Editors Note: This article comes fromChain News ChainNewsEditors Note: This article comes from
Chain News ChainNews
, by Nick Paumgarten, published in The New Yorker, October 2018, compiled by Perry Wang, reprinted with permission.
Not long ago, I was in Montreal for a cryptocurrency conference. The hotel I live in is located on the top floor of a building in the city center with a sky garden with a koi pond.
One morning while drinking coffee and bagels in the Sky Garden, I saw two ducks enjoying a feed ball someone had left by the pond. Every few seconds, the duck dips its beak into the water to drink, spitting out some undigested feed. A few koi wandered about, surfacing to swallow the debris. The longer I watched, the more I felt that the ducks were feeding the koi on purpose.is it possible? I asked the restaurant waiter, a ruddy Quebec native. Impossible, but thats what I tell the kids, he said with a smile.
A lot of things came to my mind that night:The deep mystery surrounding cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology behind them for more than a year is actually very similar to this.Bitcoin has become a hot topic around the world, spreading its prophecies of social change and reform. But more importantly:
The myth of getting rich overnight.
Based on the monetary system between people and getting rid of the dependence on the government and banks, these things can realize the prophecy of promoting social changes and reforms. This is the buzzword of the day. And follow the great god, you may get rich overnight.
There are some things I can understand, and there are still many things that I dont understand.A blockchain futurist told me that if you are not a computer expert or a mathematician, the deeper you dig into distributed computing, consensus algorithms, hash functions, zero-knowledge proofs, Byzantine fault tolerance theory, etc., the more you deviate from the familiar The declining world in the domain of the world, the more opportunities you will have to increase the upper limit of your intelligence.
These theories of blockchain make your brain a blank blackboard.You keep erasing the writing on it, and new associations keep popping up. Like in Montreal, I hold a bagel in my hand and think about ducks and koi.Assuming the feed ball is a cryptocurrency, lets call it Koicoin. Are ducks similar to miners? Most altcoins (everything other than Bitcoin) actually end up being classified as aircoins: there is a community of fanatics and rants, and Koicoin might be one of them. The restaurant waiter who left the feed balls for the ducks is the Satoshi Nakamoto in our Koicoin system.
Koicoins protocol is very strong, and the incentives seem to be quite generous, but from the perspective of immutability, decentralization, and privacy, it is not very up to standard.
Koicoin is an air coin.
A few hours later, I was having lunch in a conference room at another hotel with a table full of “wizards” of the cryptocurrency world, some of the most respected developers in the field. Four of them are researchers in the Ethereum ecosystem.Ethereum itself is not a cryptocurrency, but an open-source blockchain platform. When operating on Ethereum, the token ETH of Ethereum must be used. Similar to Bitcoin, you can also buy or sell ETH, whose total market capitalization is currently second only to Bitcoin in the cryptocurrency space.These Ethereum developers are elite programmers roaming the world, dedicating themselves to building a blockchain network that replaces the existing global financial and computing infrastructure: one that handles currency or user identity in an entirely new way, which they callWeb 3.0」Decentralized Internet 3.0 Version
,or Vlad Zamfir Among these people, one named
of ethereum developers are at the kitchen table demonstrating math formulas on a reMarkable tablet. The Romanian-born 28-year-old grew up in Ottawa and chose to drop out of the University of Guelph. As he spoke and scribbled, the rest of the table leaned their heads closer, resembling the scene in Rembrandts famous painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolas Tour. He seriously said to the two or three people at the same table who obviously couldnt keep up with their thinking: Im sorry to let mathematics alienate you.
image descriptionCasper developer Vlad Zamfir
Vlad Zamfir is the lead developer of a team working on Casper, a technology designed to scale Ethereum more securely.Zamfir told a reporter two years ago that Ethereums current technology sucks.Vlad Zamfir is showing others some of the formulas hes come up with that can solve one of Ethereums thousands of problems. These formulas of his are specifically used to optimize the incentive structure of the proof-of-stake certification mechanism. We want to practice game theory here, says Vlad Zamfir. Others pointed out what they thought was wrong. That doesnt make sense, Zamfir said.
But math is king
. This pretty much sums up my confusion in the crypto world.
Sitting on the right of Vlad Zamfir at the time was Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, who was also a king of philosophy who was half pushed and half added to the yellow robe.
Vitalik Buterin, 24, only occasionally looked at the formula written by Vlad Zamfir, but most of the time he just stared aimlessly ahead, sometimes typing text messages and tweets on his mobile phone with one finger.He is a great learner, and it seems that he is already familiar with what Vlad Zamfir said, so his thoughts and attention are not on it. When the pattern becomes too complex, it might be good to have more time to simplify, Vitalik Buterin said to me later, which I understand as a very humble statement.
Vitalik Buterin is also working on another version of Casper.
So he and Vlad Zamfir have both a cooperative relationship and a competitive relationship. When they praised each others work in person or on social media, they were sincere. Their main conversations are still in long posts on social media. Of course, the content of their conversations is like a bible to us ordinary people.
The two first met at a conference in Toronto in 2014. Vitalik Buterin surprised Vlad Zamfir, whom he called a walking computer, and Vlad Zamfir soon joined Ethereum as a developer. These two friends mainly meet at various conferences and lectures at present. They just embraced warmly in the hotel lobby the day before, like summer campers gathering again next year, and then the two walked quickly into a quiet corner. The conversation on the topic of Proof of Stake Certification Incentive Architecture started.
Wherever and whenever Vitalik Buterin and Vlad Zamfir converse, people gather: eavesdropping, hoping for a sliver of insight. The two have become accustomed to it and are almost unaffected. There are no secrets here, just problems and solutions, and the thrill of solving one problem after another.
I first heard the word Ethereum in April 2017. At the time, a hedge fund manager told me at an event in Manhattan that he had made more money buying and selling Ethereum token ETH and other cryptocurrencies in the previous year than he had made from traditional hedge funds.
That sounds like a big deal, because his hedge fund made him a billionaire. He spoke words I had never heard before. Of course, he also mentioned Bitcoin, and of course Ive heard too much about Bitcoin, but like people my age, I dont understand it very much. I was like, oh my god, Ive reached the age where I dont have to follow the trend of the times and I can eat and die.
I have heard many new words that I have never heard before, and I have heard them countless times: trustless, sharding, Flippening and so on. Explaining the blockchain has also become an emerging landscape.
butAfter the dizzying rally of cryptocurrencies in 2017, this year has been a long night of downturn, like summer and winter, and cryptocurrency investment is starting to look like a thrilling adventure. Just like the shocking bubbles in the stock market and real estate market burst, leeks were coerced into the market and then harvested by the market.but
The boom and bust of cryptocurrencies is a reflection of the debate surrounding cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology: How much are they worth? Or as some have asked: are they real? Are cryptocurrencies the future, or just a fad? Is it a stepping stone to the future or a Ponzi scheme? Is it Amazon 2.0 or Tulip Mania? What are they good for?Blockchain technology is indeed clean, but it stillLack of killer app for general acceptance: What e-mail did to the Internet.
We need a $100 computer, an entry-level artifact like the iPod
A blockchain missionary told me.
And the giants from the Lost World have bombarded blockchain and cryptocurrency from time to time. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called cryptocurrencies a fraud; investment god Warren Buffett used the phrase rat poison squared. Skeptics and technophobes alike, out of envy, indifference, or wisdom, make such critical comments. True believers and bet-crazed investors mostly shrug off the criticism. They are convinced that a new order is about to dawn. They chase higher, but not lower.
In certain subgroups, ignoring the rise and fall of currency prices is both a fashionable attitude and an indispensable quality. Their philosophy is to build and sustain a whole new system for everything from payments and banking to healthcare and identity. They said that the new system is a replacement for the old system, or at least another option. The new system has no border barriers, is free from state control, and is free from exploitation by technology giants.
Its certainly a great thing to try to create a new system that is somewhat completely parallel to the existing world and does not intersect with each other, Vitalik Buterin said. It really interacts with the rest of society, and the goal is to absolutely improve The experience of the mainstream world, but we are taking another path.”
But such a task may take many years and go through several economic and investment cycles. The old facility is decaying, and the new facility is built beside it, just like the new bridge built next to the old bridge on the Hudson River, which gradually grows and grows next to the old bridge, and will officially replace it one day.
For Vitalik Buterin, the benefits are already evident. “The cryptocurrency world has managed to push some parts of the international economic system to be more open, and political influence has receded,” he said. I really think its a meaningful contribution to the world.
Vitalik Buterins appearance is very eye-catching, very thin, with ghostly features and clear blue eyes. When he is willing to look into your eyes occasionally, it will bring a depth and warmth that you did not expect. He spoke in a flat, robotic cadence. People often ridicule him as an alien, but they usually apologize to him after saying it, because he is very gentle and has a peaceful and tolerant demeanor, and you will feel embarrassed to say such unkind remarks to him.
When we talked on the first afternoon of the Montreal conference, life in the currency circle was an endless conference schedule, and the venue was always full. Vitalik Buterin put a few things in front of him: pens, sticky notes, and mobile phones. He has few social graces and no expressions of emotion. But when he finds a problem, or has a clear and affirmative opinion, he will always generously write words of encouragement on the sticky note: Yes, yes, yes, absolutely, Yes, thats right, or express doubts Hmm. He seems to be able to predict your problems before you figure out your own problems, but he forces himself to listen to your own statements. He has a dry sense of humor that is not easy to understand.He said: Of course I dont have the personality of a single-minded CEO that many Silicon Valley venture capitalists admire, for example, ambitious and win at all costs, for example, like Mark Zuckerberg.
His attire, as usual, was a gray crew-neck T-shirt, black slacks, strapless Adidas sneakers and teal socks. He often wears unicorn and rainbow T-shirts. He is willing to use the word Lambbo to refer to Lamborghini, the ultra-luxury sports car brand beloved by the rich people in the token circle, and he himself has no interest in showing off his wealth. Despite his amazing wealth, he is still very low-key.Although he sold about a quarter of his holdings before bitcoin and ether skyrocketed in price last year, his personal fortune is said to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and he recently donated several million dollars to a scientific research project to improve human longevity .
He has no assistants, no entourage. He had very few personal belongings and traveled lightly. Recently I lowered the pack from 60 to 40 liters, he said. 40 liters is more convenient. You can walk 15 kilometers with it on your back. He also said that the Adidas sneakers on his feet are his only pair of shoes. I actually still have a pair of shoes in a place I call home, and I call a lot of places home.
The so-called homes are the apartment of a friend, where he sometimes sleeps for a few nights on a rollaway bed, and are scattered across Toronto, San Francisco, Singapore, Shanghai and Taipei. He especially likes East Asia. He can speak popular Mandarin. Dmitry ButerinI tried for months trying to interview Vitakil Buterin. In January, I reached out to his father
, he gave me feedback that Vitalik Buterin was not interested in being interviewed. Hes throwing himself into research, his father said. “He is not happy that the Ethereum community puts so much burden on him. He wants the Ethereum community to be more resilient,”
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Vitalik Buterin with father Dmitry ButerinDmitry Buterin, 46, said he grew up in Grozny, Chechnya, Russia. He studied computer science in Moscow and founded a financial software company. He immigrated to Canada when his son was six years old and settled in Toronto. Vitalik Buterins mother, a financial analyst, chose to settle in Edmonton.
When Vitalik Buterin was three years old, he got an old computer and started playing with Excel software.
By the age of 10 or 11, he was developing computer games himself.Vitalik was a very bright kid, his father said. It was not easy, his mind was racing and it made him a bit difficult to communicate with. He didnt talk much until he was 9 or 10 years old. I was worried, but one day I finally understood what was going on. .I just give him love.Father also let Vitalik know Bitcoin for the first time.
It was 2011, and not many people knew about Bitcoin, but Vitalik Buterin was an avowed anarchist, a cynical young man who grew up in the Soviet and post-Soviet era.
For many people, especially in its early days, the initial exposure to Bitcoin was like a religious epiphany: Bitcoin is powerful, life-changing, and a completely different and perhaps more accessible way of sorting out human affairs The way. “Bitcoin itself looks like the ideal destination for money,” writes tech journalist Brian Patrick Eha in How Money Can Achieve Freedom.“Before I learned about Bitcoin, I was happily playing World of Warcraft,” Vitalik Buterin told me. He had some rudimentary ideas about the risks of centralized systems and authority, and the unfairness inherent in them. He once told a reporter: I see all government regulation or corporate control as utterly evil. I think the people in these institutions are a bit like the Simpsons villain, the millionaire Mr. Burns, who sat behind his desk and said, Great. How can I fix 1,000 people this time? Bitcoin scratched the itch. But for many, it was the elegance of the system that attracted him, As if created out of thin air by a mischievous outsider. It fits the world view, a dream of a fluid, borderless, decentralized financial system that sits above governments and banks whose inevitable slippage Corruption and self-serving at the very least becomes incentive-distorted.”
Vitalik Buterin says:
“If you look at the people who were involved in the Bitcoin community in the early days, their previous backgrounds. If you have a history, you will find that they are all from the open source community Linux, Mozilla and doing spam lists. These subversives, libertarians, Political stances run the gamut from the extreme left to the extreme right, and many are not affiliated with any institution, or have not attended a prestigious school. I found that the blockchain allows thousands of people like me to create a new one out of nothing. social structure.In the 1980s, cryptographers and computer scientists began to try to design a complete form of digital currency by which transactions and contracts could be executed without any third-party intervention or rent-seeking. In the end, a man or a woman or a group of people codenamed Satoshi Nakamoto launched Bitcoin in 2008, solving the so-called double-spending problem. If you have $10, you cant buy one thing for $10 and buy another thing for the same $10. This requires some mechanism to track your assets, who you pay them to and their asset balances. The answer is blockchain technology.
In order to explain blockchain technology, people have made various metaphors for its definition:Bingo, Google Docs, a big room full of see-through safes, and more.Broadly speaking,
The blockchain records all transaction records simultaneously and indiscriminately by every computer in its network, regardless of whether the blockchain is Ethereum, Bitcoin or Monero. Think, as some say, of a dusty leather-bound ledger in a Dickensian counting room, recording every transaction involved. And every accountant in London, every accountant in Calcutta, has the same ledger, and one person adds a transaction to the ledger, and everyone else has the same transaction in their ledgers at the same time. Once this transaction is confirmed, it will theoretically be permanently recorded on the ledger, which cannot be changed or erased.Traditionally, records are stored in one place: temples, churches, servants, or whatever else is in charge. If you dont trust this kind of authority, or have an aversion to Google, this approach can be disappointing.
With blockchain technology, these records are distributed and stored in everyone through a certain encryption algorithm, and do not belong to any one person.
You cant tamper with it, because everyone is watching, because when you try to tamper, the software rejects it. There is no undo button. Each block stores a set of transactions, with a track count of all previous transactions, represented by a cryptographic code called a hash. Each new block in the blockchain contains all the information contained in the previous block, or actually records a secure reference to all information through hashing, so that it can be traced all the way back to the first block, the so-called genesis. block.Other terms are sometimes included in the definition of blockchain, but those are not reliable, resulting in endless dissecting, emphasizing, and bickering.one of the words isDecentralization, for example, a saying that some blockchains are more decentralized than others. another word isUnchangeable, the idea is that theoretically past records cannot be modified. one more word
privacy
, this vision is to hope that digital currency has the untraceability of currency. Because Bitcoin initially acted as a transaction medium for many illegal activities such as underground dark web drugs, sex transactions, arms, etc., many people think that Bitcoin is private. But actually its not. Every transaction on the ledger is visible to everyone. Its anonymous, or pseudonymous, but there are many ways to break that anonymity.
People often try to explain blockchain problems to me. Chatting with the founders of blockchain networks is the beginning of your days nightmare, and they are also the losers at the cocktail party. He came and you fell into the trap. You have to know in your heart, dont ask questions like mining.Mining is a reward mechanism, that is, a reward for miners who help maintain and build the blockchain. To legally set up facilities and trade transactions in a blockchain network requires investments in machines, memory, power and time. Cryptocurrency blockchains require armies of computers running software to confirm or reject transactions, an automated aggregation. In this aggregation, all the computers in the network compete through irrational guesswork to be the first to give the correct answer to a very complex mathematical puzzle. The more computing power you have, the more guesses you can make, and the higher your chances of getting the right answer. The winner creates a new block and is rewarded, say, a bitcoin, a new bitcoin that has not entered circulation before. (Satoshi Nakamoto set a limited supply of 21 million bitcoins to ensure that no one can inflate existing bitcoins, like the Fed inflates the dollar. Other cryptocurrencies, including ETH, do not necessarily Limited supply.)
This system is called Proof of Work (PoW). The solution to the problem is to prove that the computer is working.
This strategy has serious, in some peoples eyes, fatal flaws.
First, it consumes a huge amount of electricity. It is claimed that the Bitcoin blockchain network will consume as much energy this year as the country of Austria and produce as much carbon dioxide as 1 million transatlantic flights. The power consumption of mining machines is astonishing. Mining farms are usually located in areas where electricity is cheap (often near hydropower stations with excess installed capacity), and the temperature is low (you dont need to consume more electricity to cool down the mining machine). These mines may be housed in open-air warehouses in Canadas near-Arctic regions, Russia and remote areas in China, where the machines roared in the cold weather before the permafrost thawed, mining cryptocurrency.Secondly, a small number of mining giants or mining pools, many of which are Chinese companies, have too much influence in some blockchain networks and affect network decisions. Bitmain, a Chinese company that owns the worlds largest mining pool, confirmed last month that it plans to go public in the near future.
Another verification mechanism, which is also the object of Zamfir and Vitakik Buterins busy work in Montreal, is called Proof of Stake (PoS). In its vision, holders of these tokens become validators, often receiving a small fee from each transaction.
Theoretically, the more tokens you hold, the greater your influence, so PoW fans believe that the PoS network will become the world of the rich.
In 2013, Vitalik Buterin went to San Jose, USA to attend a Bitcoin conference. He felt that he had met a confidant for the first time in his life, and felt that the blockchain was a movement worthy of his dedication. Mihai Alisie“Everyone I’ve been looking for is there,” Vitalik Buterin told me. Cryptographer Zooko Wilcox recalled that Vitalik Buterin said to him at the time, This is the first technology I love to give me the feedback I love.
Vitalik Buterin was blogging about Bitcoin at the time, and was paid five bitcoins per blog. Later he and his reader, a Romanian Bitcoin entrepreneur
Co-founded Bitcoin Magazine.Vitalik Buterin is good at explaining things, at least to people who are prepared to learn about them. But when he attended various Bitcoin conferences around the world, he began to consider the limitations of this technology. To expand the non-monetary applications of the Bitcoin platform, the network needs to be as comprehensive as a Swiss army knife. He modified the design of an all-purpose version, a blockchain platform with wider uses and more applications.Nick Szabo prefers to compare smart contracts to vending machines.
You generally dont need someone to vouch for the machine. He described: In the world of smart contracts, a borrower who fails to repay the car loan on time will find that his/her car cannot be started, and the terms of the contract are embedded in the code and integrated into the cars system.
image description
Father of Smart Contract Nick SzaboThe reliability of the code and the system of checking the reliability of the code will free humans from trying to figure out the psychology of others, and no longer need to pay others to implement factual problems that they cannot solve.In the traditional economy, we have to spend money hiring third parties, while spending time and resources ourselves, to build a little bit of trust. This is a legitimate protection fee scam. The most typical example is insurance. The existence of the entire industry is to tell you that the developer who sells your house is the invincible owner of the house.
Protecting property, real property and intellectual property, is big business. But in the eyes of blockchain believers, there is actually no need for this kind of business, and the code will eliminate annoying disagreements and costs.“Blockchain really enhances our ability to address these large social distancing issues,” Vitalik Buterin said. Trust machines bring more trust where there was a lack of trust before.
Another thing were all but ceding now is our identity, and thats potentially risky:Confirm who I am, and all data related to it.
We know that our identity information is currently usually kept by centralized organizations: tax authorities, vehicle management agencies, police, etc. It often leaks out without our knowledge or consent, through transactions, browsing habits, unencrypted communications, and more. In the age of Google, bits and pieces of information about ourselves are scattered across the Internet.
The innovation of the blockchain is the so-called self-sovereign identity, that is, you control your own identity and control information disclosure independently.
We can then see a vast expanse of space where old intermediaries have barely had a foothold. The most obvious beneficiaries of trust machines are the allegedly vast cohort of billions of people who are disenfranchised and so-called outside the reach of reliable financial institutions.These questions may be difficult for Americans to understand, because services such as Citibank, Visa credit cards and Western Union are at our fingertips in our daily lives to help us settle daily transactions and track money as it moves around the world. In such a powerful financial system, blockchain may be like a background service, changing the accounting system, which may seek some benefits for blockchain believers and people who are extremely good at calculating, but for mass consumers it often feels No specific difference.But if youre a Venezuelan citizen, or a Turkish journalist, or a refugee from Syria or Burma
, Through blockchain technology, they can finally control their money and identity, and allow money to circulate, which will bring them great help and may even save their lives.
Unless you forgot your private key.In November 2013, Vitalik Buterin wrote a white paper, proposing to create a new open source, distributed computing platform on which people can build various smart contracts and applications, and issue various tokens. He calls it Ethereum.」
“When I was thinking about the name of this blockchain, I went through a lot of Wikipedia entries under science fiction,” he said at the time. “I think the name Ethereum sounds great with the word ether in it
, ether refers to the imaginary invisible medium that runs through the universe, carrying light waves.He expected seasoned cryptographers to tear his proposal to shreds, but it turned out that everyone who read the white paper was captivated by its elegant design and ambition. Some of the early fanatics included several Toronto bitcoiners who met each other through informal meetups and Skype group chats, which one described as a regular phone conversation between a serious group of people.The founding gathering in the Ethereum creation story took place in January 2014 at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, USA.
These serious people decided to rent a house with a sea view, and after a week or so there, they polished a fuller idea of Ethereum. Buterin described it to me as
Airborne Computer.
Anthony Di Iorio invited another Bitcoin believer in Toronto, 49-year-old Joseph Lubin, who sniffed out the significance of the event, and brought in journalist Morgen Peck to witness the process.
The online publication Backchannel published the journalists article, along with her photographs of Vitalik Buterin waking up early to work on his laptop while everyone else was asleep. Morgen Peck said the pipe on the table next to Buterin was not his.
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Photos taken by Morgen Peck at the timeAt the age of 19, Vitalik Buterin caused a stir when he first publicly launched Ethereum in Miami. He chose to drop out of the University of Waterloo, where he was studying computer science, to devote himself full-time to the Ethereum project. We realized it was going to be a massive event, recalls Charles Hoskinson.These co-founders each perform their duties.Joseph Lubin, who had Wall Street experience, was chief operating officer at the time.
“It’s one of those stupid titles we give ourselves,” Lubin told me. In this kind of weird open source project, it doesnt make any sense at all.Joseph Lubin sees himself as the adult in the project, the guardian of the real world.
He later clashed with Gavin Wood. “Joseph Lubin wanted to be a mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi the Jedi, but unfortunately, he ended up being Darth Vader,” Wood said.
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Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of ConsenSys
After several months of work, these co-founders launched a special dictionary and a set of conceptual frameworks to define the professional vocabulary of Ethereum and prevent possible legal consequences.
When they thought about selling a new cryptocurrency to the public to finance the project, Joseph Lubin and Charles Hoskinson realized that in opportunity came risk. “Some people, including myself, point out that we may be raising tens of millions of dollars from bitcoin upstarts, we may want to talk to some lawyers, we must be aware that we may be characterized as selling illegal securities to Americans ,” said Joseph Lubin. This is a matter of great significance, with hidden legal risks.
“During this process, we strictly defined what Ethereum is and what ETH is,” said Joseph Lubin. We realized, I realized, that we have a chance to explain to the world what this is, and theres a good chance theyll take our ideas and create reality in this way. It seems to be working. We seem to have created Reality.
Their wording is extremely careful: ETH is defined as encryption fuel, and anyone who runs a program or stores data on Ethereum needs to pay ETH. Gavin Wood called Ethereum the computer at the center of the world at a conference in New York. Like the mainframe in the 1960s, all users anywhere in the world can access it.
The co-founders embraced ethereum as the world computer, arguing over the best form of the company. Should it be a for-profit entity funded by an ICO or VC backing, like Ripple, which was founded earlier, or a non-profit foundation with independent oversight? The eight co-founders formed different factions, each with different positions, some leaning towards profit and others leaning towards nonprofit. The nature of things changed very quickly, recalls Charles Hoskinson.
Gavin Wood said to me: There was an atmosphere at the time: Vitalik is a golden chicken that lays eggs, and objectively everyone treats him like this. It feels like an alien from Mars came to help us all. I dont like this The atmosphere is disgusting.
There was a lot of drama at the time, Joseph Lubin said. The situation has become extremely complicated. Simply put, developers, including Gavin Wood, are wary of the motives and philosophies of marketing figures, who believe that these programmers lack business acumen and lack the desire to make a lot of money.
Eventually the co-founders agreed to let Vitalik Buterin make up his own mind. Im undoubtedly the person everyone respects and trusts more than they trust each other, which is unfortunate and sad, Vitalik Buterin said. He also appeared to be the most harmless of the bunch, he said.“Vitalik is very simple and doesn’t understand the dangers of the world,” Dmitry Buterin told me. He has to learn a lot of lessons to understand the dangers of the human heart.
Six months after the Miami founding meeting, the entire founding team met in a house in Zug, Switzerland.
Zug, a former tax haven for hedge funds, is now known as Crypto Valley.
This is the first time that all the co-founders of Ethereum have gathered in one room at the same time. After a period of solitary deliberation, Vitalik Buterin told Charles Hoskinson and another co-founder: They were out. He later made it clear that Ethereum would become a non-profit foundation. It was a terrible time, and it was a terrible thing that Vitalik was forced to make such a choice, Gavin Wood said.
“That was one of the few nukes I dropped on the Ethereum governance process,” Vitalik Buterin told me. “I feel strongly that Ethereum has to remain open source to the world,” he continued, “if it is a for-profit entity at its core, it may become overly centralized.” The remaining co-founders set up a non-profit The for-profit Ethereum Foundation, which funds the development of the Ethereum network, is headquartered in Zug, Switzerland.The ethereum co-founders parted ways, driven by discordant tones and more enticing money-making opportunities. Were all blown by the wind, Charles Hoskinson told me. He later started a cryptocurrency company called IOHK, and a blockchain project called Cardano. Now I run my own company with 160 employees, he told me. Im sort of a billionaire. Right now, I still cant get over the less than six months of my life connected to Ethereum.。
What does a world rebuilt by smart contracts look like? Think of a scenario:There are no bankers, lawyers and accountants in the towering office buildings; the cryptocurrency utopia lands on a hurricane-ravaged Caribbean island; the mines where mining machines gather in the wastelandIn May, I attended the Ethereal Summit in a former industrial glass building on a hilltop in Queens, New York. The symbolism is palpable: a new order rises on the turf of the old, while food trucks, local craft beer and a Zen Zone meditation tent add another layer of flavor:
Blockchain is a way of life.
The two restrooms stand side by side, and they were used regardless of gender at first, but by the afternoon of the first day, without a centralized authoritative order, an order was spontaneously formed in which men go to the right and women go to the left.
On the main stage, a group of people dressed as luminous orbs and missionaries characterize the industry, but inside this old factory, you can find practical examples of blockchain.One was a presentation by Viant, a supply chain start-up that is developing blockchain technology to track fish as it makes its way to the table. The video played showed that a yellowfin tuna was caught in Fiji on April 10, and it became sashimi a month later. Its entire supply process was tracked by the blockchain, completely credible, and indisputable. Attendees had to squeeze their way through the crowd if they wanted to taste the free samples. The founder of Civil, who tried to use blockchain technology to rewrite the media industry, had a panel discussion on the spot. The media industry was already seriously injured under the double blow of the impact of the Internet and the obvious shrinkage of traditional advertising business. Also outside, in a small brick building, Cellarius is on display, and according to its founder, Igor Lilic, the project consists of: 1) a crowdsourced, co-created sci-fi story set in 2084, when artificial intelligence is prevalent; 2) A community of artists and collaborators; 3) A technology platform gradually built by developers;
Igor Lilic said: Its a hypothesis... The long-term goal is to find some new economic models of intellectual property. Is this a worthwhile goal?God knows, I still dont understand how it has anything to do with the distributed ledger or consensus algorithm of the blockchain?
The organizer of the conference is ConsenSys, founded by Joseph Lubin in Brooklyn, New York after leaving Ethereum in 2014.. ConsenSys is a new agency and incubator of new projects that are, or will be, run on the Ethereum blockchain. ConsenSys is the most famous developer and promoter of decentralized applications on Ethereum. There is nothing like tuna or science fiction. It mainly focuses on basic business forms such as real estate ownership, identity management, document authentication, commodity transactions, and legal agreements. Joseph Lubin calls this the embryonic state of a new decentralized economic infrastructure.
ConsenSys is based in a graffiti-filled industrial complex in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a rebellious expression that works in harmony with the anarchist claims of cryptocurrency. But the latter is a bit of a bluff,
Because ConsenSy continues to engage with traditional enterprises and governments, seeking to help them build private chains.A friend who worked with them said: ConsenSy is sitting on billions of dollars. Why? Why dont they go to Manhattan and set up an office on 28th Street like everyone else? They now employ more than 1,000 people and have offices all over the world. .Theyre so rich, said another member of the community. The strategy is,Throw all your money and see which cloud rains
. ’ But there aren’t many projects that are working right now. They can claim that dozens of projects they have invested in are in different stages of development;
But so far there is no popular DApp.
Joseph Lubin is said to be the largest holder of ETH tokens, with his ETH holdings estimated to be worth more than $1 billion.
I have been told by multiple people that Joseph Lubin created ConsenSys to increase the value of ETH. When I asked him that question, he scoffed. “What a stupid way to make money?” he said. “It’s like I’m going to build a company that’s built on an ecosystem that doesn’t exist, so I can increase the value of my tokens.” He continued: “ People who got into crypto early on were doing it for philosophical reasons, political reasons, or economic reasons that had nothing to do with personal wealth.”
ConsenSys issued a policy prohibiting its employees from publicly discussing token prices. I went to Bushwick to meet Joseph Lubin one night after ETH and other tokens took a big hit. When I asked about the market dive, he said, Who the fuck cares? Crypto billionaires dont seem to care.
Many people present at Ethereal were filled with a missionary enthusiasm. They wanted to build a technological utopia, not dependent on the money of Silicon Valleys venture capitalists, cult leaders such as Musk, and Jack Ma. “We want to change the world, and we really believe in that,” Aya Miyaguchi, director of the Ethereum Foundation, told me.
The first time I met Joseph Lubin was in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the summer of 2017. He was eating a taco with his chief marketing officer, Amanda Gutterman.
Amanda Gutterman said: We call him Bai Morpheus. Morpheus refers to the character played by Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix
Joseph Lubin portrayed an alternate reality and then encouraged people to claim great miracles. Like Buterin, he refuses to deify his founder in business, but the real world seems to insist on labeling him similar. In comic fan art, Buterin is often portrayed as Jesus driving a Lamborghini. If he is the Messiah of the blockchain, Joseph Lubin is his saint Paul. He is also tirelessly spreading the gospel of the blockchain and focusing on changing the world. He is a true believer in Ethereum, but he is also an advocate of so-called enterprise-level applications, which usually create practical business applications on private chains, which is expected to make traditional enterprises interested in reducing the original blockchain technology. Certain bloated links.
“Joseph Lubin has had a lot of criticism for trying to push ethereum into enterprise applications,” said Emin Gün Sirer, a professor of computer science at Cornell University who has worked on ethereum. Look at it dialectically. The part that the fringe counterculture promotes, and the part that pays the bills for all the developers. One appeals to cyberpunk teenagers, the other is clearly more attractive to adults in the office. A bald-headed Joseph Lubin with a calm Toronto accent. During a panel discussion at Ethereals last rant, stand-up comedian Ronny Chieng from The Daily Show rants about Joseph Lubins fashion sense for wearing sandwashed jeans and printed T-shirts, teasing him that when you When you turn your face and look in other directions, you will attract more investors”, but in fact his face does not seem to change, and teasing that he obviously does not use the Ethereum vocabulary that has just been created less than two years ago speech to explain anything.One of his roommates was Mike Novogratz, now the head of a venture capital fund, who in 2017 became a leading figure on Wall Street embracing the cryptocurrency bubble, and Richard Tavoso, who later became a professional wrestler, who went by the stage name Fudge. It records who owes whom when playing cards between roommates.
And that detailed ledger led his roommates to follow in the footsteps of Lubin and Novogratz 30 years later and join the blockchain boom.
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Legendary Wall Street investor Mike Novogratz
While working as an experimental artificial intelligence researcher out of college, Joseph Lubin once aspired to become a professional squash player, helping robots build neural and visual systems. He married early, had a son, and later divorced. I have worked in programming for several years and worked in Wall Street institutions including Goldman Sachs for several years. I learned about cryptography and how to write software with encryption systems, he said.
He later developed a set of software for trading foreign exchange and securities, and founded a fund company with quite impressive performance. However, he was hit by several financial market turmoil, coupled with the impact before and after the 2008 financial tsunami, and his early obsession with science fiction literature and cyberpunk culture, which gave him a quasi-apocalyptic view of the world. He believed 9/11 was an internal conspiracy. He considered buying land in Peru or Ecuador. “It was out of fear and anticipation that the financial system would collapse violently,” he says, but he eventually began planning a vertical farm in Brooklyn, New York City. He also befriended a Jamaican model and actress, and moved to Kingston, Jamaica, to help the latter develop a career as a singer. They bought a house, built a recording studio, recorded some songs, made some music videos. Then those things are a thing of the past, he said. “Things got complicated. Then the Ethereum thing happened.”
He dabbled in investing in Bitcoin in 2011, when he came across Satoshi Nakamotos Bitcoin white paper on Slashdot and started researching Bitcoin and the new blockchain protocol. But in the end it was Vitalik Buterins white paper that changed his life.
Vitaliks white paper is the best white paper Ive ever read, said Joseph Lubin. He first met Vitalik Buterin at a party in Toronto on New Years 2014. I asked about the situation at the time, and he said, We talked about the blockchain.Joseph Lubin blinked when he talked about what he thought was the first opportunity in human history to create a social system without echelons of missionaries, ancient priesthoods as recorders, soothsayers, and petty hunters. He still admitted: Of course we need missionaries to build this system. These people refer to top programmers and developers. Veteran Canadian film star William Shatner has called cryptocurrencies the currency of cyber snobs. In some ways, we will substitute one mission for another.Governanceis a dull word, but it has deep meaning in the crypto world. It involves how and who makes decisions collectively. Every blockchain network as a technology, a community, and a social experiment requires the act of reaching consensus. Its a human problem, so the mechanics limit how much it reflects the priority of the machines work. We have learned time and time again that technology cannot solve the problems of human nature. Although the initial starting point is to eliminate power, the reality is that power can still breed.
Father of Smart Contracts Nick Szabo, a staunch libertarian, once tweeted: Blockchain governance usually comes in three forms: 1. Lord of the Flies; 2. Lawyers; or 3. Ruthlessly minimize Roger VerAt times it looks less like Lord of the Flies and more like the Life of Brian situation: small difference narcissistic hilarious mode. Last year, bitcoin miners and developers clashed over how to make the network more efficient, with some opting for a hard fork, creating a new version of bitcoin known as bitcoin cash, the most famous standard-bearer of what was once known as bitcoin jesus libertarian
, he claimed that the creation of cryptocurrencies was as important as the invention of the wheel, electricity generation and converters.
image descriptionBitcoin Cash supporter Bitcoin Jesus Roger Ver
Roger Ver, who lives in Japan, served 10 months in prison for selling explosives online, further fueling his distrust of institutional authority and boosting his reputation as an anarcho-capitalist.Roger Ver often promotes that Bitcoin Cash truly maintains the design philosophy of Satoshi Nakamoto, and those who oppose it are fake Nakamoto believers.The overriding principles of the split situations that are common in the crypto world are
Love or go. The viability of any particular upgrade or project is measured by who decides to adopt or participate. They are either down-to-earth, in the common parlance of “doing their own work,” or they align themselves based on the reputation of those advocates, supporters, or specific critics.In the absence of a formal hierarchy, the influence of fame capital is paramount. The main avenues for fame and influence are sparring on social media and in post-conference panel discussions. The stars of the encryption community stand for their teammates, announce their positions, and ridicule their opponents, which means that you have received orders that are constantly changing.Our governance is inherently social,
Vlad Zamfir once said on a similar stage.
The closer people are to the community, the more power they have, a kind of soft power.“Across all blockchain networks and cryptocurrencies, there are some concepts that I call high priests,” Vitalik Buterin told me. “A high priest is a person who has a high status in the crypto community for whatever reason, and sometimes these high priests speak. I don’t know if you want to mix in religious metaphors, but they do issue orders.”
Vitalik Buterin does not exclude himself among the high priests. He does not have any institutional titles or high-level roles, but he is recognized as an iconic figure and spokesperson for Ethereum. Hes not keen on maintaining that status. “The Ethereum community won’t survive for long if it’s completely dependent on me,” he said.
I think the right way is not to eliminate me. It is to add others to complement me and replace me in the future. Now there are more and more core developers who express themselves strongly. I also do my best, such as encouraging the Ethereum community There are more high priests. One thing I can do is accommodate them.
“Perceived authority and actual authority became blurred,” Hoskinson told me. Vitalik was not elected to any office, or given any real authority. But when he spoke, millions of people around the world listened.
Or they attack him. Vitalik carried the weight of the world, and there were an unbelievable amount of assholes attacking him across the Internet, and he did so gracefully at the age of 19, 20, or 21, Joseph Lubin said.Someone posted a forum chat record last year claiming that Vitalik Buterin died in a car accident. The price of ETH then plummeted. In response to this rumor post, Vitalik Buterin posted a photo of himself, with a timestamp generated by the blockchain (an Ethereum block number and the corresponding hash value), written on a piece of paper. The price of ETH then stabilized.
Ethereums Most Disgraceful Governance Crisis Is The DAO Project
The DAO was the largest crowdfunding project at the time, raising about $250 million, and is now worth about $2 billion. But weeks later, it was hacked. Its code contained loopholes; hackers repeatedly withdrew money from The DAO without transactions being recorded, until they stole more than a quarter of its funds.
“Vitalik doesn’t have any power,” Emin Gün Sirer, a Cornell University professor who both criticized the DAO, along with Vlad Zamfir, told me: “Vitalik had to clog the Ethereum network with spam transactions to slow down the hackers’ efforts to steal tokens from the DAO.” speed.
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Cornell University Professor Emin Gün Sirer
Parts of the Ethereum community, including Vitalik Buterin, Emin Gün Sirer, and Vlad Zamfir, debated how to effectively roll back transactions, that is, change theoretically immutable transactions, so that people who invested in the DAO can get back lost funds. Others insist that by doing so they violate the principle that blockchains must remain immutable.
“We all wondered: is the code the law?” Emin Gün Sirer recalled. Whats code? Whats law? Whats agreement? Its almost a matter of perception. Were a bunch of computer geeks with more than enough energy.
A split happens, a hard fork. According to those who lost their tokens, most ethereum users followed Vitalik Buterin and other ethereum bigwigs and moved to a new ethereum network, while fundamentalists stayed on the old ethereum network, known as ethereum Classic Ethereum Classic, and the hacker theoretically still holds the tokens it stole on the Ethereum Classic network.
Many people who oppose this hard fork do not belong to the Ethereum community, Vlad Zamfir once said, more are blockchain people who care about the hard fork of Ethereum.Emin Gün Sirer said: If you get illegal money from drug cartels and drug dealers, you must keep network transactions immutable. This is the spirit of Bitcoin.Usually,
The Bitcoin community seems to be more contentious and hostile than the Ethereum community, especially when it comes to infighting.
Some Bitcoin believers who firmly believe that Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency, including the so-called long-term holders hodler, have repeatedly misfired on Reddit and Twitter. In a way, Bitcoin is a strong critic of the fiat currency system because it is an alternative to fiat currency. So there are factions in the Bitcoin community that have been hoping to stir up disputes. They hope to gain more followers. The Ethereum community retains some of the combative, libertarian characteristics of the Bitcoin community, but as an infrastructure that supports many applications, it is inherently more replaceable. The Ethereum network is a platform that supports other virtual currency tokens and tokens.“People in the Ethereum community are very gentle and kind,” said Emin Gün Sirer. Many people joined the Bitcoin camp late. They are Obama-style and like to think and ponder.Emin Gün Sirer said: The hard fork is the best thing that happened to the Ethereum community. It shows that Ethereum takes mistakes very seriously.
It is to adopt a realistic attitude rather than an arbitrary attitude.
Choosing to do the right thing takes precedence over the letter of the rule, or code. Only a tiny fraction of the crypto world understands blockchain technology, and they engage in heated, incomprehensible debates about various important ideas and terminology in the field. Others are just putting on airs and talking nonsense.
An investor who met Joseph Lubin and Mike Novogratz once told me that in terms of understanding the blockchain,
“Out of 10, I guess I could give Joseph Lubin an 8.5, maybe even a 9. Vitalik, I’ve never seen one, I’d guess maybe a 9.2. I might get a 2.5, maybe a 3. My A technical person might score a 7. Ive seen a few people working in the crypto space get a 4 and a 5. But most of the traders Ive met coming into the industry from outside the field have no more than a 2.5 , or even lower.”
Peter Smith, co-founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency and blockchain technology platform Blockchain, said to me one afternoon: This is my lifes work, creating a new field, and I give myself a 4 out of 5. I havent seen one that gets a 5.
A ConsenSys engineer said: At a certain point, you make a breakthrough, and then you understand it all, and then the door closes behind you, you understand it, but you cant explain it clearly, all the rhetoric you explain , the people outside the gate can’t understand.”
A friend of mine who is into a blockchain startup said that people have been trying to explain the technology behind things, explaining the engine, not the car on the road. Its like they want to describe email to people, not to say: You use the Internet to send messages to people; but to say: There is an SMTP protocol that locates a set of rules for sending files from one place to another. He also complained about a group of people he called hopeless, the Luddites who refused to try He likens these people to office workers who refuse to learn how to use copiers.
And the crypto world is full of stupid behaviors, which also create obstacles for the public to understand the industry. The more gimmicks and showmanship the crypto world has, the more it obscures its subtle values or its cynical agendas.It should come as no surprise that the founders of a cryptocurrency debit card company called Centra have pleaded not guilty to being arrested for securities and money transfer fraud. The company was originally backed by famed boxing champion Floyd Mayweather, Jr. and music producer DJ Khaled.
The gold rush in the currency circle has attracted all kinds of celebrities
WHAT: Actor Ashton Kutcher, hip-hop singer 50 Cent, singer-actress Jamie Foxx, socialite Paris Hilton, child star-turned-actor Brock Pierce and, of course, the Wentworth twins who fought Facebook founder Mark Zuckerbergs lawsuit , They put the settlement compensation they got from Facebook into Bitcoin, and they are generally considered to be the earliest billionaires in the currency circle.
Now it’s easy to get your money by just slapping the word “blockchain” on it, or whatever it sounds like is high-tech. This has become a well-known joke. The Long Island Iced Tea Company, labeled “blockchain,” has tripled its stock price without taking any concrete steps to prove that distributed ledger technology is the panacea for boosting sales of sugary drinks. Every few weeks, some silly-sounding altcoin starts an ICO. One day, there will be a banana coin Bananacoin issued by the banana plantations in Laos, whose price is anchored to the price per kilogram of plantains. After a while, a dentist coin Dentacoin will appear. No kidding, its market value may exceed 20 One hundred million U.S. dollars.
Coinye, an air currency formerly known as Coinye West, may have been brilliant for a time, because American hip-hop superstar Kanye West, the Kan Ye, did not sue them for trademark infringement. Jesus Coin is a spoof currency, but it is traded like a real currency, and Christ Coin is not a spoof currency, but it looks like a spoof, and it has not been involved in a lawsuit because of its name. The digital wallet application Tyson Bitcoin Mike Tyson Bitcoin is also safe and sound. Former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson said, I will never admit to being a Bitcoin master. It just sounds interesting. The possibility of this kid makes me Fascinated. There are even Koi Coins, and the value of a single coin is a few tenths of a cent.
Last December, when the price of ETH skyrocketed, the most popular DApp in the Ethereum community was the virtual pet application CryptoKitties CryptoKitties. You adopt a pet, each with a unique code, stored on the Ethereum network. Part of its founder Cat #18s bio reads: When no one is home, I invite the brothers over and we listen to Rihanna. I look forward to riding unicorns with you.
During the blockchain week held in New York in May this year, I saw Joseph Lubin give a speech on stage in three venues within a few days, answering the accusations of many doubters.
The first is Nouriel Roubini, known as Doctor Doom, the economist best known for predicting the 2008 financial tsunami. Fluidity, the conferences organizer, has previously touted the debate as a professional boxing match. The dome of the former Gilded Age Savings Bank in Williamsburg was so packed that many spectators had to stand and listen.
image descriptionDoctor Doom Nouriel RoubiniRoubini went straight to the point and questioned directly:
“99% of cryptocurrency transactions are done on centralized exchanges,”
He said. “Vitalik Buterin is called a ‘benevolent dictator.’ All the decentralization talk is rubbish.” There were some laughs and boos in return. Joseph Lubin maintained a polite, if mischievous smile, arguing in his usual flat tone that the arguments would be consigned to the dustbin of history. Vitalik is not really writing code now, he said, and there are now 10 teams starting a race to catch up.
Joseph Lubin began to describe the future of decentralization, technologies such as state channels, side chains, Plasma, and sharding. Lubini said: You have been talking about these things for five years. I mean, lets be real.
I can show you the code, Joseph Lubin said. Go to the office after the meeting.
A man sitting next to me said dismissively, referring to Roubini: He probably doesnt even know what the code looks like.
Roubini continued: Among all recent ICOs, 81% are scams. He summed up the common blockchain project roadshow routines, which are all old wine in new bottles, saying too crazy.
The audience started laughing at him. Someone yelled: Shut up.
Joseph Lubin seems to be enjoying it. In his speech and demeanor, he has the confidence that history will prove that Roubini is terribly wrong. Gavin Wood once told me that no matter how much he disagreed with Joseph Lubin, he had no doubts that Lubin was a true believer in the blockchain: He seems to have eaten some kind of acid, or dimethyltryptamine, and saw the light. the same future as
The host asked the same question to the two guests: What aspects do you think may be wrong?Joseph Lubin kept smiling and said, I was wrong because I expected it would take more time for this to happen. Then he added: It is not easy to be human in an era of exponential growth.
Of course, during the blockchain week, it is very difficult to be a non-exponential growth person.Amber Baldet There was crazy networking and pompous bureaucracy inside, and then there was all sorts of activity outside: a party on an East River boat, another party on the roof of a furniture store in Bushwick. The 2018 Blockchain Consensus Conference hosted by CoinDesk was held at the Downtown Hilton. The organizers clearly betrayed the information of the journalists who interviewed them. My inbox is filled with material from all kinds of PR people.
In the huge conference room of the Hilton Hotel, I saw Joseph Lubin answering questions again. He and the blockchain technology expert who just left JP Morgan Chase Jimmy SongLike Joseph Lubin, Amber Baldet is an advocate for advancing existing enterprise-grade blockchain technology. Guests at the same venue include developers from the Bitcoin core team
, the latter was wearing a pink top and a cowboy hat, leaning lazily on the seat.
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Joseph Lubin and Bitcoin Core Team Developer Jimmy Song
Jimmy Song was asked to comment on Amber Baldets presentation of the Clovyr project. “I don’t see anything but buzzwords. It’s like playing buzzword bingo,” he said.
Amber Baldet smiled and let him continue.
Jimmy Song continued: When you are a company, how do you decentralize? Blockchain is expensive and slow. You optimize tools, not the key to solving the problem. You are looking for nails with a sledgehammer. Blockchain It’s not a panacea, it’s not like you sprinkle blockchain magic on it and it’s different.”
Tattooed and lavender-haired, Amber Baldet has mastered the fusion of cognitive dissonance between the anarchism of the crypto world and the global banking system, and as one of the few female leaders in a male-dominated field, She, too, has grown blind to this gender difference. She attributes Jimmy Songs aggressive attitude to the fierce battle for fame and fortune in the crypto space. You may become famous in this field, on the stage of the venue or online. Shes also used to men belittling her work performance, especially on social media.
Joseph Lubin said: So, in five years, we will still only see Bitcoin 1.0?
“Most projects in the crypto world today will be gone in five years,” Jimmy Song said.
