ETH Denver + Defi thoughts

Mostly disillusioned

Ethdenver felt like a bunch of Ponzi hawkers selling their wares under the guise of “open source” and open finance. I think the ideas are still interesting, but had a moment which made clear how far many protocols are from reality. Conference attendees were supposed to pay for meals with BUX tokens from a downloaded myetherwallet. I couldn’t do this the first day at the conference since the wifi was unable to handle the # of users. After prepping that night, I was prepared to scan qr codes and buy food, claim poaps etc. It worked ok for two hours and then was DDOS’d by lunch time. Even though the tokens didn’t work, what did work was the Visa terminal. I’ve met one protocol which has been built to account for WIFI/satellite destruction, where you could exchange the token via NFC. Other than that, this tech is so reliant on cloud infrastructure and wifi that I felt like no one can seriously claim this stuff is open and decentralized.

Compound that with the banking crises and Balaji’s bet a few weeks later and I’m at a crossroads in my thinking. I do think the workings of finance are complex and murky, and do result in dollar depreciation. I think the obsession with protecting net worth seems an indicator of what drives the whole space - individual sovereignty and money, but it doesn’t seem self aware enough to comprehend how larger stability is enabled by big centralized institutions like the military, police, legislature etc. I like self custody, but I think it wouldn’t function too well in certain environments where stable wifi/internet wasn’t available.

I still like that there is another venue for artists to get exposure, and wish that more real world use cases were sticky with this technology. I’m curious to see what survives the next 20 years.