Oddbean

A short story on why ETH is dying and will continue to do so: First, why on earth does the ETH crowd work so hard to be the cringiest thing in the world? Second, ETH is stagnant because they sold their token on a bunch of "revolutionary hullabaloo" and literally the only thing with a meaningful market turned out to just be token gambling during the hype cycles. The growth was always on the "next thing" that was gonna "break open the floodgates" of the whole world running on the ethereum VM, but it never came and there was never a use case that really mattered. The value case for Bitcoin was always just fixing the money. ETH thought it was literally going to replace the entire internet with a giant, slow AF, expensive, poorly secured and completely unnecessary consensus system because the whole world would financialize everything arbitrarily, and literally sold people on that idea. Apparently all of the same things, "BuT WiTh tOkENs!" that inject pointless volatility, liquidity problems, and that were all centralized anyway, was somehow a "groundbreaking" idea. -- Bitcoin realized that the problem was the gross OVER financialization of the world, and the pointless gambling of the fiat financial and political apparatus that had caused staggering imbalances and trillions in misallocated and wasted resources. All resulting from shitty, cheap, endlessly manipulated money. It sought to END it. -- While ETH didn't even understand that as a problem. To the contrary, it sought to EXPAND the over financialization of everything into every last corner of the world and into every market that it hadn't yet ruined. It only hung on for as long as it did because it had a "roadmap" and everyone could just point to a date in the future where it would suddenly get better and fix all the problems. It was the iceberg build, then the avalanche merge, then the deep freeze, or whatever stupid name they came up with for the15 stages of their 1 year plan that stretched out a decade, that finally culminated into the conversion to a PERMISSIONED proof of stake system... and it was all just a giant "meh." It's now even more convoluted and less secure, and essentially for the sole purpose of appealing to the "cult of fixing the weather." And still to this day, they survive on the last vestiges of token gambling, but increasingly people are finding out that theres no long term market to gamble on stuff that has no purpose to begin with, except to simply gamble with money. Adding arbitrary tokens just makes it worse. Slot machines are far simpler and serve the purpose perfectly. And if the tokens aren't going anywhere, then there is no way up, and if the token gambling isn't going anywhere, then what does ETH even do except suck at the one thing #Bitcoin has done since the beginning? Be reliable, trustworthy, open, and incorruptible money. #Bitcoin sught to undo the destructive disincentives of the fiat world. While ETH tried to "technify" all of those bad incentives by tokenizing it all on the blockchain, without ever understanding what any of it actually meant. -------------------- Financialization for the sake of financialization is so completely missing the point. That is always what "crypto," with ETH as the cringe father of it all, really represented. The slow, drawn out fall of ethereum was easily predicted. nostr:note1txflur2zcx2j92acjmx7xljm9a2t7sw9tj62qgx94rz6fdn47h2sk4a5ej

I hadn't thought about it before, but it's quite hilarious to think that I'd rather just gamble at a slot machine and pay with Bitcoin than fuck with shitcoins. It would be simpler and more fun if I actually enjoyed gambling. And if I didn't have a strategy for being a pump and dump scammer, I'd be far better off just saving my fiat. This is why my blossoming Bitcoin mind originally went Bitcoin only, I just didn't realize it fully at the time. It's not hard to imagine that others will have a similar experience and flock to sound money, even without fully understanding why. In the short term, it's just easier to breathe. I lost so much stress when I went Bitcoin only. It was a massive weight lifted. I chose Bitcoin because it was the only one of any real value in my limited knowledge based opinion at the time. nostr:nevent1qqs0sj7fdma6gc7073sah6dk554ynm9tjg3qq3gelts2r6k26734m8cpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsyg9euaj5dwsxg4hdxqweu54uf8ay3ec2d0ezs2l85xh899rkzgprmspsgqqqqqqsm308gy

All utility tokens are just promises of some arbitrary, singular utility that will be "trapped" behind the use of the token itself. In how it was framed and used, I think "financialization of everything" is the best way to describe the crypto thesis. https://i.nostr.build/2o9nTwWwDhsMmkM0.png

Great post, man. This is exactly why I was so confused and saddened by the decision of Bitcoin devs to allow users to embed monkey pictures and other garbage on-chain. The beauty of ETH is that it attracts all of those worthless use cases and the charlatans that shill them like a magnet 🧲 — keeping them safely away from the Bitcoin ecosystem. And the Bitcoin community responds by bringing that crap into our own house? I don’t get it.