Vitalik Buterin and Elon Musk’s Ethereum Discussion

Elon Musk struck up a conversation with Vitalik Buterin regarding Ethereum over the past few days. The exchange was made via twitter and it seemed to begin with Musk trolling the Ethereum co-founder.

Musk began by simply tweeting “Ethereum” and a couple of minutes later followed by “jk” (which means “Just kidding”, for those that don’t know). Buterin responded by asking him to attend Ethereum’s Devcon in October which prompted Elon to respond with a genuine question.

The Tesla founder asked Buterin “What should be developed on Ethereum?”. Vitalik replied saying, “A globally accessible financial system, including payments, store of value, also more advanced stuff like insurance,” as well as talking about creating a peer-to-peer market for internet connections and also mentioned a system which would be suitable for people with limited resources. It would allow for reputation, identity and credit systems for people such as refugees.

He also said that Ethereum could be used to develop the following:

• 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
• Cryptoeconomics/micropayment schemes to reward publishers of good content
• Testing ground for new market designs, eg. frequent batch auctions, combinatorial auctions, automated market makers

He also went on to mention many more things in his discussion with Elon Musk, such as a platform which automatically filed insurance claims for hurricane aid if a warning is issued to a location. There was also mention of aiming to prevent spam in Social networks and the ability to use an Ethereum account to sign into Facebook in an attempt to remove intermediaries.

Many more suggestions were made by Buterin alongside the ones mentioned above. Is Elon Musk planning to work alongside Ethereum with their developments? Or was he just curious to find out what Ether’s plans were? Their twitter conversation seems to have died down for now, but there is always a chance it could spark up again. Click here to read the full thread.