The Chopping Block: ETHPoW Is 'a Terrible Way to Fork the Blockchain'

Episode 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

Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital
Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures
Robert Leshner, founder of Compound

Guest

Emin Gün Sirer, Founder and CEO of Ava Labs

Episode Links

Ava Labs Accusations:

Tornado Cash

Treasury Press release
Coinbase supports lawsuit against US Treasury
Huobi delisting privacy coins
Previous coverage of the Tornado Cash Sanctions on Unchained:

Podcast Episode Details

The Chopping Block: ETHPoW Is 'a Terrible Way to Fork the Blockchain'