Vitalik Buterin Speaks To Argentina: “Decentralization Goes Far Beyond Money”

Reportedly, Vitalik Buterin went to Buenos Aires to experience inflation first-hand. Argentina’s Ethereum community embraced the creator and treated him like a king. Pictures of Vitalik with the country’s politicians and tech influencers flooded social media. Then, a rumor. The man was willing to give a free lecture if the community could produce the event fast enough.

The avid public claimed the 800 virtual tickets in less than five minutes. Granted, they were free, but the enthusiasm was palpable. Only God knows why, but Vitalik Buterin entered the stage wearing flip-flops. He speaks fast and seldom stops to think. Vitalik throws names of Ethereum-related projects like it’s nothing, assuming everyone in the audience knows exactly what he’s talking about.

About the Argentinian Ethereum community, Vitalik says it’s “much more than I expected. Even more than I’ve seen in the world so far.” He shouts out several projects with Argentinian roots, like Proof Of Humanity, Nomics, OpenZeppelin, and Kleros. According to Vitalik, the country has an “amazing amount of talent” and a real need for blockchain technology. In Argentina, the so-called Web3 is solving problems.

Then, he threw one of the phrases that made headlines. According to Ethereum’s creator, Argentina is a country with “low State capacity, but very high people capacity.”

What Did Vitalik Say About Ethereum’s Future?
According to the man himself, “DAOs are the thing that’s finally ready to happen.” He also predicted growth for ENS, the popular Ethereum Name Server. Vitalik mentioned his new roadmap, and its silly-named faces: the merge, the surge, the verge, the purge, and the splurge.

In general, Vitalik is all about fixing. He admitted that the Ethereum blockchain has several problems, but there are people working on each one of them. For example, he promised Ethereum will finally turn to the Proof-Of-Stake consensus mechanism. When that happens, Vitalik claimed that they will “get rid of Infura centralization.” And made a call to all wallet developers to take on the challenge. “It’s 2022, we can make Ethereum decentralized and usable. Let’s do it.”

Speaking about decentralization, Ethereum’s creator shared his views on the subject. According to him, the concept doesn’t imply that there are no leaders. It does imply that those leaders can’t make unilateral decisions and have to work to earn everyone’s respect, though. And that there are structures in place in which new leaders can emerge. He feels that a project needs a positive vision to follow, and that “Ethereum has gotten more and more decentralized over time.”

Later on, Vitalik said the phrase that gives this article its title, “I think the value of decentralization goes far beyond money.” A phrase that summarizes Ethereum’s ethos.

ETH price chart for 12/26/2021 on Bitfinex | Source: ETH/USD on TradingView.com

What Else Did They Talk About?
Besides Ethereum, the hosts and Vitalik discussed varied topics like fractional ownership (of properties), life extension technologies, how blockchains could contribute to the evolution of social media, and credible neutrality. According to Ethereum’s creator, social media could avoid centralized moderation by encouraging good behavior and punishing bad actors at the protocol level.

In general, the man is a futurist and believes technology can and will solve most problems.

What Would It Take For Ethereum To Fail?
The production team took questions via Twitter, using the #AskVitalikBA hashtag. The one in the title got this response:

“If Ethereum fails to scale, then Ethereum deffinitely failed. If Ethereum succeeds at scalling, but it turns into something that’s centralized, then I think it also failed. If Ethereum succeeds at scalling and at being decentralized as a blockchain, but nothing interesting gets build on top of it and no one actually gets any vallue from it, then it also fails.”

Besides that, they got him to talk about NFTs. Vitalik approves that they provide a business model for art, but thinks they have to survive a complete cycle before considering them a success. Can NFTs survive a bear market? He thinks that NFTs will benefit from creators figuring out how to get more functionality attached to them.

Conclusions And Commerce
Ethereum’s creator is an interesting human. He kept the audience engaged the whole time, and got a standing ovation at the end. And a hat. And assorted presents. A few days later, an entrepreneurial individual set up an online store with everything Vitalik was wearing at the event, except for the watch.