They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and Bitcoin SV (BSV) is feeling pretty flattered lately. The BSV powered Metanet was simply too good of an idea for other projects to ignore, and so on June 16, Ethereum got Ethsites.
Philip Daian made the announcement on Twitter, posting a line of javascript code that would query the Ethereum blockchain. He goes on to explain how to use the code to read a website from the blockchain, and describes it as:
“Bam, instant censorship resistant websites on-chain for ~$100/MB. Put your DEX UI, political statements, or more on-chain today. No central servers!”
The immediate response by the Ethereum community was skepticism and fear that this power could be used by bad actors to steal funds from browser based wallets, although Vitalik Buterin and others commented that any website or app could be malicious and this new Ethsite was no different.
The team that developed Ethsites might have been working at it for quite some time, but its already been beaten to the market by a superior product. The Metanet has had user development for months now, with Jack Davies’s recent CoinGeek Toronto presentation demonstrating the scope of projects already available on it, as well as the technical details of how the Metanet works.
Beyond instinctual fears of bad actors on the Ethereum blockchain, the reaction to the details of Ethsites also showed how much superior the Metanet is. 1MB, a web hosting service, inferred that at $100 per MB of hosting, it’s unlikely Ethsites will impress potential content creators. It’s also a poor contrast to the much cheaper Metanet, which can massively scale and as a result, reduce hosting costs.
The important thing here though is that the Ethereum development teams have recognized a good idea in the Metanet, and tried to build their own version of it. It’s not very good news for them, as web developers, either now or in the long run, are unlikely to want to use the slower, costlier Ethereum blockchain. The good news is purely for the BSV blockchain, as Ethsites might show them that storing content on the blockchain is the future, and then they will turn to the superior scaling and fees of BSV for their needs.
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