Absolute must-read

Ray Dillinger, early Bitcoin code auditor, writes in LinkedIn about his view of the ICO phenomenon:

…the Trustless nature of Bitcoin was the main thing that convinced me Satoshi wasn’t scamming. He built a highway with no toll bridge. People could use Bitcoin without creating any obligation to pay him anything ever. He wasn’t selling coins, he was giving them away for solving hashes. He reserved nothing for himself.

 

He wasn’t trying to line his own pockets at the expense of others. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever encountered someone so completely uninterested in personal wealth. You know the old saw about being able to get a lot done if you don’t care who gets the credit? Satoshi doesn’t want the credit. Two years later he walked away and left the pseudonym behind. And hard as this may be to believe, it looks like he doesn’t even want to be paid for it. As far as we can tell he mined approximately a million Bitcoins and has never sold a single one of them.

 

The first anonymous multibillionaire is being absolutely hardcore about demonstrating to the world that he is not ripping anybody off. He is not even using his privileged early-miner position for personal gain. Just stop and think about that for a minute, before you go on.

Unlike, say, Ethereum or half a dozen other projects I can think of off the top of my head, which Dillinger all but names.

Incidentally, this was my reason for starting Monax Industries in 2014 (then called Eris Industries) – to give people the option of running Ethereum smart contracts, without forcing them to buy the coins and enrich the (often piratic and unsavoury) early adopters.

The result of the Monax team’s efforts was the Hyperledger Burrow blockchain client, which is totally FOSS. As in actually, totally free to use. But, as I’ve explained, VCs didn’t dig that, so I’ve stepped away from blockchain for a bit to dual-qualify and to get a nice seat to observe the collapse of ICO mania (and subsequent legal actions) from a safe distance.

Read the whole thing.