Translation: TIME Magazine's latest feature: The man behind Ethereum is worried about the future of cryptocurrency assets.

This article is summarized from TIME's feature report. In case of any ambiguity, please refer to the original text.

TIME's Description of Vitalik and Ethereum

• Vitalik Buterin is one of the most influential figures in the cryptocurrency industry.
• Nine years ago, Vitalik dreamed of Ethereum as a way to utilize blockchain, the underlying technology of Bitcoin, to achieve various purposes beyond currency.
• Ethereum has become an open-source, decentralized cornerstone of the new internet.
• Ethereum has allowed thousands of unbanked individuals worldwide to join the financial system, enabling funds to flow across borders unhindered, providing entrepreneurs with the infrastructure to build various new products.

Vitalik's View on Ethereum's Development: Greed Could Overshadow Revolution

• Despite the rapid rise in the value and trading volume of cryptocurrencies, Vitalik feels both proud and fearful of it.
• Ethereum has made many people unexpectedly wealthy but has also led to environmental pollution, tax evasion, money laundering, and fraud. Vitalik states that if cryptocurrencies are abused, many dystopian scenarios could emerge.
• Vitalik is concerned about the urgent investors, soaring transaction fees, and the flaunting of wealth in the crypto community.
• Vitalik mentions the danger of turning Ethereum into another form of gambling, where people merely buy it as they would yachts and Lamborghinis.
• Vitalik hopes Ethereum can serve as a platform to initiate various social and political experiments: fairer voting systems, urban planning, universal basic income, public works projects, and checks on authoritarian governments, while overturning Silicon Valley's constraints on our digital lives.
• Vitalik acknowledges the risk of the vision of Ethereum's transformative power being replaced by greed.

Vitalik states that if we do nothing, the only thing that will be built is the intention to make a quick profit.

• Vitalik can only express his opinions through soft power in the decentralized community by writing articles, giving interviews, conducting research, and speaking to steer Ethereum away from becoming a speculative financial tool.

Vitalik's Stance on Being Blunt: Less Neutrality, Risk Offending Some

• Vitalik states that his significant decision for 2022 is to reduce neutrality, preferring to potentially offend some rather than see Ethereum become a meaningless product.
• Vitalik offers donations and criticizes Putin.

He believes that the true meaning of cryptocurrency is not to play games with monkey pictures worth hundreds of dollars but to create something meaningful in the real world.

• Vitalik has both Russian and Ukrainian heritage, born in the outskirts of Moscow in 1994, a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At that time, due to hyperinflation, his grandparents lost their lifelong savings.
• Vitalik showed high intelligence from a young age, being able to use Excel spreadsheets at 4, recite over a hundred digits of pi at 7, and code in the Microsoft Office Suite at 12, until he moved to Canada the year Putin was first elected.

Vitalik's Involvement in Cryptography, Co-founding Ethereum, and Evolution

• In 2011, Vitalik became familiar with Bitcoin through his father.
• In 2012, at 18, he co-founded Bitcoin Magazine.
• In 2013, he dropped out of school and wrote a 36-page concept white paper on Ethereum.
• Vitalik had ideological disagreements with other co-founders, attempting to convince them to establish a for-profit entity instead of a decentralized organization. In 2014, co-founders Charles Hoskinson, now the founder of Cardano, and Amir Chetrit left Ethereum. That same year, the non-profit organization Ethereum Foundation was established.
• The article also mentions The DAO incident, ICOs, DeFi Summer, and the NFT craze.
• Vitalik did not anticipate the rise of NFTs.

Vitalik believes that financial derivatives and some speculative products have caused high and congested transaction fees on Ethereum, burying some genuinely interesting things.

• Vitalik recognizes gender and racial inequalities in the crypto space.
• Vitalik views the process of DAO using tokens for majority voting as another form of plutocracy, where anyone with money can make any favorable decision. This is what he sees as a dystopian phenomenon.
• Vitalik sees users moving to other cheaper and faster underlying chains and understands it. He also accepts this situation due to Ethereum's current user overload.
• Facing criticism that Web 3 is moving towards centralization, Vitalik believes in the imminent arrival of a properly verified decentralized blockchain world and sees no reason for the technology as it is today.
• Vitalik realizes that without implementing sharding soon, people will move towards centralized solutions.
• The article revisits Vitalik's idea of new non-transferable NFTs.

Vitalik believes the worst-case scenario for cryptocurrencies in the future is if blockchain technology ends up concentrated in the hands of authoritarian governments, which could use the technology to suppress dissent. This is one of the reasons Buterin insists on keeping cryptocurrencies decentralized. He sees blockchain technology as a tool to balance governments and corporations.