The Chopping Block: ETHPoW Is ‘a Terrible Way to Fork the Blockchain’ – Ep. 396

Welcome to The Chopping Block! Crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Robert Leshner and Tarun Chitra chop it up about the latest news in the digital asset industry. In this episode, Emin Gün Sirer, the emperor of Avalanche, also joined the conversation

Show topics:

• Gün’s take on the Ava Labs conspiracy story and whether there was any truth in the videos
• The impact of the Merge on ETH issuance and energy usage
• What’s going on with the ETHPoW fork, and how the team has been messing up
• The TL;DR of the technical side of Ethereum scaling, explained by Tarun
• How, in the beginning, proof of stake was designed to resemble proof of work 
• What Ethereum miners are going to do after the Merge
• Whether increasing hash rates spike prices of PoW coins 
• How the Basic Attention Token is like the Stanford prison experiment
• Whether the fights between Gün and other founders were positive or negative
• How an exchange delisted every privacy coin
• Whether Coinbase’s support of the lawsuit against the US Treasury over Tornado Cash was a PR move
• How this moment in history resembles the 90s and the rise of the internet
• Whether there are blockchain-haters and what the crypto industry can do better
• How there can’t be a single chain to meet every need
• How FTX and Coinbase have different approaches to regulation 
• How would everyone celebrate a successful Merge and whether there’s a chance of it failing

Hosts

Guest

Episode Links

Ava Labs Accusations:

Tornado Cash

ETH Proof of Work and Miners:

The Merge: