anywhere in the world

that can be censorship resistant,

not be controlled by any nation state or corporation.

Thank you to everyone for coming.

Vitalik has been on a global campaign to raise awareness of his creation

and its potential implications for business, finance, and government.

Learn everything you can about Ethereum

because it really is very much the business.

Some big investors saying, fine, I was a skeptic.

I've changed my mind.

Square, PayPal getting involved.

I created a project called Uniswap.

It's a decentralized exchange protocol built on top of Ethereum.

We should expect to see a whole range of societal functions

moving into this kind of decentralized technology.

Now to the latest trend that's sweeping the internet,

digital art sold as NFTs.

NFTs are a new business case for artists to be able to monetize their work.

Ethereum has really caught on.

It's a $370 billion industry being built by a bunch of internet kids

in unicorn T-shirts.

The epic rise is insane.

Well, yeah.

Cryptocurrency is having a notable impact on the world's financial markets,

but it's also affecting the environment.

People are just starting to talk about this

and recognize the sustainability questions,

particularly as Ether, environmentally incredibly costly.

The way that Ethereum verifies transactions,

you've got these computers running an algorithm in order to solve equations.

It's using all of these energy inputs.

And of course, that massive energy consumption has been a huge critique.

If you believe that blockchains are going to grow by 100x,

this becomes unsustainable.

We can't have Ethereum consume half the world's electricity consumption.

The show is asking if she should just order food,

or we should just order food.

Do we not have enough to make stuff?

We don't have eggs.

Safeway is like literally 500 meters away.

That's true.

Yeah.

I am happy to like literally go on a Safeway run myself if people want.

We can do that.

Okay, I'm going to do that.

Good luck.

Okay.

See you soon.

Okay.

Seems like it's egg day again.

Wow.

Cake.

Cake.

Maximum speed.

Okay, okay.

Let's start?

Okay, let's start.

Okay, let's do it.

Yes.

Okay.

Let's break some eggs.

Free-ranged eggs.

No added hormones, no antibiotics.

What does it say?

We love our hens, you'll love our eggs?

A lot.

Yeah.

I don't believe a word.

Me neither.

It sounds like creepy Brave New World stuff, doesn't it?

Let's see.

How do we do this?

Well, my usual algorithm would be to pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop,

pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.

Okay.

That was a bad idea.

That's nice.

Okay, let's have food, guys.

We're going to the restaurant, man.

If we don't finish everything before the call starts, then Ethereum has failed.

We're trying to upgrade Ethereum because there's a fundamental problem.

The higher the price goes up, the more energy consumption will show up.

Currently, Ethereum uses something like the energy consumption of Argentina.

It's important that Ethereum doesn't cause the planet to keep warming up increasingly

quickly.

And so we have been really intent on coming up with a solution.

This is a really big and important set of upgrades that really fundamentally improves

what Ethereum can do.

This upgrade is all about changing the foundations.

A good analogy would be swapping the engine of a gasoline car with an electric car.

We're effectively changing the engine while we're driving, which is kind of crazy.

It's probably the most complex distributed software upgrade that's ever happened.

There's $500 billion of value locked on Ethereum.

The chain goes down, you could have some serious issues.

0 to 2.67 is going to be the time for the proposer to publish, right?

Then 2.67 is the cutoff for everyone to attest.

So, either they attest to the proposal or they attest to the idea of there being emptiness.

It's very important that this goes off well, but there's a lot of different kind of mechanics

at play.

You know, there's researchers, there's community members that are outspoken, and there's a

lot of developers, right?

There's a multitude of voices, and it is a messy process.

The way that blockchains upgrade themselves is through a process called sortation.

Social consensus.

What does that mean?

It means that all the users around it, all the whole ecosystem, everyone kind of come

to rough consensus that an upgrade needs to be done.

This is why a lot of the difficulty is all around coordination.

When people think of like a leader of a project, or traditionally I think they think of them

exercising a lot of formal power, like, you know, the way Mark Zuckerberg exercises a

lot of formal power over Facebook.

But the Ethereum ecosystem is very complex.

just does not work that way at all.

Like, ultimately, I do not own and I do not control Ethereum.

Is it possible that the cross-domain MEV

could be a good thing for Ethereum?

We say Ethereum is committed to decentralization.

So, of course, it's chaotic.

Of course, it's not easy to coordinate.

But we want to let things happen as organically as possible

because we want this to be a community project

that's open source.

This is the most important, unique part of Ethereum.

Oh, wow. Yeah.

You don't see this big tree in Singapore.

No, we do not.

The log, it's very logarithmic.

I'm just imagining, like, if you can climb up them

and then you just kind of sit there at 60 meters above ground.

Well, I hope that both we

and the trees live as long as the Earth.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We want Ethereum to live longer than that, though.

This is true.

The growth being so quick has definitely been very surprising.

Well, the growth of crypto in general being so quick

is definitely something very surprising.

Like, the number of people who know about it,

how much people care about it,

the number of projects that are happening,

the amount of media attention.

And at the beginning,

kind of these jumps didn't really feel like as much,

but then the growth with NFTs feels like

it's just gotten catapulted into something much bigger

than most of us could have imagined.

NFTs are booming.

It's a $10 billion business.

That's a 2,000% increase, by the way, just this year.

I like those apes.

What are those?

They're angry apes?

What kind of apes were they?

Bored apes.

Bored apes.

I bought an ape.

I got an ape, too.

Is it about more than just making money?

I'd say it's 50-50 on that.

It's fun to make money.

Ethereum prices are going big.

It's being driven in large part by a whole new cast

of cartoon characters.

Crypto punks are the most expensive.

Catching up fast are the pudgy penguins.

They're up more than 7,000%.

This is one of the largest speculative bubbles

I've seen in my career.

I don't understand why people are paying $10, $20 million

for digital pictures of fat penguins and bored apes.

What exactly is happening here?

The thing, the difference between crypto

and a lot of pre-crypto things with similar value to crypto

basically is the money aspect.

And this is a double-edged sword.

The good edge of the sword is that it provides funding

to things that did not have funding before.

A lot of the things that are being developed by crypto projects

are fundamentally public goods,

which don't really give anyone a profit.

But with the crypto ecosystem,

there now is an incentive to develop these things.

But then the negative risk is basically that people see

the opportunity to use Ethereum as a platform

to just make money by speculating.

If that kind of activity starts to dominate,

then the risk is that the equilibrium flips.

People start to see that,

oh, this is what the ecosystem is about.

And so there is this balance.

Financial incentive is like a fire.

You can use it to keep yourself warm

or you can use it to burn your house down.

Welcome to Bankless,

where we explore the frontier of internet money

and internet finance.

Guys, we have a fantastic episode.

And who is the guest?

Vitalik Buterin.

Vitalik, it's great to see you again.

How are you doing?

Just yesterday, I found out about this NFT project

that's called weirdvitalik.com.

It's a collection of 10,000 randomly generated

Bored Vitalik Buterin NFTs.

This was just totally done without my permission,

and it's very not in line with my own values.

It is basically a money grab.

I've had multiple interviews,

podcasts everywhere,

criticizing this idea of,

hey, we're just going to use Ethereum

in order to make $3 million monkeys.

The challenge here is,

how can we very strongly signal to the community

that this sort of stuff,

if you're into this sort of stuff,

you're not really part of the kind of community

that we want.

That we want to see.

The Ethereum ecosystem is growing.

Like, we see new people coming in.

It is very, very important

for us to stick to the original vision.

But that is not easy,

because the whole structure of the society

is built in a way that making the most profit

is the goal.

Without further ado,

let's welcome Vitalik Gudrun.

The cryptocurrency ecosystem

has been around for a little over a decade.

How do you see this moving forward?

What I would want to see is,

can we make changes toward a better system?

A lot of things are open and undecided.

If the only thing that gets developed on blockchains

is just the ability for people to essentially gamble

with tokens with each other.

Then that ends up not being something

that's very valuable.

And that just ends up being

a really huge missed opportunity.

This is Tim O'Reilly's interview.

Take one marker.

For the last, you know, 40 plus years,

I've seen a lot of technology change.

And if funding races ahead of achievement,

then...

then you have a real problem.

When the crypto boom started happening,

I said, this is as if the dot-com bubble

had happened in the 1980s

on the original internet technology

before the World Wide Web had been invented.

Imagine, if you will,

sitting down to your morning coffee,

turning on your home computer

to read the day's newspaper.

Well, it's not as far-fetched as it may seem.

Realistically, what we want

with new technologies, new decentralization,

is lots and lots of experimentation.

Until you see what works.

This is an experiment.

We're trying to figure out

what it's going to mean to us as editors and reporters

and what it means to the home user.

People are trying things and failing

and trying something else.

And new people are coming in and trying that.

And that's what decentralization is about.

It's like that innovation

until you find the thing that scales up

and becomes the new normal.

But when too much capital floods in,

uh...

it really wrecks things.

Technologies, uh...

you know, very rarely, uh...

stay the same as, uh...

as they are envisioned by their creators.

Ethereum is very much a tool for innovation.

But amongst the good actors

and those contributing to the code development,

you also have bad actors

who are looking at the code specifically

to identify vulnerabilities

so that they can exploit those vulnerabilities

to hack and steal funds.

Elicit actors using virtual currency

are able to send virtual currency cross-border rapidly

without any of the normal controls

that might be in place

with a more traditional financial system.

There's an understanding within the FBI

that the virtual currency space is growing.

It's growing rapidly, uh...

and we need to address those threats.

These are not small in terms of numbers.

And I fear it's only gonna get bigger.

This past year was the largest year

of hacked funds and stolen funds.

And the largest hacks

were perpetrated by North Korea.

You have a country that has taken

its intelligence services

and decided to have them steal funds.

They have a very sophisticated

laundering technique.

This is an image

of over 15,000 discrete wallets

that have been used to launder funds.

So far, in 2022,

they've stolen $1.7 billion

in cryptocurrency.

This is money that they can use

to directly fund their missiles program.

And so,

the impact is massive

from a national security perspective.

So, as the creator of this technology,

do you feel responsible

when it's used in this way?

Hmm.

Um, I mean...

You know, responsibility definitely exists.

Um, and that's, uh,

importance to think about.

Um, though...

I mean, like, technology as being, uh,

the idea that technology is worth building,

like, even if there are things

that are pretty...

that are far off,

that can't be predicted,

I think is also really important.

So, you know, look,

I think it's, uh,

importance to balance between the two.

I think, like,

a lot of downstream consequences of technology

just are really hard to predict, right?

Like, you know, do you...

do you hold Albert Einstein responsible for,

you know, like, nuclear weapons?

I would say no.

Ultimately,

he invented an amazing piece of physics,

and it just, like,

has all sorts of applications.

A lot of people really are putting a lot of hope

into the, uh, crypto space.

To, like, actually, you know,

walk the walk in terms of, uh,

changing the world.

At some point,

we have to actually do that.

It has happened.

This is Ukraine's capital.

What seemed unthinkable in the 21st century

is now underway.

Trainers wake up to find

themselves plunged into the midst of all explosions

and air raid sirens ringing out here

in Kyiv and cities across this country.

Ukraine is under cyber attack,

and among the reported victims

are banks and government websites.

This is part of a Russian plan

to paralyze the Ukrainian government.

Response time is crucial.

Whether banking system is possible

to finance important things for the army.

I want to help to defend Ukraine

from this attack with crypto.

By selling an NFT of a Ukrainian flag.

And we are using Ethereum

to transfer the funds urgently

to, um, charities in Ukraine

that are helping Ukraine defend itself right now.

When this ends,

I just want my family to be at peace.

I want them to be alive.

That's literally the only reason

why I'm doing this.

And then, um, sorry,

I'm just, as we speak,

I'm seeing this, you know.

I, no, I have no words for this.

It's, it's just some unspeakable violence.

When the war started,

I had an immediate realization

that if I don't use it,

if I don't use my voice and do something here,

then, like, why would I do that

for, uh, pretty much anything else?

I did not want to give people the impression

that, like, they easily could have gotten

if I said nothing,

that I quietly support what's going on.

The Russian government's hope

is that Vitalik's technology

can be as transformative for their own finances

as it has been for his.

We discussed what else we need to do,

what we need to do additionally

in order to ensure that your work

is effective and profitable

and that it contributes

to the development of the Russian economy.

I should have handled my Russia trip better.

And I should have taken more of an effort

to avoid the government groups.

This is definitely one of my biggest regrets.

There are some things that are, um,

worth making a stance over.

Massive donations are pouring into Ukraine

in the form of crypto.

This is huge for the Ukrainian government

because it's nearly instantly available.

It's a lot harder in the midst of a war

to be able to acquire, you know, dollars

or any other currencies.

Food.

Food.

Lighters.

24 power banks.

Medicine.

Thank you, guys.

And greetings from Bakhmut,

from Pani Elena and her, uh...

Hello?

Yes, dad.

I'm crying with joy.

High-precision weapons.

Full weapons.

I've arrived in Kharkov.

Stingers.

Everything has arrived.

My daughter is asleep.

Hooray.

Thank God.

Come on, it's tears of joy.

She's crying.

Yeah, yeah.

It's all right.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, my dear.

That should be.

And I guess there are some categories for these risks.

So like, this is the protocol level.

This is the time where all of these, uh,

things that we're building are just very quickly moving

...moving from theory to practice.

This big upgrade has definitely been something that we're stressed about.

The question now is, like, what are the biggest risks right now?

Like, what are the biggest risks as we approach this thing?

And, like, are there things that we're not doing or others are not doing that we should be?

The adversary that I'm trying to keep in mind here is the most well-equipped adversary that exists.

There's large governments right now in the East and in the West have entire payrolls of hackers.

Like, how do we harden against that?

Client teams have mentioned that, like, they do feel pretty stressed and urgent.

And I think there is a fine balance between having a sense of urgency but just having people be so under pressure.

There is a point where too much pressure just pushes teams to burn out.

There is a large technical upgrade coming for Ethereum, which will hopefully make the network less energy-intensive.

But it's been delayed multiple times, and it's a very troubled process at the moment.

Hi, Zaya!

Hi, Pavel, how are you?

Great, how are you? Where are you now, in San Francisco?

No, I'm still here in Denver.

In Denver? Ah, cool, cool.

How is it going with the...

with Proof of Stake?

It seems like everything is going according to plan.

So far, I've been thinking about it for the last four days.

Well, yes, me too.

And, you know, a lot of emotions have passed.

How are your own emotions?

Because, you know, tears are flowing here, and some kind of anger, and helplessness.

Well, yes, yes.

Well, that and that.

And also the understanding that I have some kind of strength to have an impact in this situation.

100%, 100%.

Well, it's a huge responsibility to use it correctly.

Yes, yes.

Well, yes, and your strength, it is also, you know, that in such a situation, everyone around is watching.

Who to believe? Who is our flagship?

Yes.

Yes.

Crypto's market value has halved, hemorrhaging and eye-watering $2.2 trillion.

What we've seen in the last few months is this perfect storm of black swan events.

The price of cryptocurrencies has plummeted.

With crypto crashing, if you own a non-fungible token or NFT, you are so funged.

Because, evidently, celebrity-endorsed NFTs are leaving investors financially crippled.

This bear market, or as it's known to people within the industry, crypto winter, is slightly different to those that have come before.

You know, I think we can acknowledge that these ideas have failed.

It's hard to justify what the hell we're doing here, man.

It is probably not as revolutionary as it's being made out to seem.

I think, well...

Well...

If the space ends up basically failing from here, then obviously its biggest impact will have just been what it's done so far

and its contribution to this kind of chain of stuff investing into stuff investing into stuff,

where the stuff at the end was just making these crazy bets that look very intelligent in bull markets, but then in bear markets,

one thing loses everything and that makes another thing lose.

And then there's a shorting cascade and more people lose everything.

So, trying to really get beyond that.

Do you feel like this is like the coldest it gets?

I don't know yet.

Sometimes I feel like there hasn't been enough to spare yet, but I don't know.

Like it needs to hit rock bottom?

Yeah.

I don't really know where all this is going.

I do know that if this is a truly valuable technology, the best thing that could happen to it right now is what is happening,

which is this collapse of the speculative economy so that you can see what's left.

You can see what really matters.

We are going to Ukraine for the Kyiv Tech Summit.

It's something that's important to me personally.

You know, you could say that a big part of any person's actions is their search for meaning.

.

.

.

.

That's the bomb shelter, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a bomb shelter.

Okay.

.

Hello, everyone.

.

.

Let's give him some claps.

One and only, no need for introductions.

It's an honor to have Italic with us today.

It means a lot for Ukraine, for all of us.

May I shake your hand?

Yeah, sure.

I really admire you for taking a stance with Ukraine.

Just want to say thank you.

And I just applause for that.

I mean, I was just very impressed by the fact that, you know,

you would even be willing to just go and host a tech summit in the middle of a war.

So I wanted to come and support you.

Very proud and excited to welcome Vitalik to the stage.

I think this moment has definitely shown that crypto actually can have some real impacts on the world.

So far, they've raised a total of more than $100 billion.

More than $30 million at this point, which is amazing.

So I think it's important for our industry to have these kind of down-to-earth moments

of remembering that there are very real and important things that the technology is doing.

Bubbles pop, but sustainable long-term utility is something that can last forever.

Cryptocurrencies have become a way for people in Argentina

to protect themselves from endless economic crisis.

We all know in the crypto industry that Argentina loves crypto.

Do you experience this level of rock star in anywhere else?

No.

The number of people here, the number of projects here,

the excitement of the people here is definitely amazing.

The fact that decentralized social is finally taking off is amazing.

The fact that we have like Farcaster and Lens, also things like ZooPass,

the sign-in with Ethereum is expanding.

It really is turning into something that's a much stronger ecosystem

that was available even one or two years ago.

So I think that's really amazing too.

How excited are you, Vitalik?

I mean, you've got to be ecstatic at this point in time, right?

Yeah, no, I am absolutely excited.

I mean, there is always the probability every day of some horrible break happening.

The worst case scenario would be someone intentionally causing some horrible bug.

If they wanted to be mean, they would do it at 4 a.m. Euro time.

If there was ever an incentive to spend the effort,

like if you were a large nation today,

to attack something like this,

this would be probably the one you'd go for.

Because there's no reason, like,

say you don't really have haters until you make it,

like ETH has made it, right?

So it's, yeah.

We'll see. We'll see.

We want to see some of these really positive indicators.

And then once we see finalization,

we can take a deep breath, breathe easy.

Then we'll be monitoring, you know, obviously,

the next couple of hours, the next couple of weeks.

And honestly, we're monitoring all the time.

So I think we're about two minutes till,

so I will turn it back over to y'all.

Once we get this nailed down

and get a few more updates in the future,

the protocol is going to be incredibly robust.

And I think it will last,

hopefully the rise and fall of empires,

and it will still be around.

This will reduce worldwide electricity consumption by 0.2%,

which, like, sounds tiny,

but when you consider that's electricity consumption

for all of humanity,

that's like a pretty mind-blowing number.

The merge happened on 15 September,

seven hours, 39 minutes ago.

There's a panda on Google. That's amazing.

Click. Ding.

It's a panda.

Yeah.

Top stories.

Ethereum brings the merge behind it.

This is fun. We get some German media.

Cryptocurrency ether reduces energy usage by 99.95%.

That's nice.

Okay, Business Insider.

Oh, God.

Business Insider does not seem to care a huge amount

about electricity or the environment.

It just cares about the price.

I guess Germans care about either the green or the green.

So...

Ethereum completed its much-anticipated shift

to a more energy-efficient architecture.

Okay, see,

New York Times cares about the environment.

This is going as well as it could so far,

said Danny Ryan.

The technical details of the merge

are mind-bendingly complex.

Whoo!

Whoo!

Whoo!

Oh, panda balloon!

Catch a panda!

Catch a panda!

Come on, do something.

I think we've accomplished something quite large

in, like, a very non-traditional context.

Ethereum's not done,

but this certainly represents

its ability to get some, like, pretty major stuff done.

So I'm certainly optimistic about the next few years

and continuing to get Ethereum

where it needs to be.

I think anyone who thinks that they understand

exactly where it's all going is...

They're lying to you or lying to themselves.

So, with everything that happened in the last year,

I've realized at some point

that, like, I have to make sure

that things go in as positive a direction as possible.

But my biggest fear is a bull market.

If a bull market happens,

then, like, all of that speculation, obviously,

just, like, comes back.

There is value in being quiet

and, like, there is value in not being loud

until you have something that's worth being loud about.

The basic idea is that we're bringing 200 people together

from the Ethereum community

and, you know, philosophers

and people from a few other areas

and basically just getting them to live together

for two months

and try to solve problems

that matter for people and Ethereum itself.

Let's, like, let the crypto-anarchists

and the geeks, like, put in the effort

at, like, making this stuff work

and, like, maybe within a couple of years

we'll, like, get a kind of legit product

that larger groups will care about.

I do what I can to make sure the thing happens,

but hopefully it becomes something

that doesn't need me to be around forever.

I'm, uh, I don't know, an instigator, maybe?

I mean, I feel like the last year

has been a new chapter for me in a bunch of ways.

But I'm definitely feeling more optimistic

than I did a few months ago.

We know what the roadmap is.

Let's, uh, you know, keep calm and keep building.

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