Top 19 Vitalik Buterin Quotes

The main advantage of blockchain technology is supposed to be that it’s more secure, but new technologies are generally hard for people to trust, and this paradox can’t really be avoided.

Some bitcoin users see the hard fork as in some ways violating their most fundamental values. I personally think these fundamental values, pushed to such extremes, are silly.

The technical side of Ethereum‘s efficacy is 100% an engineering exercise.

A smart contract is a mechanism involving digital assets and two or more parties, where some or all of the parties put assets in, and assets are automatically redistributed among those parties according to a formula based on certain data that is not known at the time the contract is initiated.

I remember knowing, for a while, for a long time, that I was kind of abnormal in some sense.

The thing that I often ask startups on top of Ethereum is, ‘Can you please tell me why using the Ethereum blockchain is better than using Excel?’ And if they can come up with a good answer, that’s when you know you’ve got something really interesting.

Scalability is this idea of coming up with a blockchain that can scale much larger than existing chains essentially by processing transactions in parallel. And moving away from this paradigm where every single node on the network has to process every single transaction.

I think people don’t realise that running a piece of code that verifies some conditions for a financial transaction, that by itself is a lot less work than verifying a cryptographic signature, and so even if the virtual machine is inefficient, the cryptographic signature is still going to dominate.

I personally, generally, don’t really feel much emotion if there’s some problem and I’m actively solving it.

You could imagine something like a completely automated system for renting bikes that’s just done completely over blockchain crypto-payments. And theoretically just sort of start it up, and it works completely autonomously.

You can write anything that you would be able to write on a server and put it onto the blockchain. Instead of Javascript making calls to the server, you would be making calls to the blockchain.

I think Bitcoin really feels empowering in a sense.

Many people at different levels of the Russian government are open to crypto-currencies.

When I was in grade five or six, I just remember quite a lot of people were always talking about me like I was some kind of math genius. And there were just so many moments when I realized, like, okay, why can’t I just be like some normal person and go have a 75% average like everyone else.

Initially, I thought that Ethereum was a thing that would be used for people to write simple financial scripts. As it turns out, people are writing stuff like Augur on top of it.

In general, signalling theory says that if you have a good way of proving something and a noisy way of proving something, and you choose the noisy way, that means chances are it’s because you couldn’t do the good way in the first place.

Blockchain software companies may end up being amalgamated into existing software giants, at which point blockchain patents will just become part of the existing patent war.

Although the Ethereum blockchain is a public blockchain, it is great to see private and consortium blockchains using the Ethereum code base actively under development.

There is definitely a lot of banks that are interested in private blockchains. In some cases, they are happy with public blockchains as well. The opposition to just doing things on a public blockchain is definitely smaller than some of the strongest detractors think.