Quotes from Vitalik Buterin

I personally like hard forks. Particularly, I like the fact that they give users a measure of control, requiring them to opt in to protocol changes. Sure, they can be a little more chaotic if they're controversial, but that's the price of freedom.

There is definitely a lot of banks that are interested in private blockchains. In some cases, they are happy with public blockchains as well. The opposition to just doing things on a public blockchain is definitely smaller than some of the strongest detractors think.

In order to have a decentralised database, you need to have security. In order to have security, you need to - you need to have incentives.

Some bitcoin users see the hard fork as in some ways violating their most fundamental values. I personally think these fundamental values, pushed to such extremes, are silly.

I think people don't realise that running a piece of code that verifies some conditions for a financial transaction, that by itself is a lot less work than verifying a cryptographic signature, and so even if the virtual machine is inefficient, the cryptographic signature is still going to dominate.