A biography for Fred Ehrsamhasn’t been written yet.
“I'd guess blockchains will be the full-blown backbone of virtual worlds - the system for currency, assets, identity, even governance - before doing the same in the 'real world.' Which is where I think we will end up in the real world eventually; it's just a matter of which goes first and how long until it's the case for both.”
“There's been a myth perpetuated where people think, 'I need to go into consulting, banking, finance, law, or medicine to make a consistently reasonable amount of money.' People are now realizing that's not the case.”
“Bitcoin is valuable as a currency because of the economic efficiencies the bitcoin network is already creating as transactions flow over it. As with the Internet, more applications will flourish which will make the bitcoin network, and thus bitcoin as a currency, valuable.”
“When you drill down, blockchains are really a shared version of reality everyone agrees on. So whether it's a fully immersive VR experience, augmented reality, or even Bitcoin or Ethereum in the physical world as a shared ledger for our 'real world,' we'll increasingly trust blockchains as our basis for reality.”
“Developer mindshare is the most important thing to have in digital currency.”
“The Internet will continue to be valuable so long as it is the most efficient mechanism for transferring data. Bitcoin's value is the same: It will remain as long as it is the most efficient mechanism for transferring ownership.”
“At the end of the day, what's going to make bitcoin successful is more people making more interesting things, just like the beginning of the Internet.”
“Ethereum may make monetary policy decisions like, 'Let's do 1% inflation to support the ongoing development of the Ethereum protocol.' A token built on Ethereum might want to do the same.”
“The best engineered organisms can outpace others, even if they start smaller or later.”
“As with early internet startups, some token models don't make sense. For every 1 huge hit, there will be 3 minor successes and 100 failures, so we shouldn't be surprised when some fail.”
“For the foreseeable future, I'm all about building blockchain-based decentralized services.”
“We are on our way to blockchains as the fabric of society - the system for what we own (assets), who we are (identity), how we make decisions (governance), and more in an increasingly digital world. It's going to be a wild ride.”
“To create an open protocol which helps coordinate resources towards a common goal, the resources need to be known at some level in the same way a lot of of data on the web needs to be public for it to be traversable and useful.”
“Just like mutations to DNA in biological organisms allow for evolution through natural selection, forking lets us run multiple experiments in parallel where the strongest versions survive.”
“AIs are only as good as the data they are trained on. And while many of the tech giants working on AI, like Google and Facebook, have open-sourced some of their algorithms, they hold back most of their data.”
“Tokens align incentives between developers, contributors, users, and investors. They allow everyone who wants to contribute to a project early the opportunity to get in on the ground floor.”
“AIs trained on open data are more likely to be neutral and trustworthy instead of biased by the interests of the corporation who created and trained them.”
“When the actual Bitcoin network launched in 2009, no one knew about it, and many of those who did thought it would surely fail. Just to make sure the thing worked, the scripting language in Bitcoin was intentionally extremely restrictive.”
“Forks often arise from differences of opinion in the direction of a project. And tokens are increasingly a mechanism for voting on changes to their protocols. Since the point of a fork is to try a new path, the new fork may not want to port all of the prior holders opposed to trying the new path the fork was created to take.”
“There is nothing that Bitcoin can do which Ethereum can't. While Ethereum is less battle-tested, it is moving faster, has better leadership, and has more developer mindshare.”