🪙 The founder of Ethereum has 3 big worries

GM, this is the Milk Road.  Your place for crypto news and takes, just the meat, no bun.

Email Read Time: 3 Minutes & 48 Seconds

What are the big stories today?

• ⏱️ Vitalik graces the cover of TIME

• 🐐 Vitalik and Tom Brady

• 🤑 On the verge of the ETH Merge

• 💧 The leaked Bored Ape deck you gotta see

"The Prince of Crypto Has Concerns"

TIME Magazine just dropped their first magazine as an NFT. 

They chose Vitalik Buterin - creator of Ethereum, and my new favorite person on earth (used to be The Rock, but now it's Vitalik, our lanky king 👑).

The article is a 10 minute read, but here’s a 1 minute summary: 

3 Things Vitalik is Concerned About:

1. Overeager investors jumping in and investing more than they can afford to lose

2. Public flaunting of crypto wealth - buying yachts & lambos (can hurt public perception)

3. High transaction fees making it so that you can only use it for finance & gambling

Vitalik still believes Ethereum can do meaningful things for the world….

He hopes Ethereum will become the launchpad for all sorts of experiments:

• fairer voting systems

• urban planning

• universal basic income

• public-works projects. 

• Above all, a counter-punch to authoritative governments (eg. Russia) or tech monopolies (Facebook, etc)

He likes that it's crazy. But wants "Good Crazy" not just "Bad Crazy"

He wants the ecosystem to have "Good Crazy" and "Bad Crazy."

Bad Crazy = hacks, crime, scams etc.. 

Good Crazy = new experiments like new funding models for science & research (eg. quadratic funding), universal basic income, soulbound nfts etc.. 

Basically, Good Crazy is new stuff that's net positive for the world. 

He wants to make sure there’s good crazy going on, not just bad crazy. 

He understands … it’s not up to him

Unlike Zuck at Facebook, Vitalik isn’t the CEO of Ethereum. There is no CEO. It’s decentralized. 

But he does have influence & a voice. People like me want to hear what he has to say, even if it's just an opinion, not a command. 

He’s got a superhero origin story: 

His parents lost their life savings when the Soviet Union collapsed and inflation ate their life savings (hmm… sounds like a traumatic experience that would make you like money that can’t be inflated away by the government..) 

At age 4 he was using Excel spreadsheets

At age 7 he could recite 100 digits of pi 

At age 17 his dad showed him Bitcoin 

At age 19 he wrote the Ethereum whitepaper, and now Ethereum is worth $340B+ (based on market cap.)

He started small. He wrote articles as a freelancer for Bitcoin Weekly for 5 Bitcoin/article ($4 at the time). Then he created Bitcoin Magazine. Now he is a staff writer for the Milk Road. 

OK, made the last part up.

People saw the Time Magazine cover photo and started making fun of his appearance…

Here at the Milk Road, we include a picture of Vitalik at the bottom of every email because: 

1. Someone accidentally put it there in the first edition, so we made it a tradition

2. Vitalik created something amazing. ETH is the backbone of web3

3. We love the decentralized daddy. Our lanky king. So we honor him in each daily edition. 

But some people saw the Time mag cover and started making fun of him. One theme: people saying he looked like a freakishly skinny Tom Brady.

The best part, Vitalik has no idea who Tom Brady is: 

Tom Brady replied, calling him the goat. (while name dropping his nft project 😑) 

Can’t wait for the jersey swap at next year’s Super Bowl: 

ON THE VERGE OF THE ETH MERGE

One of the biggest moments in Ethereum history is getting closer and closer…the Merge.

On Friday, one of the “test” versions of the merge was successfully completed. 

Meaning, we’re getting closer to merge than you were with your high school prom date.

What’s the merge mean?

ETH is going from “Proof of Work” to “Proof of Stake” with one goal in mind: faster  transactions with less energy.

What changes? 

People who hold ETH can “stake it”, putting skin in the game to help validate transactions.

I’m not a giga-nerd, do I care about the merge? 

1. Yes - smart money thinks this will drive the price upwards. 

There are many reasons, but here’s a simple one. There will be less sell pressure every single day. 

Right now, miners have to pull the money they earn out to pay real bills (costs money to run their mining computers). Right now that’s about ~$40M of sell pressure every day. No mining = less sell pressure daily = price goes up? 

2. This is the big step towards more scalability & lower fees == which makes more apps possible. 

When will this happen?

Nobody knows….but people are predicting June.  We’re closely watching Wenmerge.com and will keep our beloved readers in the know.

P.S. if you wanna go deeper, this Reddit post is damn good.

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FIVE NUGGETS

“Bitcoin is exciting because it shows how cheap it can be. Bitcoin is better than currency in that you don’t have to be physically in the same place and, of course, for large transactions, currency can get pretty inconvenient.”  - Bill Gates

The Bored Ape Yacht Club funding deck leaked over the weekend.  It's 93 slides and shows their grand vision.  Spoiler alert: it's to create the gaming platform for the metaverse.  [Read the whole deck here]

Do Kwon, the founder of LUNA, confirmed that he's about to buy $3B worth of Bitcoin.  This is a strategic move to protect the potential worst case, death spiral of LUNA. Now, when there is fear in the UST market, the UST can be redeemed for BTC, which shouldn't drag the price of whole LUNA ecosystem down. [Read more here]

Balaji dropped a new book on Twitter about the Network State.  He even hinted at an NFT for everyone who orders now, a clever way to rise up those Amazon rankings. [Read more here]

“Is Uber going to accept crypto in the future? Absolutely.” - Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber CEO

Alright, that's all for today!

Shaan "Chocolate Milk" Puri and Ben "2% Milk" Levy

What'd you think of today's email?

• 🥛🥛🥛🥛🥛 F**king great

• 🥛🥛🥛 Meh, do better

• 🥛 You didn't bring the heat