Motion: The future of blockchain will be an oligopoly of public blockchains (Illia Polosukhin vs. Zaki Manian)

Guests:

Lee Bratcher (twitter.com/lee_bratcher)
Ben Hertz-Shargel (twitter.com/benhertzshargel)

Host:

Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09)

Today’s motion is “Bitcoin mining is good for the grid.”

Bitcoin advocates think bitcoin is a good invention for many reasons, one of which is that it makes the power grid more robust. In 2021, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas made the claim that Bitcoin is, and I quote, “a way to strengthen our energy infrastructure.”

But is it? How exactly does bitcoin mining make the grid more robust?

In today’s debate, I wanted to focus more on whether bitcoin is good for the grid, not whether bitcoin is good. So I try to steer the conversation away from whether bitcoin is a societal good, independent of its impact on the electric grid.

One of our guests today is a researcher in the subject matter of electric power grids. The other guest runs a trade group that tries to advocate for bitcoin and crypto industries in the state of Texas.

If you’re into crypto and like to hear two sides of the story, be sure to also check out our previous episodes. We’ve featured some of the best known thinkers in the crypto space.

If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.

Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.


Source of select items discussed in the debate (and supplemental material):

• https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/04/bitcoin-miners-say-theyre-fixing-texas-electric-grid-ted-cruz-agrees.html
• https://www.utilitydive.com/news/bitcoin-mining-as-a-grid-resource-its-complicated/617896/
• https://www.dallasnews.com/business/energy/2021/11/29/why-cryptocurrency-miners-pose-the-next-big-threat-to-the-texas-electric-grid/
• https://www.woodmac.com/industry/power-and-renewables/grid-edge-service/

Guest bios:

Lee Bratcher is the President and Founder of the Texas Blockchain Council. The Texas Blockchain Council is an industry association that seeks to make Texas the jurisdiction of choice for Bitcoin, crypto and blockchain. The TBC helped to research two pieces of blockchain legislation that were passed by the state’s Legislative body signed into effect by state Governor.

Ben Hertz-Shargel is Global Head of Grid Edge at Wood Mackenzie, where he leads research across electrification, distributed energy resources, and demand flexibility. He is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center and serves on the external Advisory Committee of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Energy and Environment Program. Ben holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from UCLA and spent a decade developing demand response technology.

Guests:

Ed Felten (twitter.com/edfelten)

Tushar Jain (twitter.com/TusharJain_)


Host:

Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09)

Today’s motion is “We should always reduce MEV on blockchains."

Generally speaking, MEV or Miner Extractable Value is a way for miners to derive additional revenue by executing transactions based on information in the mem pool. For instance, say a miner notices a transaction in the mem pool waiting to be included in a block. Maybe this is a transaction to buy up some cheap Ethereum. The miner can execute that purchase themselves, at the expense of the trader that placed the original order. And of course, this means value got extracted by the miner, transferred from the original trader. This behavior pattern, of course, applies to both miners and validators. Or to all block producers, to be generic.

The question is, is MEV an inevitability of blockchain systems? Are there ways to reduce it? Are our resources better spent creating systems that reduce as much MEV as possible, or should we acknowledge their existence and try to distribute that MEV more fairly, or at least transparently?

Our two guests today include a layer-2 founder and a VC well-versed in this area. It will be a great discussion.

If you’re into crypto and like to hear two sides of the story, be sure to also check out our previous episodes. We’ve featured some of the best known thinkers in the crypto space.

If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.

Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.


Source of select items discussed in the debate (and supplemental material):

• https://pdaian.com/blog/mev-wat-do/
• https://multicoin.capital/2021/09/08/tokenizing-mev/
• https://medium.com/offchainlabs/meva-what-is-it-good-for-de8a96c0e67c
• https://docs.flashbots.net/flashbots-protect/overview

Guest bios:

Ed Felten is co-founder and chief scientist at Offchain Labs, the inventor of Arbitrum, a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum. He was previously a professor of Computer Science at Princeton, and before that the Chief Technologist for the Federal Trade Commission as well as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer at the White House.

Tushar Jain is co-founder and Managing Partner of Multicoin Capital, one of the most successful crypto funds in the last cycle.

Announcement: I have a new show called “Crypto This Week.” It’s a weekly, five-minute news comedy satire focused on the world of crypto. Check it out on YouTube here: Crypto This Week with Richard Yan

Guests:

Liron Shapira (twitter.com/liron)
Kyle Samani (twitter.com/kylesamani)

Host:

Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09)

Today’s motion is “Web3 is worse than Web2.”

Web3 is a new buzzword that’s generated a lot of excitement, but also a lot of confusion and division. You’ve got plenty of intelligent and reputable individuals on both sides, either advocating it as the future or denouncing it as a delusion.

Here are two succinct ways I have heard Web3 described:

Web1 is read-only. Web2 is read-write. Web3 is read-write-own. 

Read-only as in, static pages served by relatively few content publishers. Read-write as in, explosion of user-generated content, think social media. Web3 as in, users do not only contribute content, they also own that content and can port it from web application to web application.

Here’s a second way I have heard Web3 articulated. It was from Li Jin’s Means of Creation podcast:

A mental model for Web3 is a world computer where everyone has access to its data and can change its data.

I think for some of you, these definitions seem refreshingly clear. For others, they only add to the confusion.

In any event - Our two guests today include a Web3 advocate in the form of a successful token fund founder, and a Web3 skeptic who has openly questioned the legitimacy of various claims of this new paradigm. Interestingly, the Web3 skeptic confesses to seeing some value in crypto as a medium of payment and enabler for digital art NFTs.

If you’re into crypto and like to hear two sides of the story, be sure to also check out our previous episodes. We’ve featured some of the best known thinkers in the crypto space.

If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.

Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.

Source of select items discussed in the debate (and supplemental material):

• Liron's skepticism of views from Web3 advocates:
  • Chris Dixon's Web3 thread: https://medium.com/bloated-mvp/chris-dixons-crypto-claims-are-logically-flimsy-a26cc8906b3f
  • Naval and Dixon's appearance on the Tim Ferriss show: https://medium.com/bloated-mvp/naval-ravikant-and-chris-dixon-didnt-explain-any-web3-use-cases-affc45ec3c60
• Multicoin on Helium: https://multicoin.capital/2021/03/17/the-helium-flywheel/
• Axie Infinity as potential ponzi scheme: https://medium.com/coinmonks/axie-infinity-gaming-nft-revolution-or-ponzi-scheme-3d81b1647429

Guest bios:

Liron Shapira is a rationalist, entrepreneur and angel investor. He is the CEO of Relationship Hero, a Web2-based relationship coaching service. He has expressed his skepticism of Web3 extensively on social media and on Medium.

Kyle Samani is a cofounder at Multicoin Capital, one of the most successful venture funds this cycle. Kyle is a day-one supporter of Solana, a smart-contract platform optimized for high throughput

Announcement: I have a new show called “Crypto This Week.” It’s a weekly, five-minute news comedy satire focused on the world of crypto. Check it out on YouTube here: Crypto This Week with Richard Yan

Guests:

Jeff Dorman (twitter.com/jdorman81)
Joel Monegro (twitter.com/jmonegro)

Host:

Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09)

Today’s motion is “The industry is growing out of the Fat Protocol Thesis.”

The Fat Protocol Thesis was coined by a blog post on Union Square Ventures’ website. The Fat Protocol Thesis postulates that because crypto protocols are investable assets, they will likely capture more value than the applications built on top. This is contrary to the Internet stack, where applications captured much more value than the protocols they operated upon.

This thesis seems to have worked out nicely so far, with the aggregate valuation of various layer-1 protocols far exceeding that of the applications. But will this continue to be the case? What are the nuances related to the Fat Protocol Thesis that would inform sharper thinking about relative value of protocols vs applications?

Our two guests today are both investors at well-known digital asset funds. One of them is the author of the original Fat Protocol Thesis. The other has a few questions about it, to say the least.

If you’re into crypto and like to hear two sides of the story, be sure to also check out our previous episodes. We’ve featured some of the best-known thinkers in the crypto space.

If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.

Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.


Source of select items discussed in the debate (and supplemental material):

• Joel’s Fat Protocol Thesis: https://www.usv.com/writing/2016/08/fat-protocols/
• Joel’s Follow-up piece Thin Applications: https://www.placeholder.vc/blog/2020/1/30/thin-applications
• Jeff’s Blogpost “Revisiting the Fat Protocol Thesis”: https://www.ar.ca/blog/revisiting-the-fat-protocol-thesis
• Laura Shin interviews Joel Monegro on the Fat Protocol Thesis: https://unchainedpodcast.com/placeholders-joel-monegro-on-the-fat-protocols-thesis-today-ep-65/
• Arca Fund's crypto taxonomy: https://www.ar.ca/digitalassettypes

Guest bios:

Jeff Dorman is the CIO of Arca, a digital asset investment platform with more than $500 million in assets under management. Prior to Arca, he worked in portfolio management and trading at various places including Citadel Securities, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers.

Joel Monegro is a founding partner at Placeholder, a crypto venture fund. Prior to Placeholder, Joel was at Union Square Ventures, where he developed the firm’s early  blockchain thesis and portfolio. He is also the author of the seminal blog post Fat Protocol Thesis, which is still up on Union Square Ventures’ website today.

• DAOs related to Synthetix: https://decrypt.co/37011/synthetix-is-now-controlled-by-three-daos
• Edmund Schuster's paper on smart contracts: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3476678
• Wyoming DAO law: https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/04/22/state-lawmaker-explains-wyomings-newly-passed-dao-llc-law/

Guests:

Giacomo Zucco: twitter.com/giacomozucco
Paul Sztorc: twitter.com/truthcoin

Host:

Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09)

Today’s motion is “Toxic maximalism is great for bitcoin.”

I hear many no-coiners say that “the worst thing about bitcoin is the bitcoiners.” They are referring to their negative encounters with staunch bitcoin believers on social media. The criticism is that these bitcoiners are irrational, vicious and annoying, and they attack no-coiners in unison like a coordinated army. 

The essence of this behavior is captured by the term: toxic bitcoin maximalism. The idea is that bitcoin is superior to all other currencies, which include fiat, obviously, and all other cryptos; and impolite behavior online is justified in promoting bitcoin or defending its legitimacy. 

Well, obviously not all bitcoiners are like that. Today, we will have two bitcoiners facing off, on whether such behavior continues to serve bitcoin well.

If you’re into crypto and like to hear two sides of the story, be sure to also check out our previous episodes. We’ve featured some of the best known thinkers in the crypto space.

If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.

Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.


Source of select items discussed in the debate (and supplemental material):

• Article on the Bitcoin blocksize war: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@tobixen/a-brief-history-of-the-bitcoin-block-size-war
• Book about the Bitcoin blocksize war: https://www.amazon.com/Blocksize-War-controls-Bitcoins-protocol/dp/B08YQMC2WM
• Giacomo Zucco personal website: https://giacomozucco.com/
• Paul Sztorc personal website: https://truthcoin.info
• Paul Sztorc article on Bitcoin post-maximalism: https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/bitcoin-post-maximalism/
• Paul Sztorc's drive chain proposal: https://www.drivechain.info/

Guest bios:

Giacomo first heard of Bitcoin in 2012 and shortly started to mine the cryptocurrency. He quit to focus on Bitcoin full-time in 2013 and has since cofounded and supported Bitcoins startups. He is cofounder of BCademy, a website dedicated to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology education and consultation.

Paul is a self-branded independent Bitcoiner. He is perhaps best known as the proposer of Drivechain, a project that seeks to leverage sidechain technology in order to introduce additional functionality to Bitcoin. One use case of this is a zcash-like fully encrypted sidechain using Drivechain.

Guests:

Yves Bennaïm: twitter.com/ZLOK
George Selgin: twitter.com/georgeselgin

Host:

Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09)

Today’s motion is “It's a bad idea to make Bitcoin compulsory tender.”

If you’re somewhat into crypto, you must have heard about El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law that has made Bitcoin a legal tender in addition to USD. With an asterisk. Dictionary definition of legal tender says a legal tender is a money that must be accepted if offered in payment of a debt. But El Salvador goes one step further, and says not only do lenders have to accept payment in bitcoin, but merchants that provide products and services must also. This is why the motion uses the term compulsory tender instead of legal tender.

The two debaters today will discuss what all this means. One of them will argue why this is not in line with bitcoin’s values and why this may even hurt bitcoin’s adoption. The other will argue that adoption of a new money necessitates such coercion, and this will give the little guys the same kind of opportunity as sophisticated financiers in getting involved with bitcoin.

If you’re into crypto and like to hear two sides of the story, be sure to also check out our previous episodes. We’ve featured some of the best known thinkers in the crypto space.

If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.

Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.

Source of select items discussed in the debate (and supplemental material):

• Full text of El Salvador Bitcoin Law (3-minute read): https://freopp.org/el-salvadors-bitcoin-law-full-proposed-english-text-9a2153ad1d19
• Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador: https://www.bitcoinbeach.com/
• How the community custodial wallet works on Bitcoin Beach, explained in another podcast: https://stephanlivera.com/episode/279/
• Explanation of how Strike uses a private instance of the Lightning Network: https://twitter.com/AdrianoFeria/status/1411344200390557701

Guest bios:

George Selgin is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute and professor emeritus of economics at the University of Georgia.

Yves is the founder of 2B4CH, a Bitcoin Think Tank and Industry Advocacy Group in Switzerland. He also writes about Bitcoin and crypto for the Swiss business magazine Bilan as well as the daily Swiss newspaper Le Temps.

Guests:

Bennett Tomlin (twitter.com/bennetttomlin)
Sam Kazemian (twitter.com/samkazemian)

Host:

Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09)

Today’s motion is “Algo and fraction stablecoins are flawed.”

A good stablecoin can sustainably hold its peg, and recover quickly from a premium or discount. This is a basic requirement for stablecoins. 

An obvious design is the bank coin model, where coins are backed 1-to-1 by fiat. But this creates a single point of failure and incurs compliance overhead. 

Hence MakerDAO, which made a smart contract driven stablecoin, and is de-coupled from the banking system. But it requires over-collateralization. 

So new designs popped up and tried to make the next capital-efficient stablecoin to allow under-collateralization, with innovative collateral adjustment mechanisms. We call these algorithmic and fractional stablecoins. 

Historically, most of these coins failed to hold their pegs. Is there a fundamental problem? Or can these challenges be overcome?

The two debaters today include the founder of an algo/fractional stablecoin that has been holding its peg relatively well since launch, that is about half a year, as well as a well-known critic of various stablecoins.

If you’re into crypto and like to hear two sides of the story, be sure to also check out our previous episodes. We’ve featured some of the best known thinkers in the crypto space.

If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.

Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.

Source of select items discussed in the debate (and supplemental material):

• Dragonfly research on FRAX stablecoin: https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/a-visual-explanation-of-frax-bcce72c1730f
• Bennett Tomlin article on FEI stablecoin: https://bennettftomlin.substack.com/p/fei-protocol-analysis-last-reminder
• Frax stablecoin: https://frax.finance/
• Bennett Tomlin blog (mostly crypto): https://bennettftomlin.substack.com/
• Maker DAO's Black Thursday: https://medium.com/@whiterabbit_hq/black-thursday-for-makerdao-8-32-million-was-liquidated-for-0-dai-36b83cac56b6

Guest bios:

Bennett Tomlin regularly publishes articles about fraud in the crypto space via his blog. His dayjob is data scientist and fraud investigator in the pharmacy benefits area.

Sam Kazemian is cofounder and CEO of Frax Finance, a stablecoin project that brands itself as the world's first "fractional-algorithmic" stablecoin. Sam also started Everipedia, the first decentralized online encyclopedia on the blockchain.

Guests:

Anatoly Yakovenko (twitter.com/aeyakovenko)
Dankrad Feist (twitter.com/dankrad)

Host:

Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09)

Today’s motion is “Security is about maximizing the minimum set of colluding miners.”

This is a mouthful. The minimum set of colluding miners is the smallest cartel of dishonest block producers you need to attack a network. Maximizing that set is about increasing the size of such a successful cartel, essentially making it harder for block producers to collude. Note this debate statement leaves out full nodes. And that’s the essence of this debate: Are they important in securing the network?

So, to get more context on this, take a look at a recent blogpost by Vitalik Buterin on limits to blockchain scalability. This article instigated the sparring between our guests on Twitter, and led to today’s debate. In his article, Vitalik argued that the ability for consensus nodes to collude and do bad things should be held in check by full nodes. And therefore, there’s a strong need for regular users to be able to run full nodes. 

Today’s debate is essentially an examination of the validity of that statement. Is security about maximizing the minimum set of colluding miners (aka increasing the smallest number of consensus nodes required to censor or collude), or should we also worry about making sure to onboard more full nodes?

The two debaters today are from Solana and ETH 2, respectively. When it comes to ensuring security of the network, they disagree on how important it is to make it easy to run full nodes.

The debate took a major detour. The two debaters were very passionate about their respective projects and went down the rabbit hole several times pointing out potential weaknesses they see in each other’s designs. I decided to keep all of that in, because one way or another, those discussions found their way back to the topic at hand.

If you’re into crypto and like to hear two sides of the story, be sure to also check out our previous episodes. We’ve featured some of the best known thinkers in the crypto space.

If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.

Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.

Source of select items discussed in the debate (and supplemental material):

• Multicoin article on Solana’s decentralization: https://multicoin.capital/2021/05/25/technical-scalability-creates-social-scalability/
• Solana’s dashboard for validators and full nodes: https://solanabeach.io/
• Dankrad Feist article on full nodes: https://dankradfeist.de/ethereum/2021/05/20/what-everyone-gets-wrong-about-51percent-attacks.html
• Vitalik Buterin’s article on the limits of blockchain scaling: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html

Guest bios:

Anatoly is founder and CEO of Solana, a layer-1 public blockchain built for scalability without sacrificing decentralization or security, and in particular, without sharding. He was previously a software engineer at Dropbox, Mesosphere and Qualcomm.

Dankrad Feist is a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, working on ETH 2.0. He was previously an engineer for Palantir, and co-founded a healthcare startup named Cara Care.

Guests:

Bob Hockett (twitter.com/rch371)
Larry White (twitter.com/lawrencehwhite1)

Host:

Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09)


Today’s motion is “The US urgently needs to catch up on CBDC.”

Central Bank Digital Currencies are sort of like government-run Paypal accounts. They allow the government to do scalpel-like fiscal policies more easily, such as airdropping cash to citizens and stimulating spending.

At the same time, CBDC could also allow the government to track individual spending behaviors.

China is obviously leading the effort in CBDC adoption for all major countries. As of recording time, it’s already run multiple trials in various major cities. This has spurred a debate as to whether the US should follow suit.

We discussed:

* CBDC and privacy

* The consensus from the right and the left on the importance of CBDC, but the lack of urgency for implementation

* Countries adopting Bitcoin as a legal tender

* Hype vs reality: The possibility of China's CBDC becoming a currency to settle international trade and therefore be a real threat to USD

* CBDC's potential cannibalization of private banks
 

If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.

Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.


Source of select items discussed in the debate (and supplemental material):

• Bob's article explaining his position: https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/497427-americas-digital-sputnik-moment
• Larry's article explaining his position: https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/spring/summer-2021/should-state-or-market-provide-digital-currency

Guest bios: 

Bob Hockett is a professor at Cornell Law School, focusing on Corporate Law and Financial Regulation. He is a fellow of the Century Foundation and a regular commissioned author for the New America Foundation. Bob also does regular consulting work for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the International Monetary Fund, Americans for Financial Reform, the 'Occupy' Cooperative, and a number of federal and state legislators and local governments. He is the author of the book “Financing the Green New Deal: A Plan of Action and Renewal.”

Larry White is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives. He is also a professor of economics at George Mason University. He has written five books on banking and monetary policy, including The Clash of Economic Ideas, The Theory of Monetary Institutions, and Free Banking in Britain. He is editor and co-editor of various publications, including Renewing the Search for a Monetary Constitution and The History of Gold and Silver. He also writes regularly for the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives publication called Alt‐​M.