The $55 Million Mistake That Vitalik Buterin Made With Ethereum

Ethereum’s permanent blemish

Isaiah McCall
Yard Couch

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Image by DonkeyHotey from Flickr

Ethereum is the most successful blockchain in existence. There, I said it.

I wish I’d been the first, but Bloomberg writer and author of “Out of the Ether” Matthew Leising beat me to the punch.

It’s not just Ethereum’s lofty goal of creating a radically new decentralized internet that makes it better than Bitcoin. It’s what it’s already been able to accomplish in six short years:

  • Ethereum pioneered Smart Contracts (digital transactions that can eliminate middleman services like Uber, Airbnb, and lawyers, to name a few).
  • Ethereum created a successful dApp (decentralized app) ecosystem. The most important altcoins and NFT ecosystems are built on Ethereum’s blockchain today.
  • Ethereum created ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) as a means for developers to fund their own projects. This is how an ICO Works: Create a dApp, give yourself and other creators your own cryptocurrency (e.g. Chainlink), and if the project is a success the value of that crypto will go up paying you automagically.
  • It’s spawned competition with cryptocurrencies like Polkadot, Cardano, and Tron, to name a few.
  • Ethereum — more specifically a group of…

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Isaiah McCall
Yard Couch

Journalist for 99Bitcoins and former USA Today, also Ultramarathoner | On Substack: https://isaiahmccall.substack.com/ mccallisaiah@gmail.com