Buterin presents Ethereum at the North American Bitcoin Conference and a founding team coalesces

JAN 26 2014 · 12:00

Video: Vitalik Buterin reveals Ethereum at Bitcoin Miami 2014 Date: 2014-01-26 · Type: conference · Tags: ethereum, miami, founding, vitalik-buterin, conference, NABC-2014 By the end of the talk it was clear Ethereum was the most ambitious proposal in the room. The North American Bitcoin Conference ran January 25–26 2014 at the Miami Beach Convention Center, and Buterin's slot on the second day — roughly twenty-five minutes — was one among several pitches for programmable-money overlays. Mastercoin, Counterparty, and BitShares were all represented. Buterin's presentation was distinctive not in its rhetoric (he is not a natural showman) but in the scale of its ambition: where the others were proposing extensions to Bitcoin's rails, Ethereum was proposing new rails entirely. Charles Hoskinson and Anthony Di Iorio were in the room. Amir Chetrit was there. Joseph Lubin joined the nascent team a few weeks later. The talk functioned as a kind of dispersed founding event — no single moment of signing, but a gravitational center around which people found themselves orbiting by February. The team's first working base was Hoskinson's apartment in Denver, then a rented house in Zug the press would later call 'Spaceship House.' The Miami gathering was also where the fundamental structural question surfaced: would Ethereum be a for-profit company or a non-profit foundation? That question, deferred in Miami, came to a head in Zug on June 7 2014. The Miami presentation exists on YouTube, and watching it now is instructive. The slides are modest, the argument is clear, and Buterin is visibly twenty years old. The boldest thing about it wasn't the technical proposal — it was the social claim embedded in it: that a small group of developers could write a new general-purpose layer of the internet in less than a year. Facts • Conference: North American Bitcoin Conference (NABC), Miami Beach Convention Center, January 25–26 2014 • Buterin's slot: approximately 25 minutes, second day • Immediate post-talk affiliates: Hoskinson, Di Iorio, Chetrit; Lubin joined weeks later • Competing presentations: Mastercoin, Counterparty, BitShares • Team's first working base: Denver (Hoskinson's apartment), then Spaceship House, Zug Primary Documents • Vitalik Buterin NABC 2014 presentation (YouTube) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9dpjN3Mwps