39 / The Merge

NVIDIA has a plan for a POW Ethereum fork, and the discussion goes through the incentives and challenges surrounding it. Who benefits from it and how it can affect the industry?

Timeline

00:49 The drink

01:11 POS intro

02:31 What if miners continue to mine?

03:50 We're on Ethereum version 20 already

05:29 The Merge prevents future forking

07:50 What about censorship resistance?

13:52 The rebellion

17:17 NVIDIA business plan

19:51 What happens to bridges in The Merge?

20:41 How to incentivize development on POWNet?

22:27 Why you should still mine on POWNet

Participants

Episode notes

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What if miners continue to mine!!!??? Let’s call it POWNet! Difficulty goes down
Who benefits from POWNet? Who is likely to be the loudest advocate
- the biggest miners // because they have a sunk cost in mining equipment which becomes useless in POS
- NVIDIA EthHash
What is the economic incentive to validate on a non-mainstream POS network?
- incentive = stake/{total stake} * value
USD 1M of marketing sells USD 100M of pictures of animals // so USD 10B of marketing can make POWNet valuable enough that miners use it and NVIDIA’s stock goes up 40%
POWNet will be broken for most bridges
On POWNet what about the difficulty bomb!?
https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-decreased-demand-means-gpu-price-cuts#:~:text=The%20falling%20demand%20represents%20a,which%20led%20to%20skyrocketing%20prices
https://twitter.com/takenstheorem/status/1560690035955011585/photo/1

Short: NVIDIA plan for POW Ethereum fork / tw