François CholletVerified account

You also have CryptoNote protocol, which enables digital transactions that are private-by-default. Where only the recipient and sender know the details of a transaction, and the rest of the network doesn't know who sent how much to whom - yet can still verify no double spends.

If the future is digital, we have a choice between: - Centralised digital money, where corps mine and sell information of users - Trad. block-chain like Bitcoin, where corps mine and sell information of /all/ users - Monero, where that can't happen.

Anyway, tl;dr: Ethereum (the technology, if not that specific block-chain, though likely that chain) is going to absolutely revolutionise finance over the next few decades. It is /so/ efficient. It is amazing.

Oh, and I would be a liberal / progressive (in a European sense). The attraction for me is that this will democratise finance. It makes it possible for the working people to directly participate in and have a stake in the (new, distributed) finance system.

Where before, finance, and the creation of wealth by the aggregation and allocation of capital, was concentrated in a tiny elite in a handful of cities (London, New York, etc.), who skimmed of /vast/ wealth for themselves. ...

In the world of distributed smart-contracts, these are open to all. Sharing in that generated wealth is open to anyone with an internet computer.

So, there's a progressive, egalitarian appeal to that. A smart-contract running on a distributed, trustless, virtual machine doesn't care that you have the right school tie.

You'll forgive me for thinking that what you just wrote sounds more like a boiler room pitch for a chop stock than anything legitimate. I do like the idea of democratizing finance. Vanguard has done a fabulous job of that already, no cryptocurrency needed.