Over the past six years, Ethereum has grown from a newly launched project to a global settlement platform valued at $9 billion a day with applications from DeFi to NFT.
What is the Regret of Ethereum Co-founder Vitalik Buterin?
He revealed this in a Twitter AMA today.
“The whole thing with the 8 co-founders (and choosing them so quickly and indiscriminately).”
The eight co-founders are Buterin himself, poker trainer Mihai Alisie, the Canadian entrepreneur Anthony Di Iorio, the programmer Jeffrey Wilcke, the mathematician Charles Hoskinson, Amir Chetrit, who works on Colored Coins, the CEO of SyNerG Music Joseph Lubin and the computer scientist Gavin Wood ( based on their work at the time).
Hoskinson is now the founder of Cardano, which will launch its smart contracts this month, and Gavin Wood is building Polkadot. Both are the top 10 blockchain platforms by market capitalization.
Back then, there was a lot of controversy over whether Ethereum should be a for-profit company or a not-for-profit company. It was almost incubated as a company, but the document was never signed. This problem caused disagreement and even resulted in Hoskinson being excluded from the group.
“People are harder to tightly coordinate in small groups than I expected. You can’t just get everyone to sit around in a circle, see each other’s inherent goodness and get along, especially when huge incentive conflicts are at play,” Buterin added in response to a similar question.
Vitalik Buterin Exposes Other Problems of Ethereum
As for the design of the Ethereum virtual machine itself, Buterin said that setting it to 256-bit was a bad idea, and it should be “64-bit with bigint capabilities of any size.” This refers to the processing power, 64-bit systems can process data faster.
Buterin speculates that if he doesn’t like crypto, he could work on designing a social media platform.
He also talked about how he’s still a bit of a digital nomad, even if he’s slower now and lives in one place for several months at a time.
“I feel like my huge span of time in Singapore last year changed me quite a bit. It was interesting to just… be by myself and with my own thoughts for the first time in nearly a decade,” he said.
Tesla boss Elon Musk also got involved and asked Buterin what love was. He replied: “X AE A-12 don’t hurt me …”