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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Guests: Giacomo Zucco: twitter.com/giacomozucco Paul Sztorc: twitter.com/truthcoin Host: 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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

Guests: Ruben Somsen (twitter.com/SomsenRuben) Muneeb Ali (twitter.com/muneeb) Host: Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09) Today’s motion is “Trustless smart contracts for bitcoin are impossible without forks.” A few projects have been known to try to bring smart contracts to bitcoin. But are they doing this in a way as you understand it? This episode explores this question. We pitted a bitcoin developer against the founder of Stacks, and you can draw your own conclusions after...

Motion: NFTs are dumb (Edmund Schuster vs. Andrew Steinwold, co-host: Maria Shen)

Motion: Ethereum is too early for institutional money (Lyn Alden vs Qiao Wang)

Motion: Diem is a glorified Paypal (David Gerard vs. Bryce Weiner)

Motion: Tether has always been acting in bad faith (Bennett Tomlin vs. Larry Cermak, co-host: Patrick McKenzie)

Motion: Bitcoin is a scam.

Motion: Legally speaking, tokens are more like commodities than like securities (Lewis Cohen vs. Gabriel Shapiro)

Motion: Today’s blockchains can’t increase TPS without taking a hit on decentralization, II (Evan Shapiro vs. Anatoly Yakovenko)

Motion: Tether will likely get crushed by authorities in the next two years, thanks to its shady practices and defiance against regulators (CasPiancey vs. Matthew Graham)

Motion: ZK rollup has a better set of security/scalability tradeoff than optimistic rollup (Alex Gluchowski vs. John Adler, co-host: James Prestwich)

Motion: Yield Farming is an innovation (Haseeb Qureshi vs. Meltem Demirors, co-host: Tarun Chitra)

Motion: Blockchain analysis companies are bad for bitcoin

Motion: Today’s blockchains can’t increase TPS without taking a hit on decentralization

Motion: Scalability is impossible without sharding and layer-2 solutions