gm,

sadly more demotivating hit pieces are being published slandering Ethereum visions: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/A-Libertarian-Island-Dream-in-Honduras-Is-Now-an-dollar11-Billion-Nightmare?index=0x67aee832a2297b6d49163d112dcd9f70263f1b96ca903f0238c5ccd5a055ef0d4dd9ae58

It's an entire storm of discredit and demotivation, when including yesterday's story too.

I'll ask again: What do we want here? Do we really just want blockchain and the EVM as a memecoin casino? Is this really the limit of the technology?

The portrait is that we're incapable of navigating the moral dilemma of deploying powerful technology.

That we're too stupid to control the technology and that it changes the lives of people for the worse. We're unable to defend against money laundering criminals. In fact, it isn't even reported that we want to keep those criminals out. It is ascribed to us that we're free market loving extremists who happily platform them. Do we?

And we're, of course, also evil neo-colonialists who treat local Honduran residents badly in our opulent living quarters on the beach.

No wonder the ETH price is low. No wonder sentiment is dog shit. No wonder ETH researchers have been cucked to being paper clip optimizers.

It is because the only exciting thing to report on is that someone has enabled 5% cheaper transactions while bridging tokens from one L2 to the other. If you didn't get the memo yet, anything else that we intended to do is now either canceled, illegal or highly immoral.

To all the naysayers and doubters in our own ranks. Thank you for intensely questioning the well-intentioned entrepreneurs in the space, you created the memecoin casino too.

100%. Also say anything about Ethereum, but I think the moral compass here is the strongest among crypto.

There are many people who actually mean well, and are fully aware of all moral dilemmas. Hence things like Railgun, that helps you maintain privacy without taking part in money laundering (https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/@vitalik.eth:-how-Railguns-privacy-pools-filter-criminal-deposits?index=0x67add400bb19dc7f272a327ed6757d7d20d58aa6cfbc974715ebd101f2947dc56b787c62).

So why so much of this memecoin casino exists? Yes, of course people want to get rich quick. But a few weeks ago, I listened to an interview with Chris Dixon.

They asked him about the US crypto regulations, and he said that in a16z they know many entrepreneurs who wanted to build genuine businesses around crypto. But these regulations literally favored memecoin casinos and scams. You could deploy a memecoin and not care about SEC going after you, but if you built a valuable DeFi project, you'd be on the radar (see: Uniswap which received Wells notice).

He said that with new regulators we will unlock many new use cases as people are literally waiting to ship them. I hope he's right, and the next 4 years will be focused on shipping real stuff.

I doubt that media outlets who's business model rely on spreading FUD will stop doing it. But it's much harder to convince someone DeFi sucks if they use Aave to pay their bills.