Out of the Ether. Matthew Leising

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Out of the Ether - Matthew Leising


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       Mihai Alisie – Cofounder of Bitcoin Magazine with Vitalik, helped set up Ethereum's Zug headquarters, business development

       Gavin Wood – Architect of Ethereum, C++ client creator, a bit prickly, took Vitalik's vision and made it real

       Jeff Wilcke – Created Ethereum's Go client, sided with developers on power struggle question

       Joe Lubin – Early and important investor in Ethereum, former software developer and Wall Street software engineer, true believer, user of strange words, founder of Ethereum development studio ConsenSys

      Other important early people

       Roxana Sureanu – Helped get Bitcoin Magazine off the ground, willing hardscrabble traveler, turned the Spaceship House from a dwelling into a home

       Stephan Tual – Ethereum evangelical, ran marketing for the project, has the gift of gab, one of three founders of slock.it, added to Ethereum leadership after Zug purge

       Christoph Jentzsch – Helped debug Ethereum code in run up to 2015 launch, theoretical physicist by training, co-founded slock.it, really wishes he could revisit line 666 in the DAO code

       Mathias Grønnebæk – Helped establish Zug headquarters, reader of tax laws, worked for Charles Hoskinson, helped craft Ethereum Foundation business plan

       Taylor Gerring – Helped secure Bitcoin raised in Ethereum crowdsale, taker of many photos, added to Ethereum leadership after Zug purge

       Anthony D'Onofrio – Designer and software developer, helped improve early Ethereum web site, took drugs, saw future, one of the few people Gav Wood likes

       Emin Gün Sirer – Blockchain pioneer, first to use proof of work to back a digital coin, Cornell associate professor of computer science, called unsuccessfully for a moratorium on the DAO then found the DAO bug and dismissed it

       Peter Vessenes – Bitcoin pioneer, tangled with the Bitcoin Foundation, pointed out smart contract security issues

       Ming Chan – First executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, whipped it into shape to keep it within its means, Vitalik favored her though she rubbed many the wrong way

      Badass blockchain ninja warriors

       Alex Van de Sande – Known as avsa, helped marshal the Robin Hood Group from his apartment in Rio, co-developed the Mist wallet, excellent husband, the one who pushed the button to start the DAO counterattack

       Griff Green – The Mayor of Ethereum circa June 2016, hugger, visionary, driver of the RHG, slock.it's first employee, wants a sick jump shot but it's just not happening this time around

       Fabian Vogelsteller – tech whiz who helped the RHG prepare to fight the ether thief, co-developed Mist wallet

       Lefteris Karapetsas – coding guru, replicated DAO attack in a few hours

       Jordi Baylina – helped the RHG drain remaining $4 million of ether from the DAO, coding genius, Spanish freedom fighter

      Other really important early people

       Dmitry Buterin – Vitalik's dad, supportive father, hater of communists

       Natalia Buterin – Vitalik's mom, patient mother, adventurous spirit

       Maia Buterin – Vitalik's step mom, patiently waited for Vitalik's cooking

      Important people who helped Ethereum go mainstream

       Amber Baldet – Hands-on builder, coder, vital within JPMorgan to link Ethereum to its in-house Quorum project

       Christine Moy – Amber's first hire for Quorum within JPMorgan, finance master in all areas of the bank

       Patrick Nielsen – Hired by Amber at JPMorgan, solved the privacy issue for the bank that gave birth to the Quorum ecosystem

       Marley Gray – Microsoft director of blockchain and distributed ledger business development in 2015, lover of Andrew Keys, delivered on Microsoft's vision of “a growth mindset” by linking up with Ethereum

       Alex Batlin – Ran UBS Labs, a fintech-focused unit at the Swiss bank, instrumental in creation of Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

       Jeremy Millar – ConsenSys executive who helped create the EEA after realizing competition from R3 and IBM were real and needed a response

       Andrew Keys – One of the first ConsenSys hires, worked for free, loaned $100,000 to the Ethereum Foundation to ensure Dev Con 1 took place, great explainer of complicated things

      The future was broken.

      Every person in this story I'm about to tell you knew this. Felt it in their bones. Their views were well known and widely shared, yet nothing ever seemed to change. Capitalism was destroying the planet. Income inequality kept tightening its grip. Tech behemoths like Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter owned the public square, where once all you needed was a soapbox to voice an opinion. Now any of these monopolists could censor you or shut you down for even clearing your throat. Human beings had ceded their organizing power to corporations that saw them as data to be harvested and sold. The grievances were long and detailed, and yet not many of these people could put their fingers on a way to effect change.

      The future was broken.

      The future was broken.

      The Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, a giant in media theory who changed the way we look at popular culture, warned us in 1967: “How shall the new environment be programmed now that we have become so involved with each other, now that all of us have become the unwitting work force for social change?” he wrote in The Medium Is the Message. “All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.”

      Fifty years after McLuhan wrote those words, another writer had also been at work. Here was a rare individual, someone able to put a finger on the dystopia that sprang from so much concentration – concentration of power, of wealth, of media. All of it originated from centralization. The gatekeepers kept making the gates higher and higher and more and more costly. But what if we could create a system without gates, without a central authority and the power to say what is permissible? What if, the people in this story asked, the organizing principle instead was flat and distributed and no one had enough control to stop anyone else?

      That's the idea Satoshi Nakamoto gave to the world in the fall of 2008. The creator of Bitcoin had seen the future, knew it was broken, but also knew it could be different. Bitcoin would fix the future, and it would change so much more than how people thought about money. It gave these disconcerted characters the elusive thing they sought – the key to unlock it. Blow up the center. Destroy the middleman. Take the power back. That was the idea, anyway.

      And


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