Anybody listen to this Bankless ETH is Ultra Sound Money podcast? They made some interesting points but it also seemed like 2hrs of pro-ETH, anti-BTC propaganda. I'm looking for some rational counters to the arguments made. Will probably listen again to solidify my views, just wondering if anybody as a take on it.


https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/-ultr...y-justin-drake

Prob hit ATH today.

Berlin upgrade in 2 weeks.

I think bitcoiners vastly underestimate the potential of ethereum as the money of the internet, which is imo better than "digital gold".

A common argument from bitcoiners goes like this: "I don't care about ethereum because the TAM is too small -- BTC is a store of value, which is by far the largest use case, and BTC is the far and away frontrunner there"

Where they're wrong is the use case for Ethereum is a superset of BTC -- BTC enables a censorship-resistant store of value. Ethereum enables a censorship-resistant new economy, with its own native store of value (ETH). In Ethereum, ETH can be used as: collateral in DeFi, stake in PoS, gas for transactions. Value of network is a function of users, users are a function of what you can do on the network, what you can do on the ethereum network far >> what you can do on Bitcoin network.

The main counter-arguments to Bankless are:
-BTC immaculate conception/fair launch is more socially scalable (I agree with this, but think maximalists far overestimate this, as IMO the long-tail of users who will eventually use crypto thru frontends that abstract away the complexity will not know or care about the virgin birth origin)
-ETHs monetary policy is not set in stone and therefore could be mismanaged. Reality is no one knows what MP is or isn't sustainable, so Ethereum has gone with "minimum necessary to secure the network" whereas BTC has gone with "decreasing every 4 years, eventually 0". With EIP-1559 Ethereum could have net negative issuance while still having a healthy validator budget. Also worth noting, both BTC and Ethereum monetary policy are determined by social consensus. Both could be changed if enough people/nodes agreed. The idea that BTC MP can't change (because it hasn't so far) while ethereum's can is delusion.
-the BTC narrative "digital gold" is far easier to understand than Ethereum, which is very complicated (also agree with this, but I think taking that side is betting on stagnation instead of progress. The people with these views never thought Ethereum would get where it is now with a flourishing dapp ecosystem)
-ETH won't scale (this is possible, we'll see)

Ez game

https://research.parsec.finance/posts/uniswap-v3-vs-LOB

Will doesn't blog very often, but when he does it's always a good read. Some thoughts on the DEX space and Uniswap v3 design.

noob question and it's a double whammy

just went to purchase 1k of eth for various stuff like topshots and found the fees just to buy it and such would be about $40 and then any time i moved it or made purchases with it, there'd be more fees

whole thing doesn't seem sustainable having to pay a cover charge anytime i want to do anything, that's some serious rake

1. am i doing this wrong, are there fee free or insigificantly low fee eth transactions
2. how will eth platform sustain itself if prices continue to rise and fees are attached to eth not dollars

You are doing it right, on the weekends and during certain times (early morning in Europe) fees are almost always lower.
There are several upgrades to the ETH platform planned already, in two weeks we will have the first step with the Berlin upgrade.

how are you trying to buy?

I'd suggest using coinbase pro.

If you want to play with topshots, you can just use a credit card.

Simple ETH sends aren't very expensive as they only cost ~21,000 gas. More complex smart contract interactions are quite expensive, though, so you need to factor fees into your transactions.

Fees are decoupled from the ETHUSD price via the `gas price` mechanism; fees simply come down to demand for blockspace relative to how much blockspace is available. ETH will [attempt to] sustain itself by scaling. There are already many layer2 options with very low fees (xDAI, Loopring, Matic, Starkware) available with more and more coming soon (Optimism, Arbitrum). PoS will also help, and at some point when there's enough testing to conclude it is safe, the block gas limit will likely be increased (creating more blockspace).

Do you think UNI v3 will push people/demand to Sushi? Everything I’ve read on v3 is it’s an institution/VC wet dream. Retail can’t compete anymore, code is no longer open sourced etc.

No. Uni v3 is 10x better. Secondly, Uni v2 will go on forever. The contracts are non-upgradable, so that will continue to compete with Sushi.

Uni v3 will:
-allow market makers to compete to provide tighter quotes, which will ultimately give traders a better price. Better price -> aggregators route trades there
-more liquidity around the spot price will also eliminate most sandwich attacks on retail; for many this is likely invisible value leakage to parasitic traders they're not aware of/don't understand
-very low fees on Optimistic rollup (L2)
-more fee tiers fixes the mis-parameterization uniswap had from the start with fixed 30bp fee which allowed them to be disintermediated by Curve.
-massive improvements to their price oracles will allow them to gain market share there (though still not a good oracle for many use cases)
-code is still open, just can't be forked

You are correct though that Uniswap v3 is bad for "lazy liquidity"; those people will likely be better off on Sushiswap while it is subsidized, but that will not last forever. Ultimately, appealing to pro MMs who are providing 7-8-9 figures is more important because it leads to traders getting better prices and not getting exploited by sandwich attacks. Also re: volume, should note that Uniswap v2 has much more native volume, and much more organic liquidity.

Was going to write on the top paragraph that uni2 continuing to exist will lead to less volume on uni2 and uni3 individually, which is good for aggregators.

You captured that in the last quoted sentence.

I'm bullish on 1inch. Imo it's the best aggregator right now. Given bullishness on 1inch, the 1inch farms are particularly attractive. 1inch-eth and 1inch-wbtc are around 90% apy.

Some other aggregators don't have tokens yet and are good to use in hopes of a retroactive drop.

When purchasing try to do so via a limit order on coin base pro, might save u the std 3 to 5% rake.

Eth fees generally go up as the network get cluttered with new money. It will get worse before it gets better, fees were redic during previous ATHs and some stupid kitty swappy thing. Look at coins like tron etc for low fee movement between exchanges etc. Enjoy.

On a side note :

I have a theory that live testing is happening to see how far up the creek they can jam up network when **** starts getting “sold” for whimsical values

So I am playing around with providing liquidity, mainly just learning & exploring the downsides/risks. Seems it's far better to utilize a stablecoin pairing because you don't have two coins that can go wild in the opposite direction?

Also, what do you guys think about Quickswap? I've been bullish on matic forever, involved in meme/game projects that run on it, and have only used it to basically transact & offload profits back to mainnet so far. I'm still a DeFi noob but have dipped my toes in a few pools here on quickswap just because the gas fees are essentially non-existent, and I don't want to make any real plays for $50 gas fees & the requisite EV-viable amounts until I'm ready.

I'm vaguely aware of the downsides of just focusing on Quickswap pools for now, and fine with it as a learning tool, but if anyone can comment ELI5 donwsides it would be greatly appreciated.

Feels like this "no-rake" environment incentivizes the type of guys to participate that won't benefit a noob like me, whereas higher gas is not necessarily a downside if it hinders streamlining from the pros (although it basically benefits whales/big transactions whose gas fees are negligible I guess). Maybe I'm way off-base here and gas-less situation is better, yet can't get it done with the lessened security involved with running a layer 2, which produces lower liquidity situations, etc.

I tried all those sidechains and they all look identical to me. Literally no difference between xDai, BSC and Matic. Avalanche seems a little different?
I also tried layer 2 via zkswap and it was a bad experience. My expectation was that once you are on layer 2 you are on layer 2 but you have to interact with layer 1 A LOT.

For me it would be very hard to say on which horse to bet on so I decided to bet on ETH. In regards to all the other layer 1 blockchains: As far as I can tell there is a lot more development on polkadot than on all the other the chains

Wow I bought the top and the price continued to go up.

First time for everything!

UNI is in a dominant position but I think SUSHI, 1INCH and UNI are all excellent investments short-, medium- and long-term.

The fees pay for themselves when there are 1x-100x investment opportunities out there.

Scaling solutions are currently being implemented. dYdX's just launched today, for instance:

dYdX's Layer 2 Goes LIVE

Which ones are you looking at?

I've my eyes on:

- Opensea
- Zerion
- DMEX
- dYdX

I've interacted with Zerion, DMEX and dYdX. Always looking for other potential airdrops.

This is true. I am huge on DOT. I think it hits 1K pretty easily in the long-term. DOT and KSM must be apart of any portfolio imo.

Paraswap
Metamask
Zapper
Saddle
...

Frankly I am a DeFi noob, in terms of high-volume/serious projects. I will do more research on dYdX.

But why are more people not talking about Matic/Polygon? It looks like at a minimum this will be used for a lot of the gaming/NFT platforms on ethereum (it literally has been for the past few months). Quickswap is doing impressive volume, although it appears to me that L2 competition FUD has stifled past-month growth (among other stuff like NFT blow-off top). My user experience of matic mainnet has been wonderful after being on uniswap/eth mainnet last year, and I've greatly enjoyed a few new projects over here.

Are we just heading to this landscape of different "countries", like bsc, matic, dydx, etcetera?

What do you mean? MATIC is huge. Rank 67th in marketcap. Up nearly 4x since February '21. Plenty of eyeballs on MATIC. I think it's pretty fairly valued.

xDai STAKE is what you want if you're looking for the "next MATIC." Perpetual Protocol, Bao Finance, others (being lazy right now, sorry) are building on it. Last I checked it had more transaction volume on it than MATIC.

There are a ton of scaling solutions. Have you read this yet?

i have a few btc sitting in a ledger doing nothing right now. you recommend a 1inch-wbtc pool? What makes you like 1 inch over say matcha as an aggregator? i'm fairly risk tolerant.

I like it. Don't believe there are any matcha pools that give apy. They might give out a token at some point so using it would be good in case there's a retroactive token.

If you don't want any IL risk, you can put your BTC on Badger or Yearn. There are other pools that have IL risk. Personally, I like 1inch so I'm not too worried about IL risk in terms of having less btc, and the apy is juicy.

https://beincrypto.com/1inch-network-launched/

1INCH and SUSHI are really doing big things. (And UNI, too, obviously.) Did you qualify for the 1INCH airdrop?

https://defipulse.com/

Click 'DEXes'

One of only 7 DEXes listed there with at least $100M locked.

Other resources worth checking out to help answer these questions (not to imply that TVL is everything, however):

https://defillama.com/home

https://duneanalytics.com/home

https://www.tokenterminal.com/

Noobish question, are you guys staking your ETH? Pros and cons? Best options on where to stake?

Are you interested in just staking or more broadly earning yield on it? I'm farming with most of my ETH. I'd be mindful of creating a tax event when exchanging for a different token.

Here are some solid medium risk/reward ideas for farming:
crvSETH or crvSTETH on Yearn - ~20% in underlying
KeeperDao - ~10-20% in ROOK
Vesper - ~20% in VSP (.6% withdrawal fee)

Here are some reasonable options for staking:
Sharedstake - ~30% in SGT
staked.us
rocketpool

I was staking eth on various platforms but it's better to just lend it out on aave and borrow stable and farm the stable for > 100% apy