This week Vitalik Buterin announced the latest stage of Ethereum’s technical roadmap, named ‘The Scourge’.

But what is a scourge?

According to the dictionary, it means ‘a whip used for punishment; or a person or thing that causes great suffering’.

So that’s reassuring. It sounds more like a horror film title than a step in a technological roadmap.

Except, when you look at all the stages of Buterin’s roadmap, they all sound like they could be horror film titles…

‘The Merge’: when an online transaction goes horrible wrong, a man ends up as part human, part crypto-currency, and starts a reign of terror against central banks and traditional forms of monetary exchange.

‘The Surge’: when Ethereum’s value crashes, thousands of bereft investors all mysteriously feel a simultaneous surge of regret and misery that manifests itself in a group vomiting event which drowns the world in sick.

‘The Scourge’: every blockchain in use combines to form a huge, online digital whip which physically attacks computer users worldwide to punish them for their sins… except for Terra Luna owners who’ve suffered enough already.

‘The Verge’: a man mows a strip of grass next to a busy road, haunted by the ghosts of his lost family… who threw him out after discovering he’d invested all their money in Celsius Exchange.

‘The Purge’: is literally a horror film already!

‘The Splurge’: when a series of people spend an inexplicable amount of money on dodgy crypto-currency, a detective finds that every person involved was temporarily possessed by the spirits of crypto-finance arse-wits Kim Kardashian and Matt Damon, and recruits high-priest of real money Warren Buffet to exorcise them.