Why Ethereum Lost The Plot [Su Zhu]

Listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_2fDTuh5aU (start at 25min mark) Crypto villain of the year https://cryptobriefing.com/2021-review-the-top-10-crypto-villains-year/ Transcript i would be curious to learn in what sense has ether over optimized for being money so what at what points did it make a trade-off like a conscience trade-off to say we we designed the chain to be better money and worse as let's say an execution layer sure i think a good broad way to understand it is if you look at antonio the founder of do idx's tweets about it afterward and he he said you know the ethereum user experience on on layer one has basically not even 10xed over five years um and at that time the roadmap was very much to to figure out how to cater to users and developers right um and and so i think just like if you just zoom out that far it's pretty easy to see that we're we're in a very different place today on ethereum than it was uh a couple years ago and i think the another easy way to see this is just with d5 itself right where if you look at the d5 that's kind of really taken off and done well it's been crosstrained it's been non-ethereum right so you know luna versus snx but then also you know um sort of projects on avalanche versus projects on ethereum the you know the same exact project but they'll do better on avalanche um and then you know you you you kind of get a sense that um i think ethereum rightfully says that they're the bedrock or kind of the uh birthplace of defy innovation right but what that also means is that if that's the main claim to to to um sort of power that that that becomes quite it becomes quite nostalgic like in a way right uh where um what about the new users or what about the new developers where do they go and and you know what we're seeing is that new developers are just multi-evm right so they deploy where the users are because their goal is to have their product be used you know so an example is we back tranches which is a quite quite uh novel mechanism for doing risk sharing across um longs and shorts and it's got one of the highest tbls in d5 right but they started off on bsc and the the founders love ethereum but they just said if i launched on l1 uh there's no way and i'm not gonna launch on matic because if i'm gonna launch on another chain anyways i might as well launch where the actual users are right so uh okay this is what kind of work this is kind of what we're seeing on the app side and then you look at the performance of d5 coins too right you know when we have that part let's take note with the performance let's let's stick with the sort of the tech for a second because yeah sure sure so um if we i think if we look at blockchains from actually first principles it's really just you know it's a shared database where anyone can can verify or where anybody can see that the the computation that was done whether it's a transfer or a smart contract execution that was done with integrity so that was that was done correctly right and you can have various kinds of such uh database basically so being the most centralized would be just binance right the centralized exchange nobody has any insight into their database but it has a lot of reputation at stake um so you just trust it to you know perform all the other updates correctly pretty much and on the other extreme you have something like bitcoin and ethereum where they say oh we throttle the network um really hard to sort of keep um this verification cost this cost for people to actually do the accounting themselves to to to to walk through every step that was done and say oh i can i can verify without making any trust assumptions that all of this computation was done correctly right and in the middle between these two extremes centralized exchange and the completely decentralized blockchain you have a pretty wide trade of space right and um that's where you find bsc that's where you find avalanche and solana at some points across these spectrums right but sort of what i'm wondering is i mean are these other chains really gonna you know develop in in in any other way i mean than ethereum and bitcoin so their databases are always so yeah i guess my answer would be they already have and they will continue because they are attracting all the new users i think this is the just the reality of the space right and i think you know when i told you that half of metamask users are bsc users and it under shocked you it's because a lot of you know a lot of ether ogs and biblical energies they don't use chains because they don't need that money right like you don't need to make a thousand dollars you don't need to make ten thousand dollars right you're too wealthy to care but that says more about you than it says about other people right so it's kind of my point which is that um i i find that a lot of ethiopians they're in the mindset now where they're like i'm already rich and you have to understand why what i've done is so good and also what i why what i'm preserving is so valuable and valuable as it may um you have given very few outlets for new users to come and participate in what you've done and and so you know that's the reality of the space and and you know having matic is not is not an answer right because if you have matic then they say what is the difference between matic and any other l1 right and then and then you open up that door and then yeah of course of course there's none right so so i think that that's kind of the reality of the space and i agree with you a hundred percent on you know there is a you know a decentralization trade-off uh between each of these and i think what the novel sort of understanding that i have or or that um i think the market has as well is that um where ethereum is on the trade-off scale um [Music] it it is optimized for a world that um it's struggling to maintain its network effect for evm itself where evm developers are immediately deploying to every chain and then users are using where they find it most convenient so i would say in april or march i would have said that ether itself uh will benefit a lot from this multi evm i believe i said that in a thesis um and he did and i think in part ether has right it has outperformed bitcoin quite a bit uh since then because ether benefits from being able to be ported around on evm just much easier right so you can bring your you know y...