The digital currencies space is booming, nearing a market cap of $100 billion. Higher than many multinationals and even the GDP of some small countries as awareness reaches new levels.
The last time this happened, although at a far smaller scale when the combined market cap was at $10 billion or so, was during 2014, when a number of household brands, including Dell, Microsoft, even some parts of the Times Magazine, seemingly embraced bitcoin by accepting it for payments.
Some wondered back then whether it was too early for btc. With hindsight, it probably wasn’t, but the currency botched the opportunity, sinking under its own weight, due to their failure to increase capacity to keep up with demand.
It was, and remains, self inflicted, with the network now considered as old, outdated, expensive, while the community many say is toxic, even idiotic, unable to behave in a professional manner.
Ethereum now is experiencing bitcoin’s 2014 moment, but at a far higher level and scale because bitcoin never had an alliance. No bitcoiner ever met a President. And bitcoin’s child prodigy left them at inception.
But the similarities are there nonetheless, conceptually. Just as some household brands adopted bitcoin back then, many more household brands are adopting ethereum now.
So just as some asked then, they are asking now whether ethereum is ready? With the only rational answer being that whether it is ready or not it has to be, and if it is not it has to get to a ready level or it sinks.
But which is likely? To definitively answer that question requires a crystal ball, which unlike Trump or the Saudi king, we don’t have, but we can try and engage in a somewhat objective analysis through deduction and probabilities.
Ethereum has had the benefit of traveling a path that has already been walked upon by bitcoin. So they can see what the traps are, what is to be avoided, what is to be embraced.
One of the traps for bitcoin was the voluntary, although unintended perhaps due to nativity, vacuum created by developers who may have misjudged good-will and may have trusted too much in a trustless currency.
Another one was bitcoin’s focus on rhetoric, rather than technology. Here, if our space does really succeed as we hope it to, they will make a great tale about the fools and the wise.
They will tell the story of how Nakamoto, who brought a great gift, told them not to taint it by sending it to the great fire of super high politics, where high principles and the rest can be less relevant than playing chess.
And then they will tell how the fools ignored the wise man, and nonetheless held a fragile egg as the savior of Wikileaks at the height of a chase by the great empire.
Then, they will say how the great living genius saw them to be fools, descended into depression, into pessimism, and left them. For the fools to prove their idiocity by asking, where art thou, why have you forsaken us?
That tale should be a great warning to Ethereum’s community, because divided we must fall. Only united can we stand. It is a refrain throughout history, that is why the best attacking strategy, whether intended or otherwise, is to cause division.
That strategy can only succeed when wise advice is not heeded. That is why it is crucial ethereum must operate on pragmatic, objective and logical thinking, rather than ideological, Utopian, or even superstitious what ifs.
As long as that is maintained, whatever challenge may come, this community can face. For the greatest enemy is not others, but ourselves. For others look up to us, as long as we don’t eat our own, because we do provide a solution to many things.
Not in the teenage manner of shouting that we can throw away all our plates, while having no better plates to replace them with, thus being left with no cutlery to eat, but in the rational manner of the intellect that has driven forward this world since we were cells.
A rationality that has driven it forward in a consensual way. Not by shouting to walls, but by showing how it is all just better, superior, beneficial to everyone, in a way that improves everything in an incremental manner, the British glorious manner.
So we think it is probable Ethereum will swim as its community appears to be largely grounded, pragmatic, highly educated, tech focused, while enjoying the benefits of learning from bitcoin’s mistakes, both the very recent ones and the ancient ones in internet time frames.
Whether that will indeed be the case only time can tell. Yet what one can say with some confidence is that even if it does sink it will necessarily give rise to a stronger, more nimble, swimmer.
But, we think it is unlikely a better replacement is required for eth appears to have the necessary qualities to meet the challenges of creating a very new future where those flying cars might actually become a thing.
