What is Ethereum? Mumbai street interviews.
Answers What is Ethereum? · see how other cities answered →
One question on the streets of Mumbai, asked of person after person, and almost nobody has heard the word. What comes back instead is a small masterclass in how people handle a question they cannot answer.
Some try to place it by sound. Aetherium. Terrarium. One man reasons it out from first principles: “Errarium means slow process.” Another decides it must be geological, and hazards that “something that comes out of the ground could be called Ethereum.”
The best answer is from a student who recognises the shape of the thing immediately and files it correctly: “This is out of syllabus question.”
And the one that lands hardest is a cab driver who does not pretend for a second. “Friend, I am just a simple man from Mumbai.”
Published exactly as filmed, mishearings included. The temptation with a transcript like this is to tidy the word up everywhere it appears, which would delete the entire point: the gap between how completely settled this technology feels inside a conference hall and how completely absent it is from a street in one of the largest cities on earth.
Worth watching directly after the University of Lagos version of the same question, where the answers are very different and the gap is just as wide.