My fellow retards,
If you’ve ever been down a psychedelic rabbit hole, you probably got to confront some rather unique perspectives. Some will surely seem retarded in retrospect…others may actually provide some benefit.
One thing you can break without taking Vitamin P(sychedellic) is the tacit acceptance of a functioning norm.
To look at a simple situation that has always worked and realize there is a better way is kind of a trip in itself. This goat herder realized that the bath mat would be more efficient for the post shower routine if it were perpendicular to the shower rather than parallel. Simple, doesn’t affect anyone really, and would never have been discovered because it’s such a boring and simple object to focus on during normal life. We skip thinking about how so many things just are…we go on our merry lives and never really focus on the present state.
If you come out of a trip with a big solution, odds are its probably not that good. Belief that you’ve uncovered massive inefficiencies in the market and you’re the only one who realizes it is usually a recipe for disaster, but it worked out really well for Michael Burry in 2008, when he stood up against all of wall street—the entire contemporary zeitgeist, to proclaim that the housing market was a massive bubble prior to its collapse in 2008.
Burry did further than proclaim, he put hundreds of millions of dollars that he managed at stake while hemorrhaging premiums to put on significant bets because he had true conviction.
It is hard to have true conviction when you stand alone. When you see something that others don’t, or refuse to accept due to cognitive dissonance—most of the time they are right, and you are wrong. It builds a ton of moral character if you’re willing to put yourself out there and take that position. The cheese stands alone.
Rewind the clocks back to June 2016. Or rather if you’re one of our psychedelic cosmonauts, traverse the inside of your funnel and skip back a few jumps to the previously experienced reality that was the DAO.
Without getting into all the nitty gritty of the DAOs history, we will look at one tiny aspect. Post hack, 70% of the ether was syphoned off into a child DAO. There was a 28 day reprieve where the attacker could not touch those assets. The community coalesced around the idea of a soft fork to save the situation. The soft fork would force any miner to ignore transactions that originated from the location of the stolen assets.
What did some of our brilliant minds think at the time?
I personally believe that the soft fork that has been proposed to lock up the ether inside the DAO to block the attack is, on balance, a good idea, and I personally, on balance, support it, and I support the fork being developed and encourage miners to upgrade to a client version that supports the fork.
This was god-hero Vitalik Buterin’s take.
Vitalik understands Ethereum better than anyone in the world, he is the creator, the designer, and by far the most ideal leader we have seen in this ecosystem. He thought the soft fork was a good idea. As did many, many others. How hard must it be to read these thoughts from Vitalik and then willingly stand against him, and the entire community that you are a thankful member of?
At this time, young Tjaden Hess was a mere 16 or 17-year old lad. He followed the DAO, he read the proposals for the soft fork, and he got to thinking. He realized that the plan was fucked. He realized that Vitalik was wrong, as were all the other thought leaders pushing it. He reached out to some trusted advisors and shared his concerns.
He realized that anyone would be able to DOS the network due to the new mechanics implemented by the soft fork. Miners were to throw any transaction that called a function or interacted with the location of the hacked funds. A nefarious actor could broadcast a 50-step transaction where the final computation would do something at the address of the hacked funds. This means that miners would have to process 49 compute steps before realizing the entire transaction must be thrown. No gas would be spent on this because the transaction, by the new mechanism, would not make it into the chain. This was a brilliant way to force miners to do a ton of unnecessary transactions and would grind all of Ethereum to a halt.
Young Tjaden saved Ethereum from an ugly fate. He gets next to zero credit. Few remember his name. He made a difference. A hard fork to fix this situation after a failed soft fork would have been ugly. Ethereum would have slowed down. It would have taken a while to sort things out and put a new fix in place. Imagine what it must have been like to be a teenager and discovered multi-billion-dollar design flaws while the rest of the world, and the creator of the system, wanted to push ahead with them. The cheese stands alone.
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Targets for the marketcap of PHONON DAO remain:
$1b by Q2 2022, $12b by EOY.
On the high end, $300b marketcap in 3 years.