#80 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, and the Future of Money

Vitalik Buterin is co-creator of Ethereum and ether, which is a cryptocurrency that is currently the second-largest digital currency after bitcoin. There’s about 110 million ether out there, which equates at this moment to about 22 trillion dollars. Ethereum has a lot of interesting technical ideas that are defining the future of blockchain technology, and Vitalik is one of the most brilliant people innovating this space today.

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EPISODE LINKS:
Vitalik blog: https://vitalik.ca
Ethereum whitepaper: http://bit.ly/3cVDTpj
Casper FFG (paper): http://bit.ly/2U6j7dJ
Quadratic funding (paper): http://bit.ly/3aUZ8Wd
Bitcoin whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Mastering Ethereum (book): https://amzn.to/2xEjWmE

This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon.

Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

OUTLINE:
00:00 – Introduction
04:54 – Satoshi Nakamoto
08:50 – Anonymity
11:41 – Open source project leadership
13:14 – What is money?
30:12 – Blockchain and cryptocurrency basics
47:01 – Ethereum
59:34 – Proof of work
1:02:22 – Ethereum 2.0
1:13:19 – Beautiful ideas in Ethereum
1:17:10 – Future of cryptocurrency
1:22:16 – Cryptocurrency resources and people to follow
1:24:38 – Role of governments
1:27:37 – Meeting Putin
1:29:52 – Large number of cryptocurrencies
1:32:59 – Mortality