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Here comes a long and meandering thread about markets, competition and social norms, with some personal history thrown in. I’ve been thinking about what precipitated my interaction with @sgoldfed yesterday a lot and I have some thoughts.
I think the first thing to clarify is that my “nothing is even close” comment was aimed directly at competing L1 chains, for ETH scaling we’ve picked the OVM and I’m confident they deliver but if you are building something on Ethereum we are cool. I support you and wish you well.
Second, I love the Ethereum community and the whole flowers, rainbows and unicorns vibe. I think we should all aspire to be more collaborative at a deep level. But I also believe in markets and I think people in the ETH community are privileged to be able to ignore them.
Markets on short time frames can be capricious and feel unfair, it’s over longer time frames where I think they tend to be highly efficient. Ethereum is both within a wider SC platform market and itself a market for both infrastructure and consumer facing tech. That’s reality.
Being fucked over by the market doesn’t feel good, but lashing out at your competitors is almost never effective. We wrote this post about Maker in 2018 and tried to keep it as balanced as possible because we needed a way to distinguish our approach https://blog.havven.io/makerdao-and-the-dai-f21a4d5571a1
Why did we need to do this? Because basically everyone in the core Ethereum community supported Maker and dismissed our approach out of hand, many still do! Despite the fact that Havven was more reasonable as a mechanism that Synthetix on paper.
It was not fun at all being called a scam or dismissed by the vast majority of the eth community. https://www.reddit.com/r/MakerDAO/comments/7vxel5/havven_vs_makerdao_why_havven_is_a_scam/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
This is literally a discussion that happened in the Maker reddit with @RuneKek who at least defended us as not being a scam :) but yeah I remember this vividly almost three years later.
Now there are a few responses to this kind of thing, you can get angry and lash out or you can say fuck it I’m going to prove them wrong. Both of these can end in failure and both can end in success, so by all means go nuts and do whichever one you want.
Now back to my response yesterday. A few people who know me or have gotten to know me over the years in crypto have said this publicly but I’ll just validate it. I am a hyper-competitive person, I know that’s somehow considered weird in the Eth community, but it’s who I am.
To the point where I genuinely wonder how the fuck all the prominent people in Ethereum have become as successful as they have while not being competitive. It is a genuine mystery to me. I want to win it’s in my nature. If you are somehow winning without trying idk I’m impressed.
I think high conviction and competitiveness are critical to a well functioning market. How else do we decide whether a given approach is right, if we haven’t tested its limits.
I also believe people are a mix of environment and genes, in my case my father was a professional athlete. I grew up the oldest of four boys. My house was fucking competitive. We still compete. I grew up expecting to be a professional athlete myself.
Unfortunately while I was pretty talented I didn’t have the mental toughness back then to make it. I hated losing and my fear of losing made it worse. I spent a lot of time in my 20’s deconstructing what went wrong in my teens to make sure it didn’t happen again.
So back to the thread yesterday, I am a consumer of the OVM I didn’t build it. And my tweet hyping up the OVM triggered a few people, probably fairly, @jadler0 called me out too, albeit in a much more reasonable fashion.
But here’s the thing, if you don’t like something I’ve said and you get up in my face and challenge me I’m not going to back down and I’m probably not going to take the high road. I’m probably going to just knock your ass on the ground. That is just me.
To be clear if you come out and attack a potential user of your platform for saying your competitor is going to win, that’s really self destructive, we aren’t having a debate on merits at that point we are in a different place. And I can happily go to that place as well.
This is especially true when I feel like someone is playing games and wilfully ignoring the roadmap that was presented like a week ago. Either these things will be there in a few weeks or everyone involved is just bullshitting.
If you attack people I like and trust I’m not going to take that well, if I choose to not take the high road and have a sober and cleared eye discussion on the technical merits I’ll accept that criticism but if you are shocked I didn’t do that you don’t know me at all.
So apologies to anyone I triggered with that tweet, unless you are launching a competing L1 chain lol, in that case I’m throwing down the gauntlet. We are directly competing and I’m going to do everything in my power to ensure Ethereum wins.
Addendum: since my mentions are still full of but but but the tech stack *hand wringing* not everything is about tech. You need people, you need them to believe and trust you to buy into your vision. Excluding Founders if you don’t have a bd/strategy leader fix it, list below 
Some of the top non-tech leaders in the space imo:
@cjliu49
@EidJohann
@ashleighschap
@hjmomtazi
@DeFi_Dad
@thedhkt
@brendan_dharma
@sassal0x
@econoar
I’m sure I’ve forgotten a ton of amazing people, more likely they are all rounders who escaped my mental filter.
@cjliu49
@EidJohann
@ashleighschap
@hjmomtazi
@DeFi_Dad
@thedhkt
@brendan_dharma
@sassal0x
@econoar
I’m sure I’ve forgotten a ton of amazing people, more likely they are all rounders who escaped my mental filter.
