Meeting Vitalik and the Web 3.0 Vision
“Every ambitious person’s life in America as far as I can tell is a complex, often irreconcilable interplay between greed and idealism.”
The events in this story take place in late April 2016.
When Vitalik Buterin stepped out in front of the several dozen of us gathered at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, CA my heart leaped into my throat. I felt like a recluse must who meets his lover after months of messaging online. I fought back tears; overwhelmed with relief that Vitalik was real and not an AI-generated apparition. After months of watching his talks on YouTube, I had feared that he was too good, too god-like, to be real.
I discovered Ethereum four-months earlier while researching Bitcoin for a class. Bitcoin, of course, is a novel form of internet money backed by code instead of a government. Pretty interesting. But Ethereum, in my eyes, meant freedom from societal derangements ranging from income inequality to chauvinism.
Vitalik was still just twenty-two, but he was only an adolescent when, stumbling and fidgeting, he introduced Ethereum at the Miami Bitcoin conference at the start of 2014. That was over two years prior, and Ethereum had been running more-or-less smoothly for nine-months, prompting a global speaking tour to discuss what came next. Vitalik was, and remains, home-less. As a footloose ambassador for Ethereum, he lives out of hotels, splitting his days between PowerPoint and GitHub and headlining meetups at night. Hacker Dojo was his latest stop.
We levitated back and forth on our tech-issue Aerons in front of glossy white tables while Vitalik tested the clicker with deliberate, jerky motions — like Heath Ledger’s Joker finishing off Gotham General. The walls of the room were white as the tables lending it an interrogation room aesthetic. But through my eyes, the room glowed with the same canvas-like possibility as Vitalik’s creation. Vitalik’s presentation would explain exactly how Ethereum’s vast potential would begin to be realized in the next twelve months.
Ethereum, if you’re unfamiliar, is the first general-purpose world computer. It’s “Turing complete” in computer science parlance, which is another way of saying that Ethereum is capable of running any code recognizable by a computer. But Ethereum is the democracy to your Macbook’s dictatorship. On Ethereum you’re just one of thousands determining the next action the computer should take. This takes time, prompting the question: Why build an opiatic MacBook?
One word: trust. You see, Ethereum isn’t just a computer, it is also a web. A web-computer hybrid. Today, the web is a series of walled gardens forever under siege: Google, Chase Bank, Cloudflare, the US Government, all employ an army of defenders. All have been hacked. The web is a savage place teaming with huns mobbing a series of Great Walls erected by technology giants. Ethereum tears down walls by demanding consensus before every move, ensuring all behavior is socially sanctioned.
Web 1.0 — mostly text and images published on self-hosted websites — reigned from 1993 up until roughly 2000. “Surfing the web” meant jumping from wave to wave, where a “wave” was an independent server and “jumping” meant clicking [hyper]links. As web 2.0 began replacing web 1.0, everyone joined the same wave, or few waves, specifically Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, collectively referred to as “FANG.”
In short, web 1.0 was decentralized whereas web 2.0 is centralized. FANG benefits from network effects and corrals financial returns, enabling them to hire tens of thousands of software engineers to make their platforms better, and more addicting. This started out great for everyday users. But the relationship has turned toxic as users are now dependent on platforms. Toxicity in personal relationships largely stems from asymmetric dependencies whether financial or emotional, where one side feels that they need the other. In economic contexts, this is referred to as monopoly power, and in the case of tech, the relationship between platforms and users has turned from mutually beneficial to extractive. Algorithms now feast on vast buffets of data in order to condition users to serve financial ends.
This is the situation we now find ourselves in. And barring government intervention, the only way to move forward is to collectivize and build alternative platforms that give power back to users. Collectivizing vast numbers of unfamiliar individuals was formerly impossible, until Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, invented a way to distribute returns from a peer-to-peer decentralized network to first thousands and then millions of individuals. It’s impossible to know the exact number, but best estimates put the number of Bitcoin holders at around 100 million, doubling every year. And while Bitcoin targets the centralization of money, Ethereum targets the centralization of platforms, businesses, and even countries. Ethereum imagines a future web that joins the functionality of web 2.0 with the decentralization of web 1.0. The result: web 3.0 — the toilet that never overflows.
You would be hard-pressed to find a more ambitious project than Ethereum. Ethereum imagines a world where selfish and extractive behavior is obviated by transparency and trustlessness, because everyone’s moves are constrained by broader interests. But the obvious downside is that it is slow. So Ethereum is best for applications that don’t require a ton of moves, called “transactions.” As it stands, Ethereum can handle about ten or fifteen per-second. This number is measly compared with the web’s millions of interactions per second, and it remains one of the primary blockers to Ethereum’s scale and impact. Still, Ethereum offers something profoundly new and even revolutionary despite this straightjacket.
Transactions are approved by a technically complicated protocol known as “Proof-of-Work,” which is a very clever means of making this all happen without requiring everyone on the network to sift through transactions all day to see which ones they like. It all happens automatically and yet it still works, which is a kind of magic.
“Okay.” Said Vitalik. Having gotten the clicker working. “Let’s get started.” I straightened up in my chair and beamed. “The most important thing on my agenda” continued Vitalik “is to discuss the governance of — um dependent projects on Ethereum. What I mean is if you look at Ethereum or Bitcoin it’s an independent thing. It relies on nothing and serves as ground truth for other, dependent things. I mean obviously, Ethereum relies on — um TCP/IP and the kind of underlying internet protocols [the aforementioned plumbing], but generally people are happy to assume that it just works.”
Vitalik spoke haltingly but not unconfidently; his speech just occasionally needed to catch up with his mind. His eyes flitted back and forth uncontrollably as all his physiological resources were sent inward.
When Vitalik’s talk ended, the meetup attendees milled around and chatted. French, German, and Chinese accents mingled in a multicultural stew. It was euphoric. The Ethereum movement was borderless, and Vitalik himself, a Russian who grew up in Canada, was Ethereum’s equivalent of the New Soviet Man. I felt a kinship with everyone in the room, the blockchain connected all of us like so many nodes in a network.
I shuffled towards Vitalik the way a shy middle schooler makes his way to a pretty girl at a dance. Staring awkwardly, I tried to clear the cotton from my mouth as I rehearsed an introduction neurotically in my head. “Hi I’m Dean — Hi I’m Dean!” I thought to myself, imagining different inflection levels and hand thrust speeds with which to reach out for a shake.
Older and confident engineer types asked him flurries of very serious and important-sounding questions. After nearly half-an-hour, Vitalik broke off and made his way for the exit. Out of the immense fear of personal loathing for saying nothing, I lunged forward — “Hi I’m Dern. Nice to meet up. Meet you.” I said, garbling my own name and not reaching out my hand. Vitalik smiled “Great to meet you!” Bringing his hand to his shoulder in a friendly wave. Thanks for coming.” He nodded and continued his exit as I turned scarlet.
