[HN Gopher] Bored Ape virtual land sale breaks Ethereum
___________________________________________________________________
Bored Ape virtual land sale breaks Ethereum
Author : danso
Score : 192 points
Date : 2022-05-02 21:18 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| dralley wrote:
| chef0 wrote:
| deevolution wrote:
| It's amazing how much people care how other people spend their
| money. It's their money, if they want to spend it on ape pictures
| so be it. Nothing to see here, move along.
| zeusk wrote:
| Because most of them down the line will shell their ponzi
| assets to other unsuspecting general public in lure of
| ludicrous returns.
| jayd16 wrote:
| So why did this need to be a gas war? Couldn't they have run the
| sale such that a race isn't necessary, eg waiting longer for
| transactions to complete?
|
| What was the point?
| dibujante wrote:
| I don't really understand how a "$25 NFT with a $3300 transaction
| fee" can exist. Isn't that a $3325 NFT? The purchaser was willing
| to pay that.
|
| It seems like the main difference is that the seller didn't
| receive what the purchaser was willing to pay, creating a rather
| unique dead-weight loss. Wouldn't it be better if the seller
| received the additional $3300?
| brutshucks wrote:
| I look at these projects in amazement that anyone would waste
| such significant amounts of time and money on them.
|
| Cryptocurrency really is a cult isn't it.
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| With that money I could have financed clinical trials with PNC-27
| + thymalin and therefore solved cancer. I'm not even joking,
| people don't have the erudition to realize it but it's true.
| dqpb wrote:
| The US has almost 1000 billionaires. Any one of them could
| decide to mobilize researchers for this purpose, but instead
| they have decided it's not worth doing that. In fact they have
| decided it's not worth mobilizing anybody to do anything with
| that extra money. Why?
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| Ignorance and mediocrity have much more explanative power
| than malice
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| "burned nearly $200 million worth of Ethereum"
|
| I wouldn't say it was "wasted" - some people made a lot of money
| out of it.
| theptip wrote:
| Right, "burned" suggests it was destroyed. Instead this was
| paid to miners.
|
| The service the miners are providing is auctioning off time-
| slots in the network. This is load-shedding in action; if you
| don't think your transaction is worth the fee, wait until the
| network is less congested. (Sure, this is probably an
| indictment of Ethereum-as-currency, but I don't think that's a
| use-case that is seriously contemplated by most market
| participants right now.)
|
| Edit: this first part may be false, fees are apparently
| actually burned now. Sorry.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241054#31241311
| solveit wrote:
| Also, it's not like Ethereum is a physical good that can be
| destroyed. It's just a bookkeeping tool and what happened is
| people trying to mint NFTs gave up their portion of the total
| supply in exchange for having their transactions go first. The
| "wasted" fees were in effect distributed equally to every other
| ETH in existence.
| vkou wrote:
| Did ~$200 million dollars worth of electricity & hardware
| depreciation get burnt as part of this land sale?
|
| If so, I'd say that it's close to 'wasted', given that as I
| understand, the only thing of value that has been _created_ is
| only useful for financial speculation.
|
| We're paying people to dig ditches, and then fill them. Just
| because the ditchdiggers got paid doesn't mean their effort
| isn't wasted!
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Not going to comment on the specific claims here, but
| "speculation" is often a useful activity if we care about
| planning for the long-term and adequately allocating
| resources.
| vkou wrote:
| It is, if it actually results in useful, productive, real-
| world work to be done more efficiently. I understand why
| people may want to trade futures, or hedge against
| instability in FOREX or interest rates, and how this spawns
| a side-industry of derivatives traders and speculators,
| etc, etc.
|
| Unfortunately, the ratio of speculation to productive real-
| world work done by the crypto space seems to be ~0,
| compared to speculation in most of the real-world economy.
| If all of these ICOs and NFTs were producing valuable goods
| (food, medicine, shelter, widgets, entertainment[1]) left
| and right, more efficiently than the traditional economy, I
| wouldn't accuse the space of being purely speculative.
|
| [1] Well, it does produce _some_ entertainment...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Stablecoin adoption in the developing world seems to be
| of value. Compensating artists and thus incentivizing
| artwork seems probably good too.
|
| But I'm not very familiar with the space as I've said.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I don't think the way it works is that every blockchain
| transaction of value X requires an equivalent cost X
| (denominated in USD) of electricity usage and hardware
| depreciation.
| vkou wrote:
| ... Right. Duh.
|
| If this was simply a surprise pay-day for miners (as
| opposed to the real cost of running the network), you are
| right, in that extent. In that case, yes, from a
| productivity & resource usage point of view, this wasn't a
| waste of $200 million.
| rglullis wrote:
| No, it didn't. The amount of electricity doesn't increase
| because of network congestion, and with Ethereum's mining
| reward system, there is no incentive for miners to increase
| their hash rate _just_ for high-congestion moments.
|
| Lastly, these reports really need to stop denominating things
| in USD. 64k ETH were burned, the dollar amount is not related
| to it.
| nootropicat wrote:
| Fees rising isn't the same as 'breaking'. Also this was clearly
| intentional marketing to promote their chain.
|
| Fees would get that high on every single blockchain because the
| mint price was below the empirical market price, leaving gas
| prices as the only remaining market. The only difference is that
| it would be over faster on something with more tps. That's why
| it's obvious it was intentional.
| amyjess wrote:
| Most of the spike in gas prices here was caused by their
| contract being horrendously un-optimized. If they had done even
| basic optimization of their contract, gas prices would've been
| a tiny fraction of what they were, and they would be orders of
| magnitude smaller if they used ERC-721A. Here's an estimate of
| what would have happened if they just optimized their damn
| contract:
| https://twitter.com/gioperalto/status/1520751524070187010
|
| 919.96 ETH would have been saved if they optimized it and
| stayed on ERC-721, and 39194.05 ETH would have been safed if
| they also switched ot ERC-721A.
|
| I'm convinced that Yuga is just technically incompetent. All of
| the people I pay attention to in the crypto space are
| _incensed_ by everything Yuga is doing here, from the un-
| optimized contracts to blaming ETH for their own incompetence
| to their pricing model that excludes everyone except for whales
| who are already wealthy. The people I follow in the space are
| small-time independent artists who use NFTs as a way to make a
| living off their original art, and none of them are happy with
| Yuga at all.
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| What's preventing an actor from deliberately designing the
| slowest or most resource intensive contracts in order to
| break the system ?
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| Consumers normally won't tolerate insane prices.
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| Mistakes happens
| runnerup wrote:
| Inefficiency costs money. Every operation on the Ethereum
| Virtual Machine costs "gas". They'd have to get someone to
| pay for all that gas used.
|
| Yuga is able to get people to pay because they have the top
| "brand" in NFT's currently.
| pshc wrote:
| It's all limited by fees. Typically, users would see the
| high fees and choose not to interact with the contract. It
| seems during this sale, FOMO outstripped the incredibly
| (negligently) high expense.
| nootropicat wrote:
| A more optimal contract would just mean it would happen
| faster, with a higher gas price while the sale is ongoing.
|
| I think this was also intentional - as a way to make the
| congestion last longer.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| With a more optimized contract, the same number of
| transactions would have been submitted, and the aggregate
| computational load would have been smaller, leading to less
| congestion.
| rglullis wrote:
| No, Ethereum didn't "break", it worked _exactly as designed_.
|
| No fees were "wasted". If people were willing to make a
| transaction knowing that this was going to be the cost, it is a
| reflection of people's time preferences.
| akgoel wrote:
| This isn't completely true. There are 2 types of gas fees - the
| first is the type you are discussing. The 2nd is the inherent
| fee of executing the smart contract. $100MM of the fees went to
| contract execution, over half of which could have been avoided
| with a more efficiently coded smart contract.
| rglullis wrote:
| If this is the type of discussion you'd like to have, one
| could argue that they could've launched their NFTs on layer-2
| systems like Loopring/Immutable and avoided _all_ of these
| fees.
| philipov wrote:
| Transaction fees can change while you're in the middle of a
| transaction that you initiated when the fees were lower, so no.
| pabl8k wrote:
| This isn't really true. You submit a transaction with a
| maximum gas price. All wallets that I know of will show a
| maximum transaction fee based on this before you submit the
| transaction, and you can manually lock in any arbitrary gas
| limit you would like. If gas prices suddenly go up right as
| you submit your transaction (read: other network users outbid
| you for use of the network), your transaction will stay
| pending and either eventually process at the gas price
| specified, or fail and you will pay either nothing or a
| partial fee based on your maximum gas price * computation
| steps used.
|
| Gas is basically a means to ensure all computation on
| ethereum halts.
| rglullis wrote:
| not since EIP-1155, no.
| soared wrote:
| A transaction for $25 that costs $3,000 to complete seems
| pretty plainly broken. Imagine that happening with your credit
| card.
| fuddle wrote:
| list price + tx fee = market price. Vitalik summed up up well
| - https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/15206218132097843
| 2...
| nvahalik wrote:
| Except that if you knew your CC transaction would cost that
| much, you'd probably use a different card or use cash.
| siftrics wrote:
| Those who submitted the transactions _knew_ the transaction
| fees before submitting.
|
| They voluntarily and intentionally paid these fees.
|
| This is not broken.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Sorry, but nobody signed up for their transaction to fail,
| this is a bullshit excuse.
|
| > Besides high fees, the transaction load resulted in a
| bottleneck that resulted in failed transactions that people
| still had to pay fees for--now in the thousands of dollars
| for nothing in return, not even an NFT.
| nawgz wrote:
| This same user is arguing that Crypto is justified
| because it helps people in dictatorial or corrupt nations
| protect their money.
|
| I really can't stand this hypocrisy - "it's working as
| intended to drop transactions even after charging
| exorbitant transaction fees - by the way it also is
| protecting impoverished people's money". You cannot tell
| me this is a good-faith argument.
| siftrics wrote:
| No one held a gun to their head and said "you have to bet
| thousands of dollars of ETH."
|
| If you want to move lots of money for the purposes of
| escaping authoritarian regimes, there are other chains
| which have extremely negligible transaction fees.
| ChrisClark wrote:
| They obviously did sign up for the transaction to 'fail'.
| In this case, it just means others paid more for their
| place in the line than they did.
|
| They absolutely picked the price they were willing to pay
| and lose, in the hopes it was more than the others trying
| to get a place in line.
|
| So yes, they absolutely knew their transaction could fail
| if others paid more than them.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| "fail" here is not just being outbid, but still paying
| most of the money you bid. That's not acceptable.
| siftrics wrote:
| Yes they did. They knew that transaction failure is a
| risk and they accounted for it.
|
| I don't feel bad if they did not do their due diligence
| before attempting to transfer thousands of dollars of
| ETH.
| [deleted]
| db_admin wrote:
| Why are they [0] offering a return of the gas spent,
| then?
|
| [0]
| https://twitter.com/yugalabs/status/1520612364839661568
| tofuahdude wrote:
| Marketing and brand.
| siftrics wrote:
| Because it's profitable for Yuga Labs to do that? They're
| a business making a business decision. They know users
| are more likely to participate in the community in the
| future if Yuga is willing to cover costs out-of-pocket.
|
| Again, assess the risks yourself. Assume responsibility
| for your own actions. Especially in an environment like
| crypto today.
| can16358p wrote:
| It was intentional. They paid that amount to move in front of
| others trying to get the same thing.
|
| Something similar to starting to wait in line hours ago in
| front of Apple Store to buy a new iPhone: you are sacrificing
| something to get something that you think is more valuable
| from what you've sacrificed, earlier than others, to avoid a
| potential unavailability.
|
| Yeah it looks ridiculous, but that was paid to get something
| that might potentially be valued 1000x the current price (at
| least, the buyer believes in so, which isn't impossible to be
| fair) so that they will make more money than they've
| "wasted".
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Customers shouldn't need to understand why suddenly the tx
| fees are jack to high heavens. The UX is broken.
| leshow wrote:
| If this is the system working as intended, and you think
| that is a good thing, then I don't think there is any way
| to convince you otherwise.
|
| To, on one hand, talk about helping the unbanked in Africa
| while at the same time justifying thousand dollar fees as
| "working as intended" is farcical.
| rvz wrote:
| > If this is the system working as intended, and you
| think that is a good thing, then I don't think there is
| any way to convince you otherwise.
|
| They have just admitted that Ethereum is a millionaires
| playground, and it isn't useful for the 98% of users. If
| it wasn't a problem, why are many users complaining about
| it?
|
| Also, if a bunch of rich whales wanted to rush and mint
| hundreds of JPEG apes or virtual land, that would mean
| 98% of all transactions for wallets on the platform would
| either fail or take their left over ETH to spend it all
| on fees for a single transaction. That could be bots with
| over >100k worth of ETH to snipe and mint these NFTs
| quicker than most.
|
| If that is _' working as intended'_ then they are also
| saying that it is designed not to globally scale be
| useful at all. If you wanted to send payments or buy
| something at the supermarket store using a crypto debit
| card with ETH, the unpredictable fees will make the
| transaction fail or use up all your ETH for the fees;
| paying thousands for a $10 purchase at the supermarket
| which is wORKiNG aS iNTEndeD; even in the real world.
|
| The banks are really scared and shaking in their boots
| over Ethereum's absurd and unpredictable gas prices. /s
| rglullis wrote:
| The problem with your rant is that you are comparing
| apples with oranges.
|
| Ethereum's base layer is not meant to compete with credit
| cards. Ethereum's base layer is not even meant to be a
| bank.
|
| If you want to compare with "credit cards", then you need
| to look at the layer-2 systems, which (a) already exist
| and (b) are cheaper than most credit card transactions
| (cents on the dollar for Loopring) and (c) are just as
| permissionless and accessible as the base layer.
|
| The fact that a bunch of "rich whales" decided to play
| with their money did not make the layer-2 systems less
| secure or less efficient. Quite the opposite.
|
| The _system_ is working as designed.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Maybe a good comparison would be to high speed trading
| companies who pay exorbitant rent to get their servers as
| close to the stock market servers as possible and reduce
| latency that way and get their orders in before others.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| In this case they understand what they are getting into,
| here most Eth users will just be saying wtf
| siftrics wrote:
| It's not the duty of anyone except myself to understand
| the risks of my own actions.
| canadaduane wrote:
| This is a good maxim for oneself, but a poor one when
| trying to understand or improve systems.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Such a great point! I wish more people embraced having
| two philosophies. One for them as an individual and one
| for policy making/discussion. E.g. I never want to myself
| rely on the social safety net. Yet at the same time, I
| want nobody, no matter how bad their decisions are to die
| because their basic human needs like food and shelter
| aren't met. I think a functioning society, especially a
| democracy, requires these two mindsets from their
| citizenry.
| siftrics wrote:
| Honestly, I agree. It can both be true that 1) a system
| could be improved so as to reduce harm to the average
| user and 2) ultimately the users are responsible for
| assessing risks before participating in the system.
|
| The problem is as soon as you argue for (2) everyone
| reacts like you're the most evil, heartless person on the
| planet.
| dvtrn wrote:
| Because the system you're passionately defending via the
| "personal responsibility" angle has so far demonstrably
| shown itself to be susceptible to the same externalizes
| of greed, avarice and "fuck you I got mine" misbehavior
| as the current system and people are lining up in droves
| to have their chance turning the grinder as long as it
| means they get a ticket to the sweepstakes.
|
| And the responses you're giving of "just be risk
| aware/just read the source code/just know what you're
| getting into" doesn't change that, doesn't educate the
| people who probably and realistically _could_ benefit,
| and it doesn 't change the fact that there is a _LOT_ of
| obfuscation, misinformation and mishandling of trust
| going on in order to separate people from their actual
| fungible money.
| siftrics wrote:
| I just feel like they're not incompatible. I think we can
| help these people who get screwed without assigning the
| costs to unknowing, unrelated passers-by.
| dvtrn wrote:
| I think we can too.
|
| I just don't trust....90% of the people, platforms and
| providers who claim that's what they're doing via crypto.
| soared wrote:
| Hope you don't use public transit, electricity, plumbing,
| or breathe central air.
| siftrics wrote:
| I don't understand how that contradicts what I said. I'm
| not arguing against public goods. And I'm not arguing
| against improving systems for those who don't do due
| diligence.
|
| I'm just saying take responsibility for your own actions
| and your own decisions. The world doesn't owe you
| anything. Such statements are not incompatible with
| improving the standard of living for everyone, even those
| who are actively liabilities.
| zakki wrote:
| But I believe it is the duty of everyone to not
| cheat/scam other people
| siftrics wrote:
| Sure. No contradiction.
| ericlewis wrote:
| or how I wish markets actually worked.
| ep103 wrote:
| What the responses that people are sending to you are
| trying to point out, is that while this is an honorable
| rule of thumb, it doesn't scale. You cannot build a
| society this way, or none of us would be able to function
| reasonably.
|
| It is unreasonable to build tools for other people to
| use, that will break the user's expectation of
| consistent, reliable and safe use.
|
| This is a not an abstract idea, this is a fundamental
| legal concept in the west.
|
| If everyone using Ethereum was expecting these fees, and
| are fine with it, then good for them, and no harm no
| foul. But this approach will not scale to larger
| communities, and it is unreasonable, cruel, and legally
| wrong to put the burden of "they should have known how to
| avoid this" on the larger populace, which is, of course,
| what crypto evangelizes the ultimate end-goal to be.
|
| This is where comments like soared comes in. "I hope you
| don't use public transit, electricity, plumbing, or
| breathe central air." A human being simply cannot
| function in society if we have to study local EPA data to
| know whether its safe to breathe along our commute to
| work, that our electricity will be safe to use with all
| of our devices, that my car won't explode if I press a
| button in a different way, and that I won't go bankrupt
| if I use my crypto card to pay for a meal.
|
| Expecting everyone to research how every tool works
| before they use it fails Kants categorical imperative,
| because it is simply impossible for everyone one of us to
| research every tool we use given a finite lifetime. Hence
| the responses you are receiving here.
| siftrics wrote:
| > Imagine if you had to...
|
| Given the historical context of these systems working
| reasonably well for decades, I've decided to take for
| granted that I won't get rugged by my public transit, or
| my electricity company, or the food in the grocery store.
| Still, I do assess tap water before I drink it, even in
| the US.
|
| If you're the type of person who likes to blindly trust
| systems without studying them, that's fine; you can wait
| to partake in crypto until this sense of trust has been
| built. No one is holding a gun to your head and saying
| "run arbitrary code against your crypto holdings." Yet
| people do it. This is their fault. If they don't want to
| take the time to study the code, then they should have
| waited until the community did the due diligence for them
| to whatever is their own personal level of satisfaction.
| ep103 wrote:
| I believe you have missed the point of my post. I have
| updated it in the hope that perhaps I have made the point
| clearer.
| xur17 wrote:
| I think GP's example of the Apple store line matches a
| lot better. The high fees on Ethereum were for 2 or 3
| hours, similar to Apple's line when they sell a new
| phone. If you don't absolutely need to run a transaction
| during that time period, you just.. wait.
|
| For example - I was looking to move some USDC, but I saw
| the fees, and just came back a few hours later and
| submitted it with no problems.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| The system sucks. It isn't broken.
| serf wrote:
| one could argue that surge pricing on Uber during the
| holidays feels 'broken' in the same respect, but the
| characteristically high costs during those times are
| precisely the indicator that the system is working as
| intended.
| vkou wrote:
| If someone tried to pitch to me that we should replace the
| existing car, taxi, and bus infrastructure with 'transit
| 3.0' that sometimes has the cost of a ride increase by
| ~500,000% - I'd laugh them out of the room.
|
| Even if their system were 'working as intended'. A footgun
| is working as intended when it sends you to the hospital -
| and it's defective by design.
| rglullis wrote:
| This is exactly what happens with "surge pricing" on
| Uber.
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| Unfortunately HN is so vehemently anti-crypto that articles
| like this get upvoted regardless of the accuracy of their
| content.
|
| I don't like crypto either for many of the same reasons - most
| notably crypto's horrendous environmental impact. But we need
| to stick to facts when we criticise crypto, and avoid mindless
| bandwagoning just because it's currently the in thing to hate
| on all things crypto.
| McLaren_Ferrari wrote:
| It completely destroys the mechanism of an auction. Especially
| an online auction
|
| During an auction you always know the price and hence the bids
| are somewhat incremental. You can bid in 1$ increments or even
| lesser increments.
|
| When the network is congested people put a fee on their
| transaction without knowing anything except that more = better.
|
| It is a market failure. The time preference BS is something
| made up by "true believers" who think that "bad news is good
| news" because it supposedly supports the winner take all
| mindset that crypto enthusiast love.
|
| Except when the winner is Ken Griffin, in that case we should
| stop playing , throw a tantrum and ask the refs for a redo lmao
| rglullis wrote:
| Since EIP-1155, people submitting transactions knew _exactly_
| how much the gas fee is going to be and how much the
| transaction would cost. The "auction" mechanism for the
| miners to select the transactions to get into the block is
| basically irrelevant compared with network congestion itself.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| vmception wrote:
| I will agree that the "broke Ethereum" rhetoric is stupid. It
| relies on elevating Yuga Lab's tweets to a level of credibility
| that they lost, their community should turn on them for
| deflecting responsibility.
|
| _But_ I would say that there are unintended consequences of
| Ethereum 's EIP1559 burning. A lot of tokens sold off as people
| were positioning for this sale. In the past, this money would
| have been recirculated from miners back into these leading
| tokens and projects and economy. This time it hasn't really
| happened because it was burned. Ethereum hasn't "priced in" any
| scarcity based on this burning, its still swung by the general
| tech sector swinging. Not a fan of this outcome personally. But
| yes, I'm all for letting the burns continue, just want
| communities and projects to be more discerning.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Usurious and predatory loans also work as intended. The person
| signing the document knows what they are getting into it, and
| presumably have done the cost/benefit analysis.
| TomGullen wrote:
| Rational actors acting rationally
| arthurcolle wrote:
| I always wondered why a gas fee future or option never was
| developed to mitigate gas fees indirectly. Since gas fees are
| heavily dependent on smart contract conplexity, a secondary
| market based on gas fees, and not on ETH spot price, seems like
| it would be a useful financial innovation in this space
| literallyWTF wrote:
| dralley wrote:
| >A Twitter thread by Molly White, creator of Web3 Is Going Great,
| documented how exorbitant fees affected people buying NFTs from
| different projects, often outstripping the underlying asset: a
| $3,500 fee for a $500 NFT, a $3,800 fee for a $270 NFT, a $3,950
| transaction fee for a $260 NFT, and a $3,300 transaction fee for
| a $25 NFT were just some of the many ridiculous trades executed
| during the gas war caused by Otherdeed's NFT launch.
|
| Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their
| monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2,
| or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-
| fire. I'm 100% serious.
|
| All of this, over gifs, jpgs and fake land in a theoretically
| infinite digital universe that was probably procedurally
| generated anyway.
| pabl8k wrote:
| I'm not a fan of Yuga or "land" sales on blockchains, but this
| argument comes out every time there is something even
| tangentially related to proof of work blockchains. There is not
| a significant marginal expenditure of electricity per nft
| minted or transferred. The same order of magnitude of energy is
| expended to ensure the security of the blockchain whether a
| large NFT mint happens or not so long as the blockchain exists.
|
| What really happened here was that the company that launched
| this did it in a way that congested the ethereum network and an
| auction essentially occurred in "gas" to use the network for
| this purpose for a couple hours. Instead, the company should
| have pre-allocated guaranteed minting on a lottery basis so it
| didn't devolve into a "gas" auction or, increased supply to
| match demand, which they knew in advance (like you said, limits
| here are artificial).
| theturtletalks wrote:
| A better way to look at the gas price is that is the cost of
| decentralization.
|
| One single entity being the source of truth will always be
| cheaper than a blockchain verifying a transaction. The caveat
| is if that cost is worth it.
|
| For buying tangible goods, the gas price might be worth it
| since Visa/MC control what you can sell online and payment
| processors can be circumvented using crypto. That is a pain
| point.
|
| For intangible goods, the gas price is simply not worth it.
| What pain point exists for owning digital goods that would
| require decentralization? In my opinion, none.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Something like BOYC couldn't have been build in a
| traditional centralized manner. 4 founders had the idea of
| this club and were able to build it up on the back of
| Ethereum without any permission needed or their own
| infrastructure. It might not be worth it, but that's
| something unique that hasn't been possible before.
| jasonshaev wrote:
| Serious question: what did they actually build?
|
| They create images and sell them on someone else's
| network. I could list a JPG on eBay without having to run
| any infrastructure either.
| ATsch wrote:
| > The same order of magnitude of energy is expended to ensure
| the security of the blockchain whether a large NFT mint
| happens or not so long as the blockchain exists.
|
| That's not completely true. The amount of resources wasted
| per hour are proportional to the value of the coin. Lacking
| any genuine uses for for cryptocurrencies, people determine
| coin value by things like transaction volume, market
| capitalization, influencer endorsements and active wallets
| instead. Thus every additional user, transaction and
| especially the common million-dollar wash trades designed to
| pump their respective projects, contribute significantly to
| the waste that is generated.
| thorncorona wrote:
| Perhaps instead of all of these feel-good blaming the end user
| for systemic issues we could actually solve of the low hanging
| fruit surrounding climate change?
|
| I'm tired of the blaming of regular people for not composting
| or recycling instead of the corporations who routinely behave
| poorly on a global scale.
|
| Instead of CO2 generated by computers we could talk about CO2
| generated by heavy industry? Which is actually a large emitter?
|
| Or maybe we could talk about regulating corporate giants who
| routinely abuse environmental regulations by doing them in the
| 3rd world such as Conagra, Shell, or Dupont? These are
| companies which release untested chemicals and incentivize
| rainforest burning and yet we give them a free pass to focus on
| trivialities.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| 0.1 % of the world's energy is used by this, and growing. It
| is no longer ignorable.
|
| And anyways most mining is inaccessible to regular people. It
| is gigantic corporations doing all the mining these days.
| Etherium itself runs mostly on AWS.
| thorncorona wrote:
| > The industrial sector accounts for 30% of global
| emissions and roughly 37% of global energy consumption.
| This huge share of climate-changing emissions from one
| sector is an equally huge opportunity for emissions
| reduction on a global scale.
|
| It's quite literally a rounding error. You're focusing on
| trivialities compared to actual polluters.
|
| It doesn't really matter whether it's accessible to regular
| people. Container ships aren't exactly accessible to
| regular people either.
|
| Eth most definitely doesn't run off AWS. Way too expensive
| lol.
|
| https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/decarbonizing-
| heavy-i...
| dralley wrote:
| Replacing cryptocurrency can literally be done overnight.
| That's not true of international shipping.
| iostream24 wrote:
| Is crypto mining heavy industry?
|
| All those poor miners with black lung and cave-ins and
| such...
| dralley wrote:
| This 100% falls into the category of low hanging fruit. It's
| merely a far less efficient way of doing things we already
| know how to do. No worthwhile functionality would be lost.
| hkt wrote:
| CO2 generated by Facebook and Amazon would be interesting to
| see. Worldwide computing usage too.
|
| Fair point though: companies should be embargoed for wrecking
| the environment at this point. Even a handful of big western
| countries doing it would likely make waves, even without the
| US.
| varenc wrote:
| An increase in gas fees doesn't correspond to an increase in
| energy consumed/CO2 produced. The network was chugging along at
| its usual hash rate like always, but this sudden demand for
| transactions creates a bidding war for the existing gas
| (computation) available. The fact that the gas rates rose so
| high shows that the network's energy consumption didn't
| increase.
|
| Of course, in the long term, exorbitant gas fees produce some
| incentive for more miners to join and burn more CO2.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| Equating CO2 emission with Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire is
| deliberately inflammatory and grossly misleading.
| wyager wrote:
| If anything, higher atmospheric CO2 is probably locally
| better for the Amazon.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| This is wrong though. During the sale, the fees were much
| higher, but the CO2 emissions remained constant.
|
| It's just not the case that you can "talk about gas fees in
| terms of tons of CO2".
|
| You should talk about the CO2 emissions of the Ethereum
| network. It's not 1:1 with fees in any sensible way.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| This is a temporary state of things due to proof of work. Proof
| of stake is coming, and already bored apes et al should be
| running on a Layer 2 like Polygon. Harping on the environmental
| consequences is a bit disingenuous.
| smiddereens wrote:
| jameshart wrote:
| When's the President going to do something to fix these gas
| prices?
|
| Anyway, I thought crypto currencies were meant to be inflation-
| proof.
| vmception wrote:
| Blockchains use the same energy whether there are transactions
| or not.
|
| This bolsters the anti Proof of Work/blockchain argument if you
| understood it. Which ironically means understanding blockchains
| instead of just finding the nearest convenient reason to not
| bother understanding them.
| RGamma wrote:
| There's no reasoning about (lack of) fundamentals or e-waste
| with crypto loyalists.
|
| Just let it play out naturally: let the scammers scam, the
| gamblers gamble, the bag holders hold bags and the vanity coins
| go boom and bust. Can't do a thing about it; accepting this is
| much better for your sanity.
|
| And well, all the electronics that are wasted on digital La-La
| land? It's a tell tale sign of the decadence of our times.
|
| That too will come to an end, when earth finally forces us to
| get our priorities straight. It can only continue for so
| long...
| basisword wrote:
| >> Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their
| monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2,
| or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-
| on-fire. I'm 100% serious.
|
| We don't do it with anything else, so why do it with this?
| Other than to virtue signal of course.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| We do with tons of stuff? Articles have been written about
| CO2 costs for literally every aspect of life at this point.
|
| That being said Proof of Work is a slightly different beast
| because the consumption of resources is the goal in and of
| itself. Efficiency gains are antithesis to it as the cost is
| what keeps the network safe.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| When was the last time you read an article about the CO2
| output of the finance industry?
|
| I can first hand assure you there are a lot of very
| expensive CPU cores sitting in datacenters all over the
| world shuffling money back and forward for fractions of
| cents on the dollar.
| johnny22 wrote:
| huh? people talk about it all the time on this very site
| in the past. ALthough it's usually about how much VISA
| and mastercard uses, or how much is used by money flowing
| through the american banks.
| basisword wrote:
| Yes, but we don't do it and ignore monetary value. We can
| and do discuss both.
| fartcannon wrote:
| It's kind of like trying to outwit other traders in the stock
| market, isn't it? Just a bunch of people building elaborate
| systems to gamble.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Stock market trading is actually super efficient energy wise,
| comparatively, due to its centralized nature in a trusted
| environment. No need for proof of work or proof of stake, so
| no need to spin cycles for crypto trust theater (because you
| can still be prosecuted and sued if you steal crypto and it's
| worth someone's time to obtain justice; code as law until the
| cuffs are on or wallets are blacklisted at exchanges).
|
| In this example, Ethereum is this enormous, slow distributed
| runtime moving image receipts and tokens around.
| fartcannon wrote:
| You can expand and contract the 'stock market' to whatever
| shape and energy density your argument requires. Does it
| include all the energy required to keep alive the people
| who work to sustain it? Does it include investors, the
| wealth it generates and all the super yachts bought with
| it? Or on the othet side, is it just the near energy free
| idea of what the stock market is?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| etherium solves 0 of those problems so it's a moot point
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| There are already a hundred different crypto exchanges
| (more than regular ones, possibly)
|
| We do not count the people working on these exchanges as
| a part of crypto energy cost. So your argument is wrong,
| actually.
| bduerst wrote:
| If ethereum ever achieved adoption even close to a
| fraction of what stock trading has, then you'd have the
| same problems and overhead.
|
| As it stands, the apples to apples comparison has any
| centralized, trusted network being more efficient than
| [attempted] trustless, proof of work like ethereum.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> No need for proof of work or proof of stake
|
| Yeah, I mean naked shorts and all.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| Naked shorts can and do exist on crypto exchanges
| phkahler wrote:
| On an exchange, but not on a blockchain.
|
| Exchanges are a convenience, and go against the entire
| concept of a distributed ledger. That part of what makes
| the whole thing a joke.
| vkou wrote:
| 1. Naked shorts are illegal except in very special
| circumstances for a market maker.
|
| 2. You don't need naked shorts for a stock to be >100%
| shorted.
|
| We'd all have been better off if people took the GME
| frenzy as an opportunity to better understand how stock
| trades work, as opposed to an opportunity to reinforce
| their pre-existing misunderstanding.
| phkahler wrote:
| Naked shorts are not possible with crypto unless I'm very
| mistaken. You could do it in some secondary market, but
| the blockchain AFAICT only works on "real" assets.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| Which is irrelevant, we should judge things as they are
| and not as they "should be". Exchanges are part and
| parcel of the crypto ecosystem. We cannot ignore them in
| this discussion.
|
| Naked shorts do exist in the crypto market and they do
| affect the prices of those currencies.
|
| But of course why would anyone do that when there are a
| hundred easier ways to manipulate the crypto market? Buy
| a few influencers and UFC athletes to shill your crypto
| and you get a much better return on investment.
| m00dy wrote:
| >.. a trusted environment ..
|
| There is a term called circuit-breaker. How would it
| possible to trust a system if it has a "feature" called
| circuit-breaker ?
| thorncorona wrote:
| You could instead lose $625M to poorly written code [0].
| Crypto is just rediscovering the reason we have financial
| regulations, at a higher speed.
|
| https://crypto.news/axie-infinity-ronin-network-
| hack-625m-us...
| adoxyz wrote:
| what's wrong with having a circuit-breaker? My house has
| many and they come in handy. Same with the stock market,
| it helps slow down emotional trading and limit certain
| attacks.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Crypto proponents and libertarians taking issue with the
| rules of the capital markets is different than the system
| having no trust. The US capital markets are some of the
| most regulated, trusted markets in the world; it's why
| capital flows into it (versus say, Russia, China, LATAM,
| etc). Some poorly written smart contract isn't going to
| nuke their (potentially hundreds of millions of dollars)
| capital on a whim, and if there is an issue, there is a
| resolution path through industry, government, and the
| courts. That is "revealed trust" if you will.
|
| Importantly, the belief of an individual can be
| drastically different than the consensus of market
| participants. Based on the capital allocation in US
| capital markets (tens of trillions of dollars), what does
| that signal regarding trust?
|
| https://www.sifma.org/resources/research/fact-book/
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Meh, we "waste" all sorts of energy, and what constitutes as
| waste is something to be debated and something that probably
| hits philosophical/ethical bedrock much like talking about,
| say, meat consumption.
| drekk wrote:
| It is wasted. I can send you a JPG without using more energy
| than a EU resident will go through in several years. This
| isn't a philosophical or moral question. We have ownership
| models and financial systems that are flawed but at least on
| paper accountable to democracies and not mining consortiums.
|
| Meat consumption is wasteful, sure, but at least the end
| product feeds humans. I don't get why we have to burn more
| energy than entire countries to power a speculative asset. Or
| buy contraband online.
| warent wrote:
| We're not talking about abstract metaphysics here. These are
| objectively measured metrics that correlate to direct
| physical impact on the planet.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Yes, so does meat eating. Nobody said anything about
| metaphysics, but whether something is wasteful is a
| normative question.
| warent wrote:
| There is research demonstrating that the lowest-impact
| meat produces significantly more greenhouse gas than the
| worst, highest-impact vegetable.
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216
|
| If you're arguing that excess greenhouse gas emissions is
| not a waste product, then it seems like you're either
| embracing climate change or you know something about
| greenhouse gasses that nobody else knows.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > There is research demonstrating that the lowest-impact
| meat produces significantly more greenhouse gas than the
| worst, highest-impact vegetable.
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216
|
| Yes, that is my point.
|
| > either embracing climate change
|
| I'm making the very basic claim that all of these are
| based on normative facts, not metaphysics.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| "Murder isn't a problem because people die all the time."
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I don't think analogies are helpful, but if murder were
| rampant while we narrowly focused on the murders of a
| single subset group, mainly due to visibility reasons
| because they've only started murdering recently, then I
| would have the same problem with that inconsistency.
|
| To reverse out of the analogy, we've decided that the
| solution is to simply illegalize murder, and it generalizes
| over any group doing any kind of murdering.
|
| But what is the equivalent for energy waste? Illegalizing
| energy waste, for example, isn't quite as open-and-shut as
| murder.
|
| Imagine how hard it would be to actually etch out the
| details (operationally, ethically) of an energy policy that
| generalizes over waste in the crypto space but also any
| other place we waste energy for things we don't actually
| need.
| haswell wrote:
| > _Imagine how hard it would be to actually etch out the
| details (operationally, ethically) of an energy policy
| that generalizes over waste in the crypto space but also
| any other place we waste energy for things we don 't
| actually need._
|
| Does the fact that this is hard somehow make the problem
| go away? Yes, it will be hard. Like many factors
| contributing to climate change, changes are required that
| will make people unhappy.
|
| The only question is whether humanity will take the steps
| to change on their own, or if the Earth will make those
| decisions for us.
|
| It's also not necessary to implement an all-encompassing
| policy about every possible form of energy waste to take
| aim at emerging trends that are a clear threat to the
| climate.
|
| Taking just one example, unwinding the problems with the
| meat industry is going to be incredibly difficult because
| of hundreds of years of precedent and expectations of the
| population. In that regard, focusing on curbing new
| threats first while still in their early stages sounds a
| lot more viable and at least in the short term, valuable.
| haswell wrote:
| When I eat meat, it nourishes me, and keeps me alive for a
| period of time. There are valid criticisms of the meat
| industry for sure, but generally speaking, meat keeps humans
| alive.
|
| The power consumption of the crypto ecosystem is not
| comparable. The power consumption of the crypto ecosystem is
| sobering when you dig into the details.
|
| Now, couple that with the very dubious value of the things
| built on top of that ecosystem, and this is not a "meh, just
| a little more waste" kind of conversation.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Your meat consumption is excessive to your needs and
| produces excess GHG. It is a want.
| haswell wrote:
| And that is why I mentioned there are valid criticisms of
| the industry.
|
| I personally don't eat meat often, but that's not the
| point. The broader point is that meat, while wasteful,
| still provides clear value. That doesn't mean emissions
| aren't also a problem.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > The broader point is that meat, while wasteful, still
| provides clear value
|
| What clear value compared to a less emitting alternative?
| haswell wrote:
| Meat has a history going back to the dawn of man as a
| primary source of sustenance. It's delicious, and
| thousands of millennia of evolution predisposes me to
| enjoy it more than less emitting alternatives.
|
| The fact that meat has value is unrelated to the current
| state of the industry, which as I have said, is
| problematic.
|
| The point I'm making is about the intrinsic value of the
| thing, because the GP wants to compare meat to
| cryptocurrency.
|
| My point is that they're not comparable, regardless of
| the realities of mass produced meat and that industry's
| sustainability problems.
|
| Dismissing issues with crypto as "meh, meat is a problem
| too" is a little bit like watching the Amazon burn down
| and concluding "meh, driving cars are a problem too".
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Let's say I enjoy trading crypto. What puts that
| enjoyment as lesser to an equivalent amount of meat
| consumption that creates the same GHG emissions compared
| to alternative?
|
| This time without appeal to the naturalism fallacy.
| haswell wrote:
| Admittedly not my greatest comment, and my point was lost
| in the shuffle. But since we're shifting the goalposts
| now and comparing _activities_ to _commodities_ , let's
| say the only meat I choose to eat is sourced by hunting
| wild game. Let's say I did the hunting myself with my own
| bow.
|
| Are you saying that you do not acknowledge the value of
| meat as a basic form of sustenance? Would you change your
| position if lost in the wilderness, feeling that pang of
| hunger in your gut?
|
| Are you saying that trading crypto as a hobby is
| equivalent somehow?
| serf wrote:
| even a vegan should see the value of the resulting
| nutritional calories from meat consumption, even if they tout
| alternatives.
|
| I haven't yet been pointed at the value with regards to the
| thread topic (except in vague 'it's art!' kind of ways), even
| by extremely enthusiastic crypto-nuts -- so it makes the
| 'waste' w.r.t the thread topic a bit more egregious feeling,
| personally.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Well, a vegan and an honest meat eater would bring up
| trophic levels and needs vs. wants, though I don't want to
| get into that.
|
| But I liken that incendiary debate to this one over who is
| "allowed" to waste energy and for what reason. It doesn't
| seem as simple of an argument as people in these comments
| suggest.
|
| If I buy $100 of energy, what exactly am I allowed to do
| and not do with it? Can I not use all of it to power my
| vibrating butt plug? I think anyone who wants to go down
| the route should be ready for a much bigger conversation
| than the (seemingly) kneejerk, narrow-focused reaction lets
| on.
|
| I mean, if the point of bringing up energy waste wrt crypto
| is to just marvel at the waste, then fine.
| haswell wrote:
| Let's say you have a friend who is always in debt. He
| knows it. You know it. Everyone you both know knows it.
|
| He has a few friends, also deeply in debt, who try to
| pretend it's not an issue, but most people roll their
| eyes in frustration at that subgroup.
|
| One day, your friend comes over in a brand new high-end
| Mercedes. You and all of their friends are appalled. Why
| on earth would they buy a Mercedes when they are already
| so far underwater that it's unclear if they'll ever be
| debt free.
|
| To me, this is the problem with the crypto space. The
| world is full of problems that are threatening the
| planet. The world can't yet agree on how to solve those
| problems, (and some people pretend that problem doesn't
| even exist).
|
| And along comes this new thing that consumes more energy
| than entire countries. And it's not really clear if it'll
| ever provide enough value to warrant the cost.
|
| Yes, this will require some difficult conversations along
| the way, but people are quick to jump all over this
| because quite frankly, it's exactly the kind of problem
| the world doesn't need on top of the existing problems
| that still haven't been solved. There's a kind of
| exasperation that comes with the feeling.
|
| When people bring up climate change, it's rarely just to
| marvel.
| haswell wrote:
| I'm admittedly not very knowledgeable about the Web3/Crypto
| space beyond the basics - are all of these fees also publicly
| visible on a ledger?
|
| It seems like someone could build a pretty sobering dashboard
| that shows exactly what you describe if this data is readily
| available.
|
| I've wanted to dabble in the space purely so I could understand
| it more deeply, but am not really interested in the hype.
| However, building visualizations to help people understand the
| insanity...sounds like an interesting project.
| joshcryer wrote:
| The gas fees don't really correlate to any energy usage.
| They're actually a fee for computation on the block. It's no
| different than the Bitcoin miner fee, except it's based upon
| how much code is being included and the current network
| demand. It still blows my mind people think it is acceptable
| that the network eat their transaction fee if the transaction
| doesn't go through, especially when these fees are so high
| (as if now it can cost $2k to do any sort of NFT stuff).
|
| Imagine sending $100 to your mom with your bank and then the
| bank charges you $2,000 and then the transaction doesn't go
| through because someone sneezed on the keyboard at the bank
| and forgot to press send and then the bank keeps the $2000
| and your mom doesn't get the $100. Only in this case they
| didn't sneeze on the keyboard, the transaction calculation
| actively changed to be $3000 and if only you had $3000 in
| your account your transaction would've gone through so it's
| your fault your bank didn't have enough money to send your
| mom $100.
| iostream24 wrote:
| Or more like someone is depositing millions into their bank
| account in small coins and it's occupied all the tellers in
| the bank and no one is available to deposit your granny's
| 20EUR check
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Gas fees are publicly visible on the ledger, but not
| necessarily their value in USD or other irl currency. But you
| can get that easily enough from exchange APIs and other
| sources.
| kuldeepfouzdar wrote:
| Here are a few https://etherchain.org/burn
| https://ultrasound.money/
| https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_supply
| meibo wrote:
| Platforms don't show this to people because they want people
| to trade. People that trade don't look for this
| information/live in blissful ignorance because they would
| feel bad otherwise.
|
| If anything, by now we should accept that showing people
| numbers isn't the right way to make them aware of climate
| change.
| WalterSear wrote:
| > It seems like someone could build a pretty sobering
| dashboard that shows exactly what you describe if this data
| is readily available.
|
| Crypto relies on people who don't know to look at dashboards.
| rglullis wrote:
| Yes, it is publicly available. The blockchain keeps a record
| of every transaction, which includes how much gas was spent.
| bogomipz wrote:
| >"All of this, over gifs, jpgs and fake land in a theoretically
| infinite digital universe that was probably procedurally
| generated anyway."
|
| Sorry if this a naive question but what does "procedurally
| generated" mean here?
| Fomite wrote:
| The "world" is algorithmically generated, rather than being
| deliberately designed.
| GalahiSimtam wrote:
| Implying low quality art-wise, probably. Borrowed from
| videogames industry, where Elden Ring reviews outperformed No
| Man's Sky, but not only because the latter had 2^64 different
| planets, one for each seed value, while the former had the
| world pretty much handcrafted. In fact there are good games
| with procedural generation, too.
| fosk wrote:
| > Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their
| monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2,
| or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-
| on-fire. I'm 100% serious.
|
| I am so annoyed by this argument. The question we should be
| asking ourselves is how electricity is being generated in the
| first place. Fighting crypto is the wrong fight for
| environmentalists: the right fight is transitioning to
| healthier and cleaner source of energy in a world that will
| inevitably consume more and more electricity as part of our
| organic progress, with or without crypto.
|
| If anything, use crypto and electric cars as a driver to enact
| these changes, not as blockers, since they drive more electric
| consumption and therefore they help making a stronger case for
| cleaner source of energy.
| jasonshaev wrote:
| Aren't both things true from an environmentalists
| perspective?
|
| 1) We need to "transition[] to healthier and cleaner source
| of energy" 2) We need to use less energy overall
|
| We do not produce enough clean energy to meet the total
| demand for energy. Until that is true, using less energy is a
| valid path to reducing the total impact of climate change.
| pcwalton wrote:
| Cryptocurrency is worse than electric cars because
| cryptocurrency can be mined everywhere in the world, whereas
| electric cars require the use of the electrical grid near the
| location they're being driven. This means that local
| governments can mandate cleaner sources of energy and
| actually have an effect on electric cars, as you can't just
| import electricity from overseas as easily, while
| cryptocurrency mining can just move to more favorable
| jurisdictions in response to any inconvenient regulations.
| The incentives of cryptocurrency mining create a race to the
| bottom, where mining operations simply relocate around the
| world to wherever the regulations are laxest.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| While the low-effort statements stemming from the obsession
| with crypto carbon output annoy me as well, energy budget is
| an essentially zero-sum game (ignoring anomalous areas like
| those with net excess geothermal), and zero-carbon energy can
| be achieved by increasing 0C production or decreasing
| consumption.
|
| As with almost every ecological issue, decreasing consumption
| is the more economically and logistically viable part of the
| solution, especially when it comes to cryptocurrency where
| the value-per-unit-energy is so many orders of magnitude
| lower than traditional systems.
| fosk wrote:
| I suggest scaling nuclear power all the way, while still
| innovating and investing in non-nuclear clean energy in the
| meantime.
| Banana699 wrote:
| You're assuming that the proponents of this argument are
| convinced that crypto is a worthwhile burn of energy in the
| first place, which is - off course - exactly the opposite of
| what's being implied.
|
| Here's how your opponents see this exchange :
|
| >> Instead of talking about <<<Burning skyscrapers for fun>>>
| in terms of their monetary value, we should measure them in
| terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-
| Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. I'm 100% serious.
|
| > I am so annoyed by this argument. The question we should be
| asking ourselves is how <<<Gasoline>>> is being generated in
| the first place. Fighting <<<Burning skyscrapers for fun>>>
| is the wrong fight for environmentalists: the right fight is
| transitioning to healthier and cleaner source of
| <<<Gasoline>>> in a world that will inevitably consume more
| and more <<<Petroleum>>> as part of our organic progress,
| with or without <<<Burning skyscrapers for fun>>>.
|
| I replaced some words (marked by <<<.>>>) to make an analogy
| that will stand out to you and let you see how the other side
| uses the argument: they're not implying that enviromental
| disasters can be totally averted by banning crypto, they're
| simply stating that crypto is such a monumental waste of
| energy, the equivalent of burning skyscrapers for fun, that
| banning it will deprieve us of nothing valuable while saving
| up valuable time in our _continued_ fight for the enviroment.
| If you're stuck in the desert with limited water, you search
| for more water *and* punish those who waste existing water.
| The more extravagant the waste and far away the alternative
| sources, the more you should divide your attention between
| finding new sources and punishing those who waste.
|
| I'm personally moderately on the anti-crypto side (just
| barely, and very reluctantly) in this, distributed trustless
| blockchains is a A)Theoretically beautiful B)But extremly,
| hugely, unimaginably inefficient-in-practice idea that only
| kinda sorta work when you use it for what plain old bitcoin
| was used for in the early days and only under extreme
| circumstances (e.g. circumventing governoment censorship).
| It's like communism (ironic given the stereotypical
| libertarianism of it's proponents), it's beautiful that
| somebody thought of this as an alternative to what we
| currently do and it's fascinating to imagine what we can do
| with it. But it's just not ready, maybe a better humanity in
| a better time and place could make it work, but not here and
| not now. Rushing not-ready things into production then
| "fixing it later" is how you do hacky scripts and shitty CRUD
| apps, not economic and financial systems.
|
| The reason I also hate anti-crypto discourse is the extreme
| religiousness (almost of the same caliber as the fanatically
| pro-crypto side) that people treat this matter with, no
| amount of anger and insults will make reasonable pro-crypto
| people see the error of their ways, and unreasonable folks
| will not listen to the fiery screeds in the first place, so
| all this screaming going back and forth is for nothing.
| iostream24 wrote:
| That's like saying drunk drivers are actually lobbyists for
| funding more police sobriety checkpoints.
| fosk wrote:
| No. It's like saying that we need more food (and technology
| to produce it) to sustain an ever growing population,
| rather than saying we should mass-murder our population to
| bring it back within an acceptable boundary. This will
| bring investments, technology advancements, and trigger a
| race to generate energy in a better way.
|
| We will always consume more energy (and food!) as our
| civilization progresses, I am embracing that without
| blocking that. Also, even without crypto we still need to
| find better energy sources anyways, so what's the pushback
| all about? We are just kicking the can down the road with
| no action other than "criminalizing" crypto.
| [deleted]
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| The incentives don't match. No matter how efficient we make
| our power generation, PoW will simply scale up and consume
| more, making those gains moot. It will use up cheaper
| renewable energy and force everyone else to keep relying on
| fossil fuels. Of course I should not forget to mention the e
| waste which is a concern regardless of how much greenwashing
| is done
| vmception wrote:
| PoW will scale up to match, be vigilant about _which
| sources_ it uses, which sources an enterpriser wants to try
| to use. Be vigilant about the coal plants coming online,
| while non-grid connected methane-reducing sources are
| applauded.
|
| Large scale miners allowed this argument to get out of
| control because they didn't want people to know their
| sources of energy (extending their lead in front of other
| miners), and now this ESG boogeyman has taken an inaccurate
| life of its own.
|
| At the end of the day, if you really think you have another
| economical use of energy because proof of work can't
| _possibly_ be "it", then you still have to thank Proof of
| Work for making you notice an energy source and use case
| that everyone else failed to notice for decades.
|
| I think PoW's incentives to grow are something that needs a
| lot of vigilance to curb, as it will be governments
| eventually using it in the most economical and polluting
| way, in order to control the network. But I think enough
| people can see through the "I just want any _other_ thing
| to use energy waaah " argument that the private sector ban
| is never going to happen.
| MichaelBurge wrote:
| > we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps
| its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire.
|
| The marginal cost of a transaction is zero.
|
| For example, if half the block was used, and half was
| completely empty, it would cost nothing extra to the
| environment to fill the empty half with random noise, NFTs, or
| Cryptokitty spam. Maybe long-term the storage, but nothing
| extra to mine that block like you're saying.
| frgtpsswrdlame wrote:
| Even if you think the main reason crypto is bad is the
| environmental damage I think it's probably more convincing to
| normal people to talk about how stupid it is ala these fees
| than to talk about the environmental damage.
| Razengan wrote:
| ra0x3 wrote:
| This comment is a good example of trolling. How did this get to
| the top of the thread?
|
| > All of this, over gifs, jpgs and fake land in a theoretically
| infinite digital universe
|
| No good faith here. Can we flag this?
| ajmurmann wrote:
| The best way to get people to care about carbon emissions as a
| cost is to tax carbon emissions. But unfortunately, we live in
| a world where increasing gas prices immediately cause calls for
| gas subsidies even from supposedly progressives.
| rank0 wrote:
| People get upset because it effectively becomes a regressive
| tax structure. The end game of taxing carbon has poorer
| people spending a larger percentage of their income paying
| taxes...even if they're consuming the same amount of
| resources as the rich.
|
| So when Exxon gets hit with a carbon tax, what do you think
| happens? Gas and Oil prices stay the same? Absolutely not!
| They increase, and consumers end up paying the difference.
| This doesn't just affect residential energy prices either.
| Production and distribution prices increase for every
| good/service consumed. Normal every day citizens end up
| footing the bill for corporations.
| thebradbain wrote:
| ...and those citizens would be incentivized to pursue
| alternatives: car-pooling, biking, public transit, walking,
| EVs, along with the public/private investment in those
| modes.
|
| Making it costlier for consumers and corporations to
| pollute the environment so that they change their practices
| to more sustainable options is the whole point of the
| carbon tax.
| IanCal wrote:
| Which is why the most suggested thing I've seen is taxing
| carbon and then distributing that evenly to all citizens.
| Anyone using less than the mean would benefit (which would
| cover the lowest earners because they're least likely to
| have cars and high energy use), while also having
| _everyone_ incentivised to lower usage (which also means
| you can set the rates even higher).
|
| > Normal every day citizens end up footing the bill for
| corporations.
|
| Corporations are made of people. It's all just people doing
| things. Taxing anything is always taxing people which is a
| non-interesting statement.
| tejohnso wrote:
| > Production and distribution prices increase for every
| good/service consumed
|
| That sounds like a feature as consumption is one of the
| core problems.
|
| > Normal every day citizens end up footing the bill for
| corporations
|
| Corporations are serving demand. You could say citizens end
| up paying a more accurate cost for their consumption, with
| environmental costs properly accounted for.
|
| And we could redistribute the tax revenue back to the
| citizens, starting with those who are suffering most and
| are least responsible for the climate emergency.
| xur17 wrote:
| > Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their
| monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2,
| or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-
| on-fire. I'm 100% serious.
|
| That's.. not how this works. The miner receives a block reward
| which is a combination of a fixed reward (2 ETH right now) +
| tips from people trying to get their transaction (typically
| ~0.2 ETH) [0]. The rest of the transaction fees are burned by
| the network.
|
| In effect this means that miners are motivated to mine (and
| hence use CO2) based upon the block rewards. During periods of
| high network usage, they aren't magically procurring more
| miners, and hence they aren't actually using more electricity.
| And since the vast majority of the reward is burnt anyways,
| during high periods of usage, the miner reward doesn't actually
| go up that much.
|
| Regardless of all of that, Ethereum will be on proof of stake
| within a year (wouldn't be surprised if it's 3 or 4 months at
| this point), at which point the CO2 argument will go away
| altogether).
|
| [0] https://etherscan.io/block/14700751
| mccorrinall wrote:
| > And regardless of all of that, Ethereum will be on proof of
| stake within a year
|
| I've been hearing this since 2017. I won't believe it until I
| see it.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I don't think it'll ever happen because the miners don't
| want it. They've invested millions into GPUs and they'll
| all become worthless once Eth switches to PoS.
|
| Or they'll find another coin to mine.
| DennisP wrote:
| $30 billion in ETH locked on the PoS network will be
| worthless if they don't switch.
|
| Meanwhile, there's no technical way for the miners to
| keep the switch from happening.
| DennisP wrote:
| Yes and in 2017 there hadn't been a proof of stake network
| running in parallel for a year and a half, with 10% of all
| ETH deposited and locked in place until after proof of work
| is killed off. Nor had there been multiple public testnets
| for the merge process.
| [deleted]
| jjulius wrote:
| I'm just an outsider, but to OP's point, in 2017 they had
| _none_ of what you just cited yet they were making the
| "within a year" claims, and continued to do so year after
| year. One can't help but draw a comparison to the boy who
| cried wolf.
|
| Edit: This isn't me taking a position, just observing.
| nicwolff wrote:
| I'm also skeptical, but let's remember that the point of
| the fable is not "the boy's repeated claims lost
| credibility because the wolf never came", but rather "the
| people eventually learned to ignore the boy's claims and
| were caught by surprise when the wolf finally came" tsu
| lupire wrote:
| But if PoS comes after everyone stops caring about ETH
| (or PoS), it still fails. PoS isn't the hard part.
| Getting ETH successfully onto PoS is the hard part.
| Mindless2112 wrote:
| It's neither of those. At the end of the fable the wolf
| eats the boy. Nothing happens to the people who ignored
| him.
| delecti wrote:
| Yup.
|
| > The ultimate goal of the Ethereum Foundation for 2017 is
| to follow the vision of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin
| and make a move from a proof of work to a proof of stake
| protocol
|
| https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereums-2017-roadmap-
| flexib...
| Entwickler wrote:
| There's a site made to track the details of what needs to
| happen before the merge. https://wenmerge.com/ it still
| lacks specific date commitments. The focus is on "when it's
| ready" given that ~0.5 trillion dollars are in the system.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| Is ETH actually going to be PoS within a year? It feels like
| ETH has been "about to be PoS within a year" for like five
| years now.
| meowkit wrote:
| > It feels like ETH has been "about to be PoS within a
| year" for like five years now
|
| Likely because you don't actually follow the development
| milestones, and are just synthesizing a conclusion based on
| social media headlines/comments.
|
| Successful testnets for the merge have been launched and
| merge execution from a shadow-fork of the mainnet to a PoS
| testnet have been completed in the last 2 months. As far as
| I am aware, no merge date has ever been set and all
| previous timelines were speculation, not missed deadlines.
|
| I would recommend people sign up for an ETH feed or
| newsletter (e.g. the ETH Foundation blog
| https://blog.ethereum.org/2022/03/23/finalized-no-34/) and
| stop letting naive comments on hacker news/reddit/twitter
| dictate their opinions on the state of things like crypto.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > As far as I am aware, no merge date has ever been set
| and all previous timelines were speculation, not missed
| deadlines.
|
| I'm not deep in that world, but as far as I can tell
| (from wandering on the blog you posted) there still
| aren't any deadlines to miss.
|
| As we all know, strategic ambiguity is a hallmark of any
| good financial system.
| teachrdan wrote:
| They're waiting on Tesla to deliver on FSD first. But
| that's going to be within the next two years.
| rhacker wrote:
| I think the FSD requires PoS first.
| nicbou wrote:
| After the Year of the Linux Desktop
| kennywinker wrote:
| Just in time for the tenth anniversary of the year of
| luigi
| robbiep wrote:
| That's about when fusion is going to be commercially
| viable I think?
| [deleted]
| latchkey wrote:
| The heartbeat PoS network is running today and has been
| running for over a year now. The next step is to merge the
| PoW consensus model onto the PoS network.
|
| The last date was supposed to be around June, but seems
| like that will get pushed to August (or later) now. Yes, it
| is comical that the dates keep slipping.
|
| That said, changing the consensus model for a network with
| multi billion $'s worth of value stored in it, isn't
| something you just do with a lot of thoughts and prayers. I
| don't blame them for taking their time with this
| transition.
| ATsch wrote:
| At this point I can't help but feel like the main
| deliverable of "ETH going PoS" is being able to dismiss
| claims about the obvious wastefulness of the system, not
| the actual transition.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I feel like it's obvious that the goal of the the
| transition wouldn't just be the transition itself? I'm
| confused.
|
| There's _some_ difference between "so they can dismiss
| claims about wastefulness" and "so it isn't wasteful" but
| that's a pretty small distinction. I don't really care
| which of those two is a bigger motivator.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| I think they're talking about the same year when Linux will
| become mainstream for desktops.
| rvz wrote:
| > It feels like ETH has been "about to be PoS within a
| year" for like five years now.
|
| Except that it _is_.
|
| Imagine promising your clients and telling them to wait _'
| for a year'_ for the team to fix these fundamental issues
| in your product and have them lose millions on your missed
| estimates whilst you keep postponing and delaying the fixes
| for 5 years.
|
| At some point, these clients will give up waiting and move
| elsewhere. Happened to the first NFT project on Ethereum
| (CryptoKitties) and now BAYC is considering doing the same.
|
| So given that situation, the longer they delay and postpone
| it the worse it gets.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| > Imagine promising your clients and telling them to wait
| 'for a year' for the team to fix these fundamental issues
| in your product and have them lose millions on your
| missed estimates whilst you keep postponing and delaying
| the fixes for 5 years.
|
| Basically any large organization IT project, defense
| project or anything which a politician touches after the
| sign off, then.
| lupire wrote:
| BAYC is moving off ETH?
| xur17 wrote:
| I'd say I'm 95% confident that it will be within a year.
| The code is written, and multiple waves of simulated merges
| have occurred. The last 2 found small, non-blocking bugs
| that were fixed, so it's a matter of when, not if at this
| point.
| thebigman433 wrote:
| What makes you think the POS change will happen within a year
| at this point? Its been continually delayed, and the last
| word is that it will be "a few months after June"
| ChrisClark wrote:
| Because of the constant consistent progress, the second
| "shadow merge" completing successfully (testing the change
| to POS), the little to no bugs found in the various POS
| clients during these tests, etc.
|
| The slowness is a feature, an upgrade like this has to go
| perfectly, too much money is at stake.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| That is a bit like saying Amazon shareholders are only going
| to buy for the AWS revenue and not the Amazon.com sales.
|
| Miners of all people do detailed calculations to the nth
| degree. "Gas war"s will make more incentive for people to
| start buying up more cards and heating their basements.
| jjulius wrote:
| >Regardless of all of that, Ethereum will be on proof of
| stake within a year (wouldn't be surprised if it's 3 or 4
| months at this point), at which point the CO2 argument will
| go away altogether).
|
| Quoting for posterity.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Do you think this is too optimistic?
|
| https://manifold.markets/LarsDoucet/will-ethereum-switch-
| to-...
| jjulius wrote:
| I have no position.
| xur17 wrote:
| I'd be happy to make a bet based upon this statement.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| See my sister comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241852 you can bet
| there, using free paper money and if you win donate (via
| conversion) to charity which is cool.
| rhacker wrote:
| Thanks for this explanation. It helps to hear that about ETH.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Your position seems to be that CO2 isn't linked to computing
| specific transactions, it's just the amount of mining on the
| network at any given time. But that could still very easily
| be expressed in terms of CO2. I.e. "during the time these
| transactions were monopolizing the network, the carbon
| equivalent of n acres of rainforest were burnt".
|
| Proof of stake doesn't actually eliminate the carbon impact
| of these systems, it just improves the efficiency. There are
| still many computers running for the express purpose of
| buying autographed drawings of monkeys.
| rglullis wrote:
| It improves the efficiency 10000-fold. You can run a
| Ethereum validator node on a 10W celeron, underclock it,
| and still be fine.
|
| There are ~380k validators on the beacon chain now. There
| are 20M PS5 + Xbox sold already. A video game console
| consumes as much as 300W during usage, and even on _idle_
| can consume as much as a validator.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Seems like someone should go update the wikipedia article
| then
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake
|
| > In 2021 a study by the University of London found that
| in general the energy consumption of the Proof-of Work
| based Bitcoin was about 1,000 times higher than that of
| the highest consuming proof of stake system that was
| studied
|
| 1,000x is not 10,000x
|
| > They also couldn't find the energy consumption of a
| proof of stake system on a large scale as such a system
| does not exist at the time of the report.[16][17]
|
| Big systems have big side effects. As others have said,
| I'll believe it when I see it.
| joshcryer wrote:
| The entire ETH VM is running at about 0.8 MIPS right now.
| Yes. That is not an exaggeration, current gas limit is 30
| million / 3 gas for simpliest add instruction / 12 seconds
| per block. The calculation power of the network is
| absolutely inconsequential to the operation of the network.
| 99.999% of all the energy used is just for Proof of Work.
| Once they move to Proof of Stake, if they even do, most of
| the power usage will be to run the hard drives to hold the
| increasingly massive ledger that will spawn from it.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| For humour sake, if I had time i would set up a raspberry
| pi to run psql and node and provide an alternative
| centralised blockchain that would compete
| computationally.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| er4hn wrote:
| A significant source of waste in Ethereum/Bitcoin is transaction
| tips in order to process a transaction within a certain
| timeframe. This is in turn tied to the notion of wanting a
| consistent global state for everyone to operate under.
|
| If there was not a global state, but a set of transactions that
| flow across nodes this would significantly improve the throughput
| of the overall system. In other words, the state of an account
| gradually flows across the system of nodes. Are there any
| projects out there like that?
| sharperguy wrote:
| Bitcoin's lightning network achieves this by using the base
| transactions stored on the blockchain only as a fall-back, so
| that many transactions can be performed without needing to be
| globally synchronized. Only in the case that a partner fails to
| follow the established rules of engagement between nodes, a
| transaction must be created on chain, to "force" the correct
| outcome.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| The problem with such a system is the opportunities for
| arbitrage, right?
| skulk wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_clearing_house
|
| A specific project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network
| joshuamorton wrote:
| This invites double spends.
| toraway1234 wrote:
| floatinglotus wrote:
| This is the type of stuff that makes me laugh.
| dylkil wrote:
| how do these ignorant takes get upvoted on a tech board like this
| vnchr wrote:
| I have to agree. It starts with irresponsible journalism that
| is misrepresenting what actually happened. Nothing broke.
| vba616 wrote:
| I don't understand why or how they think resources were wasted.
|
| I mean, it might be true, since I don't know how Ethereum
| works.
|
| But I don't see where it says or implies or explains that the
| fees represented real resources lost - rather than money
| transferred.
| robbiep wrote:
| Some of the transaction fee is literally burned/ceases to
| exist. Some fraction of it is also printed but some goes away
| completely. As I understand it.
| ldiracdelta wrote:
| Sounds like currency deflation. There are winners in
| deflation too.
| soared wrote:
| I pray that the inevitable nft/crypto bubble pop does not trickle
| into the rest of the economy. I'd love to believe the ape nft
| stuff is also mid 20s kids like me messing around, but I'd
| imagine there is a whole lot of institutional money fooling
| around with similar projects.
| paxys wrote:
| Considering Fidelity is literally starting to offer crypto
| trading in 401k accounts, that ship might have sailed already
| Geee wrote:
| I believe that Fidelity allows investing in bitcoin, not
| crypto in general.
| soared wrote:
| True. Fidelity was mining bitcoins for years before other
| institutional investors were involved and they likely hold
| massive reserves. I just hope they've insulated themselves
| against the risk.
| xmprt wrote:
| Cryptocurrency trading can be a legitimate way to diversify
| risk. Of course people should know what they're getting into
| before they start and it's very likely to fail but I trust
| institutional traders more than anyone else to actually make
| money off of cryptocurrencies.
| rhizome wrote:
| I figure NFTs are an attempt to materialize cryptocurrency so
| that it does trickle into the rest of the economy.
|
| > _I'd imagine there is a whole lot of institutional money
| fooling around with similar projects._
|
| If it's your trashcoin/NFT/whatever, you're at the top of the
| pyramid no matter what. There's no downside in convincing
| people to contribute cold hard cash to your new soared-coin.
| daenz wrote:
| The final paragraph sums it up nicely:
|
| >We've seen this story a million times before: Crypto project is
| launched. Something goes wrong. Founders, investors, whales, and
| some of the community make out like bandits. Most people are left
| out on the cold, only to be offered another, even greater
| opportunity with an upcoming token or project. Surely this time
| will be different.
|
| I don't see how anyone can read about these crypto projects and
| see anything other than an extremely elaborate scam.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| > even greater opportunity with an upcoming token or project.
| Surely this time will be different.
|
| Get in on the ground floor now! Be the next whale.
| danans wrote:
| > I don't see how anyone can read about these crypto projects
| and see anything other than an extremely elaborate scam.
|
| My theory is that we live in a society that has long glamorized
| the get-rich-quick scheme (until it is revealed as a scam), and
| there a lot of people who have seen other people getting rich
| through technology investments (as opposed to technology work),
| and they don't want to "miss the boat" this time.
| nikanj wrote:
| We go further than that: we glamorize the get-rich-quick
| schemes even after they're revealed as scams. The scammers
| get to keep their money, and launch successful careers as
| motivational speakers / authors (of books detailing their
| crimes) / etc.
|
| The Wolf of Wall Street was widely admired even though he was
| a criminal.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| I mean, that kind of gets at the fundamental conceit of
| Marxist critiques of capitalism, doesn't it? That there are
| two classes of individual, an upper class of those who
| primarily get their income by owning assets and not doing
| work (the titular capitalists) and an underclass of those get
| their income for doing actual work (the proletariat).
|
| Everyone is incentivized to join to the upper class by
| easiest and most accessible means possible, and get-rich-
| quick schemes are the natural endpoint of that incentive.
| canadaduane wrote:
| I wonder what would happen if we (as a society) took each
| case of got-rich-through-a-get-rich-quick-scheme and analyzed
| it like we do post-mortems--with "the social contract failed
| here, what went wrong?" kind of twist. No one's to blame. We
| just want it to be more effective and productive for everyone
| next time.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > I don't see how anyone can read about these crypto projects
| and see anything other than an extremely elaborate scam.
|
| Maybe they read _The Billion Dollar Mistake_ paper and were
| like "meh, that's peanuts, we can do much better!"
| Geee wrote:
| It's very profitable to create a token, pump up the price and
| run with the money, rather than actually building something
| actually useful. Combine that with the fact that it's
| incredibly hard or impossible to build something useful on a
| blockchain. This means that the incentives simply aren't there
| for non-scam projects. All currently functioning products are
| directly or indirectly just fueling this broken incentive
| model.
|
| In 2017, people tried to innovate and imagine new applications
| for blockchain. There was AirBnB on blockchain, Uber on
| blockchain, dentists on blockchain, and thousands of other
| projects. All of these failed (their founders got rich), and
| now the whole space has devolved into just JPGs and blatant
| Ponzi-schemes with imaginary yields and elaborate "tokenomics".
| They aren't even trying to build anything useful anymore.
| vmception wrote:
| I think the real discussion is what kind of launch is best.
| Yuga Labs specifically decided against a Dutch auction, lending
| on their credibility to make it seem like that something to
| believe in, and then they did this fiasco instead. Some people
| are saying "false dilemma, a raffle would have been better!"
| okay, would a raffle be better?
|
| What about a raffle and dutch auction?
|
| What about a dutch auction at 5 ether instead of 2.5 ether in
| Ape coin, which is the floor price of the "Land" now.
|
| Even if you don't want to have a conversation that nuanced, it
| would be the most productive conversation to have _now_.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| With Bitcoin there was the promise (and to a tiny extent still
| is) the promise of it becoming a disruptive technology.
|
| With the apes there is no illusion of this being a greater fool
| scheme.
|
| I wonder how close they are skirting to illegally running a
| ponzi or pyramid scheme?
|
| The only source of income or growth for this investment is new
| people buying in. It is worse than amway, herbilife, penny
| stocks. Probably similar to madoff except the idiots who buy
| will not be angry at the creators when they lose their shirts.
| See safemoon exit scam for an early view, or indeed any other
| crypto ponzi since 2008.
| dvtrn wrote:
| At least with regards to one person I previously thought was
| someone who would otherwise "know better" after an incredibly
| confusing conversation about their NFT Group "recruiting"
| people from poor communities (their definition of recruiting
| meant nothing more than getting them to create accounts on
| OpenSea and buying shit)...they don't care.
|
| The greater fool theory handcuffs has them locked in TIGHT. I
| mean the fact that they call what they're doing "recruiting" is
| full of all kinds of ugly signals.
|
| I don't talk to them anymore.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| The cryptocurrencies themselves aren't scams. BTC and ETH are
| here to stay and there are other good coins like XMR.
|
| It's the shitcoin casino that's bad. All people have to do is
| avoid it.
| siftrics wrote:
| Because they know more than surface-level details and
| understand that trustless, permission-less financial systems
| offer a huge amount of value, especially to those in less-
| developed and authoritarian countries, who are regularly abused
| by a small group of people running their country's financial
| affairs.
|
| But that doesn't apply to you because you live in the developed
| world, where you've never had to deal with not being allowed a
| bank account or extortionist fees or the government simply
| coming and seizing your assets for an arbitrary, amoral reason.
| vosper wrote:
| I'm sure these authoritarian governments are definitely just
| going to sit by while some foreign technology disrupts their
| control of the financial system.
|
| The Security XKCD says it better - it even uses the term
| "crypto"!
|
| https://xkcd.com/538/
| siftrics wrote:
| You make a good point, but this is still a step in the
| right direction.
|
| This offers users the chance to flee their country and
| retain their assets. Good luck getting your assets out of a
| legacy banking system in such a country.
| dvtrn wrote:
| _or the government simply coming and seizing your assets for
| an arbitrary, amoral reason._
|
| You mean people don't like it when the large amorphous and
| powerful body that asks its constituents to trust it _pulls
| the rug_ , and all of their currency out from under them?
| siftrics wrote:
| Red herring.
|
| I'm not arguing for any system that has the power to rug
| their constituents, crypto systems included.
|
| Crypto at least enables systems to be built. It's up to you
| to either trust it without any due diligence or read the
| source code yourself.
|
| This is a step in the right direction for people who like
| to assume their own risk and don't like to pay for the bad
| decision-making of others.
| dvtrn wrote:
| _It 's up to you to either trust it without any due
| diligence or read the source code yourself._
|
| I suppose so, but given that your entire conceit started
| off with a defense of people in under-developed nations,
| and their access to capital and money, is this really
| about serving those people? If so, how are people in a
| country with heavily-devalued currencies under
| authoritarian regimes served by reading source code for
| cryptocurrencies? How many people in these countries are
| you expecting to pop open a laptop and start reading the
| ETH source before they can buy these digital coins and
| buy their next meal with it?
|
| I'm sorry but the response here of "just read the source
| code", given you yourself are holding up impoverished
| nations, where people are not even "allowed a bank
| account" as beneficiaries of cryptocurrencies is some
| LOUD hubris.
|
| _This is a step in the right direction for people who
| like to assume their own risk_
|
| Isn't this something someone can already do on
| established markets in the physical world?
|
| _don 't like to pay for the bad decision-making of
| others_
|
| Isn't this _exactly_ what just happened in the article we
| 're discussing right now in this thread?
| siftrics wrote:
| >Isn't this something someone can already do on
| established markets in the physical world?
|
| Name one trustless, permission-less system that avoids
| the double spending problem. I would love to know about
| it.
|
| >Isn't this exactly what just happened in the article
| we're discussing right now in this thread?
|
| I don't know what you're saying. Participants could do
| their due diligence and fully understand the risks before
| participating. Who paid for someone else's screw up?
| [deleted]
| HomeGear wrote:
| The "developed world" is who is holding the values up. Crypto
| is not a savings account for poor people to avoid
| authoritarian governments. It has no use. It's nothing more
| than gambling at this point.
| nawgz wrote:
| > Because they know more than surface-level details
|
| Implying those who criticize a project or idea simply lack
| knowledge is facile; you mightaswell just write "because
| they're haters"
|
| > you've never had to deal with not being allowed a bank
| account or extortionist fees or the government simply coming
| and seizing your assets for an arbitrary, amoral reason
|
| So, you argue some value exists in Bitcoin as a political
| tool to subvert dictatorial influence; what exactly does that
| do to justify massive compute requiring fees 10-100x greater
| than the transaction value and associated use of real-world
| energy? Why would another system not serve this same idea in
| a better way? What guarantees do people using this as a
| financial system that it will deliver this value?
|
| Ultimately, what you're saying is "this absurdly compute- and
| energy-heavy system serves an unintended purpose slightly
| better than the status quo it competes against in some
| circumstances, and that justifies all its downsides". I don't
| really agree with that, and I don't understand why you can't
| have an honest conversation with nuance about it
| siftrics wrote:
| > what exactly does that do to justify massive compute
| requiring fees 10-100x greater than the transaction value
| and associated use of real-world energy?
|
| You're confused. Bitcoin does not have such fees. Ethereum,
| while it does have such fees, is moving to proof-of-stake
| and the energy argument no longer holds up. There are
| numerous non-PoW chains already actively used, for which
| the energy argument does not hold up.
|
| This is the only way we know how to avoid double-spending
| in a trustless, permission-less way. If you know of another
| way that maintains those two properties, I would love to
| learn about it.
| nawgz wrote:
| > You're confused. Bitcoin does not have such fees
|
| This is an Ethereum thread, is it not?
|
| > Ethereum, while it does have such fees, is moving to
| proof-of-stake and the energy argument no longer holds
| up.
|
| Um, excuse me, Ethereum very much has these fees still,
| so the argument is extremely valid in the moment;
| additionally, this "proof of stake" movement was meant to
| occur in 2019 no? They are 3 years late and at best 1/3
| complete, 9 years of delay sounds about right - this
| space is full of speculation and grifters treating that
| speculation as truth to grift.
|
| > There are numerous non-PoW chains
|
| That have extremely unstable financial valuations,
| destroying the credibility of them as alternatives to
| existing financial systems.
|
| Your arguments hold no water, they require hypothetical
| futures and blatantly false things to hold, so why are
| you making them?
|
| > This is the only way we know how to avoid double-
| spending in a trustless, permission-less way
|
| The value prop of this is 0 today. Maybe it's even a net
| negative on the world, with the transactions on these
| chains having an extremely significant scam rate while
| also using more energy than entire mid-sized countries do
| to literally exist. You need to justify why "trustless
| and permissionless" are important before you can just say
| "we need systems with these properties!". I can only feel
| that you are financially deep into these systems and
| rationalizing to hold your position, you seem like you'd
| be perfectly capable of constructing good arguments when
| not emotionally compromised by the topic.
| siftrics wrote:
| You literally said
|
| > So, you argue some value exists in __Bitcoin__ as a
| political tool to subvert dictatorial influence; what
| exactly does that do to justify massive compute requiring
| fees 10-100x greater than the transaction value and
| associated use of real-world energy?
|
| So yes, you're wrong about Bitcoin having such fees.
|
| > the transactions on these chains having an extremely
| significant scam rate
|
| Sure, let's re-assert the power of authoritarian regimes
| over their people because some people don't do their due
| diligence. Once again, someone argues that completely
| unrelated individuals should be punished for the bad-
| decision making of others.
| nawgz wrote:
| > You literally said
|
| My mistake, I meant Ethereum of course.
|
| > Sure, let's re-assert the power of authoritarian
| regimes over their people because some people don't do
| their due diligence
|
| Your argument is that people subjected to dictatorial
| misgivings in the financial realm should become internet
| and tech literate enough to... pick a chain with a stable
| valuation and guaranteed low fees and no scammers? You
| must be joking me, or literally paid to write what you
| are writing.
| siftrics wrote:
| > pick a chain with a stable valuation and guaranteed low
| fees
|
| There are numerous chains with sub one-cent transaction
| fees which have tokens pegged to the dollar.
|
| I can move arbitrary amounts of an asset which is 99%
| correlated with the US dollar at any time I want with
| only an internet connection. No governments or regulators
| need to give me the go ahead. Granted, I wouldn't want to
| evade regulations or break laws in a developed country.
| But it's a nice escape hatch for when you really, truly
| disagree with such laws and regulations and you need to
| GTFO of your country forever.
|
| It seems as though you're arguing that, if crypto existed
| during WWII, refugees should be forced to give up all
| their assets and life savings in order to save their own
| life. Why?
| atwebb wrote:
| There's a lot of people who haven't played the game yet or
| think they know it better this time.
| can16358p wrote:
| That money is not exactly wasted, it's gone to miners.
|
| And how does Ethereum "break" exactly? It was just bloated with
| many transactions, creating a bottleneck, which is perfectly
| expected for a hyped project like this.
| rglullis wrote:
| > it's gone to miners.
|
| No, the base fee is burned (i.e, removed from the available
| supply). Since Ethereum's EIP-1155 (which changed the rules for
| pricing and mining rewards, miners only get to keep a "tip")
|
| Anyway, I'd also say that they were not wasted. Worst case
| scenario, these gigantic token burns reduce the supply and make
| all the token holders a bit richer.
| can16358p wrote:
| Oops, missed that, right.
|
| Yeah, even though miners get only a part of the ether, it
| still valuates the currency when it's burned.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| We are boiling the oceans with this pointless shit, too.
| SlyShy wrote:
| Nothing broke, the dynamic fee market worked exactly as intended.
| Contrast with Solana which actually went offline for 7 hours that
| same day.
| rvz wrote:
| So it essentially means that Ethereum is unable to globally
| scale or to be usable for anything on-chain at all except for
| millionaires wasting (and losing) $10k - $100k in fees for
| silly JPEG images, otherwise why are these same Ethereum
| proponents complaining that it is a problem?
|
| Regardless, Both Ethereum, and Solana were unusable on that day
| and as it stands are still unsuitable for anything _' high
| demand'_.
| rglullis wrote:
| Except that anyone with a minimal involvement with Ethereum
| already knows that the base layer is _not_ meant to be used
| on day-to-day operations.
|
| We already learned about the decentralization trillema. The
| strategy to scale Ethereum through will be through the
| adoption of "layer-2" systems, where _users_ are expected to
| be doing their transactions and avoid these costly
| transactions altogether.
|
| There are roll-ups already dealing with NFT marketplaces [0].
| There are roll-ups that can execute any type of ethereum
| smart contract [1] [2]. There are payment channels that allow
| completely decentralized and gas-less transfers of ERC-20
| tokens [3].
|
| [0] https://loopring.io
|
| [1] https://optimism.io/
|
| [2] https://offchainlabs.com/
|
| [3] https://raiden.network
| Invictus0 wrote:
| This comment is hilarious from an outsider's perspective.
| For all I know, you may as well be describing the
| turboencabulator.
| rvz wrote:
| > Except that anyone with a minimal involvement with
| Ethereum already knows that the base layer is not meant to
| be used on day-to-day operations.
|
| Despite all those contraptions existing for years, BAYC
| still chose the Ethereum L1 since that has the most
| liquidity there and all the _millionaires_ will certainly
| congest and grind the network to a halt just like they did
| with the CryptoKitties hype years ago. Here we are, this is
| no different.
|
| Anything _' on-chain'_ is the whole point of Ethereum.
| These contraptions that you are showing are all off-chain,
| once again defeating the point of using the Ethereum
| blockchain for on-chain activities in the first place. Not
| only it has been admitted that Ethereum cannot scale
| properly and is useless for anything on-chain it needs an
| entire ecosystem of insecure, fragmented and beyond
| complicated layer 2 contraptions to _' speed it up'_.
|
| These tools also have a tendency to go down or halt,
| hinting that they are not as 'decentralized' as they say
| they are either.
| vmception wrote:
| > Regardless, Both Ethereum, and Solana were unusable on that
| day and as it stands are still unsuitable for anything 'high
| demand'.
|
| "its too crowded so nobody goes there"
|
| yes, if you want to launch a premium product right now, you
| launch it on the chain people will pay to go to
|
| you can play with the "poors" on Polygon and BSC. The lower
| barrier of entry makes it even more cluttered with ignorable
| projects. (Solana is cheap too but is attracting large
| premium projects and communities as well)
| chris123 wrote:
| Prepare for all of justifications and cognitive dissonance, all
| these centralized projects (I won't use the s-word)
| WYepQ4dNnG wrote:
| I wished people would care more for the real world than virtual
| land and racing to Mars ... awful times we live in ..
| als0 wrote:
| Just wondering... Weren't they going to move to proof of stake?
| nrmitchi wrote:
| Pretty sure ethereum pos is going to show up around the same
| time tesla's FSD does.
|
| Ie, "next year", every year.
| Animats wrote:
| Etherium's move to proof of stake is expected to happen shortly
| after Godot shows up.
| pawelduda wrote:
| Recently it was delayed but supposedly still on track before
| EOY
| postalrat wrote:
| "supposedly still on track before EOY"
|
| Nice way to say "never".
| fredoliveira wrote:
| Just history repeating itself, honestly. It's been delayed so
| many times, even the optimist in me is starting to doubt this
| is really it.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Same as last year?
| manquer wrote:
| and every year for the last 5
| sva_ wrote:
| I wonder at what point you might call these NFTs a successful
| DDoS on the eth blockchain.
| Animats wrote:
| So Yuga sold 55,000 deeds to parcels in "Otherside", a virtual
| world that doesn't exist yet. 45,000 deeds were distributed to
| insiders.
|
| So what happened? 96,000 of those "Otherdeeds" are now for sale
| on OpenSea.[1] Some of the rest are for sale on Rareable. Few
| buyers.
|
| [1] https://opensea.io/collection/otherdeed
| onepointsixC wrote:
| Are we looking at the same thing? I'm seeing 6,000 sales just
| today, with an average price of 9.8 Eth [1]. That looks like a
| lot of buying and selling to me.
|
| [1]: https://opensea.io/collection/otherdeed?tab=activity
| Animats wrote:
| This will have to wait on chain analysis, but many of those
| transactions involve the same addresses. We may be watching
| wash sales.
|
| This was supposed to be an item people would hold. That's not
| happening. Almost all the items are on the market.
| vmception wrote:
| wow double misunderstanding. OpenSea reads the blockchain
| for all NFTs. You have to explicitly delist for it _not_ to
| show.
|
| and then back with the wash trading assumption. it only
| takes you trying to buy or sell a popular NFT once for
| _you_ to know that you didn 't trade it between your own
| address, even if those that would yell "source thats its
| _not_ wash trading!? " won't believe you
| samatman wrote:
| I'm an outsider to the whole NFT thing but I'm pretty sure
| you're misreading this.
|
| I clicked the "on auction" filter and see 192 'parcels' or w/e
| for sale right now, the rest are listed on OpenSea but that
| doesn't imply that someone can buy them.
| Animats wrote:
| The ones that aren't on auction have a "Buy Now" button. It's
| like eBay.
| danans wrote:
| > And a gas war did begin, as soon as the 9 PM ET sale kicked
| off. 64,219 ETH was burned over the weekend on transaction fees
| according to Etherscan--that's over $180 million at today's
| prices, most of which is now gone forever due to Ethereum's burn.
|
| Probably impossible to know, but I wonder how much actual gas (or
| other fossil fuel) got burned to power this episode.
| tofuahdude wrote:
| Impossible to know because this is not how mining works.
| ChrisClark wrote:
| The exact same amount that got burnt on a slow cheap day.
| Miners don't suddenly spin up hundreds more GPUs when the
| network gets congested.
|
| Creating a block costs the exact same energy whether it's full
| of high fees, low fees, or completely empty.
|
| And orders of magnitude less energy than bitcoin uses.
| danans wrote:
| > The exact same amount that got burnt on a slow cheap day
|
| How much is that? And what percentage of it went toward
| powering this event vs the value in $ created by it?
|
| > And orders of magnitude less energy than bitcoin uses.
|
| It's not even 1 order of magnitude less. More like 1/2 of
| bitcoin's energy consumption.
|
| https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/
|
| https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| More previous discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31224513
| ilaksh wrote:
| There are other cryptocurrencies. For example Algorand could
| handle the traffic and the fees are less than a penny per
| transaction.
| Taniwha wrote:
| "cryptocurrency" hah! It's not a viable currency until its
| transaction costs are comparable with me using a $20 note at the
| corner store
| andreisbc wrote:
| Kadena is probably the only proof of work blockchain that's
| infinitely scalable, has low gas fees, even introduces the
| concept of gas stations. They just announced a $100M fund for
| development.
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