Lead author | Zhang Xiaojun
Editor | Yang Puding
Produced by Tencent News "Qianwang"
Our world is being impacted by multiple new technological forces.
The first is the power of artificial intelligence represented by OpenAI, which is becoming the mainstream that dominates the world's technological thought. The second is Web3, encryption technology and blockchain. In the past two years, these two forces have become very different.
In November 2024, we saw Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, standing on the other side of Crypto and looking at artificial intelligence. In his eyes, artificial intelligence is intervening in human emotions, thoughts and even subconsciousness in a seemingly equal, intimate and harmless manner, and it may build an unprecedentedly powerful power center through this. A technological revolution will promote the "Game of Thrones" that concerns the fate of all mankind.
Buterin is the spiritual leader of Web3. The Ethereum he founded ranks second in the industry, second only to Bitcoin. Since the founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, has never appeared, Buterin has become the spokesperson in this field. His experience has also added to his legendary color.
Buterin was born in 1994. His parents divorced when he was a child and he immigrated to Canada from Russia. He dropped out of college at the age of 19 to found Ethereum and became the youngest crypto billionaire in his 20s. In China, people call him "V God". He just turned 30 this year.
Buterin always tries to elaborate a philosophy of technology. In his opinion, AI and Crypto represent two underlying philosophies. AI technology is more centralized and powerful, and it intends to make human civilization and technology stronger; Crypto, on the contrary, advocates a decentralized, equal survivalist philosophy. Unlike AI, which occupies a place in a few strongholds around the world, Crypto's strongholds are scattered around the world, and are even more suitable for marginal areas. In the words of Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel: "Crypto is libertarian and AI is communist."
"Now people use ChatGPT, just like chatting with a friend. But in 10 years, everyone will tell ChatGPT all their thoughts. If your artificial intelligence has no privacy, you as a person will have no privacy at all, including the privacy of your thoughts," Buterin said. "If it is centralized, it means that a large company can read your thoughts - this is very dangerous."
Buterin's lifestyle seems to be consistent with the technical ideas he advocates. Our meeting was held in a simple office space. The agreed time was 8 a.m., and he arrived at 7:40 a.m. He was alone, with a khaki canvas bag with a cat pattern under his arm. In the bag was a Dell computer that he bought to do distributed artificial intelligence. On his wrist was a plastic watch with a cat pattern. He always shuttled between discrete Web3 communities in this outfit.
Buterin speaks six languages, and his best are English, Russian and Chinese. This conversation was conducted in Chinese.
He still looked a little immature and nerdy, and tried hard to find the right Chinese characters to express the difficult technical vocabulary. The staff poured him a cup of tea, and he repeatedly rubbed the small label on the tea bag with his hands, folded it up and put it down, picked it up and unfolded it, and folded it again...
If one day, the ultimate power of artificial intelligence or "Big Brother" wants to destroy humanity, will the Crypto Kingdom you represent come to save humanity?
"It's a very complex issue," Buterin said.
The following is the full text of the conversation. (For easier reading, the author has made some text optimizations)
The author took this photo at the scene. The picture shows Vitalik Buterin
“LLM is very powerful”
"The Periscope": In the blog post " The end of my childhood" commemorating your 30th birthday, you said: " One thing that fascinates me about modern artificial intelligence is that it allows us to engage with the hidden variables that guide human interactions in different ways, mathematically and philosophically: artificial intelligence can make ' resonance ' clear and readable. " Can you tell us about AI in your mind ?
Buterin: Philosophers like to use the latest technology analogy to describe what humans are. 100-200 years ago, we had industrial civilization and early robots. They had no brains and had the first step of automation. They said that humans are machines. Recently, everyone is interested in quantum technology. Many people ask, is the human brain also quantum? I don't think so. How do humans think? Sometimes it's nonsense. But people think in this way: What do humans have in common with computers? What do humans have in common with factories? What do humans have in common with animals? This is how we understand humans.
Now, the latest technology is a new generation of artificial intelligence technology: LLM (Large Language Model). If we look at the concept of LLM, it is very complicated, but it is very powerful - it can do a lot of things, and we don't know how it does it - it is a black box.
The difference between LLM and ordinary programs is: in ordinary programs, if you randomly delete a line of code, the entire code may crash, which is extremely fragile; in LLM, if you make some small changes, it will not affect the basic functions. If you only change a little bit, the output will only change a little bit.
Therefore, LLM is particularly like humans and animals, and is biological life.
Anthropic conducted a study to see what concepts each parameter represents in a relatively small LLM. They found that in LLM, for example, this parameter represents the color red, this parameter represents the letter A, and that parameter represents capitalism. This includes some very advanced concepts.
I posted two pictures. I told ChatGPT to draw an extreme Bitcoin person and a similarly extreme Ethereum person. On the left, there is an exaggerated rich Bitcoin person, and on the right, there is a geek playing with computers in Ethereum. It can be seen through AI that there are cultural differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum. Through AI, we can think about the concepts of many people and society, and thus understand ourselves more.
Periscope: In the past two years, artificial intelligence and large language models have replaced Web3 , encryption technology and blockchain, becoming the mainstream of global technological thought. Standing at the other end of the Crypto technology wave, watching the surging artificial intelligence revolution on the other side, what are you thinking?
Buterin: Blockchain and artificial intelligence have completely different functions. In the short term, artificial intelligence is a tool that everyone can use to improve efficiency. For example, when I write code or articles, especially when I am not good at something, ChatGPT is the most helpful to me. But in the long run, will artificial intelligence be smarter than humans? It will definitely be, but I don’t know whether it will be in 5 or 50 years.
Blockchain is to solve the trust problem. If you want to develop applications, these applications need many people to participate, operate and communicate with each other. They have no trust center, and blockchain applications can solve this problem. There are many trust problems in our world, and these problems are more prominent than 10 years ago.
But in the field of Crypto, there has been a problem in the past five years: everyone’s dreams and hopes are high, but the technology cannot achieve most of the dreams. In 2020 and 2021, there was a problem: the transaction fees of Ethereum, Bitcoin and all chains were very high. It cost $1 or $3 to send a simple transaction. Most of the applications that people want to do, except for finance, are not possible. But this year, the Ethereum expansion project reduced the transaction fee on Layer2 from $0.5 to sometimes $0.005. Many applications that were impossible before are now possible.
This has happened many times in the computer field: for a long time, everyone has an idea, but it takes computer technology, CPU speed, and Internet traffic to upgrade to a certain level before these things are finally possible. In the next 1, 2, or 3 years, this trend will also happen in Web3.
"Periscope": In the field of Crypto , will Super App appear in the next three years?
Buterin: I sometimes think about a longer-term question: Will the concept of App change a lot in 10 years?
Now, apps mean you have a computer or a mobile phone, the phone has an interface, and you use buttons to do something on the interface. But thanks to artificial intelligence, the way we interact with computers and the Internet has changed a lot.
In the field of artificial intelligence, startups say, now we have AI technology, we make AI applications. Some (projects) have been successful. But most will find that: in fact, people don’t need any applications. Whatever they want to do, they can directly tell ChatGPT, and ChatGPT will give them an answer. So I wonder if the Super App of the future will be this? You can communicate directly with a computer, mobile phone or any device in an AI way, and AI will know what you want to do, and it will help you do it.
"Periscope": The revolution in artificial intelligence technology will intensify centralization, so is its development getting further and further away from the world you envision?
Buterin: This is a very complicated question. I recently discovered an interesting point with AI: I do something that many people have done before, but I am not good at it. ChatGPT is very useful to me; but I do something very cutting-edge, such as complex cryptography, which may only be done by me and 1,000 other people, and AI does not help me at all.
On the one hand, AI can achieve some equal results and allow some people to do things they are not good at.
On the other hand, ChatGPT is a very centralized application. When you use ChatGPT, you have to fully trust that it will not expose your various data. I think this problem will become particularly obvious in 10 or 20 years.
Now, when people use ChatGPT, it's like chatting with a friend. But in 10 years, people will tell ChatGPT all their thoughts. It's possible that we will have some BCI (brain-computer interface) to connect people and robots. If your artificial intelligence has no privacy, you as a person will have no privacy at all, including the privacy of your thoughts. This is the first problem.
The second problem is that if it is a centralized company, it can be shut down at any time, change the rules at any time, and change the service conditions at any time. Whether you are an individual, a company, or a country, once you start to rely on these, risks will arise.
So, AI has many advantages, but also these problems.
I know a lot of people are starting to do open source AI, decentralized AI. In fact, I use these things myself. I deliberately bought a computer - (Buterin turns around and takes out a computer from a canvas bag to show it) - this computer has a GPU, an Nvidia 4070, and I can run some LLM on my computer.
When I don't need ChatGPT's highest quality, I can do it on my own computer. I find this has an advantage when I don't have internet, which is no problem. Decentralize AI is important.
"OpenAI sacrificed open source for security in the first step, and sacrificed security for profit in the second step"
Periscope: I am very curious, what do you think of OpenAI ? Is it possible for it to become the largest or even the final monopoly?
Buterin: The story of OpenAI is very interesting. On the one hand, it has made a very useful tool for everyone.
I can't say for everyone. Because ChatGPT has two levels: the first level is free; the second level costs $20 per month, and some countries can use it, but some countries can't. This tool is very useful, especially when I enter a field I'm not good at.
But there is a problem with OpenAI. At the beginning, Elon Musk saw many large Silicon Valley companies working on artificial intelligence. He was worried that if artificial intelligence was developed by them, would it become particularly centralized? There are many risks, so he started OpenAI. Five years later, due to AI safety reasons, although they did not say that they would not open source, they changed the definition - open means that their services are open.
Periscope: Became CloseAI .
Buterin: Yeah, they became CloseAI. Today, there's another problem: first, they sacrificed their open source for security, and then this year, they sacrificed their security for profit.
Last year, the company and the board of directors clashed, and after the conflict, it seemed that Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) won. Recently, they announced that they would change from a non-profit to a for-profit company, and reduce the power of the board of directors - to the level of advisors. This makes me more worried.
Periscope: A few days ago, I interviewed Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, a Chinese artificial intelligence scientist, investor, and entrepreneur. He made a few statements, and I would like to hear whether you agree with him.
He said: " The first company to create AGI and crush its opponents must be a global commercial monopolist, and it has the ambition to become the ultimate monopolist. " "OpenAI is a particularly powerful monopoly-type company, and Sam Altman may become the biggest monopolist in history. Although he does not have a monopoly today, his ambition, strategy, and one, two, and three moves are all very clear. I admire him for these. But from the perspective of a practitioner, I am also worried. "
BUTERIN: That’s it.
Periscope: So, what do you think of Sam Altman ?
Buterin: I have only met him once, so it is difficult to judge him in depth. The only thing I can see is how he does things. There are many things he did at OpenAI that I disagree with.
He is working on the Worldcoin project. I think the idea is good. I don’t think Worldcoin should be the only way for the world to have digital identity, but it is solving a problem that really needs to be solved. I communicate with the Worldcoin team a lot, and they care about all the issues that I care about.
But there is still this problem. It is very difficult to create the "next global currency". If you want to do this, many people will oppose it. To do this kind of thing, two conditions are required at the same time - this is very interesting - first, the world needs to trust you as a person; second, everyone needs to know that there is a mechanism that allows them not to trust you as a person. They have made a lot of improvements in the past year, and I hope they can continue to develop in a good direction.
Periscope: You just said that on the one hand, you need to trust this person, but on the other hand, you need to know that you don’t need to trust this person. Does Sam meet this condition?
Buterin: I am not satisfied with the current OpenAI.
"Periscope": Will the departure of key people such as Ilya Sutskever ( OpenAI Chief Scientist) from OpenAI have an impact on the landscape of artificial intelligence?
Buterin: This is a red flag and something to be worried about.
If a lot of people leave, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there is something wrong with the company. When Ethereum first started, many co-founders left. If someone leaves or is forced to resign, it always means there are some conflicts and different values behind it. You need to look at the specific details.
Looking at the details of OpenAI, I think that this company sacrificed open source for security in the first step, and sacrificed security for profit in the second step. This reminds me of a saying of a founding father in the United States: You cannot sacrifice freedom for security. If you do this, you will find that you will lose both security and freedom. Looking at the behavior of OpenAI, it seems that this happened.
"Periscope": Sam Altman and you, who should humans trust more?
Buterin: I don’t want to answer that. (Laughs)
"The merger of biology and silicon is the only super intelligence that humans can participate in."
Periscope: How to understand Peter Thiel’s ( Founding Partner of Founders Fund ): “ Crypto is liberalism, and artificial intelligence is communism. ”
Buterin: I think what he meant is: AI is centralized, Crypto is decentralized. Where does AI's power come from? The first is the power of computing, and the second is data.
If you have more computing power, your AI will be stronger; if you have more data, your AI will be stronger. AI is a very powerful thing. The best AI is the biggest AI. If you want to make an AI, the easiest way is to put computing power and data in one place.
Now we can see that AI companies are almost all in 3-4 places in the world, Silicon Valley, London, and China (several cities); but Crypto communities and projects are particularly scattered. For the Ethereum Foundation, only 25% of its people are in the United States. Where are the rest? They are everywhere. There are more in Germany, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and a few developers in China. There are in every country. Why is this? Crypto does something different.
Where is Crypto most useful? In some more marginal places where there is no centralized trust center.
Periscope: Where there is no centralized power? This means it is not the protagonist of the world.
Buterin: The goal of Crypto is to make some applications in which everyone can see the application rules and contracts. Not everyone can read them, but at least many people can review the code and everyone can participate. Blockchain is a global thing. Therefore, some characteristics of AI and Crypto are really in different directions.
"Periscope": The underlying values are different.
Buterin: Right. And the reasons why people get involved in these areas are also different. The common reason is money. What is different is what people want to do with these areas.
People involved in AI are particularly concerned about the development of human technology, hoping to accelerate the transformation of humans into an interplanetary civilization, making humans more powerful and themselves more powerful. People involved in blockchain are concerned about decentralized trust issues, social equity issues, and so on.
Periscope: Will AI and Crypto go to two branches or will they intersect? If they go to an intersection or to two more extreme branches, what will we see on that day?
Buterin: The role of Crypto is to make a game. The game you make may have many goals. Trading can be said to be a game. Another example is the prediction market. This year, Polymarket (a prediction market project) has been more successful.
Crypto can be used to make a game, and smart contracts can be used to execute the rules of the game more safely. AI can participate in the game. If only people participate, sometimes the efficiency is not high enough. For example, in the prediction market, I have played more in Polymarket this year. I found that the quality of their results was not very high four years ago, but this year is much higher than four years ago. Why? One of the reasons is that liquidity is higher. Last year it might be 1 million or 10 million US dollars, this year it might be 100 million or 200 million. But I also found that this year, its answers to matters with low liquidity are also relatively good.
So, it is very likely that AI is involved now. AI's reaction speed is very fast. If a person does this, he needs to stay on the computer for 24 hours, reading all the news every minute and every second. But an LLM, you let it run, it can do it by itself.
I think there will be more examples in the future, possibly in the social field or in other fields. Crypto is a security bottom layer. Through Crypto, you can make a game and ensure that the rules of the game are fair. The role of AI is to participate.
Periscope: So it’s not Crypto participating in AI ’s game, but AI participating in Crypto ’s game?
BUTLIN: Yes.
"Periscope": One day, if the ultimate power of artificial intelligence or " Big Brother " wants to destroy humanity, will the Crypto Kingdom you represent come to save humanity?
Buterin: This question is quite complicated. Crypto is used to set the rules of the game, not to solve specific problems.
People want to do a lot of things - live longer, live more comfortably, go to Mars. In order to do these things, you need to solve the coordination problem between people. If you are on an island, and there is only you and no one else, Crypto is completely useless. The only function of Crypto is to solve problems between people. But if you are the only one on the island, AI is useful. Through this example, you can see that Crypto cannot solve your problems directly, but indirectly. Crypto is making games, but it still requires people, robots or other things to participate in these games.
If you want to see how Crypto saves the world, it can’t be just Crypto, but Crypto + something else. So Crypto + what?
What technology can replace AI? The only answer is that humans and computers can interact more deeply. In the past two years, VR, AR, and Metaverse have become popular, such as Meta glasses. What are the characteristics of these technologies? The communication between the human brain and the machine can become more efficient and more fluid.
When you put on Meta glasses, they can directly see where you are looking. Computers can now receive some of your conscious information; if they can see your eyes and body through glasses, they will communicate directly with your subconscious mind.
An interesting point is that the communication flow between the left and right parts of a person's brain is not very high. If we can make a communication between a person and a machine very efficient, with high enough flow and fast enough time, the computer will really become a part of you.
Why am I interested in this direction? Because something smarter than humans will definitely appear, maybe in 10, 100, or 1,000 years. But is this thing smarter than humans an independent thing that will surpass us, or can we become a part of it? - I think the second way is particularly interesting.
Periscope: Are we becoming part of it?
Buterin: Yes, or it becomes part of us, a merger - biological and silicon technology will merge together - and this technology is the only super intelligence that we humans can participate in.
If this is not done, the only possibility is that a single computer is smarter than all of us, and they will control the world, and humans will have no power to influence this world at all.
If we want to do this, we need to use the right method. Now there is Neuralink (a brain-computer interface company founded by Musk), but this technology has a risk. A computer can read your thoughts and read your brain. If it is not open source, but centralized, your information is sent to a server. This means that a large company can read your thoughts, which is very dangerous. So I hope that in both software and hardware, we have open source and security-respecting things.
How to participate in Crypto? The first is the business model. Open source technology always has a disadvantage, it is difficult to make money. If you make something centralized and controlled by yourself, there are many ways to make a lot of money. With open source technology, everyone can download and use it, and they don’t need to have anything to do with you after using it. Its technology has advantages, but the disadvantage is that it is difficult to make money. Crypto has many ways to make money that respect open source.
If we support some open source technologies through Crypto, there may be more open source BCI, more open source artificial intelligence, and more open source everything.
"Periscope": It sounds like AI is built on Crypto ?
Buterin: The business model can be based on Crypto, or we can use some Crypto technology to create an architecture.
One thing I haven't mentioned yet is that there are some interesting new crypto technologies recently, including PC (Programmable Cryptography) and FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption). The advantage is that you can make an AI that can do calculations with your private data, but no one else or other computer knows your private data. It uses your data to do calculations, but it doesn't see what the data is. These technologies have been known to be possible since 1982, but this technology has reached a stage where it can be used in more applications.
"Periscope": In the field of artificial intelligence, who do you admire and respect the most, and who do you dislike the most?
Buterin: Wow, this... there is no obvious example. I respect people who keep their principles for a long time. There have been many external changes in the past five years, and many people will change their minds. Not necessarily for their own reasons, most of them are bad reasons - for example, the team I don’t like has an idea, so I need to have an idea to suppress them.
There aren't many people who are willing to keep an open mind and have principles for a long time. If they do, I respect that.
“If issuing coins and setting up exchanges is all we do, then this industry is a failure.”
The Periscope: Given the recent popularity of AI and its appeal to young talent, what advice would you give to aspiring technologists who are hesitant between blockchain and AI career choices?
Buterin: What matters most is what you are interested in.
"The Periscope": Objectively speaking, will the prosperity of artificial intelligence in the past two years cause a cooling of Crypto ?
Buterin: Definitely. Some people who used to be involved in Crypto are now involved in AI because of the good development of AI.
I found three types of people:
I have a worry: if the smartest people don't do Crypto, the people who stay in the Crypto field may not have any interesting ideas, and the only application is the financial application that everyone has been doing for many years. This will become a situation - issue a coin, set up an exchange; issue another coin, set up an exchange; issue another coin, and this coin has a cute dog on it - these things are fun, but if they are the only ones in our industry, then this industry has failed.
The challenge facing our industry is to create an application that is both meaningful and something that many people enjoy participating in.
I recently discovered that many people want to do this now. 2022 and 2023 are very dangerous periods. AI has succeeded, but Crypto has not. Everyone knows that AI's LLM is very powerful, and you can do anything with ChatGPT. But Layer2 has not yet come out, or is in a very early stage, and the transaction fees are very high. So in 2022 and 2023, there will be the biggest difference in what AI and Crypto can do.
However, the power of Crypto has increased a lot this year, and many developers are beginning to want to create applications that are meaningful and that many users like to participate in. If the Crypto field continues to be successful, many people will still choose to participate in Crypto.
"The Periscope": I told the people around me in the Chinese venture capital industry that I would come to see you today. Many people asked me to ask you the same question: What do you think about the fact that the Ethereum ecosystem or the entire Web3 ecosystem still has no products with practical applications after so many years?
Buterin: My answer is what I just said. Before this year, transaction fees were too high, some important technologies were not mature, account security issues were not resolved, privacy issues were not resolved, and many problems were not resolved. Therefore, before this year, our industry did not have enough technology to make applications that ordinary people could participate in. One of the reasons why the only successful application is DeFi is because DeFi can make more money.
If there is a chance to increase your money 10 times, you are willing to do it even if there are technical difficulties. If there is a 30% probability that your account will be stolen and if you encounter a problem, your money is gone, but if you win, your money will increase 10 times, you will most likely still participate.
But if you want to do something more ordinary, the goal is not to increase your money 10 times, but to protect your money, protect your identity, or participate in some other applications. If the technical difficulties and security issues are not solved, you will not participate.
This year, we are finally starting to solve these problems. This is the best time to make meaningful applications.
"Periscope": Is it not what you want to keep speculating and hoarding cryptocurrencies?
BUTLIN: No.
Periscope: What do you want? What do you want to push the world towards?
Buterin: I hope the world will be fairer and more open, and to create applications that can solve important trust issues. If you want to build a fair and open world, solving the trust problem is a necessary first step. Why are many things not so good? Because people don't know who to trust.
You can look at the application cases of Crypto. In countries facing many financial problems, such as Argentina, they will be particularly interested in Crypto.
If we use a decentralized approach, it will be easier for us to create secure applications that can be used by people all over the world. This will avoid a risk: the division of the world.
Periscope: It sounds like Crypto is more suitable for places where trust and fairness are lacking; AI is more suitable for places where people want to pursue greater human power - these are two completely different human ideals. Will Crypto ignite countries like Argentina, while AI ignites countries like China and the United States? From a global perspective, the ignition maps are different?
Buterin: In the long run, we all need to improve our capabilities. If we have a perfect, fair, decentralized system, but the people who do things don’t improve their capabilities, we will still fall behind after a period of time.
Technologies other than Crypto, including AI and biological sciences, need to be participated by the whole world. But there are different ways to do these technologies. If we want to use a decentralized and more open approach, Crypto may be involved in part. In the short term, the adoption of Crypto by different countries will be completely different.
For example, Argentina has basic financial problems. For example, the United States does not have these problems most of the time. Crypto is most useful to me when I donate money to some international charities. It is difficult to do so through bank machines, but it is easy through Crypto. In developed countries, the people who use this technology the most are those who want to participate in the international market and society. In smaller countries, Appchain has more adoption.
I don’t know how these things will change in the long run.
Periscope: I have a very basic misunderstanding. For ordinary people, what is the difference between a centralized application and a decentralized application?
Buterin: I can give you a specific example. We have some decentralized SocialFi applications that have been successful on Ethereum recently. Lens and Farcaster are two of the easiest examples to understand. What is the difference between Farcaster and Twitter?
In Twitter, first, its algorithm is completely opaque; second, if you think Twitter is bad, you don’t like what it is doing, and want to move to another app, your network will be gone. Anyone who is dissatisfied with Twitter and wants to start a new one needs to start from scratch in terms of user base, and the network effect problem is particularly difficult to solve.
In Farcaster, the architecture is like this - the first layer is a decentralized network, and the second layer is an interface where users can send messages and see messages from others. One of the most used clients is called Warpcast. Warpcast is a decentralized app that you can download yourself and is very easy to use. A user who has never participated in Crypto can use Warpcast. But if you don't like Warpcast and don't like what they do, Farcaster also has many other clients, such as Firefly. If you don't like Warpcast, you can move to Firefly, and you can participate in the Farcaster network through Firefly. The messages you send can be seen on Warpcast, and you can also see the messages sent by Warpcast users.
The decentralized underlying layer ensures that different clients can interoperate with each other, which can solve the problem of Warpcast becoming a monopoly.
This is a public machine that anyone can use as a client. In the Farcaster ecosystem, the public architecture has given some users some important advantages.
Periscope: What do you think of speculators in the Crypto industry? Why are there so many such people in this industry?
Buterin: There are speculators in many fields, such as the stock market and the sports gambling industry. Many people have this habit.
What should our industry do? First, if some people like to do some gamified finance, I hope to do alignments, and the result of their participation in these things is useful to their country and society.
Second, we need some way for them to expand their wealth in the long term. In most societies around the world, people used to buy houses, but the real estate market is very unfair to many people. People don’t know whether they are making money or losing money. If we can create some financial products in the Crypto field that can make money in the long term but are connected to the real economy, that would be great.
Why didn’t it succeed before? First, the regulation was not clear enough, but recently, the regulation in many countries has become clearer. Second, the technology must be safe enough.
If you can increase your assets 10 times, you will be willing to take all kinds of risks. But the real economy is not like this, it may be less than 3%, 8% or 10%. If your return is reasonable, you need to care about safety. Now we have solved a little bit. I hope to give everyone some better financial options.
"I don't have a nanny, driver or bodyguard"
"Periscope": You became a billionaire at a very young age. What is your life like now?
Buterin: Not much different from five years ago. I go to different countries and participate in different events.
Another major change is that more people are looking for me to take photos.
"Periscope": Do you have a nanny, driver, or bodyguard?
Buterin: None. Maybe at some big events, but most of the time not.
The Periscope: I see that social media, including Chinese social media, often captures you taking the subway in Singapore. Why do you always take the subway?
Buterin: Because Singapore’s subway is great.
The Periscope: What about in other countries?
Buterin: It's different in other countries. Some countries don't have subways or the subways are annoying, so people just take a taxi. If I can walk, I will also choose to walk. I like walking.
"Periscope": Why are there cats on your bags and watches?
Buterin: Because cats are cute.
The author took the photo at the scene, Buterin showed his watch
"Periscope": Was it bought in Thailand?
Buterin: No. The watch was given to me by a friend, and the compass was found on Amazon by myself. The cat bag was given to me by my Thai friend.
Periscope: You said in an interview: When I was a kid, I always heard stories like this: some people were very rich, but they spent all their money on private jets, helicopters, luxury sports cars, or other stupid things, and in the end they had nothing. I remember thinking, this is too stupid. So when you are rich, have you ever had any stupid thoughts? Did you succumb to it, or did you resist it?
Buterin: Emm, I don’t know how to answer this.
"Periscope": In other words, has wealth ever made you lost?
Buterin: I don't think I would think that way.
"Periscope": Do you often check the amount in your bank account?
BUTERIN: Not really.
The Periscope: I’m surprised that you can speak Chinese (without having lived in China for a long time). How did you learn and master this language?
Buterin: I started learning in 2013, when I had just dropped out of college and was writing articles for Bitcoin Magazine. I decided to travel and see the Bitcoin world in China, the United States, and Europe. I read some articles about China at this time, talking about the Chinese Bitcoin community and projects, which were particularly interesting.
Many people told me that Chinese is the most difficult language to learn. This was a particularly interesting challenge, so I started learning it. I started with language software. When I first came to China in 2014, I started chatting with many Chinese friends. I continued to learn like this.
Periscope: You know many languages, I think 6 ? Does knowing many languages help you in Crypto ?
Buterin: My best languages are English, Russian and Chinese. After that, I learned French at a Canadian school from 2014 to 2019. I learned a little German and Spanish on my own. About 6 languages, and I know a little bit of other languages.
Actually, yes. One interesting thing is that European languages are easier to learn, they are very close to English, coming from Latin. Europeans all speak English, and sometimes they can speak English better on technical topics. But for people who are not in Europe, it is not the case. It is especially helpful to talk to other communities, people who speak Russian, people who speak Chinese, and in South America, speak a little Spanish.
Periscope: What are the three most important things on your mind right now?
Buterin: First, the development of the Ethereum ecosystem. What do we need to do now to make the Ethereum ecosystem, applications and community develop better?
Second, we talked about some macro-human problems, including AI.
Third, there are a lot of smaller technical matters, such as what I need to do today, what article I am going to write next, and a lot of small problems.
Periscope: What do you think of the US election and the two current candidates? The results are coming soon. (Our conversation took place one day before the US election results were announced)
Buterin: Who will win today may not have a big impact 20 or 30 years later. Some trends will happen no matter what happens today. Even if they don't happen today, they may happen in 2028. If they don't happen in the United States, they may happen in other countries. So, it depends on some long-term and global trends. In 10 years, the world's culture, technology, race, and economy will definitely change a lot.
Periscope: As a cosmopolitan or a builder of some kind of utopian community, you always try to break the old order and establish a new order. So what do you think of the human marriage system? Do humans still need marriage?
Buterin: This topic may change a lot in 50 years. In the past, everyone's goals were first economic security and second children. But now, at least in developed countries, people don't have urgent economic problems and can think more about life and what they like. In addition, many people don't want or are unwilling to (have children).
The Internet has changed our social relationships a lot. If you moved from one city to another 30 years ago, it meant you lost all your friends, but that's not the case now. If the situation changes, our lives will also change a lot.
"Periscope": Are you a free man now?
Buterin: Sometimes you are free, sometimes you are not free.
"Periscope": What are you not free from?
Buterin: There are so many people in the Ethereum community. I always wonder what they are thinking and what they want to do.
Periscope: Do you have fear?
Buterin: Fear of bugs.
——————End——————
Photographed by the author on site
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