Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin: Blockchain “is much bigger than just Bitcoin”

Vitalik Buterin is popular for the creation of Bitcoin’s competitor Ethereum. The “skinny visionary” was a speaker at the Blockchain Futurist Conference. However, he was also interviewed by the Star where he shared a lot about the blockchain and the journey in the cryptocurrency field.

According to Buterin, people need to know that blockchain has transformed from being “just about Bitcoin.” He says that blockchain is much bigger than Bitcoin and can take “a lot of different versions.”

He explained:

“For bitcoin, the idea is that you have decentralized cryptocurrency running on blockchain and protected from corporate and state control that’s not going to deflate on you and it’s not going to get confiscated. The blockchain is just a tool to make that specific thing possible.”

While comparing the above Bitcoin scenario to Ethereum, Buterin added:

“That’s the bitcoin side. For Ethereum what we care about is taking the blockchain technology behind bitcoin that makes decentralized cryptocurrency possible and making it more general purpose so that other things can be decentralized in the same way.”

Buterin also clarified that governments do have a regulatory role in the industry. However, there is a lot that needs to be done to understand initial coin offerings (ICOs) when it comes to securities categorization. “The regulators are definitely grappling. They are undecided in many ways,” Buterin said. The founder also shared his opinion on how to improve scalability which will help speed up adoption.

“The main problem with the current blockchain is this idea that every computer has to verify every transaction. If we can move to networks where every computer on average verifies only a small portion of transactions then it can be done better.”

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