What’s the $500,000 Bitcoin Bet Everyone Talks About?

An outrageous bet with more than $500,000 of crypto at today’s prices is on the line between Ethereum’s co-founder Joseph Lubin and Bitcoin educator, developer, and entrepreneur Jimmy Song.

As reported by Coindesk, Lubin and Song made an onstage bet at Consensus 2018 last year, where Lubin told Song that he would bet any amount of Bitcoin (BTC) that Ethereum (ETH) will have successful decentralized applications with a non-trivial number of users in five years.

Now, just one year later, the two individuals met again and settled specific terms of the bet to make it official at Consensus 2019. The entire discussion was recorded by Coindesk Live and can be seen below:

“It’s a Maximum Pain kind of Bet”

The official terms of the bet have been settled. If Ethereum and its dapp economy are doing great 4 years from now, Song will pay Lubin 810.8 ETH. If Ethereum’s dapp economy has failed to perform up to Lubin’s specifications, Lubin will forfeit to Song 69.74 BTC.

At today’s prices, over $500,000 is on the line. In 4 years from now, this bet could easily be valued in millions of dollars. Both parties are aware that whoever loses, it will hurt very badly.

Now, as for the details of the bet: for Lubin to win, Ethereum must have 5 unique dapps with 10,000 or more daily active users and 100,000 monthly active users for any six calendar months up to and including May 23, 2023.

Over the past year, the terms of this bet have been negotiated and hammered out by the two sides. They have even been working on an official document that will be shared with Coindesk once completed. The document is said to include specific definitions of daily active users, among other things, to ensure there is no confusion.

During the Coindesk Live show, Lubin explained both his own and Song’s thesis of the bet:

“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.”

All in all, this bet is no joke, and it will keep everyone on the edge of their seats for the next 4 years. Whether Ethereum will usher in the new decentralized web is yet to be determined, but for Lubin’s sake, it had better succeed.

Who do you think will win this potentially astronomical bet? Let us know what you think in the comment section below.