I have a confession to make: I am not rich. I haven’t made a fat pile of dough from trading, holding, or staking anything. While crypto has paid off my car and my credit card, and even built me a kickass new computer, I am still a lowly wage slave- like most of you, I imagine.

I make a fair amount of money by trading, but I basically use crypto as my decentralized savings account. I’ve been involved in the market for years now and personally seen the ups far outnumber the downs in terms of growth. Holding a $500 bonus in the market makes a lot more sense to me than giving it to the bank for 0.05% APY in return. If it goes to the moon, that’s great! But I don’t have enough invested that I’ll be retiring or buying a yacht if it does. Maybe a fancy dinner, cigars with the boys, and some new pants.

I started a new business last month and it took off like a bride’s panties. I saw more success than I was financially prepared for, and I had to really dig deep into my pockets to keep up with demand. Now, month #2 is here and my bank is taking its sweet time with my financing. My wagecuck bucks weren’t enough to fund it either, so I had to dip into my crypto bags to get a little booster until my financing comes in. I’m invested in a few different projects, so I had to choose- which do I think is most unlikely to blast off in the near future?

Sorry, Ethereum. You drew the short straw.

Ethereum is kind of a hot mess these days. It’s like a nuclear reactor on the verge of meltdown- everyone needs it, but it’s causing a lot of health problems. If you’re moving thousands of dollars at a time, then the gas fees probably don’t get to you, but I don’t have that kind of money. It doesn’t make sense to me to make a profit of $50 and spend $40 in gas to collect it. In my case, Ethereum is only good for long term holding.

I’ve heard all the promises of ETH 2.0 coming along to save the day. The more I look into it, the less excited I get. I’m uneasy about a network this big and this important risking centralization by turning to Proof-of-Stake. Besides, the switch won’t do anything about the unholy gas fees anyway. Sharding will fix that, but that’s the last step of the upgrade and is still years out.

The wide world of NFTs is built on Ethereum. But NFTs are dumb. There, I said it. I don’t give a rat’s ass about the monkey in your profile picture. I don’t game enough to care whether the game is decentralized or not. I don’t care about owning a plot of virtual land next to Snoop Dogg or Taco Bell. Virtual fine art, virtual real estate, virtual tennis, whatever. If that’s your thing then go bananas, but it’s all junk to me, so I see no reason to hold the money it’s based on.

I pay a lot of attention to DeFi, but Ethereum hardly corners the market there. There are a lot of projects already built on top of other networks. Many such networks have been using PoS since the beginning. They have lightening fast processing speeds and are terrific money-makers for the sub-millionaire investor (Cough cough, Solana).

I’m not saying the Ethereum is garbage or that the upgrade will be a total failure. I’m saying that it’s going to take a while, and I need my money today. That’s what a savings account is for, after all. In the future I might pack a new bag with Ether and profit from it then. In the meantime I’ll keep working my dead-end job, focusing on my art and my business, and investing into projects that are much friendlier to poor capitalists.

This article was originally posted 4/28/22 on anarchocrypto.net - a website where I post more crypto content like this.