A picture illustration shows a Facebook logo reflected in a person's eye, in Zenica

A Reuters photo illustration showing a Facebook logo reflected in a person's eye highlights the power of tech companies.

((c) Dado Ruvic /Reuters)

Vitalik Buterin began a recent blog post with a warning: "this post contains crazy ideas. Myself describing a crazy idea should NOT be construed as implying that I am certain that the idea is correct/viable..."

Crazy ideas are necessary to change the world, of course. Will Buterin's do just that? The Toronto native is only 20 years old and he's already a Thiel Fellow. His possible world-changing idea is a project called Ethereum, which presently has $12 million in funding.

Social-media expert Jamie Bartlett, writing for Great Britain's The Spectator, has just published a fascinating profile of Buterin's project. Here's how he described Ethereum after a recent visit to its London offices:

"An alternative way of organizing the internet is being built as we speak: an internet where no one is in control, where the government can't find you or shut you down, where big tech companies aren't able to learn everything about you. A decentralized net that is both private and impossible to censor."

Sound interesting? You're not the only one who thinks so. With Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA's online snooping and myriad big corporations collecting data on all of our online activities, many tech people love this and similar "darknet" ideas.

Ethereum started life as a cryptocurrency effort. (Buterin is a big proponent of the controversial bitcoin currency. He's co-founder of Bitcoin magazine.) But Buterin insists he's not trying to get filthy rich -- at least not through Ethereum. "Ethereum is an open-source project which is available to everyone," Bartlett writes, "and its employees will slink off when the project is complete. They're doing it because they want to transform the internet -- and, by extension, society."

What, exactly, is Ethereum? Its developers call it "deep infrastructure." It knits together spare hard-drive space of connected computers, creating a closed-off world protected by unique encryption. In this space, Ethereum users create "apps" that serve as currency and contracts. It's so open for those inside its walls that users would even be able to see how the products they buy are made.

"Borrowing the idea from the digital currency bitcoin," writes Bartlett, "Ethereum uses something called a 'block chain' to record information on a public database in a chronological way that prevents copying, tampering, fraud or deletion. It's a new anonymous, decentralized, uncensored internet, and a new way of controlling and storing information."

In that crazy-ideas blog post, Buterin says that "as society becomes more and more complex, cheating will in many ways become progressively easier and easier to do and harder to police or even understand." Ethereum seeks to flip this progression by creating an online world in which the "governance algorithms ... are actually completely public," which makes it more difficult for online bad guys to pull off scams and thefts.

Who knows how any of this will pan out? Ethereum is a pie-in-the-sky idea that could indeed change the internet as we know it -- or it could turn in on itself and become all that its creators despise. Such is the volatile nature of the internet.

Buterin and his team, however, feel that the project is absolutely necessary because the internet as it stands now has made governments and individual bad actors much more powerful and shadowy than they've ever been before.

"Democratic societies are stifling free expression" in the internet age, Ethereum team member Vinay Gupta says. "Democracies generally have constitutions to protect political rights that no law can ever cancel, and I see (block-chain and related) technologies as a way to guarantee the rights we already have."

-- Douglas Perry