22nd October 2022 > > Another ETH hard fork.

tl;dr

It looks like we have another ETH hard fork potentially heading our way.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

The vol in stocks, driven by the vol in long end rates regardless of who happens to be called PM in the UK, is not feeding through to cryptos.

Much more of this price action, or to be more precise lack of price action, is going to make me want to get involved in something potentially more lucrative.

Occasional Series – Curious Cryptos’ Airdrop Circular

The sixth edition of the CCAC was sent out to subscribers yesterday. For more details, please refer to the Curious Cryptos’ Commentary dated 12th January 2021 and 29th May 2022.

If you would like free access to this additional service, please just let me know by email.

Occasional Series – Rowing

British Rowing – who set the rules for rowing competitions in the UK – have decreed that transgender athletes (of any sex) must have testosterone levels below 5nmol/l (five nanomoles per litre) to compete as a woman.

Women - and I use that word in the traditional sense that we all understand - have an average testosterone range of 0.5 to 2.4 nmol/l.

If any reader believes that testosterone does not confer physical and size advantages during the transition from childhood to adulthood that come to the fore in most sports, but especially ones like rowing, boxing, and rugby, then frankly you are living with the cuckoos.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Technical Analysis (with thanks to the Milk Road)

https://www.milkroad.com/subscribe?ref=o5CmCFhBAK

Gotcha.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Another ETH hard fork?

Owners of ETH pre The Merge - who failed to heed the musings of the CCC about the likely benefits of selling the news – are now also proud owners of ETHW (Ethereum Work) and ETHF (Ethereum Fair).

It is looking increasingly possible that owners of ETH will soon replace that holding with ETHC (Ethereum Censored) and ETHU (Ethereum Uncensored) in their portfolio.

I should point out that this potential event is not so imminent that ETHC and ETHU now form part of the accepted terminology in cryptos – I have made them up myself, for reasons which will become clear.

…

Regular readers recall that the US Government sanctioned Tornado Cash (see CCC dated 10th, 12th, 16th August 2022 and 28th September 2022 amongst others).

This action was met with horror by true libertarians, and with glee by a certain other section of the population.

For background, if you cannot be bothered to re-read old CCCs (and no-one can complain to you about not doing so), Tornado Cash is (almost was) a mixer. By jumbling many inputs into wallet outputs, it is an effective way of obscuring the source of coins.

Those of an illiberal bent childishly assume that such functionality can only be used for nefarious purposes, whilst conveniently ignoring how useful the EUR 500 note is to drug dealers, and to no-one else.

OFAC (The Office of Foreign Assets) tried to shut down Tornado Cash, with limited effect, and almost certainly with legislative overreach, though the test of that supposition is extraordinarily unlikely to ever be resolved in a court of law.

Obviously, such a sanction could not last long, and it is back up and running (https://www.torndo.cash/).

Tornado Cash is simply a piece of code, and those of us who recognise the enormous benefits to humankind of decentralisation, and abhor the inimical consequences of centralisation, are pleased with this outcome.

…

But the arm of the law is long. Rightly so, most of the time.

The nodes that process transactions for the Ethereum blockchain are located worldwide, but a significant number of them are in the US. Fearful of financial penalties, and even more fearful of time in a US prison, US based nodes are censoring transactions linked to Tornado Cash public addresses.

What this means in practice is that if a node based in the US is selected under the PoS (Proof-of-Stake) consensus mechanism to create the next Ethereum block it will refuse to incorporate coin output from wallets associated with Tornado Cash. Such transactions are simply ignored.

At some point in the last week, more than 50% of the validating nodes had embraced this restriction.

OFAC, though probably acting illegally and certainly acting ultra vires, is achieving its well-intentioned but misguided objective.

…

This means that to a certain extent we already have ETHC and ETHU, though both are fungible with one another for now.

Just how sustainable is that fungibility?