Eric Meltzer

If markets thought Tether was insolvent, it would not still be trading (even against USD) at 1:1.

Nano/RaiBlocks is pretty interesting. The big issue they face is figuring out a way to deal with spam attacks that doesn't result in a massive network slowdown or a de facto reversion to being purely PoS.

Decred is actually a cool example of some stuff that Bitcoin will never implement. I don’t own any at the moment but like the project a lot.

Other things I am excited about: MobileCoin is quietly rearchitecting the Stellar Consensus Protocol to have strong privacy guarantees....

One thing that’s interesting is that unlike Bitcoin, which was so maligned and ignored at launch that Satoshi had to mine by himself on a single Intel CPU for most of 2009, there is (by our conservative estimates) $100 million of mostly VC money invested into special-purpose investment vehicles to mine Grin. This does a lot of weird things: It turns a bunch of people who would have been buyers of Grin into sellers of it, it changes the composition of the early holder roster, and it means the chain will launch with an extremely high degree of security via high PoW hashrate.

Despite the big amount of professional investor interest in Grin, the community itself is the closest thing I’ve seen to how the early Bitcoin community felt. The lack of a premine does magic things to human psychology; when you are doing free work for something that someone else gave themselves a huge bag of, you feel like a chump! When you do free work for something that everyone has a fair chance to mine, you feel like you’re part of a tribe, and that effect is in full swing with Grin. Wallets, decentralized exchanges, stats pages, etc., are all popping up, and our Grin community channel has smart devs asking what they can build every day.

If you just look at Twitter, you’d think Lightning is the only real layer 2 proposal for Bitcoin, but I think Cosmos actually presents a fascinating alternative, with very different tradeoffs.

Imagine a Cosmos zone with a validator set (maybe the ATOM validators, or maybe not) who control a Bitcoin multisig wallet. There are a lot of ways you could choose these validators (with a staking token, using BTC itself as a stake, or even with some variant of Proof of Work) but you can use this basic framework to have a zone where users can send Bitcoin, and then use it in ways that mainchain bitcoin can’t be used, for example in complex smart contracts that extend functionality beyond what Bitcoin Script allows.

Something that’s always put me off about a lot of the ETH ecosystem is that seemingly every new project comes with a new, increasingly illiquid token. Cosmos plus Bitcoin gives us the chance to create things like prediction markets without needing a new token at all—and using the single cryptocurrency that is most “money-like” as a result of its superior liquidity and acceptance.

Something that’s always put me off about a lot of the ETH ecosystem is that seemingly every new project comes with a new, increasingly illiquid token. Cosmos plus Bitcoin gives us the chance to create things like prediction markets without needing a new token at all—and using the single cryptocurrency that is most “money-like” as a result of its superior liquidity and acceptance.