At the end of the last decade, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin revised his predictions over the years, illustrating the ability to be right about abstract ideas rather than problems with software development in production.
Buterin started the Twitter thread with an article on July 23, 2013 outlining the main advantages of Bitcoin – universality and resistance to censorship. Buterin predicted Bitcoin’s ability to protect the purchasing power of citizens in Iran, Argentina, China and Africa.
However, Buterin also noticed the rising popularity of stablecoins when he saw Argentine companies working in Tether (USDT). He echoed his ten-year-old ideas about the negative effects of regulating Bitcoin.
The founder still believes that “money on the internet should not be worth more than 5 cents per transaction” and highlighted Ethereum’s ongoing efforts to improve the scalability of the blockchain.
“I loved altcoins before altcoins were great,” Buterin added, citing an article in which he justified this statement with three arguments: different chains were optimized for different purposes, the low cost of owning multiple chains, and the need for an alternative in case the main development team was wrong.
On the other hand, Buterin withdrew his support for Bitcoin Cash (BCH), noting that communities formed around rebellions, even if they had good reason, often struggle in the long run, adding that they “value courage over competence, uniting around resistance rather than resistance.” agreed path forward.”
“Mostly true (it was originally supposed to be ‘DeFi’), although catalytic file storage + computing didn’t take off much (yet?), and of course I totally missed NFTs.”
Buterin concluded his speech by echoing the instincts that helped him fix the bug early on, saying, “In technology, I was often qualified for abstract ideas rather than the problems of developing production software. Over time, I had to learn to understand the past.”
Related: Vitalik Buterin outlines break-even roadmaps for ETH 2.0
In early December, Buterin shared his vision for a “reasonable roadmap” for Eth2, proposing a “second level of effort with low resource requirements” to validate distributed blocks.
In addition, he suggested introducing fraud protection, or ZK-SNARKS, which could serve as a cheaper alternative for users to validate the block. According to Buterin:
“[With these updates] we get a chain where block production is still centralized, but block validation is very unreliable and decentralized, and specialized anti-censorship magic prevents block producers from being censored.”
