Buterin Believes IBM's Blockchain Is Lacking

The annual Ethereum developer conference, Devcon was relatively mellow. The yearly event was held in Prague from October 30th - November 2nd and it reflected the exuberance as cryptocurrency prices have returned to earth this year. The ICO promoters and hangers-on were gone but unfortunately, no one was offering $400k salaries to amateur blockchain developers. As of November 23rd, the Ethereum token reached a low in 2018 as of $120, down from a high of $1,400 in early January.

At Devcon4, one of the big topics of conversation was scalability, or how speed and robustness will be improved. Those who spoke also addressed topics like how Ethereum will bring in another million users? Also talked about was how designers and developers improve user interfaces.

Behind the scenes at Devcon4 was Ethereum’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin who spoke with Quartz talking about the IBM blockchain and what his favourite books are!

When he was asked about what he thought was particularly wasteful, Buterin responded saying:

“A lot of the big corporate blockchain stuff. I read this CoinDesk article about some IBM blockchain thing. I don’t understand this deeply, but the detail that jumped out at me is they’re saying ‘Hey, we own all the IP and this is basically our platform and you’re getting on it.’ And like, that’s… totally not the point.”

Buterin was also asked what he thinks about all the organisations which are using Ethereum for marketing hype in places where blockchain doesn’t make sense and what he thought about these applications:

“Sometimes it’s for marketing hype. Sometimes it’s just people who are genuinely excited about blockchains and want the thing they’re personally excited about and their job to align more with each other, which is a totally legitimate, human thing to want to do. In some cases, I think it leads to a lot of wasted time.”

After being asked what he is reading Buterin responded:

“On my flight here, I read a book about democracy in Mongolia. I was visiting the Santa Fe Institute last month and that was one of the interesting books they had on their bookshelf. I’ve also got a copy of Tyler Cowen’s ‘Stubborn Attachments.’ It basically says that we need to have more confidence in the ideas of economic growth and progress.”

What are your thoughts? Let us know what you think down below in the comments!