Like other serious crypto-anarchist visionaries, the 21-year-old Russian Canadian entrepreneur Vitalik Buterin sees the blockchain—the public ledger underlying bitcoin—as a way to liberate us all from inefficiency, cut out the middleman, and make big government and business bow at the free market's feet. What makes his vision different is its scope. Where bitcoin aims to disrupt banks, Buterin's Toronto-based company, Ethereum, aims to become what he calls "the foundational platform for everything."
