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Nobody “reads Socrates,” because nothing he authored exists. They read Plato writing about Socrates.

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damn, good point.

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I'm personally interested in the future "energy per transaction" (the sustainability angle). If EIP 1559 the Eth2 manage to go through, will "energy per transaction" in ETH be lower / more sustainable than current digital transaction methods (VISA, Mastercard etc.)? If not, then why won't people just use VISA and Mastercard for transactions? They are public companies, so the public can also "own" parts of them and be rewarded with dividends and capital gains. Although they are centralized, they would also probably adapt to any required changes due investor and consumer pressure. They've also got widespread networks and have been around long enough to have legitimacy and the "Lindy effect" work in their favour. They can also pick up the "best practices" from crypto networks to make their own payment networks more efficient and secure/ Unless ETH is able to become a more energy efficient payment network, why would it unseat these networks?

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Excellent read on Ethereum, well done! The one downside to me was that it is pretty clear you’ve not dug into Cardano (beyond reading the first line on their website). I hold ETH and ADA and can see a world where value accrues to both Layer 1 protocols

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Are you worried that deflationary pressures have downsides, such as disincentivizing transactions and usage?

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99% of transactions/usage would move to layer 2 & sidechains with negligible transaction fees. Ethereum itself will also become ~10x cheaper after sharding is added.

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which brings you to the final bullet point in the article. The risk to ETH is lower transaction fees if it scales properly which reduces demand for it. No?

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Great post! I learned a lot about Etherium and web3. I would love for you to write more about blockchain tech, mainly Etherium competition and other use cases like Helium, Ripple and Cardano.

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Reading this in 2024. Still valuable

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What are your thoughts on the recent web3 developments on Bitcoin L1? (Ordinals & Inscriptions)

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Jun 25, 2022·edited Jun 25, 2022

Reading this at the end of June 2022 after everything that happened in the past of couple of weeks, some of these points are proving to be more relevant that ever and some even seeming to be like predictions(accurate ones for that matter) even if not intended as such.

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Great read!

My only gripe is the section on ADA, I don't think it's fair to say "like seasoned execs heard about the blockchain and tried to make one that woke kids would appreciate."

Without mentioning anywhere that ADA is founded by the co-founder of Ethereum!!

Once again, great read, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

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Interesting podcast with good info on etherium. I think you need to take a deeper dive into Cardano, you dismiss it in your podcast but in reality it’s a very strong competitor built by a founding member of etherium. All the issues ETH is working through now could have been fixed before launch, but Vitalik wanted to rush it to market. That’s why Cardano exists!

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Check our Dfinity - https://dfinity.org/

L1 network that provides an environment for smart contracts to run at web speed, web scale, and minimum cost.

The project is a result of convergence of lot of interesting technologies - blockchain, webassembly, chain key technology, new programming paradigms like orthogonal persistence - combined with a solid economic model.

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Distributed network infrastructure needs to be open source to prevail - otherwise the internet would be based on AppleTalk or NetBIOS.

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Bitcoin can do smart contracts (now cheaply and privately with taproot), "bridge" with sidechains, and, via the Lightning Network, provide both "rollup" functionality as well as PoS (all without totally giving up PoW's undeniable connection to our universe's basic physical laws).

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Great piece!

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Love your work, keep it up.

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