Ethereum

i dunno if this is cope or bullish or what, but for the first time in a very long time i don't feel that there are massive gaps of work to be done in ethereum that no one is doing

feels like everything important that i can think of is actively being invested in and worked on by top tier builders

is this alignment?

The question I submitted to the EF AMA:

In the EF's mission of making the Internet better, how should it approach the necessary integration work so that Ethereum becomes part of the broader Internet?

Things like ENS↔DNS integration, IPFS support in browsers, JavaScript support for p2p gossip, .eth as a TLD, advocacy within Internet standards bodies (IANA, W3C).

For example we don't have a seat at the table of the W3C Web Payments group, and as a result they're not considering any crypto payment options for standardization in browsers.

As another recent example, the recently-spec'd Passkeys credential exchange protocol doesn't feature permissionless export, something which would have been an obvious requirement had there been more crypto-type thinkers in the room.

Do you think the EF has a role to play here?

https://old.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1iw8ln8/ama_we_are_ef_research_pt_13_25_february_2025/meel946/

Still feels like no one has picked up this part of the mission:

A doodler and computerer. I like permissive/permissionless open source, smart contracts, p2p systems, room-scale VR, and NixOS.

shazow.net

Currently: WhatsABI

Still feels like no one has picked up this part of the mission:
https://farcaster.xyz/polymutex.eth/0x28b58494

Contributor @ /walletbeat.

Censorship resistance requires privacy.

It's a good mission, not sure how we get there. Feels adjacent to lobbying?

Look at how much redundant tech is being reinvented at the "Real World Crypto 2024" conference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOfOe_z37jQ

Minus the money part of it, perhaps. I see it more as advocacy. The tech world has a duty to avoid redundant work building inferior (i.e. more fragile and/or capturable) versions of crypto tech, and then having them prematurely ossify in this flawed state.
https://farcaster.xyz/polymutex.eth/0x084b34ec

How do we get there? Having people in the room and these conferences, I think that's the only option. Have to grind our way back to legitimacy.

That said, there's still a large slice of people who are more reasonable and will be influenced by various forms of advocacy, so we should certainly not abandon that approach.

I suspect we're thinking of the same thing but on a different continuum. It's a cultural rift. What will it take for "progress" to happen? For people to stop voting against their own self interest, cutting off their nose to spite the face?

On the one extreme, it takes a whole generation of people to die out. On the other extreme, it merely takes some honest advocacy. In the middle, it's lobbying for regulatory support (from merely clarity/legitimacy to capture).

The vehement opposition to anything "blockchain" from communities like gamers, Bluesky, and many others -- makes me think we're closer to the "whole generation of people won't change their mind no matter what" side of the cultural rift.

Advocacy won't hurt, but I suspect it won't move the needle for a lot of people in relevant positions of power (making technical decisions, like standards bodies).