Eric Wall

A *Byzantine* *fault* *tolerant* consensus system's whole purpose is to be designed to handle ANY error or malicious behavior from a subset of the nodes and still reach consensus. In NEO, their system couldn't handle the most simple error of one node.

I am not convinced by Cardano's base-layer security. AFAIK, it's non-slashing PoS (slashing appears to be not decided on yet but unlikely?). I'd be very curious to learn how this doesn't introduce an array of trust assumptions and attack vectors.

PoW is only secure if an attacker can't conceivably amass 51% hashrate. BCH was *never* secure. This hashwar drama is just a symptom of the broader underlying problem. Reorg protections can't fix it. In reality, BCH's best bet is a hash function change or even a switch to PoS.

Binance is the world's fastest profitable unicorn. But can anyone riddle me how their $15MM ICO wasn't an illegal securities offering? Some facts about BNB coin:

- ERC20 token
- Offered to the public
- Founders kept 40%
- Clearly sold as an investment
- ICO before a live product

If you are satisfied with a solution where the consensus among a small group becomes canonical for the rest of the network, then both XRP or Bitcoin SV are good solutions for you (most cryptocurrency enthusiasts aren't).

A tailor-made token for a specific use case never makes sense. It goes against the fundamental idea of money. People don't want to have accept payment in things they can't use elsewhere. It's a limitation, not a feature.

To trade in one currency and settle in another requires a liquid market for CVC to other currencies. Who do you think is going to provide that liquidity? Probably someone earning on the spread = hidden fees. For the users, this is the opposite of an optimal economy.

TRX & BTT's primary use case is a public crowdfunded marketing campaign to get Justin Sun's face on as many things as possible and next to as many famous people as possible.

[Chainlink is] just a multisig oracle service. Like Provable Things + weighted average. Similar to MakerDAO price feeds. Except they require the dumbest 2017-style ERC20 utility token called LINK for queries, so of course it has a "community"....it's just Provable Things + a weighted average? It's like 10 more lines of code. This doesn't need a token, in fact, a different token required to use the system makes this thing embarrassingly overcomplicated and worthless.

It's like, you want Kin to be a cryptocurrency. But you don't want users or even the apps that they use Kin to use cryptocurrency nodes. If you don't have that, then there's no trust-minimization, no security and we're back at an in-app points system.

It doesn't help the users of Kin that a couple of large stakeholders somewhere run Kin full nodes if no one is doing it on their behalf. If no one is doing that, it doesn't help them at all that there's a blockchain or that the blockchain is federated.

DPoS chains such as Tron make an extreme trust-dependency trade-off compared to other chains to reach higher throughput. Now, despite having made this brutal trade-off, it can't even handle a single dapp (BTT) without spinning up a separate chain.

XRP incurs no in-protocol economic costs for creating conflicting blocks and has no permissionless way for new block producers to enter the system. It is also too heavy to validate as a full node so you have like 1 community full node....

The TON blockchain whitepaper made me wish I could unlearn how to read.

How Dai works (I think):
1. Have $200 ETH, get +$100 leverage from MakerDAO
2. Have $200 ETH + $100 Dai
3. Oops your ETH crashes to $149
5. MakerDAO liquidates $100 of your ETH (+13% penalty)
6. You get the remaining $36 ETH back
7. You now have $100 Dai + $36 ETH

If you had done absolutely nothing with your ETH, you'd have $149. Now you have $136. Your loss: $13 (plus some minor slippage and tx fees, so maybe $15 in practice).

EOS is just a permissioned blockchain with some voting involved to elect the nodes. If you don't care about your users having time to validate the chain, [EOS's] 810 [transactions per second] is a joke. Permissioned chains have been known to be able to do over a million tps since 2016.

I don't want to recommend people to get paid in XMR because the lower meta-anonymity set, the illiquidity, and lack of infrastructure around it. And I'm not a fan of a multicoin future, it's not good for currency to be splintered. It's better if we get BTC working for the job.

What's going on with NMR? Seem like ~all recent volume coincided with their recent stock picking tournament announcement. Is there anything "real" here except for low-effort Sybil marketing roulette?

So everyone knows that IOTA has been turned off for >12 days now, but do you also know that:
- the main client (Trinity) was actually a Trojan because of a compromised third-party dependency?
- all private keys that used this client are potentially stolen?

8,500,000,000,000 iotas (~$2 million) were successfully stolen before the IOTA Foundation could pull the plug on the Coordinator. They have no idea how many private key seeds have been stolen yet; there's a big chance more theft is waiting when it reboots.