In the long dry valley where blockchains go to grow old and dusty, a man named Dankrad Feist sat, squinting into the future like he was sizing up a stubborn mule. Dankrad, a fellow at the Ethereum Foundation, let it be knownâpublicly and not without a few dramatic pausesâthat if Ethereum didnât do something bold, itâd end up as forgotten as a payphone in a ghost town. Five, ten yearsâit didnât matter. Irrelevant, he said, like last seasonâs California oranges.
Earlier in the monthânobody remembers which day, but it probably rainedâFeist presented one wild idea: Ethereum Improvement Proposal 7938. This wasnât your granddaddyâs proposal. Nope. Feist figured they could jack up the gas limit 100 times over four years. Suddenly, transactions would run thick as jackrabbits in spring, and miners would busy themselves like bartenders on payday.
Now, Feist called it âunconventional,â and folks did fuss over that word. âAinât that the point?â he seemed to ask, smirking, âYou want to stay relevant, you got to stop playing it safe like a hog at feeding time.â Didnât matter that the risk could scare some cows.
Feist belonged to the tribe that wants Ethereum smack in the center of the crypto corral, holding down the economic fort. He grumbled that if all the money and hustle scattered into layer-2 pastures, Ethereum might as well pack its bags and head for the blockchain retirement homeâdoilies on the dashboard and all.
Feist was certainâalmost annoyingly soâthat scaling big wouldnât kill the sacred cows folks kept mooing about: censorship resistance, verifiability, and the right to two-step your way through a block without interference.
Meanwhile, Charles Hoskinson, who started Cardano (and, incidentally, not a lemonade stand), piped up from another campfire. He claimed, between bites of dried optimism, Ethereum would wind up like Blackberryâonce the king, now a trivia question nobody asks. Hoskinson reckoned that âparasiticâ layer-2 protocols would sap Ethereumâs lifeblood, and that would be that. You can almost hear the Apple ringtone echoing in the abyss.
So folks around the fire chuckled, raised an eyebrow, and wondered: Would Ethereum ride into the sunset a legend, or just another story crypto grannies tell their grandkids when the internetâs slow? đ¤
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2025-05-01 09:12