Vitalik Buterin discusses Ethereum

Vitalik Buterin is the inventor and co-founder of Ethereum and needs little introduction. Buterin is currently working on various research projects for Ethereum, most prominently on scaling and proof of stake as well as other improvements to ethereum such as abstractions. Buterin will briefly talk at RIAT Research Institute for Arts & Technology about the roadmap for Ethereum for the next one to two years. This will be followed by a long Q&A session.

Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference. These apps run on a custom built blockchain, an enormously powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent the ownership of property. This enables developers to create markets, store registries of debts or promises, move funds in accordance with instructions given long in the past (like a will or a futures contract) and many other things that have not been invented yet, all without a middle man or counterparty risk.

RIAT Research Institute for Arts & Technology is an independent research institute in Vienna, Austria that investigates how technology and art relate and inform each other. It consists of four labs focussing on open hardware, experimental publishing, blockchains, epistemic cultures and artistic technology.