Vitalik Buterin on Ether, saving and his nickname of ‘V God’

The now 29-year-old Vitalik Buterin is, partly due to the anonymity of Satoshi Nakamoto, just about the most legendary person in the current world of crypto. The young man developed Ether in his teens and is considered a legend for all those who deal with crypto on a daily basis.

He is the youngest billionaire in the crypto world, considered a genius by investors and has been nicknamed ‘V God’ in China, a country where many young people often illegally convert their savings into Bitcoin and Ethereum.

The American channel CNBC met him this week in Prague and asked some pertinent questions about where crypto should go in 2024.

Argentina

According to Vitalik, crypto is currently most useful in emerging economies such as Argentina, El Salvador and Nigeria, and is more likely to be resisted in countries with already highly developed economies, such as the Netherlands and the United States for example.

Countries with volatile national currencies are especially accessible to Bitcoin and Ether at the moment.

“The stuff that we often find a bit basic and boring is exactly the stuff that brings lots of value to them right now, like making payments work, and savings,” Buterin said, referring to lower-income countries.

“Just being able to plug into the international economy — these are things that they don’t have, and these are things that provide huge value for people there. It’s hard to even be interested in really abstract stuff like decentralized social media, when you don’t really have those kinds of basics done.”

Argentina, where Bitcoin is now trading at a record price, is a good example of this.

″When I visited Argentina back at the end of 2021, lots of people use crypto, lots of people love crypto,” he said. “I literally got recognized on the streets of Buenos Aires more often than I got recognized in San Francisco.”

According to him, payments in Bitcoin and Ether should also become much easier for everyone in the future.

“We need it to actually be possible to do ethereum payments in a way where the transaction fee is less than five cents a transaction; in a way where the experience doesn’t suck and randomly fail 2.3% of the time; in such a way that you need a Ph.D. in ethereum sciences to actually figure out what’s going on,” he said.

Lastly, when asked about his own role in the crypto world, his nickname of ‘V God’ in China and who lies behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin, Vitalik did not provide an answer. He apparently finds it all very funny though.

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