Vitalik: Ether Cap Is a ‘Joke’ Worth Taking Seriously

Just trolling – but maybe we should do it anyway.

That’s the gist of a tweetstorm Monday from Vitalik Buterin, in which the ethereum creator said his proposal to create a hard cap on the supply of ether tokens was intended as an April Fool’s “meta-joke.”

While he said he originally just wanted to see people argue over the merits of fixing the supply, Buterin added that he now believes the idea is “worth considering.”

Ethereum Improvement Proposal 960, published April 1, suggested that the ether supply be capped at 120,204,432 units, twice the amount originally sold in 2014. Addressing the cryptocurrency’s presently unclear monetary policy, the proposal suggested that a hard cap would “ensure the economic sustainability” of ethereum.

It should not matter whether or not the proposal was written as a joke, Buterin said Monday on Twitter. Because “the words actually were written in the github issue, and the arguments for it are real arguments,” he said the suggestions are “very real.”

He continued, saying:

“If the community wants fixed supply and people believe that EIP 960 is a good way to achieve that, then it should adopt the proposal. If the community does not, then it should not. This is true regardless of whether or not the original intent was in jest.”

Buterin also said some 20 percent of his blog post announcing the EIP was plagiarized from the website of Tron, a digital entertainment blockchain startup.

Yet based on community feedback, Buterin said he “now believes” that developers should look at creating a hard cap. He listed some arguments in favor of the proposal, including that in the long run, “inflationary tokens are a bad idea.”

Buterin concluded by saying that the ethereum community has progressed from waiting for the core developers to make every change to debating ideas regardless of who proposes them, but noted that “there’s still a long way to go.”

Image via CoinDesk archives