One of the most insightful and nuanced analyses of the blockchain space I've read in years. Some highlights: --- "When a hard fork happens, stablecoin custod

One of the most insightful and nuanced analyses of the blockchain space I've read in years. Some highlights: --- "When a hard fork happens, stablecoin custodians cannot recognize both sets of tokens as redeemable for their money, since there are now twice as many total tokens (two full sets, one for each fork of the blockchain). They have to pick which blockchain is the valid one in their eyes, for which they accept redemptions of their tokens for money. And whichever one they don’t recognize as valid, has its DeFi and other stablecoin value eradicated." --- "The biggest challenge with these proposals is that the more features you add to a blockchain on the base layer, the less “small and tight” it is, and therefore the less decentralized it tends to be. The question then becomes, are there shades of partial-decentralization that people will accept, in exchange for more features that the database can offer? And can those partially-decentralized blockchains survive attacks, disagreements, and other tests over the long term?" --- "And that’s not to say that all of the liquidity and price action is fraud. I don’t know how much is. It’s simply that, with the technology as it is, it is very difficult to distinguish what percentage is fraud and what percentage is real, and rising price action based on fraud can temporarily bring in real demand liquidity, making the difference between the two rather murky. This is not much of an issue for large cap liquid tokens but it’s potentially a big issue for non-fungible tokens." --- "Ethereum’s proponents often criticize (rightly) Solana as being too centralized, as their key defense for why Ethereum is better than Solana. But that puts Ethereum in a tight spot, because Ethereum’s proponents then have to criticize Solana as being too centralized, while also defending the fact that Ethereum has these centralized attack surfaces and greater complexity compared to Bitcoin. In other words, it has to justify what the right level of partial-centralization and partial-decentralization is, and that it has achieved this sweet spot." --- "The way altcoins market themselves, generally, is to highlight the shortcomings of Bitcoin as though it were old tech or “Boomer coin”, and then explain how they are better than Bitcoin. When you dig into them, however, it turns out they are making tremendous trade-offs in one area to achieve additional capability elsewhere. They are sacrificing some degree of security, decentralization, auditability, and so forth, in order to achieve things like more features, more speed, or more throughput. And now the same thing is happening to Ethereum; newer smart contract chains offer greater efficiency in exchange for more centralization, and criticize Ethereum for not sacrificing more decentralization to scale faster."