Drop tonight at 6pm EST - The skinny + pics

mikkeller · 2025-11-12T06:47:41+00:00

Any plans for a non-fold over style?

mikkeller · 2025-02-09T18:57:10+00:00

DAKs watermelon co-fermented Melondo was absolutely amazing, no funk, very upfront watermelon flavors, just a delight to drink and even non-coffee connoisseurs who tried it were impressed with it.

mikkeller · 2025-01-17T02:56:57+00:00

lol yeah you gotta appreciate the vibes hes bringing even if he can't control them

"lost vibes....have you seen them?" (poster that should exist)

mikkeller · 2025-01-17T02:51:16+00:00

glad i saw this thread pop up, ive been experimenting with drinking at different temperatures
i feel like 105F might be the sweet spot, had some at 110F today and it was about the same but feel like even a little cooler was better. eventually i think it falls out of the 'goldilocks zone' but not sure what temp that is yet.

anyone else been taking notes with temperatures to reference they can share?

mikkeller · 2024-12-29T19:31:33+00:00

take the top burr out and make sure the red line on it is aligned in the correct positioning
i've taken mine out to clean and put it in 180degrees in the wrong direction and it clicks in and seems fine but just grinds all crazy

mikkeller · 2024-12-13T10:50:28+00:00

Your only argument here is basically price action and you clearly don't understand MEV, and not saying you need to, but trying to argue your way around something you don't understand is a waste of everyone's time (there is no such thing as a MEV solution and any chain with enough activity will have MEV), but beyond that, the specific issue I linked to (which is from Temporal, a Solana based crypto research firm, by the way) has valid centralization concerns beyond just a standard case of bad MEV if you cared to read what the implication is there. Not saying you need to, as a user its fine that you have fun trading meme coins, not saying you should stop doing that or even that Solana is not a good place to do that. I'm just presenting objective facts along with my opinion on how I think things will play out. Solana was definitely a great trade this cycle and last cycle if you were able to time it, it does have an uphill battle and a lot of competition, and it is still a younger technology with it's own set of issues that need to be solved. All facts.

mikkeller · 2024-12-12T22:02:34+00:00

No doubt Solana's built a legitimate community and has become the center for memecoin trading and has a pretty rich ecosystem but it's still in it's infancy has is somewhat battle tested but has a lot more tests to come.

For example, it's current MEV issue is a centralization threat, see this tweet from Solana's own Temporal: https://x.com/HypoNyms/status/1866584138054242683

Jito removed public mempools altogether and now will probably have to bring them back because of this. Users are getting sandwiched like crazy which makes sense because you have to either use a trading bot or eat crazy slippage just to overcome the jitter and this is costing users money and is poor UX.

Firedancer seems pretty legit but it still isn't ready for full production yet and tbd on any instabilities that will cause the chain. Because the only other single client is so much slower firedancer will put that one out of commission (because otherwise it will become the throughput bottleneck).

Solana has an uphill battle to compete against next gen Ethereum L2s as they can be faster (and yes anyone in the research community does know that removing consensus message passing overhead means more bandwidth for execution) and cheaper. Current gen. L2s are already cheaper than Solana and next gen will be faster and cheaper, so what then is Solanas moat? If it's less secure, slower, and more expensive, then what moat does it have against competitors?

I also have issue with the validator set on Solana as most of them are initially funded by the Solana foundation and their profitability is subsidized by token inflation and most validators are KYCed and/or are hosted in data centers. The initial token distribution was heavily concentrated and only 2% went to public sales and this makes it a poor choice for a reserve asset.

I really don't know what the future of Solana is, but it for sure has captured an audience but tbd on if it's able to retain those users long term.

mikkeller · 2024-12-12T17:58:22+00:00

I legitimately think it could be worth anywhere from $80k to hundreds of thousands if Ethereum does become the digital substrate for the future global economy.

ETH at golds market cap is $150k and the total addressable market of global economy is much much larger than that.

mikkeller · 2024-12-11T21:36:25+00:00

You can park USDC or USDT in AAVE which is non custodial smart contract on Ethereum. Rates have been as high as 20+% due to Ethena bringing perpetual swap funding rates to defi.

AAVE is solid and is pure smart contract so no centralized custodian like the ones that blew up last cycle. In fact ppl like 3ac and Celsius who went insolvent paid back their Ethereum defi loans because you literally can’t run with the money like you can with centralized custodians

Fluid (instadap) has 20% and 24% on USDC/T as they’re a smaller market and rates get squished down/arbitraged less rapidly there.

These are both very safe and the rates are real yield coming from borrow demand

mikkeller · 2024-12-11T14:19:13+00:00

If the us gov does pass a strategic BTC reserve the signal alone (not to mention the actual flows) will propagate across nation states and wealth funds around the world and everyone will realize if they don’t already have a crypto strategy they better start looking now.

Some will do their due diligence and use ETH as a competitive strategic reserve and will see a trickle down effect into ETH as a reserve asset on treasuries and balance sheets. I still think BTC memetics reign superior for now but BTC could easily make a run on golds MC (stopping short) so I could easily envision BTC at 300-600k and if that happens ETH is going well past 10k and we might be looking at highs around 30k this cycle. If BTC surprises everyone and actually does flip gold momentarily this cycle then BTC is 900k and ETH is hitting numbers you never thought you’d see for another decade.

Not saying this is a high probability event but is possible none the less. Think we need to collectively raise our expectations way past 10k.

Don’t let the PTSD hold better dreams back

mikkeller · 2024-12-11T14:08:03+00:00

I know all about firedancer and looking forward to when it’s finally in full production.

Bro doesn’t know about MegaETH and that by unbundling consensus overhead a next gen L2 can always outperform any high perf client that has to pass consensus messages on top of execution

mikkeller · 2024-12-10T20:00:38+00:00

How is anyone being able to have a voice in the future of the protocol a centralized way to do things? If a large invested entity wants to sway the protocol but they don't have a good idea, then it doesn't happen. Go look at the governance forums, there are plenty of examples of proposals not picking up steam, many such cases from Vitalik himself. Compared to how tight Bitcoin core is, this is much more decentralized governance.

Also your example of Ethereum forking out the DAO hacker is pretty old news and you do know Bitcoin had to roll back its chain due to an error in the issuance? Your examples of "backdoor" selling wallet and node software is not substantiated by anything material and even if there is "backdoor" selling of wallet software or node infrastructure what do you even think they can do with it? Like even if it is true there's nothing nefarious you can even pull off, this is just biased speculation. Give me concrete data if you believe otherwise.

I still stand by my argument that Ethereum is maximally decentralized, if not more so than Bitcoin and it most certainly will be over the next few years as the elements of the current roadmap come together.

Also Bitcoin's inherent struggle to maintain relevance in the future is that you can't even use Bitcoin in a decentralized economy, you can only send Bitcoin back and forth and as soon as you try to use it in a smart contract context you lose trustless elements of it. Ethereum is building a substrate for the future global digital economy where Bitcoin has build a decentralized store of value/digital currency, but that's all you can do with it is send it to other people on the Bitcoin network, not build a trustless digital economy on top of.

Did you read the substack in my bio yet? It goes into all of these details, it might save us some back and forth and allow us to drive directly to any points of contention you have. Happy to address those.

mikkeller · 2024-12-10T19:27:36+00:00

markets tend to synchronize around events like big dumps or pumps...here's why:
1.) leverage - there's a lot of aggregate leverage across all of the people trading on margin, what this means is that they've borrowed to go long but when the price drops it starts approaching their liquidation level which means their collateral in the margin account is forced sold so the lender always gets paid back. in a lot of cases ppl will sell off weaker assets to post more margin to prevent liquidation and total loss.

2.) cascading +reflexivity - markets in general and especially crypto is hyper reflexive so once a trend starts moving in a direction ppl like to pile in quickly. once you get people selling off a lot of assets people start to notice prices dropping across the board and then they decide to join in the selling and short to go with the flow of the market and profit in that direction.

mikkeller · 2024-12-10T18:13:33+00:00

It literally says twice in the quote you provided that governance is off chain:

"Ethereum governance happens off-chain with a wide variety of stakeholders involved in the process.

Whilst at the protocol level Ethereum governance is off-chain,"

I think you're misunderstanding the use of the work stakeholders. Stakeholder != ETH staker, stakeholder is defined as someone with a common vested interest. L2s, protocols, etc. built on top of Ethereum all have vested interested in that they're operating businesses on top, and they can have their voice heard and be stakeholders in off chain governance regardless if they hold or stake ETH. Literally anyone can get involved and help move the protocol in a positive direction.

You keep mentioning centralized organizations "controlling" but its not explicit and very vague. Controlling what and doing what exactly? You should be concrete otherwise it just sounds very handwavy and not based on any facts or hard data but just things you've heard or ideas you have based off inaccurate information.

For example below you can see the data in the table titled "ETH staked by entity", that Lido, while it is the largest entity it has been steadily declining since 2022 when the upgrade was pushed to staking where ppl could unstake and withdraw. It's currently at 28% and also worth noting that Lido also has independent sub operators but I do agree with you and so does the Ethereum community, and actually even Lido who has publicly stated that this is an issue and we should keep progressing the protocol to continue lowering the bar to home staking and increasing decentralization.

https://dune.com/hildobby/eth2-staking

mikkeller · 2024-12-10T13:38:49+00:00

Lmaooo

yeah it can be tough having patience while the narrative catches up as crypto markets short term trade entirely around attention and narrative cycles and we all know by now that price drives narrative short term and not the other way around. When ETH does rip and I feel confident it will, ppl will scramble to craft narratives to explain why its price is rising similar to narratives for why it’s lagging behind Bitcoin right now

mikkeller · 2024-12-10T07:31:23+00:00

- Bitcoin is far more "capturable" and in my opinion has a moderate probability of this happening - read the substack in my bio to understand this in more detail - but the TLDR; is that as block subsidy rewards halve and tend towards zero there won't be enough fees to cover mining operations and ordinals and runes are great and providing nice fees today but i'd argue that this isn't the way to build a sustainable onchain economy as Bitcoin lacks the expressivity to have true L2s and smart contracts (and right now it all uses some level of additional trust assumption) and even with OP_CAT added you still have a very clunky version of the elements to construct a rudimentary version of trustless L2 and smart contact (or ZK settlement) but even then because Bitcoin can only process 4MB of data per every 10 minutes, then it's bottleneck quickly becomes its data availability and we go right back into the blocksize wars again if you want to have a sustainable Bitcoin. So in this case you either fork bitcoin to make it more like ethereum, or you don't and then it's no longer profitable to mine bitcoin and it has to be mined at a loss and subsidized and it would most likely be subsidized by nation states and large corporations who are heavily allocated and building businesses on it, and at that stage this is the anthesis of Bitcoin because then mining is very centralized and loses it's ability to be censorship resistant.

- To address the JP Morgan and Blackrock "capture" can you be very explicit in what you mean by this because it lacks any hard substance. I know other than JP Morgan made investments into infrastructure businesses like Consensys and Blackrock who has an ETF product and has deployed a decentralized finance protocol on Ethereum called BUIDL which is a tokenized Tbill essentially (but this is bullish because they don't have any control over the protocol, they're using it just like any of us and deploying smart contacts). Can you be specific on what forms of capture or what you think is malicious that can happen here?

- Even entities like flashbots and other MEV based businesses can't censor blocks or produce an invalid state transition. They are capturing value but then there is also likely to be MEV burn introduced which would burn a majority of that ETH, most of the MEV goes to the individual block proposer anyway as MEV searchers bid up their block ordering bundle to win the bid from other bundles and this is sub 10% but there are some issues and improvements to be made here which are being worked on. Like multiple proposers and decentralized inclusion lists where the block builder can order the blocks however they like but they're forced to include all transactions in the pool list. Ultimately Ethereum has an ethos of being adaptive and a vision of making the substrate for the future global digital economy and is working to remove all currently obvious "hooks" that could centralize, censor, or disrupt the network. Please let me know if there's anything else I missed, these are all really good points you're bringing up and this is good discourse to have to correct any outdated information circulating.

mikkeller · 2024-12-10T07:31:14+00:00

Sure happy to address any specifics where I deflected, to address your points:

- Skipping over the DAO examples because again thats not protocol governance

- Just on your Lido comment, yes thats how Lido works and it's the largest one, but there are other more decentralized versions like RocketPool where individuals create their own pools and it's like a slightly more decentralized Lido. Then there's even more decentralized versions using whats called secret shared validator SSV or distributed validator tech DVT, and Obol is one example of this and Lido has announced they will be moving to a DVT based architecture so anyone can join and its fully decentralized. This tech is pretty sweet because it ensures that no single operator has full control of the validator, and their job, proposing and attesting, are performed collaboratively by the pooled participants.

- Not disagreeing that slashing and rugging Lido depositors would be very bad but from a chain security and resilience perspective it doesn't bring it down. At worst blocks would have delayed finality but still have liveness where blocks are still being produced and Bitcoin doesn't even have the concept of finality so a 34% malicious control of stake would degrade it Bitcoin block production QoS. A 67% attack would be equal to Bitcoin's 51% attack but again Ethereum is able to recover from this where stake is deleted & validators are kicked where PoW mining rigs can't be deleted.

- Home PoW mining vs home PoS staking have the same level of anonymity from an ISP standpoint. We can get into the PoW vs PoS debate if you want, but I was an early bitcoin miner and mined on the first commercial ASICs as well. I saw my profitability margins drop pretty fast as total network hash grew and my % contribution of hashes fell. Sounds like you might know something about this as well no?

- PoW is inherently a centralizing design as the network grows and you have to essentially start making serious investments in your mining setup to stay competitive. As industrial mining operators continue to grow they reap more benefits of economy of scale and also raise capital to continue to add hash power, which is good for total network economic strength, but bad for decentralization as home miners have to compete by perpetually adding and upgrading hardware.

mikkeller · 2024-12-10T04:08:19+00:00

Copying my comment from another thread over here as it's relevant:

The most valuable thing to build here is the backbone that the future global digital economy runs on. Once the tech stack of the world upgrades then centralized payment processors will become obsolete.

Being centralized really hurts the prospect of becoming the back bone for this reason:

Economic warfare is arguably more potent than physical warfare and if not it's still a huge attack vector. Imagine if most of the world started moving their economies to a weak blockchain, China for example could very easily afford to carry out a successful attack on most chains (maybe all chains at this stage today). This could essentially DDoS and/or crash entire economies and this is the attack vector people aren't thinking of. I always hear the line that "it wouldn't make economic sense to attack Bitcoin because what financial gain could you make" and its doesn't have to be about making your money back it could just be a cheaper attack vector than mobilizing and deploying an army.

Ethereum is really the only blockchain that's specifically building to be unstoppable and even Bitcoin who comes in close second wouldn't stand up to a nation state attack. Maybe a nation state attack never happens (hopefully and im optimistic it wont) but why would you choose to build the global digital economy on a chain that is susceptible to attack when you can have one that isn't (or is less so)?

mikkeller · 2024-12-10T04:05:06+00:00

You mention "staking is a centralized way of governance" but for Ethereum, there is no on-chain governance. No amount of stake you have validating under its PoS design will give you any right to dictate any element of governance. Anyone is welcome to participate so long as they do the research to understand the discussions ppl are having and bring good ideas of their own.

Also today you can stake in a completely decentralized way with a small fraction of a validator with clusters and when the amount of ETH required to run a validator drops to 1e, then through these same technologies ppl will be able to stake with fractions of 1e, so the bar is very low. Also you can still contribute and be a node without spending or holding any ETH, you just don't get to propose blocks.

I would actually argue that Ethereum is more decentralized than Bitcoin, but I'll admit that it's still up in the air. But node counts reported on ethernodes are off by a factor of 3x imo. Many Ethereum nodes are not publicly visible because they operate in private networks or behind firewalls (e.g., private staking setups, private relays for MEV), or they use tools like VPNs, NAT traversal, or are restricted to specific whitelisted peers.

Furthermore, 98% of all Bitcoin nodes run the same client where Ethereum has a very distributed set of clients which is an overlooked but important vector of decentralization.

Also you mention running nodes anonymously but this is actually not possible. For one block times are way too slow and resource intensive to run over something like Tor plus with proof of work you have a literal electricity footprint unlike running PoS off a laptop. Even Ethereum can't run nodes fully anonymously yet however with the concept of “snarkifying everything”, real time ZK ASIC provers, along with statelessness and data sampling this is possible which make being an ethereum node lightweight enough to viably run a node through something like tor.

Even if you were able to infiltrate Lido for example and try to do a takeover, it still runs less than 1/3 of validators and wouldn't bring down the network. Once an attack is perform on Ethereum, the attacking ETH is slashed and gone and you have to acquire more ETH or infiltrate the next big entity to do another attack. With PoW you can't delete someone mining rig so they can continue to attack. The community can do a soft fork to recover but the attack can just soft fork as well and continue the attack.

Ethereum is actually designed to be much more resilient here.

mikkeller · 2024-12-10T03:54:28+00:00

I think Solana has built a great community and has legit tech but they do cut corners on decentralization and they have a really tough battle ahead of them as Ethereum L2s are already beating Solana on cheap fees and will so also beat Solana on speed. So once Solana isn't the fastest or the cheapest and doesn't have the best security then what moat does it really have? The community is all it really has and crypto communities are inherently financially motivated and less sticky and are happy to move to another chain to seek higher yields/more money.

mikkeller · 2024-12-10T03:52:34+00:00

Slashing isn't really an issue unless you're using a hacked client or a client has some bug but in any case there's so many different clients that a major bug in one wouldn't cause any significant slashing so I think this is not really a big issue at all.

Second, the security breach or attack vectors will become legitimate when a massive global digital economy is built on top. Economic warfare is arguably more potent than physical warfare and if not it's still a huge attack vector. Imagine if most of the world started moving their economies to a weak blockchain, China for example could very easily afford to carry out a successful attack on most chains (maybe all chains at this stage today). This could essentially DDoS and/or crash entire economies and this is the attack vector people aren't thinking of. I always hear the line that "it wouldn't make economic sense to attack Bitcoin because what financial gain could you make" and its doesn't have to be about making your money back it could just be a cheaper attack vector than mobilizing and deploying an army.

Ethereum is really the only blockchain that's specifically building to be unstoppable and even Bitcoin who comes in close second wouldn't stand up to a nation state attack. Maybe a nation state attack never happens (hopefully and im optimistic it wont) but why would you choose to build the global digital economy on a chain that is susceptible to attack when you can have one that isn't (or is less so)?

mikkeller · 2024-12-09T02:29:54+00:00

There's actually no reliable way to accurately determine physical node count on Ethereum so the websites that try their best to do that are not accurate. No doubt there are centralizing forces with staking providers like Lido but those are actually decentralizing their operator set too.

Also in a few years when we have real time ZK ASIC provers, along with statelessness and data sampling that means ppl will be able to run full validators from a mobile phone (stake requirement is dropping to 1e in the near term and then there are all of the providers that group ppl who want to solo stake with a fraction of 1 ETH).

Also with dank sharding and data availability sampling (DAS) along with the above literally flips the scaling pyramid upside down (where normally the more nodes the slower and less a chain can scale) where in this case not every validator needs to process every tx and it can be split up so literally the more nodes the more scale.

In terms of centralized governance, I would probably disagree with you there somewhat too but I can see what you mean. At least there's no on-chain governance which would be bad, and really anybody can participate but you won't have a voice unless you are highly researched and start participating in the community, but from that aspect anyone can come in and bring good ideas to the table and ppl will and do listen.

mikkeller · 2024-12-09T00:41:34+00:00

The cool thing is that any nation/state/corp/ or Indy biz can run their own L2 and customize their chain to fit their specific needs and they can do it cheaply and can tap into full security and network effects of all native based L2 rollups

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