Vitalik: Ethereum, Part 1

To me, it's not an either/or. ETH the asset and Ethereum the application layer ecosystem are synergistic with each other. The stronger the application layer ecosystem is, the stronger ETH is. And the stroger ETH is as an asset, the stronger the application layer ecosystem.

The incentives aren't there for developers to build on somebody else's blockchain. I got in trouble for saying this in 2017, but I still stand by it: There is a free-rider effect on blockchains. There is a strong incentive to fork a chain and build your own rather than to build on an existing chain.

Every generation, there is some hustle that, if you're really smart, very aggressive, and looking for edges, and not afraid of looking weird, there are ways to get ahead early or to make a lot of money in a way that's not obvious to most people and is maybe even slightly subversive.

I've always taken the point of view that the most decentralised coins will win in the end, because the whole point of blockchains is decentralization. Otherwise, you wouldn't need them in the first place.

Smart contracts are castles made of math freely trading with each other.

The larger the number of users that are verifying by default, the more secure a blockchain is.

You can put money into Bitcoin and ETH and forget about it for a long time. I'm not convinced you can do that in a lot of the other protocols that are not completely decentralized.

Today, Ethereum [does], on average, about 15 to 20 transactions a second. But if we just move to layer 2s, then we could go up to about 5,000 transactions a second.

I think of Ethereum as a general-purpose blockchain. So, instead of being a blockchain for one application, it's a blockchain that you can build any application on top of.

One of the things that's important to mention is that the scalability of blockchains is improving, and it's going to improve pretty rapidly.