Ethereum is Not a Scam - The Daily Gwei #48
Anyone telling you otherwise is being purposefully deceitful.
If you’ve spent any amount of time on Twitter over the last few months and years you’ll be very aware of the fact that a large part of the Bitcoin community considers Ethereum to be an actual scam with even prominent figures like Adam Back holding this view. I consider this to be a really crazy view for someone to hold and incredibly dangerous for newcomers to this space.
There are a few reasons why I believe it is dangerous. Firstly, the top followed accounts on “Crypto Twitter” are basically all Bitcoiners which means they control the narrative flow for newcomers. This is because when someone new first joins Twitter and indicates that they are interested in crypto, a laundry list of these top accounts will pop up and this new person will be recommended to follow them. From here on, new people will begin being exposed to all sorts of misinformation about Ethereum over weeks and months and they are really led to believe that Ethereum is a massive scam.
Secondly, by perpetuating this notion that Ethereum is a “scam”, it makes it much harder for new people to evaluate other projects/investments and come to an educated conclusion on whether they are indeed a scam or not. This, of course, leads to people investing into or follow projects that they believe are “legit” but in fact are actually scams. What makes this even worse is that some of these same Bitcoiners who call Ethereum a scam have promoted actual scams in the past to their followers! Some of them even continue to promote things like the Liquid sidechain from Blockstream as being “more decentralized” than Ethereum (which it isn’t since Liquid is a federated sidechain).
Lastly, these opinions from Bitcoiners are not confined to just the small world of Crypto Twitter - they ripple out to other areas such as the mainstream media which then continue to perpetuate these lies. Unfortunately, as Andreas says, it takes 10x the time to debunk bullshit as it does to state it which means that these lies and misinformation can spread like wildfire and then trying to clarify it for people becomes an extremely uphill battle. On top of this, the people spreading these lies usually have much greater reach than those trying to defend against them which makes it even more difficult to rebuke.
This whole thing is actually one of the major reasons that my Co-Founder Eric and I decided to launch EthHub back in January of 2019 - there was just so much misinformation and outright lies being spread about Ethereum (especially since it was a bear market). Since then, the Ethereum community seems to have developed a very strong immune system and has a better grasp on defending itself from these “attacks”. This is obviously a very positive development and I hope that it continues into the future.
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.