tl;dr: One tech time horizons

I often wonder how this period within the advent of Web 3.0 world will be viewed.

Taking a short term snapshot, it’s easy to assume that Ethereum will be here forever. It’s almost “too big to fail” right now.

And It may be.

But there’s a part of me that remembers thinking that way about AOL.

There are numerous differences, of course, but given how early we really are in this cycle (in terms of adoption, NBA Top Shot notwithstanding), we still have to see which Layer 1 protocol best addresses the so-called “Blockchain Trilemma”.

The core idea is that:

greater scalability is possible, but security, decentralization, or both will suffer as a consequence

Ethereum is moving to Proof-of-Stake in Eth 2.0 and the Foundation is certainly no stranger to the ideas of the Trilemma, so we’ll have to see how that plays out.

It’s easy to look at the list on coinmarketcap and assume that the “winners” and “losers” have been determined, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last 5+ years in crypto, it’s that things happen really quickly.

“Gradually, then suddenly.”

I’m not saying Ethereum is going to disappear. Odds are certainly in its favor, but I also think it’s way too early to call the game.

Update: here’s a chart I saw on Exponential View that gives a bigger (albeit incomplete) picture of the Layer 1 landscape.