Ethereum’s Decade: The Evolution of Vitalik’s Thought
On July 30, 2015, the Ethereum mainnet was launched.
Bitcoin emerged like a myth, growing spontaneously, depersonalized, and unalterable; Ethereum, on the other hand, is like an unfinished script, with its author never leaving the stage.
Vitalik Buterin, the young and famous technological idealist, has spent ten years infusing his personal philosophy, values, and struggles into code.
From the initial vision of a “world computer,” to governance reflections during the DAO crisis, from the Merge to profound transformations within the foundation… every evolution of Ethereum has etched traces of Vitalik’s thoughts.
The past decade of Ethereum also represents a history of the evolution of Vitalik’s ideas.
The Genius’s Utopia
In 2008, an unprecedented storm was brought on by a financial crisis.
Amidst bank failures and collapsing trust, Bitcoin emerged, sounding the horn of rebellion against the old world.
This emerging technology not only attracted geeks and cryptography enthusiasts but also changed the life trajectory of a young man—Vitalik Buterin.
While most people were encountering love at a young age, 17-year-old Vitalik encountered Bitcoin.
In 2011, he learned about Bitcoin from his father—a computer scientist—and after abandoning World of Warcraft, Bitcoin became Vitalik’s new hobby.
He began searching Bitcoin forums online until he found someone willing to pay him in Bitcoin for his articles; at that time, he earned 5 bitcoins for each article he published.
Vitalik’s articles quickly caught the attention of Romanian Bitcoin enthusiast Mihai Alisie. The two began to correspond and co-founded Bitcoin Magazine at the end of 2011.
In 2013, Vitalik traveled the world using the bitcoins he earned from his articles, visiting local Bitcoin enthusiasts in places like Israel, London, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Upon returning to Toronto, he became convinced that everyone’s understanding of blockchain 2.0 was completely wrong.
They were all trying to build complex applications on Bitcoin, but Bitcoin’s scripting capabilities were too limited.
Vitalik realized that if he wrote a Bitcoin version with a Turing-complete programming language, that network could offer all digital services, replicate social networks on the blockchain, reorganize stock markets, and even create fully digital companies, free from any government control.
In November of that year, 19-year-old Vitalik turned his idea into a white paper and named it Ethereum.
This white paper quickly swept across the crypto community, and for the first time, people realized that blockchain could be more than just currency; it could be a global decentralized platform.
Co-founders like Joseph Lubin and Gavin Wood joined in, with Lubin even calling him the “genius alien who brought the gift of decentralization.”
During that time, Vitalik was an extremely pure idealist. In interviews, he openly stated that he held a dualistic worldview, believing that most social ills stemmed from centralization. “I see everything involving government regulation or corporate control as pure evil.”
However, there is always a gap between idealism and reality.
The first divergence erupted within the team. Some co-founders wanted Ethereum to become a profitable business entity, while Vitalik preferred to maintain a non-profit, open community model. He even proposed to lower his and other founders’ allocations in Ethereum to avoid future power concentration.
By June 2014, the conflict peaked.
Vitalik demanded Charles Hoskinson and Amir Chetrit leave the team and established the Ethereum Foundation (EF) that year to establish a non-profit governance direction. In the same year, Gavin Wood also left due to disagreements with Vitalik over development priorities and non-profit direction, later founding Polkadot in 2020.
In an interview with TIME, Vitalik admitted that the vision for Ethereum’s transformation was at risk of being overwhelmed by greed:
“If we don’t make our voices heard, what can be built will only be those things that can make immediate profits, which are often not what the world truly needs.”
On July 30, 2015, dozens of young developers witnessed the automatic launch of the Ethereum mainnet in a small office in Berlin. There were no lavish celebrations, no large-scale media coverage, just a group of idealists quietly watching the blocks running on the screen.
The vision of a “world computer” moved from the white paper to reality.
However, behind the glory, young Vitalik was not prepared to face a more complex and harsh reality.
The Cracks in Ideals
In the first few years after Ethereum’s birth, Vitalik resembled a pure technological utopian. He firmly believed that the ultimate significance of blockchain lies in decentralization, emphasizing that anyone could freely build applications on Ethereum without the need for approval from a central authority.
At Devcon 1 in 2015, Vitalik repeatedly emphasized Ethereum’s open and trustless characteristics, envisioning an ideal world dominated by code rather than power.
But decentralization does not mean that everything naturally trends positively. Vitalik opposed centralization but inevitably became the ultimate arbiter of community opinions. This subtle power paradox was thoroughly magnified in the following DAO crisis.
In 2016, The DAO operated on Ethereum as the world’s first decentralized investment fund, raising over 12 million Ether worth $150 million. However, in June, a hacker exploited a vulnerability in the smart contract to launch an attack, stealing approximately 3.6 million ETH.
At that time, Vitalik was only 22 years old, just getting used to being called “V God.” After the crisis erupted, he communicated with the community almost incessantly, formulating plans and attempting remedies.
The urgent need to protect investor assets created a significant conflict with the decentralized technological creed. Ultimately, Vitalik chose a pragmatic compromise: advocating for a hard fork to restore the stolen funds and allowing the entire community to vote on it.
This decision successfully stabilized the market, but it also split Ethereum into today’s ETH and ETC.
In this crisis, Vitalik lost not only sleep but also his confidence in the “perfect execution” of smart contracts and the originally “perfect” image of leadership. Because of this event, the 100% technology-trusting “saint” disappeared, and a more pragmatic Vitalik emerged.
After the DAO crisis, Vitalik acknowledged in his blog post “Thinking About Smart Contract Security” the gap between ideals and reality. He proposed the need for stricter security audits and formal verification, and began discussing governance issues in public speeches, emphasizing that “community collaboration,” rather than technical absolutism, is the key to Ethereum’s success.
The crisis brought reflection, but the market quickly entered a speculative frenzy, leading to a heavy burden on the network.
In 2017, ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) became a phenomenon in financing, with projects like EOS, Tezos, and Bancor easily raising hundreds of millions of dollars on Ethereum.
By the end of that year, the NFT game CryptoKitties caused severe congestion on Ethereum due to a surge in users, with gas fees exceeding 800 Gwei at one point. Vitalik realized that if scalability issues were not resolved, Ethereum would struggle to achieve its vision of inclusivity.
In interviews, he did not hide his disappointment at the industry’s speculation:
“Many projects seem decentralized, but in reality, they are just repackaged. We must prove that the reason for the existence of blockchain is genuinely superior to traditional technologies (such as Excel spreadsheets).”
The craze quickly subsided, and in 2018, the entire crypto market crashed, with ETH dropping from $1400 to $83, leading to the demise of numerous ICO projects.
During this time, Vitalik continually pondered how to steer blockchain back to meaningful directions.
In 2018, he co-authored “Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society” with Harvard scholar Zoë Hitzig and Microsoft researcher Glen Weyl, proposing a quadratic voting mechanism aimed at supporting truly valuable public goods through public funding models rather than being dominated by short-term speculation.
In response to issues like network congestion due to insufficient scalability, Vitalik and community developers proposed EIP-1559, introducing a dynamic gas fee mechanism to transition Ethereum from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS), thereby reducing energy consumption and increasing transaction throughput.
The DAO crisis, speculative bubble, and price crash led Vitalik through a profound ideological shift. He transitioned from being a “technical saint” pursuing the extremes of decentralization to a builder who must consider safety, governance, and social value.
Ethereum remains his utopia, but it is no longer a purely technological paradise; it is a rugged path of reality requiring compromise, balance, and a broader vision.
In this process, Vitalik gradually found his own pragmatic philosophy.
The Battlefield Beyond Code
If the Vitalik of 2015–2019 experienced a transformation from pure technical idealism to pragmatism, then from 2020 to 2022, he underwent another key ideological shift: he began to confront the complexities of the real world, moving from pure technical ideals to multidimensional thinking that balances social governance, public responsibility, and real politics. Particularly with the Russia-Ukraine war, he began to use his influence to directly face political issues.
In August 2020, he proposed in his blog post “Trust Models” that blockchain can never fully achieve “trustlessness.”…