there’s this other side too, this more idealistic side, the side of crypto that is not just interested in, but truly obsessed with blockchains and protocols as a way of bringing governance and community into the digital era, as a way of unlocking new forms of cooperation. ........ there’s this other side of crypto that is really important to why the ecosystem has been so vibrant for so long through so many crashes. .......... They obsess over quadratic voting mechanisms, and coins tied to city governance, and decentralized autonomous organizations. .......... The central figure on the set of crypto is Vitalik Buterin. Buterin co-founded Ethereum. He wrote the white paper for the ideas behind it when he was just a teenager. And his insight — and it was a big one — was that, if you could program a currency like Bitcoin that cut out the need for a central authority, then you could use that same cryptographic technology to make almost a programming language that could then program any kind of digital agreement or contract and bind anybody who agreed to it in almost any digital way. .........
Bitcoin can be digital money, but Ethereum can be digital infrastructure. It can be the structure — a binding structure — of how people cooperate online. And Ethereum took off.
........... He’s Ethereum’s benevolent dictator, and he’s become something like the philosopher king of crypto. ......... He’s a digital nomad who lives out of a backpack and seems to think about really nothing but blockchains and what can be built on them.
I've asked over 300 open questions here on Twitter
Most of them are specifically beneficial for FOUNDERS and INVESTORS
Here are the top 26 questions with the best answers & advice from VCs, angels, founders, and operators:
Today I read 30 VC websites ๐ต๐ซ and, frankly, I don't know how founders navigate the VC landscape.
My advice to VCs: For the love of god, tell me where you invest and what support I should expect from you. If there is something different about how you operate, tell me that too.
— ๐๐ฒ๐๐ถ๐ป ๐ก๐ฎ๐๐ต✌๐ผ (@DEVINENASH) August 11, 2022
I just closed a deal yesterday that we lost last year!
The founder and I maintained a good relationship and I was his first call when he wanted to take on more capital.
Tech peeps that get money don’t do enough cool shit with it - social capital goes to investing in other devops startups and being an LP in their friends funds
Gotta start shifting social capital to investing in arts, culture, education, shit that’s more interesting
1/ After ~9 amazing years I’ve decided to wrap up my day job at @Ripple. Luckily, I’m not going far as I join the Board of Directors, where I’ll continue to provide input on company vision + strategy. I haven’t decided what’s next, but plan to continuing BUIDL in crypto :)
2/ In the past few days, I’ve had the chance to reflect on where we’ve come from and how much we’ve accomplished both as Ripple, and as an industry through some memorable moments and launches over the years.
3/ When I started… Largest crypto exchange: Mt Gox vs Binance Daily volume: $2m vs $70B Market cap: $1.6B vs $1.3T This is an early picture of the team in our first-ever office! pic.twitter.com/wVdBY7FySw
4/ 2013 – Within a few weeks of joining, Stripe tried to acquire us. Ultimately the deal fell apart shortly after this dinner at El Tepa Taqueria in SF, but who knows what crypto would look like today if Stripe had gotten into the industry in 2013. pic.twitter.com/8gjGjqu1Rv
5/ When he was at Bitcoin Magazine, Vitalik worked out of our office in Dec 2013. I remember him talking about early smart contract concepts. We made him an offer to be an intern at Ripple but couldn’t get the Visa sorted out, and he’d later speak at our first Swell conference. pic.twitter.com/aN4u3QBcsf
6/ 2013 - we piloted RipplePay, a functional credit card where you could use XRP to make everyday purchases, using the XRPL DEX to convert any currency in your XRPL wallet into USD. Unfortunately, no card network was willing to come within a 10-foot pole of crypto at the time. pic.twitter.com/2sy5cKTK9i
7/ When RippleNet first launched crypto liquidity in the market was too limited to support crypto-enabled payments at scale, so we laid the foundation for RN w/ fiat first, while continuing to iterate on a product that would also use crypto liquidity when the timing was right.
8/ In 2018, the timing was finally right for the first production ODL transaction (FKA xRapid). This was a huge milestone launching the first production cross-border use case that leveraged crypto at scale, despite lots of external skepticism.
9/ Also in 2018 - @hodges hosted an amazing crypto dinner in April with @twobitidiot, @DaveBalter, @GaryGensler and others. Selkis was a lot nicer in-person & Gary Gensler was interested in learning about the intersection of crypto and finance (๐คwhat happened?). pic.twitter.com/2aGgkrrZ8u
10/ Back to Ripple…I’m incredibly proud of the RN team as RippleNet continues to hit new milestones. In 2021, we previewed new alpha products like Liquidity Hub and RippleNet hit 1 billion in monthly volume. We’ve gone from 3 to 25+ payout markets for XRP-powered payments today.
11/ Lastly, I want to thank @chrislarsensf and @bgarlinghouse who gave me invaluable opportunities and many, many lessons learned along the way at Ripple. I’m honored to join the Board and continue being a part of the company. (Photo: Brad’s first day at Ripple) pic.twitter.com/zmsWtpazbq
12/ And finally to @MonicaLongSF – we started at Ripple in the trenches together just two weeks apart! I can’t think of anyone better suited to take the torch to lead the RippleNet team. pic.twitter.com/YgOkfgO4o3
@ashgoblue You team up with me now, and I will topple Putin by Christmas. Russia's Democracy Movement will be tokenized. https://t.co/YaBK8rHUwV#russia#ukraine Please take a listen. This is my pitch.
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) June 9, 2022
Contradiction between my desire to see Ethereum become a more Bitcoin-like system emphasizing long-term stability and stability, including culturally, and my realization that getting there requires quite a lot of active coordinated short-term change.
Contradiction between my preference for reducing reliance on individuals and trying to build fixed systems that can stand the test of time and my appreciation of "live players" and their role in helping the world move forward.
Contradiction between my desire to see Ethereum become an L1 that can survive truly extreme circumstances and my realization that many key apps on Ethereum already rely on far more fragile security assumptions than anything we consider acceptable in Ethereum protocol design.
Contradiction between my love for things like decentralization and democracy, and my realization that in practice I agree with intellectual elites more than "the people" on many (though definitely far from all) specific policy issues.
Contradiction between my desire to see more countries adopting radical policy experiments (eg. crypto countries!) and my realization that the governments most likely to go all the way on such things are more likely to be centralized and not friendly to diversity internally.
Contradiction between my desire to see more diversity in interesting *cultures* and my realization that maintaining a culture that's distinct from the mainstream seems to often require *some* kind of insanity or artificial barrier or similar thing that I ideologically dislike.
Contradiction between my dislike of many modern financial blockchain "applications" ($3M monkeys etc), and my grudging appreciation for the fact that that stuff is a big part of what keeps the crypto economy running and pays for all my favorite cool DAO/governance experiments.
Contradiction between my desire for crypto to grow beyond finance and my realization that finance (incl payments+SoV) is still by far the most successful category of crypto apps, *especially* among third-world residents, human rights activists and vulnerable people generally.
Contradiction between my desire to maximally simplify the L1 and my desire to maximally simplify the whole ecosystem (as a simple L1 often "exports" its complexity to higher layers of the stack that users have to adopt anyway)
Contradiction between my desire to be a positive-sum mediator figure that can be everyone's friend and my desire to stand strongly with good against evil those times when true evil is what we face.
Questions that can be easily resolved in the spiritual domain can feel impossible to resolve when technology is your only tool. Hire me to work on corporate culture. https://t.co/pc27jtNc1m
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) May 17, 2022
The Man Behind Ethereum Is Worried About Crypto's Future. Vitalik Buterin, the most influential person in crypto ....... He doesn’t drink or particularly enjoy crowds. ...... the 28-year-old creator of Ethereum to celebrate. Nine years ago, Buterin dreamed up Ethereum as a way to leverage the blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin for all sorts of uses beyond currency ........ Ether, the platform’s native currency, has become the second biggest cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin, powering a trillion-dollar ecosystem that rivals Visa in terms of the money it moves. Ethereum has brought thousands of unbanked people around the world into financial systems, allowed capital to flow unencumbered across borders, and provided the infrastructure for entrepreneurs to build all sorts of new products, from payment systems to prediction markets, digital swap meets to medical-research hubs. ........ Ethereum has made a handful of white men unfathomably rich, pumped pollutants into the air, and emerged as a vehicle for tax evasion, money laundering, and mind-boggling scams. “Crypto itself has a lot of dystopian potential if implemented wrong,” the Russian-born Canadian explains the morning after the party in an 80-minute interview in his hotel room. .......... Buterin hopes Ethereum will become the launchpad for all sorts of sociopolitical experimentation: fairer voting systems, urban planning, universal basic income, public-works projects. Above all, he wants the platform to be a counterweight to authoritarian governments and to upend Silicon Valley’s stranglehold over our digital lives. But he acknowledges that his vision for the transformative power of Ethereum is at risk of being overtaken by greed. .......... has left Buterin reliant on the limited tools of soft power: writing blog posts, giving interviews, conducting research, speaking at conferences .......
“I’ve been yelling a lot, and sometimes that yelling does feel like howling into the wind”
......... The war is personal to Buterin, who has both Russian and Ukrainian ancestry. He was born outside Moscow in 1994 to two computer scientists ........ At 4, he inherited his parents’ old IBM computer and started playing around with Excel spreadsheets. At 7, he could recite more than a hundred digits of pi, and would shout out math equations to pass the time. By 12, he was coding inside Microsoft Office Suite. The precocious child’s isolation from his peers had been exacerbated by a move to Toronto in 2000, the same year Putin was first elected. His father characterizes Vitalik’s Canadian upbringing as “lucky and naive.” Vitalik himself uses the words “lonely and disconnected.” ........ Vitalik soon began writing articles exploring the new technology for the magazine Bitcoin Weekly, for which he earned 5 bitcoins a pop (back then, some $4; today, it would be worth about $200,000). ..... At 18, he co-founded Bitcoin Magazine and became its lead writer, earning a following both in Toronto and abroad. “A lot of people think of him as a typical techie engineer,” says Nathan Schneider, a media-studies professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who first interviewed Buterin in 2014. “But a core of his practice even more so is observation and writing—and that helped him see a cohesive vision that others weren’t seeing yet.” ........ The blockchain, he thought, could serve as an efficient method for securing all sorts of assets: web applications, organizations, financial derivatives, nonpredatory loan programs, even wills. Each of these could be operated by “smart contracts,” code that could be programmed to carry out transactions without the need for intermediaries. A decentralized version of the rideshare industry, for example, could be built to send money directly from passengers to drivers, without Uber swiping a cut of the proceeds. ....... In 2013, Buterin dropped out of college and wrote a 36-page white paper laying out his vision for Ethereum: a new open-source blockchain on which programmers could build any sort of application they wished. .......... Within months, a group of eight men who would become known as Ethereum’s founders were sharing a three-story Airbnb in Switzerland, writing code and wooing investors. ........ The ensuing conflicts left Buterin with culture shock. In the space of a few months, he had gone from a cloistered life of writing code and technical articles to a that of a decisionmaker grappling with bloated egos and power struggles. ........ Buterin still does not present stereotypical leadership qualities when you meet him. He sniffles and stutters through his sentences, walks stiffly, and struggles to hold eye contact. He puts almost no effort into his clothing ....... Buterin is wryly funny and almost wholly devoid of pretension or ego. He’s an unabashed geek whose eyes spark when he alights upon one of his favorite concepts, whether it be quadratic voting or the governance system futarchy. Just as Ethereum is designed to be an everything machine, Buterin is an everything thinker, fluent in disciplines ranging from sociological theory to advanced calculus to land-tax history. (He’s currently using Duolingo to learn his fifth and sixth languages.) He doesn’t talk down to people, and he eschews a security detail. ....... Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit and a major crypto investor, says being around Buterin gives him “a similar vibe to when I first got to know Sir Tim Berners-Lee,” the inventor of the World Wide Web. “He’s very thoughtful and unassuming,” Ohanian says, “and he’s giving the world some of the most powerful Legos it’s ever seen.” ............ There was the ICO boom of 2017, in which venture capitalists raised billions of dollars for blockchain projects. There was DeFi summer in 2020, in which new trading mechanisms and derivative structures sent money whizzing around the world at hyperspeed. And there was last year’s explosion of NFTs: tradeable digital goods, like profile pictures, art collections, and sports cards, that skyrocketed in value. ........ Proof of Humanity, which awards a universal basic income—currently about $40 per month—to anyone who signs up. ...... Inequities have crept into crypto in other ways, including a stark lack of gender and racial diversity. ........ frustrated users are decamping to newer blockchains like Solana and BNB Chain, driven by the prospect of lower transaction fees, alternative building tools, or different philosophical values. ........ On his blog and on Twitter, you’ll find treatises on housing; on voting systems; on the best way to distribute public goods; on city building and longevity research. ........ His blog is a model for how a leader can work through complex ideas with transparency and rigor, exposing the messy process of intellectual growth for all to see, and perhaps learn from. .......... He sees the technology as the most powerful equalizer to surveillance technology deployed by governments (like China’s) and powerful companies (like Meta) alike.
Disparities in economic success between men and women are far larger once marriage+children enter the picture. Synthetic wombs would remove the high burden of pregnancy, significantly reducing the inequality.https://t.co/Zpin8tTlR6
I didn't even know who Tom Brady is, had to ask people around me. My best guess was that he was the actor from Mission Impossible. pic.twitter.com/MLWVcbtPHc
