Your Daily Reminder that BNB and the Binance Smart Chain Is an Attack on ETH and an Attack on a Decentralized Smart Contract Future.

I get it. When you invest, you probably invest to make money. That's the goal and usually the only goal. But it's worth considering that you're not just making money off a particular project, you're also supporting the particular vision that project entails. If you're a decent person, there's a line you (hopefully) wouldn't cross. If there were a tokenized version of child sex-trafficking, one would hope you wouldn't invest in it even if it were a growing market. But the examples don't have to be that extreme: if you're an environmentalist, you probably shouldn't be buying big oil companies like ExxonMobil.

So let's remember what the Binance Smart Chain is in relation to Ethereum. Ethereum introduced the world to the idea of a decentralized open-sourced smart-contract platform, a World's Computer. As Vitalik put it:

Whereas most technologies tend to automate workers on the periphery doing menial tasks, blockchains automate away the center. Instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer directly.

We're not there yet obviously, but the promise of a future built on smart contracts is there. So that brings us to the Binance Smart Chain. What is it?

The Binance Smart Chain (BSC) is just a copy-paste of Ethereum with the tweak that they ditched decentralization. That's it. Founded in China, moved to the Cayman Islands, their founder and CEO regularly shit-talks Ethereum, holds no ether, but openly-plagiarized their work to launch it.

The key difference between the Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum is governance. On BSC, 11 validator nodes are responsible for governance. They're already selected. We don't know precisely their ties to Binance, but they behave in a coordinated manner. (E.g., they rotate producing blocks in a seemingly predefined order despite their being no stake-weighted mechanism to determine which produces the next block.)

By contrast, governance on Ethereum's Beacon Chain is handled by the over 133,000 validators staking. The number is rapidly rising and anyone with the (admittedly significant) funds can join.

And to be clear, I'm all for competition. Cardano, for example, appears to be a genuine effort to compete. BSC is a pure centralized attempt to undermine.

TL;DR – Consider Ditching BNB and BEP-20 tokens.