maybe to be more blunt whose job was it to get this right, and why did they fail?

Ethereum

i'd support Danny Ryan as head of the EF Danny led Ethereum through the most difficult transition in Ethereum history, and is respected by both developers AND community members. Aya is frankly respected by neither he "gets" Ethereum, and he lives and breathes Ethereum. full stop tbh, i am not even sure if Aya uses the chain. i'm sure she's a nice person, but she doesn't have the vision or credibility to shepherd the EF through the times to come staff at EF should also support this, because i believe Danny would help get everyone focused on value added activities which will help Ethereum win, rather than whatever stumbling in the dark is happening right now for some significant percentage of the organization it's time for a change, and change is good

How to think of Eth (the asset) a Manifesto: Eth is *the* permissionless money. What is permissionless money? Money that can move trustlessly through an on-chain economy. USDC/T have trust assumptions (they can freeze anytime). Before I make the case to you why permissionless money is all that matters, let me first explain what doesn’t matter. I don’t care about P/E, cash flows, or even burns. What I care about is the network effect of the Eth asset itself and it’s usage of pristine collateral/money in the ever growing on chain (trustless blockspace) economy. If you also own Eth, hopefully I will make the case for you to then come to understand this is all that actually matters. I don’t care about the fees/revenue because if you do any sort of DCF model the truth is every single chain that competes on this is like a 500 P/E, or not even profitable after validator emissions. Actually if I cared about this, I would own TRON as its pure value but I don't care about this so that's that. But what about "the tech", do I care about that? I don’t really care about that either, because you’re constantly constrained by past design decisions and there really is no lasting moat in this regard. At best, and under optimistic assumptions, if Eth the asset is valued by technology it could maybe grow to 2-3T from fees/revenue if you scale and execute perfectly on that roadmap. The Sharpe ratio of owning an asset like that, for that kind of upside, in such a disruptive environment, forget it and if somehow Eth community decides to lean into being the “tech” and not the money play I’ll be the first to sell all my bags. The tech only matter as a means to an end in the sense are the devs creating more blockspace with Eth gold standard settlement properties intact? Ok cool, we're all good and let the devs cook on that. They cook that & we the community make money. If you disagree with me and you want to invest only in “tech” let me help you out: You’d be better off buying the newest alt L1s and then constantly looking over your shoulder before an even newer Alt L1 disrupts your bag. That way you can then quickly rotate your capital to the next gen tech being released. That new gen tech will be 1.1x better than [your bags]. Just be aware it’s a commodity product that is in a hyper competitive environment backed by VCs who got in at 1/50th your buy price who will then be dumping their staking rewards (from their vesting tokens, what, you didn't read pg 23, paragraph 3 of their private SAFT agreement that allows them to stake them?) as it converges to zero margins amongst a field of competitors going for a TAM 1/20th of what Eth is competing for. Yeah I simply refuse to all-in with my wealth into that environment for that TAM. What I do actually care about is permissionless money. Eth itself *is* the product. And the product is valuable because it offers you access to neutral blockspace with a growing and useful on chain economy built on top in which your money/SOV (Eth) will be the kingmaker in. How I measure the product (Eth) success is by how far the distribution is being expanded through growth in L2s & maturation of Dapps/services and products. I want the on-chain economy to grow and Eth on every chain, and that vision is slowly unfolding, but the story and narratives are being told reflecting this are poorly told. I can imagine in the future both humans and ai agents/bots using Eth as money/SOV (once again the only *fully* permissionless money you’re able to use in the on chain economy) as they consume services and products. In this economy USDT/C still exist of course, but they’re not how you store wealth. If anything you borrow them against your pristine collateral (Eth) when needed. It really is that simple. What about SOL? What about XYZ? SOL has a different thesis and is not aiming for the money like monetary premiums like BTC & Eth. They can indeed compete on “the tech” which they are, and are doing a great job at it and will likely will win a chunk in the power law share. The design decisions they have taken to build their blockchain reflect that and Eth should not and cannot compete on L1-L1 in that regard, it is a complete waste of time and don't get dragged into thinking Eth should. I’m not a hater, number goes up, I own some and use the chain often, but it’s just not a competitor to Eth how I imagine the design space playing out. I see Aptos, Sui, Base, those are SOLs comp on longer timeframes. And what about BTC? BTC is great. I’m also not a hater and number goes up. BTC is indeed digital gold and has a great usage case for that. The only true drawback for why BTC can’t compete on the North Star I envision for Eth is because there is no way to build a trustless on chain economy on top of it. BTC itself would need to hard fork, and opening up the design space to allow this would be against its social contract and risk the Digital Gold narrative. It’s too technical to go into it, but just ask any honest nerd who does not gaslight and you quickly realise all the ecosystem marketing on top of it is just multi sig side chains that are not end-game equilibrium interesting as far as digital property rights go. WBTC also has 3rd party custodian assumptions, which may not seem like a big deal, but imagine a world where trillions of value is being moved around on chain daily, do you really want someone to be able to freeze you through code? I don’t say this as a negative to BTC, because I actually do not want my digital gold to have complexity and instead just have a narrow simple design space that is more rock solid. It has SOV properties, I like it, but it's not a monopoly on SOV and remember Eth grows its own SOV halo more through its expansion and usage of money. BTC grows it by not expanding in this fashion. And I believe it’s going to do well, has great product market fit, and is digital gold. This is indeed useful for portfolio allocation So why do I still hold ETH (despite the PA?) Once the community actually gets it shit together they will see that I am right here. And if the Eth community comes to consensus on this, this is a screaming good hold with a great r/r. The TAM for SOV/MONEY is 50T in the next 10y. The TAM for blockchain tech is maybe 5T. Eths *only* North Star should be solely building towards being the best permissionless money there is, and the sooner Devs/Community recognise this and fully buy in the better off we are. If that happens, I will continue to only add to my bags and front-run this reality before the rest of the space realises this is the actual crown worth designing for. Alternatively, if somehow the ETH community rejects this premise and goes with we are pure tech and ignores being money, full disclosure I would shift all my digital wealth into the communities that actually believe in the money/SOV properties (BTC) while also placing better risk adjusted bets on tech (Newest Alt L1s, Coinbase stock, whatever) or even barbell some of it with some memes for that matter. Final quick thought: In case it hasn’t clicked, this is also why both BTC & SOL maxi communities try to position Eth as a P/E tech play — from a strategy point of view if this is the chessboard that I laid out, it weakens the competition for SOV (against BTC) while simultaneously uplifts SOL (against ETH) — and it’s disappointing how few in the Eth community have a spine to call this out or be able to see it clearly, or worse yet fall for this psy-ops. That’s also why I took the time to write this out to make it as simple as possible for it to click to everyone who holds Eth and as my contribution to the Eth community. Here is actual common sense being spoken to you and I hope it gives you considerations to think through and awakens a light bulb in you @mikeneuder gives a great talk on many of these points and I’ll link it below in the next post. Never spoke to him, but he is a G and gets it. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

This will probably the modal daily headline for the next year or so