Vitalik wants ETH to become "digital gold," but Ethereum is still constantly upgrading: pursuing innovation on one hand, while asking the market to believe it will never change on the other?

Vitalik Buterin on November 8 argued that ETH should be valued as a store-of-value (SoV) asset rather than a fee-burn token, rejecting the burn-driven valuation model that he says fails because most on-chain fees come from crypto-internal activity and collapse with prices. The article identifies three unresolved conflicts with that thesis: without burn pressure ETH becomes a perpetually inflationary asset with no hard supply cap, its monetary policy remains changeable (EIP-1559 in 2021 and the 2022 Merge already altered issuance, and the EIP-8363 issuance-curve proposal is still being pushed), and a network that hard-forks roughly every six months and must keep upgrading for threats like quantum computing cannot easily be sold as immutable digital gold. It notes Ethereum needs at least 700,000 ETH per year in protocol-level funding to match R&D spending at comparable tech firms, and that Vitalik instead anchors ETH's value in decentralization and CROPS principles (censorship resistance, open source, privacy, security). The piece frames the debate as a paradigm clash between a high-growth tech-stock identity and the certainty an SoV asset requires, with the Ethereum Foundation shrinking and targeting a 2029 "Strawmap" and a "walkaway test" in which the network runs without its core developers. What to watch: whether issuance policy is credibly fixed and whether RWA and institutional adoption translate into measurable net demand for holding ETH.