It's a crypto/blockchain podcast, but very technical, it's focused around the advanced technology that makes up the ecosystem (zero-knowledge cryptography, multi-party computation, consensus algorithms, miner-extractable value, new blockchain programming languages, etc).

Very technical, almost nothing about investing. The downside, some episodes may be a bit hard to jump into due to the technical nature.

High fees means there's tons of demand to use the chain.

Yes, it sucks for small users who are priced-out, but scaling solutions such as rollups should be launching within the next few weeks.

People who can make more than 10% trading?

Lending protocols aren't doing anything different than what banks do: allocating inactive capital to those who can make use of that capital and are willing to pay for it.

Interest rates are high because of A: market volatility, professional traders can easily make more than 10%, and B: information asymmetry, large capital pools haven't allocated to these pools.

If you somehow banned any new users from using Ethereum, existing users would continue to use Ethereum for the applications built on top of it.

There's many applications like DeFiSaver that use flash loans to allow users to migrate debt between lending protocols without needing additional capital.

Both have massive network effects. Marginal technology improvements aren't enough to convince developers to build on a platform that has no users, no application & no infrastructure.

No, you would vote on the DAO with a power of 900, because your original 1000 ETH collateral is being held by the lending protocol

People need ETH for:

* Paying transaction fees to use the network. For example, Visa is now settling payments with card issuers using USDC on Ethereum, so Visa needs to pay these fees with ETH.

* Collateral in financial applications: Over 11 million ETH (over $24 billion) have been locked as collateral in various financial protocols

* Staking & validating: In the same way that Bitcoin miners must purchase mining hardware to earn money, Eth2 validators must purchase ETH to earn staking rewards

If you want an example of one innovation, look at flash loans. Flash loans provide the ability to atomicly borrow infinite money for the duration of a transaction, with no collateral or credit. This money can be used for arbitraging or just to provide working capital for a complex operation. If the loan isn't repaid by the end of the transaction, the whole transaction is cancelled.

Better explanation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCJUhnXQ76s

Crypto & DeFi is a new backend for finance

The social contract is that the protocol & monetary policy will ossify after the transition to PoS & sharding is complete.

I can put stablecoins (crypto dollars) in a lending protocol like Aave and earn ~10% APY. Compare that to my savings account, which pays out 0.25% APY.

Or how about the stablecoins themselves? MakerDAO creates the Dai stablecoin, backed by crypto-native assets like ETH & BTC.

I have a number of friends in Argentina who are surviving hyper-inflation by keeping their wealth in stablecoins.

Both are valuable because of their universally recognized scarcity and value. If you want to put your wealth in a SoV cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is the clear schelling point.

Ether will remain competitive with BTC, it may even flip it in market cap, but I doubt Bitcoin will ever go away.

Seems like there's discussion of scrapping the whole phase 2 "execution environments" and just allowing heterogenous execution on rollups.

Long answer: The beacon chain _will_ run in parallel until the two chains are merged. Until that time, ETH in the Beacon Chain isn't transferable, so effectively not a separate asset.

However, exchanges are offering Eth2 staking derivatives which they're branding as "ETH2". But it should be remembered that this is a derivative, not a separate M0 asset.