Optimism removing whitelist, EIP-4488 chat and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #272 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 13th of december 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so the last all-core devs call of the year was held last week on friday and it was a big one uh you know how i've been talking about eip 4488 uh the one that was going to reduce the cost of roll-ups at layer one ethereum uh that has kind of sorry there's kind of been a decision made around when that will actually be going on to mainnet and it will be post merged now so after the merge it will not be before the merge i did speculate before that i thought that it should go you know i thought that it could happen before the merge and personally i

thought that it should happen before the merge but there are a lot of kind of like good reasoning given in the old call devs call about why that shouldn't happen and i mean the tldr you can read this thread but the tldr is that the merge should literally be the number one priority it's what everyone's working towards right now we really really need to to just get it done and dusted and over with because that's the biggest thing to get done to enable everything else um you know for a variety of reasons and we shouldn't just kind of like go off course like you know we're basically on this course we're all kind of like heading down the same lane right now and if we were to kind of diverge and just do like a d2r then it would obviously delay the merge and and kind of like push that back even

further i think the core devs estimated that it would delay the merge much more than a couple of weeks probably even you know up to two months or something like that so it's obviously not a path that we want to go down so the decision was made that 44.88 can be considered for an upgrade after the merge it doesn't mean that it's actually gonna have been approved or anything like that it just means that uh there's gonna be no more upgrades until the merge essentially so and that's what this thread kind of like describes among a bunch of other things here but uh yeah i mean that was kind of like the main takeaway and you know i mean at the end of the day like the core devs have their own opinions and at the end of the day they're also the ones that code up the upgrades for for

things to go into clients and stuff like that so you know they're kind of like well we don't have the time to do both right now like they're they they're not they're a limited set of people you know being a core dev is a very kind of like um specialized job so they're kind of prioritized doing the merge over this 4488 this is not them saying we don't want yeah 4488 we don't want this to happen but it's saying that well look we all the community already agreed that the merge should be the next upgrade for ethereum let's just stick to that let's not kind of derail things and that's exactly what seems to be going on going on here so no kind of like dates given around the merger or anything like that we did have arrow glacier which is pushed back to the difficulty bomb to

june and the difficulty bomb is actually going away with the merge so if we can merge in june it would actually be ideal because uh we can kill two birds with one stone because if we don't merge in june what ends up happening is that we'd have to have a separate network upgrade to push back the difficulty bomb again then we'd merge and it just becomes a bit of a you know a logistical mess so if we do the merge in june and we kind of like get rid of the difficulty bomb in june as part of that uh it's just kind of like nice and simple and clean but in saying that they're not going to go ahead with the merge if uh they don't feel comfortable doing so just just to kind of like have that clean transition i mean pushing about the back the

difficulty bomb is trivial merging the two ethereum networks is not trivial definitely something that's not been done before and need to get it right uh more than kind of like uh you know pushing back a difficulty bomb there so yeah that's another scenario that could happen but i'm still sticking to my q2 kind of prediction for the merge nothing has changed on that front just yet we'll see how it goes like i think their long live devnet is getting stood up this week i believe so that'll kind of like run through the holidays and we'll have like a much better idea of timelines i think after that like if that all goes well if no one's able to break it if it just runs really really smoothly then it just gives us a kind of like much better idea of what the you know what the

timeline for the merge is going to look like so yeah that was the update there from the old core devs call and then paulina also pulled out a tweet thread after this you know after seeing that 4488 is now coming post merge um but this tweet thread basically goes through what the other avenues are to lower fees on rollups now i've talked about a few of these before but the main points that polynomial goes through is basically optimizations and call data compression which arbitrary nitro um you know is coming to to base basically hard fees uh optimism is working on it and also with the ovm 2.0 upgrade they've already done a few optimizations but you know neither of our arbitrary optimisms are doing core data compression right now i believe uh while it's supporting bls signature aggregation sorry bls signatures arbitram can enable it easy

1k you know 1000 gas reduction which is not negligible there uh basically getting more people to move to roll ups incentivize you know incentivize people to use them because then the greater usage on rollups leads to lower fees uh so as i've discussed before you know the fees are amortized across users so it actually works differently to layer one uh and and basically we all get cheaper fees the more kind of like usage is up there and there's a bunch of other things in here that play in our notes which is which is obviously pretty cool i like like sharding and things like that you can get you can go give this this um this full thread a read here uh uh for kind of like polyness thoughts but um yeah it's not like you know some people might be thinking wow okay 44.88 was such an awesome

upgrade it would make rollups five times cheaper to use uh and you know benefit everyone and now you know some people might be thinking ah damn like now we're gonna have to kind of like wait even longer i guess i have like two kind of like arguments against that one the merge i think is more important to be honest uh as much as like high fees uh hurting users at layer one i'm gonna have to like if i had to choose the merge is definitely more important and the thing is we had to choose like there was no you couldn't do both so there was a decision made that the merge is more important and i believe so for a variety of reasons and probably the number one reason is that we need to get off proof of work we we cannot stay on proof of work like it's

been way too long for ethereum the merge should have happened you know a little while ago uh if if all timelines you know and software were you know when it went to schedule but uh yeah the merge is definitely more important and the second thing is that i honestly don't think that we're there yet in terms of like getting mass mass migrations to roll-ups because we don't have all the centralized exchange bridges in just yet there there's not a lot of new users pouring into the ecosystem right now because the markets are quiet we have time i think uh as much as obviously the layer one fees they're low today i mean they're about 30 gray right now but you know generally they're obviously higher than that as much as they're like really crappy and still way too expensive um in terms of like a

level of importance i do think the merge is more important because then 44.88 can just be kind of implemented after the merge and in a much kind of like calmer and and less rushed fashion as well and by then the l twos will be kind of like i mean you know in six months time the l twos are going to be way better than what they are today i think they're probably going to be in the process of decentralizing themselves we're gonna have many more of them live they're probably already doing call data compression and then this you know 4488 will actually have like a much larger impact than it would of right now which is which is also really cool so yeah i mean there are arguments for and against but i do believe i i i do believe pretty strongly that the merge is the most

important thing right now there is nothing more important for ethereum let's just get that done and then we can kind of like go into all these other upgrades as time goes on all right so big news out of optimism they're finally going to be removing their white list very soon so i've been talking about their white lies for a while saying that it's been holding them back but they announced on twitter on i think this is saturday uh they basically said that the whitelist is going away very soon now obviously it's not gone away yet but very soon meaning maybe this week or next week or something like that i'm sure it would be nice to get it done before the uh the end of the year and for those of you who don't know the white list is basically um preventing uh just anyone from deploying

onto optimism you have to go through kind of like signing up i guess like signing up on a form or kind of like putting your details in a form in order to launch on optimism and it just adds overhead whereas arbitrary doesn't have that right now and optimism won't have that in the future and optimistic ethereum so anyone will be able to deploy any kind of like arbitrary code they want to the network which is obviously going to lend itself to a lot of a lot of new activity on there a lot of new kind of like applications launching um and a lot kind of like faster adoption as well i mean the thing is arbitrary optimism they both obviously don't have tokens right now they don't have token incentives going on so the adoption is kind of like slow-ish because i mean it's still very

early there's a bunch of reasons but like i think that's a big reason but the thing is is that there are other projects that launch that can have their own tokens and incentivize people to bridge across arbitrary's been doing a lot here optimism as well i mean lyra's been doing liquidity mining and a few other kind of things a few other kind of like projects and stuff like that but once you have no why at least how much you have arbitrary code deployment everyone can deploy there and there's no need to kind of like go through the optimism team as a kind of pseudo gatekeeper here uh which is really exciting so awesome news out of them i hope it happens before the end of the year very soon means you know a week to me maybe it means different you know very soon is

ambiguous right like there's a i guess there's a reason they didn't say kind of like one to two you know one to two weeks we'll put a hard number on it but uh i you know i'm hoping it's before the end of the year that'll be really exciting uh and the other thing to talk about with optimism is that or both optimism and arbitrage i should say is that uh remember that uni liquidity kind of like mining uh vote that i was talking about that little cohen had been doing he first did one that kind of like failed and then the second one has had more success well this has passed so basically uh this is the consensus check that has passed so essentially people want it like he's basically saying okay well people want uni liquidity mining on l2 and optimism and arbitrary in order

to kind of like bootstrap some adoption there or i guess like uh turbo charged the adoption there um and then the final on chain vote is coming up soon and that's where gets serious as little cohen says here um and that's when you know once that final vote is done and if it passes that that's when the liquidity mining will happen just like as i mentioned last week um the the vote had passed on chain for getting the unisof v3 onto the polygon pos chain so a lot of cool stuff happening in unistop land on the scalability front this is awesome i mean it's funny because uniswap is already doing a lot of liquidity at layer 2 through irishman optimism but getting liquidity mining rewards on there is just gonna i think uh sorry i should say a lot of volume a lot of liquidity but

that's gonna bootstrap basically the whole ecosystem because not only are people gonna bridge across liquidity to use uni-swap but they're also going to kind of like look and see what else is around this is exactly what happened with ethereum layer one where people came in they brought they brought their assets in they brought their assets on chain and they started doing things because of compound you know liquidity mining or yield farming then um more and more apps you know kind of like came onto the scene and people kind of like interacted with them and it was just basically an and a really big kind of like marketing tool for all the all these ecosystem in in ethereum layer 1. now we're going to do the same thing at layer 2 and could this trigger a true kind of like arbitrary optimism season i think so i mean

ethereum didn't need to issue eighth tokens right as as liquidity mining rewards as a lot of these other l1 networks do so i don't think l2s necessarily have to do have to have their own token um and kind of like issue them as liquidity mining rewards in order to boost strap liquidity i think the app layer can easily handle it if done right and i think doing it through unisop is genius because unisop is the biggest app in ethereum you know still to this day or at least one of the biggest i mean i think it's the biggest in terms like depending on what metric metrics you use but it's huge obviously so um and it has the brand awareness it has kind of like the user base to get people to use it at layer two especially if there's kind of like more uni tokens to be made or uni

tokens to be farmed i'm pretty confident that that would lead to an explosion in liquidity on for uni spot but also an explosion and kind of like activity on all these other apps on these l2 so very much looking forward uh to that so we'll i'll keep you know guys updated on this see what the on-chain vote i see what happens with the on-chain vote for sure so sandeep put out a great tweet before sunday from polygon where he said ethereum is transitioning from a c2u chain to user platform to c2c chain to chain platform via layer 2. as my brother mahalo said ethereum equals web 3 get ready for the mount adoption of web 3. now this is i guess like a really cool i guess like this is really a really um traditional way of kind of

talking about the relationship between ethereum and l2 because obviously with traditional businesses you have like b2b which is business to business or b2c businesses consumer or you can have like you know more complex constructions but those are kind of like the basic stuff there so c2u being chained to user so ethereum kind of like layer one two users is what we're all kind of like used to and and and have been using for quite a while but then there's c2c chained to chain and this is basically another way of saying that ethereum is the settlement layer for these layer two chains so the layer two becomes chain to user all right but the layer one becomes chained to chain where all the layer twos feed into layer one they pay it for security and you know that's obviously

going to price out uh you know every other user uh in the long term and then the users basically do their chain to user stuff at layer two so it's just like altering the relationship there where and in a much better way as well i mean you know even if if if layer one ethereum had cheap fees i still didn't don't think it'd be something that we could scale to to the globe because it has you know 13 second blocks or whatever and 12 second post merge that's not fast enough like no one wants to wait around whereas on the l2s we have like instant confirmation with delayed finality which i think is amazing like i think that's the proper way to do it because obviously as i've said before we get to preserve this decentralization and security of layer one and then push everything else to layer two and that's

exactly what we're doing here we're pushing the chain to use a paradigm to layer two where it makes sense and we're keeping the chain or we're introducing i guess the chain to chain paradigm of the layer one and layer two kind of relationship there but it's also the side chains and the commit chains and anything really that can like bridge and talk to ethereum you know can fall into that category but it makes a lot of sense uh when it comes to layer two is because they obviously inherit ethereum security and decentralization so you could think of it as like ethereum is a business it's selling its services which or its product which is block space to these layer twos and that block space is essentially a very a very scarce assets and these layer twos outbid each other to like every other user on l1 outbids

each other to purchase space in that block so that's the kind of like paradigm shift that's happening right now um and you know in the long term as i've said i believe ethereum l1 will just be a settlement layer for roll-ups and for probably some whale transactions and stuff like that and maybe some high-value nfts but definitely not a regular chain to use a platform that is going to be a layer twos and eventually you know people are going to be interacting with these things just using kind of like interfaces that abstract away all of this they're still going to be using kind of like a blockchain so to speak but they're not even going to be kind of like knowing that they're using it which i think is going to be you know the path to mass adoption which is which i think is really cool

so uh i mentioned polygon zero last week which is the new uh kind of like zk roll up out of the polygon ecosystem that they acquired mia protocol for 400 million um this is a sneak peak of polygon zeros a sub second zk recursive proofs now i mentioned this last week where they were doing proofs in 0.17 seconds on a laptop and in the laptop in this case is a macbook air m1 this is as i mentioned last year this is groundbreaking right the fact that you can do these proofs which is you know very heavy computational wise but the fact that you can do them in sub seconds is an amazing innovation and you know i i can't like i can't like um talk about this enough we'll talk up this enough the amount of zk kind of brain power that polygon has right now

is incredible i mean they have three teams three teams working on zk stuff hermes um polygon zero and polygon maidan are all working towards kind of like the same goal of scaling zk tech to the world and making sure that we can build these robust layer two ecosystems that are really kind of like uh easy to run and we can kind of like get these i guess like issues of expensive proofs and and you know um taking a long time to get these proofs to kind of uh uh generate that we can get them down to you know as much as possible we can improve it here so yeah i mean i'm just so pumped for polygons z keger system i uh i've been pumped for it for like you know since they kind of like acquired hermes and then might and now polygon zero you know

i think they're done at this stage i'm not sure you guys know i'm an advisor to polygon but i'm not privy to kind of like the future acquisitions for obvious reasons and stuff like that but uh i'm not sure if they're done in terms of like acquiring teams uh i would say that if they find another team that they could acquire they probably would but the funny thing is about zk teams is that there's not many of them like there's zk sync there's starkwear and then there's polygons and there's um scroll which is part of the ethereum foundation but really zk teams are some of the scarcest kind of like assets um in this ecosystem because it's such new tech and it's such specialized tech using such kind of like you know moon math that basically uh you you kind of like either need to kind of do mergers

and acquisitions to or i guess like a merger or an acquisition to get them you know as part of your ecosystem or you need to hire people out of it and start up a new team and polygon's obviously gone the route of kind of like acquiring these teams and giving them basically unlimited funding to do whatever they want which i think is the proper approach because that way these teams get to build amazing open source software uh amazing kind of like open source zk tech and they're not kind of like beholden to to kind of like any other kind of like entity which which is obviously amazing but yeah just wanted to highlight here a little teaser of the sub second zk recursive proofs from polygon zero so metamask is teasing another feature in this video here uh they're saying just in time for christmas this is a

feature called transaction insight where it will give you more transparency into your transactions details before approving them now this video doesn't really go into any detail about this it's just like a kind of like teaser screenshot i did ask for a more detailed blog post and they did reply saying that more details will be shared in the coming week which is cool but this is great to see because as i've said before one of the most dangerous things uh um in kind of like not just ethereum land but just like when you're doing stuff on blockchains is signing something and not knowing what you're signing because as i've mentioned before you could be subject to a man in the middle attack where someone has injected a malicious transaction into your into your transaction flow and then you end up signing something that you shouldn't of

and you basically uh send money or deposit money into somewhere that you didn't want to um usually a scammer's address so it's good that metamask is giving a lot more details here on the front obviously the lattice one that i talk about a lot the hardware wallet gives you a lot of details the ledger and trez are basically uh out when it comes to this sort of stuff like i i wouldn't and personally i don't trust them with large kind of transactions uh and largest relative i guess like for for people because it's just it's hard for me to trust them because i'm like okay well i've got no guarantee that there's not some sort of malware on my pc that somehow got there that's going to do a man-in-the-middle attack so i check everything that i sign but uh metamask doesn't give me enough

detail the lattice one does give me a healthy amount of detail and the ledger gives me basically nothing so it's just scary whenever you're doing that and kind of like wondering okay am i signing a transaction that is just gonna rug my entire portfolio right like i don't move around my entire portfolio very often but uh you know some a lot of people do like if you're going to cash out a large chunk and you know you get mad in the middle attacked it's a scary scary prospect because what ends up happening is you could send a large chunk of your portfolio to a scammer and there's no recourse so i'm very glad to see minamas taking this more seriously and introducing more detailed transaction transparency here and i can't wait to see them detail this and kind of like explain how it's all going to work

because i think there's one side of it which is giving the user information and the second side is giving the user the information in a way that they can actually understand it uh because you know you know at the end of the day like most users aren't just going to understand kind of these random variables and random numbers so there should be kind of like a ways to help them understand it um which i hope there is in there but yeah i'll be monitoring this and let you guys know when they publish more details about this so each tbr on aztec has been exploding lately so since september i guess like 2021 it's gone from about what does that look like to me that looks about 300 i would say uh to i guess like 2 000 ethno so pretty pretty nice growth here on aztec which is a

privacy layer 2 protocol as i've talked about before on the refuel now it's always funny when i see these kind of like charts because i kind of think to myself one of two things is it adoption of people actually wanting to use what aztec is kind of building which is privacy payments i think you know a decent chunk of that would be um but is it kind of like also people are farming an airdrop right because we all know that everyone is airdrop farming these days i mean we have a channel for it in the discord server where we basically talk about um different apps that haven't got tokens yet and may have a token in the future as i said before i think everything's going to have a token in the future um and like how do we farm an airdrop for it essentially so i think

that's what you know at least some users are doing but at the same time aztec just keeps kicking goals with their products they keep bringing out new products i mean aztec connect as i detailed last week is on testnet right now i'm sure that'll be on mainnet soon and just generally more people would be hearing about aztec and kind of like onboarding onto there but you know i'd be remiss to say that it's all totally organic there's a lot of people farming air drops of course there's a there's a portion of it where people are farming air drops but uh you know in saying that i think uh when it when it comes to it uh it doesn't really matter at the end of the day it doesn't matter if people are farming ear drops or not they're still using the app they're still using

the protocol and they're still getting use out of it it's kind of like a sales funnel at the end of the day like the prospect of an airdrop is a sales funnel for these kind of apps and i think that's okay i don't think that's a bad thing at all because incentives are what get people to use things in the uh you know at the end of the day like it doesn't matter if it's a monetary incentive or a social incentive or some other kind of incentive people only use things because they're going to get something out of it like for example people only sign up to social media apps because they have an incentive uh a social incentive to do so people a lot of people only use things on chain on ethereum because they have a financial incentive to do so uh so from that

perspective it's all about us incentives right so i don't think it's good or bad i don't make moral judgments on this and i think it's just you know the prospect of an air drop acting as a sales funnel is a funny little little thing but i think it makes a lot of sense and i think it's uh it's a cool a cool little thing that happens you know a unique thing to our ecosystem that happens so brantley from the ens team shared uh kind of like tweet over the weekend where basically he's got a bunch of ens names with profile pictures or nfts on them uh on display in times square in new york i believe so you can basically see here that this was displayed on one of the prominent billboards in times square and basically showing a bunch of nfts with east this is this is super

cool i love this stuff i mean there's a there's a video here of it a better video um i love this sort of stuff the fact that like you have crypto stuff in in such a prominent place is just crazy to me like especially from where i came from in crypto like how small it used to be and then just like seeing it kind of like whenever i see stuff like this like in the real world and kind of like seeing it bleeding into the real world i kind of like take a step back and think to myself wow we have come such a long way from the days of people thinking this was just some fringe thing that no one was ever going to use that was only used for kind of like drugs and criminal activities it's just so amazing when i see stuff like that

we really have come such an amazingly long way and uh you know this isn't the first time something has been up on you know in times square but it's just awesome that uh we can keep doing this like it's awesome that's not a once off thing because there were some things like this during 2017 and i guess like early 2018 where people thought the bull market was still on where it was very flashy but it wasn't it wasn't like this it was more kind of like spammy icos or scammy icos and more kind of like just ugly crap that that was going on in the ecosystem at the time but now it's more about the vibes right it's more about the gm vibes the dot eth the nfts and all that sort of stuff so yeah whenever i see this i just get a smile

on my face so i just wanted to share it with you guys all right speaking of i guess like uh what i was talking about before like the early days of crypto there was this meme made by a low strife account on twitter here um and he captioned it it's a bit sad how much things have changed and the meme basically shows a picture of how captioned how i got introduced to crypto in 2013 and it's got a video of andreas antonopoulos talking about bitcoin from eight years ago and then it's got another caption underneath it saying how you get introduced to crypto today and it's a bunch of those youtubers with kind of like their their mouth wide open and kind of like num uh uh the thumbnails with text that say alts 100x or ripple cell after 200 pump and stuff like that and i saw this and i was just

like wow like this hits hard right i got into crypto not because of andreas but i kind of like got into crypto in 2013 through a friend and then andreas was like really one of the only people back then if not the only person back then evangelizing bitcoin in such a really big way i don't think it was the only one but he was like the most prominent one i think and i watched all of his stuff like i was obsessed with his stuff he had such a clear way of communicating the value prop of bitcoin uh the dream of it why it's so special and he just uh he did it all for free right he was so honest about it like it was not there's not a dishonest bone in this guy's body right uh and he was just like such a champion for bitcoin at the

time and it was just a really really great way to to get get introduced to it now fast forward today to today and andreas is still around doing everything he's doing um you know i'm i i kind of like got inspired by andreas as well that's uh you know it's one of the reasons why i do what i do in the education front we have you know really cool other other ecosystems like bankless of course and the define i mean there's a bunch of them now right a bunch of educational ecosystems out there not just kind of like ethereum focus but also crypto focused but the sad reality is is that the biggest accounts on youtube biggest crypto accounts at least are the ones that do this in the picture they do the stupid thumbnails like bitboy here for example he has what over a million

subscribers um and i don't even know the other ones really like i don't even know what they're called because i don't watch this stuff but that's what a lot of people get coming to you know get introduced to crypto with these days and that's why you see during the you know the really hot bull market periods the absolute crap just pumps like shib and doge and all this meme stuff just absolutely goes gangbusters because that's what these people are shilling to their audience and they're doing it because it's what the algorithm rewards the youtube algorithm is geared towards um kind of like getting you know i mean it's geared towards kind of like getting as many eyeballs on content as possible but the thing is it's got a limited way to do that so if you want your content to stand out you need to kind of do a

thumbnail like this right because it appeals to people's uh psychology and you know you're more likely i mean it's psychologically proven that you're more more likely to click on a thumbnail like this rather than a thumbnail that basically doesn't tell you anything about the video which i understand i get that but at the same time it just warps the incentives completely and basically uh drives the incentives to to kind of like um people shilling all this stuff because they know it gets the most clicks and then it ends up in a vicious cycle where even the honest content creators need to do this in order to stay on you know stay on top of the game in order for the youtube algorithm to reward them because their algorithm rewards content that is popular and if your content is popular um uh uh you're gonna get ranked higher

and to get popular content it's it's very easy to do that when you've got like thumbnails like this and you're promising riches to people and you're doing all this kind of like other stuff right so from that perspective um it i i don't kind of like necessarily blame people for doing it but uh i do kind of like have a big issue with people kind of doing it and then just like selling people hopes and dreams and stuff like people will show coins that they have like a big bag in won't disclose it they'll dump on their followers they'll also have kind of um i guess things they're trying to sell you like trading courses stuff like that there's a lot of that stuff going on and it just kind of like muddies the waters because say you're a new person that comes into crypto today you're completely new you

have zero context about anything and you you search you know crypto such bitcoin search ethereum on youtube the top results are going to be this crap the top results aren't going to be andreas antonopoulos or some you know honest other honest kind of educators the top results more often than not are going to be these crappy videos here and you're going to watch them and then you're going to think well okay like this person knows what they're talking about because you have zero context and this person sounds like they have a lot of context especially if they're speaking confidently about it and you're going to get like trapped in that hole and then you have to kind of like dig yourself out of it and kind of like make a conscious decision to be like no wait okay this seems a bit dodgy seems a bit

fishy i'm going to ignore this and i'm going to go you know find the honest content creators but it becomes really hard to find the honest ones because they're being drowned out by a sea of dishonest ones and you know i've seen this play out time and time again whenever i talk to people outside of the ecosystem they have such a warped view of cryptocurrency and it's dictated by these sorts of videos the me the mainstream media coverage it's so bad i have to kind of like spend so much time convincing them first that crypto isn't just a scam or just is it isn't just a casino and actually has a real value behind it and it breaks my heart like it actually it's gotten to the point where i'm kind of like now when i see people in real life i just i don't actually

want to tell them what i do like i'm really proud of what i do um if people understand crypto but i kind of like don't want to mention that because because when i mention oh i'm in cryptocurrency you know maybe not all the time but like a lot of the time i i know immediately in their head they're probably like oh okay i've heard about cryptocurrency from like you know the mainstream media calling it a scam or saying that you know pumped and dumped and and only you know the mainstream media only reports in it when something you know is going on whether the price is going up or down or there's some kind of like big scan that happens then i have to walk the people through well no it's not all a scan there's actually things being built and you know it's it's actually it gets kind of

easier for me because i'm in ethereum like i can't imagine what it's like for a bitcoin or they'd probably sound crazy to the average person i'm sorry but like for them to try and sell bitcoin to the average person being like oh you know it's digital gold this kind of like protects you against this protect you against like um a rogue governments and kind of like inflation and stuff like that to the everyday person that's not going to mean much to them right whereas with ethereum i i find it pretty easy to explain to people once i get going i can basically say to them well ethereum is like a platform that you can build applications on like your iphone or your kind of like android phone and it just the is click for people um but yeah i don't know how bitcoin is uh bitcoin is

do it um because really bitcoin today is really only just like a digital gold or it's not even really an alternative money anymore at least to me um but but but anyway i think just like looking at this like meme i guess you could call it it was just sad for me because i really wish that um the algorithms rewarded the honest content more but the problem is the algorithms don't know they don't know what the what what the content is they're not smart enough to know that maybe in the future they will but they don't know the difference between an andreas antonopoulos video and a click bait buy my token video because the clickbait by my token video is is more popular so the algorithm is like okay well this this content must be better than this content because it got more views and the on but the only reason i

got more views was because it had a better thumbnail and had a better title on the video and that's just how it works at the end of the day that's just that's the only way it actually can work because in the attention economy you need to do that in order to get you know you get people's attention as i've just as i've discussed before attention is the most scarce resource in today's world and the the fastest way to get it is to appeal to people's psychology or to appeal to kind of like their monkey brain which is exactly what these thumbnails do and it's been proven time and time again it's proven by the market it's proven by the algorithms that people love this sort of stuff and there's actually guides on how to do this now pretty sure youtube even provides these guides saying use a you

know a thumbnail that will attract people to your video because that's the first thing they see before anything else they don't you know they'll see the title but that'll be after they see the thumbnail so if you want to get maximum clicks on your videos that's what you need to do now obviously for the daily gray i don't use click bait titles or thumbnails i don't want to attract that crowd to the videos i want to attract people who just want to learn about the fundamentals behind ethereum and you know the crypto space more generally i'm not trying to sell anyone on anything of course um but the thing is there's a lot of people that do this and there's a lot of people that put out these videos and they have really really big channels i mean bitboy has what millions of subscribers as i said like i don't know

who most of these people are here um and he will just constantly talk about like every kind of like token under the sun he'll get like insider allocations to it he'll get paid to do it and there's not really disclosures anywhere and then his followers are the ones who kind of like lose money in the end and that's why you have like such extreme bull and bear kind of like cycles within crypto because there's just so much money that goes to waste i actually consider consider it wasted money but at the end of the day maybe that's how people have to learn like people learn from that that's fine because i i mean in 2013 i felt even though i was watching andreas i still fell for scams and pump and dumps because i was really new to the ecosystem but i i really do hope that

that we can kind of like get to a point where it just gets better because at the moment it just seems like it's getting worse where we have like too many pump and dumps we have too much money kind of going to the wrong people and it just feels like how is this ever going to stop like how do we ever change this the only thing we can do is keep building right keep building good products keep building good products and services keep educating um and make sure we call this stuff out when it kind of like becomes prevalent which is again another double-edged sword because if you call it out you give it attention and then by giving it attention you know it's just even worse so i don't know what to do here guys like i'm at crossroads myself with this sort of stuff but i did want to just give

them some color around that because i did write today's delegate newsletter about this too but it's just something that i think about a lot as well but definitely don't expect me to do any kind of like wide mouth click bait thumbnails for the daily gray i will never do that um or in like any clickbait titles but you know you look at my channel uh and and then you look at you know someone else's channel that does that there's a night and day difference right so i don't blame kind of the honors content creators for kind of like going more towards that especially if they're it's their living because like for me i do deadly way for free right but for a lot of content creators it's their living it's what they do to to kind of like they need to make money off of it um so they need to kind of like

employ those tactics so i get that but it's when it gets to the point of like these other kind of like youtubers where they've made so much money already and they just really don't need to be doing this kind of crap but they keep doing it because it's so lucrative for them um but anyway i'm gonna leave it at that because i've gone on enough about that so yeah that's it for today thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone