My husband is driving to the bank to try to sort out ongoing issues with wire transfers to our own account in Egypt.

We used to transfer with no issues but lately they have been blocked. And they don’t make it clear where it was blocked, so we have to talk to banks on both sides and triangulate where the issue is. It could be related to Egypt’s ongoing currency crisis since they’ve been doing some capital controls, but we don’t know yet.

And in the meantime we’ve been sending money via a remittance service instead, which is about 5x more expensive in terms of fees.

Fiat system is going great. Keep it up guys. Absolutely nothing to disrupt here.

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.