Hi, this is Chris Dixon. This is the A16Z podcast. Today we're going to talk about Ethereum,

and we have the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, and we also have Fred Ersum, who's the co-founder of Coinbase.

Thanks guys for being here.

Pleasure.

So Vitalik, could you tell us what Ethereum is and why it's interesting?

Sure. So I'll probably start off by going back a couple of years to when the

project first started. So at the time, at the end of 2013, people were starting to get really

excited about Bitcoin. And people were also for the first time starting to get excited about

the Bitcoin's underlying technology.

So about blockchains and decentralization,

and people are starting to basically think about what other use cases

can you come up with for these kinds of systems.

So if you've been in this space for a while,

you might have heard of Namecoin,

which is a blockchain based and decentralized DNS that

a few people came up with back in 2010. There were also some projects at the time that were called

covered coins, which was trying to use the Bitcoin blockchain in order to store kind of more

generic and different kinds of digital assets. There was also a project based out of Israel called MasterCoin.

It was trying to be even more advanced.

It was trying to support certain kinds of financial contracts, name registration,

betting, and lots of other different use cases.

And I looked at this project, and at first, I wasn't really too interested in any of them. Like I actually

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