polynya

@polynya

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A personal note on this: I spent the last year of my blogging career focusing on exploring from first principles the fundamentals of blockchains. It hasn't gotten much attention, but I still believe it's by far the most impactful writing on my old blog. Blockchains are only useful for strict global consensus, with the key overarching usecase being objective accounting. For everything else, there are far more efficient and more decentralized options available/to be invented. Being dogmatic about only using blockchains has actively hindered growth for years - to expand the onchain economy we must adopt & invent better solutions, even if its not technically "onchain".

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Crypto's greatest contributions to humanity: 1) Adding an overwhelming body of evidence to the millennia old universal truth: money is the root of all evil [...] 2) Digital store-of-value commodity as an alternative to Gold 3) Stablecoins that make USD more accessible in countries with high inflation + it's restricted

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Beam Chain is basically the "zkEthereum" endgame I hoped for and wrote about in 2021, that plus the data layer and zkEVM upgrades. Back then, I had expected something like "about a decade", albeit delivered incrementally. So, anything sooner than early 2030s sounds like a win for Ethereum's Endgame. The one thing I'd like to see is what I called an "Enshrined zkEVM bridge" (a standardized in-protocol bridge for all "Type 0" zkEVM rollups) though maybe that's more suited for the EL, idk

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My favourite invention in crypto is Uniswap range orders. Most crypto apps are alternatives to stuff that have existed, but Uniswap range orders are largely unique, offers a great way to scale in and out of positions, and earn while you're doing it! That and ZKPs as a broader category, of course.

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As some of you have noticed, a big theme on this Farcaster profile is objectivity vs. subjectivity The human experience is extremely complex, multi-faceted, diverse, and thus deeply subjective Financialization is an attempt to dumb some things down into objective numbers. For some things, like capital allocation, exchange of goods, it works brilliantly. Blockchains are exclusively the domain of the strictly objective. But for almost everything else, forcing subjective matters into objective outputs leads to potentially catastrophic outcomes, and the root cause is plutocracy - determining governance by wealth, to the worst-case scenario, truth itself. I don't need to tell how that's peak dystopia and an affront to humanity. Fuck "info finance" with a bag of stale scrotums

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"Info finance" is pretty emblematic of financialisation gone too far to become outright dystopian It's happening, there's no turning back, but I'll personally avoid it like the plague

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Over the last decade or so I've been commenting on crypto (different pseudonyms) I've noticed a very clear pattern - the reaction to my content is directly proportional to how bullish the audience perceives them to be for their bags. That makes me appreciate the few who react positively even if I'm being critical.

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A couple of years ago, I identified two main usecases for blockchains: objective money/finance and objective identity However, over time, I've warmed to the idea that objective identity does not actually require strict global consensus. A less strict, loosely ordered global consensus may be adequate Really, it's only money that requires strict consensus, or anything else of *temporal* economic value While identity does have economic value, it is in most cases non-temporal in nature, and can hence be achieved better with loosely ordered alternatives to blockchains

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Though well-written and inspirational, I believe this post fundamentally misunderstands Ethereum and blockchains. Ethereum's distinctive property is objective, strict global consensus, and absolutely nothing else. It's great for usecases that require strict global consensus, but it's impossible for everything else, because Ethereum cannot parse any subjectivity or rough consensus at all. As such, while money, contracts, governance, identity, law are presented as examples, Ethereum can only parse very, very limited forms of the above, where it's objective. In some cases, like governance or law, it's almost entirely subjective with negligible scope for Ethereum to help. 99.99% of economics, institutions and the like are deeply human and subjective, which Ethereum or blockchains in general cannot interpret at all. Indeed, we've seen many a times how forcing subjectivity into objective code has led to many disastrous outcomes in crypto. (Contd...)

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The reason why "DAOs" require traditional governance is because blockchains can only do strict global consensus The assumption is you need a token to organise said governance, but this is not true. Indeed, some DAOs would be much better off following the worker cooperative or consumer cooperative model, rather than the public company model, with democratic voting and vetos for checks and balances (instead of being controlled by few whales, as it is for almost all crypto projects now - not just not decentralized, but very centralized. VCAOs, if you will, pun intended) Yeah, I get it, token gambling is crypto's big usecase, but it doesn't have to be. Building the best possible protocol to attract the most users might not be such a bad idea for the long term

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Tangentially, all other value accrual mechanisms in crypto should be minimised to remain competitive with non-crypto solutions Fees, commissions, margins, and yes, tokens, all of that needs to tend towards zero Tokenless, governanceless, intermediariless, non-profit protocols are the true USP PS: only applies for valuable 3-5 usecases where strict global consensus is useful, for everything else non-crypto is simply better

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It's evident that alternative store-of-value is >90% of the demand driver for the crypto industry, and arguably the only demand driver for its dominant asset - BTC. Yet, it seems there's very little investment in improving this dominant usecase and biggest success story. BTC remains a ticking time bomb, and aside from BTC & ETH, most crypto assets are high inflation dumpsters (literally, for VCs).

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Unfettered financialisation will never solve subjective human problems - indeed, they often make it worse as power is derived from wealth This is a common delusion in crypto, and other than being hazardous, more importantly is distracting from the problems crypto can help with

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I've definitely been slacking on my "1 cast per week" goal, so to make up for that, how about I do an AMA for the first time? Topics I won't reply to: trad crypto infra (L1, L2 etc), prices, or personal questions

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I was mistaken, it seems I've underestimated the depths of cryptobro depravity yet again

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Half a year on from my final and most hated blog post, have things changed? Unfortunately not, crypto remains among the most morally bankrupt industries, and far and away the worst I've personally participated in. Most people in this industry are perpetually in denial, with negligible effort to change things for a better culture. Yes, vile degeneracy has been temporarily muted relative to March 2024, but this is only because the shitcoins are down 99% since then. I see no evidence that any lesson has been learned, and the same pandemonium is very likely to repeat. Obviously, I still highly respect the 0.1% of this industry that's actually net positive for humanity, and needless to say, all of this is just my personal opinion. I still hope, one day, at least some of the remaining 99.9% of the industry will share those values.

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In the past, I've mentioned many times that upgrade rights to Security Council are not good enough for Stage 1, and that they should only come with freeze or pause rights. That's why I cannot recommend anyone use Arbitrum One or OP Mainnet despite being Stage 1 according to L2Beat. Glad to see that is the case for ZKSync. In addition, I'd like to see an elected Security Council for Stage 1, a unilaterally selected Security Council is also not good enough. (E.g. OP just held its first elections, hope ZKSync will do so soon) I have also expressed my opinion on some aspects of Stage 2 being not good enough, you can see that here: https://warpcast.com/polynya/0x6131e8f0 (Disclaimer: I hold some $ZK tokens and am a delegate for both ZK Nation and OP Collective) https://x.com/TheZKNation/status/1834256567316705674

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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

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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.)

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