Thread by @KyleSamani

0/ The best thing to happen to Ethereum in 2018 was.....

EOS

A thread

1/ At the start of 2018, the Ethereum community couldn't be higher off its own supply. Literally

2/ Just 2 months prior, Vitalik had laid out the (now defunct) sharding roadmap at Devcon. Just 5 months prior, he and Joseph had published the plasma paper

FFG was nearly finalized, and CBC was looking good

3/ Over the first few months 2018, the EF realized that implementing FFG on the existing chain was gong to be duplicative with rolling out CBC and sharding later

So they decided to skip it entirely, and just focus on sharding

4/ Then, at some point around May/June, they realized that the sharding plan was not going to work

So back to the drawing board they went

Meanwhile, EOS launched. And fell on its face. A few times

5/ By July, what started to be called Eth 2.0 had started to take shape. Eth 2.0 was going to be so big, so badass, and so amazing, that it actually required a new version number entirely

6/ It was going to be so amazing that it didn't even need a timeline

Or answers to questions like data availability (still unanswered)

7/ Coming in on the 1 year anniversary of plasma, plasma researchers began to recognize that running the EVM on plasma is basically not possible

medium.com/@kelvinfichter…

(Plug: this is why we invested in @skalelabs)

8/ Meanwhile, the EOS chain stabilized, and people started doing what they do on all new blockchains: gamble and issue tokens. And to some extent, play games (e.g. EOS knights)

9/ Pretty quickly, those use cases came to drive more meaningful on EOS than anything on ETH had sustained

And slowly, narrative changed

And some businesses started switching from ETH to EOS

10/ By August, the narrative around ETH as a dapp platform started to really falter, and ETH price decoupled to the downside from BTC in a meaningful way

11/ Through Oct, EOS kept growing, and for the first time since inception, ETH felt actual competition from the thing that

1) it dismissed
2) thought was garbage
3) was the best capitalized
4) took the easiest path to answer hard questions (while ETH took the hard path)

12/ This resulted in a few things that we've already seen (and perhaps more that we haven't)

13/ The whiteblock report, which was

a) laughable in its technical claims (it implied that Bitcoin is not a blockchain)
b) showed their insecurity
c) showed how low they're willing to go (even though they claim the moral high ground, e.g "we don't need $4B!!")

14/ Then, we learned of some secret meetings at/around devcon in which Eth 1.x became a thing

Wait, I thought it was duplicative to work on the existing chain still?

15/ It's clear now that Eth 1.x shows that ETH can respond to competition, and can muster resources to try to compete

And I like it.

16/ ETH has been a monopoly for so long, it forgot how to compete.

Now that it has competition, it's starting to move at a much faster pace

17/ So although ETH price is in the gutter right now, there is a lot to look forward to. While we still don't know much about Eth 1.x, that it's even on the table is a massive step forwards, especially given how much technical risk remains around Eth 2.0

18/ We should all be grateful for competition. It really does make the world a better place. Although this thread has been a bit tongue-in-cheek, I really am glad that ETH is getting more aggressive.

Necessity is the mother of invention

{fin}