"crypto markets are becoming highly interconnected with the traditional financial sector"
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This episode is brought to you by Alpe Audio. Want to learn on the go but need more depth than a podcast? Alpe is the app for you. It’s an audio education app that brings great in depth courses that are as fun as podcasts but as educational as well, a degree. Each lesson comes with summaries, additional resources, flash cards and more. You can even find Ethereum Audible on Alpe with all those additional resources.
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💎 Are you interested in Tokenomics? I'm collecting everything that I'm learning about tokenomics into a free email course & newsletter you can find here: https://designingtokenomics.com
DeFi is growing and is quickly on its way to becoming a new financial paradigm, yet there are financial risks in DeFi that manifest in new ways that we haven’t seen in the traditional financial system:
In an effort to remove humans and automate as much as possible through smart contracts, DeFi has introduced or amplified these risks. This paper explores all of these aspects.
"crypto markets are becoming highly interconnected with the traditional financial sector"
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👉 Start learning with Alpe: https://link.alpeaudio.com/70to/d895de1
This episode is brought to you by Alpe Audio. Want to learn on the go but need more depth than a podcast? Alpe is the app for you. It’s an audio education app that brings great in depth courses that are as fun as podcasts but as educational as well, a degree. Each lesson comes with summaries, additional resources, flash cards and more. You can even find Ethereum Audible on Alpe with all those additional resources.
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💎 Are you interested in Tokenomics? I'm collecting everything that I'm learning about tokenomics into a free email course & newsletter you can find here: https://designingtokenomics.com
DeFi is growing and is quickly on its way to becoming a new financial paradigm, yet there are financial risks in DeFi that manifest in new ways that we haven’t seen in the traditional financial system:
In an effort to remove humans and automate as much as possible through smart contracts, DeFi has introduced or amplified these risks. This paper explores all of these aspects.
"In this article, I’ll talk about L2s on Ethereum, the state of the current scaling ecosystem, and why I believe running L2s on top of Ethereum is the most economically and technically sustainable scaling solution long term."
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👉 Start learning with Alpe: https://link.alpeaudio.com/70to/d895de1
This episode is brought to you by Alpe Audio. Want to learn on the go but need more depth than a podcast? Alpe is the app for you. It’s an audio education app that brings great in depth courses that are as fun as podcasts but as educational as well, a degree. Each lesson comes with summaries, additional resources, flash cards and more. You can even find Ethereum Audible on Alpe with all those additional resources.
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💎 Are you interested in Tokenomics? I'm collecting everything that I'm learning about tokenomics into a free email course & newsletter you can find here: https://designingtokenomics.com
In this episode we're going to be be reading through part 2 of this epic guide on L2s on Ethereum by DCBuilder. After completing this guide you'll have a good grip on all the different acronyms and projects in the L2 ecosystem of Ethereum and you'll know the difference between optimistic rollups, ZK rollups, and EVM compatible or non compatible rollups. Enjoy!
Here is the original post with a plethora of links and resources: https://dcbuilder.mirror.xyz/QX_ELJBQBm1Iq45ktPsz8pWLZN1C52DmEtH09boZuo0
"In this article, I’ll talk about L2s on Ethereum, the state of the current scaling ecosystem, and why I believe running L2s on top of Ethereum is the most economically and technically sustainable scaling solution long term."
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👉 Start learning with Alpe: https://link.alpeaudio.com/70to/d895de1
This episode is brought to you by Alpe Audio. Want to learn on the go but need more depth than a podcast? Alpe is the app for you. It’s an audio education app that brings great in depth courses that are as fun as podcasts but as educational as well, a degree. Each lesson comes with summaries, additional resources, flash cards and more. You can even find Ethereum Audible on Alpe with all those additional resources.
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Are you interested in Tokenomics? I'm collecting everything that I'm learning about tokenomics into a free email course & newsletter you can find here: https://designingtokenomics.com
In this episode we're going to be be reading through part 1 of this epic guide on L2s on Ethereum by DCBuilder. After completing this guide you'll have a good grip on all the different acronyms and projects in the L2 ecosystem of Ethereum and you'll know the difference between optimistic rollups, ZK rollups, and EVM compatible or non compatible rollups. Enjoy!
Here is the original post with a plethora of links and resources: https://dcbuilder.mirror.xyz/QX_ELJBQBm1Iq45ktPsz8pWLZN1C52DmEtH09boZuo0
"I'll take the opposed, in that I think there is decent precedent to find ETH to not be a security in a post-merge environment. Let's breakdown some specifics:"
In this readthrough I'm going to Twitter for the first time to read a 43 long tweet thread (yup - 43 tweets) by @adamscochran, aka Adam Cochran, Partner at CEHV and Adj. Professor of Info Sci/Biz Analysis. He analyzes whether Ethereum's shift to Proof of Stake makes it eligible to be names a security by the SEC and analyzes Ethereum vs the Howie test, previous rulings in the US court system and theories of what different staking make ups could lead to.
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👉 Start learning with Alpe: https://link.alpeaudio.com/70to/d895de1
This episode is brought to you by Alpe Audio. Want to learn on the go but need more depth than a podcast? Alpe is the app for you. It’s an audio education app that brings great in depth courses that are as fun as podcasts but as educational as well, a degree. Each lesson comes with summaries, additional resources, flash cards and more. You can even find Ethereum Audible on Alpe with all those additional resources.
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Follow Adam on Twitter: @adamscochran
Adam Levitin's tweet thread making the case for why PoS is a security: https://twitter.com/AdamLevitin/status/1550990967670554624
Adam Chocran's tweet thread responding and making the case why PoS is NOT a security: https://twitter.com/adamscochran/status/1551278224218488832
Adam has put the thread into a website: https://isethereumasecurity.com/
Are you interested in Tokenomics? I'm collecting everything that I'm learning about tokenomics into a free email course & newsletter you can find here: https://designingtokenomics.com
IT'S MERGE WEEK!
To celebrate I'm going back to the OG episode for this podcast - Vitalik's article on Why Proof of Stake!
On Nov 6th 2020 Vitalik Buterin wrote a short article on why the Ethereum ecosystem is migrating to Proof of Stake (PoS). Despite the shift being planned for years there's a lot of discussion in the ecosystem on why Ethereum is doing this, what are the benefits to PoS over Proof of Work (PoW) and whether this migration is fair to all the players in the ecosystem.
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This episode is brought to you by Alpe Audio. Want to learn on the go but need more depth than a podcast? Alpe is the app for you. It’s an audio education app that brings great in depth courses that are as fun as podcasts but as educational as well, a degree. Each lesson comes with summaries, additional resources, flash cards and more. You can even find Ethereum Audible on Alpe with all those additional resources.
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To read the original blog: https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
For a summary of the article: https://thewizardstower.com/ethereum-primer#32c8bb249298410ebd37305fb7543c93
The merge is coming - right next week! Here are some of my recent favorite pieces of content that cover the bull and the bear case.
To read:
The Complete Guide to Rollups: https://members.delphidigital.io/reports/the-complete-guide-to-rollups
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Ethereum: https://members.delphidigital.io/reports/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-ethereum
Bankless:
https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/debrief-arthur-hayes
https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/debrief-ethereum-unsensored
http://podcast.banklesshq.com/dissenting-from-chinas-censorship-with-jiajun-zeng-layer-zero
Unchained:
Given the sanctions on Tornado cash is Ethereum Censorship Resistant? https://youtu.be/_ohvRtxJzrc
Magic Internet Money:
https://www.bradmills.ca/podcast/navigating-the-cryptocurrency-chessboard-with-guests-lyn-alden-dylan-leclair-and-checkmate
The Bitcoin whitepaper! This is a plain readthrough of the whitepaper.
"We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust. We started with
the usual framework of coins made from digital signatures, which provides strong control of
ownership, but is incomplete without a way to prevent double-spending. To solve this, we
proposed a peer-to-peer network using proof-of-work to record a public history of transactions
that quickly becomes computationally impractical for an attacker to change if honest nodes
control a majority of CPU power. The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. Nodes
work all at once with little coordination. They do not need to be identified, since messages are
not routed to any particular place and only need to be delivered on a best effort basis. Nodes can
leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the proof-of-work chain as proof of what
happened while they were gone. They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of
valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on
them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism."
As always, you can support the show by supporting and subscribing to Alpe Audio: 👉 Start learning with Alpe: https://link.alpeaudio.com/70to/d895de1
Want to learn on the go but need more depth than a podcast? Alpe is the app for you. It’s an audio education app that brings great in depth courses that are as fun as podcasts but as educational as well, a degree. Each lesson comes with summaries, additional resources, flash cards and more. You can even find Ethereum Audible on Alpe with all those additional resources.
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Link to whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
The Bitcoin whitepaper explained! This is a readthrough of the whitepaper interspersed with commentary that breaks down the important parts and offers explanations and meaning.
"We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust. We started with
the usual framework of coins made from digital signatures, which provides strong control of
ownership, but is incomplete without a way to prevent double-spending. To solve this, we
proposed a peer-to-peer network using proof-of-work to record a public history of transactions
that quickly becomes computationally impractical for an attacker to change if honest nodes
control a majority of CPU power. The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. Nodes
work all at once with little coordination. They do not need to be identified, since messages are
not routed to any particular place and only need to be delivered on a best effort basis. Nodes can
leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the proof-of-work chain as proof of what
happened while they were gone. They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of
valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on
them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism."
As always, you can support the show by supporting and subscribing to Alpe Audio: 👉 Start learning with Alpe: https://link.alpeaudio.com/70to/d895de1
Want to learn on the go but need more depth than a podcast? Alpe is the app for you. It’s an audio education app that brings great in depth courses that are as fun as podcasts but as educational as well, a degree. Each lesson comes with summaries, additional resources, flash cards and more. You can even find Ethereum Audible on Alpe with all those additional resources.
___________________
Link to whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
"I continue to view the digitization of money as a key theme for the 2020s decade and beyond, both in bottom-up ways (e.g. bitcoins) and in top-down ways (e.g. central bank digital currencies), and am interested to see the directions that it goes in."
Today we're reading part 3, the final part, of Lyn Alden's 1:30 hour long article on the state of network. This will be a 3 part series due to length. In the first part we'll cover why a medium of exchange first needs to be built on top of a store of value. Lyn uses the lessons learned from previous Bitcoin forks and imitators to bring this point home.
In part 2 we cover why layers make sense to scale and how the Lightning Network is structured.
In part 3 we cover the critiques of the network and a summary of thoughts.
As always, you can support the show by supporting and subscribing to Alpe Audio: 👉 Start learning with Alpe: https://link.alpeaudio.com/70to/d895de1
Want to learn on the go but need more depth than a podcast? Alpe is the app for you. It’s an audio education app that brings great in depth courses that are as fun as podcasts but as educational as well, a degree. Each lesson comes with summaries, additional resources, flash cards and more. You can even find Ethereum Audible on Alpe with all those additional resources.
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Link to the paper: https://www.lynalden.com/lightning-network/
Analysis of Bitcoins maximum price: https://thewizardstower.com/the-bitcoin-maxi-price-whats-the-maximum-price-of-bitcoin
"All manner of individual hardware electronic devices became mostly-obsolete as they became applications on a smart phone.
I view the Bitcoin/Lightning stack as being similar. The network is still tiny and has a lot of development work still to do, and nothing is for certain. But to me it looks like a powerful monetary network with a ton of upside potential over the next decade."
Today we're reading part 2 of Lyn Alden's 1:30 hour long article on the state of network. This will be a 3 part series due to length. In the first part we'll cover why a medium of exchange first needs to be built on top of a store of value. Lyn uses the lessons learned from previous Bitcoin forks and imitators to bring this point home.
In part 2 we cover why layers make sense to scale and how the Lightning Network is structured.
As always, you can support the show by supporting and subscribing to Alpe Audio: 👉 Start learning with Alpe: https://link.alpeaudio.com/70to/d895de1
Want to learn on the go but need more depth than a podcast? Alpe is the app for you. It’s an audio education app that brings great in depth courses that are as fun as podcasts but as educational as well, a degree. Each lesson comes with summaries, additional resources, flash cards and more. You can even find Ethereum Audible on Alpe with all those additional resources.
___________________
Link to the paper: https://www.lynalden.com/lightning-network/
Analysis of Bitcoins maximum price: https://thewizardstower.com/the-bitcoin-maxi-price-whats-the-maximum-price-of-bitcoin
"If the purpose of sanctions is not to punish, but to change behavior, then it makes no sense to add to the SDN List an immutable smart contract that cannot change its behavior because it has no agency. It is not a person nor is it under the control of any person. By conflating the Tornado Cash Entity and the Tornado Cash Application and adding both to the SDN List, the government has essentially accomplished a ban on Americans using a particular internet tool without any clear prospect that the restriction will ever be lifted."
Today I'm departing from our analysis to read Coincenter's analysis of the Tornado cash sanctions that OFAC laid down last week. This is a critical time for the web3 and general crypto ecosystem - the first real attempt at censoring by a nation state and it's on us to understand the legal case and ramifications.
As always, you can support the show by supporting and subscribing to Alpe Audio: 👉 Start learning with Alpe: https://link.alpeaudio.com/70to/d895de1
Want to learn on the go but need more depth than a podcast? Alpe is the app for you. It’s an audio education app that brings great in depth courses that are as fun as podcasts but as educational as well, a degree. Each lesson comes with summaries, additional resources, flash cards and more. You can even find Ethereum Audible on Alpe with all those additional resources.
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Read the full analysis: https://www.coincenter.org/analysis-what-is-and-what-is-not-a-sanctionable-entity-in-the-tornado-cash-case/
https://www.coincenter.org/about/
"A truly decentralized and permissionless payment network requires its own underlying self-custodial digital bearer asset. If instead it runs on top of the fiat currency system or relies on external custodial arrangements at its foundation, then it is neither decentralized nor permissionless."
Today we're reading Lyn Alden's 1:30 hour long article on the state of network. This will be a 2 part series due to length. In the first part we'll cover why a medium of exchange first needs to be built on top of a store of value. Lyn uses the lessons learned from previous Bitcoin forks and imitators to bring this point home.
As always, you can support the show by supporting and subscribing to Alpe Audio: 👉 Start learning with Alpe: https://link.alpeaudio.com/70to/d895de1
Want to learn on the go but need more depth than a podcast? Alpe is the app for you. It’s an audio education app that brings great in depth courses that are as fun as podcasts but as educational as well, a degree. Each lesson comes with summaries, additional resources, flash cards and more. You can even find Ethereum Audible on Alpe with all those additional resources.
___________________
Link to the paper: https://www.swanbitcoin.com/a-look-at-the-lightning-network/
"Bitcoin is a disruptive new crypto-currency based on a decentralized open-source protocol which has been gradually gaining momentum. Perhaps the most important question that will affect Bitcoin’s success, is whether or not it will be able to scale to support the high volume of transactions required from a global currency system. We investigate the implications of having a higher transaction throughput on Bitcoin’s security against double-spend attacks. We show that at high throughput, substantially weaker attackers are able to reverse payments they have made, even well after they were considered accepted by recipients. We address this security concern through the GHOST rule, a modification to the way Bitcoin nodes construct and re-organize the block chain, Bitcoin’s core distributed data-structure. GHOST has been adopted and a variant of it has been implemented as part of the Ethereum project, a second generation distributed applications platform."
As always, you can support the show by supporting and subscribing to Alpe Audio: 👉 Start learning with Alpe: https://link.alpeaudio.com/70to/d895de1
Want to learn on the go but need more depth than a podcast? Alpe is the app for you. It’s an audio education app that brings great in depth courses that are as fun as podcasts but as educational as well, a degree. Each lesson comes with summaries, additional resources, flash cards and more. You can even find Ethereum Audible on Alpe with all those additional resources.
___________________
Link to the paper: https://www.ifca.ai/pub/fc15/89750476.pdf
Link to my summary of the whitepaper: https://www.notion.so/yehoshua/Ethereum-6f74eacc4f374ee49ba8c792009c87cb#dd6134662902483382fe03c9e19506c9
"Tendermint is awesome. The future is now"
Today we're diving into the original whitepaper on modern proof of stake blockchains: Tendermint. This paper from 2014 lays the groundwork for many of the proof of stake blockchains that come after and is the basis for the entire Cosmos ecosystem.
We'll breakdown why proof of stake over proof of work how consensus is reached and the game models and theory for cooperation in the system. This is a great place to start from when you're exploring what proof of stake is and how it works, in depth.
As always, you can support the show by supporting and subscribing to Alpe Audio: 👉 Start learning with Alpe: https://link.alpeaudio.com/70to/d895de1
Want to learn on the go but need more depth than a podcast? Alpe is the app for you. It’s an audio education app that brings great in depth courses that are as fun as podcasts but as educational as well, a degree. Each lesson comes with summaries, additional resources, flash cards and more. You can even find Ethereum Audible on Alpe with all those additional resources.
___________________
Link to the whitepaper: https://tendermint.com/static/docs/tendermint.pdf
Link to the Tendermint docs: https://docs.tendermint.com/master/introduction/what-is-tendermint.html
When should you use tokenomics in your web3 project? What purpose does a token serve?
Let's break down the core 'why' behind adding a token to your project and when you should or shouldn't use a token. This is the core question to ask when you evaluate a projects token or consider using a token in your own project.
"We introduce Casper, a proof of stake-based finality system which overlays an existing proof of work blockchain. Casper is a partial consensus mechanism combining proof of stake algorithm research and Byzantine fault tolerant consensus theory. We introduce our system, prove some desirable features, and show defenses against long range revisions and catastrophic crashes. The Casper overlay provides almost any proof of work chain with additional protections against block reversions."
Today we're diving into Casper, the finality gadget that is the base for Ethereum PoS finality mechanism.
____________________
As always, you can support the show by supporting and subscribing to Alpe Audio: 👉 Start learning with Alpe: https://link.alpeaudio.com/70to/d895de1
Want to learn on the go but need more depth than a podcast? Alpe is the app for you. It’s an audio education app that brings great in depth courses that are as fun as podcasts but as educational as well, a degree. Each lesson comes with summaries, additional resources, flash cards and more. You can even find Ethereum Audible on Alpe with all those additional resources.
___________________
Link to the paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.09437.pdf
"Honest-but-rational or ideologically motivated validators could use this attack to increase their profits or stall the protocol, threatening incentive alignment and security of PoS Ethereum. The attack can also lead to destabilization of consensus from congestion in vote processing."
Part 2!
Today we're reading through a recent paper that pokes some serious holes in the security of Proof of stake Ethereum. As we get closer to the merge, it's more important than ever to understand the different attack vectors on Ethereum, what the consequences are and how likely these attacks are to come to fruition.
This readthrough is dense and build on previous episodes we've done, so if you haven't been a long time listener, go back and listen to these first, otherwise it will be hard to understand:
1. Why Proof of Stake
2. The Beacon Chain Ethereum 2.0
3. What is Byzantine Fault Tolerace
4. Flashboys 2.0
____________________
As always, you can support the show by supporting and subscribing to Alpe Audio: 👉 Start learning with Alpe: https://link.alpeaudio.com/70to/d895de1
Want to learn on the go but need more depth than a podcast? Alpe is the app for you. It’s an audio education app that brings great in depth courses that are as fun as podcasts but as educational as well, a degree. Each lesson comes with summaries, additional resources, flash cards and more. You can even find Ethereum Audible on Alpe with all those additional resources.
___________________
Link to the paper "Three attacks on Proof of Stake Ethereum": https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.10086.pdf
Have you heard the sentence "I believe in blockchain just not Bitcoin"?
I have - many times. It's usually said by people who have a tech background and want to sound tech savvy but anti crypto. They want to hedge their bets: sound techhie but not crypto fanatics.
They're missing the whole innovation that crypto and web3 bring. They're missing all of it.
"Honest-but-rational or ideologically motivated validators could use this attack to increase their profits or stall the protocol, threatening incentive alignment and security of PoS Ethereum. The attack can also lead to destabilization of consensus from congestion in vote processing."
Today we're reading through a recent paper that pokes some serious holes in the security of Proof of stake Ethereum. As we get closer to the merge, it's more important than ever to understand the different attack vectors on Ethereum, what the consequences are and how likely these attacks are to come to fruition.
This readthrough is dense and build on previous episodes we've done, so if you haven't been a long time listener, go back and listen to these first, otherwise it will be hard to understand:
1. Why Proof of Stake
2. The Beacon Chain Ethereum 2.0
3. What is Byzantine Fault Tolerace
4. Flashboys 2.0
____________________
As always, you can support the show by supporting and subscribing to Alpe Audio: 👉 Start learning with Alpe: https://link.alpeaudio.com/70to/d895de1
Want to learn on the go but need more depth than a podcast? Alpe is the app for you. It’s an audio education app that brings great in depth courses that are as fun as podcasts but as educational as well, a degree. Each lesson comes with summaries, additional resources, flash cards and more. You can even find Ethereum Audible on Alpe with all those additional resources.
___________________
Link to the paper "Three attacks on Proof of Stake Ethereum": https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.10086.pdf
