Out of the Ether. Matthew Leising
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behind Bitcoin, with the ether price at about $242.
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Ethereum was invented in 2013 by a 19-year-old named Vitalik Buterin. He was familiar to the Bitcoin community at the time as the cofounder and head writer of Bitcoin Magazine, where he penned well-written stories on all aspects of the technology. Buterin possesses the type of towering intelligence that forces people to describe him in otherworldly terms, an alien sent from the stars to live among us. He sort of looks like an alien, too. His head is too big for his body, sitting atop an elongated neck. He's long limbed and has a bit of a mechanical gait. His voice can register in flat, almost computer-like tones at times, though when he laughs in quick bursts his voice deepens. His large blue eyes can be piercing if he takes the time to look at you as he speaks, which isn't often. He has an unmistakable presence: you could spot him across the most crowded conference space. His fashion sense for many years led him to lean toward rainbow T-shirts with pictures of unicorns or Doge, the Shiba Inu dog mascot of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin.
There is a whimsy about Vitalik that not many people get to see. He has a sharp wit and is quite funny. We met in Seattle; Ithaca, New York; and Los Angeles to talk for this book. He was incredibly generous with his time, once I could get on his hectic schedule. He doesn't know how to drive and on average is on a plane once a week. Wherever he lands, he tends to stay from between three days and three weeks. He has no permanent home, though his family all live in Toronto. Like any inveterate traveler, he has his routine down to a science. He packs a bag that measures forty liters in volume. Contents: seven T-shirts (a few long sleeved); seven pairs of underwear; seven pairs of socks; sweater; jacket; spare pants; toiletries; a spread of foreign currencies; and public transport cards for Toronto, Boston, Washington DC, San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Bangkok, and Sydney.
He is frugal to an almost ridiculous degree. In high school his dad couldn't convince him to buy a new pair of shoes when his were literally falling apart. Through his early involvement in Bitcoin and then as the inventor of Ethereum, the cryptocurrency fortune he's amassed has at times been in the billions, though he demurs when asked for a specific figure. Yet through the first part of the journey he took across the US and Europe as he formulated the ideas that would become Ethereum he limited himself to a budget of $20 a day. As that level of restraint implies, Vitalik is also fastidious. At one interview we were sitting outside at a café on the Cornell campus, speaking of his fellow cofounder and friend Mihai Alisie. Vitalik peered across the table to my notebook and let me know I'd spelled Mihai wrong.
There is a humility to Vitalik that I find extraordinary and admirable for someone with so much influence and power. He has a joy to him that might come from being independently wealthy – or maybe that's just who he is. After we met at the Washington State Convention Center – Vitalik was speaking at Microsoft's developer conference – he got up from the table, crumpled his paper cup in his hands, and leapt into the air. He kicked his feet out just a touch as he sank the shot in a nearby trash can.
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Vitalik wanted to give the world a way to build whatever its heart desired on top of his blockchain. Two things were necessary to make this possible: smart contracts and ether, the cryptocurrency that must be used to pay for every Ethereum transaction.
In the most basic sense, smart contracts are what separate Ethereum from Bitcoin. Bitcoin is used to send value from person A to person B. It's linear. Vitalik wanted to be geometric, to create a system that could involve however many participants were necessary, linking A to B to F to K to G and then back to A. A way to do that is to have computer programs that are tied to and follow the rules of a blockchain system. That allows the various inputs to the program – the data – to change the state of the system.
Okay, wait. What the hell does that mean? Smart contracts are like a store: let's call it 7-Eleven. Think of all the things you can do in a 7-Eleven. We'll call you Electron Girl, because that's what you are – all blue and sparky, sending out lightning bolts from time to time. As you make your way through the store (let's say you're in Tokyo, which has the best 7-Elevens in the world) you can buy some sushi or get money from an ATM or talk to a friend or look at the magazines until the guy behind the counter yells at you. When you pay for your sushi at the register, you might get a receipt, but if you pay in cash there's not much of a record of the purchase.
All the various things you just did at 7-Eleven you can do digitally while interacting with a smart contract. The programming to secure the purchase of the raw fish is written in code that lives within the smart contract – we buy things in such an automated fashion online every day.
Talking to your friend is just a chat function. And the library (maybe the digital Library of Congress one day?) is just over there. Your digitized self runs through this routine by engaging different Ethereum-based applications that use smart contracts. I don't mean to leave the impression that one smart contract runs the entire 7-Eleven; you engage different, discreet contracts for each interaction.
So, what's this part about changing the state of the system? It's simple: it's just the recalibration of funds – for example, when you got cash from the ATM. Your wallet now has $40 in it, while the bank is less the same amount. And, oh yeah, you're reminded that you owe your friend 20 bucks, so you pay up. In Ethereum, paying your friend can be as simple as reading a QR code from his phone. The digital wallet where you keep your ether, where the original $40 value is stored, is now lighter by $20. The state of that environment changed and the blockchain updates to keep track of it.
In this scenario, Bitcoin can only be used to buy your sushi. You can't talk to your friends or read Moby Dick while using the Bitcoin blockchain. You can using Ethereum.
Much more complicated systems are also possible. It's not unrealistic to say that almost the entire global oil market could be shifted onto Ethereum using smart contracts. Oil output could be monitored and secured on the blockchain. Private trading would be simple to set up because of the small number of participants. What Ethereum is not yet ready for is the speed at which electronic oil markets, like the crude futures traded at the New York Mercantile Exchange in New York, work. Yet OPEC production cuts or gains would transmit via an automatic information feed to the Ethereum network via what's known as an oracle. The oil tanker industry could move its supply chain to Ethereum as well.
Again, I think about it in terms of generic contracts. You made many contracts in your 7-Eleven adventure, even though we don't think of talking to a friend in those exact terms. But conversation is a contract. Now imagine those contracts are on Ethereum. You engage the blockchain differently than how we go online today, no doubt about it. Yet in many ways it's not that far from what we do today when we interact with the web.
These types of transactions are bread and butter for any computer, but until Vitalik came along they hadn't been coupled with a decentralized network. Smart contracts can handle thousands of inputs and outputs, and as long as the code is clean they can live on indefinitely.
Access to such a system, though, has to have a price. This is where ether enters the equation. Vitalik knew that there would be people who would want to try to overwhelm Ethereum, to slow it down or even break it entirely, by spamming it with thousands of simultaneous transactions. If they wanted to do that, they'd have to pay a hefty fee in the form of ether. Gas was the main idea here, like what you put in your car. No gas, no go.
That means ether would have an inherent value, as it's vital to how Ethereum operates. Whether that value was 10 cents or $1,000 would be up to the people who wanted to use it.
Ether differs from Bitcoin in an important way – one that the Ethereum cofounders were very aware of. In the beginning, ether would be created out of thin air. Some of this ether would go to the founders as a reward for their work on the project, or what's known as a pre-mine. A much larger quantity would be sold to the public to fund ongoing development. Bitcoin never did a pre-mine: every Bitcoin in existence has been earned by the computers on its network that ensure transactions are valid. If ether were to be created, however, it risked falling under the jurisdiction of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, among other global regulators. That's because the SEC could view ether