The prediction cited by Buterin was anticipating a supply of 150.8 million Ethereum five years out. Still, the actual supply today is only 111.3 million.
Ethereum (ETH) creator Vitalik Buterin tweeted today that the amount of this cryptocurrency is 40 million less today than what was predicted in the original whitepaper. Buterin said he believes the situation with the current supply contradicts the theory that Ethereum is run by inflationist technocrats.
ETH supply that the whitepaper says we would have today: 150.8 million
Actual ETH supply today: 111.3 millionSo please don’t try to claim that ethereum is run by inflationist technocrats. pic.twitter.com/6CuPngDbHY
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) June 17, 2020
The prediction cited by Buterin was anticipating a supply of 150.8 million Ethereum five years out. Still, the actual supply today is only 111.3 million. The issues of inflation and deflation are always combative for crypto traders, as many believe that the implied deflationary nature of cryptocurrency is one of its most important assets over its fiat counterparts.
Even though Buterin’s conclusion is interesting on its own, it would even more interesting if he had also compared today’s state of Ethereum with where it was supposed to be according to the plan.
Meanwhile, today ETH price is slightly down. The coin is trading at around $232 which means that it has lost around 0.43% in teh last 24 hours.
Situation with Current Supply of Ethereum Contradicts Original Theory
But let’s see what the actual whitepaper says. It starts with the Ethereum main intention to merge together and improve upon the concepts of scripting, altcoins and on-chain meta-protocols, and allow developers to create arbitrary consensus-based applications that have the scalability, standardization, feature-completeness, ease of development and interoperability offered by these different paradigms all at the same time.
It then says:
“Ether” is the main internal crypto-fuel of Ethereum, and is used to pay transaction fees. In general, there are two types of accounts: externally owned accounts, controlled by private keys, and contract accounts, controlled by their contract code. An externally owned account has no code, and one can send messages from an externally owned account by creating and signing a transaction; in a contract account, every time the Page 13 ethereum.org contract account receives a message its code activates, allowing it to read and write to internal storage and send other messages or create contracts in turn.”
Recently, Buterin said the current financial crisis is very different from the 2008 Global Financial Crisis that Bitcoin came from and that the crypto community needs to adapt its thinking appropriately. Buterin stated that some of Bitcoin’s anecdote had not been borne out this time around.
He then went on to say that 2020 is not a repeat of the financial crisis in 2008/2009. He also said it is a “virus crisis”, a crisis of “epistemology” and one of “overbearing policing”.
‘Money Printer Did Go Brrrrr’
Buterin reiterated the idea that the Bitcoin story regarding the inflation was an important aspect of the immediate situation, not least because of the approaching specter of deflation:
“Yes, the money printer did go brrrrr. But that’s a relatively small portion of what is going on, and even there inflation is still going *down* not up.”
Buterin also added that Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are unrelated to traditional assets, had not been carried out until now. As proof, he showed a chart of the downturn in the S&P 500 that happened in March, at the same time the value of Bitcoin and other digital currencies dropped more than 50%.
Buterin said it was “high time” the community went after the attitude shown in Binance Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Changpeng Zhao’s tweet that: “Bitcoin is the peaceful protest.”
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