What if I told you about a business with strong network effects and 200x YoY revenue growth that was preparing to offer a 25% dividend and implement a permanent share buyback program? Is that something you might be interested in?

That's pretty much Ethereum. It's one of the most fascinating and compelling assets in the world, but its story is obfuscated by complexity and the specter of crypto. 

Ethereum is so many things at once, all of which feed off of each other. Ethereum, the blockchain, is a world computer, the backbone of a decentralized internet (web3), and the settlement layer for web3. Its cryptocurrency, Ether (ETH), is a bunch of things, too: 

Internet money. 

Ownership of the Ethereum network. 

The most commonly-used token in the Great Online Game. 

Yield-generating. 

A Store of Value (SoV). 

A bet on more on-chain activity, or the web3 future. 

Because Ethereum is so much at once, it's hard to understand. This post is an attempt to help Ethereum be understood. To a group like us, people interested in technology businesses, finance, and strategy, it's much more fascinating than bitcoin, but that comes with a tradeoff. It's much harder to grok than bitcoin, and because of that, it hasn't gotten the mainstream or institutional attention that bitcoin has. 

Bitcoin is easy. It's digital gold. It's a Store of Value (SoV). It just kind of sits there. 

That's its value prop. It's immutable and the most decentralized asset in the world. It's the OG and the hardest to attack. At this point, your bitcoin will not disappear overnight (although this post on Tether is illuminating with regards to ways it, and other cryptos including ETH, can be manipulated nonetheless). As long as other people believe in its value, it will continue to be valuable. Technically, upper-case-B-Bitcoin is the blockchain and lower-case-b-bitcoin is the cryptocurrency, but for all intents and purposes, they're the same. Bitcoin exists to make and track bitcoin. It's very good at what it does.