Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin was recently interviewed on Babbage , a podcast by The Economist . Buterin shared his long-term goals for Ethereum, which is a public blockchain that allows developers to easily deploy decentralized applications.
A Programming Language for Blockchains
When asked what inspired him to create Ethereum, Buterin first talked about how Bitcoin originally sparked his interest in blockchain technology. The open, permissionless nature of public blockchains is a key feature that attracted Buterin to the ecosystem. He noted, “I like the idea of 12-year-olds potentially being able to build the next financial system and so forth. That’s a large part of what attracted me [to] blockchain technology.”
With Ethereum, Buterin intends to allow those programmers (young or old) to build much more than the financial applications of the future. The Ethereum blockchain is Turing complete , which differs from how things have worked in Bitcoin up to this point ‒ Satoshi Nakamoto (Bitcoin’s creator) purposely limited Bitcoin’s scripting system for security reasons.
Buterin explained:
“I thought [those in the Bitcoin community] weren’t approaching the problem in the right way. I thought they were going after individual applications; they were trying to kind of explicitly support each [use case] in a sort of Swiss Army knife protocol.”
With a Turing complete programming language, the potential applications of the Ethereum blockchain are limited only by a developer’s creativity. Buterin used an analogy to explain how this compares with Bitcoin:
“Instead of creating a device that just does a specific number of things, you have a device that understands and supports this programming language and whatever people want to do [can potentially be implemented]."Buterin mentioned shipment tracking and digital identity systems as two potential applications that could be built (or are being built) on top of Ethereum. Is Bitcoin the Napster of Cryptocurrencies? Although […]
