“The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Everybody wants to believe they’re bettering the world, and what’s more, that they’re on the brink of a revolutionary transformation. And when you’re immersed in a whole cohort of such people, a whole movement, as I was this week at the Ethereal Summit, a conference for startups building decentralized apps atop the Ethereum blockchain … well, it’s hard not to get swept up in that belief.
This is as true of the “old world” of VC funding as it is of the “new world” of ICOs. People who are angry and cynical about venture capitalists and the Silicon Valley ecosystem — and I know many — often don’t appreciate the extent to which VCs genuinely believe, in good faith, that what they do makes the world an enormously better place, by nurturing green shoots of innovation into a mighty forest of progress, and are genuinely baffled by the counter-narrative that they reinforce pre-existing social stratification while mostly just helping the rich get richer.
Source/More: Ether fever dreams | TechCrunch
