On Tuesday (April 30), at 01:15 (UTC), Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, revealed his interest in Ethereum (ETH) and got seemingly the whole of the crypto community on Twitter very excited with this very short tweet and mysterious:
Ethereum
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 30, 2019
The above tweet generated a huge amount of interest (at the time of writing, it has had almost 63,000 likes), and shortly after it had been sent, people started noticing Elon’s tweet was apparently having a positive impact on the ETH price.
Seven minutes later, Elon sent out the following tweet that suggested that he was joking although it did not look like he was, and it became clear a bit later:
jk
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 30, 2019
Roughly 30 minutes after Elon’s original tweet, Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of Ethereum, invited Elon to come to Ethereum conference Devcon 5, which is taking place in October:
You should come to our Devcon in October 🙂
— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) April 30, 2019
Just three mintes later, Elon sent out the following reply to Vitalik:
Stop giving away free ETH! 🤣🤣
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 30, 2019
Around six hours later, Elon decided to send out a more serious reply to Vitalik’s tweet:
What should be developed on Ethereum?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 30, 2019
Vitalik, who had written about this topic on Twitter before, managed to prepare a comprehensive answer for Elon (in the form of a tweetstorm) within half an hour:
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
(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
In recent months, it has become clear that from Elon’s tweets and interviews that he is interested in cryptocurrency, and more specifically, prior to today, he had talked about Bitcoin (BTC) and Dogecoin (DOGE), but his question about what could be developed with Ethereum suggests that he might be considering if there is some way his car company Tesla could get involved with crypto. In fact, Elon’s tweet about possible applications for Ethereum comes just one day after UK’s largest car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover announced that, via a partnership with IOTA Foundation, it was testing software that would allow drivers of its cars to earn IOTA tokens as reward for data sharing.
According to CryptoCompare, ETH is currently trading at $161.01, up 3.34% in the past 24-hour period:
Of course, not everone in the crypto community was quite as excited about Elon’s interest in Ethereum as Vitalik. For example, Brendan Blumer, Co-Founder and CEO of Block.one (which developed the EOSIO software that the EOS platform runs on) suggested that Elon should consider development on EOS instead:
Might want to check out #EOSIO for two reasons:
1) Performance can meet the needs of real mainstream applications; it’s fast, cheap, and scalable
2) Most things will run on private chains, but public #EOS chains align control with tokens holders, opposed to 2-3 mining pools
— Brendan Blumer (@BrendanBlumer) April 30, 2019
