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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 👉 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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

"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. ___________________ 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/

"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

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

"We additionally show that high fees paid for priority transaction ordering poses a systemic risk to consensus-layer security. We explain that such fees are just one form of a general phenomenon in DEXes and beyond—what we call miner extractable value (MEV)—that poses concrete, measurable, consensus-layer security risks. We show empirically that MEV poses a realistic threat to Ethereum today." __________________________ 👉 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. __________________________ Today we're reading through part one of the Flashboys 2.0, the seminal piece of research that introduced the concept of MEV. This readthrough is slightly different as the complexity of the paper required me to stop and offer explainers throughout. MEV is a concept that is critical to understand as it poses consensus layer risks to Ethereum 2.0 and opens up attack vectors which we'll be exploring in future read throughs. The full paper can be read here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.05234.pdf

The Howey Test is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot in the crypto world when it comes to the legality of many projects. But most don't know where it comes from and what it actually means. Let's break it down.

"crypto markets are becoming highly interconnected with the traditional financial sector" 👉 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. __________________________ 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: Interconnections with the traditional financial system, Operational risks stemming from underlying blockchains Smart contract-based vulnerabilities Other governance and regulatory risks Scalability challenges. 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.

Welcome to Blockchain bites!  This is a new format where I'll cover topics, terms, debates but in short bite size takes. Think of it as your lexicon for your blockchain discussions at a cocktail party. This bite is about why crypto can't just be 'copied' - which is one of the most ridiculous arguments that keep on popping up on Twitter or in discussions with friends.

"For a blockchain to be decentralized, it's crucially important for regular users to be able to run a node, and to have a culture where running nodes is a common activity." 👉 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. __________________________________________________________________________ This weeks read we're exploring the limits of scalability to blockchains and why those limits exist.  What are the tradeoffs for increasing scale? Transactions per second? Lowering fees? Everything has a tradeoff and that's what we're going to be exploring this readthrough.   Original article: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html#its-crucial-for-blockchain-decentralization-for-regular-users-to-be-able-to-run-a-node

"While there are many paths toward building a scalable and secure long-term blockchain ecosystem, it's looking like they are all building toward very similar futures. There's a high chance that block production will end up centralized" 👉 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. _________________________________ What's the endgame that Vitalik Buterin has in mind for Ethereum? Where do we go after the merge, what should concern us and what should we be planning for and thinking about already? That's the topic of this readthrough, Endgame. We'll cover: What concerns Vitalik post merge and rollup centric Ethereum Ways to solve future problems Break down of the decentralization matrix Full article: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/12/06/endgame.html Limits of blockchain scalability: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html#its-crucial-for-blockchain-decentralization-for-regular-users-to-be-able-to-run-a-node

"To most users, the freedom to pack up and move your digital assets and identity does not matter. But it might matter one day, and when it does, it will matter a lot." ____________________________________________________ 👉 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. _________________________________ Why does web3 matter and how can we define it and what matters exactly about it?  Definitions matter and in this last installment of our exploration into why the web3 ecosystem matters and what it brings to the table we read Dror Poleg's reply to Moxie's piece from last week. Here's how I define web3: It's property rights brought digital facilitated by open protocols, tokenization and decentralization. Without those three components, there is no web3.  Read the full article: https://www.drorpoleg.com/unpacking-the-web3-sausage/

"This was surprising to me. So much work, energy, and time has gone into creating a trustless distributed consensus mechanism, but virtually all clients that wish to access it do so by simply trusting the outputs from these two companies without any further verification." ____________________________________________________ 👉 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. _________________________________ Today we'll be continuing our exploration of why web3 matters with this take by Moxie, the founder of Signal. He took some time to play around with building on web3 and shared his well thought reflection. The first part is reading his article, the second is a readthrough of Vitalik's rebuttal/thoughts followed by the 'Yosh's take'. Link to original article: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html Link to Vitalik's answer: https://np.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/ryk3it/my_first_impressions_of_web3

"But wherever this leads us next, it's clear to me now that I was too hasty to completely dismiss crypto on the basis of all the things wrong with it at the moment. Instead of appreciating the fundamental freedom to transact that it's currently our best shot at protecting. You don't need laser eyes or an NFT avatar to appreciate that." ____________________________________________________ 👉 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. _________________________________ Today we're reading to pieces: I was wrong, we need crypto by David Heinemeier Hansson and @punk6529's thread on the freedom to transact. Both pieces articulate really well the importance of decentralized, non custodial crypto. DHHs article has lots of good links and references: https://world.hey.com/dhh/i-was-wrong-we-need-crypto-587ccb03 Punk 6529's thread: https://twitter.com/punk6529/status/1494444624630403083

"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." _______________________ 👉 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. _________________________________ 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

👉 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. _________________________________ "In the future, it’s likely that the average person will not work for a company. Instead, people will earn income in non-traditional ways by taking actions such as playing games, learning new skills, creating art, or curating content. This kind of shift in how we work is not unusual or unexpected — the idea that most people would be employed by large corporations would have seemed crazy to someone in the year 1800." Today we're diving into the world of DAOs and the future of work. How will it unfold? In this essay Ben Schecter lays out his vision for the future of work in a DAO enabled world, at the end I layout my anti case. In this readthrough you'll learn: - What DAOs are - How DAOs are forming to create a future of work around different themes: contribute-to-earn, learn-to-earn & play-to-earn. Other referenced articles: On blockchain gaming and play to earn: https://thewizardstower.com/Web3-game-economies-If-Pokemon-was-built-on-Blockchain On DAOs: https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/dao, https://www.notboring.co/p/the-dao-of-daos

👉 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. _________________________________ What are the pits and falls of coin voting governance? How can we avoid them? In this article from August 16,2021, Vitalik Buterin lays out the problems with coin voting governance and offers possible solutions. Some futuristic, some applicable now. For the original article: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html

Welcome to Ethereum Audible! today we’ll be reading through David Hoffman’s Ultra Scalable Ethereum. A debate that’s been going on for a long time in the crypto community is about how to scale blockchains and the blockchain scalability trilemma. And these days it’s more relevant since we’ve got on the one hand blockchains like Solana that are ultra scalable and on the other hand Bitcoin layer 2 solutions like lightning. David Hoffman is one of the Bankless duo and has been diving deep into this space recently. This piece is from the Bankless newsletter. The Bankless podcast & newsletter (definitely worth subscribing to): http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ Ultra Scalable Ethereum: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/ultra-scalable-ethereum Follow Bankless & David on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TrustlessState, https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ 👉 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.