Date Posted: 10/26/2018

Emin Gün Sirer has quoted extensively in "The stuff dreams are made of: Is cryptocurrency the future or a fad?  And what is it good for?", a "Brave New World Dept" article by Nick Paumgarten in the Oct 22 2018 New Yorker. (The online version is entitled, "The prophets of cryptocurrency survey the boom and bust: Inside the ongoing argument over whether Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the blockchain are transforming the world").

Sirer gives context to the Ethereum effort and its history:  "You have two sides to it all. The one that appeals to the fringe counterculture versus the one where someone has to pay all these developers’ bills. One to appeal to the cypherpunk kids, another to appeal to the adults in the room".  With regards to its past governance:  "What is code? What is law? What is the covenant? It was almost epistemological. We were a bunch of computer geeks way out of our depth. ... the hard fork was the best thing that happened to Ethereum. It showed that Ethereum took errors seriously. And that it was practical and not dogmatic. It chose the right thing over the letter of the law—or, really, the letter of the code"

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