Ethereum Has Already Won The Developer War
In cryptocurrency, the things that are supposed to make sense, make no sense and the things that make no sense still make no sense at all. When it comes to loyalty to a certain project, investors primarily go where the money is while proclaiming to be in it "for the technology"
In the lead up to the delayed EOS mainnet launch, everyone was proclaiming that EOS was can Ethereum killer and a tonne of other vague unfounded claims. When the promise of moon profits is on the line, people will say and do the stupidest things. At the time of writing this EOS is down over 15% in value.
Even though "Ethereum Killer" EOS has launched, Ethereum still doesn't look dead or even wounded to me.
Of the top one hundred coins by market cap, 94 of them are built on Ethereum. Let that sink in for a moment, 94% of the top 100 coins are based on Ethereum. And even more mindblowing is 87% of the top 800 coins by market cap are based on Ethereum’s battle-tested ERC20 format.
During a recent Q&A James Duffy from Loom Network was asked about supporting other blockchains and gave a very honest answer where he said, "We think Ethereum has already won the race for developer adoption"
Does Ethereum Have Problems?
Absolutely. It is acknowledged by the Ethereum project themselves (including project creator Vitalik) that Ethereum has some issues with speed and scalability. But so too does Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency projects.
The scalability and performance issues are being worked on as we speak. In terms of development effort, a lot of thought has been put into solving the scalability and performance issues in a way that it won’t weaken Ethereum’s security.
It’s easy for people to point out how fast EOS is (even though it hasn’t been tested in production yet) but ignore the finer technical details on why it’s fast and why Ethereum is slow (because they work completely different to one another on a technical level).
People like to bring up examples of Friendster and MySpace losing to Facebook and how being number one doesn’t mean that you’ll always be number one. But once again, the people making these claims fail to look at the situation with the kind of microscopic detail required to truly make the comparison.
The Ecosystem
You only have to do a search for the keywords, “erc20” or “ethereum” on Github to see that there are a lot of open source tools, libraries and resources for working with Ethereum. For a technical project like Ethereum and programming language like Solidity, the project is only as good as the ecosystem sustaining it.
The golden standard for developing Ethereum applications is using a CLI tool called Truffle. which has seen almost 500k downloads in just the last year. And we can't forget about Zepellin which offers you the ability to write safe Ethereum smart contracts, which works super easy with Truffle.
And we can’t talk about tooling without mentioning the MetaMask browser extension which assists you in building a dApp (distributed application) or accessing them.
And besides the tooling and trove of information out there on how to build an Ethereum decentralised application, the shared knowledge is something that cannot be easily replicated. Any new project that starts from scratch is already three years behind and will be playing catch-up for the foreseeable future.
Any project that wants to compete with Ethereum has to do more than just provide a "faster blockchain" they'll also need to grow an ecosystem and sustain it. As someone who is actively involved in open source, I can tell you right now that this is no easy feat even if you have billions in the bank.
Go Where The Jobs Are
The thing that Ethereum has going for it is that it has had a three-year headstart on these other competing projects like EOS and Cardano. In any emerging tech industry like blockchain and cryptocurrency, three years is considered a lot.
If a developer is looking to upskill from being a software engineer or front-end developer, which cryptocurrency project are they likely to upskill in? Ethereum. And why? Because that’s where the jobs are, most cryptocurrency startups are built on top of Ethereum.
In combination with the massive ecosystem that features not only tools making it easier to build with Ethereum, some of the smartest minds in crypto have built a rapport with a community via their work with Ethereum.
So many people in crypto owe their success to Ethereum and it’ll take more than a fast blockchain to win these developers over and ask them to start again. As a front-end developer myself, I have seen similar parallels when it comes to Javascript libraries and frameworks.
If you want to be guaranteed a job in front-end land, all you have to do is learn ReactJS and people will be clamouring to hire you. Opposed to learning some unknown framework or library with limited job prospects.
The same thing applies to blockchain, want a job in blockchain? Upskill in Solidity and you'll be hounded night and day by recruiters on LinkedIn to help fill the gaping hole in cryptocurrency/blockchain experience that exists in the market right now.
In Conclusion
I am not saying that Ethereum is going to be the only cryptocurrency project to win over developers. But saying that another project is “going to kill it” is just absolute fantasy.
Ethereum is not going anywhere, no other project is anywhere near the level of Ethereum to even inflict a paper cut let alone a devastating blow. The hill is big enough for more than one big player.
I don’t think anyone expected EOS to kill etherum before the chain has even been validated.
From what I saw of the launch they have done a damn good job of creating an ecosystem of talented and dedicated developers. That was the whole point of making the community launch the chain themselves.
Totally respect your opinion, but I think and hope that you are very wrong about EOS
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Go here https://steemit.com/@a-a-a to get your post resteemed to over 72,000 followers.
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You knew I was going to reply to this ;-).
The war has just started, it is not even close to over. I am not naive enough to believe that Etheruem is going away, but it certainly is in trouble.
The reason for this is no superiority, a big factor is that their were simply no other real alternatives on the market and the explosion of ICO’s we witnessed in 2017. In my opinion, the ICO methodology is not going to survive as the SEC have stated these will be deemed a security. The airdrop method used by EOS bypasses these laws (for now) and give the delvelopes instant access to funds for one of the various EOS VC foundations. Being first to release a project does not guarantee success, Apple are a great example this, of course they have released cutting edge technology but they do not rush to introduce other tech until they have it right.
You are right, it is no secret Ehereum has major scaling issue (crypto kitties) and solutions are being worked on. I used to be a massive Eth fan boy until the crypto kitties incident and I was done. Plasma and Casper seem more like band aids to me. Moreover changing the consensus algorithm oalready established blockchain is no easy feat and will take a considerable amount of time to plan and execute. Also, the decision is to move towards a PoS variant which I feel will only strengthen the ”rich get richer” factor already plaguing PoW algorihms.
This is incorrect, EOS already has node.js support which is the most widely adopted java implantation in the world. EOSIO already have a framework built and available for download on their girhub. Also, Etherem smart contracts and built using Solidity which is not a major language at all. EOS smart contract are written in C++ which is the building block for every other modern language and operating system used today. EOSIO have prewritten suburb base classes that make using and created smart contracts in C++ very easy.
I know your posts are designed to get people taking but I do hope you do not fully believe he words you have typed this time.