In general, signalling theory says that if you have a good way of proving something and a noisy way of proving something, and you choose the noisy way, that means chances are it's because you couldn't do the good way in the first place.

The thing that I often ask startups on top of Ethereum is, 'Can you please tell me why using the Ethereum blockchain is better than using Excel?' And if they can come up with a good answer, that's when you know you've got something really interesting.

When I came up with Ethereum, my first first thought was, 'Okay, this thing is too good to be true.' As it turned out, the core Ethereum idea was good - fundamentally, completely sound.

You could imagine something like a completely automated system for renting bikes that's just done completely over blockchain crypto-payments. And theoretically just sort of start it up, and it works completely autonomously.

The industrial revolution allowed us, for the first time, to start replacing human labour with machines.

In order to have a decentralised database, you need to have security. In order to have security, you need to - you need to have incentives.