Why I’ve Lost My Faith In Ethereum

Ethereum is in trouble.

There are a number of developments that have taken place in the Ethereum community that strike me as concerning. Even more concerning is that most of them seem to have been shrugged off by the community.

To put into perspective how concerned I am about Ethereum, the LEAST CONCERNING development is Ethereum’s creator Vitalik Buterin apparently supporting child porn.

And no, I didn’t make that up.

While that is extraordinarily disturbing, what’s more concerning about Vitalik and his role with Ethereum is Vitalik’s strange support for Bitcoin Cash and Roger Ver.

My concern for Vitalik’s support of Roger Ver is less about whether Vitalik believes big blocks are better than smaller ones, it’s about the tactics that Roger Ver has employed to get people to buy Bitcoin Cash.

From diversion tactics, to lying, to manipulating the Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash markets, Roger Ver has shown that he does not want to play ball with the crypto community. His propaganda tactics to FUD the market border on fraud, and his distaste for a healthy dialogue has caused way more harm than good.

I don’t care that the Ethereum creator supports Bitcoin Cash. Tech is tech. I do care that the Ethereum creator supports a man who will lie, cheat, and do basically anything short of murder to get his coin to the top.

If Vitalik is able to overlook that sort of behavior, I think it casts a shadow on Vitalik’s own character — and the characters of everyone else who works with Vitalik on a regular basis. Has the Ethereum team used similar tactics to get ETH to the top? Is that why Roger’s behavior is acceptable and supported?

It’s one thing to support technology on the merits of its innovation, it’s another to support a man who is as toxic and self-serving as Roger Ver.

And yes! I understand that Vitalik Buterin is only one man and at this point Ethereum is much larger than one man.

Ethereum is massive. It has become the defacto blockchain to build decentralized applications and tokens on. Hell, I run a company that has its token built on the Ethereum blockchain. But it’s through running this company and developing on the Ethereum blockchain that I’ve lost all my faith in Ethereum’s long-term sustainability.

This has nothing to do with morals and everything to do with the technology itself.

Coding on Ethereum is a nightmare. Building simple applications takes months and months of work, and even then it can have deadly vulnerabilities that you could never have foreseen.

Remember the most recent Parity wallet hack that froze up $275 million of Ethereum funds?

I am astonished (though I shouldn’t be) at how the Ethereum market has reacted following this news. ETH’s price is up — mainly, I believe — because the market is (incorrectly) viewing this event as a token burn.

But this view misses the forest for the trees.

The Parity hack is a BIG DEAL. The fact that Parity was created by an Ethereum co-founder means that the Parity team should understand the process of coding applications on Ethereum better than almost anyone on the planet. The hack, discovered by an innocent guy who was just playing around, was able to wipe out a large number of multi-sig parity wallets with THREE LINES OF CODE. This is equivalent to you logging onto your online bank and deleting your neighbor’s retirement account. Need I say that you shouldn’t be able to do that?

If a noob who was just “playing around with code” was able to make a quarter of a billion dollars vanish overnight, what other vulnerabilities do these applications have on the Ethereum blockchain?

If anything, these hacks highlight that coding on Ethereum is still way too complicated, poorly documented, and difficult. Which is a problem when you’re dealing with billions of dollars.

And it isn’t like this is the first time that an app on Ethereum has created a means for hackers to take advantage of the network. It happened previously to Parity multi-sig wallets earlier this year. And before that, there was the DAO.

Fuck, even my company had issues with smart contract development that was supposed to distribute our token following our crowdund. The error misplaced over 10% of our total token supply. The guy we hired to build that contract claimed to be one of the best in the business (spoiler alert, he’s not), but he’s still getting lots and lots of work with major companies.

The fact of the matter is that Ethereum is not ready for applications outside a very niche industry — token creations. And at this point, the speculative market is vastly overvaluing Ethereum’s capabilities. The good news (if you’re holding ETH), is that in crypto, the people with money aren’t exactly the people who understand code. Which means that the speculative market will most likely continue to overvalue Ethereum for many years.

But as for me, I couldn’t care less about its price. It’s going to take a lot of work before I ever believe in Ethereum again.