publishDate: "24 Apr 2025"

description: "My history, experience, concerns, and hope for Base as a viable L2 solution"

tags: []

hidden: true

---

A couple of weeks ago I watched [Vitalik: An Ethereum Story](https://ethereumfilm.xyz) with my wife, and if you haven't watched it yet I would highly recommend it. The creators did such a good job documenting the life of Ethereum, its creator Vitalik, and the core principles and values surrounding it. A wave of nostalgia took over me as I recalled the feelings I experienced when I watched my first smart contract go live on Rinkeby; a simple and very inefficient store of "posts" like a guestbook. When I saw messages recorded onchain show up on my humble website, I suddenly realized why blockchain and more specifically Ethereum could change everything. It's why I decided to dive into this field of work and why I'm still passionate about it today.

The push of coins is an attempt to rebrand tokens to be just ordinary content. The idea is that instead of posting a photo on socials, turn it into a coin. Every coin can have a photo associated with it, so why not? Instead of "liking" a post you can buy a certain amount. Zora was the first platform making this push as they pivoted from standard NFT posts to coins. I'm not here to convince you whether coins are good for the space or not. Experimentation is part of building onchain and it's how we move forward. The true controversy in my opinion is how Base has been pushing this narrative.

Protocols and tools are built to solve problems. In the case of Ethereum it created a sandbox where the possibilities are endless. Of course Vitalik and the creators had motives for building it, primarily to help democratize internet infrastructure and promote individual autonomy. Outside of some general principles that they believed in, the team was pretty hands off. It was up to the people to decide what they would build. They built things like decentralized governance, tokens, loans, etc. People saw the ways our internet society was broken and came up with solutions only possible because of blockchain and Ethereum. The Ethereum foundation or it's founders don't push people to use it in a certain way, they just provide the tools and let the builders build.

My issue with Base and the coin narrative is that it's pushing a particular agenda and use-case of blockchain. In their opinion it’s how they'll solve the issues they see in the web2 creator economy. That's a big opinion to carry and push upon your followers, and I would argue that it violates the relationship between a blockchain organization and its users. Coins are an interesting experiment, but they're also being pushed by a few individual companies, some that so happen to be financially invested by Coinbase. I want to assume the best of all parties involved, but when it comes to money, capital, and how some people can get absolutely wiped by tokens, the hair on my neck stands up. Vitalik once wrote about what he sees as the values of Ethereum but also the blockchain community at large, and he included the following:

publishDate: "12 Oct 2024"

description: "Discover why learning jq isn't just about boosting your productivity, it's about becoming a more curious developer"

tags: ["programming", "developer tools"]

atUri: "at://did:plc:ia2zdnhjaokf5lazhxrmj6eu/site.standard.document/3mdzvurdwpv2v"

---

The chances are that if you are a modern developer or if you're starting out, you probably don't know what `jq` is, and that's why I'm writing this post. It won't take long to explain what `jq` is, so let's just get that out of the way.

A great way to experience `jq` yourself is to follow their [short tutorial](https://jqlang.github.io/jq/tutorial/) but I wanted to give a more personal example. Recently I built a [CLI](https://cli.pinata.cloud) for Pinata that lets you upload, access, and manage your files from the terminal. One simple command you can run is `pinata files list -a 5` to display a list of your most recent uploads (limiting the amount to 5 items for now), and the output looks like this.

{

    "files": [

        {

This will select the array and particularly the zero index of the array, just one object:

{

  "id": "01927e06-6f36-7208-adb9-8cdd53ce1c98",

  "name": "pgdata.tar.gz",

This will give us an array of all the file names like so:

[

  "pgdata.tar.gz",

  "pgdata.tar.gz",

Then we can pipe that into a list for later if we need it!

pinata files list | jq [.files[].name] > files.json

```