How Would the Miners Collude With One Another?

At just 20-years young, Vitalik Buterin is one of the most brilliant minds in the cryptocurrency space. Previously, a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine, he has conceptualized Ethereum, the most radical and ambitious cryptocurrency project since Bitcoin. After raising $18m in a crowdsale, a team of over 30 are working on launching the project by March 2015. In his work on designing a system for the future, he has been grappling with many of the hardest problems in the cryptocurrency space over the past year.

Topics covered in this episode:

• How Ethereum has evolved since the white paper
• The problems of Proof-of-Work
• Why Proof-of-Stake is the future of consensus protocols
• Why his main focus has been on consensus issues and scalability
• Why Bitcoin will never be stable enough to price things in
• The flawed ideology of ‘Bitcoin maximalism’ that prevents people from considering Proof-of-Work alternatives

Episode links:

• Ethereum
• How to get started: Your first DApp in under one hour
• Ethereum Proof-of-Concept 7
• Proof of Stake: How I Learned to Love Weak Subjectivity
• Slasher: A Punitive Proof-of-Stake Algorithm

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/058