Vitalik Buterin makes impromptu visit to Argentina, talks about how blockchain can solve runaway inflation

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  • Vitalik decided to take a trip to Argentina and see the effects of hyperinflation for himself and later sat down for a discussion on blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
  • In the discussion, he talked about why blockchain is the answer to Argentina’s crisis, the value of decentralization beyond money, Ethereum’s future and more.

Cryptocurrencies have been touted to be the long-awaited solution to inflation, and recently, Vitalik Buterin took a trip to one of the world’s hardest inflation-hit countries to drive this message home. The Ethereum founder took an impromptu trip to Argentina where he met with cryptocurrency enthusiasts and talked about the future of Ethereum, the importance of decentralization, the massive growth in cryptocurrency adoption in Argentina and more.

Vitalik’s trip to Buenos Aires seemed to come out of the blue. However, once he got to the South American country, he was accorded a king’s welcome by government officials, dignitaries and the cryptocurrency community in general. He held meetings with the government officials and leading tech personalities in Argentina, with many of them posting photos of their interactions online.

It was then revealed that Vitalik was willing to have a sit-down with cryptocurrency enthusiasts, but only if they could organize the event fast enough. This was done quickly and once 800 tickets for the event were made available, they were grabbed in under five minutes by Argentinians who were eager to hear from one of the cryptocurrency industry’s foremost leaders.

In his sit-down, Vitalik dived into many facets of the cryptocurrency industry. He appreciated the huge enthusiasm Argentinians have for cryptocurrencies in general, and Ethereum in particular. According to him, the country has one of the largest Ethereum communities he has seen in his travels around the world. Innovators in the country have also had a hand in some successful cryptocurrency applications including decentralized arbitration service Kleros and cryptocurrency market cap data aggregator Nomics.

On Ethereum, the Canadian programmer admitted that it currently faces a number of bottlenecks, but he pointed out there’s a whole community of global developers working to solve them. One of these is high fees and energy consumption, both of which he believes will be solved by the upcoming upgrade to the Proof of Stake consensus mechanism.

Read More: Vitalik Buterin presents a “plausible roadmap” to Ethereum scalability before moving to ETH 2.0

It’s 2022, we can make Ethereum decentralized and usable. Let’s do it.

Vitalik also believes that switching to PoS will also lead to more decentralization for Ethereum, and he believes this is quite critical to its future growth. However, contrary to popular opinion, decentralization doesn’t mean there will be no leaders. Rather, it means those leaders are held accountable for their decisions and can’t make a unilateral decision without the participation of the whole community.