Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by idiotsecant 1290 days ago
It's easy to paint conspiracy theories and it's hard to actually do the work. Vitalik is not in any way attached to the EEA - he's just some guy doing work because he thinks it will lead to good things. I think relative to most of the cryptosphere, or most of tech even the guy is practically a saint. Remember these are actual people behind the screens when you spew comments like these.
1 comments

It's easy to gag opponents with "conspiracy theories" when you don't cut through the actual message. Academician Andrey Sakharov also did his work thinking it will lead to good things. Later in his life he had the gut to admit he was wrong. A researcher's good intentions and the actual use of his product when it falls into the hands of those who sponsored the work are orthogonal.
It was mainly "sponsored" by the ICO, i.e. crowd funded. I see your criticism as generally valid but the facts are upside down in that comment. Ethereum was neither founded nor supported by evil corporations, on the contrary for years the established mainstream lobbied against cryptocurrencies until one by one they flipped when they realized what smart contracts could be used for. Take someone like Warren Buffett, he's still doing it even now.

Ethereum and the crypto space are at a crossroads for sure. You have chains like Monero on the one side, many in the Ethereum community walking a tight rope trying to balance grassroots free software development with mass adoption, and on the opposite end of the spectrum you get stuff like Solana, the venture capital bro chain.