“If the kleptocracy controls technology and the means of distribution, then they simply accumulate more wealth at the expense of their citizens, draining wealth in cryptocurrencies rather than dollars or euros,” CFTC commissaris.

Ethereum has failed to scale, and after years of promising otherwise, it appears its developers have given up even the idea or ambition of attempting to scale the base layer.

The plan instead is to effectively discard the base layer, and to move almost all activity to new networks that depending on developments, can potentially effectively become ethereum.

There are a number of options, all of which conceptually operate in the same way.

You opt-in to the second layer through a transaction that enters that network, and now your eth, as well as anything that happens to it, is on this second layer network and not in the actual ethereum network.

To connect these two layers there are different methods. ZK rollups are the more interesting ones. They practically have all the data on-chain, but in a very condensed form, with the zk tech then itself keeping account without having to retort back to the blockchain too much, leading to a condensation of transactions like you zip a jpeg.

It is optimistic rollups however that appear to have a shot at becoming this second ethereum because many prominent dapps plan to jump on it.

Uniswap has announced they are “targeting an L1 Ethereum mainnet launch on May 5, with an L2 deployment on Optimism set to follow shortly after.”

Synthetix has been working on Optimism for some time, with suggestions other prominent dapps – like potentially even Compound – will adopt Optimism.

This project may be more familiar to some of you as the Lightning Network or Plasma. It’s not the same, but it is similar enough.

In short we have a Proof of Stake network that doesn’t quite validate the double spending of transactions, but instead relies on watchtowers, or snitchers, who when they see a double spending attempt provide proof of it, leading to the staker being slashed.

The connection between these two layers is this proof. The ethereum network holds in it enough data from Optimism to be able to so generate this proof at the base layer.

What if the snitcher is drunk, is a silly question with potentially significant ramifications because the Lightning Network has had numerous cases of corrupt data, and because it isn’t very clear why anyone should trust these snitchers or indeed why we don’t replace ethereum’s base layer with this proof of snitching.

Satoshi Nakamoto didn’t because no one would have bought a solution to double spending through just having spies around to see if a transaction is replicated and so go to a council and provide proof of replication.

That failure in bitcoin to re-solve the double spending problem in 2015-2017 is what led to ethereum being a challenger, but ethereum is a challenger no more, and is now just bitcoin but five years behind where this specific matter is concerned.

So the title question is wrong. It should have been how VCs were fooled into thinking they can capture ethereum, 2.0.

VC Utopia

“We’ve spent a great deal of time looking at various approaches and teams building Layer 2s, and today we’re thrilled to announce we are leading a $25 million Series A investment in Optimism.”

So zegt Chris Dixon and Arianna Simpson of AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”). Raising the obvious question, how do they plan to 10x this $25 million investment?

A decent marketing company is presumably part of that plan. Modern marketing. More than that, a web of stakes in various defi dapps that can be ordered to adopt Optimism, is an even bigger part of that plan.

The crown of thorns so being simple. You order the dapp devs who you control due to your VC investment in them, to use the project by the devs that you control due to your VC investment in them. Forming an ecosystem under your orders, and thus a captured network.

What is worse than a single dapp or even ecosystem, is leverage over an entire universe upon which all dapps and smart contracts and transactions, whether you have invested in them or otherwise, run and depend.

For this is a private investment and thus private control over a base layer protocol that stealthily aims to be ethereum itself.

It’s like Vitalik Buterin answering to Chris Dixon, and so in effect Dixon himself deciding things like whether EIP1559 should go through or otherwise.

That’s Dixon’s hope in any event, just as his hope and that of his pals was for what once was the cute Twitter or Facebook to become – knowingly or otherwise – the monopolistic fascist mouthpieces with a killer corporatist instinct that has brought destruction to online self expression.

Just as Dixon and his pals have boxed us to Reddit and Twitter and certainly no alternative to Gulag, so too these monsters now want to kill the variety and the colors flying on the butterflies field here to turn this too into a brutalist skyscraper controlled by Dixon.

His problem is that he needs a new Nakamoto to re-solve the double spending problem, and Karl Floersch is no Nakamoto.

Nor is Vitalik, as the past nearly four years have clearly shown where scalability is concerned.

Thus perhaps this space will be able to withstand the assault of the kleptocracy, in great part because Nakamoto seems to have touched something, something untamable by the old dictatas.

Let us fly
to birth of time,
here the circle, square around
there the visions, perspectav
some are dying, and they are god
gods we see, the plebs all here.

Muses typing, frozen light
in this maze of energy
where they battles of the might
rage the day and rage the night
holding mercy with no light
dance the old and starv the yang.

Rounded beauty, truth seducy
in this twilight for the musy
rage and defeat, anger and captiv beat
pleasure, for the monkey heat.

Coinsmart. Beste Bitcoin-beurs in Europa
Source: https://www.trustnodes.com/2021/03/24/how-vcs-will-capture-ethereum