Young Genius Reveals Why He Developed "Ethereum

Easily readable articles in Japanese about Ethereum

Vitalik Buterin is a “young genius” who created the crypto asset Ethereum in 2013 at the age of just 19. He is not only a programmer, but also a writer who has been covering and writing about the blockchain and crypto assets since 2011. In this article, we introduce some excerpts from the book “Ethereum: A Young Genius Shows the Truth and Future of Crypto Assets,” which summarizes his writings from the eve of Ethereum’s birth to the present, as well as the aims behind the development of Ethereum.

• Vitalik

• ethereum was developed to fill in bitcoin’s weaknesses | Nikkei Book Plus

  • What Bitcoin Lacks
    • The underlying protocol (Bitcoin) is not suitable for this purpose.
    • That bitcoin is not designed for creating layers of protocols.
      • That trying to use something designed only to create currency for general purpose use is a bad idea.
  • Contract for difference (CFD)
    • Generalization: “Formulaic contraption.”
    • To further generalize, the script
    • This brings us to the next “magic computer.”

• Ethereum founder: “Blockchain is a magic computer” | Nikkei Book Plus

  • No killer apps.
    • That it’s not in a state of “just yet to be discovered, maybe a killer app will appear in the future.”
    • The “plucked from the reachable fruit” principle.
    • WikiLeaks and Silk Road Censorship Resistance
  • Blockchain has reached peak demand.
    • = Peak utility per user
    • Not at peak utility.
  • Blockchain is not a necessity. - long tail - Ethereum and the Long Tail
    • Blockchain is not necessary, but useful
      • Not that it is essential for a major purpose (=killer app), but that it is useful in achieving a detailed and miscellaneous purpose.
        • It’s easier to follow the Ethereum ecosystem than to create the same mechanism yourself.
        • Ethereum’s general-purpose executability has expanded the number of use cases it can be used for considerably more than Bitcoin.
    • Blockchain is the magic computer.
      • Anyone can upload a program and
      • Programs can be left to run autonomously and
      • All of the programs are open to the public, with all current and past states
      • Programs that run on the chain continue to execute exactly as they should.
    • We don’t use financial language.
      • Because it’s just an application.
    • I’m not even talking about consensus algorithms or state transition functions.
      • Because that’s just a detail of the infrastructure implementation.

• Ethereum Founder: “DAO Leaks Secrets and Increases Organizational Credibility” | Nikkei Book Plus

  • [Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)
    • What it does for you.
  • hyper-rationality.
    • Rational decisions on an individual basis lead to the worst possible outcome in the aggregate. - prisoner’s dilemma
    • I don’t know what the explanation here means, so it’s possible that the translator doesn’t understand it, I’ll look for the original later.

    • Maybe the most significant unfortunate byproduct of the large centralized organizations that have emerged in the modern era has been the ability of people to deceive themselves about each other’s psychology. As a result, hyper-rational cooperation has become more difficult. But there is another path to follow. We can show the way to the super-rational, where organizations will voluntarily and thoroughly divulge secrets on a scale that has never been seen before.

      • I think I can explain it a little better. - fairness
  • DAOs are unique in that their governance algorithms are fully disclosed
  • Market inadequacies that can be resolved through ultra-rational cooperation. - The issue of public goods (i.e. goods or services such as parks or highways) does not fall within this scope. - Need to exclude organizations that do not earn trust from the economic benefits of the “Circle of Trust” - Public goods cannot be excluded. - Enter anything related to information asymmetry.

• ethereum founder, “What is Decentralization?” | Nikkei Book Plus - Three axes of centralization

I get nervous when I see things like “scalability.”

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