Blockchain Revolution

CHAPTER 11
LEADERSHIP FOR THE NEXT ERA
rolific is an adjective that should precede all titles used to describe twenty-one-
year-old Vitalik Buterin, the Russian-born Canadian founder of Ethereum.
(Prolific founder, that is.) Ask his legion of followers about Ethereum, and they’ll tell
you it’s a “blockchain-based, arbitrary-state, Turing-complete scripting platform.”
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It
has attracted IBM, Samsung, UBS, Microsoft, and the Chinese auto giant Wanxiang,
and an army of the smartest software developers in the world, all of whom think that
Ethereum may be the “planetary scale computer” that changes everything.
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When Buterin explained “arbitrary-state, Turing-complete” to us, we got a
glimpse of his mind. Listening to music is very different from reading a book or
calculating the day’s revenues and expenses, and yet you can do all three on your
smart phone, because your smart phone’s operating system is Turing complete. That
means that it can accommodate any other language that is Turing complete. So
innovators can build just about any digital app imaginable on Ethereum—apps that
perform very dissimilar tasks, from smart contracts and computational resource
marketplaces to complex financial instruments and distributed governance models.
Buterin is a polyglot. He speaks English, Russian, French, Cantonese (which he
learned in two months on vacation), ancient Latin, ancient Greek, BASIC, C++,
Pascal, and Java, to name a few.
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“I specialize in generalism,” he said. He is also a
polymath, and a modest one at that. “I had all these different interests, and somehow
bitcoin seemed like a perfect convergence. It has its math. It has its computer science.
It has its cryptography. It has its economics. It has its political and social philosophy.
It was this community that I was immediately drawn into,” he said. “I found it really
empowering.” He went through the online forums, looked for ways to own some
bitcoin, and discovered a guy who was starting up a bitcoin blog. “It was called
Bitcoin Weekly, and he was offering people five bitcoins to write articles for him. That
was around four dollars at the time,” Buterin said. “I wrote a few articles. I earned
twenty bitcoins. I spent half of them on a T-shirt. Going through that whole process, it
felt almost like working with the fundamental building blocks of society.”
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All this from a man who, nearly five years earlier, had dismissed bitcoin. “Around
February 2011, my dad mentioned to me, ‘Have you heard of bitcoin? It’s this
currency that exists only on the Internet and it’s not backed by any government.’ I
immediately thought, ‘Yes, this thing has no intrinsic value, there’s no way it’s going
to work.’” Like many teenagers, Buterin “spent ridiculous amounts of time on the
Internet,” reading about different ideas that were heterodox, out of the mainstream.
Ask him which economists he likes, and he rattles off Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok,
Robin Hanson, and Bryan Caplan. He can speak on the works of game theorist
Thomas Schelling and behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely. “It’s
actually surprisingly useful, how much you can learn for yourself by debating ideas
like politics with other people on forums. It’s a surprising educational experience all
by itself,” he said. Bitcoin kept coming up.
By the end of that year, Buterin was spending ten to twenty hours a week writing
for another publication, Bitcoin Magazine. “When I was about eight months into
university, I realized that it had taken over my entire life, and I might as well let it
take over my entire life. Waterloo was a really good university and I really liked the
program. My dropping out was definitely not a case of the university sucking. It was
more a matter of, ‘That was fun, and this is more fun.’ It was a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity and I just basically couldn’t let it go.” He was only seventeen years old.
Buterin created Ethereum as an open source project when he realized that
blockchains could go far beyond currency and that programmers needed a more
flexible platform than the bitcoin blockchain provided. Ethereum enables radical
openness and radical privacy on the network. He views these not as a contradiction
but as “a sort of Hegelian synthesis,” a dialectic between the two that results in
“volunteered transparency.”
Ethereum, like so many technologies throughout history, could dislocate jobs.
Buterin believes this is a natural phenomenon common to many technologies and
suggests a novel solution: “Within a half century, we will have abandoned the model
that you should have to put in eight hours of labor every day to be allowed to survive
and have a decent life.”
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However, when it comes to blockchain, he’s not convinced
that massive job losses are inevitable. Ethereum could create new opportunities for
value creation and entrepreneurship. “Whereas most technologies tend to automate
workers on the periphery doing menial tasks, blockchains automate away the center,”
he said. “Instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a
job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer directly.” Blockchain doesn’t
eliminate jobs so much as it changes the definition of work. Who will suffer from this
great upheaval? “I suspect and hope the casualties will be lawyers earning half a
million dollars a year more than anyone else.”
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So Buterin knows his Shakespeare:
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
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Ethereum has another apparent contradiction. It is unabashedly individualistic and
private and yet it depends upon a large, distributed community acting openly in
collective self-interest. Indeed, Ethereum’s design neatly captures both his enduring
faith that individuals will do the right thing when equipped with the right tools, and
his healthy skepticism of the motives of large and powerful institutions in society.
While Buterin’s critique of the problems of contemporary society is grave, his tone is
clearly one of hope. “While there are many things that are unjust, I increasingly find
myself accepting the world as is, and thinking of the future in terms of opportunities.”
When he learned that $3,500 would enable someone to combat malaria the rest of her
life, he didn’t bemoan the lack of donations from individuals, governments, and
corporations. He thought, “Oh wow, you can save a life for only $3,500? That’s a
really good return on investment! I should donate some right now.”
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Ethereum is his
tool to effect positive change in the world. “I see myself more as part of the general
trend of improving technology so that we can make things better for society.”
Buterin is a natural-born leader, in that he pulls people along with his ideas and
his vision. He’s the chief architect, chief achiever of consensus in the Ethereum
community, and chief cultivator of a broader community of brilliant developers who
have strong opinions about anything technical. What if he succeeds?