The Thiel Fellowship allowed Vitalik to drop out of school and work full time on ETH. And that's just one of the recipients.
why is that a good thing?
Seems fairly equivalent to funding a new building at a university that is already mostly populated by rich kids, who by and large are doing things less useful to society than building a decentralized computing platform used around the world.
Because building for the privileged is the only thing the filthy rich can do. That or funding a shitty decentralized platform.
Although I'm a pretty huge skeptic of the performance of the thiel fellowship (knowing some fellows personally and also knowing some of the showrunners), I don't think calling it a rich kid's club is fair, with the exception of Austin Russel.
I was calling universities a rich kid's club (esp. the ones that get the most gifts from the megarich). Trying to make the point that, while the Thiel Fellowship may not be objectively "good", it seems at least as good or better than the OC's suggestion that it is preferable for the megarich to fund things like universities.
Sorry, I misread.
ah yes the two things you can do with lots of money -- giving it to a university and doing the thiel fellowship
That's like saying the foundation supported a scientist working on building more coal-fired power plants. ETH, along with crypto in general, is harmful to society. Weird flex.
ETH will be POS soon, and like any invention in the beginning there are issues that need to be worked out to prevent more harm than good.
I've been hearing ETH will be POS for 3 years. When is this actually going to occur.
It's already in transition with the beacon chain and is expected to full PoS end of this year or Q1 next year.
POS?
Proof-of-stake (rather than the more energy intensive proof-of-work).
That's your opinion, which is not shared by a great many people.
Most people are barely aware of crypto, let alone the negative effects of it. Once people become more informed, hopefully more and more people will see what a plague on society it is.
The people who have that specific stance on crypto are usually those who know just enough to have to form an opinion but not enough to realize how little they know.
The electric grid, too, started on coal fired plants; perhaps we should label it as "harmful to society"
The grid actually produced something useful though.
Usefulness is subjective.
If you are going to make a point against Ethereum, I recommend this: It encourages scams, gambling addiction, people losing money accidentally, and the usual criminal activity associated with crypto.
I don't think it's necessary to debate ETH as a public good but... Vitalik is by far the most impactful recipient of the fellowship grant so "just one of the recipients" is doing a lot of work here.
The founder of Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit that engineers technology to clean the oceans is one recipient.
$100k for him is a punt. Like me spending $10. In return he possibly gets reciprocity from future successful businesses.
Wow, Figma is one of the best UI/UX design tools I've ever used. That's very interesting.
What else has the Thiel Fellowship created other than Vitalik and ETH? I'm not sure we can judge the success of it on it's single most impactful result.
The fellowship did not create vitalik and eth; he was giving talks about it on the crypto circuit before he accepted a fellowship.
There’s quite a few impressive fellows. Founder of Figma is probably one you’ve heard about.
From wikipedia: Billionaire Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and current Facebook board member, paid $10 million to help finance lawsuits against Gawker Media, including the Bollea lawsuit. He called his financial support of Bollea's case "one of my greater philanthropic things that I've done."