Comment by 3np | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 3np | Hacker News Reader

I think many developers getting sucked into a new exciting technology feel similarly at some point once it gets enough traction. "I know; it's such a hipster statement." might be all there is to it, and that's fine. I had the same phases with web and ML and I'm not ashamed to say I'm a bit of a hipster in that sense.

I think your feelings are perfectly valid and you should listen to yourself, but also realize that you'd do best in not generalizing it to be anything but personal.

...And from someone who was deep into Ethereum tech starting 2014-2015, I recently got surprisingly really hooked again on Bitcoin. Lightning is fun and addictive, and it feels like we're close to some kind of watershed there.

Hopefully you'll find something new to be excited about soon (or take a break from it all, sometimes that's what we need as well).

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The reason I'm fed up with Ethereum right now is mostly the "defi" hype where it's mostly anything but decentralized in any way if you look just a bit closer. This goes for pretty much all the projects with significant traction today. So many corners are cut just to be able to ride the wave of the hype train. "The admin with full control is only until we are out of beta, for safety", "The centralized coordinator on AWS will be replaced with a gossip protocol by V2", "The owner multisig will be replaced by a DAO", "the project leads will do all the coordination for now" and other BS rationalizations all completely antithetical to the ideology.

One major strength of Ethereum for many years have been the community. Recently I feel like greed has taken over.

Vitalik is always bitching about the greedy community, but that's really not what is killing Ethereum. What is killing Ethereum is its glacial development pace.

It took so many years for Ethereum 2 to be deployed, and even now it's deployed it's a weak shell of what it should have been.

An argument against that could be that it's simply a hard problem to solve, but then the question becomes if they've solved any other easier problems, and it seems to me like they haven't.

This is their page on smart contracts, arguably the only justification for Ethereum's existance:

https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/smart-contracts/lang...

It not only still mentions Solidity, a language which is one of the worst mistakes in IT history, it lists it as the first choice in a set of 2 options, of which the latter is only marginally superior to it. This was acceptable in 2017, a year after the realization of how huge a fuckup Solidity is, since a year might be a short time for a language to be developed and matured enough, but it's now 2021, 5 years later!

It makes me feel Ethereum just isn't managed adequately, despite being a multi-billion dollar operation.

Agreed. Anyone who's been in software long enough can take one look at Ethereum and see the telltale signs of puttering, meandering development. Creating solutions in search of problems, and favoring whats clever over what works.

It seems that the Ethereum core development community puts overly high value on cleverness and not nearly enough on hardcore engineering fundamentals.

> What is killing Ethereum is its glacial development pace.

With hindsight, it seems pretty naive to make the early core devs multimillionaires, then expect them to do anything except retire.

If you want to work on a blockchain where greed can't takeover, an inevitable unavoidable pitfall if you design the blockchains to inherently also have an MLM structure, is to design a blockchain that doesn't have financial gain as an incentive to align people to adopt it but a different form of consensus like democratic processes (save regulatory capture) where it's voted into use.

I think Uniswap is incorporated this way.

Thanks for that comment :)

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