[HN Gopher] Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?
___________________________________________________________________
Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?
Author : bpierre
Score : 162 points
Date : 2024-03-28 15:41 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (vitalik.eth.limo)
(TXT) w3m dump (vitalik.eth.limo)
| Havoc wrote:
| > proto-danksharding
|
| Points for unique naming
| ruuda wrote:
| I used to think it had something to do with dank memes, but I
| recently learned it's named after Ethereum researcher Dankrad
| Feist who came up with the idea.
| k__ wrote:
| Dank, rad and feist?
|
| What a name!
| somedude895 wrote:
| There's a security researcher who calls herself Isis Agora
| Lovecruft and I'm pretty sure it's not her real name. I
| thought it might be the same with this guy, but Dankrad
| seems to be an actual German name meaning something like
| "thanks for the advice"
| losvedir wrote:
| And of course there's security researcher, Signal crypto
| designer, and former HN commenter, Moxie Marlinspike!
| Hendrikto wrote:
| As a German, I have never heard that name, but your
| translation is about correct.
|
| "Rat" as in "advice" is spelled with a T, but the name
| might be older than that spelling.
| somedude895 wrote:
| I found it here:
| https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankred_(Vorname)
|
| Apparently the name Tanqueray, like the gin brand, is
| related.
|
| Names are fun!
| twic wrote:
| Oh, so Tancred in English:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tancred
| fwip wrote:
| I dunno, seems like a plausible trans person name, since
| we get to pick our own. Also, their twitter profile
| currently indicates that they use they/them pronouns, not
| she/her.
| twic wrote:
| I believe he developed the idea with another researcher,
| Diederik Loerakker, aka Protolambda, who contributed the
| other part of the name:
|
| https://ethereum.org/en/roadmap/danksharding/
| lxgr wrote:
| Also for transparency: I like how Ethereum doesn't even attempt
| trying to make any of this appear accessible to curious
| outsiders.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Still less baffling than urbit!
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Ethereum actually has _excellent_ documentation... it 's just
| that there's a mindboggling amount of it. Apparently it's
| quite complicated to make a worldwide trustlessly distributed
| computer that runs on imaginary money which nonetheless needs
| to be secure.
| pyaamb wrote:
| if you enjoy learning from video, finematics is a great
| resource: https://www.youtube.com/@Finematics/videos
| orthecreedence wrote:
| I'm so out of the loop these days...I've written off blockchain
| junk almost entirely. Can someone break down what blobs are? Is
| this some kind of temporary place for transactions to go so they
| aren't charged fees individually?
|
| EDIT: NVM, I RTFMed https://ethereum.org/en/layer-2/. I wonder
| what the trade-offs of layer 2 protocols are. Less secure?
| mypastself wrote:
| A lot more centralized, in my view.
| hanniabu wrote:
| If you're going to leave a controversial comment like that
| then you should back it up
| jncfhnb wrote:
| It's backed by decentralized voting consensus
| hanniabu wrote:
| Correct, which is why they should explain their claim of
| how and what is more centralized
| everfree wrote:
| What do you mean?
| bigyikes wrote:
| Upvotes and downvotes on Hacker News. It's a joke with
| some truth.
| everfree wrote:
| Oh. That's an uninteresting way to "back up" a statement
| imo. Crowd wisdom is often wrong.
|
| "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It
| never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
| bee_rider wrote:
| Just a note, the person you've responded to is different
| from the person who made the "joke," (if that is the
| right interpretation. I don't really get the joke, fwiw).
|
| It doesn't really make sense anyway; if the joke is that
| the comment is "backed" by the fact that HN users are
| upvoting it--comment scores aren't visible to people
| other than the posters, right? So all we know is that it
| wasn't smote into the hidden state.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| I agree. Voting systems are just generically dumb for any
| sort of truth consensus.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| It's confusing because we went from "decentralized"
| meaning "an inverted hierarchy" to "decentralized"
| meaning "a hierarchy seen from the other direction".
| dartos wrote:
| It's decentralized in the same way lobbying a politician
| is decentralized.
|
| Unless I'm remembering incorrectly, you need a ton of eth
| to partake in eth PoS voting.
| everfree wrote:
| Distributed validator tech (DVT) has made it so you can
| participate in PoS voting with much less ETH than was
| required before, if you choose.
| mxwsn wrote:
| Blobs are a temporary form of data storage that are only
| required to be held by Ethereum nodes for 18 days. Archival
| nodes are free to store it forever if they wish, with a 1/N
| trust mechanism to verify an archived blob. Blobs contrast with
| permanent data storage in calldata, which is very expensive
| (due to its permanence).
|
| Layer 2's are currently significantly more centralized than
| Ethereum L1, but this is not a fundamental technological
| limitation, and can be improved significantly with more
| resources and time. L2s right now have fragmentation concerns,
| where users have poor experiences interacting with a ecosystem
| of 10+ L2s, but this is largely a UX concern that can be solved
| in my view, and shared sequencers can help this on a technical
| level. I wouldn't say Layer 2's have many intrinsic fundamental
| technological trade-offs.
| dboreham wrote:
| Faster, cheaper, possibly ceases to exist. If that happens
| there's (supposedly) a way for you to slowly get your funds
| back by exiting on L1. The blob stuff is about "ok if that's a
| thing how do I prove to some L1 contract that I own these L2
| funds?".
|
| The actual proving mechanism is either a) too amazing for me to
| understand or b) not quite figured out yet. But first blobs..
| hanniabu wrote:
| > The actual proving mechanism is either a) too amazing for
| me to understand or b) not quite figured out yet.
|
| Rollups use either optimistic proofs or zero knowledge proofs
| for settlement
|
| > The blob stuff is about "ok if that's a thing how do I
| prove to some L1 contract that I own these L2 funds?".
|
| It's about data availability
|
| > there's (supposedly) a way for you to slowly get your funds
| back by exiting on L1
|
| They're called escape hatches, you can view the state of each
| L2 on L2Beat: https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary
| dboreham wrote:
| > Rollups use either optimistic proofs or zero knowledge
| proofs for settlement
|
| Can you post an example of a code that implements either of
| these? (the fraud proof, not the happy path)
|
| I ask because in the past when I researched L2s such as
| Optimism, that code was "to be developed".
| everfree wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that this is part of the code that
| implements fraud proofs on Arbitrum One, which is one of
| the few L2s to currently have fraud proofs.
|
| Sequencer side:
|
| https://github.com/OffchainLabs/nitro/blob/d28682b9300d50
| 214...
|
| Contract side:
|
| https://github.com/OffchainLabs/nitro-
| contracts/blob/90037b9...
|
| It seems to me that Optimism is lagging way behind - I'm
| not sure if they have fraud proofs yet even to this day.
| I consider Arbitrum to have "picked up the torch" so-to-
| say.
| fwip wrote:
| So, Ethereum "has blobs" now that "are provable," by an
| implementation that doesn't appear to contain tests [0].
| Crypto, stay winning.
|
| https://github.com/search?q=test+repo%3AOffchainLabs%2Fni
| tro...
| everfree wrote:
| What are you saying? There's a "test-cases" folder in the
| "prover" folder you linked to a search of.
|
| Not sure why it doesn't show up in GitHub's search, but
| it's right there in front of both of our faces.
| fwip wrote:
| Egg on my face, mea culpa. I checked all the places I
| thought to for Rust code, and was astounded that the
| search didn't turn it up.
| kinakomochidayo wrote:
| As far as I know, Optimism has fraud proofs on Sepolia
| testnet right now
| rauljordan2020 wrote:
| Hey! I'm one of the developers working on Arbitrum's next
| iteration of optimistic proofs. It's a really fun problem
| of many parties resolving disputes about a deterministic
| state. Happy to answer any questions
| benreesman wrote:
| As I always do when someone pops off with a phrase like
| "blockchain junk" I'll remind everyone that Barbara Liskov, who
| is the second female recipient of the Turing Award (and
| narrowly missed being the first, Frances Allen received the
| honor in 2006, Professor Liskov did in 2008), the John von
| Neumann Medal, an honors doctorate from ETH Zurich (received
| alongside Donald Knuth), countless other honors, and was the
| doctoral advisor to Sanjay Ghemawat (with his own trophy case
| of stratospheric achievement) devoted much of her career to the
| rigorous study of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (known
| colloquially as "pBFT") which is the consensus mechanism used
| in a number of blockchain-style data structures many if not
| most of which have at least peripheral connections to what
| people typically mean when throwing around the term blockchain.
| I haven't followed her career closely over the last few years,
| but long into the BitCoin era she was leading a group at MIT
| studying exactly this set of topics.
|
| Furthermore, she is only one example of staggeringly
| recognized, decorated, acknowledged pillars of computer science
| who either is now or recently has been doing real, substantial,
| academically sound, and novel research in this field: Philip
| Waller of functional programming and category theory fame works
| (or did recently) at IO/HK, a shop with more Fields/Turing/ACM-
| type honors than they have places to put all the plaques.
|
| So with all respect to a fellow community member, easy there
| with the "junk" stuff.
|
| If you want to say: "2017-era ICO exit scam junk", or "pump-and
| dump altcoin junk circa 2022", be my guest as long as you cite
| examples, there was plenty of fraud during those bubbles just
| like there is always fraud in speculative asset bubbles, and
| fraud is bad (whatever Greenspan and Summers are on the record
| as saying and they are both on the record as saying financial
| fraud shouldn't be prosecuted).
|
| But even there, I'll remind you that the conventional financial
| system sets no enviable record for either asset bubbles or the
| attendant fraud: quite the contrary, no one of any real
| seniority suffered so much as house arrest or community service
| let alone prison in 1987, 1999, 2001, 2008-2009, or whatever
| we're calling this. With three notable exceptions: Sam Blankman
| Fried is serving 25 years for things that happen on Wall St.
| every day of the week, and if CZ misses serious jail time it
| will be by the skin of his teeth. Do Kwon is facing trial for
| felony market manipulation in absentia.
|
| To my untrained eye, it looks an awful lot like cryptocurrency
| is the one place in the modern digital financial system where
| fraud is investigated, prosecuted, where people who go jail,
| and where the victims of that fraud receive at least some of
| their money back (I have a friend who held significant FTT and
| is already sure he's getting something back, though these
| proceedings are complicated and we're frankly a bit out of
| practice because we stopped prosecuting financial fraud in the
| late-Reagan/early-Clinton era, so he's not sure how much yet).
|
| Maybe I'm missing something here, my financial credentials are
| modest if that, perhaps you or another commenter could explain
| why the superficial analysis that indicates that crypto is the
| best-regulated of all the very rough financial markets in the
| world is deficient?
| ongy wrote:
| This must be the weirdest call to authority I've ever seen.
|
| Consens algorithms are important in both safety and
| distributed (High Availibility) scenarios. There's no
| necessary link from research into that, and blockchain in
| general, and the Proof of X style crypto blockchains
| specifically.
|
| Can you point to some research of Waller? I've tried to find
| it to see if it's more directly related, but the only
| somewhat famous person under that name I can find is a
| historian, not an expert in computing related topics.
|
| There's some interesting technology blockchains lean on
| (remember, git storage is a blockchain) but the value
| proposition of crypo currency blockchains (largely 0 trust)
| have so far not materialized outside speculative currency.
|
| Which is partially due to misaligned incentives (the
| developers of e.g. game assets in the NFT case) where the
| party that would have to enable something do not have an
| incentive to give up controle.
| benreesman wrote:
| I made a typographical error because I typed that with my
| thumb: the gentleman's name is Dr. Philip Wadler FRS FRSE
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Wadler), I also
| forgot his proper title as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
|
| The contributions that merited his inclusion in a group
| that includes (in computing alone) people like Charles
| Babbage KH FRS and Alan Turing OBE FRS are too numerous for
| any HN comment: he's got something like 20k citations of
| hundreds of papers.
|
| His contributions while working at IOHK were IIRC
| substantially around advanced formal proof systems for
| typed lambda calculus, the most recent of his IOHK papers I
| read was describing a System F implementation in the Agda
| proof system.
|
| I don't think it's called an appeal to authority when the
| topic is the merit of a field of study (I've never heard it
| referred to as a call to authority at all): when an
| overwhelming consensus of basically every reputable
| academic and scientific honor and award in the field (some
| among the highest honors in any field) are attached to
| research done over decades and reviewed, debated, cited,
| and recognized by a robust consensus, that's an argument
| that the study was important, novel, rigorous, valuable and
| worthwhile. I cited the consensus of the entire reputable
| academic and scientific world because that's how we codify
| a consensus into a formal recognition that a researcher has
| in the past, is currently, or is likely to again do
| important research. I think GP was mistaken to call this
| research junk or even imply it if someone is going to try
| to parse it that finely, and I thought that citing the ACM
| was a better citation than my own opinion.
|
| I agree that git is a blockchain, though not a particularly
| Byzantine Fault Tolerant one, along with Mercurial and Nix
| and many other tools many of us use daily.
|
| The broader convergence around previously disparate parts
| of the digital financial economy is just unambiguously
| happening: things like FedNow at the high end or Apple Pay
| / Venmo / Zelle / Wize / WeChat / etc. on a more retail
| level are arriving faster and faster, placing ever-greater
| demands on the technology involved, and similar pressures
| are producing related solutions: the NBBO system in US
| equities trading to name one example, the consolidated tape
| that results and the records around it used to be backed by
| all trades taking place on recorded phone lines, before
| that by taking place in a room full of witnesses, and
| before that in coffee shops and other gathering places. All
| of these systems were workable if imperfect solutions to
| questions of trust, escrow, reversibility or its converse,
| and broadly the ways in which Ricardian contracts are
| generally, in isolation, inadequate to promote a sufficient
| atmosphere of trust to admit active and reasonably
| efficient markets.
|
| Cryptographically durable and tamper-resistant ledgers
| remain in a sort of transitional state where they back non-
| trivial commerce and much more but still comparatively
| small amounts of speculation/price discovery: the jury is
| out on whether or not cryptography and BFT research is
| going to hit the truly big leagues in terms of notional
| value: right now they're somewhere in the rough ballpark of
| equities transactions daily in the maybe mid tens to low
| hundreds of billions in notional USD, making both a flea on
| the ass of an elephant compared to say global forex at
| something like 5-10 trillion a day, and derivatives are
| just really hard to estimate, but the notional value of all
| derivatives contracts is like, easily in the hundreds of
| trillions and there are days when a _lot_ of that moves
| quickly.
|
| But I wasn't making the case that this stuff is like 100%
| locked-in the future, I was making a much weaker claim:
| that it's dismissive and ignorant to call it "junk" and
| that what limited consequences fraudsters face for
| financial fraud are tightly clustered in this area.
|
| It's well-understood that the mechanism design of a
| combination of a floating transaction fee structure (gas)
| and a market in that unit of account with a lot of
| speculative activity in it is problematic to put it mildly:
| transactions become too expensive to facilitate significant
| commerce rather often. A lot of things are being tried to
| improve the emergent incentives, some with more noble
| motives than others, but that's finance: if you're under
| any illusion that innovation in finance is a constant
| battle between people trying to generate better outcomes
| and people trying to game the thing then you can easily
| disabuse yourself of that notion by learning about the
| history of finance and I'll recommend two excellent places
| to start: the emergence of massive OTC derivatives markets
| that began in the 1980s but really got big a decade later,
| and the emergence of fully-digital equities and futures
| markets around the turn of the millennium.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > I agree that git is a blockchain
|
| Wait, isn't git more of a merkle-DAG? I thought one of
| the defining features of blockchains was effectively
| branchless global state. My understanding is that DAGs
| are a superset of blockchains. Is this a wrong?
|
| My comment about "blockchain junk" is mainly in response
| to the fact that it's nearly impossible to find any
| investment/involvement in the space without running into
| complete fraudsters and starry-eyed "entrepreneurs" who
| view blockchain as some sort of god technology that will
| lift us out of poverty and/or upend the corporate control
| mechanisms. AKA a bandaid fix by people who don't
| understand its actual limitations or the dynamics of the
| systems they supposedly oppose.
|
| As a system for maintaining auditable global
| state/knowledge in the face of sybil attacks, yes, it's
| impressive. However 99% of the projects people reach for
| it _do not require it_ , hence the term "junk." It's more
| a condemnation of the space surrounding the technology
| than the technology itself. I figured that would be
| somewhat obvious.
| benreesman wrote:
| You sound like someone who knows your stuff on this and I
| regret if I was in any way making it sound personal or
| disrespectful to you personally. I maintain it's an
| unfortunate if not offensive phrasing, but I'm in no
| position to carry rocks around glass houses: I say
| unfortunately or offensively-phrased things too.
|
| There isn't really a robust consensus that I'm aware of
| as to what constitutes a blockchain per se: Wikipedia
| lists git as one, and I suppose that's as good a source
| as any absent such consensus.
|
| git is an (often if not typically in practice degenerate)
| Merkle Tree, the contents of one atomic (and sometimes de
| facto immutable) node contain a hash (O(1)-verifiably
| k-equivalent... you know the drill) of ancestors.
|
| In more pragmatic/colloquial usage I might define a
| blockchain loosely as a "tamper-resistant, directed, and
| typically acyclic / bounded-cyclic data structure with an
| implied machine economics optimization around infrequent
| but critically important fully-verifiable history subject
| to heuristically-determined / freely parameterized bounds
| on branching factor, duration in branched states, and a
| bounded susceptibility to adversarial interference in a
| verifiable consensus on the periodic elimination of
| branching on some semi-predicable cadence", which is
| pretty hand-wavy but I think captures the spirit of the
| general usage. By that definition git is only a
| blockchain by common convention, there's nothing
| preventing or even discouraging arbitrary, unbounded
| branching other than it doesn't have a ton of widely
| valued use cases: most any time you're fine with a branch
| that never has any scope to interact with any other via
| rebase or merge you could just make a copy or maybe a
| copy and a copy of some metadata/history, though git in
| practical terms is a good tool for such a copy.
|
| And I think you're right that as with any over-hyped
| technology, it gets attached to projects that don't need
| it when it's "hot", preoccupies both investors and
| entrepreneurs without better ideas for how to deploy
| their time and money when it's "in", and is therefore
| constantly oscillating between being a magnet for snake-
| oil types and being out in the cold.
|
| Throw in a bunch of electricity consumption that's
| _maybe_ net driving up carbon emissions and _maybe_ net
| attaching a financial incentive to electricity so cheap
| that it basically has to be renewable but it's kinda too
| soon to tell, and I think I'm now having trouble seeing
| how crypto three years ago and "AI" last year are any
| different along these dimensions.
|
| The difference in my view is that AI is probably higher
| variance by a lot on social welfare, and not because of
| some dumbass "paperclip-indifferent AGI" tripe.
|
| Blockchain as applied to finance has the scope to create
| transparency into financial markets and compel
| governments to open the books on what is and isn't legal
| regarding money, for who, and why. It will never like,
| totally disintermediate government from money, because
| money is the #1 national security priority of any
| functioning government, so inventing money that the
| government can't control is more likely to buy you a R9x
| than a Turing Award (in a macabre way it's darkly amusing
| to contemplate the fact that it could buy you both). It
| also has a positive (in my view) externality of creating
| broad-spectrum incentives for the public to understand a
| little better how important digital identity, security,
| privacy, and autonomy are in 2024 and build at least a
| little muscle memory around running a slightly or maybe
| even substantially tighter ship on personal digital
| footprint. I've apologized to two friends this week
| because I lied to them about something that is now news
| that recently broke on the Onavo/Meta thing TechCrunch
| ran and I wanted them to hear it from me. I lied about
| this because before it hit the press, I felt it would
| have been detrimental to the national security of the
| United States to talk about it, but what I really wish is
| that we wouldn't end up in situations where anyone faces
| such dilemmas in private industry.
|
| AI has more obviously useful applications at the consumer
| level (though it's largely a solution to itself as a way
| to get information one could previously get from a search
| engine before it ruined the indexes of search engines by
| making arbitrarily persuasive falsehoods too cheap to
| meter, we've had spam for a long time, but spam so good
| it's convincing to experts in anything other than a bad
| mood? That's new.). The danger with AI is that it winds
| up being something other than "available weight" and
| "operator-aligned", i.e. whoever is the last man standing
| has arbitrary unaccountable power to convince anyone of
| anything and prevent that from being accessed by anyone
| else.
|
| So probably higher stakes.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > You sound like someone who knows your stuff on this and
| I regret if I was in any way making it sound personal or
| disrespectful to you personally. I maintain it's an
| unfortunate if not offensive phrasing, but I'm in no
| position to carry rocks around glass houses: I say
| unfortunately or offensively-phrased things too.
|
| I didn't take offense at all. I find your knowledge of
| the space refreshing. I have watched blockchains
| carefully from the sidelines for some time because of my
| interest in the intersection of economics, state, and
| technology and how blockchains might change those things.
| Over time I became more jaded because the scaling
| problems blockchains run into seem to be almost
| insurmountable, so my interest has pivoted into less-
| global, more-scalable approaches (like merkle-DAG CRDTs
| with some external form of validation).
|
| > There isn't really a robust consensus that I'm aware of
| as to what constitutes a blockchain per se: Wikipedia
| lists git as one, and I suppose that's as good a source
| as any absent such consensus.
|
| Fair enough.
|
| > In more pragmatic/colloquial usage I might define a
| blockchain loosely as a "tamper-resistant, directed, and
| typically acyclic / bounded-cyclic data structure with an
| implied machine economics optimization around infrequent
| but critically important fully-verifiable history subject
| to heuristically-determined / freely parameterized bounds
| on branching factor, duration in branched states, and a
| bounded susceptibility to adversarial interference in a
| verifiable consensus on the periodic elimination of
| branching on some semi-predicable cadence", which is
| pretty hand-wavy but I think captures the spirit of the
| general usage.
|
| Have you considered a career in poetry?? Joking aside,
| this pretty much sums up my view as well. A DAG with a
| strong gravitational pull towards a master branch with
| somewhat infrequently changing data. Which also includes
| git, so you're right.
|
| > Throw in a bunch of electricity consumption that's
| maybe net driving up carbon emissions and maybe net
| attaching a financial incentive to electricity so cheap
| that it basically has to be renewable but it's kinda too
| soon to tell, and I think I'm now having trouble seeing
| how crypto three years ago and "AI" last year are any
| different along these dimensions.
|
| Yes, agreed. Let's spin up an immense amount of computing
| power to train a model that hallucinates when asked basic
| questions. Again, there is a space where the marriage of
| a large dataset of knowledge and an automated linguistic
| system searching that knowledge has great use-cases, but
| throwing "AI" at every problem is just another eye-rolley
| fad.
|
| > The difference in my view is that AI is probably higher
| variance by a lot on social welfare, and not because of
| some dumbass "paperclip-indifferent AGI" tripe.
|
| What do you mean by this?
|
| > Blockchain as applied to finance has the scope to
| create transparency into financial markets and compel
| governments to open the books on what is and isn't legal
| regarding money, for who, and why.
|
| This is one of the things I was originally most excited
| about. Make politicians receive all wages, contributions,
| etc through some auditable _public_ currency. If you 're
| going to work in the public sector, then you have to
| consent to transparency. I have my own issues with money
| (mainly its deficiency for economic transactions) but
| cryptocurrencies are certainly a step up from it. But
| like you said, you can't just release some new currency
| and expect the government to bless it. Some empires had
| their armies, some their navies, but we have our banks.
| Our empire is a financial one, and a currency that
| replaces the USD is a direct attack against the heart of
| the empire. Many mountains would have to move before that
| is possible, _unless_ Wall St finds some extra utility in
| it that allows them to extract more.
|
| > the public to understand a little better how important
| digital identity, security, privacy, and autonomy are in
| 2024
|
| 100%...cryptographic identity is going to be huge in the
| next few years (I'm betting on it quite heavily
| https://stamp-protocol.github.io/).
|
| > AI has more obviously useful applications at the
| consumer level (though it's largely a solution to itself
| as a way to get information one could previously get from
| a search engine before it ruined the indexes of search
| engines by making arbitrarily persuasive falsehoods too
| cheap to meter, we've had spam for a long time, but spam
| so good it's convincing to experts in anything other than
| a bad mood? That's new.).
|
| Yes, exactly, LLMs as they are are a glorified search
| engine. Search engines have consumed themselves trying to
| tailor results to their users instead of just fucking
| showing objective information and are becoming
| essentially obsolete pay-to-play ad machines.
|
| > The danger with AI is that it winds up being something
| other than "available weight" and "operator-aligned",
| i.e. whoever is the last man standing has arbitrary
| unaccountable power to convince anyone of anything and
| prevent that from being accessed by anyone else.
|
| Well, there's more here. As AI markets itself as this
| sort of objective intelligence machine, it garners more
| and more trust. As this solidifies it has the potential
| to shape perception over time to the benefit of the
| operators/controllers. The obvious conclusion is snuck in
| advertising, but I'm thinking much more sinister like the
| editorialization of information to protect the owner
| classes and the state from any kind of scrutiny.
| Effectively, a Big Brother that instead of using fear for
| compliance, softly whispers in your ear. Pair this with
| the immense surveillance apparatus we've spent decades
| perfecting (but it's in the private sector! so it's
| ok!!1) and we're setting ourselves up for a hellscape
| dystopia.
|
| Definitely higher stakes, I'd say.
| hot_gril wrote:
| "the consensus mechanism used in," where "used in" is the key
| part. Not "developed for."
| benreesman wrote:
| Hence my explicitly noting that Dr. Liskov continued this
| research and grew it in scope long after it had become
| clear that one of if not the primary application was
| clearly going to be tamper-resistant ledgers of financial
| transactions.
|
| It's also why I gave the example of Dr. Wadler FRS FRSE as
| someone who _even more explicitly_ did extremely
| sophisticated research well-received by the academic
| community unambiguously in this context.
|
| I just do not understand what it is about this topic that
| turns a normally very thoughtful community of people with a
| generally very high regard for the research agendas of
| noted computer scientists into spinal-reflex, knee-jerk
| critics on a dime.
|
| You hear all kinds of arguments but they generally boil
| down to some version of "blockchain is for cryptocurrency,
| cryptocurrency is for financial fraud and financial fraud
| has no place in our society".
|
| But every link in that chain is either incorrect or
| selectively tolerant of wrongdoing.
|
| Tamper-resistant ledgers have applications outside of
| finance.
|
| "Everyone knows I mean crypto."
|
| Ok, cryptocurrencies have complex outcomes attached to
| them, some positive, some negative.
|
| "I'm talking about the fraud which is rampant and the
| main/only use case."
|
| Eh, not really, speculation isn't by itself fraud, although
| it is true that markets (say, OTC derivatives markets) with
| a high ratio of speculation to other non-speculative
| activities generally have more fraud in them, so more or
| less rampant than conventional digital finance?
|
| "More both relatively and absolutely."
|
| No. Neither. Trivially false. You think that because you
| have no fucking clue how much fraud happens either
| relatively or absolutely in conventional financial markets.
| Furthermore, the fraud that does happen is dramatically
| more likely to be investigated and prosecuted, and the
| victims of that fraud are dramatically more likely to be
| recognized as victims (unlike for example victims of
| predatory lending in 2005-2007 who lost their homes and got
| called criminals into the bargain".
|
| I don't want to believe that it's just the banal fact that
| we all know someone who got stinking rich speculating in
| crypto markets and we didn't (I've never speculated in
| crypto markets and am not in the same galaxy as well-off: I
| went into debt when the tech job market collapsed last
| year, with uh, a little help).
|
| But I'm really struggling here to find a more charitable
| conclusion.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I'm not against cryptocurrency at all, but you're saying
| that Dr. Liskov was researching algorithms for that
| purpose when she really wasn't. Byzantine fault tolerance
| has lots of other applications, in fact if you search
| "currency" in the paper she worked on, you'll only find a
| single match: "concurrency."
|
| https://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/osdi99.pdf
| benreesman wrote:
| I didn't say Dr. Liskov was doing pBFT research for the
| express purpose of promoting cryptocurrency as an
| application, I said Professor Liskov was working on
| "blockchain tech", it's therefore pretty cheeky to call
| "blockchain" "junk", and I said that she not only
| persisted in but increased the scope of such research
| during a period of time when it was impossible not to
| know this is how the technology is being adopted.
|
| If you're going to nitpick in an effort to discredit a
| robust argument by beam-searching for the weakest-looking
| link in the argument and go directly after it, then at a
| minimum, be right.
|
| Don't refute intentional misquotations.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Ok, you said Professor Liskov was working on blockchain
| tech. Is that the point? Because no, she wasn't.
| benreesman wrote:
| We've reached my limit on the nesting of a contentious
| sub-thread (frankly I'm surprised we haven't reached HN's
| limit on such).
|
| If I'm mistaken about this, I want to be educated about
| it, I hold all of the famous computer scientists I've
| mentioned in extremely high regard and if I've been
| inadvertently spreading falsehoods it's a priority to me
| to both stop doing that and depending on the degree of
| such an error if it is one, a formal apology could even
| be in order.
|
| I do not think that this remains a useful or even
| acceptable forum for that conversation however.
|
| If you know or strongly believe that I've made statements
| about public figures that I admire and that are
| inaccurate, I'd not only invite but explicitly request
| that you contact me directly to straighten it out without
| the distractions and perverse incentives of an audience
| to a debate that has become more than "spirited".
|
| I'm reachable at b7r6@b7r6.net and I hope to continue
| this discussion in a more productive forum than this
| particular sub-thread.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Right now at least, layer 2s are somewhat immature. Many of
| them do host billions in assets, but they each have different
| tech stacks backing them up that are at varying levels of
| maturity and decentralization. L2Beat does a great job of
| breaking down the L2 ecosystem:
|
| https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary
|
| Note the pie chart in the row for each L2. That pie chart notes
| the security risks for each one based on their tech stack.
| Ideally, the top L2s should strive to reach "Stage 2" which
| could be considered as secure as L1 itself, but no general
| purpose L2 is at that stage yet and most are still at Stage 0.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Layer 2: It turns out "blockchain technology" works a lot
| better if you do all the important stuff off-chain.
|
| I predict that by 2030 the cryptocurrency nerds will have
| discovered SQL and transaction audits.
| pyaamb wrote:
| a good explainer video
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT9PHWloIiU
| hanniabu wrote:
| Pleasantly surprised to find this here, especially without all
| the "tokens are a scam" comments
| wesselbindt wrote:
| I'm with you, they feel a bit redundant and uninteresting at
| this point. Like we get it, a spade's a spade, no reason to go
| on about it. Imagine people commented "postgres is a database"
| on every postgres related post.
| hot_gril wrote:
| It's funny how many times in my career I've heard someone say
| "____ is not a database, it's a datastore" referring to
| something they made that's basically Postgres with extra
| steps.
| k8svet wrote:
| You know, from the way crypto threads are moderated, I bet I
| can guess dang's opinion about them. Just ridiculously vapid
| content.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > Today, we have all the tools we'll need, and indeed most of the
| tools we'll ever have, to build applications that are
| simultaneously cypherpunk and user-friendly.
|
| Really looking forward to the next couple years. Everyone has
| been writing this off as "no killer apps after 10 years" but
| there's a lot that's been happening to support adoption, from
| scaling to improved UX. In the next couple years those should
| percolate to production apps.
|
| The primary improvements have been rollups, blobs, account
| abstraction, and chain abstraction.
|
| An example of a new onboarding process being developed by
| coinbase can be seen here:
| https://twitter.com/WilsonCusack/status/1764355750149710190
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Like what
| pa7x1 wrote:
| https://github.com/daimo-eth/daimo
| jncfhnb wrote:
| So... a place to store your funds that is irretrievably
| lost if you lose your phone?
| pa7x1 wrote:
| You can backup your account with passkeys.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Surely everyone will do that
| fwip wrote:
| The killer app of crypto is... a wallet app to put your
| crypto in. Okay.
| erulabs wrote:
| This is "decentralized Venmo".
|
| Yes, the "killer app" of internet currency is going to be
| money transfers. That is not surprising, non-trivial, and
| quite valuable.
| lottin wrote:
| That's not a killer app. We already have money transfers.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| Providing global instant settlement for sub-cent fees?
| Doubt it.
| bigyikes wrote:
| What value proposition does crypto offer that existing
| solutions do not?
|
| The only reasonable answer crypto advocates can ever offer is
| "decentralization" and the lack of trust required.
|
| The problem is, most people are perfectly fine trusting their
| financial institutions.
|
| Another commenter was downvoted for saying "No one cares", but
| a more precise way of putting this is "the average person
| doesn't care about decentralization" and this is spot on.
|
| It's cool tech, but it reminds me a bit of math research -
| towers of abstractions built over decades, with little effect
| on the real world. We can only hope that some benefits will be
| uncovered down the line.
|
| That's what blockchain technology is: interesting research
| which will never be popular with or relevant to a lay person
| (outside of speculative bubbles)
| pa7x1 wrote:
| If you ascertain some value to the permissionless and self-
| custodial value of cash. And you see value in the internet's
| ability to connect the entire world. Then it follows
| immediately that you see value in cryptocurrency.
|
| Because you cannot use cash to transact globally, and you
| cannot use digital forms of central bank issued currency
| permissionlessly or have self-custody. Cryptocurrency gives
| you all those three properties.
|
| So you must give up something. HNers typically are willing to
| give up the permissionless and self-custody properties. After
| all, most of HN audience lives in developed democratic
| countries where personal freedoms are considered fundamental
| pillars and protected. But at a minimum you should consider
| that, not all the world lives under those circumstances. And
| that there are no guarantees that those circumstances will
| always be preserved in your cozy first world country.
| Certainly if you are willing to give them up so easily.
|
| Don't be so quick to assume it cannot happen where you live.
| One day they may go after some fringe truckers protesting in
| Canada. Another day they may go after some camgirls earning a
| living in ways that some executive board of a payment
| processor considers reprobable. Maybe one day they will tell
| you in what you can or cannot spend your money or where you
| can invest it and how much.
| drak0n1c wrote:
| Decentralization of compute is perhaps a more compelling
| story. There have been many recent complaints of massive
| digital networks being at the whim of centralized IP and
| platform owners making unpopular decisions - whether in
| social media or games. Even non-profit and volunteer projects
| collapse when leaders abandon ship or become tyrants. What if
| open source code could also be extended to open decentralized
| hosting via micropayments - the direction of which all
| decided by users in a participatory format - whether via
| representative republic, direct democracy, or elected
| dictator?
|
| The obstacle is human nature and ease-of-use friction -
| taking responsibility for maintenance and innovation and
| imposing a participatory need requires a modicum of awareness
| and willingness to contribute - even if only with pennies.
| This is annoying and wasteful red tape for most, and so
| corporations with strong advertisers and investors who can
| provide it cheaper or for free are obviously seen as the
| better choice. Co-ops and communes have this problem.
| valcron1000 wrote:
| > The only reasonable answer crypto advocates can ever offer
| is "decentralization" and the lack of trust required.
|
| That a very big "only". For me that's the killer app. I do
| not trust financial institutions and the ones that I trust do
| not want to accept me as their customer.
|
| > "the average person doesn't care about decentralization"
|
| It's like saying "the average person does not care about a
| system of interconnected computer networks that communicates
| through TCP/IP". The average person cares about watching
| reels on Instagram or sending messages through WhatsApp.
|
| > That's what blockchain technology is: interesting research
| which will never be popular
|
| I have no doubt that someone said the same regarding the
| Internet.
| lottin wrote:
| Exactly. I mean, you don't even have to trust financial
| institutions. You only have to trust the institutions that
| are in charge of maintaining law and order. Everything else
| follows from that. And if you can't trust those, then you
| have bigger problems that cannot be fixed with some damn
| cryptocurrency.
| killthebuddha wrote:
| I think it would be useful if the full domain (vitalik.eth.limo)
| was displayed.
|
| Not sure if that's possible or if it violates any HN policies
| about how links are displayed, apologies if it's a silly/useless
| suggestion.
|
| Edit: Not sure how popularis eth.limo w.r.t. to HN submissions,
| but the full domain should probably be displayed for any eth.limo
| submission.
| dang wrote:
| Ok!
| skybrian wrote:
| I'm wondering how this compares with other cryptocurrencies that
| seem to be getting some attention, like Solana?
| everfree wrote:
| Solana does not have blobs. It's really as simple as that.
| skybrian wrote:
| It seems to have low-cost transactions. Isn't that what the
| blobs are for? (Among other things.)
|
| (Sincere question; I don't follow cryptocurrencies very
| closely.)
| everfree wrote:
| Because transaction fees on blockchains run as an auction
| market, low-cost transactions are enabled by high
| transaction throughput, at least relative to demand. In
| other words, any chain that has high throughput and/or low
| demand will have low-cost transactions. Solana and Ethereum
| attempt to achieve high throughput in very different ways.
|
| Ethereum blobs create transaction space that has a 0-of-n
| trust model (for zk-roll-ups) or a 1-of-n trust model (for
| optimistic roll-ups). This means that there needs to be
| either zero or one honest participant who carefully
| receives, processes and validates every single roll-up
| transaction in order for an outsider to be able to prove
| that the chain was not tampered with.
|
| In contrast, Solana achieves throughput by taking the
| classic blockchain structure (with its n-of-n trust model)
| and cranking the parameters up to 11. Basically they said
| "be a standard blockchain, but do everything a hundred
| times faster on expensive servers with beefy CPUs and
| datacenter connections". The advantages are that it took
| less development time and there are less moving parts in
| the stack. The disadvantage is that the Solana blockchain
| is not actually verifiable, in the sense that you or I
| could download a piece of software onto our home computer
| and follow along with the chain to make sure it's valid.
| Ethereum is verifiable in this way, even down through all
| of its (properly-designed and fully implemented) L2s.
|
| To distill the entire situation: In order to scale, Solana
| gives up some of the fundamental properties that make
| blockchains powerful. Ethereum, scaling with blobs, retains
| these fundamental blockchain properties.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| All this crpyto technology is fascinating. But is it used for
| anything?
|
| I asked this in an Ask HN today, but got no answer so far:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39852389
|
| It looks like not a single HN reader is using blockchain
| technology for anything.
|
| If nobody is using blockchain technology outside of blockchain
| projects, what are the reasons we expect that some day we will?
| What could be a near term use case?
| wredcoll wrote:
| Literally no. No one is using it and no one has come up with a
| use.
| kinakomochidayo wrote:
| That's odd, Blackrock just created the BUIDL tokenized fund
| on Ethereum. Seems like there's definitely a use for it.
|
| https://securitize.io/learn/press/blackrock-launches-
| first-t...
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Wouldn't any company using blockchain technology be a
| blockchain project?
| stnmtn wrote:
| Sure, but if every blockchain project is just "building
| something for the blockchain" then where is the actual value?
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| You seem to be drawing a distinction here between companies
| that are building something for blockchain vs building
| something for people.
|
| Alright, I'll bite, here are some projects that use
| blockchain for things besides trading tokens or improving
| blockchain technology:
|
| - https://sarcophagus.io/
|
| - https://www.gitcoin.co/
|
| - https://docs.kleros.io/
|
| There's many more. Many don't have a lot of adoption, and I
| don't know if they will. But at the very least it's often
| interesting to see how traditional systems are reimagined
| in order to enable decentralized, trustless, computer
| programs (with humans interacting at the perimeter) to
| fulfill roles which would traditionally be filled by
| centralized, trusted intermediaries (often humans).
|
| If for no other reason than getting a front seat as many of
| them fall apart spectacularly but also because it's
| intellectually fascinating to see problems approached in an
| inverted manner.
| troupo wrote:
| > But at the very least it's often interesting to see how
| traditional systems are reimagined in order to enable
| decentralized, trustless, computer programs
|
| They are not re-imagined. It's a combination of a still
| on-ongoing gold rush (well, the end tail of it) and
| people pretending there are purely technical solutions to
| all problems.
|
| Almost every single of those "interesting re-imagining"
| projects rather quickly rediscovers why traditional
| systems are the way they are, and end up being shittier
| versions of those.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Most of those are scams.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Its main purpose is internet currency. The only serious uses
| surround that via smart contracts, like decentralized exchanges
| or provably fair gambling (unsavory as that is). Any time
| someone says "the currency aspect is separate from blockchain,"
| I'd be wary, seeing how the entire point of blockchain is
| decentralization via proof of work or stake.
|
| NFTs can make sense in theory as an alternative to the already-
| popular video game collectibles, as silly as that premise is,
| but they never really got traction, and again that's related to
| currency. There's been a lot of vaporware around things like
| corporate blockchains to track assets, which don't even make
| sense in theory.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| Are you using it as internet currency?
|
| I don't know anyone who paid anything with it in the last 12
| months.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Yes
| doublepg23 wrote:
| I'm using the Bitcoin Lightning Network to support podcasts
| every week or so.
| https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/boost/
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| Reading through the page, that sounds super complicated
| though.
|
| Couldn't the podcasts simply put a lightning invoice
| (Which is just a string of text I guess?) on their
| website with a text like "Support us via Lightning:
| 1f73ac220b9..."?
| lawn wrote:
| With a regular cryptocurrency they could just post an
| address or QR code and anyone can send it using a wallet
| at any time (no need for them to be online or anything).
| maxcoder4 wrote:
| I use it everywhere where it's an option (so not very
| often, let's say once a month). I also only use privacy
| services (vpn for example) where you can pay using
| cryptocurrency, otherwise what's the point
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| What are some other examples, except for a VPN where you
| use crypto to pay?
|
| And how is the situation around the world - are retailers
| who offer digital goods/services allowed to accept crypto
| as payments?
| hot_gril wrote:
| There are hardly any retailers accepting it in the US.
| Wonder how it is in El Salvador, since they made BTC
| legal tender.
| vernon99 wrote:
| In most of the places it's trivial to exchange crypto for
| local currency in p2p fashion, often for cash.
| vernon99 wrote:
| I've been paying multiple people and teams remotely via btc
| in the past years. Even if you can send a wire, sometimes
| it can be cheaper/easier to send crypto. But in many cases
| it's not even possible to send large amounts of money
| without incurring massive fees (international paypal,
| western union, etc). Moved hundeds of thousands of dollars
| this way by now for purely legal economical reasons,
| helping a bunch of people make money they would not make
| otherwise.
|
| Edit: relatedly, not everybody wants to pay their local
| taxes (and who am I to judge people in various life
| situations?). This itself is a _massive_ saver for the
| folks. Send somebody $5k usd a couple times and their bank
| will start asking complicated questions.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| And how do you put the crypto payments into your tax
| reports?
| bawolff wrote:
| Seems pretty easy. My country's tax forms dont
| distinguish between how you got paid, just that you got
| paid. Gov doesn't care if it was through a bank, in gold
| bars, bitcoin, etc (capital gains they care more about of
| course)
| dinobones wrote:
| The day a network exists where you can reliably send like
| $0.001 of value with little/no fees is the day the internet
| changes forever.
|
| So many ideas are infeasible right now because CC fees are
| high, and making any payment is extremely high friction.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| Even if you can send $1.
|
| Users dislike paying on the web because it is a security
| risk. Because of this insane system of credit cards, where
| you give the other party a "secret" which enables them to
| _take_ the money from you.
|
| If you could just _send_ the money, the barrier to pay
| would be 100x lower.
|
| Most websites pay the bills via ads. And make less than
| $0.001 per visitor. If they could sell a monthly membership
| for a one-time payment of $1, they would have a way better
| business model.
| hot_gril wrote:
| There are traditional ways to send money without giving
| out a secret, like Apple Pay. But there's plenty of fraud
| in the other direction, people accepting charges with
| stolen payment info that end up being reversed. It's
| always a little the merchant's job to decide whose "money
| is no good here," and that's because of laws.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| Paying via Apple Pay means you have to pay Apple so that
| Apple will pay the vendor for you.
|
| How do you pay Apple without giving them a secret?
| lxgr wrote:
| No, that's not how it works at all. Apple is neither in
| the authorization nor the transaction clearing/settlement
| flow.
|
| > How do you pay Apple without giving them a secret?
|
| Credit cards being effectively unrestricted bearer tokens
| isn't nearly the only way to do payments. For example you
| could send a signed message to your bank instructing them
| to pay Apple (in a world in which you'd be paying them;
| again, Apple Pay is not that).
| hot_gril wrote:
| I think Apple has some special relationship with banks,
| so it's not this simple. But yeah, one way or another
| you're trusting Apple Pay, which presumably is more
| trustworthy than a gas station sale terminal.
|
| And if you were signing your own payments, you'd still
| have to trust your computing device and the bank.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| With crypto, you would not have to trust your computing
| device nor your bank.
|
| You would send $100 to your computing device every now
| and then. And use that for day to day spendings. If the
| device turns out to be malicious, you lost only the $100
| and stay away from the brand that made the device.
|
| A bank would not be involved at all.
| hot_gril wrote:
| But you're sending that $100 from another computing
| device, and if you're not trusting a bank-like entity to
| hold the cryptocurrency for you, you're responsible for
| securing all your money on that device without locking
| yourself out.
|
| On the other hand, having some money outside a bank is
| nice. I've had them freeze my assets before just cuz they
| felt like it, until I spent a whole day telling them to
| fix it.
| vernon99 wrote:
| Having a couple hardware wallets in different places + a
| paper backup split in a couple pieces gives you enough
| redundancy not to worry about this. Source: my own
| experience of close to 10 years now.
| hot_gril wrote:
| So where do you store the paper?
| cesarb wrote:
| > If you could just send the money, the barrier to pay
| would be 100x lower.
|
| We can already do that here in Brazil: the web site
| displays a QR code (plus its contents in text form), the
| user scans the QR code (or copies the text) into their
| banking app, and confirms it on the app to send the
| money.
|
| I hasn't AFAIK made any meaningful difference for
| websites. What people dislike isn't the inconvenience of
| credit cards, it's the inconvenience of having any
| paywall at all.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| What if they had $50 stored in a browser plugin and when
| a website asks for it, they could pay $1 with a simple
| click?
| brazzy wrote:
| That was possible 30 years ago. There have been probably
| been a dozen schemes that tried something like that over
| the decades, starting with DigiCash from before the WWW
| existed.
|
| They all failed not because of fees, not because of
| security concerns, but because even having to _think
| about_ whether you want to pay for something and how much
| incurs a mental cost that people avoid.
|
| Free beets cheap by a margin that has nothing to do with
| how cheap or how easy.
| dgellow wrote:
| In Europe sending money from one bank account to another is
| generally free and often almost instant
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| Thats news to me. Can you link to a page of a bank in
| Europe where they state that they offer free instant
| money transfers?
| dgellow wrote:
| It's pretty simple to see. First result I found:
| https://moneytransfers.com/bank-transfers/sepa-transfers
|
| For example from Germany to Austria, sending 1200EUR, I
| see multiple providers with no fees for quick transfers.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| I dont't see instant transfers on that page. It says
| "within 24 hours" and sometimes even "within a week".
| dgellow wrote:
| You can change filters...
|
| You can also check
| https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/news-
| insights/videos/...
| IanCal wrote:
| The UK has "faster payments" which is usually instant
| (sometimes held up for fraud checks). I'm not aware of
| any bank that charges for this.
| troupo wrote:
| Besides SEPA which mandated the upper ceiling and an
| upcoming regulation which forbids banks from de-
| prioritising payments to/from other banks (can't remember
| what it's called now) many European countries have had
| instant bank transfers locally. For example, Swish in
| Sweden: https://www.swish.nu/about-swish
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Are you talking about SCT Inst? It seems like there are
| no fees built into the protocol itself, but your bank can
| still charge you to use the service, and it seems many
| banks charge between 1 and 7 euros:
|
| (pdf reference) https://www.beuc.eu/sites/default/files/p
| ublications/beuc-x-...
| dgellow wrote:
| I didn't mean a specific protocol, just based on my
| experience. But where do you see 7EUR in this document? I
| see lot of banks offering zero or below 1EUR fees. The
| highest I see is Novo Banco at 5.20EUR (page 18).
| lawn wrote:
| > The day a network exists where you can reliably send like
| $0.001 of value with little/no fees is the day the internet
| changes forever.
|
| Why do you set the bar at $0.001? Even sending $1 reliably
| and with low fees (which has been doable with crypto since
| its inception) would be revolutionary in my opinion.
| lottin wrote:
| Why would the internet change forever when people can
| reliably send $0.001 with no fees?
| giantrobot wrote:
| Then it could be way shittier because every GET request
| will be monetized. Also your whole browsing history will
| be public if you're ever tied to a wallet address.
| brazzy wrote:
| > The day a network exists where you can reliably send like
| $0.001 of value with little/no fees is the day the internet
| changes forever.
|
| It will change absolutely nothing whatsoever.
|
| > So many ideas are infeasible right now because CC fees
| are high, and making any payment is extremely high
| friction.
|
| Making payments will always be, _is inherently_ high
| friction, and reducing the amount does nothing below a
| threshold that is much, much higher than $0.001.
|
| There have been lots and lots of micropayment schemes, and
| they have all failed because the very fact that there _is_
| a payment already introduces mental friction that 's
| effectively higher than current CC fees.
|
| Any idea that is infeasible because there is no way to
| reliably send $0.001 is in fact easily feasible today by
| monetizing it some other way, usually via ads.
|
| Lower fees are only relevant for high-volume fully
| automated transactions with a substantial financial
| incentive behind them, and those can already be done
| basically for zero marginal cost, see HFT. The only
| micropayments that people are willing to engage in
| individually is when they involve addiction, and that as
| well can and is already done in gambling apps masquerading
| as games.
| shuntress wrote:
| This is something that feels pretty lost in most modern
| crypto discussion.
|
| It's evident in _literally the first line_ of the bitcoin
| whitepaper:
|
| "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would
| allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to
| another without going through a financial institution"
|
| If paying a random person online was as easy as dropping a
| quarter in a cup the internet could be a very different
| place.
| root_axis wrote:
| NFTs make absolutely no sense for video games collectables.
| As it is, video game collectables work just fine, NFTs add
| nothing except cost and complexity.
| hot_gril wrote:
| If you want there to be a marketplace for your
| collectibles, NFTs are the most open way of doing that, and
| a lot is prebuilt.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Counter-strike had a market for collectibles well before?
| hot_gril wrote:
| It took work by a large parent company. And I don't know
| how third-party websites can trade those, but it must
| mean either Valve is managing an API or people are doing
| something hacky to work around that.
| valzam wrote:
| They can't. There are third party websites but there is
| no way for them to initiate trades. They work around this
| bysome crazy peer-to-peer trust-me-bro scheme.
| troupo wrote:
| And the reason for that is simple: game collectibles
| literally cannot work in any game on any platform except
| the one they were designed for.
|
| There's a reason you can't bring your Fortnite skin into
| a Lord of the Rings game, and it has very little to do
| with "central companies" and "APIs"
| hot_gril wrote:
| Interop with other games isn't the issue here.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| a better question is to look at how people use it, the
| frictions they encounter, and who works on solving those
| frictions
|
| just saying "speculation" as if thats _not_ a use case misses
| that "financial services" are our biggest industry on the
| planet and thats mirrored in the blockchain space, many people
| solve frictions and compete with each other. it willfully
| ignores that all currencies are 99% held as stores of value and
| the M0 money supply is a tiny fraction used as cash and for
| merchant transactions, a distribution also mirrored in the
| blockchain space but ignorantly used to discredit it despite
| ironically showing how well it works as a parallel economy.
|
| additionally due to the structure of blockchains as a pay to
| write database, most use cases that aren't related to stores of
| value or trading are intrinsically tied to something financial
| which makes the standard impossible
| FactKnower69 wrote:
| >just saying "speculation" as if thats not a use case misses
| that "financial services" are our biggest industry on the
| planet and thats mirrored in the blockchain space
|
| This is such a great comparison! Crypto and "financial
| services" are both a massive waste of labor that produces
| zero material wealth and mainly exist to facilitate money
| laundering and further upward siphoning of wealth.
|
| This is why Janet Yellen is currently throwing a tantrum that
| those big meanies in China aren't playing fair by using their
| labor to actually manufacture things instead of shuffle fake
| money back and forth between different buckets until more
| money appears out of thin air:
| https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/yellen-intends-
| warn-...
| mand1575 wrote:
| Given that we are now entering another crypto hype cycle and
| blockchain technology, discussions often veer towards crypto
| and the allure of embedded tokens. I'm going to stick to the
| realty and opportunity: utilizing blockchain in fixed income
| finance.
|
| Having spent two decades navigating the complexities of Wall
| Street, I know the critical problem plaguing the fixed income
| market: the overwhelming amount of data generated during the
| origination of debt instruments and the subsequent challenges
| in reconciliation during clearing and settlement. Night
| cycles, calling Bloomberg to fix security master. Calling
| DTCC to settle trades. Blockchain is the best technology to
| solve this. Only if applied correctly. Otherwise, it's a
| waste.
|
| We started with a fundamental goal: to debunk the myths and
| misconceptions surrounding blockchain in the securities
| space. Despite the pervasive FUD propagated by the media, we
| have now proved to regulators that securities originated on
| blockchain are indeed securities - not merely speculative
| digital assets.
|
| At its core, we are looking to address the root cause of
| friction in fixed income trading: the lack of direct
| origination and data quality across market participants. By
| leveraging a permissioned network, we have proved by
| recording of municipal loans and securities on our
| blockchain. While it may not be the flashy product that
| garners headlines, this milestone marks a significant step
| forward. We also trained all of FINRA's fixed income
| examiners....
|
| Our next step is to bring brokered CDs, directly to the
| investors, giving them access to negotiate with the issuers.
| From there the goal is to extend to real-time clearing and
| settlement, streamlining processes and enhancing efficiency
| across the fixed income ecosystem.
|
| Here's how a trade moves through our system in current
| state...it's a mental journey.
| https://www.chicagofed.org/markets/view-lasalle-street/us-
| re...
| troupo wrote:
| > the root cause of friction in fixed income trading: the
| lack of direct origination and data quality across market
| participants. By leveraging a permissioned network,
|
| Blockchain has nothing to do with "data quality across
| market participants". Bad data entered into blockchain
| remains bad data.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| I think it could be used for some kind of permissioned,
| collectively crowdsourced database that's (mostly) free from
| the control of a single group of administrators/gatekeepers. I
| guess kind of like a decentralized wiki.
|
| In my view, blockchains shine where you need auditable global
| state, bonus points if you don't want central control in your
| operations (obviously this then kicks the can to the core
| devs). This use-case is fairly miniscule for most applications,
| though.
|
| As far as currency, I think they also have their use-cases as
| well but most people don't want a global audit trail of all
| their purchases. Things like Monero and Zcash shine here. The
| value fluctuations are obnoxious, though.
|
| I'm saying this as a big blockchain skeptic. I think most of
| the things people use them for are silly.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Shared append only, very slow database. It's a very specific
| setup but maybe there's some scenario for it.
| imchillyb wrote:
| Banks have been using the Ethereum blockchain for behind the
| scenes bad debt transfers for about seven years now.
|
| Banks don't want to deal with treasury departments nor do the
| banks want to be beholden to federal governments regarding
| prime rates.
|
| Ethereum allows banks to circumvent these types of issues
| because rates are dictated by banks not by governments and
| their treasury departments.
|
| Crypto currency is coming soon. It's only a matter of time and
| validating processes now.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| How can a bank transfer debt via Ethereum?
|
| Isn't "debt" a contract between the bank and a user? How do
| you transfer that and to whom?
| maxcoder4 wrote:
| That sounds suspicious. Maybe a few years back out would
| work, but now cryptocurrency is pretty regulated.
|
| And at the same time it's not battle tested. Any CFO who
| signs of on something like that risks shareholder fury when
| anything goes wrong.
| lottin wrote:
| What?
| schmichael wrote:
| Citation needed (from a non-crypto-booster source)
| tdudhhu wrote:
| Some days ago ICP showed it can run ML on a blockchain.
|
| While this is nice and does show that distributed computing is
| a real possibility I also don't think that anyone is going to
| switch from Amazon/Azure to ICP any time soon.
|
| But I must say the idea is really nice. It's very easy to
| develop Actor model based software and deploy it on ICP.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| > ML on a blockchain
|
| I would actually love it if you had a link with more info on
| that. Don't take this the wrong way, but my first guess would
| be that that basically isn't true; either it's not actually
| machine learning (as is understood today) or it isn't
| actually a blockchain but rather normal distributed computing
| being "verified" via blockchain somehow?
|
| Would love to be proven wrong though.
| dlubarov wrote:
| There are basically two approaches to on-chain inference:
| consensus-based approaches (several parties run inference
| and give a claimed result), and zkML (one party runs
| inference and proves the result cryptographically).
|
| zkML can be done using general-purpose ZK libraries (since
| they support arbitrary computations), or there are some
| specialized tools for proving ML inference, such as
| https://github.com/ddkang/zkml. It's currently pretty
| expensive to prove huge models like LLMs, but there's a lot
| of work being done to make it more practical.
| tdudhhu wrote:
| https://internetcomputer.org/
|
| A YT video about this: https://youtu.be/wk3FxuA5DKs
|
| I am still very sceptical about this because it looks very
| slow, but it seems to work.
| valcron1000 wrote:
| > It looks like not a single HN reader is using blockchain
| technology for anything.
|
| > If nobody is using blockchain technology outside of
| blockchain projects
|
| HN is very adverse to the blockchain space. This is not the
| best place to look for people using the technology since 9/10
| times you would get downvoted to oblivion
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > What could be a near term use case?
|
| Ransomware, evading currency controls, funding North Korea.
| toenail wrote:
| > But is it used for anything?
|
| What people like you usually miss.. hodling bitcoin IS one of
| its uses, store of value.
|
| > It looks like not a single HN reader is using blockchain
| technology for anything.
|
| You haven't missed anything, that's why we say bitcoin, not
| blockchain.
| scyclow wrote:
| People love shitting on NFTs, but there's still a really good
| art scene based on NFTs and smart contracts. And once you have
| digital objects that you actually care about, all the web3
| infrastructure is surprisingly useful.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > there's still a really good art scene based on NFTs
|
| Is that a "good art" scene, or a "good" art scene?
| pa7x1 wrote:
| I'm going to leave here a few dashboards that might be
| interesting:
|
| See Ethereum scale day by day (today Ethereum is doing 160 tps,
| more than 10x its initial throughput):
| https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity
|
| You can now settle your transactions on rollups for mere cents:
| https://fees-growthepie.streamlit.app/
|
| Neat dashboards regarding blob usage:
| https://dune.com/hildobby/blobs
|
| What's coming... With the current number of blobs Ethereum will
| likely be able to do up to ~500 tps on average. ~1000 tps in
| burst mode. But in coming upgrades the blobs will be sharded
| through Data Availability Sampling, allowing validators to verify
| only a subset while being sure that the rest of blobs are
| validated and available by the rest of the network. This will
| allow to scale Ethereum up to 256 blobs. Which will give Ethereum
| a throughput of around ~100K tps.
| dinobones wrote:
| Thank-you for the helpful links. Can you share some resources
| to learn about data availability sampling?
|
| Also, have folks invented a cheap/fast way of going from L2 <->
| L2 without having to do an L1 tx?
|
| I fear that L2s may never be adopted due to network
| segmentation, but if it's possible for all L2s to interchange
| with each other cheaply, then it's just as good as L1 IMO.
| everfree wrote:
| This post from the ethresearch forum goes over data
| availability sampling (DAS) in detail.
|
| https://ethresear.ch/t/from-4844-to-danksharding-a-path-
| to-s...
|
| To transfer assets from L2 to L2, of course the naive
| implementation is to use a centralized intermediary, of which
| there are currently many that are reasonably priced. There
| are ways to go between zk-L2s without any central broker in
| theory; I'm not sure whether that's also true of
| optimistic-L2s.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > have folks invented a cheap/fast way of going from L2 <->
| L2 without having to do an L1 tx?
|
| There are bridge providers like Connext
| (https://www.connext.network/), Hop
| (https://portal.arbitrum.io/projects/bridges-and-on-
| ramps?pro...), LayerZero (https://layerzero.network/) etc
| that provide liquidity across L2s to make it simple and cheap
| for common assets like USDC, ETH, etc.
|
| Attempts to do this trustlessly without relying on a
| liquidity provider do exist, but they're not mature enough to
| mention yet. They usually rely on zk proofs to validate that
| an asset was bridged from one chain to another.
|
| L2s are presently already supporting more activity than L1,
| with 4 L2s regularly doing more TPS than L1. Agreed that
| fragmentation is a concern, but I think we'll get there soon
| where the UX is abstracted away for users and the assets flow
| cheaply.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Adding to this list, for getting average 24 hour costs for
| rollups: https://gasfees.io
|
| The "growthepie" link above wasn't working in my browser due to
| "lack of WebGL support".
| pavon wrote:
| For context, Visa and MasterCard combined average 10k's tps,
| and are capable of processing 100k's tps at peak. So if it
| works out, that would put Ethereum in the same ballpark.
| Mahn wrote:
| Key quote from the article:
|
| > Many have argued that the lack of large-scale applications for
| the past ten years proves that crypto is useless. I have always
| argued against this: pretty much every crypto application that is
| not financial speculation depends on low fees - and so while we
| have high fees, we should not be surprised that we mainly see
| financial speculation!
|
| > Now that we have blobs, this key constraint that has been
| holding us back all this time is starting to melt away. Fees are
| finally much lower; my statement from seven years ago that the
| internet of money should not cost more than five cents per
| transaction is finally coming true.
|
| ---
|
| All of this depends on so called "Layer 2s", which adds a great
| deal of UX complexity to the end user. I'm skeptical that this is
| best way to solve the scalability issues that plague
| cryptocurrency, but I will say that this looks to me like it has
| a much better shot of succeeding that anything Bitcoin has ever
| attempted to do on this front.
| dylkil wrote:
| > which adds a great deal of UX complexity to the end user
|
| Not exactly, L2s are being abstracted away, end users
| eventually wont even be aware what chain they are interacting
| with without tracing the tx
| danpalmer wrote:
| 5 cents per transaction is high for many parts of the world,
| and exceptionally high if every interaction in normal life is
| turned into a financial transaction.
| kinakomochidayo wrote:
| It'll come down even more as blobs are increased, and PeerDAS
| is implemented
| medo-bear wrote:
| What parts of the world? In non developed countries bank fees
| are actually higher than in the West.
|
| In Bosnia a most basic bank account costs about $3 per month,
| or 60 Ethereum transactions (most people usually have 10 - 20
| transaction per month). For paying bills banks usually charge
| a commission fee of 1%. And if you want to send money to
| someone 50 kms away but across the border the fee is $20 with
| few days wait for money to be received.
| danpalmer wrote:
| In many parts of the world people are basically cash-only
| and don't pay fees for handling money most of the time. The
| "unbanked". This is the market Ethereum wants to serve.
|
| Also I'd challenge 10-20 transactions per month. I think in
| many near cash-less societies it might be closer to 5 per
| day.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > The "unbanked". This is the market Ethereum wants to
| serve
|
| M-Pesa got there first, and without the taint of
| cryptocurrency. It's a real, deployed, working system at
| scale, and has been for years. The idea that a "hope to
| serve" after a bit more crypto tech innovation will open
| an untapped market ... well, I wouldn't take it
| seriously. It's wishful thinking at both ends of the
| supply and demand equation.
| thisgoesnowhere wrote:
| You can't invest in M-Pesa tho so it's obviously very bad
| /s
| medo-bear wrote:
| Bosnia and eastern and most of europe in general is
| certainly not cash-less nor do most people desire that
| searchableguy wrote:
| Most major developing countries in Asia have p2p instant
| payments and bank accounts for free or with minimum balance
| requirement.
|
| UPI (Indian market) launched cross border support with a
| couple countries starting this year. 118 billion
| transactions happen via UPI annually.
|
| I do think there is some niche market where ethereum
| payments will shine but hard to beat free and instant
| systems already in place at far bigger scale.
| bawolff wrote:
| If their vision is "applications" it feels like any price is
| too high. Would you sign up for hn if it cost 5 cents? Even
| though that is nothing in terms of money (for most of us),
| the friction of money actually being involved in and of
| itself probably makes it not worth it. Especially when its
| just a silly internet thing.
| danpalmer wrote:
| It's not just sign up though, it's posting comments,
| upvoting, etc. Every "write" becomes a transaction, many
| with their own tokens.
|
| > the friction of money actually being involved ... makes
| it not worth it
|
| This is it. There are very few people who live for this
| level of financialisation.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I'd happily pay a subscription to a closed community if I
| thought the value of the community was higher than the
| entry cost. However, I'm glad Hacker News is open and
| democratic.
| tootie wrote:
| In the many, many years they have spent building a pile of
| gibberish tech, traditional finance has begun transitioning to
| T-0 settlement on centralized platforms. FedNow is going to
| replace ACH and wires and allow 24/7 real-time transactions.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > FedNow is going to allow 24/7 real-time transactions.
|
| Following in the steps of what EU and UK did few years ago.
| (1)
|
| And which always made this cryptocurrency fast settlement
| stuff sound laughable - like they're describing just what a
| regular bank account does, and it's supposedly their special
| magic, so what?
|
| People need to look outside of the USA to understand the
| state of the art.
|
| You can even find these systems in Africa already (2)
|
| 1) https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/instant_
| pa...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments
|
| 2) https://www.mfw4a.org/news/instant-payment-transactions-
| afri...
| AlienRobot wrote:
| >adds a great deal of UX complexity to the end user
|
| Considering there are people who don't understand the bitcoins
| aren't INSIDE a physical wallet, that ship has sailed and made
| a revolution or two already.
| camillomiller wrote:
| > On March 13, the Dencun hard fork activated, enabling one of
| the long-awaited features of Ethereum: proto-danksharding (aka
| EIP-4844, aka blobs). Initially, the fork reduced the transaction
| fees of rollups by a factor of over 100, as blobs were nearly
| free. In the last day, we finally saw blobs spike up in volume
| and the fee market activate as the blobscriptions protocol
| started to use them. Blobs are not free, but they remain much
| cheaper than calldata.
|
| Can someone please confirm this isn't the incipit from an
| unpublished Douglas Adams novel?
| EMM_386 wrote:
| Hmm ... "proto-danksharding" which activated the "blobscriptions
| protocol" so that blobs are "much cheaper than calldata", all of
| this helping it to become an "L2-centric ecosystem". In the end,
| this leaves them "not confident enough in the complex code of an
| optimistic or SNARK-based EVM verifier".
|
| I'm sold ... just tell me where to transfer the money.
| everfree wrote:
| The actual quote is "we are not *currently* at the point where
| we can be confident enough in the complex code of an optimistic
| or SNARK-based EVM verifier". The article seems to imply that
| "in the end", they will be.
| elcritch wrote:
| Unlike the parent, the full quote gives me more confidence
| that they're being serious about the upgrades to the Ethereum
| protocol. This stuff is all cutting edge distribute systems
| and zero-knowledge proofs work, so of course it's going to
| take a while to reach confidence in how it'll work.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| Something tells me that even if/when the optimistic or SNARK-
| based EVM verifier is production-ready, the person you're
| replying to will still feel somewhat unconvinced.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| Very likely, but if they get it sorted out one day he will
| be using it without knowing.
|
| If you have no interest whatsoever and they start
| explaining to you all the cryptography behind establishing
| a secure connection to your bank most people would dismiss
| it as mumbo-jumbo. But now you can tell your grandma to
| look out for the little green lock on the web that makes
| her account secure.
| teekert wrote:
| If only I could use meta-transflectors to transmogrify my
| unobtainium-like power conduit flex provider. I mean we're
| almost there for crying out loud. Just modulate the hyper
| spanner at a rotating frequency. I guess they just need to
| epibrate a bit more.
| d-lisp wrote:
| When setting up my DWS on the chain I performed a fresh
| implementation of the flex spanning system so that sharded
| stakes were accordingly modulated when dilution factors are
| on the rise. Retro validators should never rely on the sole
| consideration of performative liquidity, and that's why in
| most use-cases, distributive-non-passing underfitted
| categorization of assets is preferable. Every DNP-uca
| implementation has proto-failure systems that allow for
| better mining experiences, in fact every time assets are
| minted you obtain by-products of the initial dilution thanks
| to the false commitment that is produced when pseudo-stakers
| correct the current derivation according to the relative
| spike index. That's why the tech interested me at first.
| teekert wrote:
| LLMs at their finest.
| Zetaphor wrote:
| Just because you're unfamiliar with the technology doesn't
| mean it's nonsense. The failing is yours in actually looking
| into these things rather than trying to be funny.
|
| If you explain to most people how a TLS handshake works it
| will sound to them as equally nonsensical. This technology is
| complicated, this article is targeted at an audience that
| understands the technology, not one that needs a "My first
| introduction to distributed computing"
| earnesti wrote:
| TLS handshake actually makes sense for average programmers
| who understand basic cryptography.
|
| Ethereums problem is that it is a badly designed
| clusterfuck. The newer blockchains will likely take over.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| /r/vxjunkies
|
| Wait, this isn't reddit.
| PufPufPuf wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if all that was just a made up jargon
| and this was a joke article. But again, it's about blockchain,
| so the line is thin.
| Zetaphor wrote:
| There's actually interesting technology being developed here
| in the areas of distributed computation and zero trust
| systems. The implementations of Zero Knowledge Proofs and
| ongoing work on ZK-SNARKS I personally find most fascinating.
|
| There's a lot more to this ecosystem than just speculation.
| At it's core is a distributed world computer but all anyone
| knows about is money.exe because this stuff is immensely
| complex.
|
| If you look into the researcher rather than paying attention
| to the soyjack youtube thumbnails you'll find the actual
| substance. Nobody is going do the work for you. Or you know,
| just write it all off with a snide joke because "crypto bad".
| talldayo wrote:
| > At it's core is a distributed world computer but all
| anyone knows about is money.exe because this stuff is
| immensely complex.
|
| Alternatively, because the only way to use the
| aforementioned distributed world computer is to engage with
| money.exe and buy more CoinTokens. Imagine all the kids out
| there who will be delighted to learn a pay-per-use code
| interpreter. "Hey mom, I need your credit card to cover the
| gas while I debug my smart contract."
|
| But assuming you have the money to spend, it's a whole
| universe of possibilities! Just make sure to cash in before
| actually trying to _use_ any of them.
| agumonkey wrote:
| coti is also using dags for some reason
| taxmeifyoucan wrote:
| For anyone interested in in-depth details of Ethereum protocol
| and upgrades, checkout the Protocol Study Group. Yesterday's
| presentation was about scaling and Danksharding, given by its
| creator https://epf.wiki/
| Version467 wrote:
| As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually
| delivers on its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero.
| Sure, it's all drugs and stolen credit cards, but it does
| undeniably solve a real world problem for its users instead of
| just being used as a vehicle for speculative investment.
|
| With that said, I think if anyone comes up with a "killer-app"
| for crypto, then it'll be on the Ethereum chain. They seem to be
| the only ones who consistently work towards adding capabilities
| to the core technology.
|
| Edit: I realize I haven't commented on the article at all. This
| sentence stood out to me:
|
| > Today, we have all the tools we'll need, and indeed most of the
| tools we'll ever have, to build applications that are
| simultaneously cypherpunk and user-friendly. And so we should go
| out and do it.
|
| Clearly, this is an important step. But the two examples he
| provides as a beacon of what's possible (Daimo and Farcaster)
| don't inspire a lot of enthusiasm. Daimo is just a decentralized
| version of Venmo and Farcaster is a protocol to build social
| networks on the blockchain, which is yet another tool and not an
| application.
|
| I do still like reading Vitaliks thoughts. He's a pretty good
| writer, and it's evident that he spends a lot of time actually
| thinking about the topics he writes about.
| rglullis wrote:
| One of the things that made me less skeptical of Ethereum was
| that Vitalik has consistently argued based on his view of
| "Ether as digital oil to power the blockchain", which is to say
| that the point is _not_ to just hodl, but to create a core
| technology that can enable different applications.
|
| I still think that we should not forget the "I need a
| censorship-proof way to send money to someone overseas" story,
| but mostly as a hedge against the existing institutions, not as
| an immediate need.
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "Ether as digital oil to power the blockchain"_
|
| This has made you _less_ skeptical of what he's peddling?
| That slogan is a series of red flags in only eight words. He
| could be selling actual snake oil.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| Actual snake oil has actual benefits. It's fake snake oil
| you want to avoid.
|
| Effect of Erabu Sea Snake (Laticauda semifasciata) Lipids
| on the Swimming Endurance of Mice
| https://karger.com/anm/article-
| abstract/51/3/281/41756/Effec...
| bloppe wrote:
| This is an all-time HN comment
| maxcoder4 wrote:
| I'll rephrase a bit for the HN crowd: "The Ethereum
| currency (Ether) value proposition is that it is used to
| pay for decentralized apps on the Ethereum Blockchain. The
| more application and users are there, the more Ether is
| needed and hence it's value goes up". At least that's how I
| understand it.
|
| OPs point is that most cryptocurrency advocates go for "but
| my token and hold, it is sure to grow 10x in a few months"
| and I (like probably OP) consider it misleading baseless
| hope at best, fraud usually.
| PKop wrote:
| >the point is not to just hodl, but to create a core
| technology that can enable different applications
|
| This is has been said about every coin since the beginning of
| crypto.
| 486sx33 wrote:
| +1 for monero
| gehwartzen wrote:
| >As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually
| delivers on its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero.
| Sure, it's all drugs and stolen credit cards, but it does
| undeniably solve a real world problem for its users instead of
| just being used as a vehicle for speculative investment.
|
| This is exactly my use case (the former not later) with Monero
| and it's been amazing. Only marginally more difficult than to
| shop on amazon and feels a million times less sketchy than
| trying to find something locally. The speculative nature of
| crypto is therefore more of an annoyance as it causes the price
| to fluctuate too much between paying, shipping, and fund-
| release.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| So you pay with monero but you still need to give them an
| address to ship to which some probably store somewhere where
| the police might eventually find it ? I guess depending on
| the local police the chances of that leading to any trouble
| are lower than getting stabbed by a tweaker when you go out
| into the community to purchase your stuff
| grigio wrote:
| yep, Monero is the CBDC cure, what Bitcoin wanted to be in the
| origin
| shuntress wrote:
| The "Killer App" for a cryptocurrency would be the ability to
| use it as a currency.
| maxcoder4 wrote:
| As the OP said, the cryptocurrency you're looking for is
| Monero.
| shuntress wrote:
| "Bitcoin but its anonymous" does not make Monero a real
| currency.
|
| I guess it helps that its value is relatively stable.
|
| But I still can't realistically use it. I can't walk in a
| store, buy something, then pay with Monero which is
| obviously disqualifying on it's own. But in addition to
| that, if I want to give a friend some Monero I would have
| to walk them through making a new account with some new app
| which they won't do because it's pointless anyways.
| 486sx33 wrote:
| Shopify for monero is an idea being kicked around, there
| are also monero marketplaces for non- illegal things
|
| Monero could be used in a store and some stores do take
| monero! Its quick, with low fees
| shuntress wrote:
| It's maybe quick with low fees now while no one is using
| it.
|
| It has the exact same practical problems every other
| distributed cryptocurrency has preventing it from being
| useful as an actual currency. If Monero ever started
| seeing adoption as an actual currency it would fall apart
| just like Bitcoin.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Is moner just quick for now but as it scales it'll be
| slow like bitcoin? Or is there something unique about
| monero that makes it fast?
| evantbyrne wrote:
| imo this is less of a technical issue and more of a
| regulatory one in 2024. Sending and receiving large amounts
| of btc/eth for instance might take a minute. For lower value
| point of sale transactions you don't really have to wait. And
| that's money in your pocket at that point not an IOU like a
| pending transaction at a US bank. Paying capital gains on
| transactions and constantly changing value dampens adoption
| quite a bit though
| shuntress wrote:
| You could maybe call it a technical issue or an issue of
| adoption but the fact is that no one is scanning Monero
| wallet QR codes to buy coffee.
| medellin wrote:
| I mean i have been using bitcoin for the past 6 years to send
| money to people outside the country with little issue.
|
| I know it's hard to imagine for the west but places exist where
| working around the local financial system is a huge benefit.
| bawolff wrote:
| > Basically, Ethereum is no longer just a financial ecosystem.
| It's a full-stack replacement for large parts of "centralized
| tech", and even provides some things that centralized tech does
| not (eg. governance-related applications). And we need to build
| with this broader ecosystem in mind.
|
| I have respect for ethereum. It seems like one of the few
| cryptocurrency projects actually trying to push those ideas as
| far as they'll go, instead of just being endless scams.
|
| But still, at the end of the day, this feels like endless
| complexity and in the end we are just back we started:
| applications we could already do much better using traditional
| technologies.
|
| What even is the elevator pitch use case of all this?
| kinakomochidayo wrote:
| > What even is the elevator pitch use case of all this?
|
| > It's a full-stack replacement for large parts of "centralized
| tech"
|
| Anti-censorship, permissionless data that lasts longer than
| centralized companies..?
| smoovb wrote:
| My (non-crypto) company uses USDC daily on L2 Arbitrum for
| international settlement, and have seen the fees drop to a few
| cents per transaction with the release of blobs. We have
| replaced the need for wires/TransferWise/Revolut on several of
| our routes.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Awesome. Can I ask the name of your company?
| defiamazing wrote:
| There is absolutely no reason for USDC to be on a blockchain
| other than to interact with DeFi. Once DeFi hype dies USDC
| will be instantly outcompeted by a centralized solution. It's
| multisig controlled anyway so it's the same thing.
| Destiner wrote:
| Here's an elevator pitch. Your twitter/facebook/github account
| gets banned, what do you do? With farcaster/lens/radicle, it's
| impossible.
| thisgoesnowhere wrote:
| Direct RSS from the source does this as well. What's the
| difference?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > On March 13, the Dencun hard fork activated, enabling one of
| the long-awaited features of Ethereum: proto-danksharding (aka
| EIP-4844, aka blobs). Initially, the fork reduced the transaction
| fees of rollups by a factor of over 100, as blobs were nearly
| free. In the last day, we finally saw blobs spike up in volume
| and the fee market activate as the blobscriptions protocol
| started to use them. Blobs are not free, but they remain much
| cheaper than calldata.
|
| > proto-danksharding
|
| > rollups
|
| > blobscriptions
|
| > calldata
|
| I realize this post is the High Priest of Ethereum preaching to
| his disciples, but we are deep deep into "how many angels can
| dance on the head of a pin?" territory here.
|
| Does anyone know if you can use multiple slurp juices on a single
| danksharded blob?
| digger495 wrote:
| They should shove it _waaaaay_ up their butthole.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| People who still think cryptocurrency is pointless are like
| fundamentalist Christians saying that condoms are pointless.
|
| You're trying to imagine away the use cases because you don't
| agree with them.
| conradev wrote:
| > Today, we have all the tools we'll need, and indeed most of the
| tools we'll ever have, to build applications that are
| simultaneously cypherpunk and user-friendly.
|
| > The Daimo wallet is explicitly describing itself as Venmo on
| Ethereum, aiming to combine Venmo's convenience with Ethereum's
| decentralization
|
| I will forever point this out, but Venmo has a "Private" setting.
| Your balance on Ethereum is public, as is any transaction you
| send.
|
| It just isn't a viable replacement for cash
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-03-28 23:00 UTC)