Vitalik Buterin is one of the most decorated and influential names in the global crypto space. More than anything, he is credited for creating arguably the most dominant blockchain platform after Bitcoin, Ethereum.
At the beginning of his career, Buterin joined which called the Bitcoin Space. After dropping from college, he co-founded the Bitcoin Magazine, before creating Ethereum blockchain. So what made Buterin create another blockchain platform when he was already engaged in the Bitcoin space?
Bitcoin initially was touted only as a substitute for fiat currencies, or at best, an investment asset. Nakamoto’s brainchild didn’t care much about blockchain adoption, dapps, or any of the fancy stuff associated with blockchain today. However, Buterin realized that distributed ledger had much more potential than merely storing the value of wealth. He was of the view blockchain could solutions to various problems confronting life and business functions.
There’s one more thing Buterin realized, which was a more difficult one. He realized that to materialize his vision, he needed a much more liberal blockchain, which could allow developers to create apps using the technology. Moreover, Buterin felt that the structural design of Bitcoin did not leave much scope for innovation. In an interview a few months ago, on being why did he create Ethereum, Buterin replied,
Soon after that I started to realize that there were a lot more interesting things that you could do with blockchains than just a single peer-to-peer currency. And this was something a lot of other people were starting to recognize at the same time. I came up with the idea behind Ethereum.
Buterin thought that the idea of a blockchain with a built-in programming language was the simplest and most logical way to build a platform that could be used for various functions. On being asked about the shortcomings of Bitcoin, he stated that the platform had limited functionality. He went on to say that Bitcoin was like a pocket calculator, while Ethereum was like a smartphone. He further added,
A pocket calculator does one thing and it does one thing well, but really people want to do all these other things. And if you have a smartphone then on the smartphone you have a pocket calculator as an app.
