In a surprising interview, ETH founder and head honcho Vitalik Buterin admits he has no idea what the Ethereum Network is or does.
“I sort of started it as an experiment, just to play around”, Buterin told the host of a venture capital podcast over the weekend. “I decided to just sort of make up cool sounding things along the way, like ‘zk-SNARKs’ and ‘sharding’, which were actually inspired by a tabletop RPG I was really into. Then I said some wacky sounding stuff on Twitter, and, like, a lot of developers and investors just kind of kept coming to me.”
Buterin said he’s, “Moderately confident” that eventually, someone will figure out exactly how Ethereum works and what it is.
“At this point, there’s no real pressure to know what this thing is that billions of dollars and manhours are pouring into. I mean, developers seem to like it more the less sense it makes.”
Buterin maintained that, unlike BTC fans, his main interest is not in keeping the price of ETH high. “For me it’s more about seeing how many totally made-up things we can talk about in order to attract all of the world’s dev talent to this thing. It’s sort of an anti-Field of Dreams, you know, like sort of, if they come, maybe you can build something”.
The price of ETH doubled on the admission, and thousands more software developers in Silicon Valley who heard the podcast immediately quit their jobs to “Do something on Ethereum”.
