Blockchains are digital organisms. As organisms evolve through changes in their DNA, blockchain protocols evolve through changes in their code. And like biological organisms, the most adaptive blockchains will be the ones that survive and thrive.
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.
Developer mindshare is the most important thing to have in digital currency.
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.
Ethereum will be a first-class citizen on Coinbase.
AIs are only as good as the data they are trained on. And while many of the tech giants working on AI, like Google and Facebook, have open-sourced some of their algorithms, they hold back most of their data.
To create an open protocol which helps coordinate resources towards a common goal, the resources need to be known at some level in the same way a lot of of data on the web needs to be public for it to be traversable and useful.
Private funding was one of the first methods used when MIT funded Bitcoin core developers Gavin Andresen, Wladimir van der Laan, and Cory Fields in 2015.
Public crowdfunding still suffers from a tragedy of the commons problem. Everyone will want the benefit of the crowdfunded efforts but is incentivized to sit on the sidelines and hope others chip in.
The self-driving car revolution was kicked off by The 'DARPA' Grand Challenge to make an autonomous car traverse 132 mi. of a desert.
Scaling is multidimensional. Different methods address different things.
Not having sub-governance would be like anyone who owns USD being able to walk into a Google shareholder meeting and voting without owning Google stock just because Google shares happen to be denominated in USD.
Tokens align incentives between developers, contributors, users, and investors. They allow everyone who wants to contribute to a project early the opportunity to get in on the ground floor.
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.
Bitcoin's value is the same: It will remain as long as it is the most efficient mechanism for transferring ownership.
At GDAX, we want to see new protocols and their tokens flourish.
When the actual Bitcoin network launched in 2009, no one knew about it, and many of those who did thought it would surely fail. Just to make sure the thing worked, the scripting language in Bitcoin was intentionally extremely restrictive.
The scripting language in Bitcoin is important because it is what makes Bitcoin 'programmable money'. Within each Bitcoin transaction is the ability to write a little program.
People far too often associate derivatives markets with mere speculation, but there are very legitimate businesses that need derivatives to protect themselves against risk.
