For anyone old enough to remember the early to kid 90's you will remember that one website dominated the search engine market at that time, no it wasn't internet explorer... no no, that came later, the platform I am referring to is the one and Netscape, from the glasses of modernity it may look like a clunky and awkward platform (and I assure you it was, but at that time it was cutting edge, but eventually it was no longer, what happened? In short Netscape fell to the wayside many first movers do, by growing comfortable on the throne on which they sat and failing to adapt to the innovation and out of the box thinking that it successors successfully used to usurp that throne.
Often being defined as the pole bearer of the 2nd generation of cryptocurrencies Ethereum has given immeasurably to the ecosystem and that statement truly cannot be overstated, there were talks of running a decentralized world computer as a side chain to Bitcoin through code modification or side chains but this was never implemented effectively. Ethereum implemented this beautifully and it seemed the possibilities were endless with the creation of trustless systems, the disruption potential was monstrous, credit, banking, advertising, peer to peer driving ex. If you could name the system of trust then there was going to be a tokenized ecosystem waiting to disrupt it. However, here we are in year 2018 and there are no DApps adopted (not even really in a niche way) to show for it, what happened? Where is the decentralized utopia that many dreamed of? Well to begin, market exuberance and the over excitement of the crowd will always over hype the reality of technology (adoption takes time, sometimes even decades before "mass" adoption is gained) gas power ran alongside steam for many years before the full utility of gas was able to fully supplant steam, electricity was commercially available for decades but still largely lived in the shadow of oil lighting until people stopped being afraid to put lightning in their walls. The point is that not all disruption happens quickly
Correlated to DApp platforms will Ethereum be left in the dust as well? With dozens of new protocols promising to fix the ailing problems of the space, will EOS, Zilliqa, Cardano, QTUM ex. Be the Google and Microsoft to Netscape and Aol? I don't believe so, and if you give me just another paragraph I will briefly tell you why.
Closed systems have their advantages in corporate hierarchies, mainly they protect trade secrets that if leaked would allow competitors to simply copycat and potentially outdo what has been worked on, closed systems warring against each other has been the status quo since the beginning of the industrial revolution and this culture transitioned into software development when big money began to pour into computers in the 1980s. But in 2008 something revolutionary happened to open source software development and that was the release of the Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto, the principles of freedom through decentralization and censorship resistance would be perfect for peer to peer learning and thus fast adaptivity. The world is not anymore the way it used to be... no,no, no.
The Ethereum team is already implementing their methods scaling (switching to proof-of-stake, sharding, and casper) with these innovations coming to the forefront, don't expect Ethereum to be left behind in the same way that Netscape was. Open-source software allows competitors to build and improve upon that which came before much faster than was previously possible and because of that look for the various protocols to build upon each other, introducing their own methods of combating whatever future problems they may face.
So the next time somebody calls X Protocol the Ethereum killer, ask yourself if you believe they have any skin in the game and if they are impartial. In the future expect to see many different protocols servicing various industries, in an open-source world, monopolies will be a thing of the past. And Thats A Good Thing!
For my video on the same subject please check out my YouTube channel (link on my page)