On March 12, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin posted, "Recently attending Real World Crypto and related events gave me a clearer understanding of the uses of blockchain. In what areas can Ethereum create the greatest value? Judging from attending these events, the first answer I received was not what you might expect. It's neither smart contracts nor payments. It's what cryptographers call a 'public bulletin board.'"
Ethereum has significant value, and its value becomes clear if you step back and look at it from a fundamental perspective, purely as a technological tool: globally shared memory. I suspect a major bottleneck limiting the further expansion of this use case is that the world hasn't yet realized we're no longer in the 2020-2022 phase. Fees are now extremely low, and we have a stronger scaling roadmap to ensure fees remain low even with a significant rebound in usage. The infrastructure is also more sophisticated in avoiding exposing fee fluctuations to users.
Viewing Ethereum blobs as bulletin boards, ETH as an asset and general payment backup, and Ethereum smart contracts as a shared programming layer all align perfectly with the principles of a decentralized, private, and secure open-source software stack. However, we should continue to improve the Ethereum protocol and infrastructure to ensure it operates truly efficiently in all these scenarios.
