David Vorick had his thoughts about Vitalik’s recent meme coin donations: I believe these donations were immoral, though I also believe Vitalik had honest intentions. Background: Vitalik was gifted a large sum of tokens (50% of the supply) by a project, likely purely as a marketing ploy.

This has the net effect of involuntarily turning Vitalik into a billboard for the project. The tokens of this project are now one of his biggest holdings, it’s a material part of his notional net worth, and in the future it may even generate revenue. In many senses, a bribe.

Vitalik’s response was to sell some of the coins and donate the rest, effectively leveraging the power he was given as the main financial institution of the project to fund charitable efforts **at the expense of the project.

Imagine that someone declared Elon Musk as CEO of their company. And Elon Musk says “I didn’t want this role, but since I’m CEO I might as well sell/donate all the stock and put all the proceeds into charity.” This is roughly analogous to what Vitalik did.

If you zoom out a little bit, any money received by charities did not originate from Vitalik’s wealth. And it also did not originate from the founders of the meme coin project.

Vitalik effectively took it upon himself to do a massive wealth transfer from token’s speculators to a charity of his choice, against the expectations, intentions, and desires of the speculators.

Vitalik should have burned the coins. He resolves the problem where he’s a massive unwilling billboard for the project, and also avoids the ethical mess of taking money from speculators. If he needed to sell a bit to pay for transaction fees and labor, that would be fine.

He also stated, “”I’m mad at one of the only corporations in America that genuinely cares about the environment so I’m going to give my money instead to one of the corporations that genuinely only cares about profit.” – Bitcoiners, probably.”

Good reminder that the people make the product. Ownership is not leadership. This probably is a reinstatement to how important it is to be truly decentralized without getting shaken by the tweets of just one man.

Noteworthy, 90% of buyers are there simply to make fast money. Not because they have a positive nor negative feeling towards any token.

If people have the right to infringe on the rights of others (e.x. by pouring their money into a technology that’s killing the planet – and therefore billions of other people – for zero practical functionality), is that really freedom? Or just plutarchy?