When the grand experiment that is bitcoin began, the anonymous wizard desired to test two parameters – a trustless, decentralized database enjoying security enforced by the austere relentlessness of cryptography and a robust transaction system capable of sending value across the world without intermediaries. Yet the past five years years have painfully demonstrated a third missing feature: a sufficiently powerful Turing-complete scripting language. Up until this point, most innovation in advanced applications such as domain and identity registration, user-issued currencies, smart property, smart contracts, and decentralized exchange has been highly fragmented, and implementing any of these technologies has required creating an entire meta-protocol layer or even a specialized blockchain. Theoretically, however, each and every one of these innovations and more can potentially be made hundreds of times easier to implement, and easier to scale, if only there was a stronger foundational layer with a powerful scripting language for all of these protocols to build upon. And this need is what we seek to satisfy.

Ethereum is a modular, Turing-complete contract scripting system married to a blockchain and developed with a philosophy of simplicity, universality and non-discrimination. Our goal is to provide a platform for decentralized applications – an android of the cryptocurrency world, where all efforts can share a common set of APIs, trust-less interactions and no compromises. We ask for the community to join us as volunteers, developers, investors and evangelists seeking to enable a fundamentally different paradigm for the internet and the relationships it provides.

Transcript

[00:08] SPEAKER_00: I'm Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of Ethereum.

[00:14] SPEAKER_01: Hi, I'm Charles Hoskinson. I'm a core developer of the Ethereum project, and I'm a theoretical mathematician and computer scientist.

[00:24] SPEAKER_00: I first heard of Bitcoin back when I was in high school in March 2011. So I didn't even appreciate it fully at first. I saw this revolutionary cryptographic technology, but I was never really sure just how effective it would be in the real world. And it was at that time that the Bitcoin price first went up from about 13 to 100. And the community suddenly got much larger. And I realized at that point that Bitcoin is going to be much larger than I ever thought it would be. And I had a unique chance to participate, to have much larger participation in the Bitcoin project. So I quit university and I went into traveling around the world to different Bitcoin communities and working on different Bitcoin projects. And through that I worked on Colored Coins, Mastercoin, all these sort of cryptocurrency 2.0 protocols. And I was extremely excited by the potential that these protocols bring.

[01:18] SPEAKER_01: Well, after I segued from mathematics, I went into cryptography. And there's a nice relationship between the two. Over time, many people kept telling me to read Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper, the person who created Bitcoin. And back in early 2013, I decided to do that. And then I was instantly immersed in this amazing community and these amazing projects. And so I said, I have to get involved. So the very first thing that I did is I started an organization called the Bitcoin Education Project. And our goal was to aggregate the best and brightest in the community towards producing content to teach people about Bitcoin and what makes the technology very special.

To understand the next generation of Bitcoin, it's really useful to understand the history of Bitcoin and what Satoshi was trying to do with the experiment. So Satoshi started trying to test two concepts at the same time. Satoshi said, well, I have this notion of a database, the blockchain, and I want to store information in the blockchain and make it near impossible to remove that information. And I want the whole world to have a copy. I want it to be a very transparent and open ledger. Second, I want to have a transaction system that allows me to move positions in this ledger from one party to another. So, in essence, he was building essentially a currency that doesn't require any intermediaries or third parties.

But there was this third part that he had to make a decision when he started the experiment, which was this robust scripting system that Satoshi decided to leave out because he didn't want to contaminate the experiment of the first two with the security implications of the third. So now, five years later, we've had a lot of amazing innovation and we've gotten to the point where we've learned enough that it's now possible to implement a scripting system. So the future of Bitcoin, the next logical step in the movement, which many people are very excited about, is this idea of implementing a Turing complete scripting language. In essence what you're doing is taking the power of a full programming language like C and Python and marrying it to this idea of a trustless blockchain. And together you can do some incredible things that just simply are not possible today.

[03:25] SPEAKER_00: Bitcoin was originally conceived as a currency. But the interesting thing about it is that the Bitcoin blockchain is really usable for so much more than just money. You can use the Bitcoin blockchain to register domain names, to sign documents, to store data, to serve as an incentivization layer for any kind of peer-to-peer mesh networking, file sharing, file storage protocols. There are just thousands and millions of different uses of this technology.

[03:57] SPEAKER_01: Ethereum is a project that's attempting to do that. We're taking a very beautiful, very simple Turing complete programming language, we're combining it with a blockchain and we're putting it together in this incredibly elegant foundation that allows everybody to implement things like smart property, smart contracts, their own version of Dropbox on top of that platform. And the goal is to be agnostic, it's to be neutral, it's to allow everybody to come in to innovate.

[04:27] SPEAKER_00: The main difference with Ethereum is that if you look at the way a lot of other next generation cryptocurrencies are designed, they try to have features, they try and have this big long list where they say, okay, we want people to do decentralized exchange, there's a feature for that. We want peer-to-peer gambling, there's a feature for that. We want savings wallets, there is a feature for that. We want Namecoin, there's a feature for that. So Ethereum takes a completely different track. We do not try to be the Swiss army knife of cryptocurrency and have every single feature tacked into the box. Instead, Ethereum has a built-in universal Turing complete programming language. And we let you build whatever features you want on top of it.

No, Ethereum is not an altcoin. Ethereum is going to be 10,000 altcoins and decentralized exchange between all the altcoins and extremely advanced metacoin protocols, and decentralized Dropbox and identity systems and reputation systems and pretty much thousands of other protocols that we have not even imagined yet. There are just so many different protocols that could benefit from some kind of integration with Ethereum, simply because we offer such a powerful toolkit. I think this might be the missing link, not just for cryptocurrency, but even for the whole sphere of peer-to-peer protocols as a whole.

[05:50] SPEAKER_01: What's so amazing about Ethereum is it's like a giant workshop with tons of beautiful tools that people can use to implement things that have already been done, but now in a way that doesn't require trust of a third party. Many people use Dropbox, for example. With Ethereum, with just a few dozen lines of code, you can now implement a completely decentralized version that has no third party control.

Another amazing thing about Ethereum is because we're taking rules, we're taking procedures and we're putting them into a blockchain and making them deterministic. You can take organizations like Wikipedia for example, or ICANN, and instead of entrusting them to be run in a certain jurisdiction under a certain government's domain, you can uplift them and now put them into the Internet and constrain them by algorithms, just like Bitcoin constrains money by algorithms.

A distributed autonomous organization has a wonderful legacy as a term in the Bitcoin community and actually in computer science in general. There's this idea of an autonomous agent, something that's written software that does things for you. It's kind of like an AI notion. A distributed autonomous organization is the idea of taking autonomous agents, embedding them on top of a blockchain and letting those agents fulfill the facility of a full organization. For example something like Wikipedia, or a full on corporation, or even a political party.

[07:16] SPEAKER_00: A contract is the fundamental building block of Ethereum. So any kind of advanced transaction type, any kind of script, any kind of decentralized application that you want to build on top of Ethereum, you would be using contracts to do it. So a contract is like an autonomous agent. It lives fully inside the Ethereum network and it has some code that's executed by all the Ethereum nodes. So when you send a transaction to a contract, the contract executes its code, changes its state, and it might send some transactions back out. And you can write the code of a contract to do whatever you want it to do.

[08:02] SPEAKER_01: The Ethereum team is really one of the most remarkable that I've ever had the privilege of working on. It's a wonderful mix of both old and new. There are some senior software developers, people who work for Goldman Sachs off Wall Street. We have very young entrepreneurs on the team, older entrepreneurs. We have leaders in the Bitcoin community, for example, the executive director of the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada. We have people on media, we have people who are experts in hardware. We even have some philosophers on the team. It's a pretty amazing team and I'm incredibly excited to be part of it.

My hope for Ethereum is that it's going to change the way that we view trust, it's going to change the way that we use the Internet. It's going to slowly but surely take things that we do today and move them to a new paradigm where not only are they simpler, they're more fair, they're more global and they're accessible to the world.

[08:56] SPEAKER_00: If Bitcoin is money over the Internet, Ethereum is like relationships over the Internet. So to put it another way, Bitcoin is sort of like the Internet of 1995 with static web pages, which is revolutionary in its own right, but not much else. Ethereum, on the other hand, is like the Internet of today, which has advanced graphical interfaces and built-in programming languages that lets you do any kind of applications we can possibly imagine.

The creators of the technologies that underlie the Internet today did not imagine that people would be building Gmail on top of it, or Facebook on top of it, or Bitcoin wallets on top of it. And yet we are, because the Internet of today is truly designed as a platform for innovation. And that's what I want to see Ethereum become as well.