While Shin exposes the bad behavior of blowhards like Hoskinson and Wood, she also takes care to credit the role of the the legions of little known individuals who make up the "community"-and whose selfless and often anonymous contributions make them the real heroes of the Ethereum story.Ī good portion of The Cryptopians is devoted to the so-called DAO wars, which began with the creation of the first decentralized autonomous organization on Ethereum. Meanwhile, Wood comes across as a failed MacBeth, forever trying to knife anyone in his path, including Vitalik, even as his own projects founder due to security concerns and Wood’s colossal ego. Shin supplies anecdotes that depict Hoskinson, who today runs Ethereum rival Cardano, as a pervert and pathological liar. Those include Charles Hoskinson and Gavin Wood, who emerge as the chief villains in the early Ethereum story. Shin digs up new dirt on the Ethereum co-founders, all of whom made legitimate contributions to the new blockchain, but often proved incapable of sharing credit. While strife is part of every startup's story, the book describes extraordinary infighting at Ethereum, culminating in a “Game of Thrones” day in Zug, Switzerland, that saw the project emerge with eight co-founders who remain outsize crypto figures to this day.Ī lot of what follows in The Cryptopians is deeply inside baseball, though likely to tickle crypto fans in the same way that Nick Bilton’s backstab-fest Hatching Twitter titillated Silicon Valley. The Cryptopians reveals how Vitalik’s genius and innate altruism helped him overcome a total lack of social skills, and build a world-changing blockchain alongside a motley collection of geeks, grifters, and hangers-on. That work, along with Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin 2008 white paper, are the foundational documents of today’s multi-trillion dollar crypto economy. He founded an influential Bitcoin publication while still in high school, and soon after published what would become known as the Ethereum white paper at the age of 19. The broad strokes of Vitalik’s background are well-known: a precocious child raised in Toronto by Russian emigrés, he survived an awkward adolescence by finding community in the online world of cryptocurrency. For her dive into Ethereum, she hopscotched the globe-visiting Switzerland, Singapore, San Francisco and other crypto meccas-to uncover its origin story and that of its boy genius founder, Vitalik Buterin (known to everyone in crypto simply as Vitalik). Shin, a one-time Forbes journalist and host of the influential Unchained podcast, covered the early days of Bitcoin and is deeply sourced in the different tribes that make up the world of blockchain.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |