5tanley

I think Ethereum’s original sin was not considering tokenomics with every move it made from Dencun on. The ultrasound money thesis was a good one and with Dencun (or the L2 roadmap generally) they should have stopped to say that this was going to hurt the ultrasound money thesis and consider how to preserve it. Most people, like David, don’t want to believe in something that isn’t also putting up points on the scoreboard. When the main offering becomes ideology/communism and money/tokenomics/capitalism are overlooked, the peasants are going to revolt — as they’ve been doing for two years now. Look at the public reaction to Tomasz: broad praise, a sense of hope, excitement, the price pumping … only for him to be gone a year later with the new ED being someone who cannot even be found online except for a Wayback Machine url with his name that has some really questionable statements on it (and I should say the EF denied that this website, which was taken down a few weeks after he was appointed to the board, is his). They’re going to be really mad at me for even mentioning that but in the place of a void, these are the kinds of things people will glom onto. Then there was the manifesto — I mean, mandate, which they backtracked on forcing people to sign. (Btw, this is the second bit of news that seems to relate to Bastian. And now the third would be all these departures. There’s nothing else for us to point at and say about him — when I searched for his name on Google News just now only 14 links came up. He seems to be some kind of invisible hand behind the scenes.) I don’t think ideology and capitalism/tokenomics/number go up are mutually exclusive. I think you can have CROPS values and also consider how each step of the roadmap affects the tokenomics and even have teams for BD/ecosystem growth. It feels like the EF doesn’t realize the moment that crypto is in. The competition is only just starting. We are in the phase of real world adoption. The Ethereum Foundation’s CROPS principles are great ones, and they are worth fighting for. But the EF seems to want to sit back on its laurels and act above it all when all its competitors are all getting down and dirty on the field to gain market share. Maybe it is the right approach. I don’t know. I’m just saying that more competitive people won’t align with it. And so they will leave … and community members will as well. I personally don’t think it’s good for Ethereum if its most competitive people depart. Ethereum’s unwillingness to stop the brain drain will only benefit its competitors — or spawn new ones. Giving a shit about price and tokenomics and BD doesn’t hurt CROPS. It just helps ensure that these principles get spread to more people and that other chains that don’t have these principles don’t get a leg up. All the commentary may be pointless. It seems Vitalik tried what everyone wanted and it didn’t align with his vision, so he brought in a new person he felt more comfortable with. It makes me sad to see people become so disaffected with Ethereum, but maybe this is V’s Brian Armstrong/no politics at Coinbase moment where he lays down what the EF will work on and asks everyone else to leave. That was the right move for Coinbase, but I view them as fundamentally different issues. We’ll see whether Ethereum maintains its lead with a foundation that isn’t willing to fight for it.

ethereum isn't a fucking company and you don't "fix" it by building a $1b command center with a board & a mandate to pump eth. the moment you route staking or fee revenue into a central org "aligned with price", you've built a capture machine and called it accountability. that's _not_ alignment, that's governance gravity - power concentrates, others defer, and it slowly becomes the system's real control layer. cypherpunk systems don't win by optimising some retarded balance sheet, they win by resisting control, staying permissionless, and never creating a single point of pressure, bribery, or capture. period.

Has there been a huge vibe shift in CT over the last 2 weeks, or was that just me selling the last of my ETH

The way to save Ethereum: The community needs to create an organization that's economically aligned with Ethereum and accountable to it. The EF now holds less than 0.1% of all ETH. There is no flow of Ethereum staking or fee revenues to it. If we want to get Ethereum back to winning: - create an organisation with credible funding, minimum $1b as a start. That's very reasonable for an ecosystem with $250b market cap - find a leader who is competent and wants to fight - make it accountable: a board of people who want ETH to go up, and a charter that holds the org accountable to it - fund it permanently: A significant amount of staking revenue needs to go to it. A governance mechanism that can adjust it (also part of accountability). Very hard to imagine now, but I think this is the only way (and it will probably happen, but it might take a long time before it is consensus).

Has there been a huge vibe shift in CT over the last 2 weeks, or was that just me selling the last of my ETH