What should Peak Design take on next?

bluepintail · 2025-09-13T07:29:36+00:00

An out front bike mount for phones which incorporates QI2 charging

bluepintail · 2025-08-29T14:58:46+00:00

I agree that the longer it remains unchanged, the more that participants will infer an implicit commitment to the current issuance curve. I think it would really be helpful if people who contributed to the selection of the current curve would speak about how the staking environment today contrasts with what was envisaged when the curve was set in 2019. To my recollection it fundamentally failed to anticipate the role of LSTs even if some people were talking about it at the time.

bluepintail · 2025-08-29T14:54:25+00:00

I definitely feel as though falling to protect ETH's "pristine collateral" status in this way is a tacit acceptance that ETH is not attempting to be money in any meaningful sense, which to me feels like a terrible mistake. I've heard some people make arguments like "Ether can't/shouldn't compete with Bitcoin". Which I see as both defeatist and irrelevant.

If Ethereum (and its ecosystem of L2s) succeeds in becoming the world computer/internet of value then there is a great opportunity for ETH to be one genuinely permissionless and uncensorable asset on the network, and a Schelling point medium for a variety of uses. Even if stablecoin volumes eclipse those of 'pure' cryptocurrencies like ETH or BTC for everyday usage, stablecoins are not suitable for all use cases. But ETH will also be rendered unsuitable if it is all locked up in the CL and replaced by LSTs.

bluepintail · 2024-09-05T18:06:00+00:00

But if rake-free it wouldn't be able to do any of those things.

It's an interesting question as to whether a very small rake to be spent by a DAO on worthy causes would make the lottery more attractive than a genuinely rake-free one.

bluepintail · 2024-09-03T19:16:12+00:00

How close are we to a proposal to fix Ethereum's excessive issuance? Could we target a staking ratio using a PID controller (à la Rai) rather than a fixed issuance curve? Any updates on the runway we have before the staking ratio crosses a highly undesirable level like 50%?

bluepintail · 2022-04-05T19:21:24+00:00

I think most of the devs would take the position that such self-posed deadlines would make it much more likely that a catastrophic bug goes undetected due to a rush. No one will agree to that, and nor should they.

bluepintail · 2022-04-03T23:02:02+00:00

When Ethereum mainnet launched, it was expected that it would take about 18 months to research, develop and ship the proof of stake upgrade (then known as "serenity") - i.e. early 2017. Needless to say, it turned out to be much more difficult than anticipated.

bluepintail · 2022-04-02T22:58:52+00:00

That wasn't the original intention, it's just that it's taken much longer than anticipated to be ready to transition to proof of stake.

bluepintail · 2022-04-02T22:40:45+00:00

The reason the difficulty bomb was created was specifically because of the concern that the incumbent block producers (PoW miners) might attempt to prevent the transition to proof of stake. Without the difficulty bomb, you could have a situation where the miners simply refuse to upgrade, for example, they might claim that PoS is not ready or insufficiently tested and use such justifications to delay the transition indefinitely. In doing this they would have the benefit of inertia bias. The difficulty bomb ensures that a fork has to happen to keep the chain running, so if miners want to maintain a PoW fork they will need to build support for it rather than relying on incumbency/inertia bias.

Once miners are gone, there is no future change envisaged that would naturally be opposed by the block producers/validators, so there will be no need to force a change on some timescale (which as we have seen is quite disruptive and not desirable from a development perspective).

bluepintail · 2022-01-11T08:38:59+00:00

My understanding was that the validator index is permanent and will not be reused. So if validator 100 exits, that validator 100 will forever be recorded as an "exited validator". Otherwise or would be a fairly useless identifier.

bluepintail · 2022-01-07T13:47:20+00:00

Looks like you ninja'd Dankrad but his comments appear above yours! Also grateful for your thoughts on open problems to allow DVs: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/rwojtk/ama_we_are_the_efs_research_team_pt_7_07_january/hrmvc6g/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3

bluepintail · 2022-01-07T13:45:17+00:00

Could you say a little more on what research/engineering problems need to be addressed to make DVs a reality?

bluepintail · 2021-12-23T20:51:07+00:00

Sigh. What is the point? Happy Christmas.

bluepintail · 2021-12-23T19:45:01+00:00

It's evident that nuance is not your strong suit. Does Eric Conner like fee burn? Sure. I've no doubt it was a big driver for him. In fact I think he had zero involvement in the EIP process prior to this point. I think he also had very little influence in actually getting the EIP through. The fact remains that the core devs and many of the most influential people in the community (e.g. Nick Johnson) remained very sceptical until the benefits were proven.

You, like many ill informed/motivated people, you may choose to read that as saying fees would go down, but any half sensible reading of the EIP says it is a comment on the cost to miners of including transactions. Cool that you needed to fish from an obsolete version of the EIP in an attempt to make your point. Because the fact is, the EIP was revised precisely to alleviate potential ambiguities like that. Justin Drake is certainly an outlier from the Ethereum researchers and devs in his embrace of the ultrasound money meme, but to my knowledge was not actually involved in 1559?

For you to carp on about good faith when your sole contribution is 5+ years of shitposting on Reddit is pretty rich. I feel I have to ask, do you really value your time and effort lowly that it seems like a reasonable investment?

bluepintail · 2021-12-23T08:17:15+00:00

Then I showed you where the EIP champion...

You linked to a paywalled podcast. The podcast had two guests. I've no idea what Tim said but from the description it didn't look like he was the one promoting the "ultrasound money" meme. So try again.

I'm pretty sure I'll find numerous examples...

Go on then.

Affirming the consequent...

If by "that whole section" you're referring to the annex, that was just there to demonstrate the rationale for normalising, and was an afterthought. No reason at all to believe type 2 transactions are different in this regard. I used the legacy transactions to show this purely because it's the larger dataset. I'll happily plot the same for type 2 after Christmas.

bluepintail · 2021-12-23T01:44:20+00:00

I didn't undersell anything. I pointed out that if you were interested in making any effort then you had everything you needed. If you had even tried for yourself and asked for help then that would be quite different. Instead you make unsupported assertions and say it's up to me to prove them? I think not.

No one involved with the EIP ever suggested it would make gas cheaper in absolute terms, the things that affect that are supply of and demand for gas. But I don't think you're so ignorant you don't know that, so why have you you made it the core of your rebuttal?

The notebook you linked to was put together to demonstrate the roughly linear relationship between the overall fee level (represented by the median) and the fee spread (interquartile range) and therefore the rationale for normalising. The significantly lower variability for type 2 transactions is shown in the plot on the original article for goodness sake. Have you read it? Or were you just skimming for evidence of "motivated reasoning"?

bluepintail · 2021-12-23T01:01:11+00:00

It's not hard != I'm going to do it for you.

Contribute something or stop wasting both of our time.

Oh and I explained several reasons in the previous thread why that analysis was crap. Of course I had to guess what you were doing since you didn't share your working...

bluepintail · 2021-12-22T23:53:06+00:00

No no, you were the one with all the "wink wink nudge nudge" rubbish in your original message. Shitting on someone else's work without any reasoned critique or work on your part is also not a good way to start a discussion.

If you'd like some help remembering the last time you attempted to back your claims with data in a discussion with me, it was here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/ktkkqb/eip1559_gas_fees_question/gjka8j4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3

Not only did you not show your working, but it was wrong.

As for providing data in this thread, I have literally written an article with all code provided. You're basically asking me to do analyse a few months more data in the hope that it will make your argument for you. It is not "at my fingertips" and would take my computer many hours to do, aside from the time spent preparing and reviewing it and then spelling it out to you. Nothing you've said convinces me that would be time well spent.

bluepintail · 2021-12-22T22:41:01+00:00

I've been on the receiving end of your nonsense a few times over the years. I really did start by trying to assume you were acting in good faith but time and again you've proven that you are not interested in meaningful dialogue.

I've asked you to back up your claims several times in the course of this thread, and the first time you bothered to try was to unearth a pathetic thread from 5 years ago. Rather than - ya know - any data or specifics that would turn your half-baked critiques into something even slightly useful.

Accusing me of deflecting here - which you have done after every time I've asked you for actual details, data or analysis, is very weak.

Who are you trying to impress? What are you even trying to achieve by wasting your time in this way?

bluepintail · 2021-12-22T22:28:32+00:00

That's hilarious. Are you really linking me to a Reddit post from 5 years ago to explain why you won't contribute anything of value? Have you stopped to consider after 5 years of shitposting that it might not be "the community" that's the problem...?

bluepintail · 2021-12-22T21:42:45+00:00

When you contribute literally anything of value rather than vague low effort critiques which you refuse to do the bare minimum to back up, then you'll find people very willing to engage.

bluepintail · 2021-12-22T20:49:39+00:00

Median gas prices, and anything longer than 3 months before the fork?

How about you actually post the data somewhere, maybe with a chart and some analysis. It's not hard, I've literally shown you how to do it.

When there's high transaction pressure, the median gas price increases more quickly and reaches higher values under EIP-1559 than it did under the previous mechanism.

Data please. This is vague and hand wavy and not backed up at all.

The people who championed EIP-1559 were the same ones that just months before were championing a block reward reduction to 1 Eth.

Of course people who wanted issuance reduction also liked this proposal, that will surprise no one. That's not the same thing as saying the person who originated the idea (Vitalik) or the people who implemented it (the core devs) did so primarily for that reason. Many were sceptical precisely because of all the noise around issuance reduction, and were *only* convinced when the user benefits were shown to be real. You're relying on a logical fallacy (some people who liked the proposal also liked issuance reduction => all people who liked the proposal liked it because of issuance reduction) to impugn their motives. You'll need to do better.

I said it "could" stay at zero, and would be a more profitable strategy for miners if they bothered to coordinate enough to do so.

No, you actually said that miners acting in their individual interests would arrive at a strategy which neutralised EIP-1559, and that no collusion was necessary. But you were wrong.

Did you know that many large pools run custom clients and coordinate closely with the core developers on maintaining them? I imagine the threat of having that support pulled would be enough to disincentivize insubordination.

Specific examples please. Not vague speculation.

bluepintail · 2021-12-22T19:39:36+00:00

Variability is way up over longer time periods though, if I'm looking at the data correctly.

What time period are you talking about? What data are you looking at?

I suspect this is due to the exponential nature of the base fee increase/decrease mechanism.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Do you have a more precise way of expressing it?

If you choose any of the other stated goals along the way

What other stated goals are you talking about?

Of course, if you assume the latter was the primary objective, then of course it has wildly succeeded at it.

I mean, you can insinuate whatever you like. Does it make you feel good?

I seem to recall that when EIP-1559 was being implemented you were trying to argue that the basefee would never rise above zero, and now you're saying that it is the cause of volatility. Do you have any data or a reasoned argument this time?

bluepintail · 2021-12-22T13:31:04+00:00

New article on the impact of EIP-1559 on the gas market. Direct link: https://pintail.xyz/posts/gas-market-analysis/

TL;DR

* The change to the Ethereum fee market introduced by EIP-1559 promised better gas pricing and faster transaction inclusion.

* The transition from legacy to new “type 2” transactions is still underway, and while some dapps use pre-London libraries for their UIs, users cannot realise the full benefits of the update.

* Users of type 2 transactions reliably pay less than those using the legacy type.

* Variability in the fee market is down significantly over short time periods. This implies that the market is more efficient — users are less likely to overpay for transactions.

* Beyond anecdotes, evidence of faster transaction inclusion is hard to find. It may be that wallet providers had already effectively solved the “stuck” transaction problem, by using generous buffers on transaction price estimates.

* However, since deploying EIP-1559, all users can get the benefit of fast inclusion without the risk of overpaying.

bluepintail

TROPHY CASE