[icelancer]

And to think it was rooted in the fact that he got mad that he was banned from World of Warcraft, leading him to distrust centralized authority, and the Bitcoin team blew off his smart contracts ideas, so he made Ethereum.

In a parallel universe, Buterin is doing something way worse for humanity with his genius and his resolve, so I'll take the Buterin we have today.

[pavlov]

Ethereum is still like a tech demo though.

Right now, Ethereum's promised "global supercomputer" is more like a 1960s IBM mainframe that you can access through wildly expensive dial-up links. What kind of world-changing networked software would you have built on that?

It doesn't seem to actually work for any applications other than escrow (ICOs) – and even that has a strong pyramidic sniff to it, because it's used to collect investments into Ethereum-based protocols that can't really result in functional applications on Ethereum unless it's radically redesigned.

Maybe they'll pull it off and Ethereum will be useful a few years from now. I'm not making any bets.

[icelancer]

Cryptocurrency represents billions of dollars of value exchanged every single day with the bits being the physical representation of money.

Ten years ago that kind of adoption would have been considered impossible.

Anything beyond that is moving the goalposts. I'm happy to be along for the ride rather than commenting about the "this is not the likely implementation of this technology" / "it's used for scams" / "it doesn't scale."

I am aware of all that and I agree with most of it. But the financial adoption of this technology is itself incredibly amazing, and something I think people overlook so they can make a technically-correct point about the tech in its infancy. Which is not to say you are doing it, but it's pretty close, especially since I didn't advocate for Ethereum as genius (it's pretty interesting, if you ask me; and smart contracts do a great job of exposing how stupid people are and how terrible of developers we are).

[pavlov]

I agree the financial adoption is fun to watch (from the sidelines, eating popcorn), and I think there will be interesting applications for smart contracts eventually.

However I'm not convinced that Ethereum's "jack of all trades" approach has long-term potential – it looks a lot like an initial vague research prototype that needs to be pared down to specific verticals before you have a product. (Exposing the stupidity of everyone who tries to use it for anything may not be the best way to build a long-term community?)

Personally I like to imagine Ethereum as a 1969 mainframe occupying a giant office floor, and then ask the question: ARPANET was just around the corner in 1969, so what would that change look like this time? In other words, what's the "TCP/IP" for Ethereum's "mainframe on dial-up"?

[knodi123]

> Cryptocurrency represents billions of dollars of value exchanged every single day

And a comparatively microscopic proportion of those billions are used to purchase goods or services.

[AlexCoventry]

Got a cite for the origin story? That's cool.

[icelancer]

From the man himself. (I seem to have gotten the banning thing wrong, but same point overall)

https://about.me/vitalik_buterin

"I was born in 1994 in Russia and moved to Canada in 2000, where I went to school. I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit."

And a brief mention on Wikipedia on the other point:

"Ethereum was first described in Buterin's white paper, in late 2013. Buterin argued that bitcoin needed a scripting language for application development. But when he failed to gain agreement, he proposed development of a new platform with a more general scripting language."

[CryptoPunk]

>>https://about.me/vitalik_buterin

This is satire.

[kanzure]

> the Bitcoin team blew off his smart contracts ideas

Probably because he didn't realize bitcoin already had Bitcoin script. It's mostly ethereum people who disbelieve in the existence of bitcoin scripting... but go look at the source code, it's right there.

[dreit1]

This is a gross misinterpretation of what actually happened. Read up on the OP_RETURN saga. Bitcoin Core completely shitting on Counterparty is why Vitalik decided not to build on top of a system that showed that the core developers could and would pull out the rug from under him

OP_RETURN is the greatest turning point in cryptocurrency history