Balaji Srinivasan on Ethereum

The switch from physical mail to email increased speed 1000X and changed the metabolism of business.

Getting a ~1000X improvement in settlement times via ETH (1 day to 1 minute) is similar. I’ve already seen millions of dollars of txs where same minute settlement changes things.

At Earn, we would be on the phone with a client. They would send (say) $100k in ETH. We would hit refresh and see money hit on-chain. We would then send $10 paid messages to 10,000 users.

Ethereum is a major technological breakthrough. Concepts like "colored coins" that had been around since the early days of Bitcoin were made feasible by Vitalik Buterin and company. Smart contracts also extend a lot of the (originally intended) script features in Bitcoin.

Ethereum makes it so simple to issue these tokens that they are the first example in the Ethereum tutorial! Nevertheless, the ease with which Ethereum-based tokens can be created does not mean they are inherently useless. Often these tokens are a sort of public IOU intended for redemption in a future new chain, or some other digital good.