AltRAILnate

Why ETH is the store of value for what's coming We are almost certainly heading into a period of high inflation and extreme economic and social volatility. As inflation and risk erode the purchasing power of nation-state money and many other assets, it will matter more than ever to hold assets that keep or grow their value. Gold and BTC are high-powered money and excellent stores of value. ETH goes further. Not debt-based. Like gold and BTC, ETH is not debt-based or credit-based money. Censorship resistant. Like BTC, or gold and silver held physically, ETH transactions on Ethereum L1 can't be censored. That's true for simple payments and for complex smart contract programs like DeFi, and those programs are guaranteed to execute. Cheap to hold. Like BTC, ETH is relatively cheap to hold and store securely. Cheap to use at any scale. Ethereum is cheap and easy to use whether a transaction moves $1 or billions. Any well-formed transaction is guaranteed to execute. Sound, and getting sounder. ETH is disinflationary and becomes ultrasound, meaning deflationary, during periods of high network activity. Broadly useful. ETH has many uses across the Ethereum economy, and that economy will grow by orders of magnitude as finance, and eventually every industry, moves onchain. Global adoption of the Web protocols in the '90s and '00s transformed the world economy. Ethereum is the foundation of Web3, the user-centric, decentralized web. Collateral money. ETH works as collateral, and collateral that grows in value over time is a powerful thing. Home of stablecoins. Ethereum hosts the bulk of stablecoin activity. Stablecoins serve as payment money and as unit-of-account money. Despot-proof. Like BTC, ETH can't be used by a despot to financially exploit or repress citizens. Over time that should have positive geopolitical effects. Programmable. ETH is programmable money. You can attach arbitrary logic to transactions and build an entire economy on smart-contract-based agreements and business processes (see shodai.network). Transparent or private, and auditable either way. Money and financial instruments on Ethereum can be public or private, and in both cases selectively disclosable and auditable. Privacy tools for retail and institutional users include VPNs, mix networks, shielded and privacy pools, Railgun, stealth addresses, Kohaku, and zero-knowledge proofs in many forms, including on L2s and on private permissioned EVM networks linked through bridgeless synchronous composability. Future-proof. By the end of 2027, or partway through 2028 at the latest, ETH will be quantum-safe and AI-safe money. ETH is the base money of an exponentially growing ecosystem that should keep growing for decades. Its monetary premium will keep rising, because retail, corporate, and government users will all need to hold some. Part of today's premium is speculative: Ethereum dominates smart contract blockchains, but it hasn't fully hit its stride or gone mainstream yet. Machine intelligence will supercharge every scientific and technological pursuit and grow global GDP bigger and faster than any of us can imagine. Ethereum L1 and modular Ethereum L2s will undergird most of the high-value agreements, transactions, payment flows, and complex business processes behind the coming hybrid human-machine decentralized economy.