There is a new podcast from “Vitalik Buterin, Creator of Ethereum about Understanding Ethereum, ETH vs. BTC, ETH2, Scaling Plans and Timelines, NFTs, Future Considerations, Life Extension, and More.”

Some of the noteworthy points in the interview are about Vitalik Buterin calling Ethereum a general purpose blockchain. He simplified his explanation stating, it is a decentralized network of different computers, which are together maintaining a ledger with database of transactions.

He further stated, different participants have particular ways of plugging into the database. The system knows that there are different transactions happening on the network doing very particular things, but no one will be able to tamper with the system in a way that’s outside of the rules.

He also stated that Ethereum expands on the Bitcoin approach.  Rather than having rules, which are suited for one application, the rules are made more general purpose.  People/developers will be able to build their own applications and rules for all the applications that they build and it can be executed and implemented on the Ethereum Platform.

The transcript of the podcast states:  “Bitcoin is like a spreadsheet where everyone only controls their own five squares of the spreadsheet, but Ethereum is a spreadsheet with macros. So everyone controls their own accounts, which is their own little piece of this universe, but then these pieces of the universe can have code and they can interact with each other, according to pre-programmed rules.”

A lot of things have been happening on Ethereum, developers are able to build decentralized domain name systems like various decentralized financial contraptions, and prediction markets, non-fungible tokens, and all the different schemes which people have been coming up with.

The core difference between building an application on Ethereum versus building on some traditional centralized platform is that once the app is built on Ethereum, the application does not need to depend on any other single person for its continued existence.  The application cannot be irregularly tampered with.

In summary, if Bitcoin is a shared ledger, then Ethereum is a shared computer for the entire world to run its most important applications.

Also, now DeFi, which is decentralized finance is a gigantic new category where entire companies and protocols get built in a decentralized way which permit one to do a lot of things that would require Wall Street along with bankers, judges, lawyers and accountants to handle. All of these are now getting done through smart contracts which are on the Ethereum blockchain. Thus, the smart contracts are at the core of the Ethereum blockchain.

Vitalik Buterin reportedly in another interview stated, “We wanted digital nations, but we got digital nationalism.”