Successful businesses first leverage novel services to niche markets with less competition before expansion.
To be more charitable to Bitcoin and Ethereum, they are attempting to be global internet protocols, not companies. From the get go, Bitcoin supporters like Hal Finney envisioned "Bitcoin Banks" that provided access to the Bitcoin blockchain to the masses who can't afford to use it directly, much like ISPs connect non-institutional users to the internet.
So we replace a (in-theory democratically accountable) central bank with a cabal of banks?
How is this better? This is like replacing the Federal reserve with the agreements of LIBOR traders.
These fees used to be paid to miners. Now the currency paid as transaction fees are simply destroyed.
Starting August 5th for the first time, coins that were created were literally destroyed.
You can see the profound impact this has had on the total ETH supply in the chart below. You'll see the growth curve largely flattened out.
How did they pull that off w/o a hard fork?
Or was this a planned feature from the get go?
It was first proposed by Vitalik in 2018 but lay dormant for a while before being picked up by community members and being prepared for inclusion. IIRC it took about 2 years to get it into production.
Besides the technical changes it's interesting as the most vocal proponents weren't developers and as such its inclusion was truly driven by the community.
Solana is open source. What is stopping a community, perhaps even a DAO, from forking all the hard work those VCs so generously open sourced?
(side note - I fuckin love open source for this reason)
If you have the skills to maintain a Solana fork, how much harder is it to make your own chain? If the difficulty gap isn't immense, it's more upside to build a new Solana-esque chain from scratch than fork Solana, since you can't easily fork the Solana community/brand/legitimacy.
If and when Solana and other fast L1s have stabilized to the point of being simple plug-and-play software appliances, I do expect a host of forks to appear, but to succeed they will need to do more than reset the cap table and get rid of the leaders.
And yet, Ethereum and Bitcoin have succeeded despite design flaws. It goes to show that you can do much better by serving a niche with massive demand (speculators, darknet users) than trying to build a Product for Everyone.
I don't expect a Product for Everyone to come from the Ethereum or Bitcoin communities, communities rife with tribalism and whose insiders are billionaire ideological extremists, totally out of touch with normies. That much of the media coverage of crypto, such as this article, is inaccurate doesn't help matters; insiders increase their tribalism and anti-establishment angst, and outsiders increase their confusion.
So I do hope that R&D into layer 1 and consensus tech doesn't relent. As it stands, the highest bandwidth chain (Solana) makes significant sacrifices in decentralization -- SOL is hyper concentrated in VC/whale/Core Team hands, and the Core Team plays a huge role as Kingmaker, picking winning projects to signal-boost -- and there is not yet a chain with reasonable bandwidth and PRIVACY.
In the people's imagination, blockchain is a privacy technology. But in actuality, it's a panopticon. Until the gap from perception to reality closes, this market is ripe for disruption.