The tweet below completely misunderstands what Ethereum is and what we're trying to do
The Ethereum community came out of Bitcoin as a way to fulfill Satoshi's ideals, which unfortunately had been compromised as Bitcoin stagnated before it had even fixed its structural economic issues.
We wanted to fix the centralization flaws that Bitcoin decided were ok.
We wanted to build better money. Money that was both more decentralized and more useful. Programmable money that could be used to create new institutions, to experiment with better forms of governance and value allocation.
Building apps on Ethereum make it so that ETH is the _Medium of Exchange_ and the _Unit of Account
_ in the onchain economy.
One of the biggest early use cases in this technology is creating tokens. And then speculating on them. This is actually pretty common over the history of technology and often there's lots of scams and irrational exuberance and just plain gambling. [Small aside, gambling has often been an important part of capital formation, for example in the Wild West in the 19th century]
But it's hardly enough to fulfill Ethereum's vision. Gambling on memecoins and tokens is part of permissionlessness, but we should never let it become the focus.
Ethereum will never compromise on the decentralization of mainnet. It's necessary for ETH the asset and to provide the *one settlement layer* that is trustless. One thing that Bitcoin got right is that you need a maximally decentralized layer 1 to be money and right now you cannot have a scalable and decentralized layer 1. This is what led to layer2.
Historically both Bitcoin and Ethereum pursued state channel networks (an idea from
@technocrypto) for many years as a scalability solution. Ethereum realized years ago that state channel networks are a really really hard problem and require centralization, UX and security tradeoffs that are extraordinarily difficult, a fact Bitcoin is only now coming to terms with.
A better layer2 construction is rollups, which literally put the transaction data on Eth mainnet but move execution to the l2. This provides much more scale than even incredibly centralized chains like EOS or Sqlana or whatever.
Maximizing liquidity for gambling on tokens is not Ethereum's goal. Uber-centralized blockchains like SQLana are just glorified web2 databases. What is interesting about SQLana is that despite the purported advantages, it has less than 10% of the liquidity of Ethereum mainnet. It has also shockingly little scalability for all that centralization and it's already hard to get transactions confirmed on Sqlana when you actually need to.
For 99% of users, fragmented liquidity is not an issue. In fact, it's usually only an issue for whales who are several standard deviations away from normal users. These people tend to have followings on Twitter and be vocal about it. But Ethereum will improve and solve it, even for the relatively small sliver of use cases that have issues.
Ethereum is an epic ongoing project. It's no surprise that centralized chains come around and optimize for little niches. It has always been this way, going back to Counterparty in 2013. Every few months there's a new centralized chain du jour.
Centralized chains can never be money.
Eth is money.
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