Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin: Crypto Is ‘Much Bigger’ Than Just Bitcoin

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin says the crypto industry needs to do a better job of explaining the benefits of blockchain and crypto technology.

In a new interview with The Star, Buterin talks about the use cases for the emerging technology, which include decentralized finance, gaming platforms, digital identity, healthcare, voting, fundraising, security infrastructure and more.

“One of the big things that needs to be communicated is the fact that five years ago the blockchain was just about Bitcoin, but now it’s much bigger than just Bitcoin. It’s split off into separate spaces that have a lot of different visions…

For Ethereum, what we care about is taking the blockchain technology behind Bitcoin that makes decentralized cryptocurrency possible and making it more general-purpose so that other things can be decentralized in the same way.”

Buterin says governments have a long way to go in terms of understanding and implementing their role in how crypto and blockchain-based platforms develop.

“Governments do have a role and one of the roles is regulation. The usual concerns are about cryptocurrency exchanges where the basic idea is to do fundraising for a new project by directly selling tokens on the blockchains. There are debates whether specific kinds of initial coin offerings (ICOs) are legally categorized as securities. So the regulators are grappling with the issue.”

As for the future of Ethereum itself, Buterin promises the platform will scale by a factor of at least 100x, dramatically lowering transaction fees. But that’s just the beginning.

“Scaleability is not the only problem. There are still challenges with usability, with account security and with privacy that are improving. It’s also improving from a technical point of view, but even if the tech is there – how do you turn it into something people will use?”

You can check out the full interview here.

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