Blinded by Bias - The Daily Gwei #292
Even billionaires get it wrong.
Jack Dorsey - you all know him as the co-founder and CEO of Twitter and Square - but he’s also been very involved with Bitcoin over the last few years. Today, he announced that Square will be creating a new business to build non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services. Sound familiar? Of course it does - Jack basically wants to recreate Ethereum.
Tweet source: https://twitter.com/sassal0x/status/1415863787496763393
I find it really sad that someone like Jack has willfully ignored Ethereum for years now due to what really is just blind bias (since he’s a hardcore Bitcoiner). He’s missed out on the years of innovation that the pioneers of Ethereum have done across decentralized finance alongside the numerous other innovations. I’m actually not sure if he’s even aware of how far along these things are - believe it or not echo chambers can completely blind people to things that may seem very obvious to those outside of the chamber. Has Jack even personally used a DEX? Has he opened a vault on Maker? What about yield farming with some stablecoins. Hell, does he even have an Ethereum wallet? The funniest thing about all of this is that a couple of weeks ago Twitter even announced that they are issuing NFTs… on Ethereum!
Jack isn’t alone in having this view (or non-view) of Ethereum - I’ve spoken to plenty of people outside of the “Ethereum bubble” who have absolutely no idea how far along Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem is - some of them even think that Uniswap is a “centralized scam”! Of course, many of these people aren’t even thinking critically when looking at Ethereum because they are just extremely tribal about their favorite coin and to be fair, Ethereans can also get this way about other projects sometimes too. Though I like to think that we in the Ethereum ecosystem are much more open to new ideas even if they come from outside of our own ecosystem.
It’s hard to tell if all of this stuff really matters in the long-run - I don’t think it does - but people with large followings and influence ignoring Ethereum is a net negative in the short to medium term. It hampers adoption and forces the ecosystem to spend too much time trying to correct all of the mis/disinformation being spread. I’m not a big fan of using the term “post-truth” but unfortunately I think it’s rather accurate as I constantly see completely wrong information about Ethereum going “viral” and the truth getting little to no attention (a lot of the time because of tribalism).
Regardless of Jack or anyone else’s negative views, I believe that Ethereum is still going to continue growing at a rapid pace for years to come. There are plenty of open-minded pioneers flooding into this ecosystem that will counteract any tribalism from those who would rather keep their heads in the sand. So let’s all keep pushing on - we’ve got a decentralized internet to build.
Have a great weekend everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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Happy birthday, Anthony!
Best wishes.
i wonder if its also a matter of self-conflict of interest in trying to prevent dilution of outside funds to avoid dilution of BTC pricing