The Infinite Machine

by Camila Russo

He was sure his work would get torn apart. “With an idea this big, there has to be a very good reason why nobody has tried to do it,” he thought.

They had to catch the train to Zug for more meetings with lawyers and regulators, the very middlemen and bureaucrats Ethereum wanted to someday, somehow, make obsolete.

Only a year and a half ago, Vitalik had written down the basic structure for what he thought could take cryptocurrencies further, and Gavin had refined the concept in his Yellow Paper so that it could be put into the language of computers. Dozens of developers, designers, and bloggers, and then hundreds of speculators around the world had come together, in many cases dropping whole carriers, uprooting themselves, leaving personal lives in shambles, living off savings, to make that moment possible.

To grossly simplify the two cultures, if Bitcoiners were typically hard-core libertarian and carnivore, Ethereans leaned more liberal and vegetarian. After spending time in the Bitcoin and BitShares forums, Rune found it was refreshing that the Ethereum community was focused primarily on building innovative tech, rather than on any particular ideology.

There was Jesus Coin, which promised record transaction times between token holders and God’s son. There was TrumpCoin, PutinCoin, Dentacoin (“the blockchain solution for the global dental industry”), and the scathingly honest “Useless Ethereum Token,” which promoted its ICO as “the world’s first 100% honest Ethereum ICO,” saying it “transparently offers investors no value.” Its logo was a hand raising its middle finger and the website said, “seriously, don’t buy these tokens.” Still, people handed over almost $75,000 in its ICO. At the height of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, Pets.com became the poster child of irrational hype. In the middle of the ICO mania, Pets.com would have been one of the most conservative, well-grounded business ideas.

The market had crashed, but there were twice as many people at Devcon 2018 as there were at the Cancun conference near the height of the bubble a year before.