Exploring the Risks and Challenges of Blockchain Merges

Welcome to The Chopping Block! Crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Robert Leshner and Tarun Chitra chop it up about the latest news in the digital asset industry. In this episode, Emin Gün Sirer, the emperor of Avalanche, also joined the conversation

Show topics:

• Gün’s take on the Ava Labs conspiracy story and whether there was any truth in the videos
• The impact of the Merge on ETH issuance and energy usage
• What’s going on with the ETHPoW fork, and how the team has been messing up
• The TL;DR of the technical side of Ethereum scaling, explained by Tarun
• How, in the beginning, proof of stake was designed to resemble proof of work 
• What Ethereum miners are going to do after the Merge
• Whether increasing hash rates spike prices of PoW coins 
• How the Basic Attention Token is like the Stanford prison experiment
• Whether the fights between Gün and other founders were positive or negative
• How an exchange delisted every privacy coin
• Whether Coinbase's support of the lawsuit against the US Treasury over Tornado Cash was a PR move
• How this moment in history resembles the 90s and the rise of the internet
• Whether there are blockchain-haters and what the crypto industry can do better
• How there can’t be a single chain to meet every need
• How FTX and Coinbase have different approaches to regulation 
• How would everyone celebrate a successful Merge and whether there’s a chance of it failing

Hosts

• Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital
• Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures
• Robert Leshner, founder of Compound 

Guest

• Emin Gün Sirer, Founder and CEO of Ava Labs

 

Episode Links

 

Ava Labs Accusations:

• Emin Gün Sirer’s statement
• CoinDesk article 
• Crypto Leaks article

 

Tornado Cash

• Treasury Press release 
• Coinbase supports lawsuit against US Treasury
• Huobi delisting privacy coins
• Previous coverage of the Tornado Cash Sanctions on Unchained:

• • Is TRM Labs Blocking Addresses From DeFi Protocols? Ari Redbord Says No 
  • Tornado Cash Sanctioned. Did the Government Overstep Its Bounds?
  • The Chopping Block: Did OFAC Overstep by Sanctioning Tornado Cash?
  • Given the Sanctions on Tornado Cash, Is Ethereum Censorship Resistant?
  • Preston Van Loon on Ethereum's Merge and His Lawsuit Against Treasury

 

ETH Proof of Work and Miners:

• ChainID missing; the request from Coinbase

 

• CoinDesk article

• The ETHPoW team said the fork will be deployed within 24 hours of the Merge

• ETHPoW team’s promise to abolish EIP-1559

• ETHPoW first blocks

 

The Merge:

• Ethereum Foundation Merge announcement.
• Ethereum carbon emission reductions.

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