In a heated debate, Eric Wall, crypto blogger and investor, and Justin Bons, founder and chief investment officer of Cyber Capital, discuss Bitcoin’s security model, whether there are fundamental flaws in its design, and which is the best consensus mechanism. 

Crypto.com

Ava Labs

a16z

Justin:

• Twitter

Eric:

Previous Coverage of Unchained:

Bitcoin’s Security, Blocksize and Culture

Surprisingly, Tail Emission Is Not Inflationary by Peter Todd

Justin’s thread that kicked off the debate

A (brief and incomplete) history of censorship in /r/Bitcoin

Theory On Bitcoin Governance; Three Stage Model by Justin Bons

Centralization:

Ethereum Post-Merge Centralization

Lido’s validators

BTC Centralization

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In a heated debate, Eric Wall, crypto blogger and investor, and Justin Bons, founder and chief investment officer of Cyber Capital, discuss Bitcoin’s security model, whether there are fundamental flaws in its design, and which is the best consensus mechanism. 

• why Justin stopped believing in Bitcoin and why he calls it “technically one of the worst cryptocurrencies”
• how Eric’s views on Bitcoin changed over time 
• the problems they see with Bitcoin’s security
• why Eric attacks BTC maximalism, even when he is a Bitcoiner
• how the Bitcoin community will change in the next decades, and why the security problem is a challenge that could be solved
• whether BTC should increase its inflation and whether that would break the store of value proposition
• why Justin thinks that BTC fails as money and won’t play a relevant role in the future
• what happened around the time of the blocksize debate back in 2015-2017
• whether there’s something wrong with Bitcoin’s culture and why Eric compares it to a doomsday cult
• why Ethereum has external dependencies that can impose systemic risks, according to Eric
• whether proof of stake or proof of work is a better consensus mechanism
• whether Ethereum is more censorship resistant than Bitcoin
• why BTC is a speculative asset and what Justin believes is needed for crypto to finally flourish

Crypto.com

Ava Labs

a16z

• Twitter

• Twitter
• Medium

• Arthur Hayes, Former Ethereum Skeptic, on Why the Merge Makes Him Bullish on ETH 

• With the Merge, Will Ethereum Take Over Bitcoin’s Title as Digital Gold?

Surprisingly, Tail Emission Is Not Inflationary by Peter Todd

Justin’s thread that kicked off the debate

A (brief and incomplete) history of censorship in /r/Bitcoin

Theory On Bitcoin Governance; Three Stage Model by Justin Bons

Ethereum Post-Merge Centralization

Lido’s validators

BTC Centralization

Justin Drake, researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, talks about the Merge, how this transition affects Bitcoin, where Ethereum’s road map is going, and more. 

Show highlights:

Thank you to our sponsors!

1inch

Crypto.com

Messari

Justin

Twitter 

Previous Coverage of Unchained on the Merge:

The Merge:

ETH Post-Merge Dynamics:

Post Merge MEV:

ETH Proof of Work

Ethereum’s roadmap:

• ETH Vision

Haym on Ethereum’s roadmap

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Welcome to The Chopping Block! Crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Robert Leshner and Tarun Chitra chop it up about the latest news in the digital asset industry. In this episode, Emin Gün Sirer, the emperor of Avalanche, also joined the conversation

• Gün’s take on the Ava Labs conspiracy story and whether there was any truth in the videos
• The impact of the Merge on ETH issuance and energy usage
• What’s going on with the ETHPoW fork, and how the team has been messing up
• The TL;DR of the technical side of Ethereum scaling, explained by Tarun
• How, in the beginning, proof of stake was designed to resemble proof of work 
• What Ethereum miners are going to do after the Merge
• Whether increasing hash rates spike prices of PoW coins 
• How the Basic Attention Token is like the Stanford prison experiment
• Whether the fights between Gün and other founders were positive or negative
• How an exchange delisted every privacy coin
• Whether Coinbase's support of the lawsuit against the US Treasury over Tornado Cash was a PR move
• How this moment in history resembles the 90s and the rise of the internet
• Whether there are blockchain-haters and what the crypto industry can do better
• How there can’t be a single chain to meet every need
• How FTX and Coinbase have different approaches to regulation 
• How would everyone celebrate a successful Merge and whether there’s a chance of it failing

• Emin Gün Sirer’s statement

• ChainID missing; the request from Coinbase

• CoinDesk article

• The ETHPoW team said the fork will be deployed within 24 hours of the Merge

• ETHPoW team’s promise to abolish EIP-1559

• ETHPoW first blocks

• Ethereum Foundation Merge announcement.
• Ethereum carbon emission reductions.

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Kevin Zhou, co-founder of Galois Capital, and Evgeny Gaevoy, founder and CEO of Wintermute, discuss how to trade the Ethereum Proof of Work fork, what the market is telling about the Merge, and whether the Merge affects Bitcoin. 

• what will happen at the time of the Merge according to Kevin and whether there’s uncertainty
• when the ETH Proof of Work chain will emerge and how that affects trading opportunities
• the mistakes of the ETHPoW team, like repealing EIP-1559
• what percentage of ETH market cap ETHPoW will accrue
• what the first few blocks of ETHPoW will be like
• what the strategies are to earn the ETHPoW airdrop and what the on-chain activity looks like
• whether there is an “up-only” monoculture in Ethereum
• what stETH is, how it should be priced and what the futures market indicates
• where the value of a chain comes from and the likelihood of ETHPoW failing catastrophically
• how to protect from replay attacks
• the price action of ETH after the Merge
• how ETH becoming deflationary affects Bitcoin’s narrative as digital gold
• how the ESG-friendly image of Proof of Stake could affect the narratives of ETH and BTC

Crypto.com

Ava Labs

a16z

Kevin:

• Twitter

Evgeny:

• Twitter

Episode Links

Previous Coverage of Unchained on the Merge:

• Preston Van Loon on Ethereum's Merge and His Lawsuit Against Treasury

• With the Merge, Will Ethereum Take Over Bitcoin’s Title as Digital Gold?
• Why Kevin Zhou Believes Ethereum Will Have 3 Forks After the Merge
• Post-Merge, If Lido Becomes Dominant, What Does That Mean for Ethereum?

ETH Proof of Work:

• ChainID missing; and the request from Coinbase
• Kevin’s analogy

• CoinDesk article

• ETHPow Token 

• ETHPoW team’s promise to abolish EIP-1559

• ETHPoW first blocks

• Tether supports PoS

• Circle (USDC) supports PoS

ETH Trade

• Ether’s backwardation

ETH Post-Merge Dynamics:

• Onchain Wizard post

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Preston Van Loon, cofounder and Ethereum core developer at Prysmatic Labs, talks about the Merge, its impact on an environmental level, and why he is a plaintiff in the lawsuit against the Treasury Department over Tornado Cash. 

• what the Merge is on a technical level and what its impact will be 
• whether the proof of stake consensus mechanism makes the network more decentralized and secure
• what happens if the Merge fails and whether there’s a contingency plan
• why Preston founded Prysmatic Labs and how Prysm works
• what the next steps are for Ethereum and what the community is working on
• whether Preston thinks a proof of work Ethereum fork would succeed
• when and how Ethereum’s high fees and scaling issues are going to be resolved
• why Preston joined the lawsuit against the US Treasury over the Tornado Cash sanctions
• how Preston would celebrate a successful Ethereum Merge

1inch

Crypto.com

Messari

Twitter 

Previous Coverage of Unchained on the Merge:

• Arthur Hayes, Former Ethereum Skeptic, on Why the Merge Makes Him Bullish on ETH
• With the Merge, Will Ethereum Take Over Bitcoin’s Title as Digital Gold?
• Why Kevin Zhou Believes Ethereum Will Have 3 Forks After the Merge
• Post-Merge, If Lido Becomes Dominant, What Does That Mean for Ethereum?

Lawsuit against the US Treasury:

• Coinbase is supporting a lawsuit against the Treasury Department by six users of Tornado Cash.
• Fortune article on the lawsuit
• Why Preston joined the lawsuit.

The Merge:

• Ethereum Foundation Merge announcement.
• Ethereum carbon emission reductions.

ETH Post-Merge Dynamics:

• Cumberland on the Ethereum dynamics after the merge 
• Miles Suter on the implications of the Merge

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Arthur Hayes, cofounder of BitMex, discusses how he’s trading the Merge, the impact of macroeconomic policy in the markets, his career as a writer, and much more. 

• how crypto is reconfiguring how humans do finance over the internet
• why Arthur initially thought Ethereum was worthless 
• how NFTs allow users to trade human culture and will unlock trillions of dollars of value
• why Ethereum doesn’t even need to be deflationary
• whether other layer 1s can take some market cap from Ethereum
• why Arthur thinks that a successful Merge is understated and why this is a valid reason for hedging
• why he thinks an Ethereum proof of work chain won’t succeed and how Arthur will trade ETHPoW
• why LDO, Lido’s token, is a riskier bet but has more potential gains
• how he believes the Shanghai upgrade will impact ETH’s price
• whether the Merge affects BTC’s narrative as digital gold and whether the inflation hedge theory of Bitcoin still holds
• why Bitcoin is a measure of USD liquidity and why the Fed rates don’t matter as much as everyone thinks
• whether hedge funds and institutional investors would want to invest in crypto given the high correlation with traditional markets
• what Arthur believes the impact of a potential US recession would be on the crypto markets 
• why he believes the real economy is not relevant to the financial markets
• whether algorithmic stablecoins are doomed to fail
• how the credit cycle works and how it repeats again and again
• Arthur’s method for identifying good projects to invest in
• how Arthur became such a good writer
• whether BTC is money and the religious aspect of the Bitcoin culture

Crypto.com

Ava Labs

a16z

• Twitter

• With the Merge, Will Ethereum Take Over Bitcoin’s Title as Digital Gold?
• Why Kevin Zhou Believes Ethereum Will Have 3 Forks After the Merge
• Post-Merge, If Lido Becomes Dominant, What Does That Mean for Ethereum?

• Eth-Flexive
• Ether, a double digit shitcoin

• Adam Cochran on the Fed’s QT

• Whether Ethereum’s Merge is priced in

• Cumberland on the Ethereum dynamics after the merge 
• Miles Suter on the implications of the Merge

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Welcome to The Chopping Block! Crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi and Tom Schmidt chop it up about the latest news in the digital asset industry. In this episode, Jill Gunter, the empress of Espresso, also joined the conversation. 

Show topics:

Hosts

Guest

Jill Gunter

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/jillrgunter

Episode Links

Tornado Cash

Ava Labs Accusations:

Social Slashing and Censorship on ETH

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Miles Jennings, general counsel at a16z crypto, talks about its new “can’t be evil” NFT licenses and how they help to solve many problems within the NFT industry. Show highlights:

• what “can’t be evil” NFT licenses are and what problems they solve
• what can these licenses achieve for content creators
• which are the five rights that the licenses address
• whether the NFT licenses help resolve hate speech issues for creators
• why a16z described its licenses as “can’t be evil”
• how these licenses will be enforced
• how anyone buying NFTs should now be able to understand what they are buying
• why previous attempts to create standardized NFT license didn’t succeed
• why Miles thinks these new NFT licenses are going to succeed

1inch: https://1inch.io/

Crypto.com: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/unconfirmedcardearnfeb2021

Messari: https://mainnet.events/ 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/milesjennings

• a16z article: https://a16zcrypto.com/introducing-nft-licenses/

• What legal rights NFTs come with: https://unchainedpodcast.com/what-exactly-do-you-get-when-you-buy-an-nft-three-lawyers-discuss/

• Galaxy Digital report on NFT owners being misled about rights: https://decrypt.co/107827/bored-apes-moonbirds-misled-buyers-nft-ip-rights-galaxy-digita 
• CryptoPunks gets IP rights: https://decrypt.co/107184/as-cryptopunks-nft-owners-get-commercial-rights-yuga-hopes-to-secure-their-legacy-as-artwork 
• Bored Apes’ more permissive license helps it become more valuable than Crypto Punks: https://www.thedefiant.io/bored-apes-yacht-club-cryptopunks-copyright-fight 
• Moonbirds controversy ignites after move to CC0 license: https://www.thedefiant.io/moonbirds-cc0-license-nfts

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Show highlights:

Thank you to our sponsors!

Crypto.com: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/unconfirmedcardearnfeb2021

Ava Labs: https://avax.network

a16z: https://link.chtbl.com/HObAJQDL?sid=unchained

Andrew

Twitter: https://twitter.com/propelforward

Martin

Twitter: https://twitter.com/koeppelmann

Previous Coverage of the Tornado Cash Sanctions on Unchained:

Social Slashing and Censorship on ETH

Axios summary of the situation: https://www.axios.com/2022/08/23/how-transactions-might-be-censored-after-ethereum-changes-next-month

BitMex research on how the sanctions affect Ethereum: https://blog.bitmex.com/ofac-sanctions-ethereum-pos-some-technical-nuances/

Ethermine banning transactions: https://twitter.com/takenstheorem/status/1560690035955011585?s=20&t=59hWdhr8_O-hYA8uYnZJ8w

Nic Carter’s article: https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/08/25/if-ethereum-starts-slashing-it-burns/

Eric Wall’s article on social slashing: https://ercwl.medium.com/the-case-for-social-slashing-59277ff4d9c7

CoinDesk article: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/08/23/as-censorship-on-ethereum-begins-could-this-open-sourced-code-help-counter-it/?outputType=amp

Hetzner banning Ethereum users: https://twitter.com/koeppelmann/status/1563146729314467840?s=20&t=ubFhCQqrQyHKfflgMHEmJw

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