Thread by @technocrypto

Some thoughts on #eth culture:

The thing I've always appreciated most about the #Ethereum community is that we don't take ourselves too seriously. This is an underrated characteristic and one well worth protecting. Why?

Because it creates openness and makes it easier to enter a community for the first time. Everyone starts at zero, so if each tiny fact you don't know yet is A Big Deal there's no ramp to gradually build skill and acquire knowledge, just a cliff you fall off with one misstep.

It's also allowed Ethereum, as the blockchain space grows, to make use of insights gained from other chains. Important PoS components were first deployed by #Zcash. People weren't sure about EIP 1557 at first, but seeing it run in production on #Filecoin improved confidence. Etc.

But if "not taking yourself too seriously" was the only criteria, #Dogecoin would have Ethereum beat hands down 😂. The thing that makes Ethereum interesting is that it pairs this open/friendly aspect with a love of "geeking out" over technical optimization and improvement.

In that respect, it's possible to see Ethereum as a sort of hybrid between #Bitcoin and #Dogecoin community norms (actual timelines aside). Ethereum is what you get if you start with the ideas of Bitcoin, but then welcome people and ideas instead of fortifying against them.

There are two critical parts needed to make this marriage of differing foundations work.
One is legibility. No matter how deep the Ethereum research community's understanding of a topic gets, what they bring back to the rest of us has to be scaffolded for wider understanding.

This prerequisite faces significant challenges during the move to rollups, proof of stake, and sharding. The technologies needed to make all of this work are more complicated and intricate than most previous Ethereum improvements, even though these goals have long been in place.

If you're a person reading this thread, and you've felt intimidated or confused when trying to wrap your head around how complicated Ethereum has gotten, there's good news: your *lack* of experience with these intricacies is an important community resource in building legibility!

Just pick one of the parts you don't understand (I'd recommend using Ethereum.org for starters, github.com/ethereum/annot… for intermediates, and the ethresear.ch forums for the advanced) and write up what you do or don't understand about it! We don't bite 😜

What I predict you'll find is that, as long as you stick to the honesty and openness norms (up front disclaimers that you're still learning are standard here, for example) you'll find a large number of community members willing to read, respond, and answer questions you have.

That learning isn't a one way street from the ivory tower to the masses. It's how the knowledge ramp gets built, and your thoughts/feedback are genuinely considered valuable to people deeper in the weeds. This is what makes the community flourish, AND is how new experts get made!

The second critical part in protecting the union between lightheartedness and rigor is the accessory technical and social infrastructure. The what?
I'm talking about all the other tools, websites, people and so on needed to make any of the fancy sounding stuff matter at all.

This is an area that Ethereum needs to work on. The difference between whether all the latest PoS/zero knowledge/consensus stuff is a genuine boost to the real world goal of creating public decentralized infrastructure for the planet, vs just a myopic exercise in tech elitism...

...is how long, smooth, financially supported, financially accessible, and gap-free the ramp of real functionality is between the ivory towers of Ethereum's research juggernaut and the first time user wondering "What is this Ethereum stuff anyways?"

Those have been paying any attention throughout ETH history know that the ceaseless labor of people like @tayvano_ or @hudsonjameson or @poojaranjan19 or @0xstark or or or sooo many other people on deeply underappreciated yet essential aspects of making things "just work" or...

..."just click" or "not crash" or "not explode" or "show up when you panic search" or *whatever* have more often been the line between success and failure for the Ethereum community on the ground and in the trenches than the vast majority of people realize or appreciate.

Yes, there are some efforts to identify and support critical but "non-core" work (e.g. @gitcoin ), but often where the rubber hits the road is just:
do you thank these people?
do you pay these people?
do you *listen* to them?
do you take them for granted?
do you emulate them?

Again, I say that if you're new to this community, you do NOT have to be a god-tier expert in tech and/or human relations to start helping out with this work. Do you notice someone confused and needing help on social media? The whole internet is the front help desk for Ethereum!

Every person you can patiently answer an "obvious" question for is one less person joining the queue that eventually stacks up at these top-tier helpers' doors, directly or indirectly. And conversely, documenting and sharing the problem someone more experienced helped you with...

...provides valuable search fodder for others climbing up the usability rungs behind you.
Developers, this is also a wealth of opportunities not to be overlooked. There is SO much tooling, and documenting, and troubleshooting needed in this space that it does not take much...

...looking at all to find some neglected corner of the landscape where you can truly make a substantial impact just with raw curiosity, responsiveness, and (sometimes thankless) persistence. There's way more surface area than you think on the cutting edge!

But if I had to identify one area which especially needs a dose of these Ethereum cultural values right now, it has to be pooled staking. 32 ETH is just an enormous financial portcullis, not only for most people living in wealthy countries, but for almost everyone beyond as well.

The *theory* of how to raise this barrier trustlessly has been well covered, but the practical *implementation* still lags far behind as we come up on a full YEAR of having had the #beaconchain operational. We need to stop leaving this at "oh yeah someone's working on that",

and instead bring the *full* spectrum of the "Ethereum ramp" to bear on this problem. We need to center it in our conversation and in our roadmap. In my mind healthy pooled staking is a FIRM prerequisite for the merge, and for preventing the emergence of a "staking elite".

There needs to be a step by step, thoroughly pre-paved set of instructions on Ethereum.org for how anyone can stake with ~100 USD or less. Let's make it happen, and protect the ramp we've worked so hard for so long to build.

Just shunting people to trusted pools isn't just sad, it's a betrayal of our fundamental values as a community. We need to fix this.