When you drill down, blockchains are really a shared version of reality everyone agrees on. So whether it's a fully immersive VR experience, augmented reality, or even Bitcoin or Ethereum in the physical world as a shared ledger for our 'real world,' we'll increasingly trust blockchains as our basis for reality.
Ethereum has taken what was a four-function calculator of a programming language in Bitcoin and turned it into a full-fledged computer.
Ethereum will be a first-class citizen on Coinbase.
When Coinbase was starting, we thought we were seeing the birth of something that was really important - what I would almost describe as the future fabric of society - the system for who we are - our identities, what we own, our assets.
OpenAI is doing important work by releasing tools which promote AI to be developed in the open. Compute power is largely produced by NVIDIA and Intel and still relatively expensive but openly purchasable. Blockchains may be the key final ingredient by providing massive pools of open training data.
When the Bitcoin white paper emerged in 2008, it was completely revolutionary. The amount of concepts that had to come together in just the right way - computer science, cryptography, and economic incentives - was astonishing.
The self-driving car revolution was kicked off by The 'DARPA' Grand Challenge to make an autonomous car traverse 132 mi. of a desert.
For the foreseeable future, I'm all about building blockchain-based decentralized services.
The Internet had a core innovation that made it valuable: The ability to disseminate data over a distributed network in a way that was significantly cheaper than the prior methods.
Bitcoin is valuable as a currency because of the economic efficiencies the bitcoin network is already creating as transactions flow over it. As with the Internet, more applications will flourish which will make the bitcoin network, and thus bitcoin as a currency, valuable.
Working on a token is similar to working on a startup: higher risk and lower initial impact but higher upside potential. How core protocol work is best funded beyond the initial Ethereum Foundation endowment is an open question, but likely further out.
Ethereum may make monetary policy decisions like, 'Let's do 1% inflation to support the ongoing development of the Ethereum protocol.' A token built on Ethereum might want to do the same.
Sales conducted on-chain through smart contracts couldn't really be done before Ethereum, which is why they are a newer concept. I think this style will become the most common over time.
Working on Ethereum could be similar to working at a Google: lower risk with broad impact right away. Working on a token is similar to working on a startup: higher risk and lower initial impact but higher upside potential.
Make no mistake - Ethereum would never have existed without Bitcoin as a forerunner. That said, I think Ethereum is ahead of Bitcoin in many ways and represents the bleeding edge of digital currency.
There is nothing that Bitcoin can do which Ethereum can't. While Ethereum is less battle-tested, it is moving faster, has better leadership, and has more developer mindshare.
Forks often arise from differences of opinion in the direction of a project. And tokens are increasingly a mechanism for voting on changes to their protocols. Since the point of a fork is to try a new path, the new fork may not want to port all of the prior holders opposed to trying the new path the fork was created to take.
Redistributing tokens is a balancing act. In most cases, forks probably want to keep ownership for users constant so users have at least the same incentives to use the new fork as the historical one.
Just like mutations to DNA in biological organisms allow for evolution through natural selection, forking lets us run multiple experiments in parallel where the strongest versions survive.
Scaling is multidimensional. Different methods address different things.
