Thread by @kaiynne

I appear to have become public enemy #1 in red triangle land. While the reply guys are painful it has provided some interesting perspective on the narrative. My first take away is that I genuinely underestimated how powerful the “Et hirium is toooo expensive” meme would be. 🧵👇

Interestingly my first attempt to post this thread got rugged by iOS, so I got a chance to see the responses to the first tweet. So I am going to add a little more colour. L1 is too expensive to use, the meme is not about that though.

The Ethereum is too expensive meme is about trying to make so much noise about L1 gas prices that no one notices there are multiple options to stay within the ecosystem and pay less gas.

The first stage of the too expensive attack is typically “we can’t afford ethereum fees and you are too rich and don’t care about real users.” The replies on my first attempt at this thread are 50%+ that exact line of attack.

The irony is I care more about fees than most users, I’m building on eth and high gas fees are an insane impediment to growth. The idea that I would casually sit back and light cigars with $100 bills while I laugh at users who can’t afford gas is insane. But it’s a powerful meme.

If you point out that almost everyone in the ethereum ecosystem is working on scaling in some form. Whether it be sidechains morphing into rollups like @0xPolygon or ORU like @arbitrum and @optimismPBC or ZK solutions like @StarkWareLtd you get some interesting responses.

Most take the form, “It is too late! You had your chance, we are the scaling solution now!” While this is adorably naïve it’s a powerful narrative. Because there is clear empirical evidence that these chains are much cheaper than L1 rn. Users rightly want a solution immediately.

I will admit I was guilty of asking users to wait for ORUs to mature, mainly because I was overly optimistic about how quickly they would be ready. It wasn’t until the middle of the year that I finally capitulated and said just use Polygon for now.

Unfortunately this was too little too late many new users were already financially and emotionally invested in BSC, AVAX or SOL. And we all know that numba go up says more than real evidence ever could…

This situation is recoverable imo. As the majority of ETH infrastructure migrates to L2 in the early part of next year (L222) these nascent ecosystems will struggle to compete. We are already seeing adoption increase week on week across the DeFi projects deployed on Optimism.

Then you have the apologist that says “no no no, anyone using an EVM chain is part of the ETH community.” I honestly can’t understand how you watch the gleeful fudding of Ethereum from these communities and believe this but some people are simply too conciliatory.

Don’t think for a second that most advocates of these eth killers wouldn’t love to dance on the grave of Ethereum. All the while oblivious to the fact that the Geth team is propping them up 🤷‍♂️.

Now we come to the final major line of attack. “You are just supporting your eth bags you disgusting whale!” This is hard to counter because it is true, but it is only part of the picture.

They often can’t accept that many people in the Eth community are genuinely aligned with decentralisation and not just the price of ETH.

For most of the people shilling these chains the idea that you could be ideological alignment with the ethos of decentralisation and not just be looking to opportunistically extract maximum value is simply not believable.

Trust me I saw the SOL trade before you, I was on a podcast with fucking @SBF_FTX you counter trade that guy. But I chose not to put funds into these ecosystems because I knew that it would erode some of my conviction if I was suddenly sitting on millions worth of their tokens.

I chose to forgo that because I genuinely want to ensure that we don’t make poor trade offs as we are building these systems.

I’m confident that most of the current advantages of the ETH killers like AVAX are just hidden trade-offs that are creating a debt that will come due next year. I can’t guarantee this, it’s just my perspective on the balance of probabilities.

This doesn’t mean that experimentation is not worthwhile, markets will solve this, there’s too much at stake for that not to be the case. By my view rn is the money flowing into the ETH killers is a misallocation of resources. As a market participant that is my call.

What is unequivocal for me is that we really need to get our shit together in the Eth community and start to take back the narrative, because I think a lot of people are blissfully unaware of how well crafted the anti-eth memes have become.

We need fun things on L2 for new users to do. Once novel projects like @lyrafinance start to gain traction I think a lot of users will realise L2’s have significant advantages, not because they come to love decentralisation, but because the best builders are building on them.

But there is a missing piece here! Until we have tokens for @optimismPBC, @arbitrum and @StarkWareLtd we’re going to be fighting an uphill battle. Eth is too expensive for the average user and the upside on holding eth for them is limited.

But once we have rollup tokens we have a counter narrative that is extremely powerful. It will create sufficient incentives for new users to come and try out rollups and help bootstrap awareness and activity on these new networks.