I am certain I won’t change your mind but to say “proof of waste” ignores the last six years of the existence of Ethereum and its market value.

Y’all need to dial this shit back a bit.

I’d love to be a bigger supporter except the arguments are garbage. https://twitter.com/antiprosynth/status/1385232998115782671

The beacon chain implementation itself appears to be a precursor to divorcing value flow from the smart contract execution.

It is vastly over-engineered for what it portends to address which indicates ulterior engineering motives not being overtly discussed.

ETH folks like to respond to such criticism with a variety of retorts such as “all discussions were public” (laughable on its face) or that their devs are the best and you just don’t get it man.

This evolved into an interesting conversation.

Regarding the initial distribution, I did a little research.

There's some interesting data which may serve to unhinge the "distribution" narrative in favor of something closer to reality, like securities law https://twitter.com/antiprosynth/status/1388059940040945664?s=20

Data about the ETH ICO is surprisingly hard to come by.

The amount of funds raised are reported anywhere from $16M to $18.3M, and the amount of tokens generated between 60M and 75M.

For the sake of argument, I'm going to use the numbers on Wikipedia due to the disagreements.

Wikipedia indicates 75,000,000 tokens in the initial distribution, however current trackers place the current supply at just over 115M.

While I'm sure POW did allow participation by anyone w/ requisite knowledge, the number of coins minted since the ICO isn't half of the ICO.

Arguably the largest distribution event was 2017's ICO mania, however those in and outflows cannot be tracked due to the widespread use of http://tornado.cash  from ICO wallets.

At one point http://tornado.cash  has processed a number of tokens equal to the total existing.

I'm not providing links because you can Google for yourself. All of this has been out there for some time.

So while POW does allow for broader distribution in *most cases* however in the case of ETH the data required to validate the claim is impossible to collect.

Hype works because people conceptualize the ideas without stopping to verify that the actual data reflects those ideas.

In many cases... they don't.

"DYOR," they said.

This doesn't invalidate ETH... it invalidates ETH maximalist hype.

To state this clearly: there's no definitive data which can prove the claim that ETH POW increased distribution in any meaningful way as it has done with other networks.

The claim is unprovable, and due to the supply vs ICO it is most likely false.

As there is the indication of one ulterior motive in the narrative, one may begin to look further.

For instance, it is clear that the amount of POW minted coins have never exceeded that of the coins distributed in the ICO, so ending POW now may serve to retain power structures.

One must keep in mind that ETH and BTC are the two best distributed networks in existence.

This is not in dispute.

An analysis of the exact distribution from a year ago would seem to confirm some of my assertions at least in part. https://medium.com/@adamscochran/the-10k-audit-42c100dd32bb

Once one removes smart contract balances, which we will account for in a moment, the spread is as follows:

The top 100 represent 26.4M ETH.
The top 1k represents 42.5M ETH.
The top 10k represents 57.2M ETH. (56.7%)

The blog goes on to justify why these percentages are okay, but does so without mentioning some relevant facts: that the flow of funds from ICO wallets to wallets not under control of the original ICO recipients is impossible due to new address use and http://tornado.cash .

As such, at this exact moment, the top 10k addresses control 50% of the coins in circulation... almost exactly.

Now when one factors in the coins locked in smart contracts, the weight of those 10k addresses becomes *greater*.

So almost at the exact block POW miners might gain distribution equal to that of the ICO participants, the network reverses course and begins destroying tokens, which would preserve the network domination of the top 10k wallets perhaps indefinitely due to deflation of 1559.

I am an Ethereum fan.

I would not have risked my project, my blood and treasure, and my use case on something I didn't feel was the best technology on offer.

What I would argue with is the maximalist narratives which are not born from fact.

That's all.

Correction to my rant based on accurate information, the mixer in question during the 2017 ICO boom processed only 65.7% of the tokens in existence, not 100%

This was tough to verify since the original article is 410 on Medium and exists few places. https://medium.com/cyber-drop/huge-ethereum-mixer-68d08bc6af0a

The shocking part isn't actually the percentage of coins that went through the mixer... but how many times.

The mixer processed that 65.7% to the tune of 2.5B ETH.

This recycling was the market of 2017.

This mixer was operated in secret. It was not known to the general public until this Medium post.

Given the volume of coins which passed through it (65.7% of the whole network at the time), a reasonable person may then assume that it was ICO EAs laundering ETH to pump tokens.

This thread is what happens when Foucault meets crypto hype.