Talking about Shiba Inu token in the Lex Fridman Podcast: “On destroying 90% of the token worth 6.7 billion dollars, and donating 10% which is worth 1.2 billion at the time to India CoVid-19 relief fund, stating you did not want to be the locus of so much power.”
Vitalik Buterin in the podcast explains why and how he was able to walk away from this much money and this much power.
Vitalik started off stating that he would like to explain the bad story around the Shiba Inu Coins and the concept of him being given coins.
“First of all in Shiba Inu as you said is the knock off of DogeCoin. DogeCoin was the initial kind of fun coin that was created around 2014 or so. It was just created by Jackson Palmer and he put it out as a joke for a couple of hours and a community formed around it.
At the beginning, people did not take it very seriously. I still remember putting around $25,000 in to Doge sometime around in 2016 and I remember thinking to myself like okay how I am going to explain myself to my mom that I just invested $25,000 in to Doge Coins.
The only interesting thing is that there is a logo a Dog somewhere, but it ended up as one of the best investments I ever made. It did really well and at the end of 2020, Elon Musk of course started talking about DogeCoin, and the market cap just shot up to 50 billion dollars. It shot up multiple times, like the first time it went up from about 0.8 cents to about 7 cents. And, it just happened all in one day.
And, I remember this was one, I was still in Singapore in the middle of Covid and saw that the price just went up by 1000% And, I was like Oh, my god. And, I immediately called some of my friends and told drop everything and scramble I just sold half the Dogecoin. I got 4.3 million dollars and donated the proceeds to give directly.
And, a few hours after, I did this the price dropped back down from about 7 cents to 4 cents. So, I was feeling like I was such an amazing trader. But then, the price went up to 4 cents and then to 7 and then to 16 – I was like Is Doge becoming this big phenomena, where even there are a lot of people that have heard of Doge, but not have heard of Ethereum. It is like something even I was predicting.
After that we have Doge and then people are thinking, well if the leading DogeCoin is worth 50 billion dollars then the second largest Dog token will be at least 7 or 8 billion. That is kind of silly and that is the kind of mindset of these Shiba People Is.”
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