Notice something funny from the Picture above?
None of those chains even get talked about anymore. People in crypto are so greedy and self-serving and impatient and delusional that they still don't get it. This is not a competitive space. There is no such thing as an Ethereum Killer.
Look back to that post I just linked.
Wrote it on Steem (because there was no Hive) on June 25th, 2018. I must be getting better at this, because when I used to look back at posts from two or three years ago I was often embarrassed and noted what an idiot I was. Now it's like... nope... that's still totally 100% accurate. People are still running around saying the same stupid Venture Capitalist Web 2.0 mindset bullshit.
ETHEREUM would absolutely love for you to "kill it".
You'd think after ETH going x38 over the last year and a half that people would finally start to wake the F up and realize how ridiculous they're being. Such is not the case. If you ever have a chance to bet on people owning up to being wrong: bet against them.
How high do ETH fees need to get before people realize, "Hm, wow, maybe ETH needs some HELP." "Maybe they need these other chains to take some of the burden away from the main chain." Instead everyone sees the $200 gas fees on ETH and says the exact opposite! These people are high as a kite!
These Ethereum killers are going to take over because ETH has high gas fees?!!??!!? WHAT?!!??! NO! DAMN IT! That is exactly the opposite of what's happening here. The only reason why these other EVM networks and smart-contract platforms are even allowed to thrive is because of the high gas fees in the first place. The only reason Bitcoin was allowed to thrive is that our centralized solutions can't be trusted. As if BSC or Polygon would have gotten any traction whatsoever if ETH fees were still 10 cents a pop. Yeah right; keep dreaming.
Trickle-down Theory
You see? ETH is at the top and value is overflowing from every direction into the "Ethereum Killers". Do we REALLY think that all these ETH devs, who have spent THOUSANDS of hours learning Solidity and EVM are suddenly just going to pop over to Cardano or Solana or Tron or some shit?
They're just going to pack up and leave after committing THOUSANDS of hours to learning the ins and outs of this extremely complicated tech? Just to start over on some other network with lower fees? Uh, no. Go try learning Solana. Once you've put that much effort into learning EVM the chance that you start over somewhere else is pretty damn slim.
I've just been seeing more and more talk about Ethereum Killers and it's like insane that people so blatantly misrepresent what is going on here. Ethereum would love for you to come along and take some of this bandwidth away. Hurry up and do it already. lol. This is not a competition. You are helping Ethereum by building an "Ethereum Killer". Simple as that.
All of this also assumes that ETH isn't going to scale.
Everyone has the damn memory of a goldfish it seems. Oh look at ETH fees they are are terrible today, and therefore they will always be terrible, forever. Really? Wanna bet?
At the end of the day these are self-correcting systems. Just like AMM provides infinite liquidity due to yields going up when LPs exit to avoid "impermanent losses", so too will Ethereum adoption pick up when fees go down and less people are using it. Yeah you heard me right: more people are going to use Eth when less people are using it. It's a self-correcting system.
Why pay high fees?
There's a reason why Bitcoin and Ethereum have high fees. You get what you pay for. Bitcoin and Ethereum are more secure. If you want more security for your transactions, you better use the more secure networks. Users who are playing around with less money do not need to use the more secure networks. That's how it works.
People are saying that using ETH is now a rich-man's game. Yeah, no shit. And how did that happen? All the poor people on ETH became rich and now we call it a rich man's game? Jesus tap-dancing Christ! What?! Wasn't that the entire point of crypto? To get rich and break away from the chains of artificial scarcity and debt slavery? And then it happens and everyone is like "well this obviously isn't working". What we need is a Bitcoin Killer! Get me some of them Ethereum killers too!
People crave imperialism!
They crave the competition. The ability to stand over their opponents and say I win you lose I'm better than you. Even my own condescending tone conveyed in this post is rooted toxic authoritarian superiority.
You, are a worthless street rat!
You were born a street rat,
You'll die a street rat,
and only your fleas will mourn you!
This shitty attitude just oozes and multiplies throughout society.
It's the way things have always been, but it is not the way of the future. Those that figure this out early will be greatly rewarded. All that matters will be our reputations within the New World.
Hm, very off-topic now...
Back to the real topic at hand, what we really have to realize is that no one really knows what they are doing. Everyone in crypto is just faking it till they make it, and then when they make it they have a tendency to stop learning while at the same time acting like they know what they are talking about. Billionaires are THE WORST people to take advice from. They aren't thirsty anymore, and they are constantly surrounded by yes-men who's job is basically to praise their every word. How can we learn anything from someone like that? Except as a template of what not to do.
Conclusion
The future economy depends on communities rising up and building value. Just because Bitcoin and Ethereum are having trouble scaling doesn't mean some shiny new project is going to suddenly pop up and eat the lunch of the big dogs.
This is a competition between crypto vs fiat. Everyone assumes it is crypto vs crypto. This is quite clearly not the case. Show me one crypto that has eaten the lunch of another crypto. Doge and Shiba Inu are "battling" it out in the top 10. Does it really look like value from either one of these dog-meme tokens is leeching value from the other? Like... no. Obviously not. The money is coming from the legacy system, and most are too blind to see that our legacy system of capitalism is so broken that near infinite value can be derived from it using blockchain and smart-contracts.
If Hive hit #1 on the market cap would we say that Hive killed Bitcoin and Ethereum? What if Bitcoin and Ethereum both went x10 during that time? Oh we killed Bitcoin because we went x10000 and BTC "only" went x10? The logic here is asinine and rooted in scarcity and delusion.
The entire point of crypto is to get away from tribalism, but we as humans will always be tribalist no matter what for the foreseeable future. The key will be scaling up these systems of tribalism to rival that of corporations, governments, and central banking itself.
Luckily perception, in this case, is not reality. This new open-source cooperative system will continue to thrive and help one another, even if the people within it continually falsely project this toxic competitive narrative onto the cryptoverse. It's not hard to get un-brainwashed, but those who do will be greatly rewarded in the end.