Thread by @nieldlr

0/ Interesting thread here re: Ethereum, it's usage & future. Just going to add some additional unstructured thoughts and different interpretations

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1/ Yes, gas costs/fees is a problem. It's frustrating as a dev to expect some kind of action in your dapp/smart contract to have a certain cost, only to see it go & up down hugely. It's very tricky UX. There's many ways to solve this, check out @peepethApp for example.

2/ Using dappradar as a source for how "active" Ethereum is, is bad. It is self-selected and also measuring DAU in smart contracts/dapps is incredibly tricky. Case in point here ethgasstation.info/gasguzzlers.php. None of the current top gas usage in contracts are in dappradar at all!

3/ But, smart contracts aren't dapps, I hear you say. But what is a dapp really!? For example, Brendan mentions that most txn's aren't from dapps, but over 50% of txn's over the past 7 days were people interacting with smart contracts (amberdata.io/dashboards/tra…)

4/ So, obviously smart contracts are used. I'm not even sure if this data accounts for internal contract to contract/EOA txns. According to Etherscan, this sits at a total of > 50mil all time txns. Which is close to a 1/5th of all Ethereum txns over time etherscan.io/txsInternal

5/ Is this enough a moat? Who knows? But for example, each token on Ethereum is a smart contract. Dapps they are not, but smart contracts they are. There's currently 87k token contracts and this number keeps going up every minute. etherscan.io/tokens

6/ I'm not sure yet if we'll see dapps proliferate as we hope. They might have very interesting hybrid architectures. But the value of an ecosystem is not always measured in how "active" a smart contract/dapp is.

7/ For example, NFTs represent ownership. I bought a parcel of land on @decentraland. There, I own it. I don't have to interact with it every day? It's these passive agreements that I find smart contracts also have huge value in.

8/ Another example, is my own @StakeTree contracts. A beneficiary only withdraws once a week. And funders probably interact once with the contract and then only a few months again to top up their stake. How many DAUs does this have? Probably 0. But... (cont.)

9/ They create a passive agreement between the beneficiary & funder without any trusted intermediary and no rent-seeking fees. You'll probably see a lot more of these micro "agreements" than massive interlinked dapps in the short term.

10/ Building dapps are hard. Ethereum has had many years now to figure this out. Not only "how" to architect them, but also how to scale them, & make building them easier. Ask any early Ethereum dapp dev, like @simondlr, how things have changed.

11/ I see people keep talking about the smart contract platform wars that's coming. And I'm really happy to see innovation keep being pushed. Heck, that's why I switch my attention 100% to Ethereum (over Bitcoin).

12/ I'm not sure the commodification of smart contracting is really that close or possible as people think. There's so many other intangible parts of blockchains, like culture, community, developer experience, people, diversity, inclusion, vision and more, that appeals to people.

13/ Ethereum by far, has fully grabbed my attention in this regard. It's just unparalleled in dev experience, culture & community. Those looking at only the tech side of things will be confused why the "technically" best don't win in the end. How much will this count for a moat?

14/ Anyway, things might get bumpy for Ethereum over the next few months in terms of scaling. So it's still hugely important for adoption that they figure this out. But switching to another chain, because of this, requires much more than just "better" tech.

15/ > It requires a developer experience that's honed over years (@trufflesuite, Embark, Solidity, Gnarly etc)
> Full-time development into scaling (Plasma, Sharding, Casper, State channels etc),
> Excellent documentation (from 1st & 3rd parties),

16/ > Multiple open source utilities/tools, infrastructure, analytics (@infura_io, @ETHGasStation, @etherscan, @MyCrypto etc)
> UX/UI innovations (@peepethApp, @Balance_io etc)
> Standardization (ERC20, ERC721 etc)
> Global hackathons & meetups (@ethglobal)

17/ > Plus lots more & and that includes the incredible people that are way too many to mention, working in this ecosystem in their own ways.

Anyway, this became very unstructured brain dump. I'm excited for the EOS launch tomorrow! Does anyone know where I can follow this live?

Oh geez. *Its!

If only Twitter had an edit button 😓