raised in Canada two Russian parents Vitalik boo Turin is the blockchain movements biggest celebrity he created the etherium block chain when he was just 21 years old and it's cryptocurrency the ether is second only to Bitcoin it's market cap increased by over ten thousand percent in 2017 Vitalik has been on a global campaign to raise awareness of his creation and its potential implications for business finance and government we caught up with him in Russia where the government hopes that aetherium can be as transformative for their own finances as it's been for his so I heard about Bitcoin for the first time and maybe February 2011 eventually I found a guy who was willing to pay me five bitcoins per article for writing articles for his Bitcoin blog and what was Bitcoin worth of the time each pick one was zero point eight dollars zero point 8 o suta 5 per article and now that would be $5,000 an article right more or less okay being a high school guy with not much money I thought 1.5 dollars an hour was a fairly reasonable wage so I that was a good fight for 1.5 I can earn 20 bitcoins then I spent 8 and a half of them on a t-shirt and I figure oh cool this all actually works and what really struck out as me was this idea that it actually is still possible for people to come together and create an entire new financial system and it's like seemed kind of very empowering to me and hearing you talk about recreating a financial system there's something sort of utopian about it get rid of all the old stuff and create something totally from scratch no no it wasn't about kind of like overthrowing anything it was more just to the idea that before kind of finance and lots of other things seems like there were all these people way up away up there that we're just doing these things and without them you know there's no way any of this could happen and here it just made it very obvious that money is just something that a community can make for itself whenever at once we know what we T centralized networks are I mean I'm sure you've heard of BitTorrent II and all the various file sharing networks like all the various decentralized messaging systems this group of cypher punks that thought okay you can do all those things in a decentralized way why can't we do decentralized cash it's for example if I have you know some song and I wants to send you the song over a decentralized network I do this yeah that's fine I have a song you have the song money is fundamentally different because money requires some notion of memory so I have a hundred uh several dollars I send you the hundred digital dollars then I make another transaction which looks exactly like the flat first transaction except the only difference is it sends someone else one hundred digital dollars I published both transactions at the same time clearly both of those transactions cannot succeed you have to have some mechanism that keeps track of the fact that I sent you these hundred dollars and so that after I send the first transaction I in the system knows that I no longer have the money and so the second transaction fails explain to me why this technology is so transformational that people think it will change the world because they represents kind of epochal changes in the options that we have for interacting with each other with a Bitcoin it's you don't need banks to send money anymore it's just something that happens directly peer-to-peer and aetherium extends that to making digitally enforceable agreements if that changes whole industries doesn't it and it has a debt bubble soon do you feel like the destroyer of worlds here I mean you can essentially eliminate how many jobs by doing that make destroyer of jobs creator of better ones cuz that's pretty good you
