Ethereum Has Issues

Sure, it's technically cool, but it's not the currency it pretends to be.

No it isn't. You don't need blockchains to create illegal banks and exchanges or to launder money. All of that was around for a long time before blockchains. You could even create those things "as a service" without blockchains, it would be just as shady and illegal. I'm serious here, there is absolutely no practical value to blockchains whatsoever.

That's not what I was saying, at all.

>Not only that but the off topic declaration where you imply privacy is impossible on blockchain is incorrect.

Please do not argue straw men. I never implied privacy is impossible. I know about things like privacycoins. Some have even been mentioned in this comment chain. My actual implication here is that blockchains cannot promise either privacy or transparency. Those who want to use mixers and privacycoins will do so and you won't have any transparency into their activities. Those who want to insist you use KYC exchanges and traceable coins will do so and you won't be able to have privacy there if you want to transact with them. So basically, an ordinary person has no control over how much transparency or privacy there actually is on the network. Unless you have an outsized level of control on the network (and therefore the network is not decentralized) then you're completely dependent on the other more powerful party. So basically blockchains are providing nothing of value here compared to an ordinary financial service.

>2. Miners and block verifiers are not middle men. They have negligible control where as a middle man has full control.

No, they have full control. Like actual full control over the network. Individually they don't, but as a whole they do, that's literally how the network functions.

>3. The verifiably of smart contracts is not exceptional for its own sake, but for the fact that it prevents cheating in a system where cheating is heavily incentivized.

No, this is wrong. Verifying a smart contract does not prevent cheating. Even if you verify that the smart contract technically has no bugs, it could still do the wrong thing, or the other party could just commit good old-fashioned normal fraud and never hold up their end of the bargain. Smart contracts are not actually smart not are they contracts.

>4. Auditing smart contracts will generally be much easier than auditing EVM bytecode. Ethereum isn’t the only game in town and the most sophisticated layer 1 smart contract languages converge toward functional, locked down languages which lend themselves to automated and manual auditing. The same way open source increases user security even though 99% percent of users won’t build or read its code.

This whole paragraph is based on a falsehood. Open source does not increase user security, go look at the recent log4j disaster. What actually increases security is having security engineers being paid to look for and fix security issues, the cost of which is not significantly different between open or closed source. I have seen no reason to believe it's any different in smart contracts. Functional languages can be good for proving certain types of code with fixed requirement, but the same thing also applies to any of that category of software, financial or otherwise. It's again not related to blockchains at all.

>I seriously doubt you don’t have an emotional stake in your position. Perhaps the classic “I’m a smart tech person yet I missed out, so really it’s always been bad and I’ll be proven right someday,” syndrome.

This is a totally wrong, nonsensical and completely rude comment, please never say anything like this again. Never even let the words cross your mind. Your intelligence is capable of much better things.

>and others still that identified problems went to work on them rather than pretending they were unsolvable

This also makes no sense. I've been looking at this for 10 years. The problems aren't unsolvable. There are plenty of problems to solve, the reason why you shouldn't bother solving them is because all of those problems are intentionally caused by the bad design of blockchains. Our work is hard enough without purposefully making it harder, but that's the only thing blockchains do.

>The dogmatic crypto skeptic is as bad as the crypto shill.

I'm not a "crypto skeptic" and I don't care to discuss dogma. This is about the facts. Please avoid making these ridiculous accusations, please stop trying to psychoanalyze me, and just stick to the facts. That will help both of us.

In some 'we own you and command you to pay tribute to mighty rulers from what you produce' regimes, the loan avoids a sale and the resulting tax event. In my experience, the loan can be converted to fiat money.

I think the race to put order books on blockchain is misguided. Constant-product DEXes can offer way less gameable best-execution by simply trading more cautiously for the swapper.

Problem is, on Ethereum, gas makes it too expensive _not to trade_ once you get to the blockchain. MEV is a problem that can be managed effectively if the blockchain is scalable (thus avoiding gas problems).