Vitalik Tells CZ to Think Bigger: Crypto is More Than Just 'Protest' Money

The Ethereum co-founder says the crypto community needs to get with the times.

Listen to article Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says the current financial crisis is very different to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis that Bitcoin emerged from - and that the crypto community needs to adjust its thinking accordingly.

Writing in a Twitter thread on June 2, Buterin said that some of Bitcoin's most dearly held narratives had not been borne out this time around.

Pandemic and protestsThe Ethereum co-founder said 2020 is not a repeat of the financial crisis in 2008/2009.

Rather, he tweeted, it is a "Virus crisis", a crisis of "Epistemology" and one of "Overbearing policing".

"Yes, the money printer did go brrrrr. But that's a relatively small portion of what is going on, and even there inflation is still going *down* not up."

Erin added another narrative - that Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are uncorrelated to traditional assets - had not been borne out so far.

As proof, he showed a chart of the downturn in the S&P 500 in March, at the same time the value of Bitcoin and other digital currencies dropped more than 50%.Get with the timesButerin said it was high time the community moved beyond the mindset demonstrated in Binance Chief Executive Officer Changpeng Zhao's tweet that: "Bitcoin is the peaceful protest".

"Decentralized censorship-resistant publishing and communication, decentralized communities / governance / DAOs, DAOs for content curation, etc etc. All important work."

"Many old ideologies and coalitions are dying, and many new one's being born. The hills and valleys on the battlefields are shifting. The crypto space needs to be watching carefully and adjust to new realities."