What I’ve always loved about the Ethereum ecosystem is that it has a culture of diverse opinions and thoughts. There always seems to be some debate happening somewhere in the community and much of the time it’s quite friendly and constructive. And, as Vitalik notes below, it’s nice that on Twitter we can actually immediately see that someone is part of the Ethereum community just by looking at their Twitter name and seeing that it has an ENS name in it.

vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin

I love seeing people with .eth in their handles arguing with each other on twitter. Diversity of opinions is fun, and it's even more fun when there's an in-your-face reminder that no matter how much you disagree on small stuff ultimately you still love the same cryptocurrency.

May 21st 2022

2,404 Retweets20,247 Likes

Unlike some other ecosystems in crypto, people in Ethereum are encouraged and, more importantly, allowed to express these opinions without fear of being “shunned” from the community. This allows for a diverse set of debates and discussions to happen publicly in a really healthy way. On top of this, it doesn’t matter if you’re Vitalik or someone completely new to Ethereum, if you have constructive thoughts then your voice will be heard somewhere in the community.

A good example of the above is EIP-1559 as there was actually a lot of debate had in the community in the 2 or so years leading up to 1559 reaching mainnet. Much of this debate centered around the technical aspects of the upgrade, but there was obviously some pushback from miners since they were about to take a pay cut. I think overall the debates that were had were constructive, but sometimes they got way too heated and there were conspiracies thrown around by certain parties which resulted in a bunch of toxicity.

One thing that I do worry about sometimes is losing this culture as Ethereum continues to grow. I mean, we had the perfect example of this back when ProgPoW was the main debate the Ethereum community was having. It was not constructive, it was toxic, people were going around in circles and at one point it didn’t seem like the debate was ever going to end. Obviously it did end and ProgPoW never ended up happening but I think it gave us a glimpse into what a more Bitcoin-like future for Ethereum would look like (which thankfully we don’t have at this point).

I think there’s always going to be negative/toxic segments of an ecosystem - especially as they grow larger - but as long as it doesn’t become the culture of that ecosystem I think it’s okay. Now, preserving a culture is obviously quite hard, but I think if the Ethereum community keeps on this path that we’ve been on since genesis we’ll be alright - we just have to be conscious of the fact that things can change!

Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano

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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.