Blockchain’s Problem Is Too Much Hype, Says Vitalik

The biggest problem that blockchain currently faces is the high ratio of hype being generated versus actual use cases, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum platform, stressed again.

“The amount of sustainable usage of blockchain is very low. Although it exists, there are a lot of people giving value to cryptocurrencies, yet the amount of useful stuff happening is still much lower than the USD 200 billion market cap makes it seem,” Buterin was quoted as saying by Forbes.

He has already previously stated the need for more concrete usage and expressed his concern about businesses not realizing where they need to apply blockchain.

Now, speaking at a small, private event hosted by the Blockchain at Berkeley student-run organization, Origin Buterin delved further into topics such as adoption, use cases, regulations and the state of Ethereum.

Another one of his concerns is privacy on the blockchain, or lack thereof: “Currently, there are no good ways to use blockchain while preserving privacy. There have been good efforts to solve this using Zcash [a cryptocurrency] for example, along with research on top of Ethereum. However, there is still a way to go in terms of preserving privacy on the blockchain,” he said.

Speaking about the current state of Ethereum, Vitalik says that he is satisfied with a number of things such as the progress of state and plasma channels. On the problem of scalability, he says the Foundation is on its way to reach higher levels of consensus, whereas he considers this solution much better than what he had imagined five years ago. “The Casper protocol is getting much closer to being finalized at this point. It’s just pending review on academic analysis,” he said.

And yes, apparently Google did try to hire him. “Some random HR person from Google emailed me, most likely because some machine learning algorithm analyzed my GitHub and saw that I had some high score in the international Olympiad. Apparently, I fit the blueprints as a great candidate to hire at an intern salary,” Vitalik laughed.