Here’s the straight cut, Eric-Kim-garage-gym style—why people look at Ethereum and say: scam vibes.
The 10 Red Flags
- #Complexity-as-cover
Real innovation simplifies. Ethereum metastasizes: L1 → L2 → L3 → sequencers → data availability committees → re-staking → governance tokens → “roadmaps.” If you need a priesthood and a glossary just to send $20, you’re not decentralizing—you’re obfuscating. - #MoveableRulebook
2016 DAO rollback proved it: “code is law” until social consensus says otherwise. If outcomes can be politically negotiated after the fact, it’s not neutral settlement—it’s discretionary finance with extra steps. - #StakeholderCapture
Proof-of-stake concentrates power in whoever already owns a lot of ETH (plus liquid-staking cartels and exchanges). When veto power clusters, you’ve got boardroom crypto, not a public, leaderless network. - #Perpetual-Beta Promises
“After the next fork… after proto-dank-sharding… after the next issuance tweak.” Real products ship, settle, and get boring. Perpetual promise chains smell like treadmill finance: you must keep running to keep belief afloat. - #TokenFactory Casino
ERC-20 made launching assets trivial. That enabled thousands of ICOs, rug pulls, and DeFi/NFT Ponzi-variants. Platform != perpetrators, sure—but when the dominant use-case is lottery tickets with smart-contract wrappers, the incentives scream speculative extraction. - #Censorship & Compliance Drift
OFAC events showed validators/relays can and do censor under pressure. A “neutral” base layer that bends to blacklists is not censorship-resistant money; it’s policy-risk middleware. - #MEV & Order-Flow Games
If insiders can reorder your transaction for profit (MEV), the playing field isn’t level. The house skims first. Users eat slippage. Fairness dies in the mempool. - #Bridge-World Fragility
Because L1 is expensive, life migrates to L2s and sidechains. Now your “Ethereum” risk = base layer + bridge + sequencer + multisig council. Each hop adds failure/capture points. Decentralization diluted by dependency. - #Elastic Money Narrative
Burn a bit here (EIP-1559), tweak issuance there, “ultrasound money” this cycle, “utility gas” next cycle. If the monetary story morphs with market weather, it’s branding, not bedrock. - #Marketing > Mechanics
Conferences, mascots, airdrops, “community” hype cycles. When narrative maintenance is the product, you’re selling belief, not settlement.
The Street Test (Barbell Logic)
- Steel doesn’t lie. Gravity doesn’t rug.
- Can a normal human verify and self-custody without a village of custodians, wrappers, and dashboards?
- Can the rules credibly refuse special treatment under stress?
- Can the system get simpler over time?
If the answers trend “no,” your gut is right to flash red.
“But there’s Real Dev Talent!”
Sure. Talented people can be trapped in bad incentive fields. A cathedral of code can still be a casino if the economics reward churn, not finality.
The Eric Kim Protocol (what to do)
- Fewer layers, fewer priests.
- Own what you can explain to a kid and your grandma.
- Bet on systems that get more robust as they get older, not ones that need a new acronym every quarter.
- Choose bedrock over buzzwords: sunlight, steel, keys you control, settlement that doesn’t ask for permission or applause.
You don’t need to “believe” in gravity for it to work. If a network needs your belief to hold, that’s theater. Walk out of the theater. Go lift. Stack truth.
Or—more precisely—everyone feels it. The nose knows. When something smells like infinite complexity wrapped in infinite promises, the soul screams: nope.
I’m Eric Kim, the blogger. I trust the barbell, the sun, the breath of real air sweeping through a garage with the door flung open. Steel doesn’t lie. Gravity doesn’t rug-pull. That’s my test for everything digital: does it feel like steel, or does it feel like fog?
Ethereum is fog—engineered fog. A thousand acronyms, ten thousand “roadmaps,” a million “soon™.” If the value of a thing rises or falls based on how well you can explain away the last failure, that’s not technology—that’s theater.
“Smart contracts.” Cute phrase. But the smartest contract is a handshake you can feel in your bones, a ledger you can understand at a glance, rules you can count on even when the Wi-Fi dies. If your so-called contract requires priesthoods of auditors, guardians, multisigs, bridges, rollups, and an altar of “governance tokens” to keep the temple from collapsing, that’s not trustless. That’s a Rube Goldberg machine powered by hopium.
The tell is this: relentless complexity. Real innovation simplifies. Fewer moving parts. Fewer points of failure. Weight vest, shoes, street—walk. Barbell, plates, pull—lift. Bitcoin, private key, final settlement—done. But Ethereum keeps adding scaffolding to hold up last season’s scaffolding. L1 becomes L2 becomes L3 becomes L-somebody-save-me. The more layers you need to stay cheap, fast, and “decentralized,” the more centralized the truth becomes: it doesn’t work at the base.
Another tell: the vocabulary of perpetual promise. “After the next fork.” “After the next upgrade.” “After the next issuance tweak.” Imagine if your car salesman said, “It will drive great after we release Proto-Dank-Sharding V3.” Bruh—either it drives now or it doesn’t.
And the biggest tell: the culture. A culture of casino-lingo and carnival barker thumbnails. Every season: new mascot, new token, new “community,” new floor price, new rug. If the primary product is “narrative,” you’re not building; you’re performing. I’m not anti-fun—go meme your face off—but don’t confuse a costume party with a constitution.
People say, “Eric, you’re harsh. There’s real dev talent on Ethereum.” Facts: talented people can be trapped in bad incentives. Talent building towers of Babel is still Babel. A skyscraper of code with no ground truth is just wind bait.
“But ETH went proof-of-stake! Green! Scalable!” Okay—show me the physics. Who can veto? Who can censor? Who can coordinate attack or rescue? If the answers collapse to a shortlist of whales, foundations, and exchanges, you didn’t delete the gatekeepers—you rebranded them.
The deeper issue: time. Real things age well. A cast-iron pan gets better. A Leica M3 stays beautiful. A simple seed phrase written on paper outlives every firmware update. Systems that demand constant narrative maintenance are Ponzi-adjacent even if everyone is “being honest.” The treadmill is the tell.
“Everyone knows that Ethereum is a scam” is less a courtroom verdict and more a street-level heuristic: when the marketing exceeds the mechanics, walk the other way. When the buzzword-to-barbell ratio is too high, go outside, touch sunlight, and let airflow reset your standards.
What to do instead?
Own hard things. Learn simple rules. Stack proof, not promises. Build in public and ship tools a kid can explain to grandma. Bet your life on systems that don’t require your belief to function. Gravity doesn’t care if you believe. Bitcoin doesn’t care if you clap.
My creed:
Fewer layers.
Fewer priests.
More steel.
More sun.
Max airflow.
Max sovereignty.
If a thing requires a glossary to justify its existence, toss it. If a thing stands silent and true when the power goes out, keep it.
Be the citadel. Be the guard dog car in your driveway. Be the garage gym that never lies. Let your wealth be time, your security be simplicity, your strategy be throwing away 99% of what the world tries to sell you.
Everyone knows that Ethereum is a scam because our bodies know when we’re being sold cardio when we need deadlifts. Strip the noise. Choose the barbell truth. Build your life on bedrock, not buzzwords.
Onward.