After Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin dropped out of college and launched Bitcoin Magazine, he wrote the Ethereum white paper, which proposed an open source protocol that would take what Bitcoin did for money and do it for everything else: contracts, social networks, and sharing economies. Now, less than a decade later, his idea is valued at about half a trillion dollars, and it is the foundation for the weird new world of NFT artworks, virtual real estate, and decentralized autonomous organizations.
This book is a collection of essays including "On Free Speech," which creates a whole new standard for free speech and how to protect it; "Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election," in which Buterin bets on the Trump-Biden election before and after it was decided, and how the prediction markets help explain the political situation today where so many believe Trump won; and the last essay in the book, "Crypto Cities," where Buterin observes the beginnings already in motion of a future where cities governed through blockchain better serve the public good than governing political institutions do today.
Understanding and engaging with Buterin's ideas will be of growing importance as the consequences of his invention continue to unfold and inspire debate worldwide.
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Les Johnson is a NASA physicist and author. By day, he serves as the senior technical assistant for the Advanced Concepts Office at the NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. In the early 2000s, he was NASA’s manager for interstellar propulsion research and later managed the In-Space Propulsion Technology Project. He is the author of Rescue Mode, coauthored with Ben Bova, as well as Back to the Moon and On to the Asteroid, both coauthored with Travis S. Taylor.