Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin Talks About Big Challenges Ahead For Cryptocurrencies

Buterin sat down the economist Tyler Cowen in a new interview whist explaining that scalability and making it easier for the users are imperative for the success of new technology. He goes on to say:

“Ethereum blockchain’s capacity right now is about 15 transactions a second. If you even consider something like putting all the uber rides on the blockchain, that’s 12 transactions per second already.”

He continues to say:

“I do feel just raw ability to process more transactions per second is important, and that could happen through sharding and other base-layer scalability upgrades to the system, which we are working on… it could happen through layer 2 technologies like state channels and plasma which we are also working on.”

Buterin also talks about user experience and how important it is for the industry and more specifically, blockchain:

“Another big one is user experience, both user experience in terms of using the blockchain, not being as clunky as it is today, but also user experience of security. How easy is it to set up a wallet that does not allow all of your money to get stolen overnight or lost overnight if your keys get lost or stolen? Those are challenges that I do think we need a lot more innovation in, and I think we will see innovation over the next few years.”

The Ethereum creator also discussed why cryptocurrency has such value and what gives its financial worth.

“I’m not sure what the best answer is because, ultimately, it depends a lot on the way the cryptocurrency goes. One way to measure this is to treat a cryptocurrency a being a kind of corporation that collects revenue through transaction fees, particularly in the case where the transaction fees either are burned or get redistributed to the cryptocurrencies own proof of stake validators.”

As his own undertaking at Ethereum, Buterin explained what they look at when they hire new employees and why the industry excites him so much.

“There are different circles in the Ethereum community, some overlapping, some not, and there’s different ideas of what it means to be Ethereum. For example, you could be someone who has received a grant from the Ethereum Foundation. You could also be a groupie, someone who has intellectual ideas, likes hanging out with us, and just happens to fly around everywhere to the same cities that we’re in. You could work on some Ethereum application and be adjacent. You could just be a lone wolf working at home. You could pick any linear combination of these that you want."