12: Vitalik Buterin - The Ethereal Prince and His Virtual Machine

The Portal

Kast Media

Science, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 7.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2019

⏱️ 89 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Vitalik Buterin sits down with Eric to discuss ethereum, the wider world of crypto and heterodox economics.

Taking note of the new development of blockchain in 2010, Eric wrote an essay called “Go Virtual Young Man”. A few years later, a Thiel Fellow named Vitalik created a virtual machine with an idiosyncratic smart contract system and a currency. Ironically, Eric had recently become a Managing Director at Thiel Capital. Perennially circling each other intellectually, the two now sit down in person to discuss economic paradigm shifts, crypto and the future of online sovereignty and social coordination.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, you found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and I'm sitting here today
0:12.3	with the Talic buterin, the leader and a founder of the Ethereum world of cryptocurrencies
0:20.8	and smart contracts. Welcome to the portal. Thank you. It's good to be here, Eric.
0:24.1	It's terrific to have you. Now, in general, when I see you interviewed,
0:28.2	immediately everybody goes straight to cryptocurrencies and Ethereum. But one of the things
0:33.0	that I've found fascinating about your story is that in order to be a good steward of this new
0:40.4	and emerging economics, you've actually applied yourself a great deal to standard and regular
0:47.6	economic theory. And I was curious, if I understand correctly, you dropped out of college after a year,
0:55.6	yourself taught in economics, but you've taken a real interest in understanding how markets
1:01.3	in economic theory work. Is that a fair description? Yeah, I think so. And economics has been
1:06.9	of an interest for me definitely for a long time. I mean, when I discovered Bitcoin back in 2011,
1:15.9	and I was still in high school, it was this kind of interesting confluence of ideas that I was
1:22.7	already pretty attracted to. So of open source culture, that was something that a good friend
1:29.5	from high school, Christopher Ola, had already indoctrinated me with really well. The
1:36.4	math, the mathematical and cryptographic aspects, also libertarianism in Austrian economics was
1:43.6	kind of the zeitgeist of the Bitcoin space at the day. And those were ideas that I definitely
1:49.9	found philosophically quite attractive at that time. And I was definitely curious. And I read a bunch
1:58.9	of books, I read the Austrian economics, because that's what the Bitcoin people were kind of talking
2:06.0	about all day. I read some kind of behavioral economics literature, I really kind of meant
2:12.9	in Cheyedini and all of those people, just because I knew that I had to read other stuff for balance.
2:20.3	And also economics itself is a pretty mathematical and of subject. Well, kind of, it's on the border
2:30.0	line because it's both mathematical, you got your curves and your derivatives and your intersections,
	...

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