Ethereum Merge Fails to Impress White House
Even with ever evolving hoops to jump through, the DC regulatory community remains ominously crypto averse - now questioning whether crypto is an 'innovation' at all
Impossible to please two-faced public policy class, many of whom are the literal descendants of the central bank monopoly founded in 1913.
Lol.
Coinbase alone has 103 million verified users, the total crypto ecosystem may be 3 or 4 times bigger according to some estimates.
And they think they’ll silence all of us with rancid red herrings that were discredited back in like 2015?
Lol^2.
Discussed the recent fallout from ETH’s merge — its transition to proof of stake — on today’s podcast episode.
And here’s what I had to say in the newsletter about all this:
…the current Governor of Colorado, about five hours ago, congratulating ETH on the successful switchover - and noting that the software upgrade could end up reducing TOTAL worldwide electricity consumption... as in, electricity used by all humans on the planet for all things (not just mining), could drop by 0.2% or more ... all thanks to this upgrade.
That shows how embedded in the global economy Ethereum has already become.
It's exactly like Steve said all those years ago, the world values you or thinks of you as 18 months behind where you're really at internally and metaphysically. And that's not a precise measurement; I'm not implying the world looks at crypto precisely 18 months behind where it is actually at in terms of achievement and acceptance. Not implying that at all.
But the broad concept applies, I think: the world just ain't valuing us fully yet.
Among independent media, there's a crypto blindness, if not outright hostility toward it.
That's why you have FULCRUM.
That ETH proof of stake upgrade is significant. The SEC has signaled it may be interested in regulating ETH more now that it is proof of stake; this doesn't make a lot of sense, and may be a genuine overstep. Peercoin - the first proof of stake crypto - has been around for many years, and the SEC hasn't objected to its existence or the proof of stake mechanism that makes it possible.
Here, for months, they (the old folks in Washington) say they want crypto to be more eco friendly... and here ETH unrolls this incredible eco friendly thing... and now they go tsk-tsk, this could mean more scrutiny. C'mon.
Not the SEC's role to pick winners and losers, as some of its own commissioners have noted in recent years. Rather, it's their role to enforce and adjudicate around existing laws and regulations, and for years DC regulatory folk have given the marketplace the sense that ETH is sufficiently decentralized and people don't hold it merely nor primarily to derive profit from a specific enterprise - rather, it's a commodity-like currency thing - so it'd be disingenuous and would show bad faith to drastically alter their view of it now. Now that it's eco friendly, and has achieved the technologically difficult.
There are fintech lawyers who can make this argument in a formal setting, I'm sure.
The great thing about America is that the market ultimately decides.
Instead of mining determining/maintaining balances on the network, balances on the network that are 'staked' can now be used to maintain the network data (such as balances) & validate new data. That's significant, if you have been following crypto you know why. Crypto has now become purely a subdomain of mathematics and code, at least with ETH, and it's no longer tied to the physical universe - with its energy constraints and pesky environmental concerns - at all.
Vitalik created the digital perpetual motion machine, perhaps, because now even mining bans or ecological restrictions can't stop the cryptoverse from soaking up more and more of the 'real economy,' as it were.
The politics in Americana are bleak, poor Pillow getting FBI hassled when he tries to relax at his sacred Hardee's.... his spiritual brother Orange Man threatening vast "problems... the likes of which perhaps we've never seen" (actual quote!) if he's indicted, how unifying and statesman-like of a former President to be threatening society at large! Oh wait, King Lear demented level outburst. Lol.