The industrial revolution allowed us, for the first time, to start replacing human labour with machines.
Vitalik Buterin
Whereas most technologies tend to automate workers on the periphery doing menial tasks, blockchains automate away the center. 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.
In order to have a decentralised database, you need to have security. In order to have security, you need to - you need to have incentives.
I think Bitcoin really feels empowering in a sense.
As society becomes more and more complex, cheating will in many ways become progressively easier and easier to do and harder to police or even understand.
Bitcoin is great as a form of digital money, but its scripting language is too weak for any kind of serious advanced applications to be built on top.
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.
When I came up with Ethereum, my first first thought was, 'Okay, this thing is too good to be true.' As it turned out, the core Ethereum idea was good - fundamentally, completely sound.
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.
I personally, generally, don't really feel much emotion if there's some problem and I'm actively solving it.
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 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.
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.
The technical side of Ethereum's efficacy is 100% an engineering exercise.
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.
I remember knowing, for a while, for a long time, that I was kind of abnormal in some sense.
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.
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.
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.
Many people at different levels of the Russian government are open to crypto-currencies.
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 Ethereum client is literally a fork of Chromium's webkit backend. The idea is that users can build their own interfaces with HTML/JavaScript just like websites, and they will be viewable with the browser much like websites are viewable with the web browser.
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.
Blockchains will drop search costs, causing a kind of decomposition that allows you to have markets of entities that are horizontally segregated and vertically segregated.
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.
Giving users easy access to many different kinds of digital assets on the blockchain and, particularly, tokens that are linked to assets in the real world, is crucial to seeing blockchain adoption reach the next level, and I applaud Digix Global's initiative in being the first of many such projects to successfully launch.
I personally like hard forks. Particularly, I like the fact that they give users a measure of control, requiring them to opt in to protocol changes. Sure, they can be a little more chaotic if they're controversial, but that's the price of freedom.
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.
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.
I generally support just about every secession attempt that comes along. If, in the future, there is that kind of a dispute in Ethereum, I'd definitely be quite happy to see Ethereum A go in one direction and Ethereum B go the other.
