polynya

@polynya

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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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A related ubiquitous mistake: Look at "metrics" in the middle of a speculative mania, assume "it's only the beginning" and extrapolate to the future with eyewatering "metrics" to "rationalise" said up only hopium Reality: said "metrics" are completely unsustainable and have nothing to do with token prices anyway

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Continues to be the greatest misconception in the crypto space, and the key reason behind billions of dollars in malinvestment The *only* thing blockchains are good for is forming strict global consensus For almost all purported usecases, P2P, CRDTs, or just databases with validity proofs are significantly superior

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This is the most ludicrous raise I've seen since the dotcom bubble IP law is highly subjective and can never achieve objective strict global consensus - the *only* feature of blockchains I've discussed this topic at length across multiple blog posts

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I quit Twitter 15 months ago, and my last one-off tweet was half a year ago I still get people asking me to shill their projects in return for "investing in KOL rounds" or straight up tokens Funniest ones are memecoin "projects", they clearly haven't read my final blog post

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This is it, the endgame UX I hoped for & wrote about in '21: ~free, ~instant txs in 2 clicks While infra must keep developing, the path is clear. As has been obviously the case for a long while now, neither infra nor UX are the bottlenecks - it's simply applications/usecases & demand for them

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A common hopium is "crypto is up only" Reality: 99.9999...% crypto assets are down only. They hit an ATH in some mania, that ATH will never be hit again, and they will be down only forever BTC, ETH, handful others are massive exceptions that have carved out a secular bull, but even they will see a secular bear eventually, like all emerging markets have through the centuries

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The concept of checks and balances have existed and iterated upon for millennia. Likewise with follies of plutocracies. Hubris is the only reason why almost all DAOs are 100% plutocracies with 0 checks and balances even after a decade of abject failure (Not all DAOs need checks and balances, to be clear, but most do)

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Revisiting this post. I now believe this was an overestimate, now that we are demand-limited with clear data for over a year instead of supply-limited like we had been for the first ~15, I have a better understanding of strict global consensus, and fintech continues to progress rapidly, particularly in Asia and Africa. I still believe demand will grow over time, but the endgame "cliff" for "valuable transactions that need full Ethereum security" will be much lower than I had thought in 2022. It is important to consider the evidence instead of blind hopium and entitlement as increasing blob supply callously has clear tradeoffs socially, technically and economically that can compromise Ethereum's core values for zero gain. Needless to say, as usual, I was accused of being too pessimistic in 2022 when in reality even I was being too optimistic. Given prior history, it's likely I'm still too optimistic! https://polynya.mirror.xyz/gm6bUvvDF-sQAt7HuU6kRKCLIT9tAuaSCxHeNFdDVHk

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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

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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)

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The UX for Coinbase app/Smart Wallet + Base + USDC is great now, significantly superior to the incumbent market leaders Binance + Tron + USDT, plus a fraction of the cost. With the Stage 1 upgrade soon, technically it'll be a decisively superior solution (of course, even moreso with Stage 2). Yet, the real solution will be an international network of aggressive business development and marketing onboarding merchants and users from the countries where B/T/T alliance has significant marketshare - Turkey, Argentina, Thailand etc. Breaking these network effects is a very steep battle that requires significant local investment and must not be underestimated.

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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

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Over the 3 years I wrote blog posts, every mistake basically boils down to two things: 1) Underestimating development time 2) Overestimating demand for blockchains In both cases, I was more conservative than most - been accused of pessimism all the way, still am - but it was actually still too optimistic. Learning.

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This reply is representative of many others. AGI will not be a single entity like a human or a simple bot on a single server, but rather a set of networked intelligence(s) across millions of machines around the world. We can already see this property emerging in today's LLMs - GPT-4 was trained across 25,000 GPUs, inferencing over 128 GPUs. Side-note: blockchains are not immutable or permanent, as can be seen with Ethereum blobs that are deleted every 18 days; and the rest of Ethereum will too with EIP-4444 and other initiatives in The Purge. Indeed, blockchains will rely on non-blockchain P2P solutions like Bittorrent or Portal Network. As I've written about at length, the only unique feature of blockchains is achieving strict global consensus in realish-time. With AGI, this is no longer relevant as they can achieve strict global consensus trivially, and go far beyond that to attain more complex and subjective forms of consensus. Again, caveat for all of this - if an AGI actually happens.

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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

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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.

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>99% of human coordination is subjective, which public blockchains cannot parse at all This is why "DAOs" use traditional human governance methods which have nothing to do with blockchains (except for accounting, which is the only objective thing) Ironically, if "DAOs" were autonomous, you wouldn't need "DAOs"

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