Dear Mark,

Thank you for your kind words and thank you for taking the time to read my work as well as to share your thoughts on the matter. You are certainly accurate of course in pointing out that based on Ethereum’s current technology, it is far from reaching the speeds or transaction volumes that it aims to achieve, with one small caveat — yet. There is a large pool of talented engineers and developers (some of whom I have the privilege of knowing personally) investing their lives to improving the protocol. From Singapore to San Francisco, Seoul to Sydney, some of the most talented developers and engineers are working tirelessly, some without remuneration, to improve the Ethereum protocol and it is this which gives me hope. Compound that with the fact that Ethereum, thanks in no small part to Joseph Lubin, has developed an ecosystem to support the Ethereum protocol. EOS may have some of the technological advantages, but ultimately I would argue that ecosystem matters, community matters. As a decentralized initiative, I would argue that Ethereum is leagues ahead in these key areas versus EOS. Without casting any judgment on which technology is superior (I maintain that it is far too early to judge), there are numerous examples where the network effect was found to have prevailed in spite of what was perceived to be inferior technology. Consider IBM DOS vs Apple Macintosh, Betamax vs VHS to name a few.

Being that both EOS and Ethereum are still in their relative infancy, I would suggest that it is perhaps too premature to determine which protocol or whether any protocol will ultimately survive, simply because there are too many unknown unknowns and too many unknowable unknowns, atop the known unknowns.

Thank you for taking the time to challenge my assumptions — I welcome any and all opinions as it helps to hone my understanding of the space that I work in as well as to improve my analytical work.

Happy holidays to you and your family and have a wonderful 2019!

Yours,

Patrick