Guests: Lee Bratcher (twitter.com/lee_bratcher) Ben Hertz-Shargel (twitter.com/benhertzshargel) Host: Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09) Today’s motion is “Bitcoin mining is good for the grid.” Bitcoin advocates think bitcoin is a good invention for many reasons, one of which is that it makes the power grid more robust. In 2021, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas made the claim that Bitcoin is, and I quote, “a way to strengthen our energy infrastructure.” But is it? How exactly does bitcoin mining make the grid more robust? In today’s debate, I wanted to focus more on whether bitcoin is good for the ..read more

Guests: Ed Felten (twitter.com/edfelten) Tushar Jain (twitter.com/TusharJain_) Host: Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09) Today’s motion is “We should always reduce MEV on blockchains." Generally speaking, MEV or Miner Extractable Value is a way for miners to derive additional revenue by executing transactions based on information in the mem pool. For instance, say a miner notices a transaction in the mem pool waiting to be included in a block. Maybe this is a transaction to buy up some cheap Ethereum. The miner can execute that purchase themselves, at the expense of the trader that placed t ..read more

Announcement: I have a new show called “Crypto This Week.” It’s a weekly, five-minute news comedy satire focused on the world of crypto. Check it out on YouTube here: Crypto This Week with Richard Yan Guests: Liron Shapira (twitter.com/liron) Kyle Samani (twitter.com/kylesamani) Host: Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09) Today’s motion is “Web3 is worse than Web2.” Web3 is a new buzzword that’s generated a lot of excitement, but also a lot of confusion and division. You’ve got plenty of intelligent and reputable individuals on both sides, either advocating it as the future or denouncing it a ..read more

Announcement: I have a new show called “Crypto This Week.” It’s a weekly, five-minute news comedy satire focused on the world of crypto. Check it out on YouTube here: Crypto This Week with Richard Yan Guests: Jeff Dorman (twitter.com/jdorman81) Joel Monegro (twitter.com/jmonegro) Host: Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09) Today’s motion is “The industry is growing out of the Fat Protocol Thesis.” The Fat Protocol Thesis was coined by a blog post on Union Square Ventures’ website. The Fat Protocol Thesis postulates that because crypto protocols are investable assets, they will likely captur ..read more

Announcement: I have a new show called “Crypto This Week.” It’s a weekly, five-minute news comedy satire focused on the world of crypto. Check it out on YouTube here: Crypto This Week with Richard Yan Guests: Kain Warwick (twitter.com/kaiynne) Edmund Schuster (twitter.com/Edmund_Schuster) Host: Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09) Today’s motion is “DAOs are better than corporations.” Crudely speaking, DAOs are chat rooms with a joint bank account. More sophisticated DAOs code up treasury management decisions to be dictated by the outcomes of on-chain community voting. DAOs generally opera ..read more

Guests: Giacomo Zucco: twitter.com/giacomozucco Paul Sztorc: twitter.com/truthcoinHost: Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09) Today’s motion is “Toxic maximalism is great for bitcoin.” I hear many no-coiners say that “the worst thing about bitcoin is the bitcoiners.” They are referring to their negative encounters with staunch bitcoin believers on social media. The criticism is that these bitcoiners are irrational, vicious and annoying, and they attack no-coiners in unison like a coordinated army.  The essence of this behavior is captured by the term: toxic bitcoin maximalism. The idea i ..read more

Guests: Yves Bennaïm: twitter.com/ZLOK George Selgin: twitter.com/georgeselgin Host: Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09) Today’s motion is “It's a bad idea to make Bitcoin compulsory tender.” If you’re somewhat into crypto, you must have heard about El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law that has made Bitcoin a legal tender in addition to USD. With an asterisk. Dictionary definition of legal tender says a legal tender is a money that must be accepted if offered in payment of a debt. But El Salvador goes one step further, and says not only do lenders have to accept payment in bitcoin, but merchants that ..read more

Guests: Bennett Tomlin (twitter.com/bennetttomlin) Sam Kazemian (twitter.com/samkazemian) Host: Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09) Today’s motion is “Algo and fraction stablecoins are flawed.” A good stablecoin can sustainably hold its peg, and recover quickly from a premium or discount. This is a basic requirement for stablecoins.  An obvious design is the bank coin model, where coins are backed 1-to-1 by fiat. But this creates a single point of failure and incurs compliance overhead.  Hence MakerDAO, which made a smart contract driven stablecoin, and is de-coupled from the ba ..read more

Guests: Anatoly Yakovenko (twitter.com/aeyakovenko) Dankrad Feist (twitter.com/dankrad) Host: Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09) Today’s motion is “Security is about maximizing the minimum set of colluding miners.” This is a mouthful. The minimum set of colluding miners is the smallest cartel of dishonest block producers you need to attack a network. Maximizing that set is about increasing the size of such a successful cartel, essentially making it harder for block producers to collude. Note this debate statement leaves out full nodes. And that’s the essence of this debate: Are they import ..read more

Guests: Bob Hockett (twitter.com/rch371) Larry White (twitter.com/lawrencehwhite1) Host: Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09) Today’s motion is “The US urgently needs to catch up on CBDC.” Central Bank Digital Currencies are sort of like government-run Paypal accounts. They allow the government to do scalpel-like fiscal policies more easily, such as airdropping cash to citizens and stimulating spending. At the same time, CBDC could also allow the government to track individual spending behaviors. China is obviously leading the effort in CBDC adoption for all major countries. As of recording ..read more