The co-creator of Occupy Wall Street has launched dETH, a coin that destroys ETH from the Ethereum economy.
“ETH sent to this smart contract is irrevocably killed and removed from the economy. It is not just burned, it is dead,” Micah White wrote in a blog post.
dETH users can destroy ETH by transferring the currency to Hades, a “self-destructing smart contract that sends ETH to itself during self-destruction.”
Those sending ETH to the contract are rewarded in dETH, which then functions like any other ERC-20 token.
To encourage the destruction of ETH, the price of dETH increases by 0.1 percent following every purchase. Those destroying more than 3 ETH receive a 30 percent bonus. This is because in Ethereum, 3 ETH is the block reward, and to destroy more than 3 ETH in a single transaction destroys more ETH than is created through block rewards.
White tells Decrypt he created dETH while experimenting with new forms of smart contracts. White is particularly interested in “adversarial smart contracts”, smart contracts that are designed to disrupt the blockchain economy, in a new form of activism.
dETH could be considered an adversarial smart contract because it challenges the monetary policy of Ethereum. White says that dETH “presents a new kind of economic logic”; because the coin itself is the representation of ether that's been destroyed forever. “You could change the fundamental economics of the system,” he says.
White says he is working on more adversarial smart contracts, though is reluctant to go into details. He wants to create the first smart contract to be banned for political reasons—and he knows a thing or two about taking on entrenched economic systems. His most famous project, Occupy Wall Street, challenged wealth inequality in the US back in 2011.
The Occupy movement saw protestors pitching tents near Wall Street, drawing thousands of protestors in person, and hundreds of thousands online. Its slogan, “We are the 99 percent”, still remains in the back of Americans’ minds.
Drawing a parallel with Occupy Wall Street’s humble beginnings, which existed in obscurity months before it went viral, White said that dETH can exist “until people suddenly realize they need it for some reason.” Even if people don’t use dETH right now, the technology is available as and when it becomes necessary, he added: “Activists need Ethereum, even if they don't know it right now.”
“The thing I learned from Occupy Wall Street is that successful creation of something that spreads everywhere is largely not up to our control,” he said. “The only thing we can do is kind of experiment and use our intuition.”
White says that Bitcoin was a form of activism against traditional monetary systems, that, like Occupy Wall Street, grew in popularity as a response to the financial crisis of 2008.
Currently, it seems that dETH is indeed ahead of its time. According to Etherscan, the dETH smart contrast has only received one transaction to date: a transaction of 0.02 dETH, worth absolutely nothing.