Why crypto tribalism is gud
Anyone who's been on CT knows that there's a lot of fighting between the different tribes, particularly between the Solana tribe and the 'Broader Ethereum' tribe. Every once in a while, I'll see some tweet to the effect of "can't we all get along?" Well, I'm here to tell you that it's good that we don't get along.
On a typical day, Solana Twitter is abuzz with the virtues of Solana and the evils of Ethereum
The thing is, no one really knows what trade-offs will end up making sense in the real world. For example, I believe that Solana's decision to require validators to have a fast internet connection makes sense. But if the world's data center operators banded together tmr and decided they didn't want crypto stuff running in their centers, that thesis no longer makes sense. Not even Vitalik, with his plus-sized brain, knows what the future holds.
That's right, not even this magnificent creature (I'm not being sarcastic, Vitalik is literally magnificent and we all owe a great deal to him) knows what's gonna happen
And since noone really knows what decisions will be the right ones, it makes sense to try out a bunch of stuff.
The problem is that humans are hard-wired to be conformist. A few million years of getting left behind = certain death tends to do that to you. Left to our own devices, we'd probably all consolidate around a single point in the blockchain design space and shout down anyone who disagreed. That is, until we ended up being wrong about something and fly off the cliff together like a bunch of lemmings.
The Tower of Babel. Even God knew that it was a bad idea if we all thought the same way
Enter tribalism. With tribalism, you conform inwardly with your tribe but look down upon members of other tribes. So if you hear that the other tribe is zigging, you wanna zag. If the other tribe starts pursuing a rollup-centric roadmap, you laugh about how silly rollups are and double down on scaling without sharding. The result of this is that we avoid putting our eggs in one basket. When a tribe's vision doesn't work out, the tribe can disband and its members can join other tribes.
Former member of the now-mostly-defunct Plasma tribe commenting on the experience
So yeah, don't listen to those CT accounts who try to convey that they are above the petty squabbles of us peasants. Tribalism is gud, and all that shit-slinging you do on CT helps contribute to a better, brighter future!
P.S., Ethereum sux! Soylana 4ever!