Thread by @calchulus

ok time for some thought leaders to stop looking into one front end on a centralised data source trying to read data on a chain that is still struggling to build more infrastructure to read info.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS THAT UNIQUE ADDRESSES != Unique users!

https://twitter.com/CryptoCatVC/status/1368579857714708500

2/n Firstly, you guys in the eth world may know that a certain function on Eth mainnet was proposed to cease to exist in a future hardfork - which would render @1inchExchange's CHI Gas token and other gas tokens useless.

3/n Users started reporting the deployment of CHI gas token mid February on BSC. For those of you who are not familiar, CHI gas token uses the "self-destruct" function after using up the "stored gas", which is purchased at a low gas gwei price and deployed when high

4/n This roughly coincides with the incredibly high spike that users may see in this bscscan graph. Why? Because the metric "active addresses" means an address that receives or sends ETH (or in this case, BNB on bsc).

5/n This means that every CHI gas token that is minted is a new active address. because it "receives" some ETH to activate that contract. There goes your stupid metric.

6/n I wanted to anecdotally check agains the same graph for Ethereum. The date for 1inch publishing its medium article is June 5th, 2020. 1inch-exchange.medium.com/1inch-introduc…

7/n On June 4th, 5th, and 6th on the same chart for Ethereum, the number of unique addresses spikes, with the highest being 250K+ new addresses on ETH mainnet on none other than June 5th. just 2 days before? 120K, half as much

8/n In case you are wondering about the statistical probability that this metric would spike by 2x on this particular date, the same metric did not surpass the June 5th total until October 18th, well after defi summer brought new users to ETH.

9/n To explain the difference magnitude of number of CHI tokens that might be minted on another chain, one needs to look no further than the difference in gas fees. It's not cheap to hoard CHI gas token on ETH - at some point, it's cheaper to buy on Mooniswap/Uni.

10/n With CHI token not yet very liquid on BSC, plus cheap gas fees, it's cheaper to mine CHI than to try to buy it somewhere, if it's available anywhere in the first place (not to my knowledge).

11/n As a result, the demand for CHI tokens would naturally increase on BSC if this activity will not be able to occur on ETH, and the demand on ETH would be dampened because of the Uni/Sushi/Mooniswap liquidity that would exist for it, and thus not need to activate a new address

12/n the takeaways being:
1. stop looking at a mediocre metric to measure network growth or real adoption
2. stop trying to pin this on a chain or a specific ecosystem.

13/n interesting nobody suggests that vitalik suggesting killing off CHI token as a centralised move, I for one am clearly enjoying the lower gas fees so I love that CHI store, but it does seem odd that even a single proposal in a forum could lead to such a drastic change

14/n suggests that maybe the ethereum world, gasp, is not as decentralised as we might wish it to be. Or that individual teams such as 1inch, may choose to shift their priorities to other chains b/c of such decisions/signalling.

15/n it's a slippery slope argument, and i don't like these, because I think it's worthwhile to make Ethereum not just the worlds decentralised computer, but the world's digital playground, & creating a proposal that kills a project's business prop is rarely so widely championed.

16/n I've only heard ETH fans shill this specific graph NON-STOP, and not BSC users. I think that tells you that this isn't a Justin Sun telling people there's billions of users of Tron, as loud as CZ is sometimes, this chart should mean absolutely nothing to anyone.

17/n thanks for coming to the ted talk~