Replying to Avatar Willy Woo

Ethereum is NOT a protocol, you know things like TCP/IP and HTTP. The crypto world is in a mass psychosis. VC funds have blossomed on the thesis that L1s are the “protocols” for finance.

No, these are language and compute environments.

ETH was the first language to gain popularity for DeFi apps. But it was created before they knew what DeFI needs were.

We have seen this before… COBOL, Fortran, Lisp, C, JS, Rust.

Every language builds from learnings from the past and upon the needs of new domains. Old languages continue to be used, but many wane, new languages gain adoption.

ETH’s Solidity is COBOL.

To be clear:

- A protocol is a standard for messaging.

- A language is a standard for compute.

The former has longer and stronger network effects.

Bitcoin is more of the former while ETH is more of the latter.

There will be a ongoing market for better decentralised compute networks. Like COBOL it’s quite unlikely Solidity will be what we build DeFi apps on in say 20 years.
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jyap 2y ago

I don’t think you can compare a computer language which doesn’t have an inherent lock in.

A better comparison is a platform like AWS where there is first mover advantage.

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Willy Woo 2y ago

It’s a great point since AWS captures the compute environment and shapes some of the language environment. Unlike AWS, blockchain L1s are notoriously hard to change once in production. Thus they become disadvantaged against challenger L1s.