"Imminent Divine Reclamation" - Vitalik Buterin Responds to Words of Doom

Bitcoin is turning into a failed project. The seeds of its destruction among the debris of a community blinded by numerical price increases, and imminent divine reclamation. One day you will all understand my words but it will be too late, the ship would have sailed.
— Amir Taaki (@AmirPolyteknik) December 26, 2017

Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, reposted this message in agreement:

"*All* crypto communities, ethereum included, should heed these words of warning. Need to differentiate between getting hundreds of billions of dollars of digital paper wealth sloshing around and actually achieving something meaningful for society."

Discover credible partners and premium clients at China's leading finance event!

But what is this meaningful something that he talks of?

Buterin, 23 years old, is an influential figure in the cryptocurrency world. Ethereum, which can be used to create new tokens, is the platform of choice for most new Blockchain businesses. Its cryptucurrency, ether, has the second biggest market cap of all cryptocurrencies. Buterin was recently named one of Bloomberg’s 50 most influential people, a list that also included the US ambassador to the United Nations, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.

Buterin founded Ethereum because he felt that those in Bitcoin community "weren’t approaching the problem in the right way." The problem referred to is, how to expand the application of blockchain technology in order to use it in ways over and above a simple method of payment:

“Bitcoin and Ethereum are doing different things. Bitcoin is a digital currency, and the protocol is written to sustain this cryptocurrency. Clearly, Ethereum platform has ETH, it is also a digital currency, but it exists to sustain the protocol. The protocol was written for a vast amount of applications, both in the area of Payments and going far beyond payments,” said Buterin in an interview with CoinTelegraph.

His network allows users to design and run decentralised applications without having to write an entirely new blockchain, making the process much more accessible. Another utility is decentralised autonomous organisations, which are organisations governed by computer code. One advantage of this is that decision making is taken out of the hands of central authority.

To what purpose though? Buterin said in an interview with Roland Berger: "I believe in making it easier for "the bottom three billion" to participate in society – not just in their capacity as consumers but also in their capacity as producers."

This is not to say that he doesn't envisage large institutions using blockchain too: "I'd say you should not see blockchains as just an add-on to existing systems, or as just a better kind of database. I believe that the most valuable blockchain applications will involve fundamental process reengineering."

Buterin likes to talk about politics and society on his Twitter page.

Am I missing something? Is there something inconsistent about believing that people should be free, but also valuing the common good, and hoping that people try to use their freedom for the common good at least sometimes?
— Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) December 27, 2017

We recently looked out an essay he wrote on the subject of governance in a blockchain system. He draws a direct comparison between blockchain governance and political governance in the non-digital world. What was clear when reading his text is that he attaches the same weight to the intricacies of this subject as others do to the subject of actual government.

Buterin sees blockchain technology as a tool of liberation. But as people scramble to buy any digital coin available, simply because they have heard that the value is always going up, idealists may feel dismayed as a revolutionary technology, created as a tool to fashion a new world, is turned into nothing but another commodity.