IMO this is the wrong place to attack.

BTC has just completely smoked Ether. And BTC is JUST a left curve memecoin.

Have you used BTC recently? It's utter garbage.

Everybody knows that everyone who's holding BTC holds it for its simple narrative. An ETH researcher saying that BTC is going to go down is just not powerful in my eyes. That's the bare minimum you'd expect from an ETH researcher.

But sorry, isn't this the accusation that CT levels against Ethereum? That it's too researcher-y and too academic? Look we did all of this "hey we are the right curved researchers" thing. Look at the BTC/ETH graph. Do you see it working? I don't.

Yes, there are a million ways I can think of Bitcoin crashing. Do I care? Does it help Ethereum to win?

Let's be real here we just have to do the work to get to the same level of top-of-mind as Bitcoin. Ethereum is already so advanced. Advancing it even more is simply going to produce more diminishing returns

Ethereum reminds me of this Minotaur Paradox shared in the daily discussion. Also, idk if you remember, but Justin Drake predicted that only a small % of ETH will be staked which would lead to v. high yield for staker. So if an Ethereum Researcher couldn't predict the rise of LSTs, I don't think he is in the position to predict the ETH price (especially given this underperformance you mentioned).

At the same time I'm kinda tired of bashing ETH researchers. I just wonder how we can change trajectory towards a positive outlook and by supporting their work too. I think their work is important, no doubt, but as I have said in yesterday's daily, I think the meat on Ethereum is really around its bold bold visions and what they'd mean for society:

- network states

- public goods

- soulbound tokens

- zkps

- financial privacy

- trustless, decentralized compute, etc.

How do we go back to those? How do we shut up the nay-sayers? How do we make sure that our haters don't question the good intentions of Ethereum builders? How do we make sure that everyone doesn't just focus on consensus researchers when they want to portrait "Ethereum news?"

I think it'd be useful to share visions of how we want to change the world (as SV as it might sound).

When Musk says "We have electric, autonomous cars" or "We have a colony on Mars", it's a very vivid picture everyone can imagine. I think we should have the same visions for Ethereum, as no one can actually imagine "DeFi adoption".

Vitalik made a good attempt in his "d/acc: one year later":

It's the year 2042. You're seeing reports in the media about a new pandemic potentially in your city. You're used to these: people get over-excited about every animal disease mutation, and most of them come to nothing. The previous two actual potential pandemics were detected very early through wastewater monitoring and open-source analysis of social media, and stopped completely in their tracks. But this time, prediction markets are showing a 60% chance of at least 10,000 cases, so you're more worried.

The sequence for the virus was identified yesterday. Software updates for your pocket air tester to allow it to detect the new virus (from a single breath, or from 15 minutes of exposure to indoor air in a room) are available already. Open-source instructions and code for generating a vaccine using equipment that can be found in any modern medical facility worldwide should be available within weeks. Most people are not yet taking any action at all, relying mostly on widespread adoption of air filtering and ventilation to protect them. You have an immune condition so you're more cautious: your open-source locally-running personal assistant AI, which handles among other tasks navigation and restaurant and event recommendation, is also taking into account real-time air tester and CO2 data to only recommend the safest venues. The data is provided by many thousands of participants and devices using ZK-SNARKs and differential privacy to minimize the risk that the data can be leaked or abused for any other purpose (if you want to contribute data to these datasets, there's other personal assistant AIs that verify formal proofs that these cryptographic gadgets actually work).

Two months later, the pandemic disappeared: it seems like 60% of people following the basic protocol of putting on a mask if the air tester beeps and shows the virus present, and staying home if they test positive personally, was enough to push the transmission rate, already heavily reduced due to passive heavy air filtering, to below 1. A disease that simulations show might have been five times worse than Covid twenty years ago turns out to be a non-issue today.

Ofc this vision is about defense, as it's d/acc. I think we should have more "the year is 2030" visions about Ethereum making people's lives better. From network states letting people find their peers around the world, through public goods improving the lives of people of all status, through soulbound tokens helping us build reputation etc.

There's some decent content about stablecoins, though it's less about future vision and more about documenting how they already impacted people's lives.