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Comment by pfraze | Hacker News Reader

Eugh. Wow.

> In Miami, Buterin’s army was small, but already keenly aware of the importance of beatifying its leader. Joseph Lubin, one of the developers staying at the house, and one of the few people who seemed to understand Ethereum enough to decipher its potential, told me in an endearing, paternal tone that Buterin was a genius alien that had arrived on this planet to deliver the sacrosanct gift of decentralization. Nearby, Buterin was shuffling around on the grass, looking down at the ground, muttering to himself in preparation for a talk he would give to the Bitcoin elite the next day.

Are we writing software or starting a cult?

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I agree the article is distasteful in its focus on personalitiy...

...but as someone who's deeply involved in this technology (and an unabashed believer in the ethereum technology stack) I personally consider Vitalik's combination of skills in systems architecture design, cryptocurrency protocol coding, and cryptoeconomic analysis to be unmatched by anyone else in the community.

I think the HN crowd tends to forget that most people are simply hardwired to be interested in stories about other people, rather than concepts (or things)[0]. It's the best way to disseminate ideas to the general public.

[0] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11031-011-9273-2

Most people are also pretty hardwired to suspect that someone regarded as an beatific genius with unearthly powers by his friends might just be a weirdo with a few savant-like abilities surrounded by sycophants though. Which might be a hugely unfair characterisation of Buterin, but the article is much less a story about how he came about to create something, or how people are starting to benefit from stuff he's done, and much more a collection of testimony from people throwing the word genius around rather liberally. I almost burst out laughing when the author put the bit about losing millions of dollars in parentheses, as if they were worried that giving it full paragraph status might damage the financial whizzkid narrative.

In the case of Ethereum, maybe a little of both.

The plan is to create an entirely new form of social organization. I'm not making any claims about the likelihood of success, but their vision is wholesale replacement of capitalism and democracy among other things.

There are some cultlike aspects to that. It is a form of abandonment of your friends and family. Since it's not yet realized, it requires some blind faith in Vitalik.

... in some ways every startup is cultlike though.

The decentralization vision does not require blind faith in Vitalik. The tools are already available. It's up to developers to pick them up and use them.

Solving the scalability problem and moving to proof-of-stake requires some faith in Vitalik, but that's only if you care about the value of ether, Ethereum's currency. I hold ether, but if Ethereum fails to solve these problems, someone else will solve them and I will be glad.

Personally, I have no desire to replace capitalism or democracy. But they are clearly broken. I intend to fix them, and I hope the decentralization community gains enough developers, designers, and economists to make it happen. We need your help.

And the scalability/PoS project has a team of several researchers. The official PoS lead is actually Vlad Zamfir.

To be clear, I love Ethereum and I think it will be a big part of the future.

But you seem to agree with me that there is some uncertainty there. We don't know if Ethereum will become the robust future-proof platform that it aspires to be. We also don't know if the problems it solves are really a critical part of the decentralized challenge or if it's bikeshedding. If you are making plans based on specific answers to those questions, your participation involves some degree of faith.

It sounds like you aren't personally relying on those answers, and you can afford to wait it out. That's great. For you it's just a neat technology then, not a cult.

I am impatient about social change, as my friends are in pain, so some faith would be required for me to invest time in the social vision of Ethereum today.

He was clearly joking.

Digital currency is a cult.

Not an argument.

it's not an argument, it's an observation. I agree with him

Why is it a cult? What's your definition of a cult?

It's true. I'm inclined to vouch for this so any unfamiliar get a sense of the culture surrounding cryptocurrencies. There is a religiousness to digital currencies. They almost have to be this way, because their initial value depends on Ponzi-like marketing and proliferation is a very grass-roots effort.

This is absolutely true, but you shouldn't let the cults distract you from the valuable tools we now have to build software users control. Decentralized applications are the only way to keep users in control of their lives as software eats the world. Otherwise, the Facebooks and Ubers of the world will write the rules for how we interact as a society, and we will have to submit to their will or opt out of the value of large social and economic networks.

Digital Currencies have the fanaticism of cults but without the removal of freewill of participants.

Cults and Software go hand in hand. Don't be so terrified of cults if you're just getting into software - they're important in this industry. Very little of any import actually gets done without them ... and despite what you may think, the cult model is very useful when it comes to software development. Without a stable individual around which to rally, technology wheels spin and spin. However, with a cult figure making key decisions and acting as a centralized figure around which to rally, software development efforts - inherently group based - prosper.

No committee ever designed and delivered decent software systems. It takes the tall poppy to stick his head above the crop and survey the field before progress can be made.

And, before you downvote, consider the examples. There are many, many positive software cults in our world today.

"There are many, many positive software cults in our world today."

Care to name some? I don't believe cultivating religious fervor over anything and rejecting information that disconfirms or challenges your beliefs as a positive thing.

The Cult of Linus.

The Cult of RMS.

The Cult of Carmack.

The Cult of antirez.

The Cult of Pike.

Cult, definition:

... (religious definition skipped) ...

4. a group or sect bound together by veneration of the same thing, person, ideal, etc. 5. Sociology. a group having a sacred ideology and a set of rites centering around their sacred symbols.

Cult of DJB

Yup. Great example.

Peter Thiel on how to run your startup like a cult: http://www.wired.com/2014/09/run-startup-like-cult-heres/

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