Cardano Rumor Rundown March 21, 2022

Hey Everyone!

Let's go...

Newly covered today:

1. The Artifct NFT market is now live. https://twitter.com/ArtifctApp/status/1504891600605954049
2. MuesliSwap gave us a peek at their V2 interface which will include partial matching. https://twitter.com/MuesliSwapTeam/status/1505545800558026758
3. ADA Realm has announced the signing of a contract with Actum Games to develop their metaverse. https://twitter.com/AdaRealm/status/1505493627258212358
4. The March Mid-Month Update is out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RsTi6TJAvc
5. The relative capacities of Cardano and Ethereum to handle the ever-increasing complexity demanded of Gen 3 blockchains appear to be diverging with an Ethereum Core Developer dropping a long thread concluding that “If the protocol [Ethereum] doesn't get slimmer, it's not going to make it.” Meanwhile, Haskell developers are happy to explain how the compositionality of Cardano’s chosen programming language is perfect to accommodate complexity. https://twitter.com/peter_szilagyi/status/1504887154761244673 https://twitter.com/gotMeAHaskell/status/1505313180427427841

Previously Covered but still interesting:

1. The world is catching on to the difference between energy intensive blockchains and green blockchains like Cardano. https://twitter.com/IOHKMedia/status/1493986040985567234
2. This is important for all of us in crypto: a “Keep Your Coins Act” has been introduced into Congress to help safeguard the right to self-custody your crypto that certain lawmakers would like to end. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/us-congressman-warren-davidson-introduces-the-keep-your-coins-act
3. Weiss Crypto is once again saying extremely nice things about Cardano. https://twitter.com/WeissCrypto/status/1494038885294297097
4. ADA Realm is reporting that they have signed a contract for development of their metaverse in Unreal Engine 4. https://twitter.com/AdaRealm/status/1494210599705710595
5. 1 Billion ADA has moved to single pool operators. I think we can call this a TVD positive event. https://twitter.com/CardanoPoolPeek/status/1494292161889808385
6. Wyoming is trying to launch its own stablecoin. Not so sure how this will end. https://twitter.com/CaitlinLong_/status/1494427624453685248
7. There is now a Coti/World Mobile partnership. I think we’ve been waiting for this to happen. They say ADAPay will be offered to African Merchants who connect to the World Mobile system. https://twitter.com/COTInetwork/status/1494317454490673155
8. Cardano is straight up destroying everyone (again) in adjusted transaction volume according to Messari. https://messari.io/screener/chains-activity-DB01F96B
9. There was a giant attack reported on Open Sea users. The number $200MM was thrown around. Reports were of a phishing scam, but Open Sea claimed it wasn’t email based. https://twitter.com/CryptoWhale/status/1495206028065005568 https://twitter.com/opensea/status/1495473886380519427
10. If you haven’t read it already, here’s a very good thread on the need to preserve self-custody in crypto at all costs. https://twitter.com/punk6529/status/1494444624630403083
11. Self-custody software providers already handing out hilarious rejections to the Canadian government demanding that they “freeze” user crypto accounts. https://twitter.com/nunchuk_io/status/1494885897577271299
12. The Canadian government’s attempts to “freeze” self-custodied crypto immediately reminded some of the concept of “social slashing” that apparently exists in Ethereum? https://twitter.com/CryptoCrystalB1/status/1494690430105096194
13. MuesliSwap has a brand new charting function. https://twitter.com/MuesliSwapTeam/status/1495786253643661325
14. Ardana launches Ardana academy to help people learn about Cardano. https://medium.com/ardana-hub/announcement-ardana-academy-to-launch-this-week-ca30d03079c7
15. Coti/Djed has now partnered with AADA. https://twitter.com/COTInetwork/status/1495759777993011202
16. The February Cardano 360 will be Thursday the 24th at 17:30 UTC. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1495838241894940676
17. MuesliSwap has announced that in order “[t]o take some load off the main network until the congestion is resolved” they will be launching an AMM on M1. They say that “means MuesliSwap will operate an order-book DEX on Cardano mainnet and an AMM DEX on the M1 sidechain.” But, don’t worry. They report that “[w]hen the time is right, we will merge both worlds together!” As to liquidity pools on their currently existing DEX, the release says “this also allows us to test liquidity pools, which we plan on adding to our Cardano mainnet DEX in the middle of 2022.” https://medium.com/@muesliswap/muesliswap-is-releasing-an-amm-dex-on-milkomeda-sidechain-cc505438dce2
18. The Ardana community call for this week is now available. No announcement on the start date of the ISPO as near as I can tell. But, the call contained interesting discussion of Ardana’s aspirations in relation to global forex markets. https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1eaJbNlEALnJX?s=20
19. When will Biden’s Executive Order on crypto be issued given the crisis in Ukraine taking center stage? No one seems to know. We do know that there are reports of discord between the White House and Treasury that may have delayed the order as well. https://fortune.com/2022/02/22/yellen-white-house-split-slows-crypto-strategy/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-16/yellen-white-house-said-to-be-split-on-crypto-executive-order
20. Sam Bankman-Fried enjoyed getting “son’d” by both Jesse Powell of Kraken and Caitlin Long of Avanti Bank after he made some claims of questionable accuracy about crypto cooperation with regulators. https://twitter.com/jespow/status/1496327891528867845 https://twitter.com/CaitlinLong_/status/1496330615373070338
21. The MuesliSwap v.2 audit has been completed by MLabs. MuesliSwap v.2 will now be rolled out over the course of a month (first on testnet). We’re talking about the Cardano mainnet DEX here not the EVM AMM. Apparently, this is the version that will include partial order filling which is a huge leap forward for MuesliSwap! https://medium.com/@muesliswap/muesliswap-v2-smart-contract-successfully-passed-an-audit-by-mlabs-fb2434771521
22. Pavia has onboarded what seem to be some very legit music producers to create a studio on an estate in Pavia and explore what can be done in the stadium with music. https://twitter.com/Pavia_io/status/1496483677798379521
23. Big update on the Cardano Summit 2021 NFTs. It looks like we will all be able to turn our Terra Virtua assets into actual NFTs. Apparently, they are just finishing integrating Nami wallet right now. Thanks for this great update, Joshua Miller! https://twitter.com/IOHK_Josh/status/1496633915422883843
24. MuesliSwap should now reflect your ADA Handle. https://twitter.com/MuesliSwapTeam/status/1496901112351408132
25. The February Cardano 360 is now available for your viewing pleasure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTmJ5Z3wuoM
26. SundaeSwap reports that the Reverse ISO moved two billion ADA over to single pool operators. https://twitter.com/SundaeSwap/status/1496980110506921990
27. SundaeSwap starts moving toward DAO governance of the protocol. https://sundaeswap-finance.medium.com/the-sundaeswap-protocols-road-to-community-governance-be9c49d803e4
28. There’s a new Network Energy Usage dashboard in Cardano Blockchain Insights. It shows CArdano is 47,000 more energy efficient than Bitcoin. Very crazy since we’re also more decentralized. https://datastudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/3136c55b-635e-4f46-8e4b-b8ab54f2d460/page/p_lz1r0b9arc
29. Gal Gadot has invested in a Cardano DEX project? https://www.fxempire.com/news/article/gal-gadot-backed-cardano-dex-adaswap-raises-2-6-million-919416
30. Interim governance seems to be in full swing for the SundaeSwap DAO. https://forum.sundaeswap.finance/
31. Apparently, the National Security Council’s Director of Cybersecurity thinks crypto couldn’t even handle the volume necessary for Russia to evade sanctions. https://twitter.com/hannahdlang/status/1499029140305068033
32. Looks like we have some Pavia podcasts coming our way. https://twitter.com/Pavia_io/status/1498932836363120643
33. Daedalus 4.9.0 is out! If you’ve never used a full-node wallet, try it out! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1499421392470695940
34. DripDropz has now (March 3) moved back to normal distribution of all tokens after the resounding success of their 30 million token SundaeSwap distribution. https://twitter.com/ContactDrip/status/1499445874681950218 https://twitter.com/ContactDrip/status/1499403974448926720
35. Metamask users are discovering that they won’t have access to their crypto wallet if they are in sanctioned areas. Turns out decentralization has some value and Cardano users have been reflecting on this. https://twitter.com/WatcherGuru/status/1499414900355047427
36. IOG has opened a consultative discussion with stakepool operators around whether the minimum fixed fee of 340 ADA should be reduced to 30 ADA. Predictably, SPOs expressed a variety of positions on this. https://twitter.com/timbharrison/status/1499467957612814344
37. Cardano Hieronymus makes a good point about Cardano sometimes being too self-critical. https://twitter.com/CardanoHumpback/status/1499475148155588609
38. JP Morgan owns critical Ethereum architecture??? https://protos.com/consensys-lawsuit-jpmorgan-owns-critical-ethereum-infrastructure/
39. There is a brand new SpaceBudz website! https://twitter.com/spacebudzNFT/status/1500469079991369729
40. SundaeSwap now supports five different wallets. This is a great sign of a maturing DeFi ecosystem in Cardano. https://twitter.com/SundaeSwap/status/1500177005890920448
41. Node Release 1.34.1 is out. https://github.com/input-output-hk/cardano-node/releases/tag/1.34.1
42. Terra Virtua says it is still working hard to get us our Cardano Summit NFTs. https://twitter.com/TerraVirtuaHQ/status/1500905522542878720
43. Cardano defi platform, Genius Yield, has launched a new website. https://twitter.com/GeniusyieldO/status/1497317182119845894
44. Ardana has posted a recording of their twitter space on Orbis, the ZK-rollup L2 solution. https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1MYxNnYmykbxw
45. Coinbase has blocked 25k Russia linked accounts. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60661763
46. Biden has signed the executive order on cryptocurrencies (March 9). https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2022/03/09/executive-order-on-ensuring-responsible-development-of-digital-assets/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/03/09/fact-sheet-president-biden-to-sign-executive-order-on-ensuring-responsible-innovation-in-digital-assets/ https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/biden-orders-government-study-digital-dollar-other-cryptocurrency-risks-2022-03-09/
47. The ADAO community has partnered with Liqwid to build the Agora Governance System! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1501215165336981510
48. There will be a large event for Cardano community members going down in Denver in October! https://twitter.com/bigpeyYT/status/150165380779679334
49. Senator Lummis is going to unveil a bill to integrate crypto into the larger financial system. It will be interesting to see how these legislative attempts stack up against the reports that come out of the Biden Executive Order. https://twitter.com/SenLummis/status/1501576072437059593
50. Poolpeek.com has re-designed their dashboard. https://poolpeek.com
51. Genius Yield and Coti have partnered. https://geniusyield.medium.com/genius-yield-and-coti-partnership-announcement-e24a432dd03b
52. Mlabs has partnered with ACTA Finance. https://twitter.com/MLabs10/status/150194849663027609
53. The ADA Handle Mainnet is now live! https://twitter.com/adahandle/status/1502690939332034566
54. Here’s an interesting article from Rob Greig of Cornupcopias: “The Island, The Ocean, The Pond and The Metaverse”. https://twitter.com/CornucopiasGame/status/1502723613476204545
55. The EU’s Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) draft legislative framework which may limit proof-of-work crypto assets is up for a vote today (March 14). There is a report that crypto assets "shall be subject to minimum environmental sustainability standards with respect to their consensus mechanism used for validating transactions, before being issued, offered or admitted to trading in the Union." Obviously this would be a massive problem for proof-of-work chains. This is a new attempt to include such language after a previous provision had been removed. https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/12/limiting-proof-of-work-crypto-back-on-the-table-as-eu-parliament-prepares-virtual-currencies-vote/ https://www.benzinga.com/markets/cryptocurrency/22/03/26115263/bitcoin-may-effectively-be-banned-in-europe-as-eu-set-to-finalize-regulatory-framework-for
56. Here’s some analysis of the EU MiCA draft language guessing that there’s a good chance it will pass today (March 14) but that it might be removed during “Trilogues” which will be the subsequent informal tripartite meetings on legislative proposals between representatives of the European Parliament, the Council of the EU, and the European Commission. https://twitter.com/paddi_hansen/status/1502546546914729984 https://www.europarl.europa.eu/olp/en/interinstitutional-negotiations
57. It looks like we have crossed the quarter billion dollar mark in terms of total value locked in Cardano DeFi. https://defillama.com/chain/Cardano
58. The EU MiCA legislative framework went forward in the Monetary and Economic Affairs Committee without the provisions that would phase out proof-of-work. https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/14/proposal-limiting-proof-of-work-is-rejected-in-eu-parliament-committee-vote-sources/
59. Colorado will start accepting crypto for tax payments. https://dailyhodl.com/2022/03/09/colorado-governor-polis-sees-only-upside-in-being-first-to-accept-crypto-for-tax-payments/
60. Pavia is working toward yield farming with SundaeSwap. https://twitter.com/Pavia_io/status/1503329175607853059
61. The ADA Handle public mainnet mint is off to a great start. It looks like ghosting requires a lot of handles. https://twitter.com/CalvinsBrew/status/1503454784904482822
62. Cardano Village is considering shooting for a full Avatar/Chat style metaverse vision: “Let's tell some great stories. Let's open the gates of hell. We are considering making a web mode metaverse by June. Like Decentraland. An avatar will appear, chat and enter the house. Why did I make such a hellish choice? I will show everyone how good our team is. I will show everyone who is the best team.” –A-DAK-GALBI https://discord.com/channels/909109787130748928/922034270850150430
63. Here’s a testnet transaction to open a hydra head! https://twitter.com/_KtorZ_/status/1503683515421974530
64. We’re starting to see some things out of the Crypto Bisons algorithmic in-game music concept. https://twitter.com/CryptoBisons/status/1503698342320254979
65. Liqwid is announcing some good results with their qToken Plutarch script. https://twitter.com/liqwidfinance/status/1503742933614346248
66. There is a mystery project called Plutobay that is coming to Cardano soon and is partnered with MuesliSwap. https://twitter.com/MuesliSwapTeam/status/1503766642010038275
67. IOHK conservatively estimates that there are 500 projects building on Cardano. That is a small army of projects!! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1503701168001802240
68. Pavia gives us a little update on their broader “Pavia Compatible Asset” strategy. https://twitter.com/Pavia_io/status/1504092703193194503
69. The Fed raised the Federal Funds Rate by 25 basis points. While this may seem very small to combat the rampant inflation, this may be the beginning of something that could be very impactful to Cardano if the fed raises rates at every meeting for the rest of the year. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/03/16/business/fed-meeting-interest-rates https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/federalfundsrate.asp
70. NFTs are coming to instagram in the near term. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/03/15/mark-zuckerberg-says-nfts-are-coming-soon-to-instagram/
71. There is now ADA support in Trezor suite. https://twitter.com/Trezor/status/1504117266899775494
72. Liquid has partnered with Coti & Djed. https://twitter.com/liqwidfinance/status/1504465413534478341
73. Here’s more of the trend that our online future will be more 3D and less 2D. Indigo has a Catalyst Proposal to build a learning center in the Cardano metaverse. https://twitter.com/Indigo_protocol/status/1504570021741318144
74. Sen. Warren is once again up to her old tricks. She has introduced a bill with overly broad language that might end up targeting anyone (even someone who releases open source software) who might have done anything that enabled a transaction by an address that is related to a sanctioned individual. https://www.coincenter.org/new-crypto-sanctions-bill-targets-publishing-code-facilitating-transactions/
75. We now have a link for the Cardano Fraud Detection Bureau if you see something suspicious. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1504475158098026509
76. It looks like MinSwap has overtaken SundaeSwap in terms of TVL. https://defillama.com/chain/Cardano

~Army of Spies

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The Joker's New Toy - a parody short story / fanfiction about the joker and the batman universe in general

Bruce Wayne is sitting in a chair, strapped in with leather belts. He can't move his arms or legs and is inside of a large industrial warehouse. His chair is spray painted green and his mask is gratuitously graffitid with a purple and green mark of mayhem. The joker has been here. Jack Napier, the Joker, cackles from a far. His hoots and howls reverberating off of the concrete walls and floors making a ringing in the distance and a menacing echo. The moon shines brightly in the clear night sky as batman is forced to stay put in the jokers chair.

Joker: ah-ah-aaaaaahhh....! So if it isnt batsy watsy! Or should i say...brucy waynee?...

Batman growld and in his usual raspy and threataning voice, but only threatening to crime doers, lets out a quick remark.

Batman: The Joker ... you will never get away with this!!!

J: but i already have guano! Soon the whole water treatment facility will b flooded woth my signature slime... and nobody will be the wiser.

B: tell me about the slime joker

The joker creeps in from the shadows revealing his ugly clown mug. His face paint is cracked and sweaty, revealing his skin at the nape of his neck. His signature get-up purple tuxedo is stained with the wicked spray paint color combination of purple and green, the craziest colors.

J: the slime? Oh yes! The slime! My silly slime! The kookie crazy joker smiley slime!

B:joker...

J: go on bayman. Say it! Say the name of my slime!

Batman winces at the obscurity of the jokers lingo on most days, but the greatest detective couldn't let the slime infest the waters of gothams water supply. Who knows the effects of the slime? It could cause immense damage and suffering, so batman had to do what he had to do.

B: ... tell me about the kookie crazy joker silly slime...NOW!!

J: well fine bats, but you arent doing anything about it any time soon! BAAAAH HAHAHAHAHA...! Anywho...my slime starts off my victims with a symptom of giggling. Then they chuckle, then they smirk uncontrollably of course...then once they have enough liquid nitrous oxide in them to kill them...they DIE LAUGHING! but we all know that NO2 has to be kept cold...so my slime is actually my own special concoction! It can produce the effects of nitrous oxide at room temperature and in liquid form! Hehe!..hoohoo! HAHAHA GAHAHA!!

Batman. Also known as Bruce wayne, is shaving and trying to escape the chair with all of his might and muscle. He needs to stop the slime. All could go to hell if that slime were to enter the water supply. It could start a new era, they would probably call it something like "the slime years". It would be a catastrophe. Batman couldn't let that happen to gotham.

J:well batty i think the time fonally came for you to try out my new toy!

B: what do you mean joker?

J: i mean what i mean! Just that! I have a little game we can play!

A big electric machine pops out like a cartoon out of seemingly nowhere and just kindof attatches itself to batman. It looks like an machine that would put electricity in things and shock or zap them with volts and watts of power.

B: you'll never get away with this bullcrap joker...!

J:oh but i already have! Now settle down while I read you the rules, were going to play a new game this time bruce!

B: joker, what the hell are you talking about?

J: its time to play "cucky cringe!"

Out of the darkness about 20 of the jokers goons fill bleachers stolen from the childrens school football field. Huge LED lights blare in batmans face and light up a stage. One extra small goon that resembles a no life gamer mans the camera and audio mixing of what appears to be a livestreamed event. Crazy music starts playing like that of a carnival or a circus. The game begins as the live feed to reddit.com live plays on a huge monitor that is duct taped to a wall facing batman, so he cam be tortured furthar by the exlerience.

B:joker...!

J: ok batman! Lets hop to question one!

B: what!?

J: dont worry you'll learn the rules as you go! Question ONE!

"based"

B: w-what the he-

A thunderous bolt of energy booms and zooms through the batmans body, shocking him making him jitter and jive with zappingly hot electricity.

J:WRONG! that is based!

B:joker IM GOING TO PUT YOU IN AN ARKHAM ASYLUM IF YOU DONT TELL ME ABOUT THE SLIME RIGHT NOW!

J: question two!

"BTS"

B: the korean band?...

Another lightning spike strikes bruce and breaks his mind a bit furthar. There is a smoke cloud accumulating above him from frying parts of his suit and skin.

J: HEHE! CUCKY CRINGE!

B: what the hell kind of game is this!? Am i just reacting to the words? What are the rules even here?

J: thats a good game of cucky cringe for you! There are not many rules if you cant figure them out already!

Joker's livestream has over a thousand viewer on reddit live, it is being streamed on r/gotham.

Batman thinks to himself B: i guess its just a game of either reating based or cucky cringe to whatever the hell he is talking about. Hes such a jaded individual i dont even know the correlation of all of these things... but ill find a way out... i have to...

J: " incel blackpill "

B:...

J: i said, incel bla-

B: cucky cringe

A silly horn toots and some goons start to laugh and clap at bruce

J: aah! I believe the conditioning is working... you will learn the lingo quickly around here batman!

Meanwhile,The riddler and the penguin and Bane are all in the riddlers discord server watching the jokers livestream meanwhile.

Riddler: ah i love a good show of cucky cringe! Bane: yes, it pleases me greatly. Penguin: gwak gwak...guys i dont really know what the heck here is going on...gwakgwak...mind explaining...?

R: sure penguin. So in a game of cucky cringe, the joker uses that electrical machine him and i built to use right there where the batmans sitting in to condition the player into being like one of us. Through the elecrrocutions, it induces seisures. Usually he just zaps a new goon to haze em, but we have the bat here, so its time to taze him!

Bane: yes. Basically he is using negative punishment with the electric convulsions to enforce batman to get more answers right, and using the silly or crazy horn sound to positively reinforce the correct answers.

P: so ... gwak... its a bit like pavlovs dog...? Gwak?

Bane: pretty much soon he will be slobbering for more of this unhinged lingo and will be a slave to us, and gotham will be ours, yes.

R: guys guys hes doing some more!

J: Among us sus imposter

Batman: based- AAAAH CHHHCHH AAAAAAAAHHHGHH

J: hehe! Discord nitro!

B: based based!

J: E girl twitch streams

B: cucky cringe!!

Horns begin to doot and toot as batman becomes more correct with every guess. But the conditioning had begun. He was slowly encroaching on insanity from the moronic mannerisms of jack napier.

Bane is meanwhile currently crossposting about the livestream. He makes a lot of clacky clicking noises with his corsair k65. Its a durable keyboard, and it is fitted custom with cherry mx browns. Jas a collection of his favorite keyboards. Bane can achieve 122 words per minute after a meditation session.

Penguin takes a long drag on his comically large cigarette and wafts a large cloud of smoke into his Hyper X Clouds microphone.

P: gwak? hey bane? Mind going on push to talk, gwak?

Penguin takes a long drag out of his comically large cigarette. He leans back 169° in his black and white DX racer chair.

Bane ignores the penguin because he thinks the penguin is beong cringe, and keeps typing away about how the stream is popping off.

P: bane? Gwak?

Joker: "The mandalorian on disney plus"

Batman: based!!

J: "baby yoda"

B: based!!!

J: "elden ring"

B: based!

Batman slobbers and begins to slur his words.

J: "poggers"

B:BAAAASED!!!

J: "Fragging out in matchmaking"

B: based!!! Based...

The riddler adjusts his razer headset and gets close to his razer microphone to make sure he is heard loud and clear.

Riddler: Batman drools! His spit makes pools!

J: "doom eternal ost"

B: Baaaseeed!

J: "anime tomboy girl friend"

B: Based!! BASED!!

J: "reddit gold"

B: baaased!

Batman is losing his marbles at this point. He is definitely losing brain cells at a dangerous rate.

J: "goth mommy"

B: based!! Based! Based!

J: "soyjack twitter"

B: based! BASED!! BA-

Batman is hit with over a thousand volts of electricity. This was almost too much for him.

J: oooooh how unfortunate batty! You were on a roll! Soyjack twitter is cucky cringe!!

B: more cucky cringe!! More!!

The goons are losing their cool and are cheering for batman as he continues the game. The stream on reddit gains what would be its peak at 50428 viewers. All of Gotham was watching cucky cringe. All of gotham was watching their hero become a pile of mental mush.

J: "furry cringe compilation"

B: based!

J: well done batman, a lot of people screw up on that one!

"Bitcoin"

B: cucky cringe!

The joker whips out his WaynePhone8-XL and snaps a selfie of a goofy batman saying based, cucky, and cringe nonstop.

J: I'm posting this one in the server! Hheheheh!!! A HAHAHAH!

the joker posts the photo using his cellular data to riddlers discord server.

Riddler: what the hell did jokes post in general?

Mr. Freeze joy reacts the selfie the joker posted.

Bane: haha. joker always posts hilarious images. It does bring a smile to my face.

Penguin: gwak gwak gwak! You know i always love a joke from the joker...!

The riddler removes the image.

Penguin and Bane: hey!

Riddler: NO MEMES IN #GENERAL ! RULE NUMBER 2 JOKER! THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING JOKER!

Joker: "kendrick lamar to pimp a butterfly"

B: based!!

J: "Ape picture board apes yacht club"

B: based!

J: "seethe"

B: Cucky cringe.

J: "league of legends"

B: Ba- OOOOHHH AAAAAHHAGAGAAAAAAAAAAAGAGAAGGAGAGAGAAGAAAAAHHHHHH...huh...huuh.....huff...huh...

J: oooooh too bad guano! Thats cucky cringe!

"Derpina"

B: cuc- no !! BAAAASEEED!!!

J: "not busting it down sexual style"

B: cucky cringe!!

J: its working goons, the batman is becoming... purple-and-green-pilled!!! Are you watching gotham? Are you watching as your dark knight suffers under my silly games on reddit?

B: based cringe! Cucky! Cucky cringe! More cucky criiinnnggggeee!!!

J: heehee! Ok just a few more my droog to be!

Batman is sundered by the electricity...or is he? Secretly, batman was wearing a special rubber suit this whole time. He is merely pretendeing! The batman is putting on a show and the big reveal will come!

B: more cucky cringe!!

J: "panda express chicken fried rice coupon"

B: based!!

J: "chocolate soylent"

B: cucky cringe!!

J: "Doja cat and cardi B"

B: ba- no Cringe!! Cucky cringe!!! CUCKY CRINGE!!

J: "Cottage-core Shrigma society"

B: Cuck- OOOOOOHHH GAAAAH gaaaaAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHOOOOOOOOAAAAAHHHHhhhh....!!! Waaaaaahhh!

The Riddler's discord is enjoying the show with push to talk enabled.

P: based! Haha! gwak...!

Bane: how is that based? I thought for sure that would be cucky cringe?

R: shut up bane you are a cuck!

P: bane it's an ascetic aesthetic. Gwak. Its about returning to a simpler time in nature, gwak, and basically not having a lot of material posessions.

The riddler chuffs and spews an emerald cloud from his razer box mod directly into the webcam, obscuring his image of him sitting in his razer gaming chair.

Bane: I'm not a cuck. I'm not cringe riddler. Do you want to suffer? It would be an interesting duel, your riddles versus my power.

The riddler server mutes bane for the next half hour. His fat cloud dissipates, revealing via his aebcam that he is no longer present sitting down. Where could he be?

Riddler: SERVER RULE NUMBER 3 Bane! Remember to read the pinned post! No arguing with server admins!

The joker hoots and hollers some more. Batman giggles and froths at the mouth only seeming to know the words based, cucky, and cringe.

J: "throwing used car batteries into the atlantic ocean"

B: BASED!

J: "vine"

B: baaaaased!

J: "tik tok trending"

B:cucky cringe ohhh cucky...cucky cringe!!

J: "cope"

B: BAAASED!!

J: "trad AND redpilled"

B: BASED BASED BASED!!!...BAAAAASED!!!! Based!! Oh based do more please!! Please more cucky!! I'm ready for more cucky cringe!! MORE!! BASED!! more... CRINGE oh cucky...oh cucky! Oh MORE oh more oh CUCKY CRINGE!!

The ruse is nearly up, batman has successfully persuaded the joker to believe that his mind is broken. How intelligent of batman to pretend the whole time! And such genius to wear an electric proof bat suit! Batman is the best super hero.

J: ok guano... your final question!

"Gotham city's water supply"

Batman smirks.

B: based.

Joker slaps the button to release the electrocution. Nothing happens but a small amoujt of smoke rises from the material.

Batman stands up and takes the handcuffs and leg cuffs off with ease.

J: no...No!

Jokers goons all get up at once

J: GET THE BAT!

B: actually joker, the bat gets you. Now is that what you would call cucky cringe? Or is this based?

The joker looks behind him in absolute horror as the entire gotham police force takes off their goon-like costumes. He begins to chuckle as sweat and a tear sheds down his face in hilarity and fear.

J: no- n...NOOOOO!!! HEHEH!!! hooh! How IRONIC!!! hehahehhahhe!!!

Commissioner Gordon takes his goon-like disguise off and gets up from behind the camera.

Gordon: well joker, the joke's over. And we have the last laugh. You're going away for a looooong time in the arkham asylum! And the water? Were taking care of it. Nice try, but youre going to need a lot more slime and a lot more brains to out joke gotham.

J: hehe! My slime!! Heheheheheh... MY SLIME. . failed! Hooohoo.... hoh... my slime..!

Gordon puts the cuffs on a depressed, but still chuckling joker. Then hands him off to the cops and returns to the batman.

G: BATMAN YOU REALLY DID IT BATMAN YOU DID IT! YOU BEAT THE JOKER AGAIN YOU DID IT BATMAN!

b: just doing my job.

G: how did you do it batman?

B: well, ill explain it again, but you do remember from the briefing i thought, but whatever gordon i will explain it again ok? I wore a rubber suit, because rubber does not conduct electricity so i was immune to the machine that the joker used to try and use electroshock therapy on me to turn me into one of his goons. The real mystery is, i guess, all of those words and phrases he was saying. What even are those things? I am aware of who doja cat is, and joe biden, but some of the other things? Cucky cringe? Cope? Bored ape yacht club? It all went over my head and i was simply guessing weather or not they were cucky cringe - whatever that means or based - whatever that means, and i would simply pretend when i smelled fumes from parts of my suit burning up so he would think that I was actually being electrocuted.

G: a job well done batman! Im so glad we perfectly rounded up all of the jokers goons in gotham and got a chance to disguise our selves so we could execute the mission together batman.

Batman: just doing my job. Gotham can rest easy tonight, now that we locked away this "cucky cringe" criminal.

Web3 Projects Worth Watching in the Near Future

If NFTs and metaverse were the buzzwords of 2021, then 2022 could well be the year that sees the rise of web3. While the concept of web3 has been around for some time, it has still yet to settle into a commonly agreed definition, meaning different things to different people. Longtime Bitcoin advocate ex-CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey has been openly skeptical of web3 in recent months, citing the heavy funding the space has received from Silicon Valley VC giants like Andreessen Horowitz. But despite the fact that many people are divided over web3, there are a steady influx of high-quality projects. BigONE believes that four web3 tokens in particular merit our attention.

What is web3?

Simply put, web3 is the prototype for the next generation of the internet. When we browse the web or post on social media, tech companies and operators will no longer act as intermediaries, instead allowing internet users to dominate. This will make decentralization even easier to implement, allowing users to control their data in a more transparent manner. When we connect to the internet, we can browse the web, contribute to our community on social media, play games, listen to music, watch videos, or do a plethora of other online activities, and the central theme of web3 is to allow users to profit. Consider how great it would be if a company stopped selling users’ data for ad revenue, and instead allowed users to share a portion of the revenue when using the company’s internet services.

Typically, there is a lot of overlap between web3 and cryptocurrencies; after all, one of the most exciting aspects of blockchain technology is that it eliminates intermediaries in many transactions, and of course decentralization is also a key feature of web3.

Livepeer (LPT)

Video is becoming a popular way to share and consume content on the internet. However, transcoding the video for different devices and bandwidths is an expensive process. By comparison users don’t need a lot of expensive hardware with Livepeer; they can contribute their computer processing power to form a network that transcodes videos, and in return users can get rewarded for their contributions, which means companies can stream video content at a fraction of the cost compared to centralized solutions.

Audius (AUDIO)

Audius is one of the more established and well-known new decentralized music platforms that have emerged recently. For years, musicians have complained that current rules do not fairly compensate them for their contributions. Audius’s appearance is intended to address this issue. Audius is a user-friendly decentralized music streaming platform that allows artists to be paid directly by their fans.

Audius announced a streaming partnership with TikTok last summer, allowing Audius users to share content on TikTok with a single click, surprising music industry insiders who expected it to work with Apple Music or Spotify. It was initially built on POA network, but now lives on Solana. The total supply of AUDIO is 1 billion tokens, with a current circulating supply of 411m. The yearly inflation is 7%, and 50 million AUDIO were distributed to the top 10 artists and fans, with 75% going to artists based on stream count.

Helium (HNT)

Helium provides a decentralized solution for wireless network infrastructure by powering vast decentralized wireless networks with remote Wi-Fi hotspots. Users can earn HNT tokens by turning their home or office tethering into a hotspot, allowing them to have unlimited network coverage. Network participants purchase Hotspots which are a combination of a wireless gateway and a miner. Each hotspot provides network coverage, as well as mining Helium’s native token, HNT.

Internet hotspots support the Internet of Things, which refers to a wide range of internet-connected devices such as smart appliances, pet collars, smart homes, and driverless cars.

Sandbox (SAND)

Sandbox is a virtual world in which players can buy and develop land, create and trade NFTs, and so on. NFTs are important in many metaverse and blockchain games because they enable users to own digital assets, and Sandbox is one of the best performing cryptocurrencies in 2021.

Sandbox recently announced the start of a web3 LANDS promotion. Through this event, Sandbox hopes to attract the attention of exclusive collectibles, start-up brands, DAOs, and individual users, as well as expand their own influence into the Sandbox metaverse. LANDS are parts of the virtual world, owned by players to create and monetize experiences.

BigONE believes that Sandbox’s LAND promotion will be an excellent opportunity for users to engage with the community. SAND recently completed a US$93 million round of financing led by Softbank, a leading investor in the blockchain space. There are three billion SAND tokens, and a third of its total supply is circulating at $3.06.

Web3 is still in its early stages

The projects listed above have one thing in common: they all use a decentralized network to solve real-world problems with shared bandwidth, storage space, and processing power. In addition to addressing these issues, some web3 projects that combine both NFTs and the metaverse merit our attention. It is too soon to tell which projects have development potential. Because many cryptocurrency projects can only solve a small part of the problems that exist in the crypto world, having more real-world problems to solve distinguishes these projects. However, many high-quality web3 projects are still in their early stages, and no one knows what the future holds.

While these projects featured currently have a first-mover advantage, they may be replaced by new projects using improved technologies in the future. Furthermore, some established tech behemoths are unlikely to relinquish market share easily. With the growth of the industry, the tug-of-war between centralized and decentralized projects has reached a critical point. According to our assessment, decentralization is by no means guaranteed.

Tokens for Livepeer, Audius, Helium, and Sandbox can be purchased from major cryptocurrency exchanges such as BigONE. It is critical, as with any cryptocurrency investment, to only invest money that you can afford to lose. It is important to note that, while these tokens have the potential to generate high returns, they are also high-risk investments with the potential for losses. If you’re going to invest in web3 tokens, do your homework and research first, and make sure you understand the potential risks.

Why is the US Dollar a reserve currency?

This was originally written at https://brettongoods.substack.com/p/why-is-the-us-dollar-a-reserve-currency

The TL;DR (Too Long Didn't Read)

• The US Dollar is used very frequently in international trade even among countries that do not use it domestically. This happens because it has very strong network effects
• So, central banks sell their currency and buy the USD to devalue it. This makes their exports cheaper internationally. A byproduct of that is they have several US Dollars which end up in US Government Treasuries.
• Several countries don't have bond markets strong enough to finance their government and corporate borrowing needs. They borrow in US Dollars in the US because of large and liquid American capital markets. 
• In the case of excessive currency depreciation, the amount of domestic currency needed to pay your foreign debts increases. In some cases, this may lead to government default or a banking crisis. Central banks buy USD so that they can sell it in times of crisis and prevent large scale defaults on their debt.

An easy way to get attention is to predict the end of the world. If you say that the world is going to end because of some bad event that is going to happen, people will listen to you! They might listen to you because they think you are right, they might do it because they like to doomscroll, or they might do it because it’s fun to see what you’re saying and have a laugh at your expense later. 

And so in financial commentary, people end up predicting that the US Dollar is going to become worthless tomorrow. They suggest that foreign central banks will end up moving their reserves away from the US Dollar and will move to the asset of their choice (usually bitcoin or gold). But as long as these calls have been made, the dollar has done fine. And the longer the dollar does fine, just by the nature of luck, more bad things happen to it. And the more bad things that happen to it, the more that people predict that the dollar will end. Today’s example is the freezing of Russian foreign exchange reserves and sovereign wealth fund assets by the US, EU and other countries. The WSJ op-ed predicts that the US Dollar’s exorbitant privilege might be taken away by Russia and China and as does China-friendly SCMP. 

From point A to B

When two companies from different countries want to trade, they have to pick a currency. One possibility is that they’ll pick the producer’s currency. After all, the producer can only use their domestic currency at home. If you’re a Nigerian firm selling to a Brazilian company, it makes no sense for the payment to be in Brazilian real, but a lot more for the payment to be in Nigerian Naira. The Nigerian firm can now spend the Naira at home, instead of having to convert Real to Naira and then spend it.

But there are very good reasons for this to not happen. First it is that it is very hard to get Nigerian Naira outside of Nigeria especially in large quantities. You can’t walk into a bank and ask for 20 billion naira without moving the price quite a bit. (You will probably have to go to a black market and not a bank given strict Nigerian capital controls). 

Second, even if you do get how many ever Naira you wanted, the price of the Naira is unlikely to stay constant over the course of your contract. The value of the Naira (and for that matter the real) is very volatile, and all the uncertainty makes the pricing much harder. 

What’s the solution here? For a lot of international trade the answer has been to use the US Dollar for this. Why? It is that the USD has in recent history been the most widely traded currency, which makes it the first resort of anyone looking for a currency to price their goods in. Since the end of World War 2, the US has been the dominant economic power and so in international transactions, the USD has been the most commonly used. This made it convenient for third parties to use the USD for trade, which kept the loop going. As explained in Why Did So Many Countries Join the Gold Standard, network effects play an extremely important role in determining domestic currency usage. For international usage you would expect that effect to be much stronger! If a lot of people already use the US Dollar, it only makes sense to start pricing your goods in the USD. Add to that the fact that it is easy to obtain and has no capital controls, and it becomes clear why the USD is dominant in international trade. 

Now comes the question, how much exactly is the USD used in international trade? That is a difficult question to answer for the reason that this data is not usually public, and when it is, it is very limited across time and country. Our best estimates come from this paper by IMF economists where they estimate that 40% of global trade is invoiced in US dollars, despite the US being involved in just 10% of trade. There are two caveats here. The first is that their dataset does not include China which is the largest trading partner for several countries. The second is that the data is distorted by the existence of the EU because another 40% is denominated in EUR, a majority of which is internal EU trade. 

But what about trade between countries that are not the US or members of the EU? We can see some of it in Gita Gopinath’s excellent paper The International Price System, where it shows that for several developed countries almost all their trade is priced in US Dollars. From this we can get some insight on Chinese trade as well. Australia's largest trade partner is China and over 75% of Australian trade uses the US Dollar. Same for South Korea where over 90% of trade is denominated in the US Dollar and China is also their largest trading partner. Of course for trade between China and the US almost all of it is priced in US Dollars. 

So the first reason for Dollar dominance is that the US Dollar has a great loop going on: people use the US Dollar which leads to it being more common, which leads to more people using it and the loop repeats. 

Borrowing money

The other use of the US Dollar is that countries and companies borrow money in the US Dollar. They do it because there aren’t debt markets large enough in their own country where they can borrow from. For governments the problem is that the pool of domestic savings is rarely large enough to meet their financing needs. So, they borrow in foreign currencies and sell their debt in foreign markets so that they can attract larger amounts of capital. Through this process, they accumulate large amounts of debt denominated in US Dollars. 

 But for corporations, the reasons are slightly different. In most developing countries, credit systems are bank dependent. Most companies borrow from banks instead of bond markets, but this doesn’t scale very well. Banks usually can’t support large borrowers because they just don’t have enough money to lend to them while not having extremely high amounts of risk to one company. So those companies end up borrowing from the bond market. In many countries, the domestic bond market is not very active, even for large borrowers. They aren’t able to borrow much at rates comparable to borrowing in New York or London. So, it makes financial sense for them to take some currency risk and borrow in a foreign currency. 

A good example of this is Reliance Industries, a large Indian conglomerate. This January, Reliance raised around US$ 4 billion in dollar denominated bonds, which would have been extremely large for the Indian corporate bond market. The average debt raised in the last few quarters )per issuer has been in the range of $30 to $40 million which is very small compared to Reliance's $4 billion debt issue. It makes sense for companies to raise money in US Dollars if they don't have a bond market at home. 

The next question is: why pick the US Dollar? Why not any other currency? The answer is that American capital markets are among the largest in the world. The American corporate debt markets have over $7.4 trillion outstanding (not counting financial companies like banks), compared to about $603 billion in the UK and $1.4 trillion for the largest 5 Eurozone countries combined ($278 billion for Germany,  $801 billion for France, $189 billion for Italy and $159 billion for Spain). For large companies who want their debt to be priced well, inertia and more importantly the presence of large American investment banks and deep capital markets in the US make it convenient to sell debt in the US in American currency. 

Dollar liabilities need Dollar assets

Helping exports

And all of this ends up in the hot topic of the day: foreign exchange reserves. The first reason why foreign governments have reserves in the US Dollar is a byproduct of depreciating their currency and buying US Dollars. 

For a country like Japan or China which has a large percentage of its exports and imports in dollars, changes in the exchange rate of their currency relative to the dollar would affect their domestic economy. Japanese companies import oil and machinery from abroad. An increase in the value of the dollar relative to the yen would hurt them by making it more expensive. On the other hand Japan exports microchips and cars to other countries. An increase in the value of the yen would make them less competitive. 

Note that it doesn't matter where they export these currencies to. They would still be invoicing their goods in the USD. This makes the exchange rate relative to the USD very important for Japanese policymakers. To depreciate their currency and promote their exports, foreign governments have sold their currency and bought massive amounts of US Dollars. 

Where do these dollars end up? It is pointless holding just US dollars as they earn no interest relative to government and safe corporate bonds. So they take the small interest rate risk of investing in bonds and own American government debt and large corporate bonds. This is where a lot of Chinese holding of US debt came in the last two decades. This process led to the undervaluation of the Yuan which benefitted Chinese exporters at the expense of American exporters. 

Crisis insurance 

The second reason why governments have Dollar reserves is because of foreign currency debt. As mentioned above, several foreign firms have debt denominated in the USD. But having debt in the US Dollar when your revenues are in a different currency creates a problem for companies: if the value of the other currency falls, they will still have to pay the same level of US Dollar debt (which is now a higher amount in the local currency). And if this is a financial corporation like a bank, the bank defaulting on its loans can lead to a financial crisis when depositors believe that the bank is insolvent and they remove their money from the bank causing a bank run and actual insolvency. 

This is not a hypothetical! A great example of this is the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 90s where several economies in South East Asia had their currencies pegged to the dollar and high levels of foreign external debt. Several companies and banks in Indonesia and Thailand borrowed large amounts of money in the US Dollar believing that the exchange rate peg would stick. But declining capital flows led to the value of the currencies fall and the government didn't have enough US Dollar reserves to support the currency. 

In the end, the rupiah and the baht fell quite a bit! This led to bankruptcies and bank runs in Indonesia and they had to ask the IMF for assistance.

The Asian Financial Crisis was the point at which several developing countries saw the importance of high levels of foreign exchange reserves and decided to learn from the mistakes of others. So the high levels of reserves held are a sort of insurance against external debt crises. 

Surplus investment 

The most commonly reported example of US Dollar reserves is petrodollars recycling. Large oil producers sell oil to the US, get dollars and invest their profits in the United States. A great example of this is the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund invested in Softbank which invested in (among other countries) the United States. One of Softbank's largest investments was Uber. Softbank's Uber investment was what gave Uber the money to have a price war against Lyft. If there is one takeaway you have here it should be that 'Saudi oil profits were recycled into cheap taxi prices for Americans'. 

But surplus investment, while being famous, isn't a very big part of foreign currency reserves. Most of it is recycled into riskier assets like stocks, startups, real estate and high yield bonds. For example only a quarter of Norway's oil fund is invested in bonds and a fraction of that is in government bonds. Its the same for Temasek (less so of GIC -Singapore’s other wealth fund), Mabudala, Qatar's SWF and probably every other sovereign wealth fund. 

Conclusion 

In the end you've to remember a few things: the reason why central banks have USD reserves is because it is used a lot! Any currency that wants to replace the US Dollar will have to be used quite a bit for central banks to shift their reserves 

I write at https://brettongoods.substack.com. You can find me on Twitter at @PradyuPrasad

Stuff /r/ethereum should know: Proof of Stake edition

As the merge approaches, more news and poorly informed crypto-journalist articles will come out, signaling to more people that it is indeed close, and this will bring more Proof-of-Stake related questions and discussions rehashing the same topics and same misconceptions. I've already seen this to a degree with last week's announcement that the Kiln testnet successfully merged, and I expect to see much more of the same stuff going foreward so here are a bunch of common questions/takes I see, boiled down in quick bullet points. I plan on lazily linking this thread whenever I see those points being brought up, and I encourage everyone to do the same and correct me if I got anything wrong or suggest any addition.

Wat merge?

A lot more info can be found on ethmerge.com so I will keep this section light

• When the merge happens, Ethereum will be secured by Proof of Stake instead of Proof of Work.

• It's called "merge" because it's about merging the Beacon Chain (consensus layer) with the current chain (execution layer) and ditching the proof of work part of the execution layer.

• The Merge is not "ETH 2.0", there is no ETH 2.0, it's an obsolete term.

• If you don't know, "consensus" is just a fancy word for the goal of ordering transactions and getting some economic guarantee that this order won't change. Both PoW and PoS achieve consensus by different means:

  • PoW: "It costs too much to mess up with the order of blocks, playing by the rules is more lucrative."
  • PoS: "It costs too much to mess up with the order of blocks, because if I do I'll lose all the money I put up as collateral."

Why merge?

• Lower security costs since there's less energy needed to achieve consensus.

  • For PoW you need miners to be able to at least cover all the hardware and energy they use otherwise no one will mine. This requires a big issuance that is quickly sold for fiat to pay the bills.
  • For PoS you just need to give some yield to stakers to make people want to deposit capital rather than just invest it elsewhere. No big bills to pay beyond an ordinary computer and an internet connection, so the yield just has to reflect the opportunity costs and risks involved.

• More sustainability:

  • The security of a blockchain is basically proportional to the value of its coin. This is true for both PoW (more valuable coin rewards = more reasons to play by the rules = more miners = harder to mess up the consensus) and PoS (more valuable staked coins = more reasons to play by the rules to avoid losing the staked coins)
  • A newly issued coin is essentially value being taken from all holders of the coin and being redistributed to someone. All else equal, selling that coin for fiat extracts value out of the network

• It opens the door for many scaling solutions in the future, namely data sharding, statelessness, light clients, and more

• It helps reduce some complexity of the code going forward, by separating concerns between execution and consensus.

• Appeasing the environment and gamers is certainly a nice side-effect, but not really a major goal behind the switch to PoS, since it's mostly about external negativities over which Ethereum as a protocol doesn't have much control (source of energy production, GPU supply chains, etc.)

Wen merge?

• There is no official date announced yet. Just cautiously optimistic devs and community hoping for mid-June for various reasons

• Testing is still ongoing, the merge will not be shipped until developpers are fully confident that nothing will go wrong.

• I personally don't set my hopes up for June, but I definitely expect it over the summer, with the asterisk of "unless something went extremely wrong during testing" (e.g. a critical bug requiring weeks to fix, possible exploit in the specification itself require months of fixing and reimplementing)

• The difficulty bomb is set to go off in June, so there will be a hard-fork around that time, with or without the merge.

• I suggest bookmarking wenmerge.com for a quick view of the latest estimates for each testnet merge that will lead up to mainnet merge, as they are announced.

Nope, your a idiot. They will delay it like they always have in the past. They promised it years ago and still haven't delivered.

• Some useless sementics first: there is no official date announced yet, and there never was. Can't have a delay on a deadline that never existed in the first place

• The quotes along the lines of "Ethereum will switch to proof of stake by 2018" came from a place of extreme optimism and of underestimating the complexity of not only a secure PoS design, but also a safe transition from PoW to PoS. A lot is different today. None of these applied back then, but they do today:

  • There is a full protocol specification written that went through years of research, analysis of possible attack vectors and refinements
  • Client implementations are all done, it's all about testing now
  • It's all hands on deck on the merge, there is literally no other work being done other than the merge. All the necessary steps to lead to the merge are done. It's not even "they're done implementing complex stuff like EIP1559, so more attention can now be focused on the merge", it's: "all the attention is focused on the merge". There is no possible world where the merge "gets delayed again" and the devs start working on other stuff on the side. Until the merge is done, nothing else gets done.
  • PoS is literally running as we speak in the form of the Beacon Chain since December 2020. That's over a year of Ethereum's PoS getting battle tested in production (to a degree) with currently over 10 million ETH on the line. It just isn't producing blocks for the PoW chain yet.

Those millions of ETH staked will crash the price the very moment they're unlocked LOL

For sure, there will be plenty of stakers who will want to finally take profit, especially those who locked their ETH back when 32 ETH was worth $10k. But there's plenty more to consider on the other side of the equation:

• The merge doesn't unlock any ETH. Withdrawals will come in the first hard fork following the merge, likely 6-8 months after. That's months of no proof of work issuance (~13k ETH/day) being sold off and no proof of stake issuance coming into circulation.

• Just like how there's a queue to deposit ETH, there will be a queue to withdraw it.

  • First, when you exit you have to wait a little over 9 days before even joining the queue.
  • Then you're in the queue. Assuming a mass sell-off event, everyone is in that queue, limited at a rate of 1125 per day. So there's no "opening the floodgates" moment. Everyone unstaking would literally take over a year. A year of ~38k ETH entering back into circulation (or... roughly 1% of average daily volume)

• After the merge, validators will start receiving fee rewards as well, doubling the yield by some estimates. There are thousands of people waiting in line to stake right now. They're okay with a 5% yield on their ETH, I don't think they're gonna yeet the moment it becomes 10% lol

• The biggest risk involved in staking is by far the merge. Something catastrophic could go wrong, yet people have been staking and locking up their ETH for over a year despite this risk and despite the ETH being locked until an unknown floating date. How many people/institutions are waiting on the sidelines for this risk to disappear before jumping in?

• And don't forget stakers exiting means fewer validators which means higher rewards for the stakers who don't exit. It also means more incentives for other people to start staking if they weren't before...

• But of course it's crypto, and crypto's gonna crypto. The merge will bring excitement and volatility and possibly a sell-the-news dip, who knows. I don't pretend to know the future, but the way I see it it's much more likely way more ETH will flow into staking than out of it.

If proof of stake is so good, then how come Ethereum didn't go with that from the start?

• Proof of Work is easy to conceptualize and implement, Proof of Stake isn't. Especially when back in 2014 it was mostly a theoretical concept still being researched, with some blockchain implementing some version of it.

• There were several fundamental problems with PoS that needed to be overcome from a research perspective before thinking about implementing it.

• There is no one-size-fits-all for Proof of Stake. Every PoS blockchain comes with its own PoS specification that has pros and cons on various aspects, so it's not as simple as "but this other blockchain did it, why can't ethereum just do the same thing"

• Starting as a proof of work chain had the benefit of letting anyone mine coins on their own without anyone's permission, which helped the coin distribution become way better than those newer chains that are proof of stake from the start and have to decide how to allocate the initial coins, which can't really be done permissionlessly.

• Related to above: Yes, there was still a premine/presale for Ethereum, but it has now been diluted to half the supply after years of mining and multiple bull/bear cycles making that ETH swap hands, bringing the distribution closer to Bitcoin's. So it's not that big of a deal in 2022 when Ether as an asset is extremely liquid and easy to acquire.

Nah, this is really just a ploy to screw over the miners one last time after years of hard work

• PoS has been the eventual goal since day 1, everyone mining was always aware that it would end one day. There is no rugpull or unfairness going on here.

• Economic factors trump any kind of miner-blockchain loyalty. You can kinda view the blockchain as a business and the miners as employees:

  • Miners/employees have been paid for the service they provide (namely, secure consensus) with the block rewards. The paycheck is an expense for the employer and it comes from diluting the value of existing coins from holders (see above in "why merge?")
  • Miners go to the chain offering the highest rewards, most of them would ditch Ethereum in a heartbeat if another GPU minable coin gave out more rewards
  • Similarly, Ethereum will pay less for the service it requires if stakers can do it for way cheaper.

• It's not entirely exclusive. Miners can also be holders of the coin, and users of the blockchain. Nothing prevents them from holding their rewards and becoming stakers too.

The coin stops having inherent value if you're not spending real world energy to mine it

I don't really buy this argument. There is nothing magical about computing hashes over and over until you land on one that fits arbitrary requirements. I mean, you could have a proof of work blockchain where the work is done by solving sudoku puzzles and it would work exactly the same: NP-complete problem, hard to compute one way but easy to verify a solution once one has been found. That doesn't mean solving sudoku inherently brings value into the world. Cranking up the mining difficulty of a coin doesn't magically make everyone richer, it just makes mining less profitable – unless of course demand goes up too, which so far hasn't been too much of a problem in crypto

The way I see it, the value of a coin ultimately comes from supply and demand, and the demand comes from how valuable the blockspace is. People need ETH to buy the blockspace, regardless of whether that ETH is generated by a miner or a staker. Sure, the more miners there are the higher the security/decentralization which further increases the value proposition of the blockspace in a positive feedback loop, but feedback loops exist in Proof of Stake Ethereum too and they're super cool too!

Proof of Stake is a recipe for total centralization

• It's basically the same as Proof of Work but slightly different. "Better" or "worse" really depends on your opinion. The way I see it, PoW is really just PoS with extra steps.

• Ethereum as a community values decentralization highly, any potential centralization vector is addressed by the research team to come up with ways to mitigate it, even if it's at the cost of other important stuff like scaling (e.g. keeping gas limits low so more nodes can participate in decentralization, even if that results in congestion and high fees)

• There are shortcomings currently, decentralization is a spectrum and a process and we're not there yet, and for the time being there are many centralization crutches that need to go away on the long term. That said, none of these crutches represent existential risks for the network, and for practically any "it's centralized because X" statement, there is an item on the roadmap addressing X. I personally find it much more fascinating to come up with a whole bunch of stuff to solve X rather than give up and say "it can't be done because of X".

• Something interesting about Ethereum's PoS design that is often overlooked: Quadratic penalties. A single validator going down, messing up, or downright attacking the network doesn't get penalized very badly. A thousand validators doing it at the same time get penalized much more heavily.

  • This means that if you're a megawhale with thousands of validators, it's in your own best interest to spread them out, avoid cloud hosting, use different clients, etc. sure, the capital is still concentrated, but at least the points of failures are distributed which is good for the health of the network.
  • Compared to a big mining operation that relies on a central location to amortize costs, which can be spotted from energy usage and shut down if the authorities don't like it. It's hard to move mining equipment across the world, but staking only relies on private/public keys and not any actual hardware beyond a consumer grade computer.

PoS is really just "who has money makes more money"

• Yes. Unfortunately we live in a world of high wealth inequality. Blockchains don't fix that.

• It's also true of proof of work: Whoever has money can buy more mining rigs and make more money. Except with mining, the ROI becomes better with economies of scale: Centralized mining operations have the big bucks to get bulk/discount rates on hardware and move to the places with cheap electricity. The solo miner simply can't realistically compete. With Proof of Stake, everyone earns the same yield proportionally, where they stake $10 or $10M.

• "Centralized or not, those big mining operations have no reason to attack the network and weaken it since they dumped millions in infrastructure"....... so you're saying you're fine with such big actors having some kind of a big stake in the network?

Passive interest on your deposit though? Printing money out of thin air? That's literally central banks and fiat part 2 electric boogaloo

• You have to really stretch it to make this case, but I've seen people do that lol. Those takes usually begin with "proof of stake is nothing new"

• There's still "work" being done by validators: creating blocks and validating other blocks. It's just that the work done is composed entirely of the actually useful work, instead of computing hashes over and over again until one of them meets an arbitrary requirement.

• It's not really "free money being printed out of thin air", there are still costs involved in staking capital, they're just more abstract and less direct than energy bills:

  • Opportunity costs – Why stake at all if another investment offers you a better yield?
  • Illiquidity – From the moment you deposit, your capital is locked up, queued up until your validator is active, then when you withdraw there is yet another queue before getting it back.
  • Inherent risks – It's still a fairly new thing, something could go wrong, there could be a critical bug, network could get attacked, your staking hardware could get compromised, etc.
  • Volatility – at the end of the day it's still a volatile asset, if you're the kind of investor who denominates their investments in their country's fiat currency, then a 5% yield on an asset that can drop 30% overnight isn't all that great (the upside of 5% yield on an asset that doubles is pretty great though, turn that 100% gain into 110%)
  • Maintenance – You still have to maintain and secure your validator, ensure 100% uptime, update software, etc.

• Here's where it gets nifty: The more stakers there are, the lower the individual rewards get. This basically means that all those costs above will get priced by the market itself. It's easy to see why: If the staking yield is too low, then the rewards don't justify the costs and people will pull out and invest elsewhere, bringing the yield back up. Likewise if it's too high, that'll attract more capital and bring it back down.

• For example, let's say the market as a whole decides that 5% is the ideal yield, of which 3% comes from issuance. That works out to about 30 million ETH staked printing 900 thousand new ETH per year. At a total supply of 120 million ETH, that's an inflation rate of 0.75%. Which is outpaced by EIP1559 burn as long as gas fees are at least 23 gwei. (I cannot stress this enough: Ether-the-asset will become a yield-bearing deflationary asset very soon)

• "Nice math but there's no supply cap + they change the monetary policy all the time"

  • The goal has been "minimum viable issuance to secure the network" for years, priorizing network security over an arbitrary supply cap.
  • No update to the monetary policy has ever increased supply inflation. Low inflation rate (specifically disinflation) has been the goal since day 1.
  • There will be an equilibrium acting as an effective supply cap – decided again by market forces valuing Ethereum's blockspace – once the rate of EIP1559 burn matches the rate of issuance. That's super nifty if you ask me.

• So yeah, there's no "central Ethereum bank" adjusting rates arbitrarily and printing money to cronies.

Whales have all the money needed to take over and change the rules and slash honest stakers

• No. Ethereum has no on-chain governance of any kind for this reason. Protocol updates are a community effort (Layer 0) and you don't need any money staked to call out bad ideas and participate in the process.

• This is exactly the same as Proof of Work: Even if you have 99% of the hashpower, you can't make invalid transactions that steal people's money without their private keys, or change protocol rules, or really do anything beyond reorganizing blocks. The 1% of honest nodes will reject any block that don't follow the rules and you'll be mining on an invalid/useless chain. Now replace hashpower/mining with stake/staking and the same holds true for Proof of Stake (with the difference that someone caught reorganizing blocks will have their entire stake destroyed, whereas the blockchain can't exactly destroy mining rigs)

• And simply put, there is a fuckton of ETH involved. 10 million and counting and that's before the merge. At current prices that's roughly 30 billion dollars. Both "amount of ETH staked" and "value of ETH" are projected to go up, so attacks become increasingly unlikely due to the sheer economic cost involved in doing an attack — once — and the absurdity of acquiring that much ETH in the first place if the attack comes from an outside actor (where would you buy 10 million ETH to have 51% of the stake? 20M?)

32 ETH is way too much, the average person doesn't have that much

• The reason for such a high number is it has to fall in a technical sweetspot. In a nutshell, it has to be low enough to be accessible and have enough validators to secure the chain, but high enough to not have too many validators and bloat the chain with overhead. And having a fixed amount for each validator reduces some complexity by having each validator weighted exactly the same in the randomness process.

• There is a whole bunch of math involved to arrive at 32 ETH from a technical standpoint, back when 32 ETH was worth about 7000 USD. Earlier math from 2017 even suggested over 1000 ETH minimum.

• However I do agree it's a lot. There are some ideas of how it could be lowered (better signature aggregation or a rotating cap of active validators) but they don't seem to be very high on the priority list currently.

• Thankfully, just like mining pools exist, there are staking pools to allow staking in smaller amounts. It doesn't necessarily fly in the face of the "not your keys not your coins" mantra, thanks to things like RocketPool, Secret Shared Validators (not yet launched) which use smart contracts to be permissionless, decentralized and non-custodian. And because of the quadratic penalties mentioned above, I believe decentralized staking operations will outperform the centralized ones on the long run. I recommend superphiz's guide to staking for more info. And obviously, I admit staking through exchanges is yucky if you value decentralization

PoS hasn't been proven, while we know PoW works

That's actually totally fair and there is no real rebuttal to this, obviously. Only time will tell. I just think it's irrelevant in the context that Ethereum is switching to PoS and was always going to. If you don't believe in it, don't participate/invest in it. I do personally believe in a long term sustainable PoS Ethereum, but even then I'm glad good ol' boring-by-design Bitcoin will be there chugging its proof of work along.

It's all part of the great crypto experiment of our lifetime. Either it's just a fad and will fail into obscurity, which would be a bummer for sure, or we'll have succeeded in creating monster robust networks capable of outlasting humanity. To achieve that, prioritizing decentralization is key. Which is something I mainly just see in Bitcoin and Ethereum, despite the widely different philosophies. It's why I'm glad to have both to truly see what's what on the long term.

I have more questions

idk ask them in the comments, I'm sure I forgot stuff. But plz be polite