Daily Crypto Thought #9: Ethereum == JavaScript
Overnight, shorting Ethereum became the new hot trade. From Techcrunch publishing an article on why Ethereum is doomed to Coindesk’s article today on ETH short volume, the pitchforks are out for last year’s cryptocurrency darling.
Now I don’t have a view on the price of Ethereum as a whole or relative to other cryptocurrencies. However, I think one reason for the price drop is because people foresee the ability for other smart contract blockchains like EOS and Cardano, as well as Bitcoin-based solutions like Lightning Network and Rootstock, to replace Ethereum.
I’m skeptical. Why? Because people hate change.
Currently, the Ethereum ecosystem has a near-monopoly on developer attention. This is natural because it’s a lot easier to develop on Ethereum than any other platform currently. Resources available to developers include:
- Infura: Ethereum nodes as a service
- Truffle: Testing and deployment framework
- Metamask: In-browser Ethereum wallets with millions of users
- and lots of Solidity tutorials online…
Ethereum’s scalability issues may eventually force developers to find new blockchains, but those new blockchains would need to be “10x better” to get developers and users to switch over.
This will probably happen to some extent, but I think Ethereum will still keep the majority of developers and users. I predict that Ethereum will end up like Javascript: certainly not the most elegant or speedy of programming languages, but one of the most widely used simply due to ease of learning curve and existing adoption.
Note: Maintaining a daily publication pace for 8 days was a lesson in how inexorable the publication deadline is for real journalists. To ensure that I’m writing quality stuff, I’m going to relax the “every day” constraint and write when I think I have something to say! 🤔
