Inside The Cryptocurrency Revolution

[Music] so we're in a helicopter herd and Iceland over some spirits lava flows of the way at the Genesis by [Music] Marco Strang has made millions in cryptocurrency he started mining Bitcoin in his dorm room nearly a decade later the 28 year old college dropout turned a single weezing computer into a lucrative crypto mining Empire what you're seeing here is the Enigma facility which is the largest aetherium mining facility in the world and it was exciting time it was years ago when we came here and built this and now we're expanding and expanding further and further because the demand is growing and everyone is ramping up the capacity if you have the money you can always buy cryptocurrency last year Bitcoin peaked at almost twenty thousand dollars or you can earn it by running a cryptocurrency mine a network of computers that serve as the backbone of the crypto economy what are these machines doing so those computers are miners they are mining for the currencies and they're validating the transactions on the blockchain and they get a reward for them so if I pay somebody for something yeah in a cryptocurrency it's being validated potentially by one of these computers yeah that's true and when somebody makes that transaction you validated here in Iceland and you make money yes how much does one of these cost to create if I'm gonna create one of these at home one of these units and how many are in here in this one warehouse here mining operations like Marcos were made possible by pseudonymous programmer Satoshi Nakamoto who in 2009 created Bitcoin a decentralized digital currency run by no one entity and beyond the control of any one government but Nakamoto whose true identity remains a well guarded secret face an obvious problem if no physical currency exists who tracks the ownership of a digital coin to solve this he created the blockchain software that records and stores information like who owns a Bitcoin on a decentralized ledger shared across millions of computers and can't be changed and it's nearly impossible to hack the big thing about fighting it's not one single central entity that validates all the transaction the - all over the world are validating them so this server farm on this kind of moonscape of Iceland this might replace a central bank it's not only replacing actually it's making a central entity obsolete it's a scam it's a bubble it's going to burst everyone's gonna lose all their money so for some cryptocurrencies it's most likely true but I see real value in for example Bitcoin or Assyria me the underlying technology is phenomenal I have had people tell me this that this is the most revolutionary technology that we've seen since the wide scale adoption of the internet very comparable to the beginning of the internet at the beginning it was just a protocol very abstract but now I mean we're nearly doing everything in the Internet - the early days of the internet it sounds confusing but listen up it introduces so many opportunities so many unique business models people say blockchain hood and companies as we know them for regulators it is certainly a concern you have things like the SEC you have fence then you have the IRS but while the business world scrambles to exploitive and governments rush to regulate it countries like Russia see a very different opportunity my sense of crypto currencies largely driven to evade US sanctions and to undermine sovereign currencies you both of them our challenge to the - the United States we need to search for unconventional solutions these are the people we'll build our new future and live there one of those unconventional solutions is the etherium blockchain created by a man named Vitalik boo Turan [Music] raised in Canada two Russian parents Vitalik is the blockchain movements biggest celebrity if bludgeons are and a vast transformative as you know the proponents are saying they are then that would imply that eventually we'll see hundreds of millions of people using it in some way or another Vitalik created the etherium blockchain when he was just 21 years old and it's cryptocurrency the ether is second only to Bitcoin it's market cap increased by over ten thousand percent in 2017 but Alec is on a global campaign to raise awareness of his creation and its potential applications for business finance and government [Music] [Music] where are we going now we are going to Kazan which I understand is the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan in Russia like I've met government people from Canada as US UK Russia China Taiwan Singapore Thailand it's usually the central being someone want to have a chat and like why not but you're 23 years old and you're saying sentences like usually the central banks want to talk with me that's not I was very rare I would probably say I'm older than you and nobody wants to talk to me am i riding with you guys to be is that no we can't I think you're writing third this guy so we're behind a very nice Mercedes that we're not allowed to be in because it's a VIP car metallic who's treated like something of a rockstar here the Kremlin rolled out the red carpet for vitalik hoping their prodigal son would return home it would be over media travel you prefer right now we are going to the unified presentation center of the Republic of Tatarstan this is a place where we make wow effect so the government of Kazan is pulling out all the stops for photography we are and what appears to be our three of a never-ending tour of the city and what this has to do with blockchain is anyone's guess the Russian government's hope is that the talent technology can be as transformative for their own finances as it has been for his so I heard about Bitcoin for the first time in maybe February 2011 eventually I found a guy who was willing to pay me five bitcoins per article for writing articles for his Bitcoin blog and what was Bitcoin worth of the time each Bitcoin was zero point eight dollars 0.8 or even 5 per article and now that would be five thousand dollars an article right more or less okay no you know being a high school guy was not much money I thought 1.5 dollars an hour was a fairly reasonable wage so I yeah that was a good deal to you yeah fight for 1.5 explain to me why this technology is so transformational that people think it'll change the world because they represents kind of epochal changes in the options that we have for interacting with each other with a Bitcoin it's you don't need banks to send money anymore it's just something that happens to rock with peer-to-peer and etherium extends that to making digitally enforceable agreements that changes whole industries doesn't it and it hasn't yet but we'll see [Music] what is it about Vitalik why are you so interested in in blockchain because the Sun is considered to be the innovative Republic you want to be the sort of Silicon Valley of Russia exactly that's what we are trying to do in protecting Vitalik it seems like a guy that could help you do that right he is considered to be like an IT hero let's say for young people is that something that the Kremlin and Moscow is happy about yes it is I think so yeah the Kremlin arranged for Vitaly to meet one of Putin's powerful surrogates [Music] [Music] [Music] Americans capability I mean career advancement in expectation of his arrival the president arranged a hackathon for Vitalik in hopes that he might inspire a new generation of russian tech leaders so we're at a government-sponsored watching a hackathon where vitalik is a star guest and one of the judges this is a high-technology park that is intended to support IT industry in startups the goal is to make an ecosystem that will produce people that then will produce companies that then will produce technologists United States is approximately 2.5 million IT people working in the IT industry very active and Russia is just four hundred thousand a lot of your very smart Russians come to work in America - a lot a lot the leak how we call it the leak of the brains but this is something that Russia can lead in we all get in early watching we hope that's kind of the idea isn't it PT's in 2016 the Kremlin was on the verge of banning crypto currency transactions but that hostility is turned to opportunity Putin alongside rogue regimes in Iran and Venezuela realized that an anonymous virtually untraceable currency could provide an opportunity to evade crippling international sanctions when you rent the st. Petersburg Economic Forum you were pulled aside by President Putin what was that like what did he want to talk about mm-hmm I introduced to him you know what if you're iam wasn't what I was doing he and it seems like he was willing and thus supportive of like anything that we can do that are kind of unique the Russian economy better as US lawmakers are working out how to regulate crypto currencies Russia is making major moves to integrate it not only in an effort to avoid US sanctions but to undermine the power of the dollar in international trade sergey Gourcuff was trained by the FSB is a Putin confidant and currently serves as head of Russia's largest state investment bank which was hit with sanctions by the Obama administration in 2014 he recently signed a deal with vitalik in support of a new blockchain research institute tell me why the bank is so particularly interested in blockchain bonkie commish to keep an image store traded so on the bank of scaredy journalists i have any moisturizer on we've got a rush to it Ettore canisters any would propel our edge to Bangkok vanquished with gusto fictitious what would you tell a country who hasn't embraced blockchain technology pristine coat of Jane Austen God Oh little Michelle a dog dish named Olivia knows communicating on a delayed internal so estefania yep astronomer had us teachers they were talking abou demon solution on the Adhan she lost a sleep with penny [Music] you

Channel: VICE News

Views: 2,393,323

Rating: 4.8449578 out of 5

Keywords: cryptocurrency revolution, vitalik buterin vice, cryptocurrency, vice on hbo, blockchain, cryptocurrency news, vice news, michael moynihan vice, etherium inventor, michael moynihan vice special, etherium, cryptocurrency explained, bicoin bubble, iceland mining crypto, vice magazine, blockchain technology, digital recorder, data validation, bitcoin exchanges, vice videos, bitcoin mining, season 6 vice on HBO, bitcoin news, technology vice

Id: u-vrdPtZVXc

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 27 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/mirthfulPETROLEUM]

Was this filmed in 2017? Vitalik mentions he got 5 btc per article, where the reporter says thats roughly 5000$ per article more or less.

This was only in 2017, right?

[u/Wulkingdead]

That was a good watch, ty for sharing!

[u/offwwworld]

Can’t unsee Vitalik eating salad or playing with a pool stick.

[u/Papa_L0u]

Video not available? Anyone else?

[u/bitcoinbjorn]

NICE

[u/consciouscell]

Great watch! Crypto is the future - well, some of them.

HODL ON.

[u/viresennumeris]

Does anybody see which shirt Vitalik wears during parts of the video? OMISEGO!! Mainnet about to go live too!

[u/kruk1986]

what if vitalik buterin starts working for Russian gov.

[u/TomFyuri]

The Russia part doesn't make whole lot of sense... It's like today we are signing agreements to implement blockchain technology and tomorrow we disconnect from the global internet.

The currency even if it's digital or blockchain - is not very interesting if it's not global. What are they trying to accomplish, ethereum: russian edition with the only validator in Kremlin? Kinda funny.

Edit: also how to report the video? It mentions cryptocurrencies so I consider it dangerous and youtube should delete it and strike the author.