Although he’s had a variety of jobs in the industry, including a stint as Arcane Asset’s chief investment officer, Eric Wall is probably
Although he’s had a variety of jobs in the industry, including a stint as Arcane Asset’s chief investment officer, Eric Wall is probably best known for shitposting and arguing with people on Crypto Twitter.
“Just like any other person, I’m scrolling my Twitter feed, and then you see people saying dumb shit that is incorrect, and that is based on a lie. And then I just argue with that person, and then those arguments lead to long-form Medium articles,” he says with just a faint trace of a Swedish accent.
“I’m just trying to correct ‘incorrectness’ in the space.”
He’s been working on a super-secret project ever since he left Arcane early last year, so he doesn’t have an official title apart from “blockchain researcher” and board member for Ethereum scaling solution the StarkNet Foundation.
After arguing with people for years for free, more recently, Wall has been attempting to make money from challenging antagonists to a bet and has also (semi-literally) begun collecting the skulls of his enemies. “That has been paying off in tungsten cubes and actual money,” he says.
“There’s multiple cryptocurrency communities who have me as their favorite hate object basically. They want to put you in your place. And they have all sorts of idiotic ideas.”
Wall recently moved to Portugal from Sweden, attracted by the crypto-friendly regulation and the lifestyle — and for safety reasons, after the next most prominent crypto future in Sweden was physically attacked in an attempt to steal his crypto. He explains the tax system there is so transparent that anyone can look up your net wealth. “If you combine that with the fact you know they’re into crypto, and it’s very easy to pick out targets in Sweden,” he says.
Wall says he paid for the rent on his new flat through the hatred of HEXicans. He’s been at loggerheads with the HEX community since 2019 when founder Richard Heart explained the scheme to him. In February last year, he made a bet with HEXican Dixon Piper that HEX — then trading at $0.18 — wouldn’t reach a new all-time high by February 2023.
While he hasn’t won yet (but almost certainly will, given HEX’s current price), after HEX plunged to $0.04, he was able to hedge the bet and lock in a profit of $16,000 to pay for his apartment in Lisbon.
“I have this place now with just the most amazing view that I’ve ever seen in my life. I see the entire Portuguese coast from that window, from that balcony. I can have these HEXicans telling me how stupid I am while looking at that view.”
Similarly, he bet Blockstream CEO Adam Back that PlanB’s “floor model” was going to be wrong — which it was. “So, Adam had to pay up a tungsten cube with his face engraved into the cube,” he says. He won another bet against Bitcoin Magazine’s CK Snarks that the Ethereum Merge really would happen in 2022.
His plan is to build up a collection of 20 tungsten cubes with the faces of his vanquished foes so that people think twice about arguing. “You’re going to be pretty intimidated,” he says. “Do you want to be the next face in this collection?”
Bitcoin maxi to mini
Wall is a recovering Bitcoin maximalist who was once known as the “altcoin slayer” for his brutal takedowns of altcoins during the era of ICOs. One of the most qualified critics in the space — he literally wrote his Master’s thesis about blockchain — he can zero in on technological issues and communicate those problems effectively to less technical members of the crypto community.
Back when he was pointing out that most ICO altcoins were centralized shitcoins with myriad security issues, he was a hero to Bitcoiners. But ever since he started busting myths about Ethereum and suggesting that Bitcoin was being left behind by smart contracts, scaling and NFTs, they’ve liked him much less.
As you have no doubt gathered, Wall goes to great lengths to prove he is correct and once spent a month downloading an Ethereum node purely to bust the Bitcoiner myth that it took 8 terabytes of data to fully validate transactions.
“It was extremely difficult, but it was possible, and it didn’t take 8 terabytes of space on the hard drive.”
One of the big reasons for the shift from maxi to mini (he’s still a proponent of Bitcoin) is that Wall has been fascinated for years with building decentralized finance on an open and permissionless settlement layer. That was the essential subject of his thesis, and the need for decentralization to bring it…
cointelegraph.com