Like other serious crypto-anarchist visionaries, the 21-year-old Russian Canadian entrepreneur Vitalik Buterin sees the blockchain—the public ledger underlying bitcoin—as a way to liberate us all from inefficiency, cut out the middleman, and make big government and business bow at the free market’s feet. What makes his vision different is its scope. Where bitcoin aims to disrupt banks, Buterin’s Switzerland-based company, Ethereum, aims to become what he calls “the foundational platform for everything.”
At the heart of this open-source software platform is a currency, Ether, named after the pre-relativity hypothesis to explain the propagation of light waves. Though it has yet to make a public release, Ethereum has already recruited a strong roster of programmers and last year raised $18.4 million, in the third most well-funded crowdfunding effort in history.
Bitcoin’s blockchain model has been proposed as the backbone for a wide range of applications, from asset trading to real estate transactions, from escrow services to even a “national income distribution” system. What Ethereum proposes, in effect, is a global computer that could not only handle those transactions but also eventually emulate many of the functions of companies like Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox, Amazon, and Kickstarter—but without the “inefficient” bureaucracies and the other intermediaries who take a slice of the pie. That is to say, companies that, once started, can run themselves.
If the blockchain is a giant ledger, Buterin’s goal—first articulated in a January 2014 article in Bitcoin Magazine, which he cofounded—is to build the army of robot accountants working on top—what are sometimes known as “smart contracts.” Nick Szabo, the cryptographer who is credited with coining that term and is speculated to have been involved in bitcoin’s creation, described blockchain-based autonomous organizations last December on his blog as armies of accountant robots:
Instead of the cashier and ticket-ripper of the movie theater, the block chain consists of thousands of computers that can process digital tickets, money, and many other fiduciary objects in digital form. Think of thousands of robots wearing green eye shades, all checking each other’s accounting. Individually the robots (or their owners) are not very trustworthy, but collectively, coordinated by mathematics, they produce results of high reliability and security.
Bitcoin as a whole is a step in that direction, but it’s only one application. Ethereum, on the other hand, is “Turing complete,” a system in which a program can be written to find an answer—or to execute a smart contract that can buy something, sell something, or do something. In aggregate, a group of smart contracts could run what is known in Ethereum-speak as a “decentralized autonomous organization” (DAO) or a “distributed autonomous corporation” (DAC)—in other words, a corporation distilled to its most basic tasks, and operated by little more than code and the logic of if this, then that.
For all of his bluster and dedication, however, Buterin—one of three co-founders of the project, and its most prominent spokesman—doesn’t project a Jobsian ego. Sometimes, he seems like the inverse of the Apple founder: Quiet, nerdy, and unequivocal in his belief that that ownership of large systems should be distributed across the web rather than consolidated under governments or corporations. While it overlaps with the popular libertarian philosophy of Silicon Valley, this decentralized ethos is also in some ways the diametric opposite of another Silicon Valley model: the startup economy, which must ultimately enrich its developers and investors more than its end users.
