Coinspeaker
Joseph Lubin and Jimmy Song Engage in $500K Bet Over the Future of Dapps

Last year during the Consensus 2018 conference, Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin and Bitcoin developer Jimmy Song engaged in a heated discussion over the future of DApps. On one hand, Lubin was bullish that decentralized applications (DApps) have a bright future. But Song disagreed to this and decided to bet his money on it. He stated:

“The only reason dapps exist is to raise money from gullible people or from greedy FOMO people, and that’s essentially what the ethereum platform has done.”

Being a hardcore Bitcoiner, Song believes it is the only viable blockchain product. He also thinks that other developments in the crypto space will die ahead in time.

However, things have lingered upon the last year with Song accusing Lubin of “weaseling” out of the bet. Just before the Consensus 2019 conference, Song called out Lubin on Twitter reminding him of their last year’s discussion.

As Consensus/MCC and other events near, I want to remind everyone of what happened last year. It's been almost a year and @ethereumJoseph is still squelching on this bet that he proposed in public and on stage. Joe, your ego is writing checks your body can't cash. pic.twitter.com/1V1gkidbGF

— Jimmy Song (송재준) (@jimmysong) May 6, 2019

Finalizing the Terms of Bet

While meeting again at this year’s ongoing Consensus Conference, the two crypto mavericks have sealed the terms of the bet, reports CoinDesk. If Ethereum does well four years from now, Song will pay Lubin 810.8 ETH tokens or its USD equivalent. At the current Ethereum (ETH) price, this equals to nearly $185K USD.

But if Ethereum fails to meet its expectations, Lubin will send Song 69.74 BTC tokens equivalent to $560K at the current price. Note that the payment will happen only in ETH and BTC as per the fixed number of tokens. Thus, if Ethereum were to considerably do well in the next four years by 2023, its price would be much high than it is now. On the other hand, if ETH fails and BTC does quite well, Song will take a hefty amount from the bet.

Both Lubin and Song are aware of this and betting their horses. Song called it “a maximum-pain kind of bet”. “Skin in the game, that’s the idea,” he said. Song further told Lubin that “I want it to hurt for you. I don’t want you to feel like you are donating to charity.”

The terms of the bet include that the Ethereum blockchain should have a minimum of 15 unique DApps, wherein each DApp should have 10,000 daily active users and 100,000 monthly active users for any of the six-calendar months in the year up to May 23, 2023.

The bet shall be mediated by a trusted third-party which remains unknown at the moment. However, both the sides will be working on a shared document available to CoinDesk.

Speaking on this matter Lubin said:

“Jimmy’s thesis was that there would be no significant applications on blockchain, and the only thing relevant in blockchain was bitcoin. My thesis is bitcoin is awesome, and there’s a narrow set of use cases built on bitcoin and that’s wonderful. We love that, but decentralized applications are also really useful.”

Joseph Lubin and Jimmy Song Engage in $500K Bet Over the Future of Dapps