Back in the earlier days of Bitcoin (mostly pre-2015), the BitcoinTalk forums were full of interesting and innovative ideas/research about what to build on top of Bitcoin. Though unfortunately once the ‘block size wars’ started heating up in 2015, most of this activity ceased and many of the smartest people left the Bitcoin ecosystem and headed for greener pastures (of which many found themselves a home in Ethereum land).

rauljordan.eth @rauljordaneth

The amount of high-quality research in Ethereum and its openness is astounding. The specs for the merge, sharding, and beyond all have contributors from different walks of life and conducted publicly. If you’re a dev, the highest signal-to-noise ratio is in Ethereum, bar-none

February 16th 2022

18 Retweets127 Likes

The EthResearch forum is the modern day BitcoinTalk and is full of the most bleeding edge crypto-related research from economics to layer 2’s to consensus - if it’s on the bleeding edge, it’s on EthResearch. Now, a key difference between EthResearch and BitcoinTalk is that Ethereum actually ends up implementing many of the ideas posted to the research forum whereas Bitcoin has implemented basically 0 of those early ideas that were talked about on BitcoinTalk. Obviously this is due to the Bitcoin communities aversion to hard forks/network upgrades whereas Ethereum embraces these with open arms.

Focusing on Raul’s tweet now, it really is amazing how basically all of the research that has gone into core Ethereum upgrades like the merge, sharding and more have all been done out in the open. There’s no private meetings, no hidden information, no obfuscated research - it’s all out in the open for anyone in the world to contribute to - and this is exactly what makes Ethereum so special. I think that this is probably the one thing that the Ethereum ecosystem needs to preverse the most - losing this stuff would actually make me a little bearish on Ethereum because my bull thesis has always been that the smartest people will be attracted to Ethereum.

As I’ve written about before, some people will criticise Ethereum for this openness because not only can everyone participate, everyone also gets a full view of how the sausage is made. This means that any plans/roadmaps that change, any features that get cut and any research that gets scrapped is completely transparent instead of being hidden away from the public’s view. Though in saying that, I don’t think this is a big deal because it has never led to negative outcomes or consequences for Ethereum - people can criticise all they want but the Ethereum researchers and builders just keep plotting along.

Building revolutionary stuff is hard - building it out in the open is even harder - but we get it done in Ethereum. I’ve always thought of Ethereum as a “bazaar” where thousands of ideas are out in the open and ‘for sale’ to whoever wants to implement them. This is one of the main reasons why Ethereum has been able to stay at the bleeding edge of crypto development even though it’s an “older” network with a $370 billion market cap - and we should fight with everything we’ve got to preserve this for as long as we can.

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.