[HN Gopher] Interview with Vitalik Buterin on ETH2, Scaling Plan...
___________________________________________________________________
Interview with Vitalik Buterin on ETH2, Scaling Plans, NFTs, etc.
Author : donsupreme
Score : 129 points
Date : 2021-03-10 16:52 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tim.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (tim.blog)
| swaglord wrote:
| NFTs are dumb for physical items. Who enforces the ownership? Ok
| so your NFT says you own it. So the centralized governmental
| police force has to ensure the actual NFT? Defeats the
| decentralized purpose lol.
|
| NFTs are dumb mostly. Digital collector items, ok I get it
| delaaxe wrote:
| They're not meant for physical items. Never really understood
| that tokenized real estate thing
| notJim wrote:
| Digital goods as NFTs have exactly the same problems as
| physical ones.
|
| There was a case where someone stole a JPEG of someone else's
| art off their website, minted an NFT, and sold it, claiming to
| be the original artist. You still need a centralizing authority
| (like with NBA Top Shot) to ensure authenticity and prevent
| fraud.
|
| The one maybe advantage I can see of decentralized is that the
| secondary market doesn't have to be governed by the rules of
| the centralizing authority. In other words, maybe the authority
| provides for the initial minting of the good (ensuring
| authenticity, which can subsequently be verified using the
| blockchain), but don't have to be involved in the secondary
| sales.
| ziml77 wrote:
| This isn't one case of stealing digital art. A lot of work is
| being scraped off of twitter causing artists to go into
| protected mode. I've been seeing a ton of hate for NFTs among
| artists.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Even for digital collector items, it's dubious.
|
| Even NBA Topshot, the golden child of NFTs right now, is only
| useful when backed by NBA centralized infrastructure.
|
| There's a _little_ value of decoupling the ownership from the
| centralized infra that controls the thing you own..but tbh it's
| not much different than an NFT for a physical trading card lol.
| Anon1096 wrote:
| The real interesting NFTs are those that don't even try and
| pretend to have a claim to a real-world item. For example, you
| can currently buy an NFT for a destroyed Banksy piece
| (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/banksy-nft-injective-destroy-
| ar...). I mean if this isn't evidence of a cryptomania I don't
| know what is. I think the most saddening part is that almost
| everyone pushing NFTs are pushing a get-rich-quick scheme, and
| trying to get as many un- or misinformed people in on the scam
| as possible. Lately I've seen relatives buying art NFTs
| thinking that they get some kind of ownership in a piece of
| digital artwork (and no, they don't get the copyright. That
| stays with the artist.)
|
| Honestly, once Jack Dorsey sells his first tweet, he just sell
| it again. What's stopping him? He got 2.5MM for it one time and
| gets to keep ownership. Why not just keep selling an NFT to the
| fabled First Tweet and rake in the cash. This is clearly an
| irrational market and seeing how crazy it can get would be
| amazing.
| usehackernews wrote:
| There's a massive forgery issue with physical items - Shoes,
| Fashion Brands, Art.
|
| The benefit of NFT for psychical goods isn't so much proving
| who the current owner is as much as it is proving the
| historical ownership so the authenticity of an item can be
| ensured. You don't need a central government for this. For
| example, as long as you know Nikes address, I can confirm a
| shoe I want to buy is truly authentic by verifying that address
| is the original owner.
| randomopining wrote:
| How do you attach a digital address to a physical item? Let's
| say I buy a Nike shoe and then give 10 fake Nike shoes the
| same digital address. They are amazing fakes. Same issue as
| today right?
|
| Unless there is a clever crossover to convert from digital
| verification to physical and back... seems worthless to me.
| drcode wrote:
| Well, for any collectible item an important factor is
| "provenance", i.e. is there a legitimate reason to believe
| the item originated from a credible source.
|
| At least nfts now require people to also forge the
| provenance, which provides an additional hurdle to forgers
| (my best attempt to steelman the "pro nft" argument)
|
| For instance, if a great great grandson of Henry VII sells
| a medallion that he claims belonged to his ancestor, that
| would have more weight than a similar medallion from a
| random individual, because it's far less likely for a
| relative to also be a blatant forger. In theory at least,
| nfts provide a similar (limited) assurance.
| roywiggins wrote:
| The only thing I can think of is embedding a physical
| unclonable function into the thing. As long as Nike holds
| on to custody of the physical tokens and only embeds them
| in real Nike products, then you could verify with the Nike
| database that it's a real token and a real product.
|
| But you don't need a blockchain for that.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_unclonable_functio
| n
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Sure you do. Nike could go out of business and their
| records lost forever. Nike could suffer a hack. Nike
| could have a rogue employee manipulate the database
| values. Nike could be thrown off the internet by AWS. A
| public blockchain like Ethereum is plausibly neutral,
| decentralized into tens of thousands of nodes worldwide
| who carry copies of the ledger, and there is a strong
| economic incentive baked into the blockchain to keep
| blocks consistent and persistent.
|
| And if you want to trade your Nike NFT with someone's
| Reebok NFT, it would help to use an open standard with an
| economic mechanism for trade between counterparties
| built-in.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Nike can just produce a set of PUF keys,
| cryptographically sign that list, and publish it. Then
| they embed one of these into a bunch of otherwise
| identical Nike products. The message could also describe
| the product's physical attributes so someone couldn't
| swap a PUF between differently-rare Nike products.
|
| Knowing the PUF key doesn't let you fabricate a physical
| widget with the same key (that's the unclonable part). So
| they can all be public, and anyone can keep a copy of the
| batch of PUF keys that includes their object's PUF key.
| When they want to prove it's an authentic item, they can
| prove the PUF produces a key on that list and prove the
| list was signed by Nike by normal public key
| cryptography.
|
| In this scheme, Nike published their public key in an SEC
| filing, so in the worst case you can go ask the SEC for
| it. Nike could also stick a copy of their public key in
| every product and advertisement they make if you want to
| be paranoid about verifying this in 50 years.
|
| This seems more bombproof in some ways than relying on
| Ethereum to keep existing and well-governed.
| usehackernews wrote:
| You can't give 10 Fake Nikes the address of Nikes original
| wallet, that's not how this works. You can't just assign an
| NFT any address you want, this is all verified via smart
| contracts. The point of the block chain is that it's
| immutable.
|
| Here's Nikes patent for this:
|
| https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?docid=10505726
| roywiggins wrote:
| And if someone intercepts the shoe in transit and replaces it
| with a counterfeit, how does the token notice?
|
| Nike could just publish a public key in an SEC filing and you
| could use that to verify that you're actually talking to the
| company. That would be exactly as good and much simpler.
| usehackernews wrote:
| The token does not notice, and that's exactly what we want.
| As the original buyer, the token is already stored in my
| wallet when I bought the shoes from Nike.
|
| Whoever stole the item can try to sell it, but given they
| don't own the wallet that the token lives in - everyone
| will know it's a stolen good. Another benefit of NFT for
| psychical goods.
|
| Here is Nikes patent for this use case:
| https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?docid=10505726
| krrrh wrote:
| Anyone who's been involved with crypto for more than a
| month or tried to help people to sign their email with
| PGP knows how often people lose their keys even when
| access to fungible cryptocurrencies is on the line.
|
| So what happens to the shoes I want to sell if I lose my
| private key or it is stolen (probably more likely than
| someone stealing the physical shoes)?
|
| Do I simply lose the right to sell? Or do I go to jail
| for not being able to prove that I own them? What if the
| person I'm selling the shoes to believes me or doesn't
| care?
|
| What is the real cost of stolen or fraudulent goods to
| the shoe market in percentage terms? Does it justify all
| of these extra transaction costs being layered on the
| honest shoe traders?
|
| Are there probably good reasons that the idiom,
| "possession is 9/10ths of the law" is so common?
| DC1350 wrote:
| I still don't get it. Why can't the owner of the NFT and
| real shoe just keep the real shoe and transfer a
| counterfeit shoe along with the token?
| the_gastropod wrote:
| But even for digital collectors items, it still seems dumb to
| me. Digital things can be copied. There's nothing you can do to
| prevent copying the payload. And only outside legal authorities
| can enforce property rights, making the whole blockchain part
| of it redundant.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I guess we'll just have to wait for the first person to feel
| robbed and ask for re-evaluation of the NFT collectible
| principle.. then it will go away.
| ptmcc wrote:
| Precisely, there's zero linkage to the physical world from an
| NFT unless it's recognized and enforced by some sort of central
| authority. At which point it's orders of magnitude easier and
| more efficient to use a centralized database.
|
| I did some contract work with an Ethereum NFT startup several
| years ago (now defunct), before the recent hype, and the only
| "value" proposition was that they were selling "genuine" NFTs
| blessed by particular large consumer brands.
|
| Behind the scenes it was all a centralized SQL server that only
| touched the blockchain when you exported your tokens to a
| private wallet because that was slow and expensive -- and turns
| out almost no one actually cared about that part. As long as
| you left your tokens in custodianship of the company, the
| company technically owned them as far as the blockchain was
| concerned.
|
| And then even for digital goods where the concept of the
| "original" is meaningless when exact digital duplicates are
| zero-cost, just... who cares? What do even own, and why should
| anyone else respect your "ownership"?
|
| All this NFT noise just feels like those scams where you "buy"
| a plot of land on the moon or name a star. No authoritative
| body in the world recognizes that claim, and if we ever start
| colonizing the moon you can be sure as shit that no entity is
| going to respect your "ownership".
|
| It all feels very regressive in the face of decades of efforts
| of open source and work to liberalize things like copyrights
| and fair use in software and digital goods and services. Not to
| mention that it is an environmental disaster.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > there's zero linkage to the physical world from an NFT
| unless it's recognized and enforced by some sort of central
| authority
|
| Not at all the case. All the artist needs to do is publicly
| declare that they listed their art on an NFT platform, such
| as Rarible or Zora or what have you and that's enough. Direct
| communication with the fans is all that's needed, no central
| authority required.
|
| Not all NFTs are created equal. Some have all the data
| necessary to reproduce the work of art embedded right on the
| blockchain, such as Euler Beats: https://eulerbeats.com/ .
| Others use IPFS hashes and embed the hashes on the NFT
| itself, so all you need is a single server in the world
| serving up that file and you can validate authenticity.
|
| An NFT is sort of like a signed, autographed copy of
| something. Sure, I can have a reproduction of the Mona Lisa
| printed for about $50, but can I have the original canvas
| that Da Vinci himself painted on for $50? Of course not.
|
| When I was a kid, I liked to collect baseball cards. I knew a
| mint condition Mickey Mantle rookie card was exceedingly rare
| and valuable. A signed and rare card can go for tens of
| thousands or more dollars. Signed baseballs or gloves can
| also have additional value compared to the underlying
| physical item. What is it about the signature that changes
| the value of something? You know that the player themselves
| interacted with that item.
|
| That is the case with NFTs. They won't be going away. You can
| try to mint a copy of an NFT, but it will always have a later
| timestamp than the first one, and it won't have the original
| block number, so it's quite easy to root out counterfeits.
| notJim wrote:
| > All the artist needs to do is publicly declare that they
| listed their art on an NFT platform, such as Rarible or
| Zora or what have you and that's enough.
|
| What happens if the artist declines to participate in the
| NFT marketplace, or (gasp!) even in social media
| altogether? In practice, one of the things that can happen
| is someone impersonates them, steals their art, mints
| tokens for it, and the artist gets nothing.
| randomopining wrote:
| Yeah lol I agree. But I thought I might be dumb.
|
| Someone I follow who is always right is big on them. Their
| argument is that people buy expensive and rare shit just to
| have it and project superiority.
|
| Thus "owning" the HD Clip of Lebron slam dunking is like cred
| they are willing to pay USD for.
| dgellow wrote:
| I think about it as a post-modern art performance. The goal of
| NFTs is to deconstruct the concept of ownership. It's absurd by
| design, and relies purely on faith, forcing us to consider its
| deep implication in our lives and societies.
|
| I don't know if I'm writing this as a joke or not :)
| twox2 wrote:
| I think you are right on. The world is struggling to define
| what "digital ownership" means. Enter NFTs. I think they are
| here to stay as a baseline even after it bubbles up and pops.
| glitchc wrote:
| Concur, NFTs are only good for digital assets, which was the
| driving rationale behind Ethereum in the first place (a
| distributed place to capture digital assets so that one party
| could not unilaterally decide to modify or delete them).
| seanalltogether wrote:
| So i have a pretty clear view of how bitcoin operates, but what i
| don't understand about ETH is the description of it being a
| generalized protocol, or a "world computer". They talk about dns
| or messenger accounts, etc, but is all this data stored on the
| blockchain? How does the size not balloon out of control?
| casi wrote:
| Full nodes are around 500GB, so they do fill up faster than
| bitcoin does. Archive nodes are bigger, but you can get
| everything in an archive node from a full node as it contains
| all the proofs. There are other data pruning techniques, and
| lots of work being done on light clients for eth2 (so you could
| connect via a light client running inside an app on your phone,
| rather than the app connecting to infura/alchemy).
|
| Though contrary to what people think about this being a
| weakness for ethereum, there are still ~10000 nodes running, so
| pretty close to the amount bitcoin has.
|
| Its an area under active research though.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| > How does the size not balloon out of control?
|
| It does, which is why they are looking into scaling solutions
| (sharding, layer 2 solutions, etc).
| Geee wrote:
| It does balloon and has already ballooned. There's company
| called Infura that hosts most of Ethereum full nodes. Because
| of this, the system is quite fragile and not properly
| decentralized.
| https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/84232/ethereum-infrastru...
| DennisP wrote:
| The current size for an Ethereum full node is 690 GB on Geth,
| or 394 GB on OpenEthereum.
|
| https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chaindefault
|
| You can buy a 1 TB SSD for about a hundred bucks. There are
| various reasons people use Infura, but inability to run a
| full node locally is not one of them. (The devs are working
| on removing some of the reasons for using Infura, by
| improving light clients.)
|
| Now if you want an _archive_ node, that will use a lot more
| space. But a full node already has the entire transaction
| history and entire current state. An archive node adds the
| ability to do fast queries of historical states, like "how
| much of this token did that address own in block number X
| last year."
|
| If you have a full node, then you can generate an archive
| node from local data, but if you don't need fast historical
| queries there's no need for it.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > The current size for an Ethereum full node is 690 GB on
| Geth, or 394 GB on OpenEthereum.
|
| > You can buy a 1 TB SSD for about a hundred bucks.
|
| And Ethereum is supposedly doing just over a million
| transactions a day [1] And it _already_ requires a terabyte
| of data to support it.
|
| That's 1% of Alipay [2]
|
| That's 0.02% or thereabouts of Visa [3]
|
| How... How many terabytes will it need for those kinds of
| volumes?
|
| [1] https://etherscan.io/chart/tx
|
| [2] https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods/alipay
|
| [3] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/
| visan...
| DennisP wrote:
| Rollups compress the data on chain, and sharding will
| mean individual nodes don't have to store all the data.
|
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html
|
| There's also work on things like clearing data that
| hasn't been accessed for a long time, and allowing it to
| be restored by supplying a Merkle branch.
| MatthewRayfield wrote:
| from what i've seen anything heavier than a URL is NOT stored
| directly in the blockchain. And even URLs are done sparingly
| and/or dynamically.
|
| for example NFT metadata/data is often stored in IPFS & only
| linked to from the contract.
|
| but confusingly some people still call data stored on IPFS "on-
| chain data".
| krrrh wrote:
| The world computer idea does help to understand it. If you are
| playing a game or running some other processes on your discrete
| computer sometimes you accidentally pin the CPU, RAM, and IO,
| then you'll run into issues where copying files to a USB disk
| or even doing simple things like editing cells in Excel becomes
| next to impossible until you force quit some applications.
|
| In the "world computer" known as Ethereum, operations are
| prioritized via "gas" payments in ETH. A bunch of people you
| don't know on the other side of the world might get interested
| in trading drawings of cats with each other[1], and suddenly
| the "world computer" has no resources available, and the cost
| of inserting simple records into the "world database", or
| moving some tokens to an exchange suddenly goes from $2 to $50,
| or $500. This can happen right in the middle of an operation so
| you have to be careful to consult "gas prices" and probably the
| I Ching wouldn't hurt, and then kind of make a guess and hope
| your transaction doesn't get stranded.
|
| If you have some tokens you want to get out of your wallet and
| you don't have any ETH in the wallet to pay for the transaction
| you may need to beg, borrow, or steal some, and you'll almost
| certainly be left with some dollars worth in your wallet that
| you may never be able to empty completely.
|
| Imagine what it would have been like to work on a big timeshare
| mainframe in the sixties where booking time to do simple things
| cost massive sums of money, except that the bids for resources
| can come in from all over the world and things are being
| repriced constantly.
|
| People like to call this decentralized, because no one is in
| control, but it actually centralizes the allocation of
| resources in a way that makes things many multiple times more
| expensive than they should be.
|
| [1] The "world computer" is not actually trading images,
| because that would be impossible given its limited compute
| resources, so all of the hard stuff like transmitting or
| decoding a gif is actually happening on the normal internet and
| discrete computers. The "world computer" is just spending
| tonnes of resources recording which user currently "owns" the
| cat via a database entry.
| casi wrote:
| Just to expand on a few points:
|
| Transactions getting stuck because of gas prices spiking:
| This was one of the main drivers of the 1559 improvement
| proposal which was recently accepted for the summer upgrade.
| Hopefully it fixes the UX around transactions and estimating
| gas fees.
|
| On demand for blockspace: as the linked interview goes into,
| scalability has been the main point of research for the past
| 5 years and has come on remarkably, we should hopefully see
| improvements over the next few months and the rest of the
| year leading up to pos.
|
| On making things more expensive than they should be: the goal
| is always make it as cheap as possible whilst maintaining
| security. Now, you may not value that security of the ledger,
| but others do. It will be cheaper than it is use right now,
| but it will always cost more than mysql. Some people value
| that, others don't. I would argue the constant demand for
| blockspace (and so the high prices) show pretty clearly there
| is significant demand for that security.
|
| The decentralisation is about resilience of the system,
| security of the information, and transparency (but not
| surveillance). We cant fix money and centralised forces of
| money and power overnight (through id argue theres a decent
| number of ethereum devs working on projects around UBI etc)
| but we can try create systems that allow people to work
| together with infrastructure they know wont be pulled out
| from under them when they need it. There are payment networks
| for sex workers who get relentlessly hassled and accounts
| blocked by banks, there are ubi scripts that you can adapt
| for your own community, there are quadratic funding
| mechanisms that can help us fund public goods. Beyond the
| stigma of the hype-moon-kids hustling money and crypto-
| scammers that seems to get most of the media attention, there
| is good work being done to actually help people.
| CryptoKitties is silly, but it proved something. the nft hype
| is a bit silly now, but it is creating interesting royalty
| and distribution ideas that allow me to e.g. sell my music
| without needing a stripe account and a bank account either of
| which could decide they dont want we anymore and screw me
| over. That is valuable to me.
| krrrh wrote:
| I'll admit to being a bit facetious in my comment, but I
| really appreciated your thoughtful reply. There are
| definitely cases where the extra expense and inefficiency
| is worth it because of being able to route around broken
| centralized systems, but there are also a lot of things
| where there a trusted central authority is likely (NBA
| trading card presume the existence of a league), and maybe
| even necessary (UBI?). One of the early hyped examples of
| an Ethereum based app was a car sharing system, but there
| was never really a good explanation about why this couldn't
| be done better with traditional brokers and servers.
|
| Too often there is a lot of hand waving around this tech
| and a reluctance to admit and account for the serious
| trade-offs. It's hard to have a realistic discussion
| because there are too many people talking up their book,
| either ETH holders themselves or even worse, VCs
| drcode wrote:
| I enjoyed the interview, far ranging topics and enough technical
| details on the upcoming ethereum roadmap to keep it timely.
| delaaxe wrote:
| A hacker tries to sell a zero-day exploit in the form of an NFT:
| https://www.coindesk.com/hacker-selling-cybersecurity-exploi...
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| Great interview. Just waiting on the HN hate of crypto to pile in
| here. Let's applaud the Etherium efforts to reduce energy
| consumption. Crypto is not perfect but projects like Etherium are
| making crypto better in terms of energy usage, tx/second, and
| smart contracts.
| dang wrote:
| > Just waiting on the HN hate of crypto to pile in here
|
| Please omit flamebait from your comments here. Nothing good can
| come of it! Even if other commenters are consistently annoying,
| we all need to learn the discipline not to react to annoyance--
| and especially not to pre-react to pre-annoyance.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| brighton36 wrote:
| Its probable that everything you've ever heard about crypto, is
| a post-hoc justification. That 'number go up' is the result we
| all want. And anything that's said about the matter, was said
| because 'number go up' is the technology behind blockchain.
| SI_Rob wrote:
| Sigh. If any of the downvoters knew how well connected parent
| commenter is (as in, has had years of extensive and direct
| communications with) basically everyone of note in crypto,
| Buterin included. Many of these discussions are published, as
| well. He's choosing to use a handle here on HN so I'll just
| leave it at that.
|
| This perspective is blunt, but correct. Crypto is successful
| primarily by virtue of its unregulated rube goldberg casino
| revenue model, with just enough of a plausible tech veneer to
| allow people to rationalize behavior otherwise
| indistinguishable from naked gambling.
|
| Crypto does not solve the centralization of leverage over
| liquidity (and thus the ability of a few to manipulate the
| wealth of many), which is the sole centralization "problem"
| that matters to the vast majority of people who would use it.
|
| Take away the Potemkin decentralization apparatus known as a
| blockchain (the premise of which holds that The State and its
| central bank minions are the only centralizing agents capable
| of public harm) and you are left with plain old unsexy
| digital currency.
| Geee wrote:
| However, it's important to notice that Ethereum is not money.
| It doesn't have a clear monetary policy, and it has a major
| utility risk, making it a bad store of value. It solves
| completely different problem than Bitcoin. No one really knows
| what problem it solves, but it's getting there.
| dgellow wrote:
| Storing "value" in a crypto currency is a concept I will
| never understand. What value do you store? How can you store
| value in something that can drop by 20% in a few hours?
|
| It seems to me to be a way to say "put your money there and
| it will eventually become more", which is just speculation,
| and not a store of anything.
|
| Edit: to add to that, how is Bitcoin a store of value if a
| bear market is >90% lower than a bull market?
|
| That seems to be a meme that people repeat to justify their
| Bitcoin bet, but I don't see how that makes sense.
| [deleted]
| wmf wrote:
| The trough tends to be higher than the previous peak so if
| you're willing to hold for ~5 years it has been a good
| investment. Even that has to end eventually though.
| dgellow wrote:
| Sure, but that's speculation. I can speculate on Tesla
| shares, but that's not considered storing value. What is
| the store of value in the case of Bitcoin? The bull
| market will stop at some point. Is it still a store of
| value in this case?
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| If you're storing value in a physical bar of gold you're
| speculating on its price not to fall (aka to increase).
| So do you suggest gold not being a store of value?
|
| On the other hand, if you decide to store your savings in
| the form of Dollar bills under your pillow, you're
| probably not speculating its purchasing power to increase
| (as that would be against its historic trend). Rather,
| you're speculating to need it soon to buy goods.
| Essentially, you're betting on an economic crisis to come
| soon and prepare yourself with a decent amount of cash.
|
| Either way you are trying to anticipate the future and,
| hence, engage in "speculation".
|
| IMHO, the "store of value" vs "speculation" is a false
| dichotomy.
| Geee wrote:
| It has all the properties of a store of value. Scarcity,
| durability, portability, fungibility and divisibility. If
| we compare assets on their fundamental properties, then we
| arrive at the conclusion that bitcoin is the best asset for
| storing value. Then, markets decide the relative value to
| other assets by buying and selling. The upwards movement in
| price discovery will continue until value from inferior
| assets, such as gold and real estate, has transferred to
| bitcoin. After that, bitcoin's price will stabilize around
| $15 million per bitcoin, and continue increasing with
| economic growth.
| sparkie wrote:
| If an apple falls from a tree, does the apple move away
| from the tree, or does the tree move away from the apple?
| In order to determine whether something has "dropped", you
| need to have a frame of reference to compare it to. You
| have arbitrarily chosen a frame of reference which fits
| your existing world-view, the dollar. If you are fixated in
| this view you will struggle to comprehend alternatives.
|
| Consider instead, that a bitcoin (or satoshi) could be a
| frame of reference, and from it, you can determine whether
| a dollar is dropping. Here's a visualization of this:
| https://usdsat.com.
|
| Since it is very clear from this visualization that over
| the course of years (rather than hours, which you have
| limited yourself to) that the dollar is in decline w.r.t
| bitcoin, then anybody wishing to "store value" over the
| course of years (not hours) would be making a poor choice
| if they selected dollars to do it.
|
| This is part speculation, as you suggest, but this
| speculation is not random or guesswork - it is a result of
| other processes which go by names such as "quantitative
| easing." These processes (deliberately) devalue the dollar.
| Since not everybody wants to hold onto an asset which is
| being devalued, they look for alternatives, and they find
| one which, by design, cannot be deliberately devalued.
|
| Further, the reason the value of dollars declines so
| rapidly w.r.t bitcoin is because people are betting against
| the currency which is being devalued, and for the one which
| can't be deliberately devalued. As more people make this
| bet, others become more confident that they can also make
| the same bet, which then leads to a situation where the
| more astute savers will front-run other savers because they
| expect that the dollar will continue to decline in value
| w.r.t bitcoin - and since the monetary policy of the
| federal reserve is to keep devaluing the dollar this is a
| very asymmetric bet.
| krrrh wrote:
| Isn't this true of any asset? You're not really
| addressing GPs concern that the term "store of value"
| usually applies to more stable valued assets.
|
| > You have arbitrarily chosen a frame of reference which
| fits your existing world-view, the dollar.
|
| It's not really arbitrary. The earth and things anchored
| directly to it is an obvious frame of reference for
| objects moving in space because it is by far the largest
| gravity well compared to anything you'd be referencing it
| against.
|
| The US dollar is the world's reserve currency, and fiat
| currencies have armies and police backing them and their
| use for paying taxes in addition to massive distribution,
| velocity, and proven utility.
| [deleted]
| casi wrote:
| The monetary policy is becoming much clearer with proposals
| like EIP-1559 which has been approved for the summer upgrade.
|
| But beside that, I can buy things with it, and I regularly do
| buy things with it. I pay people with it, and get paid with
| it. So that makes it money to me. Peoples experience with it
| make it something else to them. ether is more useful to me
| than $ (as a european).
| cslarson wrote:
| Might be tough to hear but it is money if people use it as
| money and they certainly are within the Ethereum ecosystem.
| Bitcoin's promise of only 21m is based on a wing and a prayer
| (very suspect whether fees can ensure security in place of
| mining rewards) whereas ETH is based on 1) primacy as money
| within Ethereum, 2) utility - required for paying Ethereum tx
| fees, 3) earning potential with PoS staking, 4) deflationary
| pressure from fee burning under EIP 1559.
| tryptophan wrote:
| "Monetary policy"
|
| What a joke. Using big-boy words doesnt make such ridiculous
| ideas any more sane.
| sparkie wrote:
| "Monetary policy" is the term used by fiat economists to
| describe their policy, which inevitably boils down to debt
| expansion towards infinity.
|
| Bitcoin is an experiment at providing an alternative to
| infinite debt expansion, by defining a finite quantity of
| the asset which can ever exist.
|
| The idea behind MMT is that you can kick the can down the
| road forever and the road will never end. Whose ideas are
| ridiculous, you say?
| Ceezy wrote:
| Hate? So when you do POS what happened to the supposed bullet
| proof security of of crypto coins? Cause I m not to sure how
| that's compatible. Also I would like to see the chart of
| adoption of these cryptos in unbanked countries/populations.
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| POS = "Proof of stake" here, not the more common use of POS.
| PoS if implemented with the correct incentives is as secure
| as PoW. I don't have much faith in crypto helping unbanked
| populations, as there is a pretty high learning curve. You
| can easily wipe away all your money if you do a step wrong or
| loose a private key.
| zapdrive wrote:
| > PoS if implemented with the correct incentives is as
| secure as PoW.
|
| Lol. And we're just supposed to believe you, right? Show me
| one POS which is as secure as POW.
| _jjkk wrote:
| It is yet to be proven if it is "as secure" because no PoS
| network has operated at scale.
|
| It also certainly defeats much of the original purpose of
| decentralization when a few stakeholders have total control
| of the network because they hold the most coins...
|
| Regardless if the network has "correct incentives" or not,
| things can happen to those stakeholders outside their
| control, or other incentives could easily develop to act in
| bad faith against the network.
| Shoue wrote:
| > It also certainly defeats much of the original purpose
| of decentralization when a few stakeholders have total
| control of the network because they hold the most
| coins...
|
| As opposed to a few stakeholders that have total control
| of the network because they hold the most computational
| power?
|
| And before you bring up mining pools, you can replicate
| that in Proof of Stake by creating staking pools.
| ddrdrck_ wrote:
| Have a look at cosmos.network for successful
| decentralized dPoS network. Also Binance chain is built
| using Cosmos SDK, one could argue it is not decentralized
| enough, but it is certainly secure enough.
| DennisP wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean by "at scale" but ETH2 PoS has
| been operating for several months now, and currently has
| over 100,000 validators with over $6 billion staked.
| capableweb wrote:
| While slightly out of date by now (doesn't have the latest
| years) and only having data from two sources (localbitcoins &
| paxful), this research from CoinDesk shows that the P2P
| market for cryptocurrencies have been growing solidly in the
| "unbanked" world, especially Venezuela:
| https://observablehq.com/@coindesk-research/localbitcoins-
| pa...
| Ceezy wrote:
| Thanks do you have any with the number of unique account?
| I'm not too sure volumes of bitcoin means anything if
| people use it illegally.
| capableweb wrote:
| That's a good idea, but even if I did, I don't think it
| would give a fair view and creating new
| accounts/addresses is cheap enough. So someone holding a
| lot of volume is most likely not holding it in the same
| address.
| reedf1 wrote:
| This should surely satisfy some of the sceptics. ETH2 solves many
| of the controversial problems with cryptocurrencies.
| ppf wrote:
| Seeing ETH2 in full operation would satisfy them more.
| MrMan wrote:
| I am going to stake eth 2.0 in hopes that it and other POS coins
| can provide an alternative to POW (despite any security or other
| technical shortcomings). And then if prices of POS coins can be
| made stable, perhaps by the use of synthetic baskets of POS
| coins, they could achieve some utility beyond hoarding
| delaaxe wrote:
| Can you delegate your stake to a validator node without having
| to use an exchange?
| casi wrote:
| There are services like Lido which is live, and RocketPool
| which is launching soon. You can essentially just buy lido
| staked ether (steth) on uniswap, steth is a token which
| represents staked ethereum and accrues interest via rebasing.
|
| RocketPool would be the preferred method once it is live as
| it maintains the decentralised ethos letting people run
| rocketpool nodes and anyone pool any amount they want, like
| how mining pools work today (except running on a raspberry
| pi, rather than maxing out gpus).
| DennisP wrote:
| You can stake directly if you have 32 ETH. There's also at
| least one decentralized staking pool being worked on, but I
| don't think it's live yet.
| barbegal wrote:
| Vitalik says that layer 1 optimisations can enable a scaling up
| by a factor of 100 and layer 2 optimisations by another factor of
| 100. Does anyone know where the evidence to support these claims
| is? And if scaling up by these huge factors is possible then why
| haven't we seen them be successfully implemented already. I
| understand that zero knowledge proofs involve a huge amount of
| complex maths but I didn't think they actually enable a scaling
| up as they need huge amounts of data in the proof and massive
| computation.
| cslarson wrote:
| > why haven't we seen them be successfully implemented already
|
| They require cutting edge cryptographic and blockchain research
| and development which has only recently been achieved. Many
| teams are racing to solve this because there is a fortune to be
| made for whoever does. So probably these developments will be
| delivered no later than possibly can be.
| casi wrote:
| Vitalik actually has an excellent blog post on rollups. [1] As
| well as the Rollup Centric Roadmap posted last year which is a
| little more technically specific[2]. All the evidence/math is
| there to read, or in the developer forums.
|
| Currently Ethereum has 15 transactions per second. Optimistic
| rollups can rollup 200 or so transactions per second into each
| ethereum transaction. Optimistic rollups are launching onto
| mainnet this month after successful testing for the past few
| months[3]. So straight away with ORs we can hit 3000tps. Then
| on top of that general purpose zk-rollups aren't far behind
| [4][5] and they can get into the thousands of tsp themselves.
|
| Once we get data sharding on layer 1 this amplifies the number
| of rollup transactions we can handle pushing us up to
| ~100000tps (a combination of increasing how much the main layer
| 1 chain can handle, and this multiplying with the rollups). And
| then there is computation sharding further down the line which
| will push it up again.
|
| This has taken so long and hasn't been seen before simply
| because nobody knew how to do it! The researchers have spent
| the past 5 years intensely working on it. But its actually
| starting to happen, and this month too! Which is pretty wild
| for those of use who've been working on it along the way, lots
| of previously unfeasible and expensive applications are
| suddenly going to be possible and cheap.
|
| We scale up with rollups this year, then move onto a full Proof
| of Stake network (not DelegatedPos)early next year, finally
| ditching energy inefficient PoW to everyones relief, and we
| have a much greener, better distributed, easy to participate
| in, scaleable for mainstream use, beautiful ledger.
|
| [1] https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html [2]
| https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-r...
| [3] https://optimismpbc.medium.com/ [4] https://aztec.network/
| [5] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/layer-2-scaling/
| barbegal wrote:
| The first blog post only seems to suggest a 10 times speed
| up.
|
| "A simple Ethereum transaction (to send ETH) takes ~110
| bytes. An ETH transfer on a rollup, however, takes only ~12
| bytes"
|
| But the 12 byte number makes some assumptions that will
| probably not be true or only be true if many transactions are
| made by the same addresses.
|
| Computationally there didn't appear to be any scaling since
| checks still need to be made by someone and verified by other
| nodes that fraudulent transactions aren't in a roll up.
| zeroxfe wrote:
| Ethereum is on the forefront of some of the hardest problems in
| distributed systems and security today. If anything, public
| blockchains have really pushed the edges of research in some of
| these spaces, particularly around consensus, crypto, and
| mechanism design.
| dgellow wrote:
| Also in governance! Lot of research is now financed directly by
| grants from the Ethereum Foundation! That's a game changer for
| researchers. I know a few people who were able to get grants
| for their research projects, without the need to pass by the
| traditional academics system (I mean, they are academics but
| didn't have to play the usual academics politics game to be
| funded).
| jfk13 wrote:
| So instead they were able to get grants on the basis
| of....what? Knowing some key people involved with Ethereum?
| Telling a persuasive story on Twitter? Having the right
| buzzwords in their bio?
|
| Sure, "the academics politics game" may often be an issue.
| But I don't see how "blockchain!" suddenly solves the problem
| of deciding where research funds should go in a better way.
| DennisP wrote:
| Grants from the Ethereum Foundation work like grants from
| any foundation that funds research: the foundation has a
| lot of money and employs people with the expertise to
| evaluate grant proposals.
| dgellow wrote:
| You're projecting your doubts here. The research topic
| isn't blockchain related, isn't based on buzzwords, isn't
| Twitter driven, etc.
|
| The Ethereum foundation is using their funds to finance
| open research in a lot of different domains, you can check
| https://esp.ethereum.foundation/en/grants/.
|
| Anyone can submit a proposal, present their research topic.
|
| It's an actual community based way to finance some open
| research projects. That's a fantastic development IMHO.
| jfk13 wrote:
| > The research topic isn't blockchain related, isn't
| based on buzzwords, isn't Twitter driven, etc.
|
| Well, one of the criteria appears to be "the potential to
| positively impact Ethereum", so it's hardly unrelated.
|
| > The Ethereum foundation is using their funds to finance
| open research in a lot of different domains, you can
| check https://esp.ethereum.foundation/en/grants/.
|
| So why should I believe they're more able to choose
| worthwhile projects to finance than any other foundation?
|
| As your link says, the "ESP team will work with you to
| refine and rescope your proposal as needed, then evaluate
| the final proposal with input from technical advisors
| before a funding decision is made".
|
| There are lots of foundations that finance research
| projects in whatever areas they're interested in, based
| on the funding decisions made by a
| panel/committee/team/whatever-you-like-to-call-it. What
| makes this one different/better?
| yurielt wrote:
| I honestly do not know what might be the actual conditions
| of the academics of the comment above. However in most of
| the cases of the research funded by the eth fundation it
| seems, it is because they have a good proposal, that is
| properly structured and detailed to seem valuable to the
| foundation. On top of that they likely happen to have an
| impressive resume and citations that give them the
| credibility. No need to quite aggressively shill the
| outdated academic politics, just because you mad about the
| fact that things like this are better.
| maldini94 wrote:
| I wonder if the pursuit of crypto is equivalent to our
| aspirations in space. We may not get to Mars but we'll learn a
| lot by attempting and will have valuable biproducts.
|
| Of course there is a waste product as well and the pursuit
| holds some cost but it motivates people and that shouldn't be
| underestimated
| cphoover wrote:
| I'm all for the potential of cryptocurrency... But can we all
| agree NFTs are dumb though?
| wtf_is_up wrote:
| No
| xrd wrote:
| I think they are dumb. But, people are getting more and more
| used to having a lot less physical things. Maybe the truth is
| they don't really care about the thing itself, but the feeling
| they are special because they hold it, and others don't. For
| that reason, maybe NFTs are going to be valuable. I didn't say,
| intentionally, they will be useful, just valuable. Value is in
| the eye of the beholder.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Things don't need a coherent reason to be thought valuable
| like "feeling special" they can be thought of as valuable
| just because everyone else thinks of them that way. The
| problem is that a sudden lack of confidence causes valuable
| things without backing to collapse in value. Tulips and every
| other bubble that collapsed ever.
|
| That we're seeing NFTs trading well isn't an indication that
| it's the art behind them that matters rather than the popular
| view of it as an asset.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > I'm all for the potential of cryptocurrency... But can we all
| agree NFTs are dumb though?
|
| Sure, given how they're being used for now; but with some
| refinement this could displace deeds and titles for property
| for instant verification. Possibly even validating credentials
| and degrees and maybe even passport and associated visas.
|
| I'm not sure how you get over the enforceability aspect, but I
| can see a country like Estonia could opt to build their
| architecture around this.
|
| Also, if I'm honest ETH is the last blockcahin of the big 3
| that I'd consider putting something critical given all the exit
| scams: DAO and the first ETH etc...
| ChrisClark wrote:
| Yeah, just as dumb as buying an original art piece for your
| wall instead of a print. But... it's not dumb to other people,
| just you and me. Other people like buying things that are
| provably 'only theirs'.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| When you buy a painting you have genuine rights to the
| physical object. When you buy an NFT you have genuine rights
| to the NFT but usually none to the linked item. When you buy
| digital art more normally you're essentially licensing use of
| it within a specified context. As you do with other IP. In
| theory you could do that with NFTs _I think_ but in practice
| it doesn't seem to be the case.
| krrrh wrote:
| The Venn diagram overlap between people with sizeable art
| collections and people who don't back up their computers
| and store their passwords on a piece of paper under their
| keyboards is definitely not zero.
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| Art NFT is dumb in my opinion. However, I'd love NFTs to prove
| ownership of car titles or real estate. Think of how much
| easier transfer of ownership of titled assets would be with
| NFTs.
| ska wrote:
| > Think of how much easier transfer of ownership of titled
| assets would be with NFTs.
|
| How is that going to fit in with tax assessment and ownership
| transparency legislation without making things complicated
| enough you haven't gained anything?
| miracle2k wrote:
| It's actually the other way around. The government needs a
| court to be able to force the transfer of deeds, so
| essentially control over the ownership of those NFTs. At this
| point, there is little reason to use a blockchain.
|
| Art NFTs are digitally native. Like Bitcoin, the blockchain
| entry _is the thing you own_. That is why they are seeing the
| success that they are.
| tim333 wrote:
| When someone hacks your computer and transfers the NFT of
| your house that's going to be an interesting one.
| whateveracct wrote:
| crypto lovers really don't understand that there is value
| to existing real-world "archaic" systems
| scotu wrote:
| they might understand, but they also want to profit as
| much as possible on it ;)
|
| anyway, I like to talk about "archaic" systems in terms
| of fast and slow (rather than old/archaic/obsolete. for
| example when I talk about the reason why election
| processes should not be "computerized"/networked it's
| because you want a slow system, it's a feature. The slow
| system gives you a slow result (but in an acceptable
| time), but it also avoids fast/at scale fraud.
|
| I think slow while still holding slightly negative
| connotation is not as negative as archaic and other
| option (slow food is good)
| rattlesnakedave wrote:
| you can build replicas of archaic systems on top of
| crypto based systems for better UX, while still
| maintaining the possibility of self custody for those
| that desire it. The inverse is not true.
| sparkie wrote:
| This is just adding unwanted complexity to an otherwise
| simple problem.
|
| The purpose of a distributed cryptographic ledger is that
| no authority may commit to it without the required
| cryptographic private keys. If you have some party who
| can commit to the ledger arbitrarily, or who has a
| skeleton key, then you don't need the distributed ledger
| - you just need a centralized ledger with replication
| (far more efficient).
|
| Any situation where ownership is enforced by a central
| party is a poor fit for this technology. You either want
| the cryptographic keys to secure the property, or you
| want the humans in charge to secure the property through
| a legal system. There is no sensible marriage between
| these systems. A system controlled by humans undermines
| cryptographic security, and a system controlled by
| cryptography obsoletes human control.
|
| Therefore, the only thing worth owning w.r.t a digital
| ledger is the digital token itself. As a proxy for
| anything else, a digital token cannot assert right of
| ownership.
| whateveracct wrote:
| The legal red tape of real estate ownership is a feature not
| a bug
| delaaxe wrote:
| I don't think anyone wants to get rid of the legal stuff.
| Just digitize it in a way where we get rid of outrageous
| notary fees and other middlemen. Those shouldn't probably
| be bearer tokens as theft/loss is a big deal
| sputknick wrote:
| I think you nailed it. NFTs could be useful for a lot of
| boring applications. What if your software license was an NFT
| that you verified every time you opened it. Or maybe a book
| you bought on Amazon for the kindle. That way you could sell
| these digital assets you own.
| tantalor wrote:
| How does verification work? How do you prohibit
| duplication? If you need a central server for verification
| then blockchain is pointless.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| I have thought about this quite a lot. NFT for software
| license would only work for applications that work with
| the blockchain. Something like a blockchain client where
| the user needs to authenticate to interact with the
| blockchain. Without authentication the application is
| useless. With authentication their account/wallet would
| have a license key and software use authorized.
|
| For other types of software, without authenticating to
| the blockchain, there is no way to verify that the user
| is the owner of the license.
| tantalor wrote:
| But how do you check the user with the token is the
| actual owner?
|
| Do you need to add a transaction to the ledger for each
| use/verification?
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Fabrica.land uses NFTs to transact on real estate properties in
| less than a minute. I wouldn't call that use case dumb.
|
| (disclosure: I have interest in the company)
| JeremyBanks wrote:
| I would call that use case _very_ dumb.
| bsaul wrote:
| interesting, but who needs to transact on real estate
| properties in less than a minute ?
| random5634 wrote:
| People who don't mind their $1B portfolio being stolen in a
| minute?
| kemonocode wrote:
| NFTs are fine to tokenize things that are valuable because they
| are limited, say, like property deeds. You own the token, you
| own the deed, and it's possible to establish an one-to-one
| relationship.
|
| Attaching a token to something that's inherently reproducible
| such as digital art yet with granting no means to actually
| enforce copyright is pretty much lunacy and it's just muddying
| the waters further when it comes to cryptocurrency.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Imagine getting evicted from your house because your realtor
| accidentally used = instead of == for comparison in the smart
| contract.
|
| The strength of smart contracts are also their greatest
| weakness - they're code, so any bug in the code is a de facto
| rule of the contract.
| diab0lic wrote:
| Yeah there are all kinds of edge cases when a digital token
| represents ownership of a physical object that just aren't
| accounted for. What if I get foreclosed on but smash the
| hard drive containing the key out of spite. Who owns the
| house now? The chain says me, the law (central authority)
| says the bank and under the rules we live by today the
| central authority is correct.
|
| What now?
| ska wrote:
| > say, like property deeds.
|
| The problem with this line of thought is that the Venn
| diagram of cases where there is a potential natural fit for
| NFT and the cases where there is both a need for them and
| likelyhood of adoption may well have an empty intersection.
|
| Property deeds are a good example. They can't practically
| replace the current system without radically rethinking that
| system, and it's unclear that the stakeholders would find any
| compelling reason to consider that.
|
| Do you have a compelling example?
| _jjkk wrote:
| A deed? You mean, a legal document which is enforced through
| a centralized power i.e. government....
|
| What advantage is gained by tying it one-to-one with an NFT
| or storing it on a blockchain at all?
| capableweb wrote:
| For one, if I want to sell/give something to someone, I
| just transfer the NFT representing the agreement.
|
| Imagine if you could transfer car ownership without having
| to deal with the government or anything else? Just a
| transaction away. If the seller/buyer also uses
| cryptocurrency, you could safely write a contract that
| swaps the funds for the NFT without any risk of either
| parties running away with both of them (funds and NFT).
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > Imagine if you could transfer car ownership without
| having to deal with the government or anything else?
|
| Even if there wasn't any value in registering a car with
| the government, people buy how many cars in their
| lifetime? I expect that the number of cars that I'll ever
| sell in my life is less than ten. So this would save me
| like 30hrs in my entire life in DMV trips.
|
| Maybe there is some utility here for dealerships who are
| dealing with a lot of government paperwork involving
| titles, but for a general population this seems like an
| incredibly tiny benefit.
| _jjkk wrote:
| Sure, it makes sense from an "imagine a world where..."
| perspective. Sounds convenient.
|
| I'm looking at it from a "why would any government on
| Earth choose to use a 'decentralized' blockchain as a
| source of truth to keep track of property deeds in their
| jurisdictions" perspective.
| whateveracct wrote:
| > Imagine if you could transfer car ownership without
| having to deal with the government or anything else? Just
| a transaction away.
|
| uh you still have to register with the government, for
| good reason. and that's not going away.
| capableweb wrote:
| Well, imagine the car maker when creating the car creates
| a NFT. At that point it's registered and government can
| read all the details from there.
|
| When it reaches the reseller, it changes hands from the
| manufacturer to the dealer. Once the dealer sells it, it
| reaches the owner. At that point, government can still
| see all the details, transfers and more by just doing
| queries, instead of relying on people filling out forms.
|
| Or am I missing what you mean?
| [deleted]
| ericb wrote:
| Well, if you tie it to an NFT, you can make it easy to lose
| or be stolen, which is helpful because...<why again?>
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-03-10 23:02 UTC)