In this episode, I caught up with Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum at EthCapeTown Hackathon. Vitalik Buterin is a Russian-Canadian writer and programmer. Vitalik was involved in the Bitcoin community since 2011, co-founding and writing articles for Bitcoin magazine. But he is primarily known as the boy-genius behind Ethereum, the world’s second-most valued and recognized cryptocurrency platform behind Bitcoin.

Buterin learned about Bitcoin, from his father, at age 17. In 2012, he obtained a bronze medal in the International Olympiad in Informatics. In 2013, he visited developers in other countries who shared his enthusiasm for code. Buterin first described Ethereum in a white paper in late 2013. Buterin argued that bitcoin needed a scripting language for application development.

The project was publicly announced in January 2014, with the core team consisting of Vitalik Buterin, Mihai Alisie, Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Joe Lubin and Gavin Wood. Buterin also presented Ethereum on stage at a Bitcoin conference in Miami, and just a few months later the team decided to hold a crowdsale of Ether, the native token of the network, to fund the development. Around the same time, Vitalik himself received the Thiel Fellowship grant in the amount of $100,000.

We talked alot, some of the topics covered in this podcast were:
-Do you think blockchain will be a plugin to the current system?
-What’s the best Dapp have you come across in 2019?
-What was the initial idea of Ethereum?
-How has Ethereum evolved?
-Did you thought of ICOs before or they surprised you?
-Design in Blockchain, overvalued or undervalued?
-PoW has 51% attacks as a threat, what are threats to PoS?
-Are Government threats to Blockchain?
-How are you solving the privacy issue?

This interview was made possible by Linum Labs and EthGlobal