WATERLOO — A skinny 23-year-old who dropped out of the University of Waterloo is at the heart of what could be the next big thing online.

Vitalik Buterin, a Russian-born Canadian, basked in a standing ovation Saturday from computer coders and futurists who came to Waterloo to help change how the internet works.

In 2013, Buterin invented Ethereum, an open software platform to help people reach agreements by cutting out middle parties such as banks.

His new technology has seen setbacks and successes.

And some 400 computer coders came to Waterloo this past weekend to spend 36 hours creating possible software applications that use it. Buterin helped judge the best ideas.

The mostly-male crowd met Buterin with a fan-boy vibe when he participated in a panel discussion. Handlers gave him rock-star treatment, keeping him away from the media.

Buterin quit UW in 2013 after one year. He wore a T-shirt that said Hard Fork Café, an inside joke riffing on a computing term, and was introduced as someone "literally ahead of the technology" who beat out Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg for a global technology prize in 2014.

Ethereum aims to exploit what some predict is the next version of the internet, in which millions of computers work collectively to continuously update ledgers that everyone can inspect but no single user controls.

Futurists argue that decentralizing the internet in this way makes transactions tamper-proof, without a central point for hackers to target, free from censorship or interference. The technical term for this is a blockchain.

The Economist magazine calls it a machine for creating trust because it encourages people to interact directly, with no need for someone in the middle to facilitate.

If this happens on a big enough scale it could disrupt enterprises in the 'trust' business such as banks, lawyers and governments that make money from facilitating transactions. It could disrupt internet firms that make money guarding, buying and selling data.

Buterin didn't decentralize the internet. He has proposed a way to use a decentralized internet that includes an internet currency called ether, seen as a rival to bitcoin.

If all this talk of disruption seems wildly speculative, keep in mind that it's early days. "We're in the first minute of this revolution," said Ethereum proponent Joseph Lubin, a Canadian software entrepreneur who founded the New York-based firm ConsenSys.

Buterin sees more craziness than wisdom in the early development of his technology. "There are some good ideas, there are a lot of very bad ideas, and there's a lot of very, very bad ideas and quite a few scams as well," he told the audience.

Ethereum has caught the attention of Waterloo scholar Julie Maupin, who argues the decentralized internet will still have to be regulated.

One reason is to prevent its misuse by dastardly deeds. "There are bad people who want to do bad things. It's not all roses and cherries out there," said Maupin, an economist, lawyer and senior fellow with the Centre for International Governance Innovation, a Waterloo think tank.

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Another reason is to ensure that eliminating middle parties doesn't erase taxes that governments spend on valuable public works such as schools.

She wants software developers to work with governments on internet technology so that regulators aren't forced to play catch-up later.