Thread by @lrettig

I want to talk about why Ethereum matters to me, and why it should matter to you, too.

In 2018 when most people in the world hear "Ethereum" they think of ICOs and scams and shills. That's disappointing but understandable. The true message has gotten buried.

I posit: the existing system is broken. By "system" I mean economic, political, social, take your pick. Turn on any news channel anywhere in the world for five minutes if you need evidence. The list of broken things is too lengthy to detail here but, briefly...

Most countries have for some time functioned under a tacit social contract whereby "the public" agree to be ruled by a minority elite with the understanding that the elite will protect their interests and won't rip them off too badly.

This worked in the immediate postwar period but began to fray in the seventies as trade liberalization and the decline of unions caused real wage growth to stagnate. The average US worker today earns less in real terms than they did in 1970. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm…

And this is spite of an _enormous_ increase in productivity and GDP over the same period. As a result the gap between the rich and the poor has risen to levels not seen since the Great Depression. The lion's share of income now goes to capital (not labor). gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucm…

Millennials today, myself included, live in a world where a. we are saddled with enormous student debt, b. the job market for most is bleak, c. we will never be able to own property, and d. most will never achieve financial security, much less financial independence.

No wonder @SenSanders's message that "the system is rigged" resonates for so many millions of people. As if things aren't bad enough economically, they are falling apart politically, too. Populism is on the rise, monkeys are in charge, and politics is toxic and divisive.

Among the hundreds of talented young people I've met, I can only think of one or two with the naked determination to enter politics, at least in this country. At a time when we need good politicians more than ever an entire generation has been disgusted by the current system.

I don't think we should burn down the existing system wholesale but my frustration with this system is intense and growing. I advocate reimagination, not revolution. We have new tools and ideas at our disposal and we must use them. Ethereum is one of those tools.

We can use it to reimagine democracy, with quadratic voting and liquid democracy (cf @DemocracyEarth). To reimagine markets a la @glenweyl's Radical Markets hypothesis. To imagine and #buidl a better, fairer, more inclusive, more humanistic world. It really is that powerful.

To be clear this isn't about Ethereum specifically. It's about what Ethereum embodies: Censorship resistance. Equality of all before the law (of code). Privacy. Permissionless innovation. Radical inclusion and radical transparency. It's about any platform that delivers these.

THAT is what Ethereum is about and that is why it matters. It's a grand economic, political, social experiment and I hope it's just the first of many. It truly gives me hope that we can build a better system together, through radical experimentation.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - R. Buckminster Fuller