The Blockchain Debate Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Motion: Yield Farming is an innovation (Haseeb Qureshi vs. Meltem Demirors, co-host: Tarun Chitra) Sep 18, 2020

Show notes

Guests:
Haseeb Qureshi (@hosseeb)
Meltem Demirors (@melt_dem)
Host:
Richard Yan (@gentso09)
Tarun Chitra (@tarunchitra, special co-host)
Today’s motion is “Yield farming is an innovation.”
Yield farming, or liquidity mining, refers to a newly popularized practice of DeFi protocols, where the protocols incentivize usage with reward tokens. The trend was kickstarted with Compound offering their native tokens for anyone lending on their platforms. And with the mooning of COMP, many other DeFi projects followed suit with their own liquidity mining schemes. This led to soaring prices, unprecedented volumes, popularization of ERC20 friendly DEXes such as Uniswap, proliferation of nonsensical meme coins, and all the elements of another hype-driven bull run.
The question is, is yield farming innovation? That is, is this something fundamentally different from what we’ve seen before? A better understanding of the utility of this mechanism will inform assessment of its sustainability.
Today’s two debaters are investors of high profile funds that actively partake in the yield farming ecosystem. And our co-host is a repeat guest with unique perspectives on the topic at hand.
Today’s episode is shorter than usual, due to speaker time constraints. And there are a few threads in the conversation that certainly could’ve used a deeper dive. Alas, maybe we will cover those areas in a future episode!
If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.
Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.
Source of select items discussed in the debate:

Yield farming explained: https://www.coindesk.com/defi-yield-farming-comp-token-explained
Haseeb's research pieces at Dragonfly: https://medium.com/dragonfly-research
Meltem: https://www.meltemdemirors.com/
Haseeb discusses decentralized trading on Unchained Podcast: https://unchainedpodcast.com/why-decentralized-trading-has-10xed-in-a-few-months/

Debater bios:
Haseeb is a managing partner at Dragonfly Capital, a cryptocurrency venture fund. Before this role, he was a General Partner at another crypto fund named Metastable Capital. He is also a crypto educator and has published a comprehensive blockchain course on nakamoto.com. He previously developed software for Earn.com and Airbnb. Prior to his journey in tech and crypto, he was a Full Tilt Poker sponsored professional poker player, and he conveyed his learnings in the book: The Philosophy of Poker. Haseeb subscribes to the philosophy of Effective Altruism, where one undertakes a high paying career to donate his earned money to charity.
Meltem Demirors is Chief Strategy Officer of CoinShares, a digital asset investment firm. Previously, Meltem helped build and grow Digital Currency Group, also a crypto fund. Prior to crypto, Meltem worked in the Oil & Gas industry in trading, corporate treasury, and M&A roles. She is also a founding member of the World Economic Forum Blockchain Council and testified before the House Financial Services Committee on digital currencies. Meltem teaches at her alma mater MIT as well as Oxford, and is passionate about privacy and civil rights.
Tarun Chitra is Founder and CEO of Gauntlet, a simulation platform for crypto networks to help developers understand how decisions about security, governance, and consensus mechanisms are likely to affect network activity and asset value. He previously worked in high frequency trading for Vatic Labs and was a scientific programmer at D.E. Shaw Research.

Motion: Blockchain analysis companies are bad for bitcoin (Alex Gladstein vs. Dave Jevans) Aug 27, 2020

Show notes

Guests:
Alex Gladstein (@gladstein)
Dave Jevans (@davejevans)
Host:
Richard Yan (@gentso09)
Today’s motion is “Blockchain analysis companies are bad for bitcoin.”
Blockchain analysis companies are effectively on-chain detectives. They help exchanges and other financial institutions detect and monitor money-laundering activities and therefore stay in compliance. They also help law enforcement do financial investigations.
But their tools may also be useful for repressive regimes in spying on financial behavior of their citizens, in hopes of crushing political dissidents.
Today’s debater includes someone from the Human Rights Foundation, who is very passionate about bitcoin’s financial liberating cause, and someone that started one of the largest blockchain analysis companies, who believes their tools help bitcoin and what it stands for.
If you’re into crypto and like to hear two sides of the story, be sure to also check out our previous episodes. We’ve featured some of the best known thinkers in the crypto space.
If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.
Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.
Source of select items discussed in the debate:

Human Rights Foundation: https://www.hrf.org
CipherTrace: https://ciphertrace.com/
Quick primer of blockchain analysis companies: https://news.bitcoin.com/a-forensic-analysis-of-blockchain-surveillance-companies/
International anti-money-laundering organization FATF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Action_Task_Force
https://www.realclearworld.com/2020/07/29/china_is_what_orwell_feared_500463.html

Motion: Today's blockchains can't increase TPS without taking a hit on decentralization (Emre Tekişalp vs. Anatoly Yakovenko, cohost: Uri Klarman) Aug 10, 2020

Show notes

Guests:
Emre Tekişalp (@etekis)
Anatoly Yakovenko (@aeyakovenko)
Hosts:
Richard Yan (@gentso09)
Uri Klarman (@uriklarman, special co-host)
Today’s motion is “Today’s blockchains can’t increase TPS without taking a hit on decentralization.”
Today’s guests are from two different public blockchains Coda and Solana. The CEO of Bloxroute came on as special co-host. So Coda came to this topic from the angle that, adding full nodes will further decentralize the network but slow down performance. And Solana started by asserting that only the voting nodes mattered because they alone would provide the censorship resistance, which is the key to decentralization.
As usual, the debate then evolved, and covered a lot more ground. We got into things like weak subjectivity and Moore’s Law, and at the end meandered into the topic of nation-state attacks.
If you’re into crypto and like to hear two sides of the story, be sure to also check out our previous episodes. We’ve featured some of the best known thinkers in the crypto space.
If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.
Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.

Source of select items discussed in the debate:

Solana: https://solana.com/
Coda: https://www.codaprotocol.com/
Bloxroute: https://bloxroute.com/
Weak subjectivity explained: https://academy.binance.com/glossary/weak-subjectivity
Coda article on mental model of Scalability-per-unit-of-Decentralization: https://codaprotocol.com/blog/solving-the-scalability-trilemma

Motion: Scalability is impossible without sharding and layer-2 solutions (Georgios Konstantopoulos vs. Anatoly Yakovenko, cohost: Tarun Chitra) Jul 20, 2020

Show notes

Guests:
Georgios Konstantopoulos (@gakonst)
Anatoly Yakovenko (@aeyakovenko)
Hosts:
Richard Yan (@gentso09)
Tarun Chitra (@tarunchitra, special co-host)
Today’s motion is “Scalability is impossible without sharding and layer-2 solutions.”
Today’s discussion is highly technical in nature and I’m glad to have Tarun as my co-pilot. Between the two debaters, one is building a public chain that insists on achieving scaling without sharding, and the other is an independent consultant with extensive experience with various chains, including many layer-2 solutions.
My co-host Tarun’s summary at the end was quite apt - it’s easy to pull a carriage with one horse, but can you pull a carriage with 1024 chickens? The debate seems to partially come down to how powerful the machines can get to sustain the ever-growing network activities without resorting to quote unquote, fancy techniques like sharding and layer-2 solutions.
If you’re into crypto and like to hear two sides of the story, be sure to also check out our previous episodes. We’ve featured some of the best known thinkers in the crypto space.
If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.
Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.

Source of select items discussed in the debate:

Motion: Nation-state attack on Bitcoin is an unresolved ticking time-bomb (Mike Kelly vs. Hasu) Jun 29, 2020

Show notes

Guests:
Mike Kelly (@mikekelly85)
Hasu (@hasufl)
Host:
Richard Yan (@gentso09)

Today’s motion is “Nation-state attack on the bitcoin network is an unresolved ticking time bomb.”
In this thorough and fascinating debate, we covered these topics:

The motivations of nationstate attacks
The mechanisms of nationstate attacks
The aftermath of nationstate attacks
The preventive mechanism of nationstate attacks

The idea for this debate was born out of a twitter discussion, where someone posted a video of Andreas Antonopoulos dismissing the threat on bitcoin from nationstates.
Now, while you’re here, be sure to also check out our previous episodes too. We’ve featured some of the best known thinkers in the crypto space. And it was great to have a few no-coiners on. I always appreciate their agreeing to do the show, and adding perspectives to what sometimes seem like an echo chamber.
If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.
Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.

Source of select items discussed in the debate:

32 states have introduced legislation accepting or promoting the use of Bitcoin and blockchain distributed ledger technology https://www.businessinsider.com/blockchain-cryptocurrency-regulations-us-global
State-by-state regulations on Bitcoin and blockchain https://www.carltonfields.com/insights/publications/2018/state-regulations-on-virtual-currency-and-blockchain-technologies

Motion: Corporate bailouts and capital market rescues make sense, II (Jonathan Padilla vs. Nick White) Jun 03, 2020

Show notes

Guests:
Jonathan "JP" Padilla (@JPadillaCA)
Nick White (@nickwh8te)
Host:
Richard Yan (@gentso09)

Today’s motion is “I largely approve the US government’s fiscal and monetary response to the ongoing economic crisis.”

We recently had another debate on a similar topic, between Qiao Wang and Jimmy Song.

While Qiao argued for the pro-establishment view, he still saw lots of issues with the government’s intervention in the markets. In the debate, Qiao was playing the role of a devil’s advocate, to help the crypto community understand the pro-intervention perspective.

In today’s debate, however, the pro-intervention guest (Jonathan "JP" Padilla) is a Kenseyan, has worked for the Whitehouse, and is very supportive of the government actions during the ongoing crisis.

The anti-intervention guest (Nick White) today is also not a hard-core libertarian like Jimmy from the previous debate. So today’s debate is more consensus-building than that previous debate.

Be sure to also check out our previous episodes too. We’ve featured some of the best known thinkers in the crypto space.

If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.

If you like the show, please give us five stars on iTunes or wherever you listen to this.

Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.

Source of select items discussed in the debate:

Components of CPI: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm#Question_10
Banks fined $243 billion since the Great Recession: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/banks-have-been-fined-a-staggering-243-billion-since-the-financial-crisis-2018-02-20
The federal government made $15Bn profit from TARP: https://money.cnn.com/2014/12/19/news/companies/government-bailouts-end/
Niall Ferguson, "The Ascent of Money": https://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/dp/0143116177
Airlines receiving government assistance in return for equity warrants: https://www.barrons.com/articles/airlines-stocks-government-bailout-grants-loans-cares-act-covid-19-passenger-traffic-51586967006

Motion: Corporate bailouts and capital market rescues make sense (Qiao Wang vs. Jimmy Song) May 05, 2020

Show notes

Guests:
Qiao Wang (@qwqiao)
Jimmy Song (@jimmysong)
Host:
Richard Yan (@gentso09)

We all know the dominant crypto-native perspective on corporate/Wall Street bailouts — as generally anti-intervention, both fiscally and monetarily. But it’s important to hear the other side, if only to kick the tires of your own beliefs. After all, many smart people embrace a statist, big government view, in how to run an economy.

In this debate, we covered many topics, including the following:

A way to think about corporate bailouts as claims on a social insurance policy, with an analogy in social security and Medicare
How the monetary policies are worsening the wealth gap by giving a disproportionate advantage to the rich not enjoyed by the poor
Whether FDR’s intervention policies were instrumental in lifting the nation out of the Great Depression, or this was just revisionist economic history, with these policies accomplishing the opposite or having tepid effects at best

Our two knowledgeable guests are both in the crypto circle, but come from very different backgrounds. One used to be a Wall Street trader and is a finance buff. The other is a bitcoin maximalist and an unapologetic libertarian.

Be sure to also check out our previous episodes too. We’ve featured some of the best known thinkers in the crypto space. And it was great to have a few no-coiners on. I always appreciate their agreeing to do the show, and adding perspectives to what sometimes seem like an echo chamber.

If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.

Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.

Source of select items discussed in the debate:

Change in unemployment and GDP during the Great Depression: https://www.thebalance.com/unemployment-rate-by-year-3305506
The Forgotten Depression (1921) by James Grant: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanlewis/2017/02/23/james-grant-explains-how-a-crash-in-1921-cured-itself-with-the-help-of-good-policy/#3feb9a1dbd86
Qiao's Messari articles (paywall): https://messari.io/article/how-will-the-recession-impact-crypto-theses-questions-and-lessons
Jimmy Song's Programming Bitcoin book: https://programmingbitcoin.com/
America's Great Depression by Murray Rothbard: https://www.amazon.com/Americas-Great-Depression-Murray-Rothbard/dp/1607960656

Motion: Ethereum 1.0 can scale (Uri Klarman vs. Mrinal Manohar) Apr 29, 2020

Show notes

Guests:
Uri Klarman (@uriklarman)
Mrinal Manohar (casperlabs.io)
Host:
Richard Yan (@gentso09)
The guests we have today have close ties to Ethereum. One is actively working on a solution to scale the 1.0 version. The other was an early investor in Ethereum.
In this episode, I learned about:

An interesting layer-0 approach to improve the performance of Ethereum 1.0 as well as any layer-1 protocol;
Disadvantages in layer-2 solutions with similar value proposition in scaling;
Main benefits of upgrading from Ethereum 1.0 to Ethereum 2.0, besides the change from POW to POS;
And other non-scaling goodies such as perspectives on M&A of public blockchains in a crowded space.

Be sure to also check out our previous episodes too, on Bitcoin’s store of value status, tokenization and smart contracts, DeFi, bitcoin halvening, China’s future in blockchain, POW vs POS, oligopoly vs multiplicity of public blockchains, and permissioned vs permissionless blockchain for enterprise usage.
If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.
Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.
Source of select items discussed in the debate:

Bloxroute: https://bloxroute.com/
CasperLabs: https://casperlabs.io/
MakerDAO Black Thursday event (collateral liquidation at zero dollars): https://medium.com/@whiterabbit_hq/black-thursday-for-makerdao-8-32-million-was-liquidated-for-0-dai-36b83cac56b6
CryptoKitties clogging up Ethereum: https://www.coindesk.com/loveable-digital-kittens-clogging-ethereums-blockchain

Discussion: Baseline ("Permission-less Chain" for enterprise) vs. Corda ("Permissioned Chain" for enterprise) (John Wolpert vs. Richard Brown) Apr 19, 2020

Show notes

Guests:
John Wolpert (@jwolpert)
Richard Brown (@gendal)
Host:
Richard Yan (@gentso09)
Today’s session is about enterprise blockchain and features a co-founder of Baseline protocol and CTO of R3. The former is building an enterprise solution on a public blockchain, whereas the latter is doing so on a private blockchain. So you will learn about the two approaches as the two guests compare notes on their respective products. And today’s format is more of a discussion rather than a debate. It is an update to a debate that took place between them a year ago.

To derive the most value from today’s discussion, some familiarity with the state of enterprise blockchains is necessary. If you’re new to enterprise blockchain, it’s probably best to check out that previous debate first. It was hosted on another podcast called Insureblocks. Just google “insureblocks enterprise blockchain debate” and you will find that episode. The relevant link will also be in the show notes.
Note that this episode's format will be a little bit different than usual. This will be a follow-up conversation to the previous debate, even though you will still hear plenty of disagreement from our guests.

Also, be sure to check out our previous episodes too, on Bitcoin’s store of value status, tokenization and smart contracts, DeFi, bitcoin halvening, China’s future in blockchain, POW vs POS, and oligopoly vs multiplicity of public blockchains.

If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.

Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.

Source of select items discussed in the debate:

R3/Corda: https://www.r3.com/corda-platform/
EY launches Baseline protocol: https://www.ey.com/en_gl/news/2020/03/ey-launches-baseline-protocol-an-open-source-initiative-for-the-public-etherum-blockchain
Previous debate between John and Richard: https://insureblocks.com/ep-53-debate-public-vs-private-blockchains-for-enterprises-with-r3-and-consensys/

Motion: The future of blockchain will be an oligopoly of public blockchains (Illia Polosukhin vs. Zaki Manian) Apr 14, 2020

Show notes

Guests:
Illia Polosukhin (@ilblackdragon) - debating FOR the motion
Zaki Manian (@zmanian) - debating AGAINST the motion
Host:
Richard Yan (@gentso09)
In a world where decentralized applications proliferate, will these applications be built on top of a few or many public blockchains? Exploration of this topic would help us understand the merits of the coexistence of many protocols. On the extreme, each dapp can have its own chain, so that the developers/community for each app can have maximal control over the full stack of their product.
The guests we have for this episode have essentially voted on their position with their feet. The oligopoly advocate is cofounder of a layer-1 protocol, and the multiplicity supporter is a major contributor to one of the earliest, if not the earliest, blockchains designed with interoperability in mind.
Be sure to also check out our previous episodes too, on Bitcoin’s store of value status, tokenization and smart contracts, DeFi, bitcoin halvening, China’s future in blockchain, and POW vs POS.
If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.
Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.
Source of select items discussed in the debate: