#504: Vitalik Buterin, Creator of Ethereum, on Understanding Ethereum, ETH vs. BTC, ETH2, Scaling Plans and Timelines, NFTs, Future Considerations, Life Extension, and More (Featuring Naval Ravikant)

Bitcoin the currency derives value from Bitcoin the currency, and Bitcoin the blockchain is kind of this thing off on the side that, well, okay fine, it has to exist. Whereas in Ethereum, it's much more of a system where the blockchain is the point and ETH the asset gains value from the blockchain doing its job successfully.

We're all born time billionaires with billions of seconds of life, and then we spend those, and now you get to someone like Warren Buffett, and I'm sure he would trade $100 billion for more billions of seconds, but he can't. In fact, healthcare is the ultimate inelastic good; on your deathbed, you'll spend any amount of money to live even an hour longer.

One explanation that I heard one person give is that Bitcoin is like a spreadsheet where everyone only controls their own five squares of the spreadsheet, but Ethereum is a spreadsheet with macros ... Everyone kind of controls their own accounts, which is kind of their own little piece of this universe, but then these pieces of the universe can have code and they can interact with each other according to pre-programmed rules, and you can build a lot of things on top of that.

I remember, when Ethereum first launched, that a lot of computer scientists I spoke with privately said it would never work—because it's kind of this crazy idea that the way we're going to get a trusted computer in the cloud is we will each run a copy of all the computations on all of our computers, and then we'll sink it up, and make sure it matches. That's the recipe for building the slowest computer in the world, but somehow we've gotten away with it. And so I think the big debate now about Ethereum has shifted from 'Will it work?' to 'Will it scale?'

DeFi (decentralized finance) is this gigantic new category in which entire companies and protocols are being built in a decentralized way that allow you to do a lot of things that would have required Wall Street along with bankers and judges and lawyers and accountants to handle, but now is done through smart contracts that are living on the... Ethereum blockchain.

Where we're standing today is... for biotech the equivalent of where computers were in 1950 ... Imagine the difference between the ENIAC and a modern kind of laptop or smartphone, that's the difference that we're going to see between the biotech of 2020 and the biotech of 2090.

Tokens are one of those things that's really like playing with fire ... On the [one] hand, fire is crucial to human civilization, but on the other hand, fire is very evil and can burn up your family if you're not careful.

The concept of your grandmother dying is just going to kind of slowly leave the public consciousness the same way that the concept of getting lost in a city slowly left the public consciousness over the last 25 years as we got better cell phones.

If Bitcoin is a shared ledger, then Ethereum is a shared computer for the entire world to run its most important applications.

I actually think, eventually, all Internet traffic will be encrypted and all of it will require cryptocurrencies to kind of just allocate scarce resources. Like, even today, there are things that we do on the Internet that are centralized, like caching and routing and spam filtering, that should be decentralized and involve crypto payments for efficiency.

If you wanted to build a fraud-proof voting application, you'd probably do it in Ethereum.

I'm very happy that the coronavirus has helped to delegitimize bioconservatism to the extent that it has.