In a recent interview, while talking about the motivation behind Ethereum (ETH), the second most valuable cryptocurrency in the world, its creator Vitalik Buterin said that if you think of Bitcoin as a pocket calculator, then Ethereum is like a smartphone.

The Russian-Canadian programmer’s comments during a video interview with Business Insider that was released on Thursday (February 28th).

Vitalik started by explaining how he got into the crypto space:

“So, I first got into the crypto space back when it was just called the Bitcoin space, around 2011. I thought it was something really interesting. I started getting into the community more and more. I co-founded Bitcoin Magazine.”

Next, he explained that after doing some Bitcoin-related work for around two years, he eventually quit college/university to focus on Bitcoin full-time. A short time later, came the realization that there were more things you could do with blockchain technology than just using it to create a “single peer-to-peer currency.” So, he came up with the main idea behind Ethereum, “this idea of a blockchain with a built-in programming language.”

He then explained what was the biggest problem with Bitcoin that he was trying to solve with Ethereum:

“Just too limited functionality. Think of the difference between a pocket calculator and a smartphone, where a pocket calculator does one thing, and it does one thing well, but really people want to do these other things. And if you have a smartphone, then on the smartphone, you have a pocket calculator as an app, you have play music as an app, you have a web browser, and pretty much everything else. So, basically, taking that same idea of increasing the power of the system by making it more general-purpose, and applying it to blockchains.”

On February 19th, as reported by CryptoGlobe, Vitalik revealed some details about his financial standing, including which cryptocurrencies he holds and his major corporate shareholdings, and these showed that the vast majority of his crypto holdings are in Ether (ETH).

Ethereum Foundation’s Hudson Jameson made a post called “AMA about Ethereum Leadership and Accountability” on the “ethereum” subreddit. The purpose of this post was to encourage all those in a leadership position in the Ethereum community, especially the people who are “actively involved in protocol decision-making” to disclose which cryptoassets they hold and where their income comes in order for others to be able to see if there were any potential conflicts of interests.

 In this thread, Vitalik revealed the following information about his current financial standing:

  • “Non-ethereum-ecosystem tokens: BCH, BTC, DOGE, ZEC; total value < 10% the value of my ETH"
  • “Non-ETH ethereum ecosystem tokens: KNC, MKR, OMG, REP, total value <10% the value of my ETH"
  • “Significant corporate shareholdings: Clearmatics, Starkware”
  • “Revenue in the last 12 months other than ethereum foundation salary: a few advisor tokens (included in above)”

Vitalik also disclosed his non-financial interests: “friends in the ecosystems represented by the above projects, as well as some non-token ethereum ecosystem orgs (eg. L4, Plasma Group, EthGlobal, EDCON) and non-token non-ethereum orgs (mainly professional cryptography and economics circles).”

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