As most of you probably know, the ETH staking deadline for the Beacon Chain deployment is coming up fast. Ether staking is nowhere near the number it needs to be at in order to release Beacon, and no one seems to have a plan to make it so.
I've been saying that the crypto world needs to move away from the Ethereum network. No, not because I'm butthurt over its outrageous fees and endless cascade of rugpull projects. It's because at a fundamental level, the philosophy of the folks in charge of decentralizing Ethereum is not strong. I think Ethereum will eventually follow through on its technical promise to deliver a worldwide finance computer. I do not have faith in the Ethereum Foundation to follow through on its promise of decentralization or democratic finance.
However, I don't believe this is why the ETH network is having trouble getting its staking minimum. The investors that Eth has attracted do not bode well for its future or for the future of crypto as a whole. On one side, you've got overnight millionaire yuppie degens who got rich too fast during the 2017 mania. On the other side, you've got soulless groups of institutional and private investors who are cynically extracting as much profit as they can out of Ethereum before they move on to the next crypto wave.
It seems that no one believes in the promise of Ethereum any more — not the devs who originally proposed it, nor the "investors" who make Ethereum the most popular and active network in crypto. Everyone's in the space for the wrong reasons, and until that gets fixed, the staking minimum rightly won't get met.
Blockchain: The Next Everything
I had the unfortunate displeasure of reading Blockchain: The Next Everything by Stephen P. Williams in a coffeeshop not too long ago. If you're wondering where my negative attitude on crypto investors started, it may well have been here. Now you'd figure a book titled like Williams' would go more into the technical aspects of what blockchain has and could accomplish. Actually, he spends most of his time describing the scene around the blockchain in New York City, and it's not a pretty sight.
If you find it hard to fathom how degen developers could purposefully create scam dapps to rugpull people out of hard earned money, just read Blockchain. During a particularly eye opening chapter in the book, Williams describes attending a huge NYC blockchain conference. He paints a world of entitled, drugged out hipsters who just want to party and get high, not develop the next phase of democratized finance. These are people who charge $50 (fiat, not crypto!) to attend some druggie chill session in which the main speaker and leader of a "crypto-meditation session" is none other than Deepak Chopra — the inspiration for today's entire generation of Earnest Shills.
Everybody who's not devving up the next rugpull is investing daddy's money in it. The wrong people made money in bitcoin in 2017, folks. The newly minted millionaires were just yuppie Millennials playing around with trust fund money anyway. They were the only people who had enough expendable cash to invest in something that speculative.
Williams put faces to the eth wallets and devs we all see behaving so...degenerately. And degens will be degens — when it's time to get responsible and actually pull your weight in helping to decentralize the network, people drag their feet.
This is the main reason why Ethereum isn't meeting the staking minimum. The people who have the leverage to stake don't have the will, the discipline or the personal philosophy to do so.
Bigger Pots of Gold
For the rest of us middle class investors, it may be time to start pulling some funds away from the Ethereum network and start checking out alternatives like xDai. I've personally checked out Honeyswap, and it's a more than viable alternative to what we've got going on right now. BINANCE Smart Chain claims to be a friend of Ethereum, not a competitor, but I can't see how people don't see just how easily we could all just shift over to a more stable, less expensive chain with like, no problems whatsoever.
What's more, degen projects on Eth still provide plenty of room for exponential growth. And remember — Eth whales were NEVER in a position where they had to care about the money they were throwing around. Those kind of people are always going to choose the degen yield farm over staking Eth and losing that liquidity for a year or more.
For some reason, ether is pumping as well. Tradfi investors are actually discovering ether alongside bitcoin. Companies like Grayscale offer ether products and bitcoin products. I should know; I'm invested in both. The eth side is more volatile, but it's in an uptrend as well. People are finding out about what this side of crypto has to offer and they are moving in on it.
All of this means bigger pots of gold for anyone robust enough to hold 32 eth. That $12,000 or so can be put to tremendous use, far beyond the paltry 10% that the network is offering. What's more, I don't see the devs behaving in a mature way if Beacon Chain doesn't deploy like it's supposed to. The actions of Peter what's his name who pulled the hard fork on his own show that. Who's to say that he won't deploy Beacon anyway or invoke some other unilateral action because he thinks he knows what's best for all of us?
So far, ether seems to be holding its value. I wouldn't be surprised, however, if there was a huge dump in the near future. The fact that the network can't meet the staking minimum says a lot more about the philosophy and people behind it than it does about the technical propensity of Beacon Chain or any other technical advancement. At its core, this financial revolution is all about people. If we don't change our human nature, then it doesn't matter what tools we have at our disposal — we'll probably just come up with the same results.
