[HN Gopher] Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
___________________________________________________________________
Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
Author : timdaub
Score : 261 points
Date : 2021-02-22 10:05 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (timdaub.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (timdaub.github.io)
| bhaak wrote:
| > Where there was a feeling of revolution and new beginnings, now
| there are people in suits talking corporate.
|
| I read both "Digital Gold" by Nathaniel Popper about the early
| days of Bitcoin and "The Infinite Machine" by Camila Russo about
| the inception of Ethereum and the difference between the early
| sentiment in those two projects is striking.
|
| Bitcoin came from a cypherpunk background and was very anti
| establishment whereas Ethereum seems to have been setup and
| conducted like a startup company. There was much more money
| involved starting the latter project.
|
| I can relate to the sentiment of the author though, money sucks
| the fun out of many things. But finance is at the heart of both
| projects, so it's too be expected that they get more professional
| and more business-like while they grow.
| te_chris wrote:
| Both of ETH and BTC's points these days is speculative gambling
| by people who care enough about finance to understand that, so
| people being shocked that finance people are invovled in
| something that it's possible to gamble on is a bit rich.
|
| It certainly isn't useful as "the world computer" or whatever:
| have you seen gwei lately??
| maipen wrote:
| This constant whining is getting popular nowadays, specially on
| hn. >ooohh this thing I got in early is now popular Give me a
| break. Alot of smart people here think they know what matters but
| they don't. They often point at the technology and this and that,
| but it doesn't matter, they are all wrong. The price chart is the
| only thing that matters. Even if you had the best scalable
| crypto. Would it matter if nobody could make money on it? People
| only adopt these things to make money because it's not a
| necessity, unlike In your country where you need, your
| government's printed money to buy food and survive. Theories
| sometimes make alot of sense in paper, but reality proves
| otherwise. In crypto all it matters is price performance. When
| there is a bear market most people don't want to talk or touch
| crypto at all. They all want to stay a away, like it is a leprous
| dog. You can pay for less shit with bitcoin today, than in 2017.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| > they are all wrong
|
| That's pretty absolutist. So, if one's right, that makes you
| all wrong?
| aww_dang wrote:
| It shouldn't need to be said, but preference is individual. If
| I dislike something, a high price tag won't change my
| preference.
| wtvanhest wrote:
| In the case of crypto, it probably should. The reality is
| that there is so much compute power aimed at BTC/ETH, that if
| you try to use a 'cheap' crypto currency, it is susceptible
| to compute power attacks or at the very least, hasn't been
| battle tested against non-compute attacks.
|
| IMO, if you are going to write a smart-contract or "invest"
| in crypto, you should have an extremely good reason to do it
| anywhere but ETH/BTC.
|
| The price and value of the chain give an signal of security.
| aww_dang wrote:
| Price isn't equal to utility.
|
| You can illuminate your home cheaply with electricity or
| expensively with candles. Yet the lower priced version is
| more effective.
|
| Technology advances. Technology is a means to an end.
| Examine the merits of the technology to determine if it
| provides utility to help you achieve the ends you desire.
| wallacoloo wrote:
| Article summarizes to:
|
| "high gas fees are ruining ethereum for me. Other people need to
| quit using it for things that I personally don't get value from,
| to free up block space. Or the devs need to scale capacity. I'm a
| dev, but I don't like contributing to projects which have grown
| as large as ethereum, or I don't want to do that work. Somebody
| else please do it for me."
|
| Sure, there's truth to it. And if the author reflected more
| before writing their rant, maybe they could have gotten to some
| interesting ideas _worth_ discussing:
|
| - How do you design a base layer which is general enough to do
| all the things author enjoys doing with Ethereum? - How do you
| make this base layer capable of scaling as more people want to
| use it?
|
| These are the existential questions that blockchains like
| Ethereum have been facing for _years_. Ethereum has some paths
| forward: rollups and sharding, and there 's a _lot_ of active
| work on both of these right now. Maybe there 's room for useful
| discussion around why these are taking relatively long to ship,
| and how can we ship them faster or avoid hitting these same
| limitations in the future?
|
| But I feel like these discussions are already happening, every
| day in this space and in a hundred different forums. There are
| hundreds of people all working to address the author's pain
| points across dozens of different projects. These things _are_
| being worked on. It just takes time. Nothing happens overnight.
| tamrix wrote:
| Tech Heads believe that the better technically performing coin
| will surface as the best performer in ROI.
|
| Unfortunately the majority of people investing just want to make
| a buck more than they care about the tech involved.
|
| That's when you realise this has more to do with money, than
| tech.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Building something useful on something that is primarily used as
| highly volatile financial speculation instrument always rubbed me
| the wrong way. The whole crypto scene is just about making quick
| dough with a technology, that for some reason remains hyped
| through and wrapped in mysticism.
|
| Face it, there is no sexy killer app for the masses. Wait. There
| is one: Crypto trading to... make quick dough. And the
| cryptonerds seeing the high trade volume then go and call this a
| success of crypto. lol
| carlbarrdahl wrote:
| Could be an antidote to spam and ai generated content? It could
| be used as a signal in the noise because of skin in the game
| for the participants in the network. One could look at it as a
| common backend for anyone to build clients that combine and
| present these feeds.
|
| Perhaps we're not seeing the forest because we're looking at
| the monetization capabilities in the wood.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Micropayments to prevent spam has been attempted a number of
| times in the past and it has never really worked.
| saadalem wrote:
| Yes but, bet on BLOCKCHAIN not a cryptocurrency(at least for
| now?)
|
| Satoshi Nakamoto created something truly revolutionary; a
| complex method of processing and recording data in a system,
| quickly began to overturn everything. Microsoft Word was the
| dominant word processing software for over a decade, with the
| creation of this new system, however, something similar
| arrived: Google Docs, Instead of one person editing a document,
| and being locked out when the other person began to edit,
| multiple people could now edit documents. That opened an entire
| world of possibility, from collaborative conferences online to
| fiction writing with both people online, using Google Docs.
| Microsoft Word was obsolete(even if still many people use it).
| Blockchain is a technology that outshines the concept of Google
| Docs collaboration like a spark versus a star.
|
| Blockchain runs on a principle similar to the collaborative
| ability of Google Docs, by having multiple computers check to
| ensure that digital information is recorded accurately,
| millions of computers, called nodes, check this data and record
| it perfectly, trying to hack Blockchain is like trying to write
| swears in Google Docs: Everyone notices immediately.
| Blockchain-based businesses are growing exponentially as the
| technology improves. Blockchain technologies are not dominated
| by large industries yet. The entire industry of Blockchain
| technology is empty except for a few small yet growing
| businesses. Anyone can use this technology, and anyone can
| learn about it. In fact, by creating a startup focused on some
| sort of Blockchain transaction, whether it's for transporting
| value across the internet, or general information, or financial
| records, you're democratizing the entire process and keeping it
| away from FAANG or even Govs. Blockchain has been compared to
| the Internet. The Internet was extremely profitable and
| Blockchain arguably has the potential to be more so, simply by
| upgrading the existing framework. The person who sets their
| mind to creating a Blockchain technology has the potential to
| be unbelievably successful beyond simply creating a profitable
| niche industry.
| berryjerry wrote:
| In countries with working currencies like EU and US, yes almost
| all crypto is speculation. BUT, countries that have poor
| banking system a poorly managed/trusted economy don't have
| access to even banks, let alone investments and stocks. Crypto
| lets those people participate in the global market.
| lopatin wrote:
| Largely agree. It's what makes Bitcoin different. Bitcoin's
| killer app is the network itself. The fact that you can send
| money/transfer wealth instantly without a bank to tell you what
| you can and can't do IS the value of Bitcoin and why it's not
| some purely speculative ponzhi scheme. As far as I understand,
| you can't reaaally use Ethereum for the same purpose because of
| high fees.
| BlackInkstoan wrote:
| You can use Ethereum for the same purpose. The transaction
| fees for sending Ether in a reasonable amount of time stands
| at sub $5. To send the same amount in the same time on
| Bitcoin's network is higher. Ethereum's high fees mainly
| hinder smart contract usage, which, depending on the
| complexity of the contract, may incur up to hundreds if not
| thousands of dollars at current gas prices.
| aww_dang wrote:
| >Bitcoin's killer app is the network itself. The fact that
| you can send money/transfer wealth instantly
|
| Instantly?
|
| >can't reaaally use Ethereum for the same purpose because of
| high fees
|
| BTC fees are also high?
| dgellow wrote:
| That's one of the point that makes little sense to me. The
| government/bank regulation kicks in when you try to convert
| to your local currency. They now have your full history of
| transactions and can decide to refuse your bitcoins or find
| you guilty of fraud or whatever illegal thing you tried to
| hide. Regulations will always be present at the edge.
| lopatin wrote:
| I didn't say that it has to be for illegal things or
| avoiding regulation. I said it's a trust-less global
| payment infrastructure. Say I need to send $500k to a
| relative in a third world country at 12AM on a Sunday. A
| completely legal transfer of money that I plan to disclose
| to the government. 100% regulated. But I need the
| transaction to go through very quickly. What are my
| options? Chase? Paypal? Western Union? What if Paypal
| decides this transaction is fraudulent and says "no". What
| if Western Union decides to limit my account? What if Chase
| wire transfer to third world bank takes 5 days? With
| Bitcoin, you can just send the money, legally, but without
| a private third party as a middleman. There is value in
| that.
| dgellow wrote:
| I agree. The "without a bank to tell you what you can and
| can't do" made me believe that you were hinting to non-
| regulated transactions, my bad then.
| lopatin wrote:
| Gotcha, yep I could have phrased that better.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Great way to put it. Yes I got excited for crypto when it came
| out but long ago realised there's nothing emancipatory about
| it.
| Taek wrote:
| You'll be back. The fundamentals are strong and the
| technology is genuinely interesting, and real world use cases
| like Sia's Skynet are starting to finally hit stride.
|
| The get rich quick crowd overwhelmed everything else but
| didn't suffocate it, just merely put it way in the
| background.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| The people who got the initial bitcoin and held onto it
| still have the majority of it. I don't see that changing.
| It's not healthy for the monetary system having most people
| try to just get rich by holding onto the currency.
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| I'm not disagreeing with you, but this isn't the first
| time. The people who made the first money held onto that,
| and then used it to control their environment and make
| more money. When the British queen invested in that first
| wooden ship to bring back riches, she made a ton of
| money. Then she started the East India Company. I don't
| see those first BTC holders as worse?
| DominikD wrote:
| You're missing the point, which was "there's nothing for
| the masses". Interesting technology is not a selling point
| for the masses. Strong fundamentals are not a selling point
| for the masses. Whether there's a get rich quick crowd
| around crypto (or not) is not a selling point for the
| masses.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| The haber process feeds 4 billion people, and most don't
| know it exists. Not everything needs to be sold and
| popularised to the masses.
| audunw wrote:
| > You'll be back. The fundamentals are strong and the
| technology is genuinely interesting, and real world use
| cases like Sia's Skynet are starting to finally hit stride.
|
| Skynet feels more like the next step in P2P solutions like
| BitTorrent, than what most people think of when talking
| about blockchain solutions. It kind of also confirms that
| the only real use-cases of decentralized trustless
| solutions are relatively trivial problems like those
| involving purely digital assets (files, domains, etc)
|
| I don't think anyone will claim that the technology isn't
| interesting. I think it's super interesting. But I think
| there's way too much hype, especially on the financial side
| (currencies, DeFi, etc)
| hoka-one-one wrote:
| This same comment appears on every single crypto post. if it
| was actually true do you think people would have stopped
| posting about crypto in the past six years or so?
| steego wrote:
| I don't think people would have stopped posting for a few
| reasons:
|
| 1. There are currently useful applications. 2. It currently
| brings value to some people in one way or another. 3. If
| there are no _killer_ apps, it 's not obvious to a large
| swath of the population.
|
| I try not to be one who invests too much into the wisdom of
| the crowd. I also try not to dismiss them either. We can be
| both clever and easily fooled.
| albntomat0 wrote:
| Plenty of bubbles take time to fully pop.
|
| It can both be true that cryptocurrency is nifty and has real
| world applications, and is at also widely speculative
| currently.
| ffggvv wrote:
| they stopped for the past 2 years until it went up again.
| similiar to people who won't stop selling their herbalife
| shakes
| [deleted]
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Greed is perhaps one of the most powerful motivators known to
| man.
| Frost1x wrote:
| Probably because it largely acts as a proxy for survival
| mechanisms.
|
| Give most people want they need and a little of what they
| want and you'll find most greed driven behaviors largely
| disappear except for a select few who I'd argue have
| dysfunctions or lack basic social maturity.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| The Mouse Utopia study from the 1960's suggest otherwise.
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-
| utopias-...
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| To prove the comment wrong you just have to provide a single
| example, but you can't do that so instead you're criticizing
| the complaint and saying it isn't novel (which is true, but
| irrelevant to its validity).
| omginternets wrote:
| >if it was actually true do you think people would have
| stopped posting about crypto in the past six years or so?
|
| I think crypto posts continue to appear because the _idea_ is
| sexy, but I also think the parent poster is correct: the
| realized applications are not.
|
| Crypto captures the imagination, but it's a disappointment in
| practice.
| viklove wrote:
| HN loves bashing crypto because as tech nerds, we all knew
| about Bitcoin/Ether at their inception, but missed the boat.
| Now we all watch as our weird crypto friends get rich, and we
| have to bash Bitcoin, predicting its inevitable decline, so
| that we can feel better about our past decisions.
| [deleted]
| a_hard_time wrote:
| The top comment on every crypto thread always dismisses
| blockchain as a failed technology (ignoring cryptocurrency)
| and smart contracts as having no killer app (ignoring
| decentralised finance). These comments never come with
| substance. They are essentially declarations of the poster's
| own lack of insight and understanding.
|
| I'm open to criticisms of crypto and smart contracts, but the
| comment above provides nothing in the way of meaningful
| criticism. It is trash.
| mouzogu wrote:
| > "that is primarily used as highly volatile financial
| speculation instrument "
|
| How is that different from any other asset; stocks, land,
| property. It's all speculation nowadays.
|
| From what I've read there are pretty much three use cases:
|
| 1. store of value akin to gold (bitcoin)
|
| 2. decentralised privacy money (monero etc, to avoid taxes?)
|
| 3. a platform on which to build decentralised technologies
| (ethereum, ada, thorchain...countless others - some with
| specific niches: gaming, streaming etc)
|
| I think your evaluation is bit unfair and shortsighted.
|
| Maybe we are not "there" yet, but why should we be? It is still
| a nascent technology and I think it would be foolish, and
| history has shown that, to dismiss it.
|
| Of course, like other asset classes, crypto is now infested
| with shills, scammers and their jargon designed to confuse and
| obfuscate in order to take money from the naive.
| satyrnein wrote:
| Land (for example) is NOT primarily used as a speculation
| instrument. Speculation on land is theoretically a bet on
| whether the inherent value will go up.
| audunw wrote:
| > At the end of the day, crypto is mountain you can't ignore
| anymore
|
| Is it really? Is there anyone that can say that a company has
| suffered because it didn't adopt crypto? It seems like it's
| perfectly safe to ignore crypto completely. You could gain a
| bit of advantage. You can use it as a marketing tool, or to
| attract certain kinds of investors, by cashing in on the
| blockchain hype. But I haven't seen that there's any
| advantage yet in using the technology itself.
|
| Regarding the use-cases you mention:
|
| > 1 store of value akin to gold (bitcoin)
|
| Bitcoin is not a store of value. It's a destructor or sink of
| value. A store of value should have some reserves behind them
| or some physical asset. Something that has value to others
| that have not invested in it. Bitcoin and similar
| cryptocurrency only has value to those that hold them. The
| value of Bitcoin could crash to 0 tomorrow, and nobody except
| the investors would care at all. If the gold price crashed
| I'd be very interested. Would be cool to buy some gold just
| to play with. Maybe make my own jewelry. But WAY before that
| there'd be plenty of others buying it for a higher price, for
| jewelry or manufacturing.
|
| > 2 decentralised privacy money (monero etc)
|
| Aka a gift to crime. I mean, in an ideal world it'd be
| amazing to have a currency like this. But in practice it does
| more damage to good. Yes, IMO it's a bad thing even in
| corrupt countries where you might have legitimate reasons to
| hide from the state. Because having currency like that
| doesn't solve all the other problems with having a corrupt
| government, so it's really just a distraction from solving
| real problems.
|
| > 3 a platform on which to build decentralised technologies
|
| This is the only legitimate use-case IMO. But it has yet to
| be proven that using a platform like this has a real
| advantage.
|
| I think the issue is that problems that you can solve with
| trustless decentralized algorithms are mostly very trivial.
| Who has ever had issues with a bank money transfer itself?
| Meanwhile, the problems we'd really like to solve around
| currencies, payment and financial services, are basically
| impossible to solve with trustless. The real problem in
| payment is to ensure that the seller delivers the product.
| The real problem in lending is to ensure that the borrower
| can afford the loan and uses the money on what he says he
| will.
|
| So you really can't get rid of the human component in most of
| these applications, if you want a solution that's as good as
| what you're trying to replace. And in that case, the
| blockchain is just a fancy and expensive implementation
| detail that serves little to no practical purpose.
|
| There may be some crossover point where these technologies
| provide some value. But I suspect it's a much smaller niche
| than most blockchain proponents would like to admit. I think
| settling international transactions between banks is one of
| the very few use-cases where it may be valuable.
| gh55 wrote:
| > The real problem in lending is to ensure that the
| borrower can afford the loan and uses the money on what he
| says he will.
|
| So the lender pays the money into a multisignature 2-of-3
| wallet, gives 1 key to the borrower, and if when the
| borrower signs a transaction with that key to spend the
| funds is buying what they are authorised to buy,
| countersigns, else does not. And then you wrap this up in a
| smart contract, call it DeFi, have a liquidity pool for
| people to loan out a token for car financing, and if those
| people don't want to perform the check themselves, plug in
| an oracle like chainlink to deal with the real world part.
| On the repayment side, if repayment not made, a company can
| buy the debt and chase it, or can be hired to chase it.
| Wall torn down around car (insert asset here) financing..
| UncleMeat wrote:
| The repossession is the hard part. Let's say I lend ten
| grand to some wallet so they can buy a car. They do so.
| Now they've got a car. They now move all their wealth to
| other wallets or fiat and refuse to pay me back. I need
| some mechanism of repossessing their car, which only
| works if I have state infrastructure and a legal system
| attached to my contract.
|
| "Btc bounty hunters" isn't a good enough explanation.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Now I'm wondering if software contracts have ever been
| legally tested. I'd enjoy a lawyer reading out the
| relevant if statement to the court.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I certainly don't think it is impossible. But the "defi
| will let everybody make 8% on their savings accounts by
| loaning cash to people around the world with no barriers"
| folks need to provide some evidence that I'm not actually
| going to lose everything to people just refusing to pay
| me back.
| gh55 wrote:
| Your correct to say the debt would need to be legally
| recognised, before it could be sold on to a legally
| registered debt collector. Aave for example has a UK
| Electronic Money Institution license, you might need some
| legal entity to take part in what I describe until laws
| catch up with innovation. Self driving cars, uber,
| Airbnb, face similar issues with regulation needing to
| adjust, that doesn't invalidate the innovation.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I think the comparison to airbnb is revealing.
|
| Airbnb allowed individuals to rent their home to other
| individuals. But this is done through a centralized
| service. Scams and abuse exist, but the centralized
| service offers some nice benefits like reviews and bans
| for abusive participants. The innovative part was the new
| model of _what_ you could rent, not the _how_ of how you
| rent it.
|
| In comparison, the defi loan innovation is "how" rather
| than "what". As a borrower I still get some cash and pay
| interest on it. Same as with a bank. As a lender I still
| deposit some cash and obtain interest on it. Same as with
| a bank. And a centralized service provides some nice
| guarantees about checking that my money isn't going to
| criminal organizations or that I have some guarantee that
| I can withdraw my money when needed and risk is
| amortized. Like with airbnb, I'd expect a centralized
| model to be more appealing to many people than a
| decentralized model. And we already have a centralized
| model. They are called banks.
|
| Airbnb succeeded because it created a product that didn't
| exist before.
|
| I only think that the defi loan system is interesting if
| it enables a ton of people to obtain a different thing
| than the thing they can already get from a bank. This
| matters for people with bad credit and people without
| access to banking institutions... but how many people are
| super excited to personally lend to those people?
| gh55 wrote:
| I suppose, with software eating the world, I want to
| believe we will collectively own and operate that
| software, rather than a particular company, that it will
| be open source, and if those who own it charge too much
| someone will fork it and outcompete them.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| That might be nice, but it isn't a feature. Vanishingly
| few people consider "the product is collectively owned
| and open source" to be a feature that they are willing to
| prioritize over other things. As such, it is hard to
| support any very large endeavor just off this thing.
| There is a reason why Blender shows up over and over and
| over and over again on "lists of awesome FLOSS apps" and
| that is because it has damn good features.
| Decentralization is not itself a business strategy
| outside of niche cases.
| gh55 wrote:
| At the moment DeFi loans are fully collateralized, with
| the loan to value ratio affecting the interest rate you
| pay. If your collateral drops in value you have to
| recollateralize the loan, or are liquidated.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I don't understand. Why would I need a loan for $X if I
| already have $X to put up as collateral?
| afiori wrote:
| While it is interesting that you can implement this on
| block-chain this is a perfect example of how block-chain
| does not provide more than just being trustless.
|
| (personally I like having trusted third parties)
| 177tcca wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYOpxzpNQJE&t=70
| gh55 wrote:
| > If the gold price crashed I'd be very interested.
|
| Imo central banks are in a tough spot now. They've issued
| huge amounts of bonds, and cannot raise interest rates. If
| inflation rises, they will be unable to raise rates -
| unless they want to pay incredible amounts of interest to
| the banks. If they do decide to do so, they will need to
| sell large quantities of gold to help pay for that, which
| will be a heavy downward pressure on the price of gold.
| More likely is they allow fiat to devalue, in turn making
| the loans easier to pay off in the future, with the side
| effect of averting any trouble brewing in the stock market
| - people won't exit their positions to cash if stocks
| continue to climb (even if it is due to a devaluing
| currency). Just my opinion.
| rmah wrote:
| Central banks do not issue bonds. What they've been doing
| is _buying_ bonds issued by national governments. Usually
| on the public markets, not directly. Where do they get
| the money to buy the bonds? Why they just magically
| create it. That 's their job.
|
| Central banks do not care, per se, if they have to "pay
| incredible amounts of interest to the banks" since they
| literally create (and destroy) money. Central banks do
| not need to buy or sell gold to create money since money
| is no longer gold backed. Operationally, central banks
| can create any amount of money they want anytime they
| want. Obviously, there are political considerations
| though.
|
| "More likely is they allow fiat to devalue", yes. That is
| exactly what they will do if inflation increases
| substantially. Though not because it will make their
| loans "loans easier to pay off" since central banks have
| no loans to pay off; instead they get paid coupons and
| principal on they bonds.
| gh55 wrote:
| Thanks, your understanding is better than mine. Its the
| national governments who would have to pay the incredible
| amounts of interest, and may fund that by selling the
| gold they own (https://www.usfunds.com/investor-
| library/frank-talk-a-ceo-bl...). Interested to hear
| whether you think gold will increase or decrease its
| value, over the next years.
| rmah wrote:
| Rising interest rates will only make _new debt_ more
| expensive for governments. Existing debt will actually
| become cheaper as rates rise. If rates rise high enough,
| they could actually call (buy back) the bonds early for
| less than face value. This is because most government
| debt is fixed rate.
|
| To use an example, you issue a 10 year bond with a face
| value of $100 with a 1.00% coupon (i.e. you need to pay
| $1/yr for 10 years and then $100 at maturity after 10
| years). Fast forward 5 years -- rates have risen for
| similar risk debt rise to 5.00%. You've paid out $5 so
| far in coupons... but that bond (now 5 years to maturity)
| will cost $84 on the open market. So you simply buy it
| back for $84. That means you spent $84 + $5 = $89 for
| $100. Woohoo!
|
| One financial strategy for governments would be to 1)
| issue excessive debt when rates are very low, 2) don't
| spend all the money, 3) buy back some of the debt when
| rates go up for less than you issued it, thus further
| lowering the cost of debt for the portion you did spend.
| Sadly, most governments have trouble with step #2.
|
| As for gold, I have no idea. Historically, gold was an
| inflation hedge (i.e. it's price rose with inflation).
| But so are a lot of other things. At this point, there's
| nothing special about gold except that it stays shiny
| forever.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Rising stock price due to currency devaluation is already
| happening.
| tekkk wrote:
| A part of what was not mentioned is that it is used as a
| gambling chip. Plain and simple. Sure, not the cheapest
| lottery ticket you can find but hey, your chances of making
| money are probably higher with crypto than the average
| lottery.
|
| Is gambling useful to the society as whole? Probably not.
| But it does make things interesting and alas, Bitcoin (and
| other cryptos) intersect in a most curious way where you
| are gambling but also have a very easy method to move those
| assets around.
|
| And I think cryptos do _save_ money when making larger
| transactions between entities. So there is something real
| there, although it 's not very tangible. For the average
| Joe, I agree. I don't think they really provide that much
| value except your average thrill at the casino (with better
| odds, sure).
| charcircuit wrote:
| >A store of value should have some reserves behind them or
| some physical asset
|
| Nope. This is old people thinking. Young people are used to
| digital items being worth money. People spend real money on
| cosmetics in video games despite there being nothing
| physical about them. These "imaginary" things spawned into
| existence can have value.
| microtherion wrote:
| Have you considered that your use of the term "real
| money" undermines your position a bit?
|
| People spend money on things with little tangible value
| all the time. The benchmark, IMHO, is whether _others_
| accept these things as payment. It 's generally pretty
| hard to pay your utility bill with Farmville coins, or
| buy groceries with Angry Birds Mighty Eagles.
| virgo_eye wrote:
| You can't pay your utility bill with Apple stock, or buy
| groceries with crude oil ETFs. You have to convert them
| into money first. Does this mean that they are not a
| store of value?
| [deleted]
| brabel wrote:
| > How is that different from any other asset, stocks, land,
| property.
|
| You're putting completely different things in the same bag. I
| would say you're right that crypto currencies and stocks are
| kind of similar, but stocks at least have a small (very
| tenuous, I admit) connection to reality. Stocks are related
| to real-world companies that deal things people are willing
| to pay for with real money. Stocks go up and down based on
| how much money the companies are making, not only based on
| how much speculation their stocks are being subjected to.
|
| Crypto is purely and solely speculation. There's no one
| actually trading anything else other than the crypto coins
| themselves! That's quite different in my opinion.
|
| Now, even though, sometimes, land and property are used as
| instruments of speculation, they're still connected strongly
| to the real world, real people. If the world forbid
| speculation overnight, people would still need to own
| property and land to survive, and they would still be willing
| to buy it in exchange for their work or other assets.
|
| If crypto were forbidden overnight, the real world would be
| unaffected. Some people would lose savings they bet on a
| fictional economy, but beyond that, nothing would change.
| These things are fundamentally different.
| imtringued wrote:
| >How is that different from any other asset; stocks, land,
| property. It's all speculation nowadays. How is that
| different from any other asset; stocks, land, property. It's
| all speculation nowadays.
|
| Just because other people are insane doesn't mean you should
| be insane too.
|
| You can sanely invest into stocks, land and property. You can
| never sanely invest into cryptocurrencies, the same way
| nobody invests into dollars. No, buying dollars when your
| national currency is hyperinflating is not an investment
| since you merely expect your purchasing power to stay the
| same.
| lmm wrote:
| > How is that different from any other asset, stocks, land,
| property. It's all speculation nowadays. Just look at the
| housing market in London and other places.
|
| This is a common talking point but it's not actually true.
| 99% of London housing is used for living in.
| aabbcc1241 wrote:
| I don't want to call cryptocurrency as money because they're
| not circulating as you'd expect from money. Globally limited
| transaction rate, relatively long confirmation time, and few
| adoption.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| An ACH transfer through my bank takes multiple days. I've
| only made a few transactions on crypto, but confirmation
| was more like seconds to minutes.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| In euro area we have SEPA instant payments. Cross border
| payments that take place in real-time (10 seconds max).
|
| Took some time for the old banks to wake up, but I think
| they have been doing decent work on catching up.
| aabbcc1241 wrote:
| I was imagining paying subway for my lunch using money.
| audunw wrote:
| > An ACH transfer through my bank takes multiple days
|
| But that's just a regulation and/or implementation issue.
|
| You can transfer in minutes between countries in
| different currencies without blockchain.
|
| The fact that your country is stuck in the stone age in
| this regard isn't really a good argument that
| cryptocurrencies fundamentally provide value over a
| solution without blockchains.
|
| I guess the main value blockchain could provide here is
| to give banks and politicians a kick in the butt, and
| force them to invest in solutions and regulations that
| speed up money transfers.
| afiori wrote:
| In practical terms the main value of cripto is to people
| that are legally forbidden to access these kind of
| services. Even if the Nigerian prince was a scan there
| are many countries where limited access to financial
| services is unescapable; it is to them that crypto has
| the greatest value proposition (whether it will be good
| or bad in reality I have no idea)
| UncleMeat wrote:
| That'd be true if the BCH people won, but btc as a
| mechanism to evade oppressive governments doesn't work
| for the masses when transaction costs are so high.
| imtringued wrote:
| Yes, nowadays Bitcoin is just a shell of its former self.
| It simply is not practical for anything other than Tulip
| manias. That's incredibly sad. Practical usage of Bitcoin
| doesn't even compete with the speculation beyond
| transaction capacity. If anything speculators would
| prefer an economy built on Bitcoin that actually
| guarantees that it's more than just an instrument for
| speculation.
| Proven wrote:
| > 1 store of value akin to gold (bitcoin)
|
| It's not. It has no other popular uses than crypto trading.
|
| > 2 decentralised privacy money (monero etc)
|
| Who quotes prices in only crypto (outside of stablecoins)?
| Noone. It's not at all useful as unit of account - it doesn't
| have 2 out of 3 properties of money (store of value, unit of
| account).
|
| > 3 a platform on which to build decentralised technologies
| (ethereum, ada, thorchain...countless others - some with
| specific niches: gaming, streaming etc)
|
| Many of those (probably most) can work just fine with
| centralized or decentralized non-blockhain apps.
|
| One use case is (relatively) censorship resistant messaging
| and that's only because no major government has decided to
| censor it.
| martin_a wrote:
| After all those years, there's still not a single useful
| blockchain application around.
|
| These days I see lots companies telling me, they put their
| "supply chain on blockchain" and while I understand what they
| probably want to tell me ("you can't tamper with where our
| stuff comes from") I don't see the point in that. If you've got
| trust issues with your subcontractors you should fix those and
| not "seal" the willingly wrong information in a blockchain.
|
| Maybe we should just declare blockchain a "failed technology".
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Cryptokitties is actually great
| Tepix wrote:
| They left Ethereum due to the high gas prices, didn't they?
| How many MAU do they have?
| rawtxapp wrote:
| I know someone who got a 7 figure loan backed by
| cryptocurrency collateral in a matter of minutes using
| makerdao. The best part? They didn't even had to provide
| their name. This is the future folks, I highly recommend that
| you actually try some of these projects before writing them
| off.
| valarauko wrote:
| Interesting. I think I know somebody who might be
| interested in something similar: ie, put X BTC as
| collateral for a loan, and pay it back after a year to get
| X BTC. Any pointers for where I could learn how this could
| work?
| rawtxapp wrote:
| Or you could just treat that collateral as a credit line
| that's always growing, if it grows faster than your
| spending, just withdraw a portion of your collateral.
| Just look at Youtube videos on makerdao, there's some
| good ones out there and _try_ it for yourself once you
| feel comfortable with small amounts.
|
| Once you actually try it, you're going to be like "this
| is the future", every single one of my friends that tried
| came to the same conclusion.
| laughingbovine wrote:
| Cryptocurrency's lack of regulation is not a feature.
| martin_a wrote:
| > The best part? They didn't even had to provide their
| name.
|
| The mafia probably doesn't need your name for a loan, too.
| They'll find you anyway.
|
| But maybe I'm all alone in finding this somewhat shady.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| > The mafia probably doesn't need your name for a loan,
| too.
|
| What? They'll know your name, address and your whole
| family history usually.
|
| It's just a smart contract execution on the global
| computer that is Ethereum, how is that shady?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| There's a big cultural gap here, because your description
| sounds obviously shady to me. If my car financing
| agreement said "the terms of the loan are whatever
| happens when you run this program we wrote", I would
| never in a million years have signed it.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| The code is immutable and open source, so you can inspect
| _exactly_ what it does.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I can inspect the code I write professionally too, but I
| still end up shipping bugs from time to time. So I'm not
| really convinced that the ability to read the code will
| let me reliably determine what it does. Have you heard of
| the DAO hack?
| ethanbond wrote:
| You do realize it's law and not technical incapability that
| prevents financial institutions from lending like this,
| right?
| 177tcca wrote:
| It is technical incapability of some financial
| institutions to set this up inside of their regulated
| position.
|
| Other freely operating entities across the globe are not
| in the same position.
| tootie wrote:
| It's an interesting thought. Any online brokerage, lender
| or retail banker could probably set up an anonymous
| verification of asset ownership without going through
| background checks or credit agencies. You just need
| 2-party consent and verification, not a whole blockchain.
| The trick is not proving you own a thing, it's that you
| need to prove you haven't used it as collateral for
| anyone else or don't hold outstanding debts somewhere
| else. Blockchain will be completely useless for solving
| that. A universal identity (ie SSN) is the only option.
| ike77 wrote:
| I don't think law would prevent a fully collateralized
| loan on the basis of borrower/lender risks.
|
| AML seems a non issue too, as the loan only moves the
| question.
|
| KYC remains one big problem but there are many startups
| providing those services and they are slowly gaining
| acceptance in courts.
|
| Don't be impressed if a few years (and maybe even months)
| from now you start to see classical banks trading
| mortgages onchain.
| boh wrote:
| The banking system doesn't work like a tech company.
| They're highly dependent on a credit eco-system. If the
| debt they sell is backed by highly volatile collateral,
| their own debts will become unsustainably expensive with
| the additional risk factors. Yes I know the future of
| crypto is sunshine and rainbows but the price swings of
| the past three months makes this a highly volatile asset
| class (regardless if the price is moving up). Even
| security backed debt negatively effects risk factors, but
| at least securities have accompanying rights to offset
| losses--crypto has absolutely zero safety nets.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _I don 't think law would prevent a fully collateralized
| loan on the basis of borrower/lender risks._
|
| It doesn't.
|
| _AML seems a non issue too, as the loan only moves the
| question._
|
| No, anti-money-laundering laws are at the heart of why
| the financial system can't do this. KYC laws apply at the
| customer level, so you only need to handle KYC once per
| customer. AML laws apply at the _transaction_ level, so
| you need to apply them to each loan.
|
| Cryptocurrency solves absolutely none of the existing
| _legal_ reasons that banks can 't issue large loans in
| minutes or seconds to existing (or new, well
| collateralized) clients.
| lynx234 wrote:
| > Cryptocurrency solves absolutely none of the existing
| legal reasons that banks can't issue large loans in
| minutes or seconds to existing (or new, well
| collateralized) clients.
|
| Yes, this is definitely correct in that crypto does
| nothing to solve the legal requirements of the banks and
| does not help the banks.
|
| But it's worth mentioning that this sort of fully
| collateralized and anonymous borrowing does not (and
| would not) happen through banks, but through platforms
| like AAVE and Compound. It's a financial tool separate
| from banks. And these tools cannot be shutdown, as long
| as ethereum exists, these tools exist.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Banks don't need to issue fully collateralized loans.
| That is not a thing people need to do in the real world,
| because banks will gladly issue _partially_
| collateralized loans.
|
| As for anonymous loans, those exist solely to service
| criminal customers, so that is not an _advantage_ of
| cryptocurrency.
| lynx234 wrote:
| For people holding crypto assets which they don't plan to
| sell, it's a valid way to borrow other assets for use.
| Potentially for other investments. Definitely not just
| for criminals.
|
| And overall, it's a demonstration of a financial product
| which can only be built in the space of decentralized
| finance. I do not know of another tool which allows
| anyone around the world to borrow significant amounts of
| money anonymously and without an account. Whether it's a
| net good for the world I don't know, but I do believe
| it's a powerful technology and space.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| I mean I don't care why they can't, right? These
| financial systems are so old, corrupt and broken, you
| have to pretty much start from scratch in my opinion.
| lynx234 wrote:
| You do realize that's a characteristic which gives
| decentralized finance an advantage over traditional
| financial institutions, right?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The value of that loan is less than the value of the
| collateral they put in though, that's how vaults work.
|
| You're never going to get an amazing loan deal from a
| trustless system.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| But you can access liquidity without selling your asset
| which is exactly what they want.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| ie. So they can have cash while continuing to be
| speculatively exposed to eth.
|
| I think that ethereum might have great applications, but
| a loan backed by more collateral than it is worth doesn't
| seem like one of them, unless Dao starts allowing for the
| use of collateral that is less liquid than eth.
|
| The issue is that contracts don't have any way of
| "calling in" to the legal API, so you can't put up your
| house as collateral.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| They also avoid capital gains tax which would be pretty
| significant. They can use the money to hedge their bets
| against crypto by buying traditional markets if they
| wanted.
|
| For house mortgages, there are companies that are
| "tokenizing" houses on the blockchain, so putting it up
| collateral would be as simple as depositing that token.
| That said, I think this is far from becoming reality
| anytime soon, just because there's lots of legal issues,
| etc. Nonetheless, the future is pretty exciting!
| rank0 wrote:
| I believe that technically, any conversion between crypto
| assets is still a taxable event. If you want to follow
| the (silly) rules, you have to pay taxes on your gains
| once you purchase something using your borrowed
| stablecoin.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| AFAIK, this isn't how MakerDAO loans are being treated
| right now.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| Presumably the point is to avoid triggering capital gains
| tax with the low cost basis of your coins by borrowing
| someone else's coins to make purchases.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| So yes, you'd pay capital gains tax on the DAI that
| you've borrowed when you transfer it back to USD, _but_
| DAI is a stablecoin that 's pegged to 1$ and the volumes
| are pretty high on many exchanges.
|
| Once you include your exchanges fees in your cost basis,
| you actually lost like 30-40$, so it's a taxable event
| with capital gains _loss_.
| rank0 wrote:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/shehanchandrasekera/2020/07/
| 21/...
| rawtxapp wrote:
| This is more applicable to liquidity providers or things
| like AAVE and compound where your crypto is actually
| loaned out. With maker, your crypto doesn't move anywhere
| and isn't loaned out to anyone.
|
| For what it's worth, if you use AAVE or Compound, you
| also have to declare interest income on what you've
| earned.
|
| With maker, you'd be responsible for capital gains if it
| was liquidated because you fell below the 150% minimum
| ratio.
| rank0 wrote:
| Admittedly, I am not familiar with maker I will have to
| go take a look.
|
| I guess the difference between me and someone who would
| use these DeFi apps, is that they are using crypto as a
| speculative investment (which is fine, I speculate with
| other assets all the time). But most people do not have a
| significant portion of their net worth in crypto tokens.
| For me, it is much cheaper/easier/safer to just get a
| traditional loan.
| lottin wrote:
| What happens in the event of default?
| rawtxapp wrote:
| It's over-collaterized, so if you fall below the 150%
| minimum collateral ratio, maker smart contract could
| liquidate the asset to cover the loan and then return the
| remaining 50%-liquidation fees back to you. As long as
| you're conservative in your borrowing (as in you borrow
| up to 25%-50% of your holding), your chances of getting
| liquidated are pretty slim.
| sabas123 wrote:
| How is being able to do this good? There are reasons why
| this shit has been regulated.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| It gives freedom to people, how is that bad? The whole
| point is that it's a permissionless, borderless
| technology that anyone can participate in. There's really
| nothing holding innovation back.
|
| Flash loans are an example of that innovation, where if
| you see an arbitrage opportunity in the market, you can
| profit from it even if you don't own huge capital, so it
| levels the playing field for all these financial actors.
| Nemi wrote:
| This seems akin to looking at someone's code and saying
| "This is crap! We should throw it out and rewrite it from
| scratch" without understanding how and why it got the way
| it did.
|
| See Chesterton's Fence:
| https://fs.blog/2020/03/chestertons-fence/
| eek04_ wrote:
| > It gives freedom to people, how is that bad?
|
| That's just a slogan. The devil is in the details. To use
| an extreme example: Murder laws removes my freedom to
| kill random people; how is that good?
| kingaillas wrote:
| >It gives freedom to people, how is that bad?
|
| Well it's great in theory until you hit a problem nobody
| was incentivized to guard against the resulting failure
| cascades.
| jagger27 wrote:
| Rich person gets easy loan and other news at 11.
| gher-shyu3i wrote:
| That's what happens when you have an economy based on
| (interest bearing) loans.
| rank0 wrote:
| I really am struggling to see the practical value here. You
| have to provide collateral worth more than your borrowed
| amount. The rates are HORRIBLE for borrowers. Straight up
| predatory.
|
| The anonymity part is cool, but if I want to borrow to get
| a mortgage how exactly does this help me? I do not have
| $500,000 in crypto laying around and a traditional lender
| will give me a 2% interest rate instead of 15%
| rawtxapp wrote:
| So the stability fee you pay is 4.50%. You're still
| holding on to your assets appreciation, so if Bitcoin
| continues to appreciate at 300% per year, the 4.50% is a
| drop in the bucket _and_ you didn 't have to pay a
| capital gains tax.
|
| Eventually, some companies are working on tokenizing
| homes, so once that happens, you could potentially
| deposit that as collateral just as easily, but that's
| still far out.
| karpierz wrote:
| Do you not pay the loan back in Bitcoin? How would you
| exercise the 300% gain while also paying the loan back?
| [deleted]
| rawtxapp wrote:
| So if Bitcoin grows 300%, that means your collateral is
| now worth 300% more.
|
| You can either withdraw a portion of it back to your
| normal wallet or you can just borrow more against the
| same collateral. So it's like a credit line that's always
| appreciating in value.
|
| If one day, you need the whole collateral for whatever
| reason, then you'd pay the loan to unlock it fully and
| withdraw it.
| rank0 wrote:
| > So the stability fee you pay is 4.50%.
|
| The fees I am seeing on Uniswap/Aave are much much higher
| than 4.5%. Even at 4.5% that equates to six figures of
| additional interest payments over my 30 year mortgage.
|
| > and you didn't have to pay a capital gains tax.
|
| This isn't true. Any conversion between crypto assets is
| technically a taxable event...even if we both can agree
| that the rules are silly.
|
| > Eventually, some companies are working on tokenizing
| homes, so once that happens, you could potentially
| deposit that as collateral just as easily, but that's
| still far out.
|
| Okay great, but how does this promised future development
| help me secure a loan for the home I want to buy? Or the
| business I want to start? Again, I do not have 500k in
| bitcoin laying around nor a "tokenized home."
|
| It was super easy to get approved for a 500k mortgage
| just based on my income.
| DennisP wrote:
| The idea is that it's not a conversion, it's a loan. The
| collateral is held in a smart contract and when you pay
| off the loan you get it back. In much the same way,
| people take out loans on their stock portfolios, and they
| don't pay capital gains either.
| rank0 wrote:
| Is there any definitive source on this? I get lots of
| conflicting information from my brief google search.
| Equities and Cryptocurrencies are not treated the same
| for tax purposes by the IRS. It seems like they are
| treated as property and do not qualify as a "fungible"
| asset like stock or USD.
| DennisP wrote:
| I don't know and I haven't consulted a CPA, which is why
| I described it as an "idea" instead of a fact. I know
| technically how it works, but not how the IRS will view
| it.
|
| But to my amateur mind, treating it as property doesn't
| seem like a problem for this view. If you get a loan from
| a pawn shop, you're not selling them your property,
| you're just putting it up for collateral while you pay
| back the loan.
| lisperforlife wrote:
| This. It took me a long time to understand this. I was so
| focused on the volatility that I failed to look at the
| larger trend. It clicked for me only a couple of months
| back.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| Same here, it took me a while to understand why anyone
| would get an over-collaterized loan until it just
| clicked, then I was like this is the future, it doesn't
| make any sense to sell the most valuable and appreciating
| asset ever, but you can still use the money from it.
| phamilton wrote:
| > sell the most valuable and appreciating asset ever
|
| What happens when it stops appreciating? Or is the
| premise that bitcoin will alway outpace interest rates?
| rawtxapp wrote:
| In the short term it could do anything, in the long term
| you'd expect it to constantly appreciate.
|
| It's a scarce/deflationary/limited supply asset which is
| compared against an endless money printer.
| zionic wrote:
| >After all those years, there's still not a single useful
| blockchain application around.
|
| Why are uniswap/none of these DeFi/DEx'es "not useful"?
|
| https://defipulse.com/
| Geee wrote:
| There is Sia/Skynet which I think is really cool. Sia is the
| decentralized storage layer and Skynet provides file-sharing
| and HTTP-access through webportals. It's actually working and
| can compete with AWS S3 in terms of security, performance and
| price, while being completely decentralized. Check out
| https://siasky.net and the Skynet App Store:
| https://siasky.net/hns/skyapps/#/apps/all
| gh55 wrote:
| Putting supply chain on a blockchain isn't about verifying
| the authenticity of the goods. Its about being able to buy
| and sell the goods at any time, hedge out price risk, etc.
| teus wrote:
| > Its about being able to buy and sell the goods at any
| time, hedge out price risk, etc.
|
| Can you explain this in greater detail? I don't wish to be
| a naysayer, but I don't understand how those concepts are
| blockchain-specific. Goods being re-sold/diverted while in
| transit was a regular occurrence prior to the existence of
| blockchain technologies. What is being brought to the table
| that is new?
| mountainb wrote:
| Full supply chain documentation takes a long time to put
| together. If the application could generate the full supply
| chain documentation for an item with a certain serial number,
| that would be very useful.
|
| It is also very common for suppliers and various
| intermediaries to have bad document management practices that
| get further muddled by digital file issues (e.g. people just
| generating documents from their software that may be
| different from the real invoice).
|
| The issue with that is that not everyone involved wants
| transparency or wants to know, because you can get discounts
| from illegal or merely hinky behavior such as through gray
| market imports. There are good reasons as to why a lot of
| people involved in bringing products to customers want to see
| no evil / hear no evil / speak no evil. There's room here for
| the law to push people into adopting better technology than
| what is currently used.
|
| This is another case in which the paper tech is better for
| fraud, negligence, and crime than the blockchain tech. It is
| also more forgiving because it prevents participants in the
| supply chain from becoming aware of fraud further up the
| chain, so it prevents them from taking on liability.
| Transparency sounds great until you learn it means that you
| have to pay more for the same units because the crime / lax
| practices that lubed the system up is now infeasible.
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| Dumb this down for me, because it's unclear how blockchain
| would solve the issues you bring up.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Blockchain is just a ledger. So "the Blockchain" does not
| make anything significantly better. Its in fact
| ridiculously expensive.
|
| The idea is that everytime sweat shop X finishes sewing
| sequins on a dress, they can scan the RFID tag on the
| dress with their smartphone, and the ledger gets updated,
| and then Walmart can prepare for that dress, the shipping
| company can print out labels etc.
|
| Its a good idea.
|
| Industries are supposed to work this out, create their
| own cheaper blockchains that just need some sort of
| simple KYC to get started, then its as cheap as email to
| add your little bit to the supply chain.
|
| I dont know of any successful implementations
|
| Edit: no blockchain will solve the grey market problems.
| Everything will have to be made genuninely on the chain.
| Which starts to lead to probelsm with if you cannot get
| permission to write to the chain ... etc etc
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| I appreciate the response, but it's still entirely
| unclear how blockchain would help here. In a supply
| chain, why would blockchain be better than a centralized
| process? It seems to be trying to put a square peg in a
| round hole.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| It's a fine question - I guess politics mostly
|
| 1. If the central database is proprietary then it is
| enforced (usually by a major retailer ie Walmart drives
| all sorts of RFID supply chain requirements for its
| suppliers. If blockchains come in this is likely how)
|
| 1.a. But which other retailer will sign up to walmart's
| versions ? So it is hard for all suppliers to sign up to
| the same standards
|
| 2. Open standards make it easier for anyone to write apps
| to join the chain.
|
| 3. it's not at all clear how this is better I will admit
| beyond "decentralised" and "open". But those are
| excellent places to start.
| koonsolo wrote:
| I think the decentralized web pieces are starting to fall in
| place: decentralized file storage, decentralized domain
| names, decentralized communities and streaming, decentralized
| payments, etc.
|
| I wouldn't declare it "failed technology" just yet.
| loceng wrote:
| Did Filecoin actually gain any traction?
| toss1 wrote:
| Seems they recently launched late last year [0], some of
| the miners went on strike seeing the actual mining deal
| worse than they expected in several ways [1], and current
| price is going up a bit in the last few days, but
| consistently down vs BTC [2].
|
| They may be having some success on their original
| purpose, having just passed 2.5 billion GB on the
| network, i.e., 2.5 exabytes, and 1300 miners, 200+
| projects and 5900+ GitHub contributors [3].
|
| [0] https://www.coindesk.com/filecoin-mainnet-now-live
| [1] https://news.bitcoin.com/filecoin-miners-start-a-
| strike-fil-... [2]
| https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/filecoin/ [3]
| https://siliconangle.com/2021/02/16/filecoins-
| decentralized-...
| loceng wrote:
| Do you know if they list the price of storing/accessing 1
| GB on Filecoin compared to say AWS?
|
| It's obvious that people who own Bitcoin would want to
| use the system in order to show usefulness, demand,
| however I'm wondering if there's any use of people who
| aren't financially incentivized (like early adopters who
| have the most to gain).
| toss1 wrote:
| Good question, but IDK. Current price is around
| $37/Filecoin, falling from $45 earlier in the week, but I
| have no idea what one Filecoin buys in terms of storage.
| Let me know if you find out more, and I'll do the same
| loceng wrote:
| Will do. It's always been odd to me that that is never
| listed prominently - as price is always the main
| competitive factor for anything, and even if it's 100x
| more expensive than similar solutions - at least people
| get a frame of reference to then see if the multiple is
| worth the value of storing in the Filecoin system; and
| with whatever risks may come with that.
| boh wrote:
| Just because something works doesn't make it a success (see
| Betamax, laser disc, steam powered cars etc.).
| koonsolo wrote:
| I never claimed it was. Read back what I said.
| ertian wrote:
| Just because something doesn't work in the first attempt
| doesn't mean it never will (see various attempts at
| ecommerce, online news, streaming video, or just general
| computer-network-for-the-masses attempts from the 80s and
| early 90s).
| boh wrote:
| It does work, that's the problem. Because even though
| it's working, few people are actually using it for
| anything other than speculative trades (and its been
| working for ~11 years).
| koonsolo wrote:
| The first electric car worked perfectly in 1890. 11 years
| is nothing!
| UShouldBWorking wrote:
| I love that HN has been calling blockchain a failure for 10
| years now. I wish that I could make heads or tails of your
| arguments against it but you seem to just take the worst
| aspects of it to make a point.
|
| The killer app is cash, everything else is a distraction. I
| think hn guys just happen to get paid a lot of money in a
| stable fiat currency so the system works great for you.
| Everyone else is looking for an alternative.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| I think it's being declared "failed technology" at least once
| a month since inception, no?
| boh wrote:
| I mean it "works", but so do steam powered cars. The
| problem is most people don't actually use it, just trade
| it. The space used to mostly involve people who actually
| wanted to decentralize currencies, now it's almost
| exclusively "hodl $$$$$ to the moon etc". This article is
| articulating what's been clear to many people who really
| believed in the promise of decentralized currency: crypto
| in its current iteration has essentially failed. Time to
| try something else.
| touristtam wrote:
| Nevermind article like this one then:
| https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/05/03/jp-morgan-
| microso...
| boh wrote:
| Exactly. Nevermind this article because Bitcoin and a
| blockchain from JP Morgan have nothing in common (also
| JP's enthusiasm for blockchains have been steadily waning
| and their earlier attempts are already dead on the vine).
| People have no interest in the tech, just gainz, bcs
| blockchain finance, consensus, future, JP Morgan and
| whatever word cloud pumpers want to use to get you
| excited don't actually reflect realities. If you have so
| much faith in the tech, start using it for real-world
| transactions, which you can do right now. If you're just
| hodling with some vague assumptions of moon money, you're
| not supporting the actual purpose of crypto. But let's be
| honest, most people aren't really supporting it or have
| any interest in actually using it, that's why crypto has
| been failing (even though it technically "works").
| martin_a wrote:
| Not sure, but we should act more like that then.
| miedpo wrote:
| I mean... there are a few.
|
| Brave (the browser) uses blockchain in their privacy
| protecting ad technology.
|
| Skynet uses a blockchain to allow users to share their extra
| computer storage space for a CDN.
|
| And I'm sure there are a few others. It's just that the
| amount of use cases send legitimate applications using them
| are... limited. Most of the ones I'd consider valid uses have
| a substance-full technical goal, like the two I mentioned
| above.
| martin_a wrote:
| > Brave (the browser) uses blockchain in their privacy
| protecting ad technology.
|
| uBlock Origin works fine based on txt-files. Not sure how
| blockchain could improve this.
| TheMblabla wrote:
| Iirc the idea behind brave is to create a sustainable
| alternative to the ad/data collection of big tech. They
| use blockchain to enable microtransactions for content.
| martin_a wrote:
| So, we are back to flattr, PayPal recurring payments or
| whatnot again.
|
| $localNewspaper not go through the hassle of dealing with
| payments through blockchain technology.
| baq wrote:
| i guess the whole point of tracking containers on blockchain
| was that you don't have to trust middlemen to do the right
| thing anymore.
| Lazare wrote:
| I've read some detailed discussions from people in the
| industry explaining how blockchains don't help. And I've
| read some very high level, breezy assertions from people
| outside the industry asserting that blockchains can help
| (although they never spell out how, exactly).
|
| As far as I can tell:
|
| 1. There's a pretty big issue with containers having the
| wrong contents (eg, counterfeit items loaded initially, or
| contraband added during transit). Current solutions are
| focused around physical security, seals, locks, etc., but
| it's fairly easy to bypass and forge these physical
| measures.
|
| 2. There's no real issue with tracking containers. We don't
| always know what's actually _in_ them, but we know really
| well where they are and what 's _meant_ to be in them.
|
| 3. There's some efforts to try and replace the electronic
| systems for tracking where they are and what _should_ be in
| them with blockchains. But as above, that 's the bit that's
| currently working fine.
|
| Not needing to trust middlemen is a good goal, I just don't
| see how tracking containers on blockchains reduces my need
| to trust middlemen. When Customs seizes the container at
| the border and finds someone has added 100kg of cocaine to
| the container, how does the blockchain prove who jimmied
| the lock open and then replaced the tamper seals?
| teus wrote:
| This, a thousand times _this_!
|
| I've worked in shipping for decades. There is no problem
| with BOLs magically changing with no traceability (which
| blockchain could solve, I guess, if that problem
| existed?). There is no problem with checking that the
| seal on a box at arrival is the same seal that was on the
| box when it departed.
|
| The only viable purpose I've heard for blockchain is
| quasi-anonymous decentralized trust negotiation. This
| purpose doesn't match any real-world use case in
| shipping. A shipper doesn't want to ship product from an
| anonymous untrusted producer and no carrier wants to
| carry goods from an anonymous untrusted shipper.
|
| Blockchain won't stop companies from misdeclaring
| hazardous (but otherwise legal) goods[1], it won't stop
| traffickers from misdeclaring illegal goods (or smuggling
| illegal goods among legal goods)[2], it won't stop trucks
| from running overweight[3], it won't stop ships from
| being misloaded[4]...
|
| ---
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Hyundai_Fortune
|
| [2] https://www.freshplaza.com/article/9295962/cork-
| cocaine-valu...
|
| [3] this sort of thing doesn't usually make the news so I
| don't have a link
|
| [4] https://www.shippingandfreightresource.com/one-apus-
| containe...
| StavrosK wrote:
| And, more importantly, a blockchain provides a
| _trustless_ data store. Why can 't I just trust myself to
| keep the data?
| skywhopper wrote:
| Are the middlemen competing with each other to change the
| supply chain tracking information after it's been recorded
| in a system over which the purchaser has no control? If so,
| then maybe blockchain could help with that specific risk.
| But it can do nothing to prevent middlemen from putting
| fraudulent information into the record in the first place.
| martin_a wrote:
| "shit in, shit out" is still the working principle. I don't
| see why the middlemen should make true statements, if
| that's not in his interest after all. Instead he will just
| enter wrong information, which will then become "correct"
| information, "because it's on the blockchain!!11".
| Gatsky wrote:
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bhp-ironore-blockchain-
| id...
| robjan wrote:
| The problem is that the purpose of the Blockchain is to
| achieve distributed trustless consensus. Any time the
| Blockchain interacts with the physical world you need to
| introduce a centralised trusted entity (the oracle problem)
| martin_a wrote:
| > to digitise a sector that still uses millions of paper
| documents
|
| So, they now use blockchain where sending documents as a
| PDF would have been sufficient...
|
| I'm so proud!
|
| edit: Read the article! That's truely their main selling
| point. Formerly it was done on/with paper, now it's "on the
| blockchain". This is another great example why we don't
| need blockchain.
| rubyfan wrote:
| I think a big part of this is that old tech companies like
| IBM, Oracle and probably every big management consulting
| trying to hype the technology up. You see consultants
| recommend taking on big challenges, sort of like snake oil
| applying it to all kinds of nonsensical scenarios around
| finance, insurance, supply chain, regulatory reporting, etc.
|
| Contrary to general perception it's not a new data transfer
| cure all that will actually solve problems of sharing data
| between organizations. It also doesn't replace hard work
| required to make a new industry standard. It's barely useful
| in either of those but that's the common misconception I
| usually hear from nontechnical people who seem to be excited
| about blockchain.
|
| Are we just trapped in a hype cycle that will inevitably end
| or does Bitcoin growth spell forever renewing waves of hype?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Face it, there is no sexy killer app for the masses.
|
| It's not only the volatility but also the inefficiency which is
| the price that has to be paid for the decentralization. I
| really have trouble coming up with an app where the constant
| fees that have to be paid for actions are justified compared to
| a centralized solution.
| zionic wrote:
| Decentralized uncensorable currency exchange is a real use
| case that is live today. Billions in real value change hands
| on DEXes run on ETH every day.
| milansuk wrote:
| > where the constant fees that have to be paid for actions
|
| I agree, this has to change. I see Ethereum fees as the early
| days of the internet when we paid for every freaking minute!
| Today you can have high-speed internet with no bandwidth
| limit with a fixed monthly fee. The only limit is maximum
| download/upload speed and that's probably the key question:
| What is "maximum speed" for Ethereum? Instead of paying for
| every action, we would pay fixed daily/weekly/monthly fee,
| but it would be limited by that "maximum speed".
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Can you give better examples of funding your idea to change the
| internet/world/whatever? Taking aside if your idea is great or
| dumb.
| natmaka wrote:
| > Building something useful on something that is primarily used
|
| What is built on something often determines the way it is used.
| dgellow wrote:
| What about a voting system? That's the only application of a
| public, decentralized ledger that can kind of makes sense to
| me. I'm from Switzerland, every few months we have a public
| voting for various changes to the federal or cantonal laws. I
| currently do not have a way to be certain that my vote is taken
| in account. With a public ledger I can check and be sure that
| my vote is correct.
|
| I'm generally opposed to software voting because I have a
| complete distrust for such systems, but a public ledger
| (preferably not based on proof of work, so not ethereum) has
| interesting characteristics. And the price or inefficiency
| isn't an issue in this context.
|
| Edit: people commenting seem to misunderstand the proposition.
| I'm perfectly aware of the privacy around voting and not
| advocating against it. It should be possible to have a system
| where your vote is registered publicly as a transaction between
| your wallet and a "referendum" wallet, in that case unless you
| have a way to link the public identity of a wallet to an
| identity (meaning people would somehow leak their public
| address somewhere) you do not have a way to know my vote. The
| only thing you could know is the number of total votes and
| their choice. You can of course generate a new wallet per
| voting as a way to not have a history.
|
| Edit 2: the plausibility deniability is a fair point, I
| concede.
| lopatin wrote:
| A public ledger can be achieved without a blockchain right?
| My understanding is that a ledger can guarantee that your
| vote was counted, but it can't guarantee that all the other
| votes are legitimate.
| dgellow wrote:
| That may be the case. My point was to say that there is at
| least one potential application for a blockchain. But I'm
| sure that's not the best way to approach the problem, just
| a potential solution I could think of.
| jlokier wrote:
| > With a public ledger I can check and be sure that my vote
| is correct
|
| Any voting system with a public ledger where you can later
| check your vote is a disaster for election integrity. It's
| probably surprising, and certainly counter-intuitive, but
| that's a vector for fraud.
|
| That's why we have a long history of _secret_ ballots. And no
| cameras in the voting booth.
|
| From a comment a few weeks ago
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25739051):
|
| > you could look up your own vote and the votes of your
| friends to confirm
|
| You can't do that because visibility causes voting fraud.
|
| By coercion. If votes can be checked by other people, a very
| large number of people (enough to change the result) will be
| forced under threat by someone else to "vote correctly".
|
| The same happens if you can check your own vote, because any
| mechanism that lets you do that can usually be used by
| someone else - "give me your phone so I can check you voted
| for X like I told you to" (while holding a gun).
|
| That's why free & fair elections have secret ballots, without
| personal identification on the ballots. To prevent coercion
| fraud.
| the_snooze wrote:
| > And no cameras in the voting booth.
|
| Even with cameras in the voting booth, voters still have
| plausible deniability because they can spoil their marked
| ballot (that they may have photographed) and request a
| fresh blank one.
|
| In-person paper voting is pretty much the best voting
| method we have in terms of privacy, usability,
| scrutability, and reliability.
| px43 wrote:
| First off, there have been many implementations of various
| forms of secret ballots on Ethereum using zero knowledge
| proofs. Mix and match your feature set of who can verify
| what and when, and there's a zero knowledge scheme that can
| do it.
|
| Second, coercion has been rolled out as an excuse to
| disenfranchise voters for ages with no evidence that it's a
| real threat in the modern era. I live in Oregon, which has
| been doing mail in voting since the 70s. People argue all
| the time that mail in voting will lead to coercion, but it
| has literally never happened in Oregon.
|
| Also, voter rolls are public information. I like collecting
| data, so I have voter rolls of most states, which often
| allows me to look up name, home address, phone number, and
| registered party of anyone who is registered to vote. A lot
| of states even have parts of voting history publicly
| available. It's super easy for any employer to figure out
| what party any employee is in, and exactly which candidates
| that they've donated money to, etc, yet coercion _still_
| isn 't a thing.
|
| If you look at the pure economics of coercion, it's pretty
| obvious why it isn't a thing. It just doesn't scale. Every
| person that gets added under a coercion scheme make it that
| much more likely that the person running the scheme is
| going to go to jail for the rest of their life. No one
| cares so much about politics that they're going to throw
| their life away for the potential of changing 5 or so
| votes.
| jlokier wrote:
| > First off, there have been many implementations of
| various forms of secret ballots on Ethereum using zero
| knowledge proofs. Mix and match your feature set of who
| can verify what and when, and there's a zero knowledge
| scheme that can do it.
|
| Yes, no problem with that. But the GP was arguing that
| it's better if ballots are not secret. I think it's a
| common misconception that if only all votes were open
| they would be more democratic.
|
| At a small scale, I've directly witnessed people who
| decided not to vote on issues where their vote could be
| figured out by others, saying they didn't want social
| consequences of being seen to disagree. I've also known
| people afraid to vote with their conscience due to
| reprisals, and I do mean afraid.
|
| > Second, coercion has been rolled out as an excuse to
| disenfranchise voters for ages with no evidence that it's
| a real threat in the modern era.
|
| Good point. For the record, I'm pro mail-in voting too,
| especially during a pandemic. I'm not impressed by those
| who sought to disenfranchise votes in the USA this time
| around by arguing that mail-in votes should not be
| counted after they have been cast in good faith.
|
| The mechanisms we use to protect vote integrity are meant
| to be a "best we can do" while still allowing people a
| reasonable way to actually vote. As soon as people are
| _prevented_ from voting in the name of "integrity",
| that's not democracy any more.
|
| Mail-in voting fraud has been found to a notable amount
| in the UK, though not enough to swing a result. But it
| did not come from individual homes. It's important to
| have mechanisms in place to look for it, if only to
| evaluate that it's not happening to a significant degree.
| Monitoring mail-in vote integrity should be on the look
| out for where ballots are posted from, and whether there
| are collisions with multiple votes from the same persons.
| If 10,000 votes are detected postmarked from the same
| employer warehouse with the same handwriting, that's time
| to be suspicious. When it's from 10,000 individual homes,
| each marked in a different style, you can be much more
| confident nobody has the capacity to go around every
| household to make that happen.
|
| However, back to the technical suggestion of a public
| verifiable vote. If 10,000 people vote privately and then
| someone they have a commercial relationship with asks for
| proof they voted a particular way before they get a
| discount or whatever, that swings it from "nobody can
| visit every household" back to "systematic pressure is
| realistic", and it's not democracy any more.
|
| > It's super easy for any employer to figure out what
| party any employee is in, and exactly which candidates
| that they've donated money to, etc, yet coercion still
| isn't a thing.
|
| If people choose to announce their party affiliation,
| that's something else. Nothing stops people choosing to
| broadcast how they voted either. That's fine.
|
| However in both cases, people are free to vote
| differently in secret than whatever they are broadcasting
| or socially going along with.
|
| Polling data suggests there are plenty of people who are
| reluctant to truthfully say how they vote, even when told
| the polling is confidential. I'm sure there are people
| who leave it implied among their social groups that they
| lean one way, when in private they actually vote another
| way.
| mcherm wrote:
| I'm a Judge of Elections in Pennsylvania, USA.
|
| You write: > If people choose to announce their party
| affiliation, that's something else.
|
| In PA (as in most states) one's party affiliation is
| public by law. In PA it's important because one can only
| vote in the primary for the party one is registered as a
| member of. (Voters who do not register an affiliation or
| are affiliated with a third party simply aren't allowed
| to vote during the primary.) So it's not really a case of
| "choosing" to announce their affiliation.
|
| Also, I know multiple individuals in my neighborhood who
| have confided in me that they registered as members of
| one party but preferred to vote for the other party. Why?
| Because (at least historically) our county has a long
| history of being run by a single party and (to quote my
| neighbor), "If you are a member of the wrong party your
| trash won't get picked up."
|
| The secret ballot really DOES prevent certain abuses.
| jdmichal wrote:
| To be fair, even if you register for the opposing party,
| helping to choose the opponent is still useful. I've
| considered such plays before.
| jlokier wrote:
| I must admit, the notion of being "in" a party in a way
| an employer can easily check, or party affiliation that
| is legally registered, is outside my experience. By
| affiliation I meant only the party a person tells other
| people they support, in a non-binding social sense. I'm
| not in the USA.
|
| I agree, where affiliation with a party has greater
| meaning and consequences, and is practically required for
| access to ordinary local services, the secret ballot is
| even more important.
|
| That neighbourhood is a great example.
|
| I'm disappointed, really, that in 21st century USA those
| people are still disenfranchised by local politics from
| voting in the primary of the party they actually support.
| But presumably there are good reasons for legal
| registration.
| dmichulke wrote:
| Isn't this more about whom I trust less, the politicians or
| a third party (that might as well be the politicians)?
|
| If so, why is it in the state's power to decree that we
| have to trust the politicians but not the 3rd parties?
| jlokier wrote:
| No it is isn't. Secret ballots aren't about whether you
| trust those administering the election, although that's a
| factor.
|
| They are to let you vote as you privately decide with
| safety from _everyone_ who has an interest in the vote,
| whether that 's third parties, your boss, insurance
| company, local mafia, etc., or the state.
|
| The state's role, in a democracy, is to ensure state-
| level elections take place with the various ingredients
| that ensure it has high integrity. That requires a lot of
| things; a lot of resources, making sure everyone knows
| about it, making it clear the result will be respected by
| the state itself, acting as a coordination point with
| some kind of authority so that people will tend to
| respect that an election actually took place.
|
| If you have a third party available who can do that, by
| all means go for it, but generally you don't have one,
| and if you did you would start calling it the state.
|
| However, in a democracy the electoral process should be
| administered as separately as possible from the
| politicians of the day. Politicians of the day should not
| be getting much involved, other than to ensure it takes
| place with all the usual resources.
|
| Note that "the state" and "the politicians" are not the
| same thing in a democracy. The state consists of multiple
| institutions, many of which do not particularly trust
| politicians either.
|
| The people most directly involved in actually running it
| should demonstrate a commitment to the integrity of the
| election itself foremost, ahead of their personal
| political views. On the principle that democracy itself
| is more valuable than winning any particular election,
| while still being drawn fairly from a range of people.
| But they should be observed (without interference) at
| multiple levels by representatives of different political
| groups.
|
| Making a combination of people, systems and motivations
| to achieve integrity is the art of institution building
| (and maintenance), an electoral commission or something
| like that. Its independence from politicians of the day
| is one of its key features.
|
| Regardless of who runs it and who you trust, you still
| need secret ballots to ensure integrity of the result.
| dgellow wrote:
| Isn't that already a risk though? I vote remotely by mail,
| you could coerce me to vote for something specific and even
| send the mail yourself if you want to be sure.
| mytherin wrote:
| There is a difference between active coercion (someone
| goes to your house and forces you with a gun to vote
| their way) and passive coercion (if you vote for X in 20
| years time your vote might be considered inappropriate
| and you will be fired from your job).
| sigmaprimus wrote:
| What about if in 20 years your social media comment was
| considered inappropriate? For this example let's say it
| was in a "private" forum but political in nature, would
| that also be an act of passive coercion to silence a
| political viewpoint?
|
| Eg: We need to make a list of all his enablers before
| they delete their posts...
| irjustin wrote:
| I'm against doing electronic voting and tracking [0]. Others
| have commented on the tracking/anonymous issues, so I'll
| leave that.
|
| Make the whole system as hard as possible to manipulate by
| involving a lot of people who distrust the person they're
| working with.
|
| There is a tiny chance your personal vote will get lost in
| all the paper handling, but you can be assured that the
| system is a lot harder to manipulate simply because of the
| sheer number of people involved.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
| probably_wrong wrote:
| The main problem as I see it is that such a system would be
| completely inaccessible to anyone who is not a software
| developer.
|
| With a paper-based system, all you need to understand is that
| your paper goes into a box and someone counts it later on.
| Everyone understands every step, including the steps required
| to secure that box. But once you require people to understand
| blockchain you are putting the intregrity of the election in
| the hands of a privileged elite.
| charcircuit wrote:
| I don't understand that system. I drop off a sealed ballot
| in a ballot box and then that's it. I just have to trust
| that the system works. I have to way to prove that my vote
| was counted. I have no way to count the votes for. I don't
| understand the process behind how my votes get counted and
| it would be fine if people didn't understand how
| blockchains work.
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| If you want to understand how your local elections work,
| just go volunteer when they ask for volunteers.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| > But once you require people to understand blockchain you
| are putting the integrity of the election in the hands of a
| privileged elite.
|
| I would say, even worse, we would have to require people to
| TRUST a system that uses blockchain in addition to
| understanding it. The fact that in some thin layer of a
| gigantic inscrutable system there's a mathematically
| irrefutable "truth" does NOT make people feel better about
| it.
|
| Trust is NOT a mathematical concept.
|
| In any case for blockchain to ever take off in common
| usage, it's going to have to overcome its association with
| scammy cryptocurrency schemes. That's going to be a while!
| the_snooze wrote:
| It's sad so many technically-minded people fail to account
| for this when it comes to trust, especially in the context
| of voting. You can't get people to trust a system by
| cloaking it in cryptographic black magic. It has to be
| scrutable to the people participating in it, especially the
| voters and volunteer poll workers who most closely interact
| with it.
| dgellow wrote:
| Yes, that's a very good point and another reason I
| personally advocate for paper ballots. But you can also see
| it the other way: anyone can learn how to check their entry
| in the ledger, that takes time but it's not some rocket
| science. That can be democratized in a way paper ballot
| cannot be as it requires a huge amount of people and has an
| important cost for the community.
| joshspankit wrote:
| What about government spending? All the way from taking taxes
| to paying vendors. _Including_ the spending of all
| politicians. (Minus a reasonable "dark fund" for military and
| whatnot simply because it can be important to hide your cards
| from other countries)
|
| If citizens can see exactly where their dollars go it could
| make corruption very difficult and lead citizens to be far
| more engaged in their democracies.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| We could do that without bitcoin. Lot of things we can do,
| like make democracy more direct by allowing people to vote
| on issues from an app on their phone. The technology is
| there.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| The difficulty with that is getting trusted information
| published, not storing it in a secured manner.
| joshspankit wrote:
| If citizens paid in COUNTRYCOIN (publicly-visible
| blockchain-based currency), all spending was done in
| COUNTRYCOIN, and all government loans (in or out) were in
| COUNTRYCOIN, then trusted information would be integral
| to the whole system.
|
| Yes a contractor could still charge $10k for a hammer,
| but citizens would uncover that almost immediately.
| rmah wrote:
| You can see where your tax dollars go now (except for the
| classified items, but even there you can see the totals).
| You can get detailed breakdowns of nearly everything,
| including salaries. For example, you can see every NYC
| employee salary here https://www.seethroughny.net/payrolls.
| If you want, you can scroll through the massive list of
| federal, state, local gov contracts on a variety of
| websites today. For example, Florida state gov contracts
| https://www.dms.myflorida.com/contract_search
|
| But the fact is, (almost) no one really cares. Many people
| want to believe they would care, but they don't really.
| Either way, knowing what's being spent where only makes
| corruption marginally more difficult. It certainly doesn't
| lead citizens to be any more engaged. We know this because
| what you want is already here and it has solved precisely
| nothing (IMO).
| joshspankit wrote:
| Very solid points.
|
| I personally think the engagement part would come instead
| from "My $5000 in tax went through the system and was
| eventually spent on a federal initiative I don't agree
| with" (or since it's all granular: "only $13 of that
| $5000 went to anything that benefits my community?"). No,
| I'm not saying that everyone will care, but I think that
| _more_ people will care.
| jdmichal wrote:
| I live in Florida, so they only non-federal tax I pay is
| property tax. (Excluding sales taxes, of course.) Every
| year, I get a full breakdown of exactly what mils go
| where with the bill. I bet we would have something
| similar at the federal level by now, except that stupidly
| we have to do the whole "guess the number I'm think of"
| game with the IRS instead of them sending a bill.
| 1337shadow wrote:
| > I currently do not have a way to be certain that my vote is
| taken in account.
|
| That is something we do a lot of R&D on @Electis, along with
| the fine fellows from InfernoRed, Microsoft and others.
| Because the value of an election is the thrust that voters
| have in it!
|
| It is part of what the homomorphic encryption protocol we use
| (electionguard) aims at solving. Your ballot is encrypted
| with a joint public key, and all the "artifacts" of the
| election are published after it closes. You can verify that
| your encrypted ballot is present in the artifacts, and that
| the whole artifacts archive verifies mathematically.
|
| https://www.electionguard.vote/ https://electionguard-
| python.readthedocs.io/ https://www.electis.io/
| https://electeez.com/
| dgellow wrote:
| That's great, thanks for sharing. That could be its own HN
| submission!
| the-smug-one wrote:
| That destroys plausible deniability, no? How would that
| system work?
| moomin wrote:
| This may surprise you, but most voting systems make
| verification hard deliberately. If you can check your vote at
| home, others can verify your vote as well, which means you've
| lost the advantages of a secret ballot.
| dgellow wrote:
| You can only know my vote if you have a way to associate an
| address with an identity. Unless that's the case, you may
| be able to check the set of votes, but that's it.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| Whoever forces you to vote a certain way can force you to
| reveal your address too.
| dgellow wrote:
| Fair point
| KallDrexx wrote:
| Maybe I'm missing something, but I think the original
| point is that blockchain will help the voting process by
| providing the transparency and verification in the
| process. And part of that is everyone being able to see
| that yes the winner won because we can see every vote and
| clearly see who won.
|
| However, that doesn't help unless you know that every
| vote was a legitimate and _eligible_ vote. How do you
| know the votes are legitimate and eligible if the address
| is anonymous? You need some system to either publicly
| identify each address or you need a central authority
| saying which addresses are allowed to vote.
|
| The latter goes right back to the situation we are in
| today and the blockchain becomes no more useful than a
| centralized database, because we are still reliant on the
| centralized authority to tell us how many valid votes
| mattered.
| dgellow wrote:
| You have a list of citizens, their personal information
| are stored in your country databases. They have a unique
| key pair assigned at some point during their life (let's
| call it Citizen Key, may be paired to a Citizen ID or
| something like this).
|
| There is a new voting event, each citizen can now create
| a voting wallet using their Citizen Key then vote on the
| various motions by sending a transaction to a destination
| wallet created for this event.
|
| At the end of the voting event, the votes are counted and
| no transaction can be send to the destination wallet.
|
| You do have a central authority, it's the country (or
| state). Only citizens can vote, and only citizens have a
| valid set of keys.
|
| The benefits is that anyone voting or people who want to
| verify the voting numbers can do, and without having to
| trust the software managing the database (I mean, you of
| course have to trust the blockchain itself...).
| willis936 wrote:
| Address records are very much not considered private.
| Yellow pages only stopped being printed in 2019. The
| information is still accessible.
| dgellow wrote:
| By "address" I meant a wallet address on the blockchain.
| Majromax wrote:
| > You can only know my vote if you have a way to
| associate an address with an identity.
|
| A secret ballot makes it impossible to verify votes _even
| with collusion_ between the voter and interested party.
| That makes vote-purchasing infeasible, since I could take
| money to vote for you and still defect at the secret
| ballot box.
|
| A cryptographically-secure secret ballot in this threat
| model would need to provide the voter with a valid zero-
| knowledge proof for their actual vote and an imposter
| zero-knowledge proof for their alternative vote.
| Something like "if I input A into the system, then it
| counted vote X; if I input B then it counted vote Y,"
| with A/B remaining private to the voter.
| loceng wrote:
| That "for some reason" is that's obvious abd straight forward
| to anyone being honest and not trying to push propaganda is
| that Bitcoin, and other blockchains structures like it, are MLM
| schemes - and that it's decentralized and on a global scale is
| why it's been able to pick up so much energy - aligning people
| and industrial complexes globally to bring it mainstream.
|
| Design a blockchain system where it's agreed upon consensus and
| use/adoption is voluntary through democratically elected
| processes (save regulatory capture), and we'll have a good
| system that's not unnecessarily and unreasonably transferring
| wealth from later adopters to earlier adopters. You won't be
| able to make a fortune on it by buying it and pumping it to
| make its value goes up, nor will you be able to make money
| selling shovels to desperate or greedy or gullible people once
| they catch wind of the "gold rush."
|
| The one major benefit of all if this craziness is that the
| flood of money into blockchains has meant technology
| development and many more engineers with experience; whether
| there are engineers who'd work on non-Pyramid/MLM-Ponzi scheme
| blockchains though, if they're financially incentivized/aligned
| with Bitcoin et al, that's TBD.
| louwrentius wrote:
| Can you point to a legitimate problem that "blockchain" can
| solve, which can't be solved with existing tools?
|
| I think every smart person working on any kind of blockchain-
| related tech is seriously wasting their talent and life.
| loceng wrote:
| There may be existing tools that are foolproof that can
| provide an immutable ledger, I'm unsure if that's fully
| possible otherwise, however having all transactions and
| changes to said system being public would prevent things
| like nations printing money without reporting it accurately
| - helping to make sure everyone's playing a fair game;
| using such a ledger would have to be voluntary, with
| nations who are aligned with similar values.
|
| Edit to add: This may in fact be the only important use
| case for blockchain, where nations under different groups
| of democratic-based control, agree to use the same
| blockchain - so they can all know no one else is cheating
| the system. The transparency could allow public, peer
| analysis of transactions as well - and who knows what
| insights or protections-security could come from having
| that crowdsourced witnessing occurring; perhaps
| distributing the mining amongst the citizens of each nation
| as well, if deemed necessary as a safeguard.
|
| Serendipitously, this was just posted to HN: "Data
| Immutability, Verifiability and Integrity Without the
| Blockchain Overhead" -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26221324
| louwrentius wrote:
| You are trying to solve a problem that is a feature.
| Printing money is a feature to keep our societies afloat
| during dark times.
|
| It is one of the tools to keep a currency stable.
|
| Not to say that there aren't serious problems in the fin-
| tech world, but immutable ledgers and rigid currencies
| aren't going to solve those.
|
| The key problem - and your post is yet another example -
| is that you can't replace trust with an immutable ledger.
|
| https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_n
| o_g...
|
| The real problem - in my view - is that people don't
| understand the foundations of a society anymore, how to
| live together.
| ccortes wrote:
| > Can you point to a legitimate problem that "blockchain"
| can solve, which can't be solved with existing tools?
|
| I will never understand this. The vast majority of problems
| have more than one solution, most of the time is just about
| solving something in a (much) better way.
|
| If the bar for something to exist is "solve a problem that
| can't be solved with existing tools" then 99% of startups
| wouldn't exist.
| louwrentius wrote:
| I think you misinterpret my statement.
|
| Just as you have just a finite set of notes on a piano,
| you can create infinite music.
|
| And even if IT has a finite set of regular tools like SQL
| databases, programming languages and protocols, it's the
| thing you create with that, what counts.
|
| Blockchain is a tool that does nothing better than
| existing tools.
|
| Blockchain is a solution to a problem nobody has.
| ccortes wrote:
| I don't know if you'd count it as a blockchain solution
| but I constantly use crypto to send money to my family
| and it's the best solution that I've found.
|
| And yes, I now about transferwise, paypal, swift, etc.
| And using crypto is faster and cheaper.
| Karunamon wrote:
| I call maximum shenanigans on "cheaper" unless you're
| sending large amounts of money.
|
| Bitcoin: ~$25
|
| Ethereum (and all tokens): ~$17
|
| For comparison, to burn that much in fees on Paypal (2.5%
| + 30c), I'd need to send around 10K.
|
| Crypto is currently pointless for anything other than big
| transactions, and the unpredictability of the transaction
| fees, let alone the coin's value, is a big problem.
| ccortes wrote:
| There's more than just bitcoin and ethereum
| Karunamon wrote:
| Not that have any kind of mainstream usage.
| imtringued wrote:
| What are the tax implications for the receiving side?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Can you point to a legitimate problem that "whatsapp"
| solved that could not be solved with existing tools?
|
| Between SMS, MMS, 'normal' calls and Skype, whatsapp added
| nothing technically new to the world.
| louwrentius wrote:
| Whatsapp was cross platform and free.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| System that can't be shut down by governments?
| louwrentius wrote:
| You mean that government that just shuts down internet,
| making your 'system' totally useless?
|
| Yes, right!
|
| You can't fix societal problems with tech.
| dgellow wrote:
| Something to consider: shutting down the internet is very
| expensive for a government and is likely to results in
| social unrest and have a lot of other negative side
| effects.
| louwrentius wrote:
| For first-world countries yes, but we see second and
| third world countries do it all the time.
| dgellow wrote:
| And that damages their reputation, creates social unrest,
| makes it difficult to do business from there, etc. I just
| want to say that yes, you can shut down the internet but
| that's already a quite high bar if that's the only way a
| government can stop a system.
| robjan wrote:
| It seems that the people who need it the most are least
| likely to gain utility from it.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Yes you can, access to free information and finance
| should be a human right. Just like cash can be used by
| anyone, so electronic cash should be.
| louwrentius wrote:
| Cryptocurrencies and blockchain were never really about
| human rights.
|
| It's all about making a quick buck. If that's at the
| expense of other people or our environment, who gives a
| fuck right?
| drcode wrote:
| The alternative is building on AWS or whatever, where a big
| company can just decide arbitrarily to kill your startup at any
| arbitrary moment by shutting down your access, or confiscating
| your funds.
|
| This happens all the time.
| payne92 wrote:
| There is a killer app for crypto: international money
| laundering and untraceable transfers.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Crypto transfers are the opposite of untraceable. I'm not
| sure why that sentiment is so prevalent.
| duckfang wrote:
| The hardest pill to swallow is that we already had a very low
| cost of moving money around between hostile nation-states. And
| it's been around since the 8th century - read 700ACE-800ACE.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala
|
| Its money dealer to money dealer, and the money dealers keep
| scrips. Average fees are from 0.2% to 0.5% . It's definitely
| un-sexy since its not technology based. No chains of blocks or
| programmers needed. Fees are low, so the money transferrers can
| make a living, but not allow speculation or other hazardous
| acts.
|
| And the only reason why it's not more massively used is because
| of the US's adherence that it's "terrorism".
|
| I'd imagine that the terrorism angle is more of a "allows
| people to ignore central banks ran by USA and Europe"... as the
| US didn't much care when HSBC was financing drug cartels,
| terrorists, and the like (
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2012/07/16/hsbc-h...
| )
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >And the only reason why it's not more massively used is
| because of the US's adherence that it's "terrorism".
|
| I don't think so. A system with clear record keeping,
| auditable by third parties, and subject to the judiciary is
| far better than below:
|
| > Trust and extensive use of connections are the components
| that distinguish it from other remittance systems. Hawaladar
| networks are often based on membership in the same family,
| village, clan, or ethnic group, and cheating is punished by
| effective excommunication and "loss of honour"--leading to
| severe economic hardship.[3]
|
| Technology has obviated the need for unnecessary levels of
| allegiance to your tribe, as required in the above system.
| duckfang wrote:
| > I don't think so. A system with clear record keeping,
| auditable by third parties, and subject to the judiciary is
| far better than below:
|
| And we've learned that record-keeping has its own very
| strong negative side. It alone can establish ties between
| people, and serve to eliminate privacy all in the names of
| "transparency". (And I can hear it now too - "Why want
| privacy if you have done nothing wrong?"). I think we're
| only at the beginning of crypto-fraud arrests, because the
| ledger is the log - and that's a liability.
|
| And the auditability is primarily a governmental
| requirement, usually based around fraud, financing
| terrorists, or the like. If cheating occurs, the
| excommunication from the network is the punishment - you
| are removed from your position of power. And frankly, we
| can look at our systems of how auditability doesnt stop the
| various failure modes: blatant financing of terrorism/HBSC,
| billions of $ transferred away from citizens with usurious
| fines, overleveraging finance side affecting savings/loan.
| In the end, auditability is just a way to assign blame. And
| that blame is never directed towards those at the top who
| manufacture and use illegal techniques - it is used to
| blame the rank and file; the cashier, the teller, the
| engineer, the low middle manager.
|
| And subject to the judiciary is an interesting case you
| bring up... Because transfers in (I believe) all
| cryptocurrency is not subject to the judiciary. And in many
| more popular cryptosystems, that is seen as a strong anti-
| government bonus, and not a malus. And
|
| Point being, is that the Hawala is the last millenium's
| Bitcoin.. And when compared to BTC or ETH now, is still
| strictly better. (And we haven't discussed the barrier to
| entry, wasted electrical power, e-waste, etc.)
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >And we've learned that record-keeping has its own very
| strong negative side. It alone can establish ties between
| people, and serve to eliminate privacy all in the names
| of "transparency".
|
| Hawala people can establish ties too, unless they are
| somehow incorruptible. And electronic money transfer
| systems and SWIFT and whatnot aren't perfect, but my
| contention is they are more preferable to almost all
| people than Hawala. I am aware of the corruption with
| regards to HSBC, but I can't agree with
|
| >billions of $ transferred away from citizens with
| usurious fines, overleveraging finance side affecting
| savings/loan
|
| Keeping funds secure and moving money has never been so
| easy and so cheap for almost all people. Yes, you can get
| screwed if the government deems you a terrorist, and a
| more distributed system like Hawala might be more
| resilient to that kind of attack, but there's other costs
| to Hawala that the current system doesn't have.
|
| >Point being, is that the Hawala is the last millenium's
| Bitcoin.. And when compared to BTC or ETH now, is still
| strictly better. (And we haven't discussed the barrier to
| entry, wasted electrical power, e-waste, etc.)
|
| I can't comment on this since I don't know enough about
| BTC or ETH or Hawala.
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| Technology doesn't imply a good civil society (where you
| can, on average, trust people. Aka "social capital").
|
| But does technology imply social capital? I don't think so.
|
| So if you set up the dichotomy, and had to choose, I'd
| choose "social capital" every time.
|
| I know, you didn't use this phrasing. But when I read
| "allegiance to your tribe", what does that even mean? If
| you're American and you support your troops, isn't that
| "allegiance to your tribe"?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Technology removes the need for middlemen, and hence any
| trust needed for the middlemen.
|
| Allegiance to the tribe means following the
| customs/social ordering/rules of the tribe. For example,
| how well would a gay/non religious/etc person fare in
| tribes that don't believe in civil liberties?
| duckfang wrote:
| > Technology removes the need for middlemen, and hence
| any trust needed for the middlemen.
|
| Unfortunately, I see what happens when 'We' use
| technology to remove middlemen...
|
| Apple: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/01/02/amphetamine-
| app-store-r...
|
| Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22348568
|
| (person 17h ago on HN talking about google acct ban
| remediation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26218795
| )
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/google-users-locked-out-
| afte...
|
| That's what technology has gotten us. Accounts get closed
| down due to automated systems. Something gets flagged as
| "fraud" and you lose access/money. Your previous business
| selling apps gets cancelled when your app is deregistered
| and removed.
|
| At least, the recourse is "Complain on HN or Twitter".
| Worst case is you file a lawsuit against a multi-billion
| dollar company (hah!).
|
| Now, what do you do to file a dispute against Ethereum or
| Bitcoin? Well, nobody. There is no clearinghouse and no
| masters - that's the selling point! But what about fraud
| or likewise? Too bad, so sad.
|
| With the hawaladars, their word, ethics, and livelihood
| is on the line. You have a real human who can handle the
| squishy and nigh-unautmatable parts. And they can talk
| with the person trying to transfer money in case there is
| problems unforseen.
|
| > Allegiance to the tribe means following the
| customs/social ordering/rules of the tribe.
|
| Well, yes.
|
| > For example, how well would a gay/non religious/etc
| person fare in tribes that don't believe in civil
| liberties?
|
| But this seems like a veiled way to attack a way of
| moving money around solely because the name is Islamic.
| And hate crimes happen nearly everywhere. And there was
| the Kentucky county clerk who refused to sign marriage
| certificates because a couple was gay.... And unlike the
| hawaladars whom you can go to a different one, these
| people in the county had no such choice.
|
| It's easy to set up a strawman that someone may not
| support your beliefs, but it's a false narrative to think
| that only those people do it.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >That's what technology has gotten us. Accounts get
| closed down due to automated systems. Something gets
| flagged as "fraud" and you lose access/money. Your
| previous business selling apps gets cancelled when your
| app is deregistered and removed.
|
| Automated solutions do not preclude having human
| reviewers, and I do not think it's unreasonable for the
| government to step in and mandate quality (such as
| subjecting the automated solutions to a small claims
| court style jurisdiction).
|
| >With the hawaladars, their word, ethics, and livelihood
| is on the line. You have a real human who can handle the
| squishy and nigh-unautmatable parts. And they can talk
| with the person trying to transfer money in case there is
| problems unforseen.
|
| While there's plusses, there's also minuses. What happens
| when something goes wrong with a $100M+ transaction? What
| happens if your hawaladar or the other one burns you?
| There's 7B+ people in the world, eventually some
| organization to manage reputation will develop, maybe
| even by the hawaladars themselves, and you end up back
| where you started.
|
| >But this seems like a veiled way to attack a way of
| moving money around solely because the name is Islamic.
|
| I specifically wrote "etc" so I didn't have to specify
| each and every instance of discrimination, and my example
| of "gay" would certainly include the KY county clerk, so
| I don't see how you could claim I was attacking an
| Islamic concept because it's Islamic.
|
| I'm not even attacking it, it's a perfectly valid way for
| transactions to work. In fact, my family has done it
| many, many times when they immigrated and they did it
| between various African countries, UK, USA, AUS, NZ. But
| that was during a time when transferring money was more
| costly and they didn't have another option. Now they
| might choose to use transferwise.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Cryptocurrencies can take the role of a settlement network
| between the money dealers. This allows money dealers who
| either don't fully trust each other, or simply need to settle
| debt internationally because the transaction flow is
| asymmetric, to make these transactions.
|
| It also allows for a new kind of system where the money
| dealers act as access points to the network, and customers
| trust their local money dealer, but you don't need trust
| connections between the money dealers: If I want to send
| money to you from my remote village to yours, I ask you which
| money dealer you trust, go to my trusted money dealer, give
| him cash, and tell him that it is to go to your trusted money
| dealer.
|
| The two money dealers don't have to trust each other for the
| transaction to work, and the transactions are much harder to
| disrupt than classic banking transactions.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Kinda ...
|
| Far more likely that money dealers held powerful positions,
| ensuring some very conservative social constructs stayed in
| place. People just routed around this by using "modern"
| technology.
|
| And so the percentage of legitimate uses of the system
| dwindle, and the percentage of less legitimate increase till
| at some point you are no longer a useful social service but a
| money launderer for criminals who occasionally helps the
| diaspora send money home.
| bookmarkable wrote:
| This is really short sighted thinking. The web had no "killer
| app" in the first 10+ years. It was obscure technology with
| thousands of naysayers laughing at us "web nerds" because we
| thought it would change everything.
|
| Cryptocurrency is very young. While its hard to say if BTC or
| ETH or something yet to be invented will be part of the digital
| money future, it is absolutely reasonable to expect this
| technology will have a role in the world. Of course people will
| make and lose "quick dough" but that's like saying the web
| failed because some idiot made or lost money on Pets.com or AOL
| stock.
|
| Trade volume just means that the idea is in circulation, people
| of many walks of life are seeing what is there. Feel free to
| ignore those people, but to write off the entire concept as
| "about making quick dough" is asinine.
| shuckles wrote:
| Bloomberg and Wired went online 4 years after the invention
| of the World Wide Web. In the first ten years, Amazon, eBay,
| Google, and PayPal were all founded. Technology adoption
| curves have only gotten steeper since then (e.g.
| iPhone/Android was basically the dominant consumer computing
| platform 10 years after its introduction).
| rprasad wrote:
| The web was officially launched in 1990. The web's killer app
| was information exchange, and it was used for that purpose
| _even before_ the web existed; see for example Compuserve,
| AOL, Usenet, the academic webs between universities that
| predated the "Internet."
|
| Amazon launched in 1994. Ebay 1995. Netflix 1997. Google
| 1998.
|
| In contrast, 10+ years on, and cryptocurrency still hasn't
| demonstrated a compelling use case beyond money laundering
| and collecting ransom payments. If anything, the one thing
| crytocurrency has demonstrated is how flexible and resilient
| our _existing old school_ financial system is.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| The crypto killer app is using the money to buy illegal drugs.
| It always has been. Most of the people I knew who were into
| crypto early used it to buy weed online, not as an investment.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| Mining/Trading BTC over the counter since 2011.
|
| I've never used a darknet market.
|
| I read an article on slashdot in 2011 called "Bitcoin Mining
| for fun and profit" I bought a graphics card, it paid itself
| off in 21 days.
|
| I bought 12 more graphics cards and sucked down 3kW for 24
| months.
|
| I do not regret this and every single person here that
| doesn't understand proof of work, doesn't understand a
| deflating asset with 8 (10 million) decimal places of trading
| precision against fiat currencies with only 2 decimal
| places...
|
| Well I can't help people on the internet do math and make
| money, no one pays me to do that.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I don't think one could claim mining bitcoin is the killer
| app of bitcoin. That's a reason why people would support
| bitcoin.
| fullshark wrote:
| Don't forget ransomware payoffs
| UShouldBWorking wrote:
| Exactly it is cash, as the the white paper says. Everything
| else is a distraction.
| diego_moita wrote:
| > The crypto killer app is using the money to buy illegal
| drugs.
|
| Meeh! Not even that, anymore.
|
| In Brazil there was a brief moment in 2014 when you could buy
| marijuana and cocaine with bitcoins. But now, with all this
| volatility, transfer costs and low liquidity, not even drug
| dealers want crypto currency.
| paulintrognon wrote:
| Isn't cryptocurrencies used all over the Darknet ? I know that
| is not "the masses" but it is still a non-negligeable usage
| which is unlikely to stop, no?
| questionmania wrote:
| Check Cosmos(Tendermint).
| sonkol wrote:
| Around 2015 Vitalik Buterin was one of the few crypto geniuses
| and leaders. For many years the Ethereum project leaders promised
| ETH 2 to solve some of the issues pointed in the article but they
| never delivered. It is understandable that they never delivered
| because there was a lot of complexity involved in improving
| permissionless blockchains BUT seeing a new wave of blockchains
| with good foundations makes one think they never delivered
| because they have not tried enough. Vitalik and his troop have
| enough financial resources to stimulate or hire top blockchain
| researchers from top universities around the world. It seems like
| they never pushed hard to move Ethereum. With enough resources
| you should think like you are doing the Manhattan or Apollo 11
| projects.
| akudha wrote:
| _seeing a new wave of blockchains with good foundations_
|
| Can you name a few? I don't know much about this space, just
| curious
| sonkol wrote:
| > Can you name a few?
|
| Yes, sure: Avalanche [1], Algorand [2], Solana [3], DFINITY
| [4], Conflux [5]
|
| [1] https://www.avalabs.org/
|
| [2] https://algorand.foundation/
|
| [3] https://solana.com/
|
| [4] https://dfinity.org/
|
| [5] https://confluxnetwork.org/
| rawbot wrote:
| I still hold firm to my belief that, whatever the initial
| intentions the idea of cryptocurrency had, since 5 or 6 years
| ago, cryptocurrencies are the MLM of the tech world.
|
| I even knew a few non-techies acquaintances that almost got roped
| into it (in the figure of thousands of USD) with the same pyramid
| scheme manipulation techniques and terminology.
| zionic wrote:
| Personally, I find the crypto-skepticism on HN a strong
| indicator that I should buy more.
| throw8932894 wrote:
| > _I need a hero, and by that, I mean that I need a usable
| methodology for building scaleable decentralized apps. Yes, you
| 've heard that right. We don't need more "Ethereum killers" that
| can do 10x more tx/s than Ethereum. Those are useless._
|
| > _Instead, we need an approach for the average Joe developer to
| create their idea within the Ethereum ecosystem without the need
| for hardcore unproven technologies._
|
| So instead of fixing the actual problem, Ethereum scalability, we
| will do what? This technology was developed by a few guys, most
| of them already left. It was meant to fix Bitcoin "smart
| contracts" (there is a such thing).
|
| Tech behind Ethereum is outdated. Even newer versions rehash the
| same broken idea with sharding. We got 10 years and billions
| poured into consensus research. There are actual papers and
| universities doing this stuff. There are github projects that do
| stuff like decentralized auctions, mixers...
| [deleted]
| timdaub wrote:
| Hey, I think you're making a valid point and I probably should
| have explained more what I meant by my statement.
|
| IMO, there's a middle ground we can go between slow PoW on L1
| and scaleability. I think that it can be done by having tools
| that give us the same guarantees like deploying a smart
| contract on the main chain. It's difficult to explain: But what
| I want is Plasma but as a framework to develop dapps.
|
| This project is going that route:
| https://github.com/hoytech/quadrable
| martindale wrote:
| We're building this, but on Bitcoin ("Plasma but as a
| framework for dapps" [with a focus on developer experience])
| [0]. There's already robust infrastructure for L2 contracts
| in Bitcoin-land, and we've already heavily optimized the L1
| to prepare for the load that a global, ubiquitous solution
| would need.
|
| Honestly, I see no use for Ethereum (or other Turing Complete
| L1s) looking forward -- smart contracts can be purely peer-
| to-peer, with the only pressure applied to L1 being dispute
| resolution. By pushing complex contracts up into Layer 2, we
| can keep the dangerous, money-destroying, theft-enabling
| Turing machines away from the main chain.
|
| [0]: https://fabric.pub
| peter_l_downs wrote:
| You might consider taking a look at Celo. They have ultra-
| light client support [0], it's proof-of-stake with single-
| block finality, and they run a true EVM that you can program
| in Solidity. It's mobile-first but since it's fundamentally a
| fork of Ethereum it is also web3 compatible -- there's a
| metamask fork here that should soon be functional [1]. Gas is
| payable in multiple ERC20 tokens, and should remain cheap as
| the network scales. Not sure if this falls under your
| "ethereum killers that can do 10x transactions/second" so
| apologies for shilling if it's not interesting to you.
|
| [0] https://docs.celo.org/celo-codebase/protocol/plumo
|
| [1] https://github.com/dsrvlabs/celo-extension-wallet
| VentureCurious wrote:
| If you want a Layer2 plasma with similar guarantees to
| Ethereum (account based, not zero knowledge) then you may
| like Gluon.network once they roll out EVM support.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| If I had to choose between scalability and better (more useful,
| more accessible, more maintainable) apps I would pick the apps.
| Ways to do real-world interesting things for people, buildable
| without any rocket science.
|
| For the same reason that a startup with duct-tape code,
| scrambling to scale is better than a startup with no genuine
| demand.
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| What are good examples of what you talk about in your last
| paragraph?
| TeeWEE wrote:
| > Tech behind Ethereum is outdated.
|
| Well Eth 2.0 is applying the latest and the greatest in Crypto
| research to a real coin.
|
| In terms of scalabliltiy Ethereum is already way past bitcoin
| slow transaction rates.
| XorNot wrote:
| The idea of a new version of your currency somewhat speaks
| against the utility of the whole thing surely?
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Why Does it speak against its utility to update to a new
| version? what is the problem with printing a new dollar
| bill, or everyone using windows 10 instead of windows
| seven?
| seizethecheese wrote:
| USD has gone through many iterations in its history. Even
| quite fundamental ones.
| zionic wrote:
| Absolutely not. ETH2 is poorly named, it is an "in-place-
| upgrade" whose core design principles (PoS, Sharding) have
| been part of the ETH roadmap since 1.0.
| jlokier wrote:
| There is utility in being able to evolve the protocols
| without giving up the integrity of the previous version.
|
| Eth2 isn't a different currency, it's a replacement system
| that links with Eth1 to provide continuity. The ETH coins
| are not being replaced; both systems transact in ETH and
| are linked. That's why they are being careful with how it's
| evolved and how the economic links and incentives, and
| smart contracts and data sources, are set up in the
| transition.
|
| There are many changes being implemented through this
| evolution. From PoW to PoS, single chain to cross-linked
| sharding (while managing the incentives to maintain the
| integrity of the network), various improvements to faster
| synchronisation, lower storage requirements, distributed
| storage of the state.
|
| Being able to release v2, v3, v4 of software while staying
| compatible with all the work you did using v1 is a good
| thing. Same idea with evolving Ethereum.
|
| Contrast it with the numerous new coin networks that use
| newer cryptographic ideas but each start their own separate
| networks. That's also evolution, but they don't provide
| continuity in the same way; instead they are a series of
| competing products.
| fredgrott wrote:
| The underlying problem with bitcoin is the same one with P2P and
| it's still has not been solved. IE, scalability of a
| decentralized network. Internet went the other way with a live-
| able scaling solution based on mixing non decentralized with
| decentralized.
|
| My prediction is that it will go the way of internet in that a
| set of orgs that are transparent will form the centralized
| structure to scale it at live-able terms and scaling.
|
| Does that mean pure P2P is not a scalable solve-able solution?
|
| It's a 5 systems level problem which means it takes more time,
| money, and sacrifice than people think to reach a discoverable
| solution.
|
| IMHO
| itsdsmurrell wrote:
| Try Bitcoin Cash. It's the one that implemented Satoshi's
| suggested upping of the block size limit, has the same block
| history as BTC up until the fork, and solves moving value at
| low fees. This operation is the one people should care about
| the most. Fancier things will take time. The community hangs
| out at r/btc by historical accident.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Yeah, that was my feeling about Bitcoin a few years ago after
| dabbling in it and then getting out (to the tune of 1.25
| million... which of course would be much greater now, had I held
| any... sigh)
|
| I originally got into it for the technical aspects of mining
| being interesting. Then all the speculators came in, then I
| realized that (perhaps due to my Psych major) I was pretty good
| at predicting local price maxima, but then after a time that felt
| too much like stealing from the dumber, which is not a vibe that
| brings happiness to me, so I got out of it. I'd rather use my
| intelligence to produce value by coding.
| vmception wrote:
| yeah I'm having a blast
|
| you can pre-purchase gas when gas prices are low and use it when
| gas prices are high like now
|
| there are a lot of currently advanced ways to use Ethereum, and
| all EVMs
|
| The EVM is the thing to learn, being aware of the
| decentralization ideology is a nice to have and really irrelevant
|
| (which is hilarious argument to have with Ethereum bulls
| regarding other less secured EVMs because the bitcoiners and no-
| coiners and general Ethereum detractors don't even consider
| Ethereum decentralized)
| inter_netuser wrote:
| why is the decentralization irrelevant?
| vmception wrote:
| Because using an EVM in production is acknowledging what the
| market can bear and that market is worth trillions
|
| Like any public equity there can be centralized services
| worth more a lot, as they're just platforms
|
| Being aware of what Ethereum mainnet does is okay but
| shouldn't guide any of your decisions of whether you want to
| build on or be bullish on Binance Smart Chain or somebody's
| deployment of any other EVM
| trulyrandom wrote:
| There are some ongoing (and somewhat controversial) efforts to
| make Ethereum fun for developers again: https://cheapeth.org/,
| https://www.deveth.org/.
| ostenning wrote:
| While there are many people out to make a quick buck in the
| crypto world, investment fuels innovation. It gives people
| incentive to build decentralized ecosystems.
|
| Given that we are more than ever moving toward a centalised
| society where corporations have an increasingly tightened grip
| over the people, decentalised technologies are in my opinion a
| glimmer of technological hope.
| TargetedVictim wrote:
| Dutch police and mainstream media is trying to kill me over
| bitcoin and ethereum, for over 3 years now.
| https://pastebin.com/btAfNf3T
| deepstack wrote:
| _> They announced the "Monero Enterprise Alliance." An inside
| joke, supposed to piss off other projects that had started to
| take themselves too seriously. Being slightly confused that day
| myself, I now can't recall if the effort had ever been
| successful. But in any case, I can't recommend buying Monero.
| It's useless._
|
| Why is Monero useless? Is because of transaction fee too high?
| myndpage wrote:
| It's a meme in the monero community. "Don't buy monero". Monero
| fees are actually really low. On average 0.021 cents right now.
| maeln wrote:
| I really, really don't understand where cryptocurrencies are
| going. Billions have been poured in this technology for almost no
| actual return technologically wise.
|
| And I understand, because interest are not aligned. It really
| seems like nobody actually care about advancing the state of art,
| except actual researcher who work in universities and not in
| crypto startups...
|
| Cryptocurrencies had a goal and a usefulness when they were at
| least used to buy drugs online and send a few bucks to your
| friends. Now you cannot even use them for that. Everybody saw the
| rise of the bitcoin valuation and since then, all that matter is
| how much you can make by trading crypto. The actual usefulness of
| the crypto, what it can do, is utterly irrelevant. This is proven
| by btc being one of the most traded and valuable crypto even
| though it is one of the crypto with the less feature. Most btc
| trade are not even going through the bitcoin network but through
| third party, so btc even fail at its own goal.
|
| And because crypto are seen as an investment, everybody is
| holding, and nobody is using it, and you would be a fool to do
| so, since tomorrow, your 1 shitcoin might be worth 3 times what
| you brought it for. And no, "stable coin" is not an answer since
| the only thing they have been used for is to trade between
| crypto...
|
| Then, to make matter even worse, the crypto community is its own
| worst enemy. Since it has been proven that, to make a few buck,
| all it takes is "creating" your own crypto and mining the first
| few block before other get in on it, you get thousand of startup
| coming out of nowhere proposing new crypto that are literally
| clone of other crypto. Tell me, what is the difference between
| Polkadot and Kusama ? Or is there even a significant
| technological difference between Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash,
| Dogecoin, etc ?
|
| We are more than 5 years into this crypto mania with an ungodly
| amount of money being thrown at it and there has been no
| significant technological progress, no crypto that is useful
| enough to be used by anybody else but crypto-fanatic trying to
| pump and dump it, and this is now becoming one of the worse
| climate disaster in a while. And all the while, every people
| invested in crypto will just talk about price, valuation,
| investment, hodling, etc. It is clear what is their real purpose.
|
| If you want to see actual progress in distributed computing, look
| for scientific paper coming from universities.
| rawbot wrote:
| IIRC Dogecoin was born as a meme. And now I'm supposed to
| believe it is a serious investment or cryptocurrency?
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Dogecoin is, and always was, a meme; a joke cryptocurrency.
| But it developed a life of its own and, unfortunately,
| opportunists have been putting Doge on fish hooks and,
| surprisingly, catching a helluva lot of fish.
|
| It is not, and never will be, a serious investment. The
| problem is, there are still fish that will believe it is a
| serious "opportunity" if they're shown the right kind of
| profit figures, truthful or otherwise.
| jcbrand wrote:
| Nobody is claiming that it's a serious investment.
| imtringued wrote:
| It's unfortunate that most cryptocurrencies are just as
| serious as Dogecoin.
| lawn wrote:
| There's a big difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash: the
| intent to scale on-chain while Bitcoin has given up that
| leading to today's ridiculous transaction fees.
|
| Monero is the best approach to actual privacy as it conceals
| sender, receiver and transaction amount for all transactions.
|
| I do agree that the speculation focus is misguided, but there
| are cryptos that are useful the way Bitcoin was meant to be.
| imtringued wrote:
| I consider Monero useful but most of its users are unethical.
| It's pretty telling that the author of the blog post bashes
| it in the exact way you should. "Don't buy it" as if it was
| meant to be speculated with.
| takoid wrote:
| Wasn't Bitcoin painted in a similar light before it became
| mainstream? Monero's users being unethical (in your
| opinion) is a testament to the usefulness of the
| technology, not the other way around. Would you say the
| same thing about Tor?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| All the claims of Bitcoin being anonymous were either
| incredibly misguided or delusional. Bitcoin is arguably
| far less anonymous than even cash, as it creates a
| permanent record of transactions. If your account is ever
| de-anonymized, and there are good techniques to do that,
| then any transaction you've ever sent _ever_ is going to
| be visible. The only privacy benefit Bitcoin has over
| cash is that it's easier to transmit it remotely, which
| eliminates in person risk.
|
| Monero is at least designed to be anonymous. It's
| possible that some flaw or mistake will eventually be
| uncovered that will break its privacy, but the underlying
| structure is better.
| derefr wrote:
| > And no, "stable coin" is not an answer since the only thing
| they have been used for is to trade between crypto...
|
| Our (blockchain-adjacent) company received millions in equity
| investment in the form of stablecoin transfers. Those investors
| were so heavily "in" crypto, that they didn't have any
| liquidity of useful size in any actual fiat currency, so they
| wouldn't have been able to invest in us in "real money." We
| only got those investments by being willing to accept
| stablecoins.
|
| Compounding that advantage, there were no exchange fees at any
| point during the transaction for accepting investments from
| foreign holders (as they were already holding USDC--where a
| foreign investor would find it a lot harder to hold actual USD
| in their local banks); and there were only minimal, flat
| transfer fees (i.e. gas) to get the whole investment done, as
| opposed to the percentile fees charged for international wire
| transfers. I would say that that was a pretty useful use-case
| for stablecoins.
|
| Of course, when we received these stablecoin investments, we
| gradually offramped them for actual fiat money. What were we
| going to do, pay our employees in stablecoins? And _at that
| point_ we had to pay exchange fees, because we aren't even a US
| company ourselves, and so we were off-ramping for our own local
| currency, not USD. (Though this was cheaper than expected, as
| we directly off-ramped the USDC to our local currency through a
| provider that kept liquidity in our local currency. We never
| needed to get the regular banking infrastructure involved until
| the final step--depositing fiat money already denominated in
| our local currency, into our local banks.)
|
| But just because _we_ didn't have a reason to keep /spend the
| original stablecoins, doesn't mean it wasn't useful for the
| asset to remain in stablecoin form until it reached us. It was
| certainly more useful _to our investors_ to hold USDC than to
| hold fiat currency.
|
| > Tell me, what is the difference between Polkadot and Kusama ?
| Or is there even a significant technological difference between
| Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc ?
|
| Is there a significant technological difference between the
| central banks of the US, India, China, Canada, Japan, the UK,
| etc.? Not really. The difference is that different countries
| are running them, and those _countries_ are effectively
| different "political technologies." The choice comes down to
| the relative merits of the political technology driving the
| progress and decision-making in the monetary technology.
|
| In this sense, it's sort of like if there's a single open-
| source project that was originally BSD/MIT-licensed, that has
| been forked a bunch of times, with each fork replacing that
| license with something else and establishing a separate
| "structure" to its maintainership (e.g. one fork being an
| Apache Software Foundation project; one fork being a reference
| implementation governed by an enterprise "open-membership"
| body; one fork being GPLed, run by a BDFL who accepts PRs, but
| is very opinionated, and suggests you fork their fork if you
| want to go a different way; etc.) Those are all different
| "political technologies" driving the same project forward in
| different directions!
| ag56 wrote:
| So why didn't your investors offramp to fiat themselves, and
| then transfer you USD? Or are you saying they were in foreign
| countries and had non-USD denominated bank accounts, this you
| saved them currency conversion costs?
| dgellow wrote:
| IOHK who is behind Cardano does quite a lot of scentific
| research and formalized and developed innovative concepts:
| https://iohk.io/en/research/library/.
|
| It's still very experimental and yes, there are no clear
| applications yet, but there is some genuine research being
| made.
| MaxKK wrote:
| The same can be said about Lisk with 35 blockchain technology
| research papers already published and another 19 blockchain
| interoperability research papers to be published in spring.
|
| https://github.com/LiskHQ/lips
| maeln wrote:
| This is genuinely very interesting :) . I hope for more
| innovation like this and less copy-cat, get rich-scheme
| cryptos ....
| dgellow wrote:
| Yes, there is some very interesting papers there. Really
| unfortunate that virtually 100% of the general
| cryptocurrency interest is in its price potential.
| svachalek wrote:
| It's going slower than the WWW but I feel it could be just as
| big. There are major problems with big banks, social networks,
| and the advertising model of the web and crypto can solve all
| of this: decentralization, democratization, and micropayments
| all in one. No doubt it will create its own problems but there
| is big potential. Just look at what's going on with Ethereum
| and Defi instead of the older generation of deflationary
| currencies.
|
| But you are right, there are way too many attempts at new
| networks and currencies, when we need to be consolidating
| around the best of those and building up the application layer.
| I think there are huge opportunities for people who create the
| killer apps for crypto.
| dgellow wrote:
| > Polkadot and Kusama
|
| I don't think you're actually expecting an answer, but the main
| difference is that Kusama is a "canary chain" with faster
| iteration speed (governance votes last 7 days instead of 28
| days for Polkadot).
|
| https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/en/learn-kusama-vs-polkad...
|
| You can see it as a long-living testnet.
| maeln wrote:
| Actually it was nice to have an answer :) . So at least this
| one make sense.
| imtringued wrote:
| >Or is there even a significant technological difference
| between Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc ?
|
| I would like to argue that the difference between Bitcoin and
| Bitcoin Cash isn't even a technological one. Every dunce can
| increase the block size. It's purely a political/social
| difference. It's laughable that cryptocurrencies market
| themselves as avoiding government control but yet they suffer
| from the exact same problems.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Arguably most crypto currencies are run by oligopolies,
| putting them in a worse place than even the troubled
| democracies of the west. How small is the pool of people who
| control 51% of the hashing power for any given currency?
| Probably not terribly large.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Billions have been poured in this technology for almost no
| actual return technologically wise.
|
| This is just ignorance. There are plenty of projects out there
| that are building off each other, improving, and trying new
| things. Later in your post you mention several projects yet
| there you are claiming there is no new technology being done?
|
| >It really seems like nobody actually care about advancing the
| state of art, except actual researcher who work in universities
| and not in crypto startups...
|
| So researchers are doing research as opposed to startups. I am
| falling to see the problem with your statement. Yes, people
| intentionally trying to find new solutions to problems
| cryptocurrency offers will be the ones finding solutions.
|
| >This is proven by btc being one of the most traded and
| valuable crypto even though it is one of the crypto with the
| less feature.
|
| I am sure you can find plenty of companies that had better
| technology but are doing worse than their competitors whether
| it be because of bad marketing, first mover advantage / network
| effects, etc.
|
| >And because crypto are seen as an investment, everybody is
| holding, and nobody is using it
|
| Oh please. You can go to any block explore and see tons of
| transactions going on. People are using smart contracts all the
| time.
|
| >And no, "stable coin" is not an answer since the only thing
| they have been used for is to trade between crypto...
|
| This is short sighted. There is a desire for being able to know
| that your money isn't going to crash before you have to pay
| your bills. It will be easier to onboard people to using crypto
| if it is just using something like dollars. It also gets lid of
| problems like buying crypto to buy something then the price
| crashes and you can no longer afford what you wanted to bought.
| Or the opposite where you buy something and then the crypto
| doubles and you get mad for "overpaying."
|
| >you get thousand of startup coming out of nowhere proposing
| new crypto that are literally clone of other crypto
|
| So what? If you don't want to use a fork, then don't use it.
| This is how open source works. Anyone can take your code and
| create a company around it.
|
| >Tell me, what is the difference between Polkadot and Kusama ?
| Or is there even a significant technological difference between
| Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc ?
|
| How about you look up the differences yourself. Not everyone
| agrees with what design decisions get made so forks are created
| that are free to make different decisions.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Same. I was super excited for bitcoin ten years ago, but now
| I've experienced first hand how bad bitcoin is as a currency.
| Most people aren't even thinking of using it like that. It's
| just sitting in their coinbase account. So you've just got a
| bunch of people who all expect to make money from each other.
| Without any actual value it's a zero sum game, folks!
| audunw wrote:
| > Without any actual value it's a zero sum game, folks!
|
| It's less than zero-sum. A significant portion of what's
| being put into the system, is just being burned, in the form
| of converting electricity to heat without doing much if any
| useful work.
| afishisafish wrote:
| Look at the Bitcoin as the defacto reference of value for
| other crypto that do solve other problems. It's import to
| have a store of value that's not traditional fiat (like USD).
| imtringued wrote:
| In practice you are waiting for technologically illiterate
| people to lose their Bitcoin or old people to pass away
| without revealing their wallet to anyone. That's a pretty
| weird form of "investment".
| JamesSwift wrote:
| Thats actually pretty similar to people that invest in
| collectible cards (e.g. sports or trading card games like
| Magic). One part of the value increasing is due to supply
| attrition. Existing cards get either damaged or lost.
| derivagral wrote:
| This is itself a (funny?) form of a Tontine!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine
| iagovar wrote:
| Wasn't cardano supposed to fix this?
| dylkil wrote:
| yes, its been 4 years now and cardano doesnt even have smart
| contracting capabilities yet
| Tenoke wrote:
| They are rolling them out in the next 2 months. I've played
| with their playground, looked at what they are doing and see
| little reason to doubt the planned launch will go well.
| sirpilade wrote:
| I think they're making good, solid progress. They should be
| rolling smart contracts with Gougen in Q2 this year, and
| indications so far are that they should be on time
| float4 wrote:
| Goguen, which is phase 3 of the roadmap and gives smart
| contracts, is expected to be released in March 2021.
|
| But sure, it's all taking very long.
| skinnyasianboi wrote:
| Native tokens(also part of Goguen) will be released on 1st
| of March but smart contracts in Q2
| regisg wrote:
| 4 years of research & dev. All has come / is coming : - rich
| metadatas in transactions (done) - token locking (done) -
| native tokens almost on par with ADA ( on mainnet 05/03/2021
| ) - Plutus & Marlowe ( smart contracts ). Testnet in March,
| mainnet early to late Q2, depending on testnet quality.
| skinnyasianboi wrote:
| 4 years of doing it right and academically proven
| juskrey wrote:
| Cardano project looks pretty much like Hardon Collider in
| the making
| nootropicat wrote:
| For some reason ethereum devs refuse to (recommend to) increase
| the gas limit, even though it's the only short-term way to
| decrease fees while increasing decentralization, in a mistaken
| idea that if a node doesn't run on a raspberry pi (it does) the
| network isn't decentralized.
|
| People run nodes when they need them. Decentralization is a
| function of fees and node costs, not just node costs. Right now
| deploying a large contract costs more than a good gaming pc while
| a node to verify blocks can be a pi with a ssd for a small
| fraction of the cost. As a result normal people just stay away -
| fees too high decrease decentralization regardless of node costs.
| The opposite would make much more sense: few dollars for
| deployment, gaming pc for nodes. More people would actually run
| nodes in this scenario.
|
| As long as a node only requires a high end pc rather than a
| server in a datacenter the network can stay decentralized. Even
| current (very underinvested) geth could handle 50M blocks, which
| would provide relief until rollups get going and prevent activity
| from relocating elsewhere.
|
| This is the most dangerous, with the danger completely self-
| imposed, time for ethereum ever. Maybe everything works out and
| rollups release soon enough, but the risk calculus is completely
| bonkers.
| thebean11 wrote:
| The hardware it takes to run a node _now_ isn 't the only
| consideration. Higher gas limit means the storage size of the
| history grows at a faster rate; every single full node needs to
| store that history forever.
| nootropicat wrote:
| By the time it becomes a real problem (when the db containing
| state starts to approach 4TB) presumably some other solution
| would be in place, like state witnesses in blocks
| (verification without needing to access local state), or
| other ideas like reducing the size of 'hot' state and
| requiring witnesses for old state. In any case, it's better
| to have ethereum with heavier nodes than everything move to a
| completely centralized DPoS or PoA network.
| khongbietgi wrote:
| How about https://www.algorand.com/ The team is promising and
| also their sdk is quite good.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Very glad to see Algorand in this thread. People need to talk
| about it more. It doesn't have most of the problems people have
| with crypto, and unlike cardano, it's here today and it works.
| olah_1 wrote:
| I know that they use the same Clarity[1] smart contract
| language as Stacks. I like that it's not turing complete.
|
| The more I've read about Stacks, the more I like it. But I
| haven't done a deep dive into Algorand. Do you know offhand how
| they differ / what they're going for?
|
| [1]: https://clarity-lang.org/
| exdsq wrote:
| I like the Algorand team -- first blockchain project where I
| used an app I wanted to use and only afterwards realised it was
| using their blockchain.
| khongbietgi wrote:
| That's great. Do you mind sharing the name of that project?
| exdsq wrote:
| They store the data of FIDE Online chess matches, so the
| officially ranked games that you can play for online
| titles. Not sure why they chose a blockchain - perhaps
| they're actually used for identity too, so there's some p2p
| elements of arranging matches, but as I said I didn't even
| know they were involved until I saw an advert one day
| mentioning it.
| meehow wrote:
| https://cheapeth.org/
| jasonrodrigues wrote:
| @timdaub - try Celo (celo.org). Full EVM compatibility, low gas
| prices, mobile-first money legos. There's your hero.
| mariD wrote:
| can recommend!
| oilbagz wrote:
| Its the stack. I can't get interested in any crypto currency or
| related technology that doesn't provide, at a minimum, a linkable
| C library or .. even better .. a luarocks module .. to do all the
| work.
|
| If I even have to think about using npm or javascript to join the
| new hipster cult, I'm out. These tools are not up to snuff.
|
| C'mon crypto guys, give us systems programmers the libs we need.
| Javascript is OUT. Your fancy DSL is OUT. Go C/C++ native, or
| GTFO ...
| balaa wrote:
| Check out substrate which uses Rust
| AgentME wrote:
| >Go C/C++ native, or GTFO ...
|
| I don't think memory-safety issues are the killer app for
| Ethereum. The lack of C/C++ is one of the best things about the
| Ethereum ecosystem.
| oilbagz wrote:
| Memory-safety issues are a thing of the 20th century, if you
| still have them in this day and age as a C/C++ developer you
| probably should put the real compiler down, kid ..
|
| Besides which, you're never going to convince me that
| Javascript/NPM have fewer issues with leaks and holes than a
| well engineered C/C++ lib would. I mean, come on ..
| yao420 wrote:
| As a security guy I love when people have your perspective
| on memory safety, guarantees my job for a couple more
| decades.
|
| Memory issues are still the source of the biggest and best
| bugs. I have no doubt I can find huge security issues in
| your native code.
| samtheprogram wrote:
| Entire industries have been built on top of JavaScript, from
| rags to the most valuable companies in the world reinvesting
| back into it. It's getting mature, too.
|
| As someone who 5 years ago refused to learn JavaScript and was
| firmly in your camp, I don't really see an "up to snuff"
| argument to be made anymore. All languages have quirks and
| JavaScript definitely has them, but it's not alone in that
| regard, especially comparing to C/C++/Go. Besides, you don't
| want a systems programming language to write code that runs in
| the EVM, or when running others untrusted code.
|
| Use the right tool for the right job.
| oilbagz wrote:
| Entire industries have been built on Cobol, and Emacs-as-a-
| Lisp-host, and Visual Basic too, but that doesn't mean we
| should be using any of it for a next-generation financial
| trading scheme.
|
| There aren't any good reasons to avoid producing viable C/C++
| libraries to implement this kind of technology - only
| developer complacency and laziness.
|
| Want me to adopt your new fintech? Let me embed it in _ANY_
| app I might write, not just the browser, not just cli-
| Javascript ..
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| samtheprogram wrote:
| What do you want to embed? web3.js? My guess is that is low
| hanging fruit, given that it's mostly interacting with
| Ethereum nodes over HTTP and websockets, so if someone
| wants to do this, they could pretty straightforward. If
| their primary user of their integration are people on the
| web and cell phones, I think this was a good, scope
| limiting decision.
|
| Or is it something else?
| oilbagz wrote:
| I would love to be able to incorporate Ethereum features
| in my apps - which are written in C/C++-friendly
| languages, and which avoid any and all use of Javascript,
| at all cost.
|
| I don't think the decision to use Javascript for this
| kind of functionality was wise, or practical. The
| cyclomatic complexity of managing a web-installable
| javascript codebase compared to a C/C++ module is just
| too damn high.
| TeeWEE wrote:
| > Entire industries have been built on top of JavaScript,
| from rags to the most valuable companies in the world
| reinvesting back into it. It's getting mature, too.
|
| This is a fallacy argument. Because other users it, doens't
| mean its good.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| samtheprogram wrote:
| Thanks for pointing this out. While I think that speaks to
| the productivity it has provided (I guess that's a stretch
| / could be coincidence), what I really should have conveyed
| is that through a thriving ecosystem and updated standards,
| it's gotten a lot better over time. Node v8+ and latest
| versions of NPM are very far from where they used to be.
| Again, JavaScript is not without it's quirks, but I don't
| think any language is free from that statement, and
| JavaScript's are easily managed in my opinion.
|
| It's single threaded, but again, right tool for the right
| job.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| There's a thriving ecosystem because you are forced to
| use it. Do you think there wouldn't be a thriving perl
| ecosystem if perl was the only language you could use to
| execute code in a web browser?
| samtheprogram wrote:
| Very likely; although JavaScript became much more popular
| after it was available outside the browser, that probably
| was a factor.
|
| It doesn't affect my argument that it is a thriving
| ecosystem that has made it worth much more than the
| negative sentiment it has received in the past, and that
| it is not a bad choice.
| oilbagz wrote:
| Its a bad choice because you have to use Javascript, and
| Javascript is a shitty technology akin to Visual Basic.
|
| Collective adoption of a technology doesn't make it
| 'good'. It makes it 'available'. Those things are not
| always equivalent.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| While the ecosystem contributes value for many use cases,
| I don't think you can make use of such things when
| writing smart contracts that run on a very slow and very
| expensive computer.
| [deleted]
| weeboid wrote:
| Make Ethereum great again?
| rock_artist wrote:
| A little OT but seems the right place to ask. Is there any
| 'mainstream' crypto useful for micro-transactions with low-
| latency and low-transaction fees?
|
| Or mainstream is what kills actually kills it?
| dylkil wrote:
| Yes, but you sacrifice security for scalability. One of the
| ethereum layer 2's seem to be the most promising but are yet to
| gain major traction. Loopring seems to be in a pretty good
| place right now though. You could also use some other crypto
| like BCH, which vitalik once suggested could be used to store
| ethereum state. So if its good enough for him, it might be good
| enough for you.
| ssijak wrote:
| Nano. High throughoutput, no transaction fees. Works well for
| years already.
| mlqnw wrote:
| Having some level of transaction fees could be important for
| preventing DOS attacks.
|
| I also like the idea of forming a treasury from a cut of the
| transaction fees to fund proposals for future projects from
| within the community as Cardano and Polkadot have done.
| rekshaw wrote:
| > Having some level of transaction fees could be important
| for preventing DOS attacks.
|
| Agreed. Their mitigation approach is somewhat interesting
| as well though (dynamic PoW [1]). Thanks to the independent
| nature of the blocks, signing difficulty of the
| transactions can be raised and lowered dynamically making
| spam incrementally more expensive for the spammers.
|
| [1] https://medium.com/nanocurrency/dynamic-proof-of-work-
| priori...
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Can you explain in simple words, how they achieve this?
| bmh wrote:
| Every account in the network is a chain of blocks, with
| each block signed by the private key of that account. So
| only the owner of the account can add a block to their
| chain. To send money from A to B, A will add a 'spend'
| block to her chain, and B will add a 'receive' block to his
| chain. If B is offline, he can claim that receive later.
|
| The speed comes from the fact that spends from A to B can
| be processed independently of spends from C to D. So all
| independent transactions occur in parallel (and as you can
| imagine most transactions are independent).
|
| Every block addition is voted on by all participating
| nodes, and they vote as quickly as possible, so they're
| limited by internet bandwidth/latency, as well
| public/private key signature verification and generation.
| Most transactions complete within less than a second.
|
| New blocks _do_ need a PoW signature, but these are much
| much smaller than other PoW signatures. Additionally, they
| are usually generated by the account performing the
| transaction, so they will typically run on your phone or
| browser wallet app.
|
| Finally, the entire system was feeless from inception.
| That's just a design decision. I guess people run nodes
| because they want the whole thing to live.
| ativzzz wrote:
| So it only works as long as people are willing to
| volunteer nodes right? For a stable business model, I
| assume some party will start hosting nodes and charging
| people to use it?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| It seems like it, but still, I like that approach a lot.
| gnrlst wrote:
| Out of all the options I've researched, the one I'm considering
| investing my development time into is Nano. 0 transaction fees,
| <<1s transaction times, already decentralized and a great
| community. It's a very polarizing coin (people either love it
| or dismiss it), but what won me over is that it's not built on
| promises: it does exactly what it says on the tin, already.
| jeromenerf wrote:
| The solidity language was never fun to me. I abandoned
| experiments before vyper and yul, the alternatives I know about,
| were out. Everything felt at the same time fragile and
| definitive. Bad things would happen if you "deployed" a flawed
| contract without the ever growing best practices of layers and
| proxies.
|
| I have had more fun learning about finance and creating indices
| than I have ever had coding on ethereum.
| yulaow wrote:
| Agree. Sadly both solidity and all the tools around it feel
| like a pile of broken things over other broken things over a
| lot of things who where brought up in a few days and forgotten
| in the todo world, and no one has the time or the will to fix
| them.
|
| The ethereum foundation should focus far far far more in tools
| implementation
| oilbagz wrote:
| Totally. None of this felt safe, or sane, ever.
| Tepix wrote:
| Avalanche offers the EVM, fast transactions and low fees. And a
| lot more than just the EVM on the C chain. Sounds like the
| ticket, doesn't it?
| akyu wrote:
| Ethereum was a very respectable proof of concept, but it's time
| is past. It gave a glimpse of a future that is really incredible
| for those of us who had time to poke around before fees got out
| of control. Sadly, Eth 2.0 does not look to be the messiah many
| seem to be preaching about. Sharding is a very questionable
| design decision.
|
| My take away from dabbling in Ethereum land is that Ethereans,
| and crypto folks in general, got their values mixed up. They hold
| decentralization to the highest standard above all else. But upon
| close inspection, virtually nothing in the Ethereum ecosystem
| actually lives up to the standard of decentralization. The kinds
| of decentralization you see are very superficial and largely seem
| to be intended to dodge regulation above all else (which I have
| no problem with, but we need to be honest with ourselves).
|
| After using the tech, you realize that whats really valuable
| about these systems is open APIs for value exchange,
| permissionlessness, and censorship resistance. The
| decentralization is not a value add. It is a hedge against
| counter-party risk. And that is important, especially as we go
| head first into an increasingly dystopic looking global financial
| system. But teasing apart these different aspects gives you a
| much better idea of what to focus on if you want to build the
| next generation of blockchain technology.
| labrador wrote:
| I was told blockchain would be the solution to many problems
| egypturnash wrote:
| I'll happily take your etherium if it's no fun any more. I'm low
| on cash and rent needs paying.
|
| 0x9a31DDDC8ddD0949a4Ee6aA6c297e5f517E62d59
| TechnoTimeStop wrote:
| Given the hacking climate in our world. And the zero data
| integrity policy given by the corpo scummies, you have to be a
| total dumbass bear to think ethereum and block chain technology
| doesn't have a huge future.
| monkeydust wrote:
| When do people expect Ethereum gas prices to come down? Right now
| if I want to move 1ETH its costing me $109 from one exchange.
| suikadayo wrote:
| Once Uniswap moves to Optimism sometime in the next few months,
| gas fee should drop drastically across the network
| WJW wrote:
| Supply and demand affecting gas prices is considered a feature,
| so it seems quite possible gas prices will only go higher if
| ETH becomes even more popular.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Right after the Tether/Bitcoin bubble pops.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Tether bubble? As in crashing from $1.002 to $1? USDT can
| always just be cashed out for regular money.
| microtherion wrote:
| For values of "always" that depend on whether Tether
| actually has $34B in reserves to back the 34B USDT
| currently in circulation.
|
| Call me crazy, but I'd bet on the "under" here.
| monkeydust wrote:
| Doesn't Tether have to provide 3rd party audited accounts
| as to what they actually hold in reserve?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| No. They have occasionally claimed to be independently
| audited, but never provided proof.
| TruthWillHurt wrote:
| Face it - there are no users for Dapps. Top apps get ~50k users.
| That's nothing. Whenever I think about creating something in
| Ether, I apply the "do I really need blockchain" question to it,
| and combined with low user count I realize I'll have a much
| larger audience without Ether.
| erikbye wrote:
| Maiar has hundreds of thousands.
| TruthWillHurt wrote:
| Does it? does this app that lauched January this year, the
| ONLY app on the Elrund blockchain, which itself launched last
| year, have hundreds of thousands of users?
|
| Simple answer - no, it does not.
| treelovinhippie wrote:
| It lost its way in 2017 during the first bubble when all of the
| cryptobro speculators flooded the scene.
|
| The Sydney Ethereum meetup I started in 2014 suddenly jumped in
| numbers and became full of wankers in suits wanting to discuss
| the price, wanting to apply the tech inside financial
| institutions and explore new regulations.
|
| 2017 was worrying. 2018 solidified that Ethereum was merely going
| to serve the interests of the established financial apparatus.
|
| There's no revolution or cryptoanarchy here; only power grabs and
| new oligarchies.
| edwnjos wrote:
| Asking for Ethereum to be usable by anybody is like asking for
| machine code to be usable by anyone.
|
| Ethereum should focus on innovation (desperately) whilst other
| smart people and entrepreneurs should be working layers on top of
| ethereum so its more accessable to people like us.
| skinnyasianboi wrote:
| > Instead, we need an approach for the average Joe developer to
| create their idea within the Ethereum ecosystem without the need
| for hardcore unproven technologies.
|
| Are you familiar with "The Island, The Ocean and the Pond"
| presentation by Charles Hoskinson?
| aabbcc1241 wrote:
| Compared with Ethereum, "the global computer", zeronet is free as
| it doesn't require transaction fee to function.
| insomniacity wrote:
| ZeroNet is about storage and distribution, not computation or a
| ledger.
| pjfin123 wrote:
| There's Cheap Eth which is an Ethereum fork with cheaper prices:
| https://cheapeth.org/ .
| yks wrote:
| Yeah, where author hardcoded himself 25m coins [1] and bans
| everyone who mentions it from the official discord. Currency of
| the future indeed.
|
| [1] https://github.com/cheapETH/go-
| ethereum/commit/412c38434d8d8...
| pjfin123 wrote:
| Didn't know about that. If the point is to just be able to
| play around with Solidity and smart contracts it doesn't seem
| like a big deal. The Discord banning sounds sketchy though so
| maybe not something to use beyond testing.
| vertis wrote:
| This is so true. I was playing with Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) to
| create artworks a few weeks ago. It seemed like a fun side-
| project even if I'm not likely to get rich producing something.
|
| That died right about the time when it was going to cost me ~$135
| in fees to mint the artwork[1]. While I followed through and
| completed the one artwork, most of the successful artworks are a
| series of collections.
|
| Minting those was prohibitively expensive at the time of writing.
|
| [1]: https://vertis.io/2021/02/03/exploring-nfts/
| pedalpete wrote:
| [The internet isn't fun anymore -
| 2014](https://www.puregeekery.net/2014/11/17/internet-isnt-fun-
| any...) [Computers aren't fun anymore -
| 2011](https://www.twingalaxies.com/showthread.php/132771-Why-
| compu...)
|
| It seems much of Tim's arguments revolve around the expense of
| transactions. But what about building on Nano if the cost on
| etherium is too high? Or any other lower cost alternatives? I'll
| admit, I have no idea what the transaction cost on Polkadot is,
| but there are lots of other interesting projects.
|
| I agree with Tim's disappointment that the cost has risen to the
| point where it is likely hindering experimentation, which is
| probably what the crypto space still requires, but if that is the
| problem, let's focus on that.
| heterodoxxed wrote:
| | _" What's Ethereum's killer app?" we asked ourselves not long
| ago. Now we know. It's the world's best publicly-accessible
| settlement platform for financial transactions._
|
| I don't see any evidence of this being true.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > world's best publicly-accessible settlement platform for
| financial transactions.
|
| Isn't that SEPA? Or Paypal?
| tmarice wrote:
| It is, unless you're deemed untouchable.
| aww_dang wrote:
| There's also the KYC aspects of crypto exchanges.
| microtherion wrote:
| I'm not a huge fan of lawyers and bankers, but I'd take my
| chances with them any day over this kind of platform:
| https://medium.com/@danrobinson/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest-ec...
| nstj wrote:
| Are you familiar with the "DeFi revolution?"
| TeeWEE wrote:
| DeFI is yet another set of inflated expectations and bullish
| sentiment to attract even more investors. In real terms its
| not doing a lot yet.
| nstj wrote:
| For sure, I never said it was actually
| implemented/feasible. Just that it's the current vector by
| which Ethereum is being marketed
| realPubkey wrote:
| I also see no evidence, but many hints. Most people use
| ethereum to send eth or ERC20 tokens. There are not many who
| use the smart contracts for anything else.
| drom5 wrote:
| I would say that the killer app currently is decentralised
| finance, lending and trading for example on the chain. The
| second killer app is NFTs, basically the exchange of art on the
| chain.
| gruez wrote:
| >The second killer app is NFTs, basically the exchange of art
| on the chain.
|
| There's this story from a few days ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26196027
|
| I'm not sure whether it's a good sign or a bad sign. On one
| hand it shows NFTs being serious because there's a huge
| ($500+k) transaction behind it. On the other hand it shows
| how frothy the market is given how someone just dropped $500k
| for a few hundred bits.
| dbspin wrote:
| Hypothetically, NFTs are amazing. They have the potential to
| revolutionise royalties and help artist directly profit from
| the success of their work. There are successful marketplaces
| like Nifty Gateway for visual NFT's and some under
| development for music NFTs.
|
| But...
|
| Right now, Etheriums soaring 'gas' prices are basically
| freezing new entrants into the market. The cost of 'minting'
| a token on the blockchain right now - say an image or
| animation on rarible.com, is enormous. Worse, the gas cost of
| purchasing an NFT can be triple the sale price. It's the
| equivalent of a varying, unpredictable rate of VAT in the
| hundreds of percent. This is having a knock on effect on all
| the NFT markets. Maybe it can be solved by Etherium 2.0, but
| right now Ether isn't fit for purpose for NFTs. Tying the
| cost of smart contract 'gas' to the value of the digital
| currency made this inevitable.
| suikadayo wrote:
| We don't have to wait for Eth2, there are several L2
| solutions in the works right now like Optimism and Polygon
| dbspin wrote:
| They're not supported on any of the popular NFT trading /
| minting sites. That economy is currently built around
| ETH.
| peter_l_downs wrote:
| Couldn't agree more that NFTs are theoretically very
| interesting but the way they work right now is absolute
| garbage. See this experience report:
| https://freezine.xyz/4/nfts/index.html
| dbspin wrote:
| I don't think this is particularly an issue with the way
| NFTs work - except in regard to their choice of Ether,
| and Ether's current issue with gas prices. I think
| there's a lot of potential in the existing markets. It's
| really specifically a problem with the economics of
| trading them, caused by the inflation in transaction
| costs of Ether.
|
| Article you linked the artists issue is that he couldn't
| find a market for his art. Which kind of misses the
| point.
|
| "Then I asked around if anyone wanted to buy it. The boys
| in the groupchat weren't interested. Neither were any of
| my twitter followers. Damn."
|
| Sure you could get lucky with being early into a highly
| speculative market, but by and large this is like patreon
| or kickstarter or anything else online. If there's a
| potential market for what you're making or doing, it's a
| new (and potentially lucrative) way to tap into it. It
| doesn't generate a new demand for work that doesn't have
| (or can't generate) an audience on its own. NFTs aren't a
| form of advertising, certainly not a particularly
| effective one.
|
| Also the artist initially used Zora (which I've never
| heard of), rather than Rarible or Opensea, or Mintable or
| Snark or any of the better known open markets.
|
| On rarible he set his royalties to 25% (rather than the
| usual 10%) which obviously discourages speculative
| investment. He also set the cost of his first art piece
| to 1 ETH! Crazy high for an unknown artist.
|
| The article kind of seems like a snarky joke, but if it
| is one I'm not sure what the punchline is, given he
| really did spend the money and really does seem to want
| to sell the NFTs. I think it's more likely a case of
| irony employed as a defence mechanism.
|
| We have someone who self confesses he doesn't understand
| the market, making a remix piece quickly and half
| assedly, selling it at a high rate across multiple
| markets, without an audience or any interest in what is
| popular there. I mean I get it, who wants to miss the
| gold rush? But it's not a useful barometer of NFTs.
|
| Currently all the real money is being made by selective
| services who primarily work with digital artists who have
| an existing following, or make work they think will reach
| an audience - sites like niftygateway.com or superrare.co
|
| The work that's selling well is generally excellent. And
| sure, there is something inherently ridiculous in the
| idea of 'owning' a piece of digital art. But no more so
| that owning a numbered print or piece of video art by a
| renowned artist, or hell a cardigan owned by Kurt Cobain.
| All of which have real, established and ongoing value.
| antupis wrote:
| I would say NFT and micropayments are killer apps. It would
| be fantastic if we had browser addon where you can 1-click
| pay something like 0.01$ to read article.
|
| NFT for gaming is going to be huge industry eg pro-gamers
| could sell their character skins same way now eg basketball
| players sell their jerseys or you could import that
| Hearthstone deck to complete new game.
| heterodoxxed wrote:
| | _1-click pay something like 0.01$ to read article._
|
| How would this work in a way that takes gas/fees into
| consideration?
| somebodythere wrote:
| Do it in a state channel or rollup.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| That's kind of the point: it's completely infeasible to
| do microtransactions with Ethereum, much less Bitcoin. At
| time of writing it costs around $23 (!) to do a single
| ETH transaction.
| _alex_ wrote:
| There are several lightning network (payment channel
| layer on top of bitcoin) paywalls where you can pay 1/10
| of a cent to read an article. The tech exists, its now an
| adoption problem
| aabbcc1241 wrote:
| We can if the network is not full of professional miners.
| If every user has a practical chance to pack their
| transaction into a block.
| suikadayo wrote:
| It'll be possible with L2 like Optimism which will be out
| for the public next month.
| martin_a wrote:
| For micropayments, there has been flattr. Wasn't really
| accepted and won't get better if you somehow put a
| blockchain in there.
|
| For the second: Just go with gumroad or Paypal or whatnot.
|
| Your points just prove, that there's no need for blockchain
| after all.
| antupis wrote:
| Maybe nanopayment would be better term I mean like truly
| small amounts not something like 3$ like flattr or 1$
| like Gumroad.
| martin_a wrote:
| Just flattr more things so your monthly amount get
| distributed more. I think that should work and there's no
| "lower limit" on how much a single click is worth.
|
| But yeah, it would be nice if you could set a fixed
| amount per button, like 10 Cent for an article or
| something like that.
| afasen wrote:
| I present you https://yalls.org/
| cnasc wrote:
| > The second killer app is NFTs, basically the exchange of
| art on the chain.
|
| NFTs aren't exclusively art. For example, I previously worked
| at https://unlock-protocol.com/ which uses NFTs to signify
| membership
| ccortes wrote:
| It's not. Maybe if somehow egass fees go down, right now they
| are so high that even bitcoin is a better alternative.
|
| I think the author is equating ethereum with stable coins?
| ilaksh wrote:
| Well.. Ethereum isn't very trendy anymore, that's true. But I
| still think it has tons of promise and they are making a lot of
| progress on 2.0. I feel like its amazing some people are thinking
| of giving up on it before 2.0 gets launched.
|
| I did actually buy some DOT on Kraken today though. Because that
| also looks like an amazing project. And in the end, everything is
| basically a popularity contest. So regardless of technicals,
| momentum, or anything else, Ethereum could actually become
| completely uncool in X months or years. And PolkaDOT or something
| no one knows about could be what everyone uses. Maybe after WWIII
| its the digitual yuan for a few years.. but then the
| superintelligent robots take over a few years later and everyone
| has to use metashekels or whatever that human brains can't even
| comprehend.
|
| libp2p looks really useful by the way.
| squaredpants wrote:
| Well, for the gas fees and scalability issues there's always
| avalanche [1] ...
|
| I feel like there's a project that already solves most of
| ethereum problems _now_ , but it's been slept on for a while.
|
| [1] https://www.avalabs.org/
| lazzlazzlazz wrote:
| The Hacker News community has long been anti-crypto, and as
| someone deeply involved in the space, these long threads of
| complaints and diatribes are difficult to handle. Everyone is
| missing so much context.
|
| Ethereum gas prices are astronomical because there's
| unprecedented demand to use the network: NFT art and collectibles
| are exploding (NBA TopShot, Foundation, SuperRare, Rarible,
| OpenSea, etc.) at the same time DeFi applications (Uniswap,
| Compound, Maker, Aave, Balancer, etc.) are at all time highs.
|
| This is the time, in my mind, that it's most exciting to work in
| crypto, and on Ethereum: demand has been proven and has been
| sustained (every block full for 1+ year).
|
| The naysayers who think this is all for a quick buck are missing
| the pattern and listening too much to the (admittedly, insanely
| loud and annoying) shills.
| dTal wrote:
| >The Hacker News community has long been anti-crypto
|
| Are we really allowing blockchains to annex the word "crypto"?
| "Crypto" is "cryptography". HN is not "anti-crypto", it is
| staunchly pro-encryption.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Tech has major entrenched interests in maintening the financial
| status quo
| Retric wrote:
| HN seems wildly pro crypto compared to most places. It's like
| Tesla which isn't universally supported, but still gets a lot
| more coverage than Ford.
|
| People do bring up quite reasonable objections like
| environmental costs, but it stories get a lot of upvotes and
| suggesting many people are strong supporters.
| keithtom wrote:
| Re environmental costs, I have yet to hear anyone make an
| analysis of the environmental cost of the banking system or
| an equivalent; that is, how much to warm all the offices, the
| computers and servers, the transportation costs of cars &
| planes for all the employees.
|
| Also, proof of stake will reduce 99% of the environmental
| cost.
| shuckles wrote:
| This whataboutism ignores the logic of the question: the
| banking system is not incentivized to burn power. You would
| expect each node to try to minimize their input costs to
| maximize returns. For a given unit of compute, putting in
| more energy does not increase profits for any participant
| in the traditional banking system. This isn't the case for
| cryptocurrencies, so they are asked a fair question.
| svachalek wrote:
| This isn't the case for Proof of Work cryptocurrencies.
| Many newer networks are moving away from the POW model.
| shuckles wrote:
| There might be an answer to the original question. I was
| pointing out, "But what about banks!?" is simply not a
| good one, and why it isn't.
| Retric wrote:
| Comparing the banking sector to crypto is wildly
| optimistic. Crypto is still smaller than just the Gold
| market both in number of transactions and total stored
| value of 9.4 trillion. Gold transactions, mining, and
| storage still produces significantly less CO2 while also
| being useful in industry.
|
| That's not meant as an attack, it's simply a ballpark
| comparison. For those pro crypto take it a sign of possible
| future growth.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| > I have yet to hear anyone make an analysis of the
| environmental cost of the banking system
|
| I immediately found this:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-26/is-
| bit...
|
| "One Bitcoin transaction would generate the CO2 equivalent
| to 706,765 swipes of a Visa credit card,"
|
| Another way to look at it:
|
| Bitcoin uses over 0.5% of the world's electricity:
| https://interestingengineering.com/why-bitcoin-mining-
| consum...
|
| With that, Bitcoin does about 300,000 transactions a day.
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-
| of-b...
|
| But there are over a billion daily credit card transactions
| alone - 3000 times as much.
|
| So if each credit card transaction were replaced by a
| Bitcoin transaction, we'd use 30 times as much electricity
| as the entire planet produces.
|
| ---
|
| These numbers are so grossly lopsided and so widely bandied
| about that when I hear someone say, "I have yet to hear
| anyone make an analysis of the environmental cost" I think,
| "Perhaps you don't want to hear it."
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| The banking system _exists_. It's what powers all our daily
| transactions. It's what has been tried and tested for
| hundreds of years, and got regulated. Even if Ethereum or
| coin-of-the-week takes off, this existing banking system
| will not go away. What you're doing is a well known crypto-
| lover tactic to distract from the fact that
| cryptocurrencies are an ecological catastrophe.
|
| Meanwhile, we're burning coal to produce bitcoin whose only
| value is that number gets green and goes up. Eth is
| slightly better on that point, but still wasted multiple
| TWh of electricity while it was in PoW mode, and it still
| is today.
| Karunamon wrote:
| I strongly disagree with this loaded characterization of
| mining as "waste". Converting power into value is the
| _opposite_ of waste, and that 's not even addressing the
| network security that it provides. Mining provides useful
| work. If you don't like cryptocurrency, fine, but don't
| pretend that no value is being created or that no purpose
| exists.
|
| Waste would be an incandescent bulb that throws away the
| majority of its energy generating heat that isn't used
| for any purpose.
| Retric wrote:
| The issue isn't the useful product of light or a
| functional crypto system, the issue is the amount of
| waste heat produced by the light bulb or data center.
|
| This should be obvious when you consider proof of work
| systems that generate less waste heat by using a memory
| bound rather than a computationally bound algorithm. They
| both operate on the principle of wealth destruction as
| all proof of work algorithms do, but you get different
| externalities.
|
| Interestingly, if you found something really useful to do
| with the waste heat of crypto then the systems would
| become roughly equivalent.
|
| PS: The idea of a memory bound algorithm is 1 million
| dollars of RAM consumes less energy than 1 million
| dollars of ASIC's.
| Karunamon wrote:
| _the issue is the amount of waste heat produced by the
| light bulb or data center._
|
| ..which in the case of the average crypto, is
| overshadowed many times over. One block mined equates to
| $333K worth BTC generated alone, and that 's not counting
| the value of every transaction included in that block. A
| block happens every 10 minutes give or take, so in an
| hour, that's about 2 million worth of coin generated and
| 13K transactions.
|
| There's no way on earth every bitcoin miner, combined, is
| using $2M+ worth of electricity every hour, even
| factoring in negative environmental externalities (which
| in the case of crypto mining, will be lower than most
| people think given their proximity to renewable, hence
| cheap, energy.)
|
| It is, _objectively speaking_ , not a waste.
| Retric wrote:
| Coal power plants generate more value in the from of
| electricity than they lose value as waste heat. Otherwise
| they wouldn't operate. But, clearly the creation of value
| is independent of something being wasted as you can have
| more or less efficient power plants that generate the
| same value using more or less fuel and thus more or less
| waste heat.
|
| Similarly, as I just pointed out different algorithms
| would use more or less energy and therefore be more or
| less efficient. Thus the heat produced is a waste
| byproduct mining, and electricity is the fuel. A more
| efficient process simply uses less fuel though it may
| have higher capital costs.
|
| The same is true of say cars, you're burning gas because
| driving is useful. But, increasing efficiency means less
| fuel while creating identical value etc etc.
| Karunamon wrote:
| But that heat you speak of applies to any kind of long-
| running computation. Whether that be render farms, ML
| model training, distributed computing like BOINC, or
| anything else with similar properties.
|
| It seems to me that crypto is being unfairly singled out.
| Things that are digital have meaningful existence.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| It's a complete waste. It turns energy into nothing at
| all.
| MagnumOpus wrote:
| The banking system does a lot of other things than
| transaction processing. Mortgages, loans commercial
| banking, trade finance, acquisition financing etc are 95%
| of what banks do, and cryptocoins won't replace them in any
| way.
|
| Of course even if you count all that, the power consumption
| per transaction will be at least five orders of magnitude
| lower than the 0.6MWh per transaction in BTC.
| cbdumas wrote:
| What do you see as the killer use case for crypto
| currency/blockchain/smart contracts, etc.? I mined a few Eth in
| the very early days, and hung onto it until selling recently. I
| sold because I couldn't convince myself they had any value not
| based on the "greater fool theory". Was I wrong?
| pacoWebConsult wrote:
| One, IMO, is a provably fair casino (Blackjack, Poker, etc.)
| that is decentralized and unregulatable.
| akudha wrote:
| I have the same question too. Beyond speculation/greed, what
| are real world use cases of blockchain that can't be done
| with existing/mature tech? Nano seems nice for instant fee-
| less transfer. Other than that?
| splintercell wrote:
| Take for instance, my cousin's husband in India, who
| currently holds a bunch of black money in either INR or in
| gold, can buy stablecoins such as DAI, then park it in
| various DeFi solutions to earn a nice return on it. So not
| only he is gaining an exposure in Dollar instead of a
| highly inflationary currency like INR, he is also able to
| make it work instead of burying it in a bag until he needs
| it.
|
| Before you start with the morality of the situation, just
| ignore that. You wanted to see a real use case, and I am
| telling you about it.
|
| As it turns out, not everyone shares your moral code, or
| lives in the similar legal system which allows them the
| similar property rights.
|
| Replace that person with a Venezuelan whose currency is
| completely destroyed and Venezuelan Americans are trying to
| provide their families with money.
| akudha wrote:
| Ok, that makes sense. I need to read up on DeFi, don't
| know much about it.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| Borrowing, lending, decentralized exchanges, innovations like
| flash loans that are just not possible in current financial
| system.
|
| The sky is the limit in terms of innovations possible, it's
| literally some code running on the global computer that is
| Ethereum.
| humaniania wrote:
| Not only are all those things possible (other than
| decentralized, because that has a high cost and no tangible
| benefit) in the normal banking system but there's apps for
| them already. And they are from regulated companies and you
| have legal protections.
| trident5000 wrote:
| Maybe people are tired of getting an anal probe just to
| open an account and move money/ complete financial
| transactions today?
| nostrademons wrote:
| Flash loans aren't really; nobody will lend you money
| against zero collateral that you pay back instantaneously
| after a transaction, because in the traditional banking
| system there's always a risk of default and a transaction
| cost for enforcing your rights in case of default. With a
| flash loan the whole transaction fails if at the end of
| the transaction you don't have sufficient funds to pay it
| back, while you're guaranteed payback if it succeeds.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| A flash loan is a loan you pay back immediately...
|
| So you're right, this isn't a thing that exists today
| outside of crypto because it's not needed outside of
| crypto. Someone who can pay a loan back _as part of the
| same transaction_ in which the loan is issued is not a
| default risk, and in the real world you just don 't
| bother with the loan: you just pay for the underlying
| transaction directly.
| skybrian wrote:
| How does borrowing work in an automated, trustless
| environment? Doesn't someone have to decide whether you're
| likely to pay back the loan with money you haven't earned
| yet?
| tarsinge wrote:
| Look up Aave it's Open Source, I was surprised at first
| but it seems to work. Also flash loans are an interesting
| new financial tool previously not available for
| individuals.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| It's over-collaterized, so you put more crypto than the
| loan value.
|
| You might say "why the hell would I do that?", in order
| of importance: 1) you hold on to your asset's
| appreciation, 2) access the liquidity, 3) avoid capital
| gains tax.
| lasc4r wrote:
| So the killer use case is a scheme to avoid capital gains
| taxes? Sounds about right.
| throwaway829 wrote:
| You realize elites are already doing this with USD. It's
| not unique to crypto.
| langitbiru wrote:
| I think in the past someone mentioned about under-
| collaterized loan. It's based on your reputation. The
| idea is you use your Ethereum account to do activities.
| Based on these activities, people could give you a loan.
| Such activities can be something like answering questions
| (imagine Stackoverflow but the authentication runs on
| Ethereum).
| skybrian wrote:
| Okay, but it seems like the reputation evaluation isn't
| automated, so this is more like fundraising?
| tarsinge wrote:
| You can do loans with no collateral at all if you use
| flash loans.
| skybrian wrote:
| Okay, but that seems like a pretty small niche? Most
| people don't borrow just to save money on taxes on their
| cryptocurrency gains.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| They might borrow to hold on to their asset's
| appreciation.
| skybrian wrote:
| You could lock in the gain by selling at the current
| price, so that still sounds like tax avoidance. Or
| possibly leverage, if you think the price will go up
| more?
| rawtxapp wrote:
| Yes, you could leverage, you could hedge yourself by
| buying stocks. Or you could just spend the money on
| whatever else you want.
| parliament32 wrote:
| You have to put down collateral. Same idea as reverse
| mortgages on houses, or taking out an RSP-backed LOC.
| albntomat0 wrote:
| As an outsider missing context, what are the answers to the
| following? They are all valid questions that come up every
| time, and aren't well answered, given my research into them.
|
| - Is the long term alternatives to PoW actually viable, given
| the huge power consumption of cryptocurrency currently?
|
| - Are the valid use cases (other than drugs, ransomware and
| speculation) worth the valuation?
|
| - If Tether collapses, due to the reports of its sketchiness,
| what will the shock to cryptocurrency, broadly speaking, be?
| lazzlazzlazz wrote:
| 1. This has been resolved for years. See Celo and NEAR as
| examples of fully-programmable Proof of Stake blockchains
| that are live.
|
| 2. Yes.
|
| 3. It'll be a significant issue for decentralized exchanges
| and liquidity pools, but far from existential. The seasonal
| Tether FUD is generally overstated. (I have done a detailed
| analysis of this, but it exceeds the scope of this
| conversation.)
| csa wrote:
| > 2. Yes.
|
| This is sadly a non-answer to the question posed.
|
| I am asked this question all the time by people I know, and
| the best I can come up with is illegal activities, super
| niche tech applications (e.g., DNS name reg), and
| libertarian fantasies.
|
| You have an audience here at HN who is more than willing to
| advocate for cryptocurrencies if they/we can be shown a
| compelling use case.
|
| "Yes" is not an obvious compelling use case.
|
| Please elaborate.
| lazzlazzlazz wrote:
| I have this discussion at least once a week. What would
| you build if you could deploy an uninterruptible,
| transparently verifiable, fully autonomous software
| application? I promise you that we can discuss many
| examples (any kind of marketplace or platform but with
| community governance and no rents, decentralized
| exchanges, global-by-default payments, highly
| interoperable and efficient financial infrastructure),
| but what would you build?
|
| That's the answer to your question.
| csa wrote:
| I will be sure to relay this answer to my non-tech
| friends who ask about cryptocurrencies.
|
| I'm sure this answer will send them running to buy.
|
| /s
|
| All joking aside, for a conversation you say you have
| weekly, this is a really lame answer due to the
| abstractness of it.
|
| My guess is the reason you don't give concrete answers is
| because either tech already exists for that use case or
| non-crypto tech could be easily developed if it doesn't
| already exist.
|
| Please, please, prove me wrong. I want to be a crypto
| fan, but vague answers like the ones you provided above
| are the reason a lot of people think crypto is smoke and
| mirrors and/or snake oil salesmen.
| svachalek wrote:
| Check out UniSwap and Aave if you haven't before. If
| those aren't compelling use cases, tell your friends to
| stay away.
| als0 wrote:
| > - Is the long term alternatives to PoW actually viable,
| given the huge power consumption of cryptocurrency currently?
|
| PoS and derived schemes like DPoS have been sound on paper.
| Their drawbacks have largely been accepted by the community
| as a good tradeoff for most usage models. However, it can
| take years of "production" usage to get a good feeling about
| the long term macro economics, so I wouldn't expect a
| straight answer to this. The good news is that there will be
| plenty of big tier networks like ETH2 and EOS experimenting
| with different variants.
| als0 wrote:
| > - Are the valid use cases (other than drugs, ransomware and
| speculation) worth the valuation?
|
| I think it's fair to say that the current valuation of
| cryptocurrencies have nothing to do with their tech or use
| cases. These markets have the same signs as the dot com
| bubble. However, there are valid use cases if you're willing
| to search for them. One of them is decentralized DNS name
| registration without third parties like GoDaddy or ICANN
| (https://handshake.org/), though this is a market, not a
| currency per say.
| cryptograthor wrote:
| 1. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/proof-stake-pos.asp
| Yes, proof of stake is exactly that. 2. Read the above
| comment and search some of those companies 3. Binance props
| Tether up, so the largest Centralized exchange may suffer
| dramatically, but a Tether collapse would likely drive users
| into better stablecoin projects like USDC and DAI, being
| generally good for the space
| parliament32 wrote:
| - Is there anything actually wrong with PoW? It's fun to say
| it's "wasted" electricity, but we "waste" more power,
| resources, and man-hours in other trivialities (eg. video
| games) without really caring.
|
| - Read the whitepaper of whichever crypto you're asking
| about. The answer is "it depends", because each one exists to
| fill a different niche.
|
| - Nobody really cares about Tether, so probably nothing.
| drcode wrote:
| A failure of tether would certainly cause a ton of market
| volatility, but there's enough tether substitutes for the
| markets to adjust pretty quickly. Sure, the failure might
| freeze a lot of funds and depress market caps a bit in the
| process.
| parliament32 wrote:
| Personally I doubt it. Look at the market volumes --
| everyone who wants to trade shitcoins just does it with
| BTC pairs, and most of the big boy exchanges support USD-
| BTC directly.. tether was a good idea when exchanges
| didn't want to mess with USD but that's not really the
| case anymore.
| drcode wrote:
| I think for many people it's still hard to temporarily
| and quickly exit a long BTC or long ETH position, but
| daytraders want to do this with great frequency.
|
| This is doubly true for people outside the US, not to
| mention people who are trying to skirt capgain taxes. Of
| course, an argument could also be made that a tether
| failure would cause people to flee to BTC or ETH and
| paradoxically cause prices to rise.
| nitrogen wrote:
| If actual, real consumers and professionals can't buy gear
| because it's being hoarded by miners, yeah, that's pretty
| wasteful (as in, a thing that consumes vast resources
| without benefiting very many people).
| als0 wrote:
| Agreed. ASICs have really destroyed the spirit of mining,
| and may hint that the Bitcoin style PoW algorithms are in
| fact not a senible type of proof.
|
| Memory-hard PoW algorithms, rather than computational
| ones, might be one way to reduce the amount of energy.
| Memory is expensive regardless of whether you make ASICs
| or use regular PCs.
| parliament32 wrote:
| Heaven forbid the manufacturers actually, you know,
| increase production to meet the demand for their
| hardware.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Haha. That doesn't always work.
|
| The present demand is spurred by the boom phase of a
| potential boom-bust cycle (similar to oil). You have two
| (actually more) sources of demand: crypto, conventional
| buyers (retail and industry customers). If they adjust
| production upward (which requires an investment of
| capital) to meet the present demand then they reduce
| their profit, prices will go up (at least a bit) to
| compensate. But they also face another risk: what if
| there's a _bust_? If the crypto demand for hardware
| bottoms out (whether because of a change in crypto or
| having satisfied the demand) they will be left with
| excess capacity and potentially excess inventory. The
| increased production capacity may be able to be
| redirected to other productive endeavors, or it may just
| end up idle. And the excess inventory has to be sold off
| at a potential loss as the hardware becomes worth less
| and less as each day passes (plus holding inventory costs
| money).
|
| Instead, if they leave production as is (or only increase
| it slightly) they can virtually guarantee their products
| will sell out and increase the prices because they know
| people will continue to buy it. Obviously, the retail and
| industry customers get screwed because they have less
| profit to make (if any) directly off the hardware
| purchase, but the miners will continue to buy almost
| without regard to the price because their profits
| (presently) justify the investment.
| wallacoloo wrote:
| > Is there anything actually wrong with PoW?
|
| There's more wrong with PoW besides just environmental
| effects. PoW creates different incentives for a
| blockchain's miners than for its users. Often these are
| conflicting, and have a tendency to gridlock the protocol
| development. This is especially pronounced today in
| Ethereum where the majority of users are in favor of
| certain protocol upgrades that would scale throughput, but
| miners are opposed to it because it comes at an economic
| cost to them.
|
| There's no inherent reason for this dichotomy between users
| and miners: if it's the same people using the protocol as
| securing it, you'd expect to have better outcomes for
| everyone. PoS makes it so that the users are also the ones
| securing the protocol. It's not _perfect_ alignment, but it
| is much more aligned than the miner/user split in POW.
| treelovinhippie wrote:
| If you joined the Ethereum community in 2014-2016, topics like
| DeFi and NFT were not in the discussions. These things are pure
| speculative bullshit imported wholesale from the established
| financial system.
|
| The point of Ethereum was to build an open world computer, to
| decentralize power, to build collective intelligence, and to
| supersede the corrupt global financial system with non-
| speculative economic models that served the needs of humanity
| and the planet.
| trident5000 wrote:
| HN doesnt like blockchain because its disrupting their jobs.
| chaostheory wrote:
| I'm going to agree
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852
|
| The only surprise is that HN is still a terrible place to
| discuss crypto. Not many posters or commenters seem to have
| much knowledge, which is strange for HN
| chowells wrote:
| Maybe somehow they simultaneously have plenty of knowledge
| and don't agree with you.
|
| So in the spirit of education - what amazing things are there
| about ethereum or Bitcoin that will change my mind about
| their intrinsic value that I don't already know? (My current
| opinion is that the intrinsic value of PoW systems is
| negative due to low actual utility and very high cost.)
| chaostheory wrote:
| I like seeing things that have deep criticism of crypto and
| not just cheerleader blog posts. There are few on HN, the
| only notable ones aside from this post is the Tether
| fiasco. Most commenters did not seem very familiar with
| either subject vs others on HN. Maybe it's my imagination?
| chowells wrote:
| It's true there hasn't been a lot interesting going on.
| Though I'd argue the Dark Forest articles on Ethereum
| recovery were quite fascinating for illuminating a
| possibility I hadn't predicted and doing so quite
| lucidly. Of course, the message I took from the series as
| a whole was that this is a world full of people out to
| exploit your mistakes and the way to get around them is
| to have private connections external to the blockchain,
| so... It didn't shine a positive light, either.
|
| But really, it kind of feels like the Tether
| investigation is the only thing shaking up the ecosystem
| in an interesting way, and it's doing so at a glacial
| pace. There really isn't much else new to say.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I tend to agree with your point of view that the utility
| (non-bitcoin) cryptocurrencies are something people who
| don't fully understand are really excited about, but that
| some experts dismiss.
|
| For me in my daily work, this manifests itself as companies
| that want to use more obscure currencies as a transaction
| method in games. I say: "That currency is not on a lot of
| servers, how will you protect against 51% attacks?" They
| say: "All transactions are also verified by trusted
| servers.." So does the person understand what they are
| talking about, or are they used to talking to people
| (investors / business partners) who don't have a great
| understanding. Doubts raised.
|
| However: There are times when experts dismiss new things
| and are wrong. So I try to keep an open mind.
| rudderz wrote:
| What's the intrinsic value of USD? It's a garbage pre-mined
| token that's continually debased at the behest of a cabal
| of rich bankers so they can purchase real assets and
| consolidate the world's wealth. The petrodollar isn't
| exactly efficient either, considering the costs of the
| military industrial complex.
|
| Every year the USD is worth less. Every year BTC is worth
| more.
|
| Hope that helps.
| chowells wrote:
| Nope. That's the sort of argument that makes your
| position weaker. You see, USD has a government that
| asserts it is legal tender for all debts within its
| borders and military power to back up those assertions.
|
| These are the sort of real-world constraints that you
| can't just ignore. Attempting to do so makes me less
| charitable towards other assertions you might make. You
| come across as an idealist talking about their perfect
| dream world, not someone describing reality. Now don't
| get me wrong - it's important to have a perfect dream
| world. If you aren't working towards something, what
| _are_ you doing?
|
| But at the same time, you have to accept that "this
| system is perfect, if you also change these thousand
| other things" is not compelling to someone who doesn't
| share your idea of utopia. To convince someone like me,
| you have to explain how the system improves the world as
| it exists now.
| rudderz wrote:
| > These are the sort of real-world constraints that you
| can't just ignore.
|
| These constraints were drafted by a handful of rich white
| bankers in a secret meeting. I have no problem ignoring
| their constraints. It seems you do.
|
| Can you imagine all the hot-takes HN would generate if
| email were invented today?
|
| "You can't just encroach on the sovereignty of USPS like
| that" "Electronic Mail doesn't do anything the pony-
| express can't do" "If we allow Electron Mail then how do
| we attach a postage stamp"
|
| Email adoption, like Crypto doesn't require convincing
| the entire population. The laggards will join eventually.
| chowells wrote:
| While it's tempting to conflate the beneficiaries of our
| problems with those who created them, reality is not that
| simple. Blaming things on an all-powerful cabal of
| bankers is nearing QAnon levels of seeking a small number
| of people to blame for systemic issues. That sort of
| reductionism isn't useful. Action taken based on it is
| going to never touch any real problem. At most it'll
| change who benefits from them.
|
| I think we can do better.
|
| (As for your email counterfactual... Why? Do you find it
| an effective rhetorical tactic to imagine what people
| might do instead of looking at what people have done?)
| rudderz wrote:
| "I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous
| to our liberties than standing armies," Jefferson wrote.
| "If the American people ever allow private banks to
| control the issue of their currency, first by inflation,
| then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will
| grow up around(these banks) will deprive the people of
| all property until their children wake up homeless on the
| continent their fathers conquered."
|
| This Jeff guy, what a radical. Probably will never amount
| to anything.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| I remember when email became a thing.
|
| No one said those things. Why would they?
| la_fayette wrote:
| That is just boring...
| barkingcat wrote:
| Not strange at all!
| TomSwirly wrote:
| It's been ten years. The killer app for crypto is just one
| thing - crime. Money laundering, tax evasion, purchasing
| contraband.
|
| And yes, people have made a lot of money on pure speculation
| too. That's not an application.
|
| Until we see some actual real-world uses for crypto - full-
| time, serious uses, not someone buying a pizza as a demo - that
| aren't crime, we have every logical reason to be desperately
| skeptical of this overhyped technology.
| samvher wrote:
| I feel like the general tendency on HN (and my personal feeling
| about the subject) is one of interest in the tech and
| applications, but a feeling that the hype is bigger than the
| truth.
|
| The ideas that Ethereum is innovative, that there are lots of
| possibilities in cryptocurrencies/blockchain, that at the
| moment the scene has major environmental issues, and that the
| current high valuations are unjustified, to my mind can all be
| true at the same time.
| jcrubino wrote:
| The key innovation and premise behind Ethereum was to use a
| virtual machine to enable smart contracts on blockchains. Now
| virtual machine interpreters for blockchains is common if not
| standard. Tough to imagine Ethereum failing any promises
| based on that premise.
| trident5000 wrote:
| Blockchain dapps can potentially threaten HN jobs so its not
| exactly a hit on here.
| jordanmarshall wrote:
| Help me understand the appeal of NFT art. I love digital art,
| but I don't see the appeal of spending money to get the token
| certifying you as the owner. The image/work is still out there
| and can be viewed/downloaded by other people. You don't even
| control it, unless the artist agrees to send you all of the
| files and delete them on his or her system. Your name doesn't
| even appear next to the piece when people look at it.
|
| Sure, usually the tokens come with a print, and you support the
| artist, but those are things you can do via other means. What
| is the NFT adding? It seems only slightly more authentic than
| "buying" a star from a star registry.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Why do people buy originals rather than prints, often at a
| 10x markup? Why do they get certified dog breeds rather than
| mutts from the animal shelter? Why do people pay for skins
| and unique items in video games? Why will people spend $300K
| on a college degree when the coursework itself is available
| for free on the Internet?
|
| A lot of times, people just want a limited-supply token from
| a third-party saying "yes, I paid for this, and that
| distinguishes me from the hoi polloi who got it for free".
| potta_coffee wrote:
| A digital mcguffin doesn't have the properties of a unique
| painting on a canvas.
| megameter wrote:
| NFTs are not easy to understand, but sit within the
| intersection of these two questions:
|
| 1. What is the value of art?
|
| 2. What is the value of money?
|
| When we look for analogues, they're of the industrial era,
| things about intellectual property, branding, merchandise
| etc. This is a way of directly speculating on an idea. Is it
| a good idea? If so, then other people will want it, right?
| Then, the token must have value. There are no gatekeepers or
| enforcers to say otherwise.
|
| We have barely begun to grasp what that means.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| It creates artificial scarcity for a digital product
| moron4hire wrote:
| NFT art seems like the dumbest/faddiest/scammiest idea to
| come out of the crypto sure yet, and not just because the art
| market is super faddy and maybe scammy already.
|
| I know artists that think this is going to be their ticket.
| But it was never the lack of crypto that kept them from
| making money. It was the lack of any consumer value to their
| art.
|
| There are two ways to make money as an artist: you either
| make a few, huge pieces that sell to very rich people (making
| your yearly bank on one or two pieces), or you make a huge
| number of easily reproduceable pieces that sell to the
| general populace. The difficulty in both is not the creation
| of the pieces. It's the marketing and sales pipeline. Both
| rely on selling a purchaser a narrative on what the art will
| mean to them. Exclusivity in the former, worldliness in the
| latter.
|
| If you can't crack that marketing problem, you're going to
| ask equally zero pieces as NFT than as any other medium. And
| if you _can_ crack that marketing problem, selling it as NFT
| does nothing for you as the artist.
| dorkwood wrote:
| > The naysayers who think this is all for a quick buck are
| missing the pattern and listening too much to the (admittedly,
| insanely loud and annoying) shills.
|
| I'm part of a community that's currently being overtaken by the
| crypto art craze, and I'm still convinced it's "all for a quick
| buck".
|
| The crypto art economy seems to be driven by "collectors" who
| will drop thousands of dollars on anyone who can get them more
| exposure. People who have no followers and aren't tweeting
| about NFTs every day generally don't get their art bought. Some
| of these kids who made $10,000 off a png then feel some social
| pressure to put some of that money back into the community, so
| they purchase more crypto art with the proceeds.
|
| Some collectors openly advertise their ongoing bids on social
| media. They want people to see that they're dropping big money
| on art. If it was a true art collector, wouldn't they not want
| to be outbid? Wouldn't they be hoping that there were as few
| people in the auction as possible? None of it smells right to
| me.
| nostrademons wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
|
| A lot of people buy art not because they like looking at it,
| but because they want everyone to know that they have lots of
| money to drop on worthless art purchases. This motivation is
| reinforced if a.) everybody knows how much money they're
| dropping on art purchases and b.) the price keeps going up,
| yet they still win the bid. They _want_ the price to go up,
| since a higher price just signifies how baller they are.
| dorkwood wrote:
| If that's the case, why hide behind a pseudonym that seems
| like it was created purely for buying crypto art? I'm
| looking at one right now -- their Twitter says they're a
| "rare digital art collector", and links to their pages on
| SuperRare and MakersPlace, but doesn't have any tweets, and
| there's otherwise no identifiable information.
|
| They've succeeded in demonstrating their wealth, but no one
| has any idea who they are, which seems to poke a hole in
| that theory.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| How does anyone know that they aren't already connected to
| the seller, and just passing 10,000 dollars from one wallet
| address they own, to another they also own, to create the
| appearance of a sale?
|
| You get the same veblen bragging rights, the artist
| (assuming they are not simply your own alter ego) gets a
| visibility boost and nobody is going to be motivated enough
| to go digging around the custody trail to prove this was a
| sham.
|
| This sleight of hand (in a slightly modified form) is
| standard operating procedure for inflating the value of ICO
| offerings (and by extension, crypto as a whole); I don't
| see why people wouldn't do it for NFTs, with the same
| motivations at work.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| Probably still just a big money laundering/tax evasion
| operation, like much of the real art world...
| megameter wrote:
| Yep, this is it. There has been a graduation from toy to tool.
| And...there is also rising demand for lower overheads to get
| the same functionality, which means there is serious
| competition for good tech now. If BTC and ETH are examples of
| "worse is better", there are some Right Things just around the
| corner.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| I kind of agree with what I interpret the article as saying -
| It was fun to work in the Ethereum space when people where
| there to have fun and there wasn't so much money involved.
|
| It's certainly not fun to contribute to Geth nowadays when
| every bug can have huge consequences, and the community
| constantly demands more performance so they can have lower
| costs. Peter was very clear about the burnout this causes.
|
| You can simplify that to - It's fun to work on things when
| there isn't pressure to work on them.
|
| I've run into this multiple times in my life, including in the
| blockchain space, but it isn't really anything specific to
| Ethereum. Though I do feel like the author has a limited view
| and is attributing this to be something Ethereum specific.
| bordercases wrote:
| Not really something to be disappointed by, considering that
| money would eventually have to be involved in fintech?
| haolez wrote:
| I was away from the crypto space for a while and I decided to try
| shorting some currencies yesterday using a DEX based on Ethereum.
| I wanted to create a position with 1000 dollars. The estimated
| fee for my transaction was 490 dollars. Something is broken in
| this environment.
| artogahr wrote:
| How does that even happen?
| 3np wrote:
| Limited transaction throughput (given by block size * block
| time) + an open fee market where people outbid each other to
| get priority.
|
| The only reason it's this expensive is that there's enough
| capital willing to pay the price.
| eswat wrote:
| Congested network + fees dictated by the complexity of smart
| contracts being used (which would be much higer for something
| like a DEX transaction).
| px43 wrote:
| Three things.
|
| 1. The contract in questions is doing a lot more on chain
| logic than it should be doing.
|
| 2. The network is currently incredibly active, pushing up the
| average gas cost per transaction.
|
| 3. The price of Ethereum itself, in which gas price is
| denominated, has risen about 10x in the past few months.
|
| Usually the prices die down in a couple weeks, but if there
| is concern that people are being priced out of the network
| for an extended period of time, miners will raise the global
| gas limit, and things will rapidly go back to "normal".
|
| The thing is though, people are paying the high fees. This
| chart has a really great breakdown of where all the fees have
| been going to in the past 30 days:
| https://ethgasstation.info/
| zionic wrote:
| The short version is that a seemingly large number of
| people are willing to pay out of this world fees to trade
| on a decentralized, uncensorable currency exchange. This is
| consuming the entire chains resources at the moment. The
| good news is that Uniswap (the top gas guzzler) is trying
| to move to L2 within 90 days. That will allow cheap/instant
| trades and L1 fees/usage will only occur when depositing or
| withdrawing. This should free up a lot of network capacity,
| and the high fees incentivize the devs to hurry up.
| labrador wrote:
| Most everything fun thing that I used to do is no longer fun
| anymore.
| jasonrodrigues wrote:
| And that is?
| labrador wrote:
| I don't do the Macarena when the song comes on
| KDJohnBrown wrote:
| Why would someone expect cryptocurrencies to be fun? It's
| fintech. Money isn't fun, it's money.
| phire wrote:
| A lot of bitcoin/cryptocurrency early adopters were there
| because it's fun.
|
| Especially in 2009 and 2010 before bitcoin proved it could have
| value, but even up to about 2016, a lot of people still seemed
| to be attracted due to the fun.
|
| And a lot of those people ended up in leadership positions.
| Darmody wrote:
| There's more than money. Some coins like Ethereum have a
| network behind them on top of which you can do a lot of stuff.
| ben_bai wrote:
| Like sia (siacoin) which is used to pay for distributed
| storage. But still needs mining to keep going, which
| distracts from it's purpose. Rent and lend storage space. I
| which there where some other distributed consensus mechanism
| which doesn't rely on massive mining.
| erikbye wrote:
| Lots of uses other than pure fin transactions. Most people
| are blind to this.
|
| E.g. https://golem.network/
| bitcoin01 wrote:
| And there I was entertaining the idea of becoming a smart
| contract developer for fun and profit. Programmable money sounds
| very appealing and I can see so many usecases... if only we could
| use a proper language like Kotlin to develop smart contracts..
|
| Any solidity dev that can give us some feedback of what it's like
| to work full time on this platform? P
| yulaow wrote:
| Short answer: it is Hell.
|
| Long answers:
|
| - "linking libraries" between FE and blockchains are constantly
| broken, have _a_lot_ of undefined behaviours, and their error
| codes are few and totally opaque to what's really happening.
| Bonus part: they also change fast, a lot, and mostly with
| breaking changes. See web3.js and ether.js issues if you wanna
| cry
|
| - you mostly will have to use third party services like infura
| or web browser plugins like metamask to get a working user
| experience but it will be an extremely poor user experience. We
| currently use metamask and we had a lot of problems with it,
| and also it randomly fails making ofc the whole app
| unresponsive if you don't code defensively of this behaviour.
| Did I also said they frequently update it deprecating methods
| and behaviours they suggested just some releases ago? Yeah,
| enjoy.
|
| - solidity is the standard language to write contracts and it
| is literally the worst language I ever used, with a lot of
| undefined behaviours I encounter daily. I cannot count the
| times I had to spend a dozen of hours to find information in
| obscure blogposts or issues about "hey don't use this language
| construct with this evm version while passing this type of
| parameter or the compiler will put a sort-of-nop instead of
| what you really want". You better create an internal wiki or
| you'll lose track of what you have to know to avoid to shoot
| yourself in the foot constantly.
|
| - The tools around solidity (Eg the whole Truffle suite) are
| full of major and minor bugs, will fail on you without
| explicitly telling why and the documentation is basically not
| existent. The remix ide is barely passable but you have to use
| a bunch of disconnected plugins to get something useful. The
| plugins for common ides (webstorm) or text editor (vscode) are
| useless at the moment of writing.
|
| I'll be honest, I am still working on these dapps just because
| I believe in the team I am in. If it was for the current state
| of the technology and the relative constant feeling of burnout
| I am accumulating, I would have RUN away months ago and moved
| to a corp job in a super ""boring"" stack (currently thinking
| about going the .netcore route).
| bitcoin01 wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback! I guess the grass always seem
| greener on the other side. I'm the type of guy who don't
| enjoy spending time around tooling build configs- I think
| I'll wait until better tools come around. I believe they
| will, and when the average developer can develop smart
| contracts easily, it will be a lot of fun then.
| mlqnw wrote:
| Have you done any coding in Haskell? Any thoughts on
| Cardano's decision to go with Haskell?:
| https://forum.cardano.org/t/why-cardano-chose-haskell-and-
| wh...
| langitbiru wrote:
| You know what? That makes me think. So I applied for YC with
| a non-blockchain startup. In the application form, they asked
| whether I had another idea. So I answered a development tool
| for smart contracts / blockchain applications. A Jetbrain IDE
| but for smart contracts.
|
| I already develop Mamba (https://mamba.black). It's like
| Truffle but for Python instead of JavaScript.
|
| We'll see how it goes.
| bitcoin01 wrote:
| Amazing, continue! There is a huge demand for it I'm sure.
| I know I do.
| siraben wrote:
| > _I need a hero, and by that, I mean that I need a usable
| methodology for building scaleable decentralized apps. Yes, you
| 've heard that right. We don't need more "Ethereum killers" that
| can do 10x more tx/s than Ethereum. Those are useless._
|
| Having worked on large Ethereum smart contracts (running a
| decentralized auction on chain) over two years, I fully agree
| with this. Ethereum needs better smart contract languages, better
| compilers and better dev tooling.
|
| As our smart contract written in Vyper (for ease of auditing)
| grew larger and larger, eventually we failed to deploy on the
| testnet, and closer inspection reveal that the compiler was
| blowing up code size which I had to patch[0]. Down the line
| upstream further increased gas costs by emitting code that zeroed
| out every member of an array (note the EVM already has all memory
| set to 0). To support efficient insertion/deletion of bids we had
| to handroll a skip list on the blockchain(!), because there are
| no Vyper libraries.
|
| On the language development side, things don't look too pretty
| either, I ended up having to write an EVM assembler from
| scratch[1], but deeper still are problems such as a lack of a
| separate call stack in EVM, so procedure calls always end up
| clunky and implementation-dependent. LLVM to EVM[2] is still
| experimental, so anyone who is writing a compiler will have to
| write codegen from scratch.
|
| Perhaps eWASM will alleviate some of these concerns. But until
| then, the entire dev process for writing smart contracts is
| painful.
|
| [0] https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper/pull/1488
|
| [1] https://github.com/ActorForth/evm-
| assembler/blob/master/docs...
|
| [2] https://github.com/etclabscore/evm_llvm
| px43 wrote:
| If you're working on "large Ethereum smart contracts" you've
| missed the point. On chain logic should always be as minimal as
| possible. Uniswap v1 was two vyper files. One was 46 lines, and
| the other was 496 lines[1]. It took like 20 minutes to read
| through the code thoroughly, and was one of the most impactful
| contracts ever deployed to the network.
|
| Solidity also matured a lot, which is why Uniswap v2 moved
| back. If you find yourself writing an EVM assembler from
| scratch, and you're trying to build something _other_ than a
| compiler, you have veered way way off course, and need to re-
| evaluate your system architecture.
|
| Feature creep might work well if you're trying to leech money
| from a government contract or something, or being paid by line
| of code you contribute, but it's fatal in the Ethereum world. I
| consulted for a number of projects that made the exact same
| mistake, and most of them aren't around anymore.
|
| [1] https://github.com/Uniswap/uniswap-v1/tree/master/contracts
| siraben wrote:
| > On chain logic should always be as minimal as possible.
|
| The goal of the project was to make the auction as
| transparent as possible, doesn't that imply moving as much of
| the logic on chain as possible?
|
| > If you find yourself writing an EVM assembler from scratch,
| and you're trying to build something other than a compiler,
| you have veered way way off course, and need to re-evaluate
| your system architecture.
|
| This was a different project aimed at implementing a new
| smart contract language. Didn't take off internally though
| because of shift in direction.
| px43 wrote:
| > The goal of the project was to make the auction as
| transparent as possible, doesn't that imply moving as much
| of the logic on chain as possible?
|
| Not really. Unsure of the specifics of the project that you
| were working on, but a standard auction house type
| interface shouldn't be that much code. You have listings,
| and bids. A listing should only be a timestamp for when the
| listing was placed, a timestamp for when the listing should
| end, maybe a minimum bid, and then a hash pointing to IPFS
| with all the less relevant meta-details. Bids would just be
| a price and a timestamp, though the timestamp probabally
| isn't even needed. You could just keep a record of the
| highest bid in the listing itself, and any time a new bid
| comes in, refund the previous bid to the previous highest
| bidder, and lock the current bid, so bids don't even need
| to allocate any new memory.
|
| If you really really need on-chain arbitration, you can do
| it with a simple ownership contract for starters, then
| switch over to a governance contract as the arbitration
| needs become more complex for whatever reason.
| ccortes wrote:
| If all you want is smart contracts then why stick to ethereum? As
| you stated there are plenty of different projects wich are far
| more scalable.
| You-Are-Right wrote:
| Please name five of many.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| It sounds like the only issue is high fees..?
| freeplay wrote:
| If you share sentiments in this article, checkout cheapETH
| (cheapeth.org). It's created as a utility token to solve the
| extremely high gas price problem on the ETH network.
|
| All the fun of the ETH network with none of the crazy fees and
| high barrier of entry.
|
| Not trying to shill anything. I missed the boat on early Ethereum
| and never got a chance to really experiment with the network.
| I've been doing that with cheapETH and its been a great learning
| experience.
| 3np wrote:
| I think many developers getting sucked into a new exciting
| technology feel similarly at some point once it gets enough
| traction. "I know; it's such a hipster statement." might be all
| there is to it, and that's fine. I had the same phases with web
| and ML and I'm not ashamed to say I'm a bit of a hipster in that
| sense.
|
| I think your feelings are perfectly valid and you should listen
| to yourself, but also realize that you'd do best in not
| generalizing it to be anything but personal.
|
| ...And from someone who was deep into Ethereum tech starting
| 2014-2015, I recently got surprisingly really hooked again on
| Bitcoin. Lightning is fun and addictive, and it feels like we're
| close to some kind of watershed there.
|
| Hopefully you'll find something new to be excited about soon (or
| take a break from it all, sometimes that's what we need as well).
|
| ---
|
| The reason I'm fed up with Ethereum right now is mostly the
| "defi" hype where it's mostly anything but decentralized in any
| way if you look just a bit closer. This goes for pretty much all
| the projects with significant traction today. So many corners are
| cut just to be able to ride the wave of the hype train. "The
| admin with full control is only until we are out of beta, for
| safety", "The centralized coordinator on AWS will be replaced
| with a gossip protocol by V2", "The owner multisig will be
| replaced by a DAO", "the project leads will do all the
| coordination for now" and other BS rationalizations all
| completely antithetical to the ideology.
|
| One major strength of Ethereum for many years have been the
| community. Recently I feel like greed has taken over.
| loceng wrote:
| If you want to work on a blockchain where greed can't takeover,
| an inevitable unavoidable pitfall if you design the blockchains
| to inherently also have an MLM structure, is to design a
| blockchain that doesn't have financial gain as an incentive to
| align people to adopt it but a different form of consensus like
| democratic processes (save regulatory capture) where it's voted
| into use.
| timdaub wrote:
| Thanks for that comment :)
| tinco wrote:
| Vitalik is always bitching about the greedy community, but
| that's really not what is killing Ethereum. What is killing
| Ethereum is its glacial development pace.
|
| It took so many years for Ethereum 2 to be deployed, and even
| now it's deployed it's a weak shell of what it should have
| been.
|
| An argument against that could be that it's simply a hard
| problem to solve, but then the question becomes if they've
| solved any other easier problems, and it seems to me like they
| haven't.
|
| This is their page on smart contracts, arguably the only
| justification for Ethereum's existance:
|
| https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/smart-contracts/lang...
|
| It not only still mentions Solidity, a language which is one of
| the worst mistakes in IT history, it lists it as the first
| choice in a set of 2 options, of which the latter is only
| marginally superior to it. This was acceptable in 2017, a year
| after the realization of how huge a fuckup Solidity is, since a
| year might be a short time for a language to be developed and
| matured enough, but it's now 2021, 5 years later!
|
| It makes me feel Ethereum just isn't managed adequately,
| despite being a multi-billion dollar operation.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> What is killing Ethereum is its glacial development pace._
|
| With hindsight, it seems pretty naive to make the early core
| devs multimillionaires, then expect them to do anything
| except retire.
| akyu wrote:
| Agreed. Anyone who's been in software long enough can take
| one look at Ethereum and see the telltale signs of puttering,
| meandering development. Creating solutions in search of
| problems, and favoring whats clever over what works.
|
| It seems that the Ethereum core development community puts
| overly high value on cleverness and not nearly enough on
| hardcore engineering fundamentals.
| yulaow wrote:
| As a dapp dev for work, I totally feel the mental fatigue of
| constantly fighting the ever changing tool, the broken libraries,
| the inconsistent errors management and the cascade of breaking
| changes any modify causes. It feels like js frontend framework
| madness x 10
| milchek wrote:
| >"What's Ethereum's killer app?" we asked ourselves not long ago.
| Now we know. It's the world's best publicly-accessible settlement
| platform for financial transactions.
|
| Hit the nail on the head - for now.
|
| Yes, DeFi is what kicked things off last year and people can now
| trade their favourite altcoins, borrow crypto, and even leverage
| trade on decentralized exchanges. It's also true that what
| everyone is trading are mostly other coins and other projects
| that they're speculating on - and those projects are just newer
| forms of the same projects that exist now.
|
| We've seen countless projects pop up that are all copies or
| trying to do similar things; increase throughput, connect
| blockchains, provide oracles, implement faster and cheaper smart
| contracts, etc.
|
| So, it's easy to look at all this cynically, but I like to hope
| that eventually this will end up somewhere good - I mean, there
| is financial incentive, there is the 'new toy' angle, and there
| are countless talented people who are genuinely curious and
| trying to improve the various crypto ecosystems.
|
| I guess we'll see where this all ends up in 5-10 years.
| qznc wrote:
| Vitalik recently blogged [0] that prediction markets might be
| there most important thing in Ethereum.
|
| > it is one of the Ethereum applications that have provided to me
| the most concrete value.
|
| [0] https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/02/18/election.html
| londons_explore wrote:
| Not everyone has a million dollars lying around to earn a 5%
| return, _if_ your bet is correct...
| joosters wrote:
| That's a short-sighted, american-centric view. In the rest of
| the world, prediction markets (e.g. Betfair) have existed for
| decades. It's not a technology that needs decentralisation or
| its own currency, so why on earth is it expected to be a killer
| app for crypto?
| josu wrote:
| >But I'm telling you that no sane Joe will touch that shit
| without a serious cryptographic specialist by their side.
|
| One would think so, but people in the space are calling each
| other "degens", one of the best Ethereum devs joked about
| "testing in production", and for the past year there have been
| dozens of +1M USD hacks in the space.
|
| So yeah, projects are already launching based on zk-rollups and
| other complex cryptography without "serious cryptographic
| specialist by their side".
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