Ethereum has gained quite a lot of interest in the past year and it is certainly a very exciting time for the technology as well as the community. I am proud to be a part of the Ethereum community and contributing to its open-source ecosystem at Transmute Industries. With all the news coming out everyday about the hundreds of new tokens, FUD around Metropolis and the Difficulty Bomb, Zero Knowledge Proofs, Ethereum Improvement Proposals, etc... one really has to pick what they want to know about and stick to it if they are going to keep up in terms of tech in this space.

We do our best at the Austin Ethereum Meetup to keep the discussion focused on development and code, but still we have people coming and asking questions about all the tokens they are invested in and asking for the opinions of those in the group. This is fine - we love people being interested in the tech. Personally, I find it really vexing to be engaged in speculative dialogue about the new token that has no publicly available code, a website that looks like it is from the 90s, and a whitepaper with no technical depth whatsoever as to how this token's grand vision will be achieved. If something sounds like it has legs, I'll look into it, but the vast majority of this stuff looks like vaporware, honestly.

Blockchain fever is in full swing, people are wondering how to decentralize everything; with some groups even pushing the lofty goal of supplanting AWS and similar services with a decentralized supercomputer. In terms of merit, some of these systems are totally legitimate, but with the multitude of individuals that approach my colleagues or I wanting to make a quick buck by having us program an ICO for them - it's pretty disheartening (we don't, by the way).

Now, a company wanting to build a blockchain integration for their existing system or a dApp is usually legit. Getting theoretical is fun, where everything is decentralized and verifiable offchain computation is a thing, but right now companies are working on leveraging this tech and that means having it interact with the real world instead of just the blockchain. I don't doubt the progress of blockchain tech, it's just that the past few decades involved a few centralized companies making the Internet as excellent as it is today and we can't just switch from one paradigm to another (if a complete switch were to happen) without a transitionary phase.

So, I rambled a little bit there, but the main point is that blockchain and complete decentralization isn't the answer to everything. The technology certainly has a lot of awesome applications surrounding identity, ownership, sovereignty, transparency, automation, etc... but at present there is still a need for it to play by the rules of the existing system so that the common person can actually leverage its power.

So, if you can't keep up with all the ideas flying around concerning this stuff, don't feel bad - there's a lot here. It's exciting, we're going down a rabbit hole and have just barely stuck our head in.