Daily Crypto Thought #5: We’re on the Same Side, Folks
Crypto is filled with techno-religious zealotry. A prime example is Jeremy Rubin’s nonsensical hit piece on Ethereum that somehow made it into TechCrunch today.
Why the Article Sucks
Rubin, an early Bitcoin Core developer and advisor to Stellar, claims that ETH should worthless because it can be replaced by the ERC-20 tokens issued on top of it, both as a medium of exchange and gas payment mechanism.
While theoretically possible, this is the opposite of what actually has transpired in the past year. I’m pretty sure ETH is the cryptocurrency most widely used as Satoshi’s original whitepaper wanted: a global medium of exchange.
This is primarily due to practical reasons. Everyone developing on Ethereum needs some ETH. Tokens are Ethereum smart contracts, so it’s much easier for them to take payment in ETH (assuming the token is actually present at sale 🙃). Finally, most dApps are in Ethereum since the user interface infrastructure is best in Ethereum.
When my company conducts user feedback surveys and pay bug bounties, it’s always in ETH. It’s better than Venmo because last I checked, Venmo can’t pay people outside the US. It’s better than any other cryptocurrency because everyone already has an Ethereum wallet via Metamask or Ledger.
I’m not an Ethereum fanboy; rather, I’m a blockchain atheist with concerns about Ethereum’s long-term viability. It’s too slow, and solutions like Proof of Stake (Casper) and sharding seem to be moving goalposts that are always 12 months away. Meanwhile, Layer 2 solutions like Plasma are promising but can’t yet handle smart contracts. However, this article doesn’t mention any of those things.
In addition, I’m a big fan of how Stellar has built in primitives into their protocol like wallets, anchors, and decentralized exchange. In particular, a unified, chain-wide order book should make their DEXs strong contenders versus the Ethereum ones.
The Real Folks on the Other Side
My real worry, however, is that those of us who are actually BUIDLing stuff, regardless of which chain they’re on, waste our time and attention fighting one another while the real enemies cause mainstream users to lose faith in our industry.
Nic Carter wrote about some of these bad actors today in the article below, which analyzed how coin ranking sites, alt-coin exchanges, and shitcoin projects collude to perpetuate lies about trading volume.
Rankings sites are squarely at the center of the extractive game that siphons money from retail investors and deposits it into the pockets of alt-coin creators and exchange operators.
At the heart of this shell game are fake volume at certain centralized crypto exchanges, which has been written about extensively, starting with Sylvain Ribes in Chasing fake volume: a crypto-plague.
While not impossible, faking trade volume is much harder to do on decentralized exchanges. You can’t just put in a limit buy order and a market sell order at the mid price so that it doesn’t hit the order book. You can’t just return an API that inflates 24h trading volume parameter.
It’s not too late. Let’s spend less time arguing about how our protocol/dApp is 100x better than [similar protocol/dApp]. Instead, let’s spend more time expanding the pie and explaining how what we’re building as a collective industry will benefit users, who as I always try to remind myself, don’t care about decentralization.
