Elon Musk’s said a few things about cryptocurrencies on Twitter before, which fills investors with excitement and often causes a spike in market prices. From jokingly claiming to be the CEO of Dogecoin to saying that “bitcoin’s structure is brilliant”, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s tweets always attract attention. This time it is no different, with Musk simply tweeting “Ethereum” – following which Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, himself responded, saying that Musk should “come to Devcon in October.”
Ethereum
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 30, 2019
Although Musk followed it up with a “jk” tweet, the conversation, which has caught the attention of cryptoenthusiasts, continued for quite a while, instigated by Musk asking Buterin “What should be developed on Ethereum?”,
What should be developed on Ethereum?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 30, 2019
Buterin was detailed in his response, offering several “top picks”, the first one being a globally accessible financial system – a development that many experts and insiders believe should be one of the first,
My top picks (1):
* A globally accessible financial system, including payments, store of value, also more advanced stuff like insurance https://t.co/AGoMt6r2wK
* Identity: "sign in with Facebook" -> "sign in with an ethereum account, no intermediaries". Also web of trust…— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) April 30, 2019
Buterin goes on to describe several other very specific use cases, which not all that many projects in the market seem to offer. The tackling of some fundamental problems like the ones suggested by Buterin, including identity management, privacy and credit systems, are among the most vaunted use cases,
(2)
* All sorts of registries should publish on chain for security and easy verifiability, see my thread on this https://t.co/70yV7kinVb
* Experimenting with new forms of human organizational structure, eg. @MolochDAO
* All sorts of micropayment use cases via payment channels…— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) April 30, 2019
(3)
* Markets for personal data for privacy preserving machine learning (you pay me X, I let you homomorphically execute function Y on my data that's been attestated to by Z…)
* Cryptoeconomics for spam prevention in social networks https://t.co/06n0zGQYXP— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) April 30, 2019
(4)
* Cryptoeconomics / micropayment schemes to reward publishers of good content
* Testing ground for new market designs, eg. frequent batch auctions, combinatorial auctions, automated market makers (eg. https://t.co/jaPhz1nQFr)
* Stickers/badges https://t.co/reDBpbQ7uw— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) April 30, 2019
(5)
* p2p marketplace for internet connections / incentivized mesh networks
* Identity, reputation and credit systems for those that currently have few resources (eg. refugees)
* Decentralized DNS alternatives (eg. https://t.co/aTRxfTlXpC)— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) April 30, 2019
