If youâre like a lot of people, the mere mention of NFTs makes you roll your eyes. Itâs a wildly speculative market, where people are tossing around soul-crushing amounts of money becauseâŠwhy? Celebrity endorsements? Amusing digital artwork featuring apes? So why are so many smart people so enthusiastic about the potential of blockchain? This episode of the Freakonomics podcast may give you a better understanding.
Vitalik Buterin is the founder of the Ethereum Project, a multifunctional blockchain system.
Blockchain has been described as a distributed digital ledger, but Vitalik Buterin has his own definition: Blockchains, he says, are âa form of money, but theyâre not just a form of money. Blockchains have some properties of things like nation-states, courts and even religions.â
Buterin realized âthe horrors centralized services can bringâ when he was in high school and the centralized authority behind the game World of Warcraft made changes to his favorite character. He went on to study computer science and relevant mathematics during a brief stint at the University of Waterloo before he dropped out and joined the Mastercoin project. Eventually, he saw the limitations of Mastercoin, and went on to start his own blockchain project, which he called Ethereum. Ether, Ethereumâs tokens, are âfully programmable.â
The bitcoin blockchain is essentially a database of who owns bitcoin; Ethereum could be described as a ârich design space,â and Ether as âprogrammable money.â
Ethereum is the second most valuable cryptocurrency, trailing only bitcoin...
The Freakonomics podcast is created and hosted by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner, based on their book of the same name. Freakonomics radio has expanded to include the podcasts No Stupid Questions; Freakonomics, MD; and People I (Mostly) Admire.
Comment on this summary