On Friday (5 October 2018), Vitalik Buterin, the Russian-Canadian programmer who came up with the original idea for Ethereum, said that the process of “detaching” himself from the Ethereum project had already started.
It all started when, during a discussion on Twitter about Ethereum's premining, Vitalik was asked by “any thoughts on how you will eventually detach yourself from the project?”. A minute later, Vitalik replied:
Already in progress; watch the repos, even much of the research is being done by @dannyryan, @drakefjustin, @icebearhww and others.
— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) October 5, 2018
But what he said next was even more interesting:
I think ethereum can absolutely survive me spontaneously combusting tomorrow at this point.
— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) October 5, 2018
Today, it is October 6th, and fortunately, Vitalik does not appear to have suffered spontaneous combustion, and so there is no immediate need to worry about whether or not the Ethereum project can survive without him.
Realizing that his words about detaching himself from Ethereum might cause some panic in Crypto-Twitter and, perhaps more importantly, in the crypto markets, he tried to clarify his earlier statement about detaching himself:
To be clear, “detaching” meant detaching from *needing* to participate. No actual plans to disappear any time soon.
— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) October 6, 2018
This is not the first time that Vitalik has said something that excitement/panic.
As covered by CryptoGlobe, On 8 September 2018, Bloomberg reported that Vitalik had made the following statement at an interview that day at the Ethereum Industry Summit conference in Hong Kong:
“The blockchain space is getting to the point where there’s a ceiling in sight. If you talk to the average educated person at this point, they probably have heard of blockchain at least once. There isn’t an opportunity for yet another 1,000-times growth in anything in the space anymore.”
A few days later, Vitalik took to Twitter to explain that what he meant was that there was no opportunity for 1000x price increases and that he was not talking about the potential growth in crypto adoption:
To be clear, I never said that there is “no room for growth” in the crypto ecosystem. I said there is no room for *1000x price increases*. A 1000x price increase from today means $200T in crypto, or ~an entire 70% of today's global wealth being in crypto.
— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) September 12, 2018
According to CryptoCompare, Ether (ETH) is currently trading at $224.69, up 0.42% in the past 24-hour period.
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