Was EIP1559 a distraction from scaling? - Discussion on the FUDs and misunderstandings

Posted here in response to the mod's change to Ethereum moderating policy; hope this fits!

Someone posted this in ethfinance daily, but got downvoted to oblivion - https://twitter.com/TusharJain_/status/1432410951270158338?s=20

"All the work on EIP 1559 should have been put towards scaling. So much time & energy was spent on 1559 and it doesn’t improve Ethereum’s competitive position at all."

Most people still think of blockchain development as a centralised, founder-led organisation, and that all development happens in said organisation, so there's a finite amount of funds / energy / manpower to devote to issues - and this is likely true for most of the eth-challengers.

This is probably a common misunderstanding actually and may even not be malicious, but it is also a good opportunity to highlight in some of the Ethereum development common FUD/queries.

Perhaps we need to sell the idea that on Ethereum, many people are independently taking part in the process, development is happening so quickly and from so many angles.

In fact, the EIP1559 process is a great story of a community led effort to make change that isn't core-driven, and in parallel to core priorities like the merge / sharding / state-expiry / zk!

Someone created a discussion on ethresearch, gathered like-minded folks to discuss and came up with a wonderful solution and turned it into an EIP, fund-raised independently on gitcoin, got a world-class economics audit beyond just the technical audit, paid teams to build it out on clients since the client devs were rightfully doing other important things. in the mean time, community rallied support, sold the idea (ultra sound money, more predictable tx inclusions) and here we have it.

There's literally no other blockchain where there are multiple competing clients, multiple competing scaling solutions, and that anyone can throw an EIP in and lead the process to complete that inclusion without being blocked or censored - the very point of a permission-less blockchain that happens almost nowhere else.

I believe this really is the key narrative we need to push for blockchain / ETH.

References

• Econoar thread - https://twitter.com/econoar/status/1359373681466568713?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
• ethresearch discussion - https://ethresear.ch/tag/fee-market
• EIP1559 proposal - https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-1559.md
• Gitcoin - https://gitcoin.co/grants/946/project-title-eip-1559-community-fund
• Economic Audit - https://timroughgarden.org/papers/eip1559.pdf
• Community support - https://supporteip1559.org/