Great article Thomas. You’re right that Mist was extremely early, in fact when me and Fabian were building it, Geth didn’t even have the fast sync option. Which was before the light sync option, which was before the “other” fast sync option. And yet, syncing the chain from scratch would “only” take about 30 minutes.

But I’m extremely proud of what we did. I was just reviewing some old screenshots and in some ways the experience of using a smart contract directly from the chain, with an automatic UI, is still way better than anything out there today (including the barebones implementation etherscan has). When the DAO happened us and MyEtherWallet were the only decent options to help people navigate the ensuing mess.

But I believe you’re missing a crucial component: ethereum was supposed to be one leg of a three legged stool: the other two being a decentralized file system and a messaging system. Without these you can’t build a real decentralized app and the result is what we have: dapps are just websites, you can’t host them, you can’t fork them and you need to pay dune to analyze it.

To this day swarm is not very functional and IPFS is.. not much better. And considering how much my dedicated dappnode screams in order to keep the blockchain running, I’m very skeptical we could have local clients anyway.