From a video game to the real world and back to a game

In the farm’s two vast buildings, tens of thousands of mining machines whir away, producing a huge amount of heat, so the buildings are open to the cold Icelandic air at either side. Fans in the ceiling allow hot air to escape, but spin so fast that no rain or snow can enter during the winter. Reading about Bitcoin mining is fascinating. The system has absorbed the principles of open source and public scrutiny and proved to be quite reliable. It is well thought through and provides a case for the future similar systems. But it is complex and requires thoroughly prepared mind.

One of the source of such minds is gaming community. The whole generation has grown up playing on-line since the very tender age, and now some of this generation are applying themselves to the challenges of the real world.

Vitalik Buterin was born in 1994 only, but has progressed in playing World of Warcraft enough to start looking for a new challenge, stumbled across Bitcoin, became an expert in the field and in 2011 (age 17) founded Bitcoin Magazine as the main contributing author and industry expert.

While working with Bitcoin, he noticed that its success attracted other applications, for which the original system was not designed. The extensions started to pile up, making the code more complex and prone to more vulnerabilities.

Vitalik was among the few who were not deterred by the complexity. He saw through it and realized that a more generalized platform for “any” decentralized application can be built.

In the late 2013 he has written a white paper that described such a platform called Ethereum, and today it is successfully applied in the variety of areas.

From www.ethereum.com: “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.”

Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? The test of this statement is happening as I am writing this.

From the news: “The DAO investment platform was attacked on 17 June when more than 3.6 million ethers (about $60 mln at that moment) were withdrawn from its accounts in one day. The attacker used a loophole in the system’s split function to create a child DAO and drain the cryptocurrency from the main platform.”

Fortunately, Ethereum was up to its claim, and on July 8, Coinfox reported: “By decentralised voting holders of 87% of ethers have shown unanimous support to a hard fork as an optimum way to return the funds stolen on 17 July by an anonymous malefactor. If Ethereum programmers succeed this time, the platform will turn a catastrophe into a triumph and gain the reputation of the world’s safest blockchain that would not allow an easy multi-million stealth.”

I heard Vitalik talking on youtube (here is one interview and here is another more technical talk). He projects the sense of an ultimate geekishnes, sincerity, idealism and unimposing brilliance. There are many fans that keep Vitalik in a very high esteem and rightfully so, in my opinion. The appeal of Ethereum for me and his followers is the chance for breaking our existing dependency on politics ruled by money and the tyranny of the majority, manipulated by the same money again.

Ethereum gives me the hope that I will live up to the time when a decision making system based on the pure rationality will replace governments as we know them.

These kids, by playing their game in the real life, can – that is my bet! – build a fair world, organized and governed by unbreakable rules, like in the fairy tales my grandma read to me from a nice book with the colorful pictures.