Blockchain is all the rage! And, Dr. Christian Reitwiessner is in the midst of the storm. As one of the creators of Solidity, we were thrilled that he was willing to take the time to answer questions from the LinuxCareer crew. He provided great depth on his thoughts on not only Solidity, but Ethereum overall. Hopefully, you will find his insight as compelling as we did.





Dr. Christian Reitwiessner



Christian Reitwiessner is working for the Ethereum Foundation, where he created one of the most popular high level programming languages for Ethereum called Solidity.

Interview Questions

Interview Answers

General Ethereum Questions

Question 1: How is Ethereum different than other notable blockchain technologies?

Christian Reitwiessner: Ethereum offers smart contracts and thus is useful far beyond simple value transfers. It can be used to add trustless incentive layers to decentralised networks. As an example, Ethereum can be used to remove the trust in the large number of certificate authorities by handling name allocation, transfer and certificate registry. Another example is adding an incentive layer to a decentralized data transfer system like bittorrent and turn it into a data storage system that enables you to pay for others to store your data in a decentralized and fault-tolerant way.



In comparison, other smart contract blockchains are not practical yet or do not have such high network effects. Question 2: What is the role of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance? How does it contribute to the development of the Ethereum platform?

Christian Reitwiessner: I have not seen much contributions, although I do not care much about private blockchains, it might be that they do something there.

Question 3: How would you describe Ethereum's business model?

Christian Reitwiessner: (I'm interpreting it as "the Ethereum Foundation's business model") That's the beauty of it: There is not and there does not need to be a business model. The Ethereum Foundation is fully funded for several years and can focus purely on advancing blockchain technology with 100% open source software and open research initiatives. There is no product that needs to be sold. Of course there is a product and there are customers to be satisfied, but we do not have to convince them to give us money for something.

Question 4: Can you express your views regarding the licensing of the Ethereum platform? What main freedoms and risks do developers face when building applications on Ethereum?

Christian Reitwiessner: Everything the Ethereum Foundation does is open source licensed. As always, there might be some problems with incompatibility of licenses, but in general developers enjoy a high degree of freedom. As far as people developing applications on top of Ethereum are concerned: I'm not a licensing expert, but since you do not distribute any Ethereum software with your product, licensing issues do not apply. Of course everything should be open source because it would defeat the main purpose of a blockchain otherwise.

Question 5: In your opinion, what are the most significant barriers to Ethereum adoption?

Christian Reitwiessner: I guess it still needs some time to wrap your head around the concept of a blockchain and the development tooling could be improved.

Question 6: Are you aware of any corporate adopters of Ethereum? If so, has it branched outside of the financial sector?

Christian Reitwiessner: Yes, there have been many corporates who are building applications on top of Ethereum. Most of them chose a way to be funded through the community of their potential future users. Currently, the big players are still based on transactions (state channels, auctions, insurance, etc) but we are also seeing prediction markets, games and communication platform emerging.



As far as traditional companies are concerned, I think they are shying away because they do not see how their current business model which is mostly based on advertisement or selling of individual products can be transferred to the blockchain world, where users pay for development and not for products.

Question 7: There are questions about how well it scales. What is being done to circumvent this obstacle?

Christian Reitwiessner: For Ethereum, scaling is one of the top priorities for 2018. Even without a change in the core blockchain, state channels are rather easy to implement with Solidity (as opposed to e.g. on bitcoin). Finally, the switch to webassembly (which Solidity is also joining) might provide considerable speedups.

Solidity