Vitalik Buterin
Co-founder and Core Researcher, Ethereum. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderengineerauthorscientist@VitalikButerin ↗vitalik.ca ↗Wikipedia ↗
Vitalik Buterin co-founded Ethereum in 2013–2014 to enable decentralized applications and programmable smart contracts, having previously co-founded Bitcoin Magazine in 2011. He conducts research on cryptoeconomics, scaling, and open-source governance, and authored the 2022 essay collection Proof of Stake.
1shows
1appearances
16statements
4resolved
3supported
1contradicted
75%fully supported
26said about them ↓ Everything Vitalik Buterin said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Buterin: Ethereum and Bitcoin are useless for many apps due to scalability
“So, you know, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Classic, and Bitcoin with Segwit, like, all four of those are just pretty much completely useless for a lot of what people want to do because the scalability just isn't high enough.”
Buterin: Safely Building DAOs Will Take a Couple Years
“And so that's an area where I still think that, you know, for obvious reasons, it's going to be a couple of years before we really learn how to do it well and safely, but it's still one of those that I'm Really interested and excited about.”
Buterin: Ethereum's currency serves its technology, not vice versa
“I would argue that, you know, in general, the Ethereum view is that it's definitely that the currency serves the technology and not so, and not the technology serving the currency.”
Buterin: Ethereum developers would have built replay protection before the DAO fork
“Had we known that things would turn out the way they had turned out, there were things that we would have done differently. So like one of them would have been Including, you know, transaction replay protection straight into the protocol directly”
Buterin: Cumulative Value of ETH and ETC Exceeded Pre-Fork Market Cap
“ETH plus ETC is above sort of ETC before the fork, which is actually interesting”
Buterin: Splitting Networks or Companies Can Generate More Value Than Mergers
“There are times when a split actually can increase total value. Outside of blockchain lands, one of the examples of this is that there's been some fairly decent amount of research, like you, if you read some of the behavioral economists, so condiment and so fo…”
Buterin: Ethereum's core design principle is that it has no features
“And eventually I realized that the thing that made the most sense is to basically just go all the way and create a blockchain where you have this principle that essentially there are no features. So what there are no features means in Ethereum land is essentia…”
Buterin: Building fair lotteries on Bitcoin requires O(N³) collateral versus O(N) on Ethereum
“Like, one of them was they published this at the Financial Cryptography, in the workshop, that they were trying to create a provably fair lottery on top of Bitcoin, and it turns out that if you have N players in the lottery, Then you basically have to have O o…”
Buterin: Difficulty Ice Age Will Force Ethereum Hard Fork Within 18 Months
“The difficulty Ice Age, which is something I will go into right now, but generally, essentially has the purpose of kind of putting a sort of finite lifetime on the Ethereum blockchain, so basically forcing us to kind of fork to add new features at some points …”
Vitalik: Traditional crowdsales front-load incentives, weakening long-term developer commitment
“With a traditional crowdsale, the incentives to the developers are all up front, and there's theoretically not as much incentive for the developers to kind of keep working on the project in the long term.”
Vitalik: Early crypto 2.0 projects suffered from Swiss army knife design
“Both that project and also pretty much every other project that existed at the time that was trying to do what you might call blockchain, two point O crypto, two point O cryptocurrency, two point O, whatever you call it. And the weakness is that they were tryi…”
Buterin: Ethereum was originally planned as a meta-protocol on Primecoin
“So the first version of Ethereum that I was thinking of building is just a very simple kind of meta protocol. So something on top of the prime coin blockchain that would just make a Prime point transaction data have sort of different meanings that would be und…”
Buterin: Bitcoin's Protocol Lacks Native State Persistence Across Transactions
“But with Bitcoin itself, you can't do that because the protocol has a kind of inherent Statelessness to it. Like, you can't remember the notion of, well, this guy already withdrew 500 ETH six hours ago, and another 500 ETH two hours ago, so he can't withdraw a…”
Buterin: Adding full scripting early would have collapsed Bitcoin in 2010
“Way that the Bitcoin community would be able to kind of manage itself and all these different things that I can think Satoshi probably definitely would have had way too much on his plate if, you know, we're getting hacks and collapsing in 2010 because all at t…”
Buterin: Ethereum targets medium-value tools for a broader audience
“Whereas I feel like the Ethereum community is trying to, is more interested in building things that are kind of medium value for a larger community.”
Vitalik: OpenSSL underfunding directly caused the Heartbleed bug
“Bottom-level protocols are something that's been, like, so horribly underfunded. You know, like, in the mainstream world, if you look at even something like the hard bleed bug, which happened in large part because OpenSSL security research was just, like, so h…”
The other half of the tape: Vitalik Buterin's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 25 times in 14 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ben Horowitz 6Sonal Chokshi 4Ali Yahya 3Nick Tomaino 2Dennis Nazarov 2Chris Dixon 2Phil Dayan 1Olaf Carlson-Wee 1
Statements about Vitalik Buterin, by other people (1)
Dixon: No one, including Vitalik Buterin, can cut developers off Ethereum
“As a developer, you can now invest in this. You can build things on top of Ethereum with the knowledge that no one can, you know, Vitalik, who's the kind of the, you know, the leader of Ethereum, can't pull the rug out from under you, even if you wanted to.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the a16z Podcast 25
2024 6 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
2019 14 mentions in 9 episodes 2 per episode
- a16z Podcast | Voting, Security, and Governance in Blockchains and Cryptonetworks
- a16z Podcast | Cryptocurrencies, App Coins, and Investing in Protocols
- a16z Podcast | Mental Models for Understanding Crypto Tokens
- Five Open Problems for the Blockchain Computer
- a16z Podcast | Cryptonetworks as Emerging Economies (Done Right?)
- a16z Podcast | From Research to Startup, There and Back Again
- a16z Podcast | Cryptonetworks and Cities -- Analogies
- a16z Podcast | The Changing Culture of Open Source
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2019 →
2018 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Vitalik's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| a16zLEDGER | Co-founder and Core Researcher, Ethereum | 1 | 16 | 75% 3/4 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |