polynya
@polynya
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My post from 1.5 years about "assessing demand drivers for ETH" had the line "Needless to say, we’ll need to wait for EIP-4844 to assess this."
Now that EIP-4844 is out for half a year, it's indeed time to do so. As such, I'd downgrade the significance of "L2 fee burns" from 2/10 to 1/10. While it's very likely demand for blobspace is gradually going up, supply is up even more with PeerDAS imminent, plus full sharding & Nielsen's Law making blob count up only. Cross-L2 interoperability has also been much less required than anticipated, as most users are happy to stick to their chosen L2, or bridge between only occasionally
So, why was I (mildly) wrong? I did not fully understand the concept of strict global consensus then, which I only wrote about in depth later in 2023. With a better grasp of the true demand landscape for blobspace, the 1/10 is obvious
Also, this is great for Ethereum/ETH in the same way as building public roads
https://polynya.mirror.xyz/GPC26Y_rlwCyPpj_N3HeW_izY1-pIVwKW5bjuPNrGeQ 23 replies
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Discourse is more constructive than throwing money around, which only the wealthy can afford, or dueling, which only a few are skilled at
Both plutocracy and violence are abhorrent in a modern, civilised society, except wealth often follows from privilege, while dueling is meritocratic
Not to mention, society is not about an egotist fantasy about who is "right" or "wrong" - it's about finding truth before it's too late. There's absolutely zero value to society if a billionaire swept up a prediction market for nuclear apocalypse, there's infinite value for all of us to come together and discuss how we can best prevent that outcome. (Same goes for positive outcomes.)
Betting markets aka prediction markets are useful for what they do - betting.
(Side-note: "personal consequence" would be partially true if betting markets had "wealth-adjusted risk", e.g. for a billionaire throwing $1M into a bet is nothing; for the average person, $1M is impossible.) 5 replies
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The lack of reversibility and dispute resolution is a key tradeoff with crypto payments, because blockchains can only parse strict objectivity. This is the
main service that banks, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal etc sell - the tech is very simple and easy. The only "solution" is to add similar traditional subjective layers on top. Given a majority of real-world consumer crypto payments happen through USDT on Tron via Binance/CEXs, "decentralization" is obviously not the value proposition, rather accessibility to US Dollars, so this may be an avenue worth experimenting with.
As for non-custodial - definitely important to evolve on even if it'll always be a niche userbase. Some low-hanging fruit are mandatory double-checking of addresses, human readable and savable addresses, blacklists of fraudulent addresses, an escrow/undo period, etc can help greatly. These are the common failure cases in traditional payments, and at least anecdotally in crypto too 5 replies
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A decade ago, the Ethereum Whitepaper mentioned every usecase that has been successful - everything from stablecoins to prediction markets to name services - and some that haven't
Around that time, BitShares was already live with PoS, free and fast txs, DEXs, NFTs, memecoins, algorithmic stablecoins, user-issued tokens etc.
7 years ago, the ICO mania experimented with every possible "____ but blockchain"
4 years ago, we saw our last major wave of application innovation that proved everything discussed a decade ago
Crypto is a successful, mature industry, anyone who says "crypto is nothing but gambling" is delusional, as are those who say "we're soooo earlyyyy". Acknowledge reality, keep building on things that work, that may work, and abandon everything that has failed for many years (>99.99% crypto projects) 14 replies
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PSA: Blockchains are *NOT* decentralized, immutable, permanent, transparent, verifiable, resilient, democratic or fair, or other misused buzzwords. Sure, they can be a couple of those things depending on the blockchain, but not a fundamental property of blockchains, even if they are these are much better accomplished by non-blockchain P2P/cryptographic systems.
This is not "FUD", but to better leverage blockchains we must understand & be educated about its unique properties. Why do you think we get racist ponzis instead of useful apps? I have covered these topics at length over dozens of blog posts.
The *only* unique property of blockchains is strict global consensus - a strictly ordered, objective set of txs in real-ish time. While very limited, this property is extremely valuable for extralegal financial transactions. You probably think I'm a blithering idiot, fair, but there's at least one other person who will tell you something similar:
https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1743040410212053350/photo/1 6 replies
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AGI will decisively obsolete blockchains, but it's likely it'll be obsolete for all but 1 or 2 usecases well before then (few years) as non-blockchain P2P, ZK, trust infrastructure develops
Where blockchains are limited to only objective strict consensus, AGI(s) can achieve complex, subjective consensus - "AGI will use blockchains" is a silly, nonsensical meme not unlike "telegraphs will use internet"
Valuable cryptoassets like BTC and ETH will live on after blockchains are obsolete because, as I've said a hundred times before, this is a socioeconomic movement, and tech is only means to an end. The tech will be replaced, the socioeconomics will live on.
Caveat: "AGI" is in itself a meme, so I'm assuming it'll do what people popularly expect 14 replies
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I quit a large audience on Twitter and joined Farcaster a year ago as a direct replacement. I didn't know Varun or Dan, and indeed, anyone else active on Farcaster at the time. While "the list" made sense early on, it should be opt-in recommendations now - the engagement inequality is very real.
This is made worse by the hyperfinancialization, where a handful of those people are incentivized to be very active, while a vast majority of the rest are bots. (IMO, as a casual observer nowadays) Farcaster right now should be aggressively focused on social values over financial values (and yes, this is a very direct contradiction and trade-off) - in design, engineering, and most importantly marketing. Unless the terminal addressable market target is degens, which is fair enough. 23 replies
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