As someone who lives in Portugal which already stops every single package you get from outside EU with no exceptions for a decade or more:
I can tell you how this will go
From now on if you receive a package from outside EU, it'll first go missing for weeks and nobody will know where it is, then you'll receive an email from your country's customs agency
They'll make you login to some extremely unusable and outdated web portal which breaks half the time and where you have to classify your shipment in one of 10,000 confusing category codes
Depending on the category code you'll pay a different tax rate, sometimes it's 5% sometimes it's 60%
Then you have to pay the customs duty in some archaic way that will also be broken half the time
And then you'll finally receive your package from outside EU after months
Experiencing this for a few times you'll realize you will never ever try to order or receive anything from outside EU ever because the ordeal is too painful and expensive
I get asked a lot here by people from US to test out new products (like the guy who made the Minimal Phone) and it's just literally impossible for me to receive it even for testing. I tried to classify it as samples for testing but you need to go through a bureaucratic process of insane lengths to get that through so I just gave up
Realistically all this does is make Europeans live even more in the stone ages, as now they can't use modern AI, nor get modern products from outside EU because it'll be too much hassle to order
Network outages in the past five years ↓
Solana: 6
Arbitrum: 3
Base: 3 (2 last week)
Starknet: 2
Sui: 2
Ton: 2
BNB Chain: 1
Avalanche: 1
Polygon: 1
Optimism: 1
Ethereum: 0
Just in case you were wondering why >50% of DeFi TVL is locked on Ethereum.
Normally, we see the biggest news at the top of a raging bull market.
Well, this time, we’re seeing it after a >60% drawdown, with some of the worst sentiment on CT in recent history.
I mean, what better bottom indicator could we have hoped for? - Everyone but CT is bullish crypto... who would have thought 🙃
> What if BlackRock, BitMine, and others start piling in after CLARITY?
Well that was fast 🙃
Here's what happened today:
- USDT about to be banned in EU
- Coinbase supporting OUSD
- OUSD, a major open competitor to both USDT+USDC announced, with revenue share between all their partners, backed by all the bigger financial institutions
Circle stock already down > 16%
Holding ETH, on which the majority of OUSD will end up trading anyway, suddenly doesn't sound so bad right?
Europe is starting to ban A/C for 2 reasons:
1. To kill old people with heat stroke who use up all the tax dollars in socialized medicine.
2. To make everyone feel hot and miserable so the “global warming” scam feels more real and they can pass more tax increases.
These globalist elites are truly evil.
Unpopular FUCK YOU fact:
Retirement means nothing
FUCK YOU means everything
—if you still owe THE BANKS THAT ACTUALLY OWN YOUR RENTAL PROPERTIES— you’re not in a FUCK YOU position, you’re their bitch and you shouldn’t be trusted
@materkel People are still anchoring their crypto thinking to BTC, thats the biggest issue. BTC is the one and only tech, everything else is scam with less utility.
Ethereum: If ETH's price goes up the borrowing goes up, that means more free capital on Ethereum which drives up the price of ETH and so on. Now continuously suppress the ETH's price to punish the hyped borrowers and that's where we're at.
@ETH_Daily Every year there is an important Ethereum upgrade, but there are no hype conomics, or scam economics around them. Just the boring, everything works, up to the next one.
We just announced Ethlabs (@ethlabs_org). Its mission is stewarding the growth of Ethereum and ETH. Here is why I decided to stay in Ethereum after four years at the Foundation.
We are at the moment Ethereum was built for. Adoption is here. Blokchains are being adopted as the most efficient financial rails and the traction of the very innovative financial services built on Ethereum, is accelerating fast.
Ethereum is best positioned to become the base layer for worldwide finance. It is unrivaled in credible neutrality, permissionlessness, and robustness. The core protocol is now steadily increasing its throughput and speed to meet demand. Ethereum’s application layer has the largest developer base and most institutional adoption. The contest now is on product and growth: improve user and dev experience and bring Ethereum’s apps and assets to more people.
At Ethlabs, I will focus on growth by:
- Supporting Ethereum’s builders.
- Improving infra and standards for devs, builders, and institutions.
- Increasing distribution for Ethereum’s apps and assets.
Throughout setting up Ethlabs it is incredible to see how much support we have gotten. So many of us want Ethereum and ETH to succeed. Largely thanks to the ecosystem’s size, force, and culture, it is now positioned to be an enormous improvement to the global financial system. That’s why I’m staying in Ethereum and that’s the work I want to do. Interested in joining? Go to [email protected].
Today is truly an Ethereum moment, thanks to all our backers (@BitMNR, @Sharplink, @ethereumJoseph, and so many others) and the entire Ethereum ecosystem!
"We spent a generation teaching people the first rule of the internet: never give out your real identity to strangers. We have a word, doxxing, for inflicting that exposure on someone against their will. And now the same governments and platforms are asking every citizen to do it to themselves, voluntarily, as a condition of logging in."
https://t.co/X6mzofcBgA
> Linux is free
> Docker is free
> Kubernetes is free
> Git and GitHub are free
> GitHub Actions is free
> Python is free
> PostgreSQL is free
> AWS, GCP, Azure are free (limited tier)
> Terraform is free
> ArgoCD and Flux are free
> Prometheus and Grafana are free
> VS Code is free
> Ollama is free
a laptop and an internet connection, that's all you need to start
🔥 Vitalik Buterin on why consortium blockchains have mostly failed:
“The original vision of consortium blockchains — the idea that you have 5 banks or major companies that come together and create their own chain — has been mostly a failure. I think the reason why is it ends up inheriting most of the disadvantages of centralization and most of the disadvantages of decentralization at the same time.
The first five banks join and feel like they’re building something together… but when bank #6, #7, or #29 joins later, it still feels like joining a cartel-controlled system. No real openness, no public explorer like Etherscan, and privacy becomes questionable when your data sits on a network visible to your competitors."
This is exactly why permissionless infrastructure continues to win. Ethereum will win.
Source: @Etherealize_io
People leaving the EF is something I’ve been tweeting about for a while now, but this time I’m actually going to take the opposite stance on it in that I believe it's good.
The EF itself is an organization that’s stuck in its ways. It’s overly political, poor at executing, secretly still run by Vitalik, pays poorly, undervalues some of its best people, and there are plenty of other things I could say. None of which are positive.
What that means is that nothing about the EF can or ever will change. Many people thought they could go there and change things from within. That has been a losing game.
The more important game is what happens after they leave. Many of the people exiting the EF are going to start organizations that are actually Ethereum-aligned instead of just virtue signaling that they are. I've already been hearing about the ones that are. They’ll be able to comfortably raise money because with things like Bitmine, Sharplink, and DATs, there are now significant financial incentives to make sure Ethereum has a future.
You see, while the EF accumulated social capital in a way that can’t really be taken from them, every person who leaves takes a piece of that social capital with them. A coup d’état was never possible from the inside, but this creates a different version of one. The credibility that helps prop up the institution starts walking out the door.
What you’re going to hear about over the next few months are teams that left the EF, raised money, and are executing against the Ethereum roadmap.
At the end of the day, this will be a net positive for the Ethereum ecosystem.
This is how brain-dead the crypto industry still is:
It costs roughly $30M per year to keep developing Ethereum L1, which is effectively becoming the settlement layer for the internet of finance.
Bitcoin’s PoW burns through roughly the same amount of money every single day.
One funds open-source global financial infrastructure backed by the most sound digital store of value in the world.
The other pays for an energy-intensive security model attached to an asset that is structurally and economically inferior as a store of value, not useful for real-world finance, and increasingly hard to justify based on Bitcoin’s own fee and security-budget metrics.
This is the quiet part said out loud, the thing talking heads in this space will not dare to say, but should, because it is the truth.
Vitalik Buterin explains why proof-of-stake is more secure than proof-of-work
“I think proof of stake is very secure because to attack the system, you need to have basically as much stake as the rest of the network. Right now, for example, we have 5 million ETH staking, which means you have to come up with 5 million ETH and then join the network.”
At the time of this writing, more than 37 million ETH are being staked, with 3 million ETH waiting to join via the validator queue. At today’s prices, that’s more than $80 billion of ETH someone would have to acquire to attack the network and revert finalized blocks, which is more than the cost of attacking even the Bitcoin network by some estimates.
The other defense mechanism that proof-of-stake has that proof-of-work doesn’t is slashing, which makes Ethereum antifragile. Vitalik explains:
“Recovering from attacks is much easier in proof-of-stake than proof-of-work. For many kinds of attacks you do against [the Ethereum] network, we have this concept of automatic slashing. In order to revert a finalized block, you basically have to have a big portion of your validators sign two conflicting messages. This is something where once these messages are on the network, you can go and prove ‘these people did it.’ So we have this feature in the protocol where you basically take all these people who provably misbehaved and you burn their coins.”
Vitalik also acknowledges the possibility of censoring attacks, where if 1/3rd of validators refuse to attest, the chain can’t finalize. But, as he explains, Ethereum has a contingency plan for this as well:
“Everyone who got censored would create a minority chain, and the community would have to do a soft fork. The would have to say, ‘this chain is clearly attacking us and this one is not attacking us, so we’re going to join this chain.’ Then what happens is, on that new chain, the attackers also lose a lot of coins. The difference between proof-of-stake and proof-of-work is that in a proof-of-stake system, you can identify specific participants — and this isn’t a human going in and saying ‘I don’t like you’. It’s all automated.”
One last benefit of proof-of-stake is that security scales with the value of the network. As Vitalik put it five years ago, it is really relative security, and not absolute security, that matters:
“The security needs of a thing have to be proportional to the size of that thing, because as a thing gets bigger, its enemies become bigger and more well-motivated. If BTC were 100x as big as it is today, the value from destroying it would be 100x higher, and the kinds of actors that would want to care about destroying it would be much bigger and scarier. This is also why countries of all sizes have roughly similarly sized militaries as a percentage of GDP. Hence, cost of attack divided by market cap really is the correct statistic to measure, and in the long run issuance-free PoW really does look not that good."
Source: @lexfridman (Jun 2021)