Fighting for Truth - The Daily Gwei #369
It's an uphill battle but one that's worth fighting.
Ethereum has had a lot of haters and doubters over the years with many calling it dead during the brutal bear market of 2018 and 2019. Though, as we’re all well aware, over the last couple of years Ethereum has exploded in growth and adoption proving every single one of these doubters wrong. But still, there are people out there now who work to diminish these accomplishments or try to find some way to discredit them - such is the nature of being the tallest tree of the industry.
No matter what Ethereum accomplishes, the goal posts always move. People had said for years that Ethereum would never ship Proof of Stake but then the Beacon Chain went live on December 1st in 2020 and what did those people do? They shifted the goal posts and basically said that because The Merge hadn’t happened yet, Ethereum was not “officially” Proof of Stake. The thing is that I actually agree with them here - but this was not their original critique - saying that “Proof of Stake would never ship” is very different to saying something like “Ethereum will never be a Proof of Stake network”. All this tells me is that these people are not honest critics - they are only interested in tearing down Ethereum with whatever they can latch onto - and that’s exactly why it’s not even worth listening to them.
Another major point that critics like to focus on is how much Ethereum’s roadmap has “changed” over the years and how certain features have been cut altogether. The thing that these people don’t realise is that this happens with every single product or service in any industry - it’s just that Ethereum is developed out in the open so that’s why everyone hears about it. Could you imagine Apple developing the first iPhone completely in the open? Just imagine if the whole world was able to see every failure Apple made, every feature they cut, every iteration they went through - it’d very much look like Ethereum’s public development process. This same principle applies to basically everything - if you have a front-row seat to watching the sausage be made, you’re going to have a lot more to critique than just seeing the final product.
I believe that Ethereum catches the most attention and thus the most hate because it is the largest ecosystem in crypto by far. In saying that, Ethereum isn’t the only ecosystem that has to deal with constant critique and I always find it funny when the only time certain networks are talked about is when something goes wrong (such as when Ethereum Classic suffers a 51% attack every other week). The entire ecosystem could probably benefit from much better criticisms across the board but unfortunately it’s just easy (and popular) to go after something’s weak points. I’m not sure if this is going to change any time soon and if we look at other industries for guidance then I’d probably lean on it not changing - but that doesn’t mean we should stop fighting for the truth.
When Eric Conner and I originally launched EthHub, we did so because we were fed up with the amount of lies and misinformation being spread on Twitter about Ethereum (and we needed a scalable way to fight back). Since then, an amazing ecosystem of educators and media organizations have spun up which means Ethereum is in a very good place when it comes to fighting off bad information. Though, the fight never ends, and I hope you’ll all join me in continuing to educate people about Ethereum in healthy and sustainable ways.
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.