It’s Kool Aid...😉

Thank you. Exactly how I feel. I'm eager to learn and don't mind hearing from innovators but there are too many cheerleaders just like many crypto podcasts. They should be interviewed by knowledgeable crypto people and challenged more. I would like to understand more of the technical alphabet soup and nitty gritty. Then I think I could judge better what these people are really saying and doing. Raoul is asking on twitter who would like a dedicated cyrpto tier, for more $. It sounds like many would but so much RV crypto content is available elsewhere for free so what would be exclusive about it.

@Lance: Haha, yes my bad! But there's a lot of cool aid going on nowadays as well ;) #corona

@Thomas: Agree 100%. RV brought affordable macro analysis to the people which was a great thing. However, there's no shortage of great, free crypto content out there.

Andreas (@aantonop), please.

Now replace ETH with BTC, and BTC with Gold. I hope you get the point.

Haha. This take is a bit narrow. I only hold Bitcoin, but it's hard to argue that Ethereum is a failure when all successful Defi protocols (dXdY, Melon, Coumpound, ICOs, Stablecoins, etc.) are all based on Ethereum.

As a software engineer, I completely agree with you that ETH is probably not going to do well in the long term. It's a poor architecture that crams too much in the base protocol which leaves it vulnerable (as we've seen many times) and, in the long run, difficult to extend and interface with. Calling it a scam without explaining why is off putting to people. While I don't necessarily disagree with that, ETH provides a lot of value in the near term as a way to test out numerous different kinds of new financial products and systems. Things we couldn't imagine without actively building. Even if they go the way of Netscape, and they very likely will, we will have incredible learning and experimentation as to what works what doesn't. Then you can build adaptations on the more secure network as it evolves into providing the same functionality in a much more secure and extendable way.

The so-called 'maximalists' are simply people chosing the network that actually work. Sure, Ethereum shows a lot of promise. But that's just it. *Promises*. How big is the Ethereum blockchain again and how long did it take to grow to that size? How long until normal consumer hardware won't be enough to validate the chain? Sure, Eth 2.0 might work. Proof-of-stake might work. The problem is that these are fundamental issues that the second larges crypto project still haven't solved while at the same time billions of dollars are flowing into it's ecosystem. It's crazy.

I second recommendation for @RyanSAdams and @TrustlessState. Their Bankless podcast does a great job breaking down the developments in Decentralized Finance.

To Petter's comment above, Bitcoin and Ethereum will continue to co-exist. I hold both and do not engage in religious arguments, but as a software engineer, I can tell you that you need a Turing-complete blockchain in order to unlock the full potential of decentralized finance. Ethereum VM has that. Bitcoin doesn't. Bitcoin is the most secure blockchain, there's no taking that away. But you will never be able to decentralize banking, currency trading, commodities, stocks, bonds, loans, legal contracts, APIs, etc without a flexible VM like ETH offers. The way I see it, Bitcoin is digital gold, but Ethereum is digital cash. Ethereum currently has billions in tokenized dollars being traded on its platform and growing rapidly. ETH1 already scales to 2000+ transactions per second with Rollups. ETH2 will be another 100x improvement and it's already got a working testnet: https://prylabs.net/

@Christopher: Continue for how long? The Ethereum blockchain have grown to over 4TB in just 5 years while the Bitcoin blockchain have grown to about 275GB in 10 years. At this rate it's just a matter of time before you need industrial sized hardware to run a full archival node (which is the equivalent of a full BTC node).

https://decrypt.co/24779/ethereum-archive-nodes-now-take-up-4-terabytes-of-space

Love Kyber! Also, for those interested, check out PegNet. Unique is that the Oracles are decentralized. CPU mineable, no front running, decentralized non-custodial network of tokens that are pegged to different world currencies and assets, including gold, the euro, and the US dollar. There's no associated company or foundation that needs to make money behind it — the cost of an entry credit is $0.001, and that gets burned as an anti-spam mechanism.

Chainlink. The tokenomics are as exciting as the tech. It seems to have become the standard for all decentralized oracles, and once staking and wider adoption take place, price can soar. Feels like early ETH days for LINK.

And since we are talking about Oracles, two more interesting projects that seem quite promising. And when we speak about data sources (Oracles) can never rely on a single source for a critical application such as DeFi so the ecosystem will surely have more players as backup / second source / redundancy plan. Do check out BAND and TRB.

I agree. While Melonport was one of the first (2016-2017ish), I think there are a new projects that are leaps and bounds ahead, on the forefront of relevancy, with a product, and being used. Lets help them: Kyber network, Uniswap, Maker, Aave, Nuo, Fulcrum, synthetix, Follow the volume on Decentralized exchanges that provide liquidity to these products... and you will find the golden gooses. Its all very interesting.

If you're new to the space and want to know more then you shouldn't be listening to sales pitches. You should be trying to understand what a blockchain is and how it works. It's extremely easy to be misguided in this space. People new to this space should start off by reading the Bitcoin whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf It's 9 pages. There are no excuses.