Vitalik Buterin: belief

Transcript context

…If you’re looking to hire someone — either for Ethereum or to collaborate with — what quality or qualities do you look for that maybe other people underrate? Because you’ve also built a successful company, right? You’re not just chief scientist. No. Company is not necessarily the right emphasis, once again. It goes back to my point about cultural innovation. Ultimately, there are different circles in the Ethereum community, some overlapping, some not, and there’s different ideas of what it means to be Ethereum. For example, you could be a full-time employee of the organization based in Switzerland called the Ethereum Foundation, or its outpost in Singapore called Ethereum Asia Pacific Limited. You could be someone who has received a grant from the Ethereum Foundation. You could also be a groupie, someone who has intellectual ideas, likes hanging out with us, and just happens to fly around everywhere to the same cities that we’re in. You could be someone working on some Ethereum project. There’s definitely people who work outside of the Ethereum Foundation as a formal organization that have made much bigger contributions than even some people inside of the foundation. I think that’s part of where a lot of the successful innovation has come from. One of the things that this gives you is, it basically means that there are many different ways to be in Ethereum. You can either follow along and have the same kind of lifestyle that I do, or you can work for some traditional company and have some Ethereum Foundation grants be one of your projects. You could work on some Ethereum application and be adjacent. You could just be a lone wolf working at home. You could pick any linear combination of these that you want. If there’s tradeoffs, you can be part of Ethereum while being part of a structured team. You can be part of it being a lone wolf. You can be part of it as part of some traditional, large corporation. You can be part of a startup. I do feel like this is part of what makes cryptocurrencies interesting, in that they are not just a decentralized censorship resistance, whatever system, as a product. But they are also this cultural evolution that itself incorporates many aspects of decentralization in terms of how they’re produced and in terms of a way of living and collaborating and building things. While building Ethereum, you’ve also taught yourself French, German, and Chinese without having lived in those countries. On YouTube, I’ve even seen you answering questions in Chinese about the blockchain to a Chinese audience. How did you teach yourself such good Chinese?…

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