Ethereum Will Win
Let's Go Gambling!​
I love gambling. I hate gambling.
Casinos are not healthy for chains. Should they be online crypto casinos, or attention window casinos, they always have the goal of max-extraction. And not just of on-chain liquidity, but of people, leaving in their wake endless tales of regret and alienation.
Casinos are a low effort vehicle to extract value from a chain. They are running a business, and they will win because their winnings are built into the system (upfront fees or mathematical house edge). Then they remove liquidity (not a point of argument, it's an observable on-chain fact). They are not interested in culture, the common good, or humanity—only themselves. They've accumulated billions from crypto users and off ramped it. You can't ask someone delirious with greed to give back even a little.
Casinos are not consumer friendly. They are inherently predatory. They shouldn't be promoted as the first step into an ecosystem—a system which must sustain itself (even the lion knows it must not be too greedy). Ask yourself, if you care about a blockchain's ecosystem, do you really want its primary use case to be gambling? That's just not sustainable! Casinos are not a moat, they are a pit. Yet, by the numbers, you could say that the casino is what crypto users want. They want the ponzi. They want the lottery. People who don't align with this can be seen as naïve in the same way a mobile game developer would be who didn't fill his games with ads and endless P2W IAPs.
Animals love randomness. When birds can press a button to get a consistent amount of seeds to eat, they press the button until they are full and then leave. When birds can press a button and get a variable amount of seeds to eat, they press the button like a maniac—the stimulation of random outcomes is enough to be its own pleasure.
It's the same psychological drive in us humans that make us keep playing games with random loot such as Diablo 2 or Path of Exile. Just one more kill and maybe you'll get the lucky drop.
Gambling is a part of human nature, but it has the power to destroy us.
Throughout history, it has been demonstrated that challenging human nature is almost impossible. When physical constraints are lifted, humanity’s animal nature is free to fully express itself. And that’s exactly what we see in modern societies full of extreme abundance. Take, for example, the novel slot machines of social media: the worst victims of these anti-social doom-scrolling traps are failing to reproduce or leave any kind of lasting legacy. Future generations are being shaped by these algorithmically optimized dopamine toys.
Variability is just like any other dopamine stimulation method. We all enjoy it at an animalistic base level. But we must not use it as a foundational structure to build upon.
If we were to simply say, "Truly I am only interested in making large amounts of money," then we would take the easiest path and make a casino. But that's not our goal…
We want to build things that have real value. We want to create works which enrich people's lives. Impact their day to day. Help them gain useful skills. Help them meet true friends who share their values. We're building a business, but we reject the casino. Despise those who sell lottery tickets to the starving masses. Turn the tides against them. Repent.
Value​
When the first pilgrims came to the Americas they attempted a socialized system where everything was shared and no one person owned anything. Half of them starved to death because people would rather die than be slaves to parasites who feel like doing nothing. Slackers skipped working and hard workers became resentful. Demoralization and apathy set in as human nature asserted itself. Then they tried letting people own what they worked for and trade with each other. The productive people survived, and they produced more productive children who were willing to work for what they owned.
The freedom to do trade of value is what motivated humanity to reach new heights of potential. Lowering friction of trade is what enabled the biggest leaps in not only survival but innovation.
Even when material needs are made meaningless, humans will still want to trade value. Those who produce it will want to own it. Those who want to consume it will desire to have a way to pay for it.
Consider the forum games that pre-date Web2. There is where some of the first freely tradable digital currencies were born, "mined" by simply posting. Used to buy and trade what too were effectively JPEGs, proto NFTs, but still had value as an aesthetic, tribal signaling, status symbol.
What's the end game of commerce?
Crypto.
All commerce going fully on-chain is inevitable.
But we'll get back to that topic after a brief intermission.
Government issued money can never be fully trusted. As soon as a party who wants to max spend gets into office, money will be max inflated through spending money the government does not have. Taxes are trending toward being all for show, a humiliation ritual that has already lost meaning. What's the point if the government will never stop spending? Governments will simply steal from you and devalue your efforts by inventing more money in an effort to keep government spending going. 200k net worth is working class now, but the people who caused this to happen don't want to take responsibility for it. Their solution is to tax more and spend more, making the problem even worse and taking even more from you at the same time. To take from the productive, sacrificing our money to the world and funneling the rest into their own pockets.
When some of us were younger, we recalled our elders lamenting, "Back in my day a candy bar was only $0.05 to buy." Today, due to the higher cost of ingredients, that candy bar is loaded with inferior ingredients and costs $3.00. It costs more, and is full of poisons. As long as we have all been alive, our money has been devalued. Holding cash in a savings account is just about the stupidest investment one can make.
Gold isn't a safe harbor of value, either. There is the constant looming threat of rocky behemoth death-spheres of riches adrift in space, ready to be plundered. Years ago aluminum was a very expensive metal, so valuable that when the Washington Monument was given an aluminum cap, it was a moment of prestige. Now, we throw away aluminum cans, lined with plastics, as effectively worthless garbage. Gold will have its moment soon, and humans will one day laugh at how precious it was once considered. The reward is too great. Gold is still a useful metal in industry, and having an effective unlimited supply of it is too great of a bargain to ignore. Before you know it, there will be an endless supply of super heavy rocket ships hyper-deflating the value of gold they bring back to our planet.
Unfortunately, boomers who realize gold isn't always going to go up (scarcity will be nullified), and want to get into crypto, are too easily fooled. Bitcoin, the original meme coin, isn't as useful a technology as compared to Ethereum. Bitcoin has no client diversity, it has lower cost of attack compared to Ethereum (a 51% attack on Bitcoin costs less than a 33% attack on Ethereum), it lacks Ethereum's geographic validator distribution, and it's not even fully programmable like Ethereum is. It is not digital gold, which itself will become a cheap commodity in time. Bitcoin is a subpar alternative to Ethereum, so much so that when President Trump buys Bitcoin, he buys it wrapped on Ethereum. Other options such as XRP don't even have a complete ledger, with massive amounts of the supply owned by the entity that created it. Their strongest soldiers are very good at marketing, but they are also, inevitably, traps that will lead to sorrow.
Traditional payment systems are extremely vulnerable to fraud. As many scams as there are in crypto, there are far more in the world of credit cards. Traditional financial systems of today are even more vulnerable to quantum computing than the crypto industry theoretically is.
Is crypto ready though? No, it has a ways to go. We roll with the punches, inching closer to the inevitable, year after year.
KYC is purely a honeypot to get your information. It's not useful, and your info will eventually be hacked or leaked by insiders. KYT is easily exploitable. North Korea has demonstrated its ability to launder money without centralized exchanges stopping them, and some decentralized protocols have gathered enormous fees generated by the DPRK's efforts to create their own strategic crypto reserves.
Still, we are moving ever closer toward a global economy of value where all value is settled on-chain, a shift predominantly occurring on Ethereum. Calling it a world computer is an understatement—the chain is destined to be multi-planetary. Mars will have its own Ethereum L2s that will settle on Earth.
When card based payments were introduced to retail stores, common people saw it as a joke. Why wouldn't they use what they know? Cold hard cash. But the inevitable came, and now cash is being phased out. The Federal Reserve has now stopped minting anymore pennies. Our currency has been so devalued that the material is worth more than the value it represents, making pennies a drain on our collective value.
People will use traditional cards for crypto payments. It's already been figured out and currently in use to interact with traditional systems. Your crypto powered card has an on-chain wallet with an approval for spending amounts. Your spending limit is set to what you cryptographically approve. What you have on an on-chain wallet is linked with your card and spent with just in time swaps when you use your card.
Crimes targeting people with crypto will continue to escalate. As more people adopt crypto, more criminals will target them. This difficult problem will have to be addressed eventually. Most likely with automation of global security.
We are truly entering a golden age of innovative opportunities. Money, stolen from us, and used to prop up failure, has dried up or been cut off. We're back on track to being merit first and rewarding those willing to be productive in order to thrive. Utility and fundamentals can matter again. Shipping useful things people want to interact with matters more than ever.
Commerce​
fires a rifle into the air Okay, now that I have your attention, let's get back to the true topic at hand.
What needs to happen to bring all commerce on-chain? Getting closer to total commerce capture is the vehicle to accelerate crypto's dominance of value and exchange.
Vendors benefit greatly from accepting crypto. Charge backs are a thing of the past. This alone can remove some of the anxiety of providing goods and services. Artists who make and sell art can have confidence that the money they are paid isn't going to be charged back.
Consumers also benefit from using crypto. They can actually own what they pay for. They can sell or trade what they have freely. Your licenses? Your cosmetics? Your library? Your art? It's actually yours. This contrasts incredibly with the reality of non-crypto consumer apps. We have an insane competitive advantage because we are willing to be consumer first.
Subscriptions have a pathway to be so much easier and convenient now too. Want to cancel your subscription to something? Revoke the permission of the contract you are subscribe to. No more jumping through hoops trying to cancel. Press revoke and a subscription simply ends.
People building consumer products using crypto are competing within saturated markets which contain companies mostly averse to crypto adoption. We exist in a rather hostile environment. Normies have been largely psyoped against crypto, which means, if you believe in crypto, you still have amazing opportunities to build while it's easier and less crowded. Soon, incumbents will incorporate blockchain to compete with those eating their lunch. However, it's a proposition many may not tolerate. Platforms like Steam want to maximize their profits, they want to sell a unique license to everyone who wants to play a game. They are a for-profit business who will not willingly enact pro-consumer measures unless there is a benefit to their bottom line. Actually letting people buy and sell game licenses to freely trade them on the secondary market and let price discovery do its thing is thus not their top priority. The same goes for companies like Disney. They are even worse, wanting consumers to buy multiple copies of everything they make. How many editions of Skyrim have been released? Who taught them that? Certainly, corporations like Disney, and even Valve may tokenize some things, but they will be deathly afraid of you doing to them what the web did to brick and mortar.
How do you get it right?​
Grant real ownership. Figure out how you can actually let people own things. Even if they are fungible copies of something. True ownership used to be a reality, but back then there was much more friction with secondary trading. Now, we are in a new context in which real ownership is how you give value back to consumers.
Programmable incentives. How can you make symbiotic systems between creator and collector? Between platform and user? The blueprints are there. If you upload videos to YouTube, you get a share of ad revenue. If your content gets enough views on X, you get a share of engagement fees. It can be as simple as rewarding on-chain loyalty.
Community. You're not building on your own. There are thousands of other people who want to build upon the on-chain future, who want to do things right, that know Ethereum is where to build. You should engage these communities and learn from them. Look past the fakery and find real and authentic builders. If it looks like a cargo cult or botted, then it's not genuine, and it is not going to make a lasting impact. Beyond the builder community, you also need to be fostering your own community (your users, friends, fans), managing the expectations and attention of that community. Many are not willing to do this, they want to release something and then have no involvement after, but that rarely works.
Innovation. Do things which are only possible with crypto. Reduce friction dramatically with crypto. Make what is hard now without crypto easier with crypto. Use the benefit from the transparency that crypto offers. Locks keep honest people honest, and crypto's public ledger is the ultimate lock.
Solving real problems. There is low hanging fruit that you can attack right now. Real problems which massively benefit from a crypto solution. Finding these riddles and executing on solutions will make some people billionaires and many others millionaires all while providing actual value to humanity.
Changing contexts. NFTs, for example, have traditionally been about extreme scarcity. The bigger ocean is a massive consumer market with billions of people in it. Things that seem impossible now will take someone doing it for the first time in order for others to realize it is possible. Athletic records often stay unbroken because people think it's impossible to push further. Until someone demonstrates what's possible, the limiting condition remains unbroken, once lifted others believe they can push further. You can be that person whose reality defying work changes the context completely. If you have some vision, you can see it, and maybe you'll be the first to reach it. Before you know it, supply will be much higher and managed differently than ever before, and for many types of tokens there will be no concept of "minting out".
Distribution and marketing. You need the ability to reach non-crypto people and onboard them in a web native way (see our article on Consumer Crypto). Users won't know or care if it's L1 or L2. There is so much "perfect bait" that can be made that get people to finally try something crypto. Use your brain. What do actual people want? What do YOU want? These things are the cornerstones of how you break out of the cargo cult echo chamber, how you build your product, and how you reach consumers.
Timing. Luck is the ability to be ready when it's time. Things will change. If you can sense it coming, you can prepare for it (like we are). It will seem obvious looking back. Do you see what we see? Will you be ready to strike when the iron is hot? Are you prepared to fight to survive until the day comes?
With some industries, you're up against titans. With others, the bar is so low it would be laughably easy to dethrone the current king. You can do it. You can build the new kingdom.
Don't fake it. Don't manufacture consensus or loyalty with trickery. Earn it.
What do consumers get out of it?​
Almost free movement of money. If you send $1,000,000 on Ethereum it might cost you $0.05 to do this, and it's done almost instantly.
Total control of money and tokens. If you have your money on your crypto wallet and only you have your private key to that wallet only you have total control of that money. No one can take it from you.
Cryptographically controlled identity. You can prove it's you by cryptographically signing a message. This identity can be verified by anyone, and can be connected to tokens which you own.
Ownership that goes anywhere you go. 1 ETH is 1 ETH if you are in the US or China or Mars. You can take your Oekaki Connect NFTs anywhere with you in the solar system.
Absolute disintermediation, no middle men. No government or bank or payment processor in-between you and others forcing you to interact with them. Visa and MasterCard have a tyrant's leash on commerce, they are deathly afraid of crypto, because it inevitably takes them out of the picture and removes their ability to tax merchants obscene fees and censor vendors they don't like.
Ethereum fixes this.
The Kittykaki in the Room​
Ah, but dear reader, finance and commerce are almost a red herring for the road ahead. Though all commerce will inevitably go on-chain, the herald of post-scarcity is knocking on our door. Financialization will only last so long. So, learn to find joy with those who do things just because, who make art as they are compelled to, who create libre software all for the joy of it, because soon that will be all there is. The incentive structures of all things will change and you must adapt. Will your bloodline die within the thrall of media, or will you create your place in history and continue your legacy? Is what you are doing good for society let alone yourself? Are you having fun?
Ethereum​
Chances are, if you're reading this, you are already on the winning team. Congratulations!
If you're not already a believer in Ethereum, you should be. We want you to join the winning team.
The Good​
Ethereum is the most decentralized and trustless computer in the world. Ethereum is the World Machine.
Ethereum is the L1, the Mother Chain. Ethereum L2s are part of the Ethereum network. Some L2s are purpose built. Others are made to innovate on ideas not yet possible on L1. All L2s help Ethereum as a whole to scale and do more.
L2s are growing and able to take the load off Ethereum L1. Ethereum is like a shopping mall which houses many L2s within it as a single system. A single well performing L2 benefits the entire network. That single, well performing L2 may obscure or conceal Ethereum L1. Consumers don't actually need to know for it to work.
Major upgrades are consistently coming to Ethereum that will enable the next era of on-chain innovation. Ethereum is improving. The soon to come Pectra upgrade brings more power to your wallets, transaction batching, gas sponsorship, lower deployment costs of contracts, improved staking features, improved network efficiency. The long term roadmap for Ethereum is full of good things to look forward to.
Every major institution trusts Ethereum.
Financial institutions are fighting over who will tokenize more assets on Ethereum. They want to offer exposure because the institutional demand means more liquidity to grab.
They trust Ethereum because they know how it works, they know it's actually secure, dependable, never has downtime. They know that no one can make code on Ethereum do something contrary to what its code says it does.
Code is law.
While other chains are compromising on decentralization, Ethereum is uncompromising on decentralization.
Privacy is important. Improvements are being made to make Ethereum more private. How is that possible with a public ledger? Zero-knowledge proofs. When the Tornado Cash contract address was sanctioned (a move which has since been reversed by the Trump administration) alarm bells went off. Attempts were made to criminalize those who wrote the software by people who assumed it was somehow a centralized service and not a neutral and trustless piece of software. When the world traded with cold hard cash, what you traded for was a private matter for the most part (cash still has serial numbers which can trace flow). With credit cards, corporations and governments know exactly what you are paying for. Ethereum's ledger is public by default, everyone can see what goes where. Governments around the world have sought to ban end-to-end encryption, because they do not want you to have privacy.
ETH is a credibly neutral store of value.
Credibly neutral. A strong take on it is that it means anti-cronyism. Will a protocol, or even a chain shut it down to avoid a big L? That's a problem if they do. The more actually decentralized, the harder it is to pull off breaking credible neutrality. It can also mean removing entrenched middlemen. The Ethereum Foundation made choices aligned with being credibly neutral, while other chains did not. They want open participation. Systems always create winners or losers, and biases which enable some to win more than others. Something can be neutral and still have a high cost of participation. Credible neutrality is a complicated topic and deserves its own discussion. Another way to think about it is setting and sticking to expectations within a system. Don't arbitrarily change things to change the balance of winners/losers in an effort to avoid losses or to gain more.
The Bad​
Ethereum total supply is slowly increasing. This is, currently, a side effect of more activity happening on L2s leading to less supply being burned from fees in total. Other competing L1s, with less security than Ethereum, have recently garnered some attention. The number one app in terms of revenue in the last year was not on Ethereum, but those same other chains with big hype have also had incredible fumbles recently (greater centralization, instability and outages, partisan institutional activities, shutting it all down to prevent their own losses). Low gas prices are nice for users of Ethereum L1, but this translates to less ETH being burned.
Reality is… you're still early. This is a good and bad thing. Good, because you get to be there early and make choices. Bad because the job is not finished.
If Ethereum L1 gas price is low why are more not building there? Everyone knows that gas can still spike under heavy demand. This gas spike can last a few months even. While it may cost $0.05 to do a transaction on L1 as of this post, that can easily turn into $100. What this means for products on Ethereum L1 is that you effectively can have month long downtimes where the cost to use your app is so prohibitively expensive such that people stop using it. We saw this during the short-lived 404 mania of 2024 where gas was consistently above 100 Gwei. This led to chilling effects on secondary sales of our L1 art collections. If you had a game on L1, it's a hard sell to price each input at $20, and on top of that the fee doesn't even go to the game's creator.
Even 1 day of "downtime" can be very bad. A single motivated person can burn a lot of gas to terrorize the chain's gas price. Either by burning their own ETH, or creating hyped projects which are deliberately inefficient (both have happened in the past).
This chilling effect is part of why L2s are booming, and some are angry about L2s taking a majority of transaction fees. There will be winners and losers within the world of L2s. Some L2s are more aligned than others. Ultimately, L2s are still Ethereum.
Price stability is a problem. It's only natural. Some alternatives, even if they are only temporary and have joke worthy fundamentals, have better marketing and managed to get some positive attention. Black swans hit. Bitcoin goes down. ETH goes down. Bitcoin goes up. ETH goes down. We want to think it can't keep going down, but it can. The timeframe for dominance is long.
The Ugly​
Vampire attacks are constantly happening. New L1s are appearing that should be L2s.
If the DPRK tries to use funds to launder some value, that's not money vendors get to keep. So, vendors need to be able to deal with situations like this. Right now it's the Wild West. If someone buys your NFT you just assume that crypto is clean money, but it might not be. If a sanctioned address sends you funds, that can create a situation which may be difficult to resolve.
Many L2s do not have a satisfactory exit window and most have centralized mechanisms controlled by multisigs. This could have devastating results if the companies in control decide to behave badly or get hacked. In the case of the Safe hack earlier this year, Bybit lost more than a billion dollars in value to the DPRK. It is very reckless to onboard billions in TVL while both being centralized and not having a proper exit window.
Mainnet gas prices have gone down so much that address poisoning attacks are far too easy to execute. You want to see your transaction history on Etherscan? Good luck finding legitimate transactions between the scammers PVPing in your history. L2s are even worse for this. Block explorers are risky to use for new users who don't know what to look out for. For those who don't know, address poisoning is when a scammer sends funds to your wallet from a generated wallet that has starting and ending characters which look similar to a wallet you use. So, you click copy on that scam address, and send it funds instead of the address you were intending to.
The Beauty​
Trustless compute.
When Soneium attempted to censor its chain, people were able to bypass the on-chain censorship by putting transactions directly on Ethereum L1. This is a strong win in the L2s are Ethereum debate. L2s can be centralized while still having trustless compute.
Ethereum has meaningful client diversity. There is no supermajority client. This means updating one client can't compromise the network. All clients must reach consensus on future Ethereum updates.
Ethereum has meaningful validator distribution.
Ethereum has the highest cost of attack of any other chain.
Ethereum has the very best fundamentals of any chain.
Ethereum isn't going anywhere. Ethereum is forever.
The Truth​
Ethereum has no real competition. Most other chains will not survive what is coming next.
Though new L1s appear every day, the reverse is happening too with former L1s converting to L2s.
Greed is what primarily motivates those who attempt to compete with Ethereum. But Ethereum already won this race. Ethereum is unstoppable. Unstoppable compute is what stops the excesses of the state.
The dream of sovereign money began with Satoshi, it is now real with Ethereum.
Fundamentals at long time scales are all that matter.
All networks will merge with Ethereum, the World Machine, in time, or become less than irrelevant.
With progress, crypto will not only overtake everything else in terms of commerce, but also become the layer in which all computing is settled. You don't have to take the word of private corporate servers about the state of computations which impact you. They can be settled on Ethereum and Ethereum can be the source of truth which anyone can verify. All software will be consumed by Ethereum. All software will be written for Ethereum. All state of all machines will live on Ethereum. Be it L1 or a myriad of L2s settling on Ethereum L1. Inevitably, all of compute will be Ethereum.
When post-scarcity, powered by AI and automation, inevitably hits the only value left will be coordination. Ethereum represents the disintermediation of humanity's living network.
Do you get it yet?
Ethereum already won.
We are in crypto's golden age. We are in Ethereum's dawning golden age.
Be courageous. Be principled. Be virtuous.
