Ethereum’s Ten Years: The Evolution of Vitalik’s Thoughts
On July 30, 2015, the Ethereum mainnet was launched. Bitcoin grew spontaneously like a myth, depersonalized and unwritten; Ethereum, on the other hand, resembles an unfinished script, with its author always present on stage. Vitalik Buterin, this young and renowned technological idealist, has spent a decade 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 changes within the foundation… every evolution of Ethereum has left the imprint of Vitalik’s thoughts. The ten years of Ethereum also represents a chronicle of Vitalik’s intellectual evolution.
The Genius’s Utopia
In 2008, an unprecedented storm was brought about by a financial crisis. Amidst bank failures and a collapse of trust, Bitcoin emerged, sounding the trumpet of rebellion against the old world. This new technology not only attracted geeks and cryptography enthusiasts but also altered the life trajectory of a young man—Vitalik Buterin. At the age of 17, when most people were encountering love, Vitalik encountered Bitcoin. In 2011, he learned about Bitcoin from his father, a computer scientist, and after abandoning World of Warcraft, Bitcoin became his new passion. He began searching Bitcoin forums online until he found someone willing to pay him in Bitcoin for his articles, earning 5 Bitcoins for each piece he wrote.
Vitalik’s articles quickly drew the attention of Romanian Bitcoin enthusiast Mihai Alisie. The two began corresponding and co-founded Bitcoin Magazine at the end of 2011. In 2013, Vitalik traveled around the world with the Bitcoins he earned from writing, visiting Bitcoin enthusiasts in 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 the scripting capabilities of Bitcoin were too limited. Vitalik realized that if he could create a Bitcoin version with a Turing-complete programming language, the network could provide all digital services, replicating social networks, reorganizing stock markets, and even establishing fully digital companies unregulated by any governmental entity. In November of that year, 19-year-old Vitalik transformed this idea into a white paper and named it Ethereum. This white paper quickly swept through the crypto community, and people realized for the first time that blockchain could be more than just currency; it could be a global decentralized platform.
Co-founders such as Joseph Lubin and Gavin Wood joined in, with Lubin even calling him a “genius alien bringing the gift of decentralization.” During that period, Vitalik was an incredibly pure idealist, openly stating in interviews that he held a dualistic worldview, blaming most societal ills on centralization. “I see everything involving government regulation or corporate control as pure evil.” However, there has always been a chasm between idealism and reality. Disputes first broke out within the team. Some co-founders wanted Ethereum to become a profitable business entity, while Vitalik preferred to adhere to a non-profit, open community model. He even proposed reducing his and other founders’ allocations in Ethereum to avoid future power concentration.
In June 2014, the conflict reached its peak. Vitalik demanded that Charles Hoskinson and Amir Chetrit leave the team and established the Ethereum Foundation (EF) that year to solidify a non-profit governance direction. Gavin Wood also left due to disagreements with Vitalik over development priorities and the non-profit direction, later founding Polkadot in 2020. In an interview with TIME, Vitalik admitted the risk of Ethereum’s transformative vision being overwhelmed by greed: “If we don’t speak out, what gets built will only be things that can turn a profit immediately, which often are 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 luxurious celebrations or massive media coverage, just a group of idealists quietly watching the blocks running on the screen. The vision of a “world computer” transitioned from a white paper to reality. However, behind the halo, young Vitalik was unprepared to face the more complex and cruel realities of the world.
The Crack of Idealism
In the initial years following Ethereum’s birth, Vitalik resembled a purely technological utopian. He firmly believed that the ultimate significance of blockchain lay in decentralization, emphasizing that anyone could freely build applications on Ethereum without needing approval from a central authority. At Devcon 1 in 2015, Vitalik repeatedly stressed the open and trustless characteristics of Ethereum, depicting an ideal world dominated by code rather than power. However, decentralization does not imply that everything naturally trends toward goodness. Vitalik opposed centralization but inevitably became the ultimate arbiter of community opinion. This subtle power paradox was thoroughly magnified in the subsequent DAO crisis.
In 2016, The DAO operated on Ethereum as the world’s first decentralized investment fund, raising over 12 million Ethereum, valued at $150 million. However, in June, a hacker exploited a vulnerability in the smart contract to launch an attack, stealing approximately 3.6 million ETH. That year, Vitalik was only 22 years old and had just gotten used to being called “V God.” After the crisis broke out, he communicated with the community almost non-stop, formulating plans and attempting remedies. The urgent need to protect investors’ assets conflicted greatly with the decentralized technical creed. Ultimately, Vitalik chose a compromise and pragmatic route: he advocated for restoring the stolen funds through a hard fork and let the entire community vote on the decision. This choice successfully stabilized the market but 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 that originally “perfect” leader image. It was due to this event that the 100% trust-in-technology “saint” disappeared, and a more pragmatic Vitalik emerged. After the DAO crisis, Vitalik acknowledged the gap between ideals and reality in his blog post “Thinking About Smart Contract Security.” 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 technological absolutism was key to Ethereum’s success. The crisis brought reflection, but the market quickly entered a speculative frenzy, leading to a heavy network burden. In 2017, ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) became a phenomenal fundraising method, 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 briefly surpassing 800 Gwei. Vitalik realized that if scalability issues were not addressed, Ethereum would struggle to achieve its inclusive vision.
In interviews, he did not hide his disappointment with the industry’s speculation: “Many projects appear decentralized, but in reality, they are just repackaged. We must prove that the reason for blockchain’s existence truly surpasses that of traditional technologies (like Excel spreadsheets).” The hype soon faded, and in 2018, the entire crypto market collapsed, with ETH dropping from $1,400 to $83, and many ICO projects vanished. During this time, Vitalik continually pondered how to steer blockchain back toward a meaningful direction. 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, hoping to support truly valuable public goods through public funding models rather than being dominated by short-term speculation. To address issues like network congestion caused by insufficient scalability, Vitalik and community developers proposed EIP-1559, introducing a dynamic gas fee mechanism and promoting Ethereum’s transition from proof of work (PoW) to proof of stake (PoS) to reduce energy consumption and increase transaction throughput. The DAO crisis, speculative bubble, and price collapse led Vitalik through a profound ideological shift. He transformed from a “technical saint” pursuing the extremes of decentralization to a builder who must consider security, governance, and social value. Ethereum remains his utopia, but it is no longer a purely technological paradise; it is a rugged path of reality that requires compromise, trade-offs, and broader perspectives. Throughout this process, Vitalik gradually found his own pragmatic philosophy.
The Battlefield Beyond Code
If the period from 2015 to 2019 marked Vitalik’s shift from pure technical idealism to pragmatism, then 2020 to 2022 brought another crucial ideological turning point: he began to confront the complexities of the real world, transitioning from simple technical ideals to multidimensional thinking that encompasses social governance, public responsibility, and real politics. Especially amid the Russia-Ukraine war, he started to leverage his influence to face political issues. In August 2020, in his blog post “Trust Models,” he proposed that blockchains could never fully achieve “trustlessness.”