Ethereum: Leapfrogging City Hall Legal Technologies

Vitalik Buterin and the others on the Ethereum project have raised more than $15 million for their effort to expand the technology underlying Bitcoin to new uses. (Vitalik is a Thiel Fellow, a program I help run.) Wired’s coverage: 

A year ago, Vitalik Buterin was a teenaged college dropout dabbling in the bitcoin digital currency. Now, he’s the founder of a futuristic programming project that just got backed to the tune of $15 million.

The project is called Ethereum—an effort to transform the kind of technology used in bitcoin into something that can help you build, well, anything—and after a two-month Kickstarter-style crowdfunding campaign, it has raised 30,000 bitcoin, or close to $15 million at today’s bitcoin prices. According to Buterin, Ethereum could represent the future of the blockchain—the cryptographically backed distributed public ledger that drives bitcoin—and apparently, many others agree with him.

Ethereum will let engineers build applications that rely on the distributed consensus made possible by the blockchain. One new possible application fits in nicely as a stepping to stone to opt out/opt in governance. With the Ethereum platform, you could build a public ledger that verifies title and the exchange of property. Instead of going to town hall to authenticate a sale of land–or better, instead having no town hall at all as is the case in the developing world–a community could use the Ethereum platform as a system of recordation.  Smart phone penetration is deep in the developing world, and, as M-Pesa has shown in Kenya, people will leapfrog old tech and migrate to the new.