I spent the past week listening to this Bankless podcast with Vitalik Buterin (the Canadian programmer and co-founder of Ethereum). It took me a week because I was listening to it off and on while I was in the car, headed to and from One Delisle and other meetings. But it's a fascinating episode. I think Vitalik is easily one of the most important minds of our generation.

But let me be honest and say that I wasn't able to follow everything in the podcast. I clearly still have a lot to learn when it comes to cryptography. For this reason, I'm not going to recommend that you all watch/listen to the episode — not unless you're prepared to go in deep. This is also supposed to be a blog for city builders (at least most of the time).

But I did want to share one takeaway that I found interesting.

In the episode, Vitalik describes Ethereum as the world's ledger. This maybe won't mean very much if you're not familiar with crypto, but the goal is a universal, permissionless, and censorship-resistant place for recording and securing basically everything: property title records, financial assets, AI-generated cat videos, and so on. Put another way, Ethereum wants to become a foundational layer of trust for the world.

Then, later in the episode, they somehow get onto the topic of dictators. There was a general acknowledgment that dictatorships do have their benefits, but that they also have obvious downfalls. Ideally, we would have a best-of-both-worlds scenario. We want the efficiencies of dictatorships, with all of the benefits of capitalist democracies.

I spent the past week listening to this Bankless podcast with Vitalik Buterin (the Canadian programmer and co-founder of Ethereum). It took me a week because I was listening to it off and on while I was in the car, headed to and from One Delisle and other meetings. But it's a fascinating episode. I think Vitalik is easily one of the most important minds of our generation.

But let me be honest and say that I wasn't able to follow everything in the podcast. I clearly still have a lot to learn when it comes to cryptography. For this reason, I'm not going to recommend that you all watch/listen to the episode — not unless you're prepared to go in deep. This is also supposed to be a blog for city builders (at least most of the time).

But I did want to share one takeaway that I found interesting.

In the episode, Vitalik describes Ethereum as the world's ledger. This maybe won't mean very much if you're not familiar with crypto, but the goal is a universal, permissionless, and censorship-resistant place for recording and securing basically everything: property title records, financial assets, AI-generated cat videos, and so on. Put another way, Ethereum wants to become a foundational layer of trust for the world.

Then, later in the episode, they somehow get onto the topic of dictators. There was a general acknowledgment that dictatorships do have their benefits, but that they also have obvious downfalls. Ideally, we would have a best-of-both-worlds scenario. We want the efficiencies of dictatorships, with all of the benefits of capitalist democracies.