This is fair warning, world! When we ignore ethics in artificial intelligence, the result is the reproduction at scale of discriminatory behavior in the underlying data set. When we ignore ethics in social media, the result is automated mass-manipulation of human opinion. When we ignore ethics in the attention economy, large technology companies can use behavioral hacks to addict us to endless scrolls of information we don’t care about.

If we ignore ethics in the cryptoeconomy, we will have both distributive outcomes that we do not desire, and the inability to change them since they will be written into software, not into malleable law.

You could already make the argument that multi-level marketing scheme ICO design can be used to extract financial resources from an economy today. Spin up a bot army and promote a few hundred aspirational projects with the intent to pull money from naive participants. I don’t believe that’s primarily what is happening, bit it would not be hard to accomplish with discounts, bounties, and social media.

I am massively excited about the future where blockchain tech finally marries the human with the digital. But Vlad Zamfir’s concern is real and fundamental to this moment.