Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum's founder
Ethereum’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, bashed those making over-confident predictions in the cryptocurrency industry. However, he also took the blame for doing the same thing with Ethereum’s roadmap.
For one thing, predictions and forecasts help us prepare for the future as they tell us what to expect. However, the number of fake predictions we see every day in all sectors has become quite alarming.
With no accountability, especially in crypto, we see self-acclaimed experts, project founders, and influencers making predictions that turned out to be wrong, which sometimes hurt the average traders and followers of a project.
Responding to a tweet about Coronavirus and credibility, a Twitter thread called for an accountability framework for those with a high degree of influence, adding that there ought to be an ethical penance for providing wrong information, predictions, deliberate manipulation, etc.
Buterin concurred with the user’s line of thought and went on to start bashing crypto predictions while saying that it would be a great custom to dig up and laugh at people who made “over-confident” predictions a couple of years ago that turned out to be “horribly wrong.”
This is why I think digging up over-confident predictions people made 2-5 years ago that turned out horribly wrong and laughing at them is a great custom to have.
We need at least social incentive to say things that are sane, and we need to be reminded of everyone’s fallibility. http://t.co/UDkDLKkypi
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) April 6, 2020
He went on to dig up a few price predictions made three years ago by crypto proponents and critics alike. One of the predictions was that of John McAfee, who predicted during the 2017 bull market that Bitcoin price would hit as high as $1 million by the end of 2020, or he would eat his own… well, we all know what. John was quite affirmative about his prediction but later said in January this year that it was only a ruse to attract more users to the crypto space.
While Buterin has a point that predictions in the crypto industry are notorious for turning out wrong, he needed a reminder that he also had, in the past, made some over-confident calls about Ethereum development which turned out wrong.
Interestingly, he openly admitted that his ETH predictions were wrong on many occasions.
I agree I was wrong on many of those!
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) April 6, 2020