gm,

if you're a newcomer to our Daily Discussion thread, this is a place where we discuss all Ethereum topics, news, events. And sometimes even things that are not directly Ethereum-related.

Trump and dump? I could honestly see the crypto market recovering from the correction/sideways action of the last few days after Trump's pump. But I could also see us losing more steam.

This morning I looked at how much it costs to borrow USDC on Aave and it's only at 6% interest per annum, so cash isn't high in demand on money markets at the moment. To me it also signals that a big chunk of the market isn't ready to loan out their crypto to get some fiat, which means that they don't have conviction that we're going higher.

That however, is just a measure of revealed sentiment. And the majority of Aave users could be wrong.

I also heard a more cynical point from some guy on Twitter, it went more or less like that:

"US government buying crypto might be bullish because now more people will follow, or it could be the top signal, as you always need to find a greater fool to buy, and there's no greater full than the US government".

But I disagree with it. Yeah, maybe for memecoins like ADA it could be getting closer to their top. But I don't think that's true for ETH and BTC, because it's not just a game of musical chairs. There is a real use case there. And it could be a signal for institutions to go full speed and adopt this tech more.

BTW, one thing I wanted to get off my chest lately is how the current US diplomacy impacts my life.

In the last two weeks spoke with many friends - online and offline. And 90%+ of times our main subjects were "Where is the US going under Trump?" and "What are you going to do if the war starts?".

This war anxiety is a real thing here, and I think that's because we are Russian neighbors, know their history well, and our allies have a track record of abandoning us during hard times.

Also, the war in Ukraine feels real here. We have 2M+ Ukrainians living in Poland, I know people who lost their friends during the war, saw the refugees on the border with my own eyes, and many people here took part in some version of crowdfunding for their army - e.g., one of my friends for his birthday present asked us to just buy a drone for the Ukrainians.

So when the US is drifting apart from Europe, and getting closer to Russian, it is concerning.

But it got me thinking about decentralized social a lot. The fact that everyone in the West uses American social apps like Facebook, Twitter or Reddit, means that we are under US influence as if in the 90s they owned all the major global TV stations, radio programs and newspapers.

This is exactly why in Russia and China they have their own social apps - they want to control the flow of information that reaches their citizens.

So if the US becomes less Europe-friendly, I wouldn't be surprised if social app algorithms surfaced less Europe-friendly content. Because why not? So far I haven't seen any influence from that angle, but if the situation gets tense, it could have happened.

This leads me to the thought, that well... Europe probably won't build its own social app like Russia or China did. But if in the future we had people on a decentralized social protocol - whether it's based on Farcaster, Lens, Worldcoin or just Ethereum - every country or region could just build their own client.

Every client would have a lot of influence over the features, algorithm and moderation, but the social graph could stay the same. So even if everyone spent most of the time in their walled gardens, we would still be more connected than we are today, when our social graphs are just locked in some web2 databases, and not interoperable at all.

An interesting point re: Trump announcement.

Apparently it matches Bitwise biggest investments, and someone did a $200M trade with 50X (!) leverage before Trump's announcement.

yes, hard to miss, internet buzzing with corruption go crazy.

yes, hard to miss, internet buzzing with corruption go crazy.

this is a test bc I've been playing with teh caching

this is another test

turns out there is another issue with the script that lead to make the redirect fail

oke one last test to comment and see if the feed updates

General update for the site: I have been trying to fix our Cloudflare workers so that people from across the globe have faster retrieval times. The site should now work faster anywhere, but the origin server is currently very busy with handling requests. This will hopefully soon improve when the spiders have found most of the sites that they want. I hope I have not added a regression to the Cloudflare worker.

So if the US becomes less Europe-friendly, I wouldn't be surprised if social app algorithms surfaced less Europe-friendly content. Because why not? So far I haven't seen any influence from that angle

Are you blind xD?

JK, but I think that X and FC have been pushing anti-Europe content, at least, since a year or more!

I think that X and FC have been pushing anti-Europe content, at least, since a year or more!

There's def a lot of American bias there. But I think the reason is that most users are Americans and they produce most content - not because algo surfaces some anti-European content more frequently.

E.g., this post is an interesting example:

JD Vance and White House get grilled in the comments, they even get Community Noted. That's actually better than I expected.

idk that's something else than anti-European. The anti-European stuff is the demotivating stuff. Or the culture-critical stuff. E.g. last year there was a ton of propaganda that Europeans work less, or that our GDP is lower or how we're retarded for this and that, but ofc, this is a very one-sided view that is imposed to us from the network. I don't think community noting JD Vance compares here at all