Regret is the ultimate poison.
If you are thinking about taking the leap and doing whatever it is that you love, you need to just go for it.
You will always regret the things that you don't do, not the things you did.
For all the Ethereum haters out there, pls remember every innovation we had for the last 10 years in this industry was due to Ethereum.
NFTs
Dexes
Perps
ICOs
Stablecoins
I’ve been feeling impatient and disillusioned with Ethereum and saw @TrustlessState sold.
Figured I’d do some research and maybe start to exit myself.
After reviewing, I’m more optimistic than I’ve been in years and won’t be selling.
I think the problem is that Glamsterdam, native rollups, preconfs, lean Ethereum, etc. are super boring. We all want to see some flashy use cases we can see and touch, but Ethereum isn’t a consumer product. It’s not even typical internet infrastructure like (Stripe and AWS). It’s digital bedrock (like DNS and HTTPS).
CT reminds me of engineering demos where the non-technical audience would be more impressed with the junior dev’s flashy UI than the 100x backend engineer’s data pipelines.
The trilemma (secure, scalable, trustless) is solvable and Ethereum still seems to be the best positioned to do so. The “marketing” used to be WAY better and the vibes have fallen apart but I don’t think that matters all that much. I’d rather the devs focus on delivering the increasingly logical and achievable roadmap.
L2s were a mess and the “blockchain revolution” has been taking longer than anticipated but when is progress ever linear?
In the future when nation states, corporations and ai agents are digitizing identity, ownership records, permissions, and contracts, what’s going to underpin it? Siloed servers with fragile APIs and janky data normalization? Paper still?
I still think the “world computer” is IMMENSELY valuable and I still think Ethereum will be the bedrock that enables it. I plan to keep betting my ETH on it for now.
@jchaskin22 I defended and saved around $1m that would jave been allocated to fraudulent projects that were not public goods or real projects in the gitcoin qf rounds. Does that count?
Listening to David’s explanation of why he sold was pretty mind numbing lol…
I recently shared that I was a toxic Bitcoin maximalist for roughly 8 years, from 2017 to late 2024.
Stablecoins are what initially made me revisit my thesis on Ethereum, and on ether as Ethereum’s native asset. That, combined with the rapid approach of the agentic economy - a world with an infinite number of autonomous economic actors sending value through stablecoins across a small handful of networks that society has deemed valuable - made me reevaluate further.
So I went back and revisited my priors on Ethereum. Were my early concerns around centralization, monetary policy, and network effects still valid after all these years? Surely, yes. I set out to prove myself right.
I found out I was wrong.
The centralization concerns I had entirely faded. While I was 100% encapsulated in my Bitcoin bubble, Ethereum had slowly, quietly, and relentlessly built the only other WWIII-proof, global, credibly neutral, decentralized protocol. And in some areas, Ethereum had actually become more decentralized than Bitcoin: client diversity, validator distribution, and a secure long-term scaling/security model through proof of stake.
Ethereum had matured. It had grown out of its early “shitcoin” association. It had become the only truly permissionless, censorship resistant, credibly neutral, and valuable protocol outside of Bitcoin.
It grew up.
That matters because the only reason I was ever Bitcoin-only was that, at the time, there were no other networks with the protocol traits that could plausibly make all of global finance, and eventually much of humanity, value them at the deepest level.
Back then, it was only Bitcoin.
So the irony here is incredible.
Just as Ethereum and ether have finally matured, just as Ethereum has distanced itself from the decentralized-in-name-only, venture-backed, fake startup, “we’re hiding behind a blockchain” mentality, now a small group of influencers have decided to become negative on Ethereum.
When Bitcoiners use the term “shitcoiner,” this is what they are usually talking about.
Bag chasers.
People who want their chain to act like a company. Permissioned. Hyper-structured. Marketing team. CEO. Quarterly reports. Revenue. Earnings. Some polished growth narrative for VCs.
Basically, a bunch of stupid shit that already exists in the fiat world. The same world Bitcoin, and now Ethereum, were created to help us escape from.
To suddenly be disappointed that Ethereum has a broader mandate than “pump my bag,” and is instead focused on hardening the traits that make the network valuable over decades, tells you a lot about how these people misunderstand it.
CROPS is the value proposition.
Censorship resistance.
Resilience.
Openness.
Permissionlessness.
Security.
That is why society values Bitcoin. That is why society now values Ethereum.
And that is why the Laura Shins, Ansems, and David Hoffmans of the world jumping ship now is so revealing. They are not leaving because the thesis broke. They are leaving because they never had the thesis in the first place. They do not and never have seen the value in decentralized, global, open systems - sanctuary technologies or neutral rails that can materially improve people’s lives.
What they have always chased is a high-growth stock equivalent with a smaller market cap. A shiny new object that appears once or twice per cycle; violent upward momentum, narrative, and upside without the patience required to actually understand what is being built. They need to chase because they do not have the time horizon to hold a thesis and let conviction compound over time.
CROPS is the entire value proposition. Do not let startup-brain influencers, who never understood why this ecosystem was created in the first place, gaslight you out of conviction.
This is the most interesting post about Ethereum I've read this year.
The comment section is priceless as well, there are two ways
1⃣Ethereum should fund $1b DAO or organization to ensure the future of Ethereum
2⃣Have multiple DAOs that each cover specific topics like security, development, moonshots, etc to ensure the future of Ethereum
The way to save Ethereum: The community needs to create an organization that's economically aligned with Ethereum and accountable to it.
The EF now holds less than 0.1% of all ETH. There is no flow of Ethereum staking or fee revenues to it.
If we want to get Ethereum back to winning:
- create an organisation with credible funding, minimum $1b as a start. That's very reasonable for an ecosystem with $250b market cap
- find a leader who is competent and wants to fight
- make it accountable: a board of people who want ETH to go up, and a charter that holds the org accountable to it
- fund it permanently: A significant amount of staking revenue needs to go to it. A governance mechanism that can adjust it (also part of accountability).
Very hard to imagine now, but I think this is the only way (and it will probably happen, but it might take a long time before it is consensus).
Anything worth building is built with & for the people around you.
ETHCluj is made of hard work, a lot of hope, the will to make a difference, and support of people who share the same goal. With patience & dedication all the way through.
Grateful to everyone who made this happen