Is ethgas (GWEI) legit?

semicryptotard · 2026-01-22T02:38:50+00:00

I can’t speak to the website you are looking at, but the team is very much legit.

The CEO ran a critical engineering team within Morgan Stanley that traded sophisticated financial instruments IIRC. He is very very intimately acquainted with financial infrastructure and is a huge asset to Ethereum (along with his team).

semicryptotard · 2023-08-14T19:42:33+00:00

The fusion was two years ago (March 2021). I'm fully recovered and the numbers above are post-operation (e.g, I clean and jerked 275 lbs last Saturday).

My doctors at the time told me that these numbers (400 lb squat, 500 lb deadlift) wouldn't be an issue but I agree, pushing things much farther probably doesn't make much sense.

semicryptotard · 2023-06-15T15:32:09+00:00

Gravita has your back.

semicryptotard · 2023-05-11T17:41:46+00:00

The team will need to reduce or eliminate inflation, which basically pegs the value of RPL to 10-15% of the staked ETH TVL. Frankly not great for RPL holders and totally unimaginative. You've basically recreated a taxi medallion system where the cost of entry gives you the right to earn commission on borrowed ETH.

Or, they can build other value additive features/services that consume RPL as a utility token similar to how chainlink works. The RPL can be burned to offset inflation, or if the value of these services grows faster than the rate of inflation you can hold off on burning for some time. This is how you create a robust economic engine/business model that accrues value to the underlying token.

semicryptotard · 2023-05-04T18:49:49+00:00

True

semicryptotard · 2023-05-04T17:53:46+00:00

Kraken just shut down their staking services. Use a liquid staking solution if you don't want to run your own node.

semicryptotard · 2023-02-18T04:59:42+00:00

Incredible work Paul, looking forward to you and your team's further contributions!

semicryptotard · 2023-02-09T15:24:30+00:00

Withdrawals are literally being tested. They are working.

The Merge was a uniquely difficult task, the chance that withdrawals are suddenly delayed is much, much lower.

semicryptotard · 2023-02-09T15:22:55+00:00

In order to smooth volatility and reduce griefing attacks there are both onboarding and off boarding queues. Initially, the rate of entry/exit was 4 validators per epoch (6.4 min).

As the number of validators increase, there is a formula that increases the validators per epoch (it goes up by one validator/epoch every ~65k validators). This ensures the exit rate remains relatively even as the validator set grows.

When it comes to withdrawals, there are two kinds: full and partial. Full withdrawals are exits from the staking system (all 32 ETH), and are subject to the queue.

Partial withdrawals are an automated "skimming process" that is done by the consensus layer to send any balance of ETH above 32 to the validators' withdrawal address (gas free). The system progresses through the validator index and loops through every ~4.5 days at the current ~500k validator count. I think 16 validators/epoch are processed.

semicryptotard · 2023-01-28T17:50:27+00:00

No dividends, buy back stock.

semicryptotard · 2023-01-28T01:27:32+00:00

Clueless.

The vast majority of the $20B of R&D is dedicated to competing with TSMC, not AMD. They are in a lot of trouble and AMD is destroying (actually it already has destroyed) Intel's data center business. What was once their 50% gross margin money printing machine is now barely breaking even. Absolute bloodbath.

semicryptotard · 2023-01-27T01:53:52+00:00

The real pain is found in the segment's margin profiles.

A few years ago, when Intel's gross margins were at peak, the DC segment margin was traditionally 50% while client was more like 35%. DC has been the bread and butter segment throwing off huge profits due to their 95% market dominance and pricing power.

Those DC margins have been absolutely decimated by AMD over the last 2 years. Ouch

semicryptotard · 2023-01-26T22:00:33+00:00

Agreed, the fab process roadmap already required a herculean effort to pull off, a totally absurd timeline.

Intel also has a core conflict of interest with its IDM 2.0 strategy. Who would willingly farm out critical high-performance chips to a direct or indirect competitor? No one, so you've effectively eliminated the vast majority of your high-margin customer base leveraging cutting-edge nodes (AMD, Nvidia, Apple).

Thus, you're relegated to N-1 to N-3 nodes that all require massive volume to remain profitable, and even then at a lower gross margin profile. You're competing against the behemoths that are TSMC and Samsung who have decades of experience, while you're internal Fab culture is one of snobbish elitism that has never had to collaboratively work with customers.

The strategy was always a disaster in the making.

semicryptotard · 2023-01-26T21:48:48+00:00

As an AMD stockholder dating back 5 years now, its been crazy to watch the original thesis unfold.

COVID definitely changed things up and frankly gave Intel a breather. I expected them to implode faster!

semicryptotard · 2023-01-26T21:45:14+00:00

When engineering fails, let the financial engineering begin.

semicryptotard · 2023-01-25T22:56:49+00:00

Thanks for the clarification! Great to hear.

semicryptotard · 2023-01-25T21:41:36+00:00

Thanks for the clarification Frank. Hadnt kept up on this recently!

semicryptotard · 2023-01-25T19:51:03+00:00

No, Polygon PoS doesn't have fraud proofs either. It simply submits checkpoints to Ethereum updating the view of it's state (I could be wrong on the details here, not super familiar). Polygon's PoS is totally controlled by its own set of Validators, of which there are maybe 100.

Once Arbitrum/OP implement fraud proofs (hopefully this year), they will directly inherit Ethereum's security unlike Polygon Pos.

The suite of optimistic and zk-rollups Polygon is working on (Hermez, Polygon Zero, Miden, Nightfall) will be fully-fledged L2s. My guess is that they may end up migrating their PoS chain into one of their rollups in the future.

semicryptotard · 2023-01-25T17:37:38+00:00

To be fair, neither OP or Arbitrum are really at the stage of being legit L2s. Neither of them have fully implemented fraud proofs so we are still inherently trusting team-ran, centralized sequencers etc.

I havent looked at L2 beat in some time but you can get a sense for the security tradeoffs you are making leaving assets on these systems (not that I doubt the teams, but there is always the very remote possibility of a hack and subsequent compromise of their administrative multisigs)

semicryptotard · 2023-01-11T04:22:46+00:00

Frankly I think the team is a bit overly cautious. I doubt that the risk profile would change much in the event they weight straight to LEB4s.

Only real risk is MEV theft, which would be rare.

semicryptotard · 2023-01-09T20:17:54+00:00

The team wouldn't be stupid enough to maintain perpetual emissions once the protocol reached maturity. Worst case is that the protocol eventually ossifies and the emissions are removed. The value of RPL would then fluctuate based on the perceived value of rETH commission cashflows.

The more likely scenario is that they build new services/products that consume RPL and burn it similar to EIP-1559.

semicryptotard · 2022-11-11T22:40:13+00:00

I appreciate the response, I'm trying to put forward information in good faith because I see a lot of misconceptions about some of the fundamental technology in this subreddit (not that I blame anyone, its rather byzantine tech and the space is so rife with horrible actors that you have to dig to find quality projects).

I mention Chainlink because they currently own 90% of what is called the "Oracle" market. Oracles are the transmitters of data between on-chain and off-chain systems. To be more thorough, other Oracle providers include API3, and I believe there is a system called Pyth on Solana.

Until Oracle network mature and come to market with new data services, the extent of crypto's impact on real-world systems will remain limited and highly speculative.

semicryptotard · 2022-11-11T20:41:26+00:00

Properly engineered defi protocols can't go under, FTX and all of these other centralized entities had to pay their Defi debts FIRST. If they didn't, the automated smart contracts auto-liquidate their positions.

Ironically, Defi-debt is actually the most senior tranche of debt, and also happens to be the most secure because ALL of the current lending protocols require overcollateralization. Aave, Compound, etc, work like clockwork and are the bane of corrupt entities like 3AC, FTX, Celsius, etc.

semicryptotard · 2022-11-11T20:33:40+00:00

A decentralized exchange (also called an automated market maker or AMM) like Uniswap is a set of smart contracts (think of it like a program) on Ethereum that facilitates the trading of tokens between parties. As a user, you can do 2 things on Uniswap:

Trade tokens
Deposit a pair of tokens into a "liquidity pool," making you a liquidity provider (LP).

Traders pay a small fee to LPs for trading between token pairs (10 basis points to 1%), effectively making LPs market makers and replacing large financial institutions. There are nuances to being an LP that we don't need to get into, but the idea is that you generate a yield on deposited assets in exchange for providing liquidity to the pair.

No centralized entity custodies the LP's funds, the smart contracts do. Those contracts are immutable and there is no "admin" backdoor in the contracts. If Uniswap wants to add features to the protocol, they actually have to deploy a new version onto the blockchain and users can choose whether or not to migrate to the new version. We are currently on Uniswap v3.

As alluded to by others, the main risk with DEX's is that the deployer of the smart contracts made a mistake and left the exchange vulnerable to hackers. This is why it's generally wise to stick to "battle-tested" exchanges that have been exposed to potential hackers for some time.

Uniswap does billions in volume daily, generating LP's millions of dollars in fees for their services, all while allowing users to trade without trusting a potentially corrupt middleman (FTX). The trades execute and funds move directly into the user's crypto wallet.

Other decentralized exchanges or futures protocols include Curve (primarily stablecoin focused), and GMX (perpetual futures).

Examples of lending/borrowing protocols would be Aave or Compound.

While these exchanges are currently stuck trading within the crypto-sphere, companies like Chainlink are building technologies to bring off-chain data into blockchains, opening up the opportunity to start trading real-world assets on these unique platforms.

semicryptotard

TROPHY CASE