Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0 | Lex Fridman Podcast #188

The following is a conversation with Vitalik Buterin, his second time on the podcast. Vitalik is the co-founder of Ethereum and one of the most influential people in cryptocurrency and technology broadly defined. A quick mention of our sponsors: Athletic Greens, Magic Spoon, Indeed, Four Sigmatic, and BetterHelp. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Ethereum, Bitcoin, and many other cryptocurrencies have been taking a wild ride of prices going up and down in the past few months. To me, the prices were never as important as the ideas, both technical and philosophical. Cryptocurrency has the potential to empower billions of people to participate in the global economy in a way that resists the manipulation by centralized power. Also, with smart contracts, Layer 2 technologies, data pools, NFTs, and of course, integration of artificial intelligence to the whole thing, we have the opportunity to build tools and worlds that transform physical and digital life as we know it, hopefully minimizing the suffering in the world and maximizing the fun. This is The Lex Fridman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Vitalik Buterin. Let's first talk about Shiba Inu, if we can. Also known as Shiba Token, code SHIB. For context, Shiba Inu was created in August 2020, modeled off of Dogecoin by the anonymous founder known as Ryoshi. On May 10th this year, it had a market capitalization of over 13 billion. And, uh, maybe you can explain this, but in a crazy move, you were given half of SHIB's, uh, total supply. You, uh, burned, AKA destroyed, 90% of it. That's worth $6.7 billion, and you donated 10%, that's worth, uh, 1.2 billion, uh, at the time, to an, uh, India COVID-19 relief fund, saying you don't want to be the locus of this much power. This is, uh, fascinating. Why and how were you able to walk away from this much money and this much power?

So I- I should probably start by, uh, giving some of the backstory around, you know, these coins and this concept of giving me coins. Uh, so, you know, first of all, Shiba Inu, as you said, is this kind of knockoff of Dogecoin, right? And Dogecoin was this initial kind of fun coin that was created back, I think, around 2014 or so. And it was just created by Jackson Palmer, you know, who had put it out as a joke for a couple of hours, and a community formed around it. And at the beginning, people didn't take it very seriously. I actually remember putting about $25,000 into Doge sometime around 2016, and I just remember, uh, thinking to myself, like, "Okay, how am I going to explain my, to my mom that I just invested $25,000 into dog coins?"

Yeah.

And, like, what even are dog coins? Like, the only interesting thing about this coin is that there's, you know, a logo of a dog somewhere.