Catching Up to Crypto

CHAPTER 9The Future Is Born: Ethereum and Smart Contracts

A Russian Canadian named Vitalik Buterin was among the early Bitcoiners who had a different vision for what the crypto industry could be. Buterin first learned about Bitcoin in 2011 when he was just 17 years old. That year he founded Bitcoin Magazine, one of the first “Bitcoin only” media publications. He quickly made a name for himself with his writing and, despite his young age, became one of the first thought leaders in the industry. Even from those very earliest days, Buterin imagined blockchain technology being capable of much more than just cryptocurrency. He saw a future where a wide range of digital assets would power a vast network of decentralized applications.¹

As the name implies, a decentralized application is internet software that is not controlled by a single entity. This is in stark contrast to the huge popular services that we see on the internet today, like Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Uber, or Spotify. All of these services and their parent companies have a top‐down organizational structure, where the owners and board members make all the rules and collect all the revenue. Decentralized applications work much differently, with a more horizontal system of organization and rule making. The most successful decentralized applications also tend to give their users a share of their revenue, whether in the form of airdrops, staking rewards, or dividends. Airdrops are essentially deposits of free crypto into ...