Ethereum's Next Decade | Vitalik Buterin
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So what are your hopes and dreams and goals for Ethereum to accomplish over the next ten years?
A future of computing where a trustless vision of security that is based on cryptography and verification of code. The era of trust me for security starts looking as archaic as the era of, I mean, like, not cleaning our water looks to us today. We've already gotten there with HTTPS. I think we need to get there with it with everything else, and I think, Ethereum can be a huge part of making that happen.
Ethereum just turned 10 years old, and we have back on the podcast, Vitalik Buterin. Vitalik, welcome back to Bankless.
Thank you, so much, David and Ryan. It's great to be back.
So first, happy birthday, Ethereum. The Ethereum white paper was published all the way back in 2013, and then the Ethereum main net launched in July 2015. So ten years later, Vitalik. How has Ethereum turned out compared to what you envisioned?
I mean, definitely, yeah, far bigger than I was expecting. I think that's the most important thing. Also, it's definitely taken longer than I expected. It's definitely turned out to be more than I expected. Think when I wrote the November white paper, my plan was still that this would be a side project that I would quickly get done over a couple of months and then go back to university. And, of course, that ended up not happening. And then at some point we thought that, you know, we'd have four stages. We get to proof of stake. And then exactly at that time, the foundation would run out of mon
Now that we have just ten years of Ethereum in rear view mirror, there's a lot that more or less went according to plan. Think if you read the white paper and then you look at what Ethereum is, you're like, yeah, that actually kind of followed suit with what some of the original visions were for for Ethereum. Looking back, what has Ethereum uniquely contributed to the world that perhaps you are most proud of or most happy about?
You know, I think it has contributed to openness and decentralization and just being a norm and a default mindset for a lot of people in a way that I think needs to be refreshed every generation. Right. So, you know, what kind of traditional free and open source software was in the 1980s and 1990s, I think, you know, the blockchain world is in large part meant to be basically that, but for the 2010s and 20s. And I think for a lot of people, it has actually done that. It's contributed to making a lot of things possible. Prediction markets are one of those examples. Back in the early 2010s, they
of different things. Vitalik, you mentioned some surprises along the way. I can imagine there have been a number of surprises, One of which, which is kind of fascinating trivia, is you expected this to be a side project, and it's turned into a, you know, a ten year, more or less full time engagement and, like, pretty massive in terms of scale. What what were some of the big surprises, though, along the way with Ethereum? Things you didn't expect.
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