The Limits to Blockchain Scalability(vitalik.ca)
vitalik.ca
The Limits to Blockchain Scalability
https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html
465 comments
Regarding your first reason, I think having more users can increase the security of the data, even if you're conservative about the minimum number of users you need.
For the second, if you don't care about data permanence, it's relatively easy to put the data on a second layer. Just host the data there and put merkle roots on the blockchain for consensus. If you want to verify state transitions on chain you can do that too, e.g. with zksnarks.
For the second, if you don't care about data permanence, it's relatively easy to put the data on a second layer. Just host the data there and put merkle roots on the blockchain for consensus. If you want to verify state transitions on chain you can do that too, e.g. with zksnarks.
It is always preferred to require less resources. There must be a healthy balance. If Ethereum accomplishes what a lot of us hope, allowing home-hobbyists to run nodes and at least break-even in staking or profit a small amount will be crucial. Relying on goodwill from a small amount of technically-adept-yet-centralized operators is how we get to the Tor situation where everyone knows the government runs most of the exit nodes.
Genuine question: can crypto economics provide incentives for a more decentralised Tor?
I'm talking about being paid crypto for hosting a tor node, and charged crypto for using a tor node. Using privacy technologies like ring signatures of course.
I'm talking about being paid crypto for hosting a tor node, and charged crypto for using a tor node. Using privacy technologies like ring signatures of course.
Technologies like payment channels would allow for automatic pay-as-you-go schemes where your Tor client would pay sub-cent amounts for every MB used or whatever.
But privacy is indeed a big challenge since we're talking about Tor.
But privacy is indeed a big challenge since we're talking about Tor.
It's an interesting idea, and being worked on by Nym
https://nymtech.net/
Mysterium and other decentralized vpns let you do that.
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There is already a PoS chain. After the ice age in June/July, there will be another PoW chain as well. It will be up to individuals and exchanges to decide which one they want to do transactions on. And they might even choose "both", as in the case of Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.
Proof of stake is six months away and always will be.
Ethereum proof of stake beacon chain has been live for 6 months now: https://beaconcha.in/
That's running only a fraction of the network, though. The concerns are whether or not it can scale (or at least those have always been my concerns), and I'm of the opinion it won't work.
I hope I'm wrong.
I hope I'm wrong.
It's not running any of the network. It's running on its own, and it's well beyond the point required for security. It reads the PoW chain, and reaches its own consensus on block hashes.
What remains is to alter the clients of the PoW chain, so that it reads the PoS chain. Then instead of choosing the blocks with the most accumulated work, it chooses the blocks chosen by the PoS chain.
That's not a big change for the PoW clients, it doesn't add load to the PoS network at all, and it's all that's needed to eliminate mining.
What remains is to alter the clients of the PoW chain, so that it reads the PoS chain. Then instead of choosing the blocks with the most accumulated work, it chooses the blocks chosen by the PoS chain.
That's not a big change for the PoW clients, it doesn't add load to the PoS network at all, and it's all that's needed to eliminate mining.
>Vitalik is consistently one of the most interesting people to follow
Really? He has consistently argued for on-chain scaling and for people to not validate the blockchain state much like Elon Musk, with his seemingly 101-level understanding of blockchains. This post is a strange 180 from Vitalik's usual "do the opposite of Bitcoin because that is good marketing".
Now Vitalik is aware of the importance of running a full node and validating the blockchain state, and how blockchains can't scale, and how keeping blockchain bloat limited to allow easy verification is important? I'm convinced Vitalik has been replaced by some Bizzarro version of himself because of how astonishing this 180 is.
It took creating an entirely new separate altcoin, complete with massive premine for himself, and the greater part of a decade, to finally realize Bitcoiners were right all along.
Such a strange mountain man fantasy!
Really? He has consistently argued for on-chain scaling and for people to not validate the blockchain state much like Elon Musk, with his seemingly 101-level understanding of blockchains. This post is a strange 180 from Vitalik's usual "do the opposite of Bitcoin because that is good marketing".
Now Vitalik is aware of the importance of running a full node and validating the blockchain state, and how blockchains can't scale, and how keeping blockchain bloat limited to allow easy verification is important? I'm convinced Vitalik has been replaced by some Bizzarro version of himself because of how astonishing this 180 is.
It took creating an entirely new separate altcoin, complete with massive premine for himself, and the greater part of a decade, to finally realize Bitcoiners were right all along.
Such a strange mountain man fantasy!
Provide sources please. This post is full of odd conclusions and non-sequitors.
Vitalik was a big blocks supporter for a long time. I saw this post as a 180 as well.
"Now I personally can see that it’s not axiomatically true that doing nothing is safest, especially in the context of a changing environment (for example I continue to believe that Bitcoin’s failure to raise its blocksize by a significant amount in 2016–17 was a travesty and a great violation of many people’s expectations of the protocol, and one that led to more total losses due to excess txfees than the amount lost in the MtGox hack), but this is the argument that you need to be arguing against."[1]
[1] 12/26/2018 https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/he-imagines-a-world-in-wh...
"Now I personally can see that it’s not axiomatically true that doing nothing is safest, especially in the context of a changing environment (for example I continue to believe that Bitcoin’s failure to raise its blocksize by a significant amount in 2016–17 was a travesty and a great violation of many people’s expectations of the protocol, and one that led to more total losses due to excess txfees than the amount lost in the MtGox hack), but this is the argument that you need to be arguing against."[1]
[1] 12/26/2018 https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/he-imagines-a-world-in-wh...
It's literally the only comments on Ethereum there have been from knowledgeable people. Show me a source from an expert that thinks Ethereum would scale
All the experts, including the numerous researchers who work on and have contributed to ETH 2.0, say Ethereum can scale. Any one with a passing familiarity with the cryptocurrency space knows that.
Yes everyone with a passing familiarity knows this. People knowledgeable see the obvious scaling problems
The only people who claim Ethereum can't scale are those who claim Lightning Network can scale, and have aggressively silenced any one who says otherwise within the Bitcoin space for the last six years, while declaring themselves to be the only experts on the issue.
Who cares who claims what? It's more important to hear the reasons behind the claims. Vitalik makes excellent points about tolerances and safety margins needed in decentralized networks like this. People who call for increasing the key parameters almost never acknowledge the fact that things aren't as simple as what some fast machines can process in ideal conditions.
He's repeating the criticisms of his own system as if they are new ideas. A positive I guess if he wasn't already aware of these issues
It is a bit surprising to hear this stuff coming from him, since Ethereum isn't exactly known for prudence in scaling.
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This has some really questionable assumptions.
Like the part about permanence.
"An important property of a blockchain that users really value is permanence. A digital asset stored on a server will stop existing in 10 years when the company goes bankrupt or loses interest in maintaining that ecosystem. An NFT on Ethereum, on the other hand, is forever."
This is wrong 2 times.
First, there is no general requirement of permanent storage. Its not important at all. It solely depend on the use case. Thats why it is very much inefficient to use a DLT with that property to move value (btc/eth etc.). I dont care how my coins was moved 10 years ago. The only storage that is relevant for me, now, for value transfer is the current undisputed state (aka the balances). Sure the Tx history has use cases and people who need them should store them but making that a technical requirement is only going to degrade performance and drive up Tx cost.
BTW cash does not have a recorded Tx history who thought "p2p cash" should? Its only because of the way BTC works (chain of all Tx) that this "believe" became common. Its technically not needed at all. There is absolutely no reason to recreate the whole chain to come to the current state. You either use the current state or you cant participate. If you would find an error in the chain whatcha gonna do about? Nothing. The current majority accepted state is all that matters. The "validation" is placebo it does nothing. And by running the exact same software as anyone else your validation would simply do the same error if there would be one.
Second, the "forever" is a blatant lie. There is no way to know. Its will exist for however long at least someone is willing to store it. Exactly the same is true if storing is optional. But without the downside of crippling the performance and impose cost on the people running the DLT. The cost for storage should be paid by the user of the storage. If I can impose cost on all participants of a decentral system for all eternity with a one time payment then the system is deeply flawed. The possibility for abuse can be limited by simply making it expensive at any given time. But this obviously reduces the usefulness of the whole system especially for value transfer. The idea of an internet of value is to make value move like data, dirt cheap and decentral so no one takes a cut.
"An important property of a blockchain that users really value is permanence. A digital asset stored on a server will stop existing in 10 years when the company goes bankrupt or loses interest in maintaining that ecosystem. An NFT on Ethereum, on the other hand, is forever."
This is wrong 2 times.
First, there is no general requirement of permanent storage. Its not important at all. It solely depend on the use case. Thats why it is very much inefficient to use a DLT with that property to move value (btc/eth etc.). I dont care how my coins was moved 10 years ago. The only storage that is relevant for me, now, for value transfer is the current undisputed state (aka the balances). Sure the Tx history has use cases and people who need them should store them but making that a technical requirement is only going to degrade performance and drive up Tx cost.
BTW cash does not have a recorded Tx history who thought "p2p cash" should? Its only because of the way BTC works (chain of all Tx) that this "believe" became common. Its technically not needed at all. There is absolutely no reason to recreate the whole chain to come to the current state. You either use the current state or you cant participate. If you would find an error in the chain whatcha gonna do about? Nothing. The current majority accepted state is all that matters. The "validation" is placebo it does nothing. And by running the exact same software as anyone else your validation would simply do the same error if there would be one.
Second, the "forever" is a blatant lie. There is no way to know. Its will exist for however long at least someone is willing to store it. Exactly the same is true if storing is optional. But without the downside of crippling the performance and impose cost on the people running the DLT. The cost for storage should be paid by the user of the storage. If I can impose cost on all participants of a decentral system for all eternity with a one time payment then the system is deeply flawed. The possibility for abuse can be limited by simply making it expensive at any given time. But this obviously reduces the usefulness of the whole system especially for value transfer. The idea of an internet of value is to make value move like data, dirt cheap and decentral so no one takes a cut.
When I talk to people in the world about what about blockchains they find exciting, the aspect of permanence really is one of the things that people find attractive. I agree it's use-case dependent, but the problem is that once you go down the use-case-dependence rabbit hole, developers and users have to really think "am I creating something permanent or not"? And once you have to think even a little bit, you lose 50%+ of the magic. Having properties that you just get by default that you don't even have to think to obtain is quite important.
The good news though is that you don't need permanent storage of history to be supported by the base protocol itself. Consensus nodes don't need to know about history to verify the current chain. There are plenty of other mechanisms for storing historical data: bittorrent, centralized archives, Filecoin-style networks, etc etc. You just need the blockchain's throughput to be not _too_ high, so that it's actually possible for these protocols to store what comes out.
Definitely nothing is permanent, but you can get pretty close to "permanent unless civilization collapses", and that's much better than "data could drop at any time if a few people just forget"!
The good news though is that you don't need permanent storage of history to be supported by the base protocol itself. Consensus nodes don't need to know about history to verify the current chain. There are plenty of other mechanisms for storing historical data: bittorrent, centralized archives, Filecoin-style networks, etc etc. You just need the blockchain's throughput to be not _too_ high, so that it's actually possible for these protocols to store what comes out.
Definitely nothing is permanent, but you can get pretty close to "permanent unless civilization collapses", and that's much better than "data could drop at any time if a few people just forget"!
In anthropology I believe it is accepted truth that when you ask people questions regarding motivations or rationalisations for their behavior, particularly group behavior, answers given do not necessarily equate to observed reality, ie. "Oh yeah I'm fully in to decentralisation and taking down the establishment." -> "I want a lambo."
> Definitely nothing is permanent, but you can get pretty close to "permanent unless civilization collapses"
Let's be honest here and acknowledge that we're talking about "permanent unless your particular fork of one particular blockchain collapses". There's a vast chasm between that and all of civilization.
Let's be honest here and acknowledge that we're talking about "permanent unless your particular fork of one particular blockchain collapses". There's a vast chasm between that and all of civilization.
I disagree. If bitcoin or ethereum gets completely killed today, I'm confident you'll still be able to download the chain in four decades (assuming civilisation still exists) out of pure history and data hoarding.
Right. The "value" / perceived value won't be permanent (and may be very subjective and disputed from the start), but in terms of long-term data integrity and availability, blockchains can be useful. An NFT ownership transfer that occurred in 2020 on some blockchain may not be considered too valuable in a hypothetical 2040 world where almost no one is using that (or perhaps any) blockchain anymore, but you can likely at least retrieve that record and be pretty sure the data is accurate and wasn't tampered with.
So a (at-one-point reasonably popular) blockchain or protocol forking or falling out of use won't actually result in that data being lost to time. You'd probably need a major worldwide catastrophe for there to be a significant risk of that.
So a (at-one-point reasonably popular) blockchain or protocol forking or falling out of use won't actually result in that data being lost to time. You'd probably need a major worldwide catastrophe for there to be a significant risk of that.
> but you can likely at least retrieve that record and be pretty sure the data is accurate and wasn't tampered with.
You will have no way to tell if this data came from the legitimate Ethereum blockchain that was in use in 2021, a forked chain, or even a completely fake one which has zero blocks in common with the real one.
The authenticity guarantee in blockchains doesn't come from cryptographic schemes, it comes from the network agreeing on some shared truth. If the network is no more, you have no way to tell the truth.
You will have no way to tell if this data came from the legitimate Ethereum blockchain that was in use in 2021, a forked chain, or even a completely fake one which has zero blocks in common with the real one.
The authenticity guarantee in blockchains doesn't come from cryptographic schemes, it comes from the network agreeing on some shared truth. If the network is no more, you have no way to tell the truth.
If the network is totally gone, it's indeed more tricky. But if it still exists, and if there's no indication that the main network and chain was ever disrupted between then and now, you can be pretty confident the data is accurate if you join the network.
If no one uses it anymore or if it's so little-used that it's schismed into tons of other chains over the years, I think you can still probably obtain the original data you're looking for, but it'll take more effort to verify its authenticity.
Especially if the data you're looking for occurred at a time when the network was healthy and intact (like 2020), all you need to do in 2040 is find a block number and corresponding root hash that existed in 2020. I think these'll likely be possible to find even if the network's dead, and you can compare them against several different sources to increase confidence that they're not fake. Then as you scour the internet and download different published blockchain copies, you can truncate it back to that block number and compare the hash.
It's possible your search will be futile and you'll be unable to find a trustworthy record of block numbers and root hashes or that you'll be unable to find a verified 2020 blockchain, but I think your odds will be pretty good if the internet hasn't collapsed. Either way, as Vitalik pointed out, the odds are way higher you'll be able to find that compared to some data you entered into some SaaS in 2020.
If no one uses it anymore or if it's so little-used that it's schismed into tons of other chains over the years, I think you can still probably obtain the original data you're looking for, but it'll take more effort to verify its authenticity.
Especially if the data you're looking for occurred at a time when the network was healthy and intact (like 2020), all you need to do in 2040 is find a block number and corresponding root hash that existed in 2020. I think these'll likely be possible to find even if the network's dead, and you can compare them against several different sources to increase confidence that they're not fake. Then as you scour the internet and download different published blockchain copies, you can truncate it back to that block number and compare the hash.
It's possible your search will be futile and you'll be unable to find a trustworthy record of block numbers and root hashes or that you'll be unable to find a verified 2020 blockchain, but I think your odds will be pretty good if the internet hasn't collapsed. Either way, as Vitalik pointed out, the odds are way higher you'll be able to find that compared to some data you entered into some SaaS in 2020.
> you can be pretty confident the data is accurate if you join the network.
And how do you know the network you're joining is actually the original ethereum network and a completely different blockchain?
Like every peer to peer network in existence, an Ethereum node needs to connect to a reliable first node (a “tracker” in the bittorrent protocol, idk what's the name in the ethereum world). If they are down, you're on your own to join the network, and you have little guarantee that the network you're joining is working on the original ethereum blockchain.
In fact, after the ethereum foundation is gone, what guarantee do you have that you are running an actual ethereum node and not something running a modified protocol?
And how do you know the network you're joining is actually the original ethereum network and a completely different blockchain?
Like every peer to peer network in existence, an Ethereum node needs to connect to a reliable first node (a “tracker” in the bittorrent protocol, idk what's the name in the ethereum world). If they are down, you're on your own to join the network, and you have little guarantee that the network you're joining is working on the original ethereum blockchain.
In fact, after the ethereum foundation is gone, what guarantee do you have that you are running an actual ethereum node and not something running a modified protocol?
>And how do you know the network you're joining is actually the original ethereum network and a completely different blockchain?
The "if you join the network" is contingent on the network still being active and widely used; presumably with the Ethereum Foundation or some successor also still being active. I may not've made that fully clear in the first paragraph.
If that were the case, you could ask the same question right now. And the answer is that they publish an official client you can download and should be able to trust. This would be the case in 2040 if the network is still active and the foundation still exists.
If the foundation is gone and the network is mostly dead, then it'd indeed be much harder or perhaps impossible. The second part of my answer covers that scenario:
>If no one uses it anymore or if it's so little-used that it's schismed into tons of other chains over the years, I think you can still probably obtain the original data you're looking for, but it'll take more effort to verify its authenticity.
>Especially if the data you're looking for occurred at a time when the network was healthy and intact (like 2020), all you need to do in 2040 is find a block number and corresponding root hash that existed in 2020. I think these'll likely be possible to find even if the network's dead, and you can compare them against several different sources to increase confidence that they're not fake. Then as you scour the internet and download different published blockchain copies, you can truncate it back to that block number and compare the hash.
>It's possible your search will be futile and you'll be unable to find a trustworthy record of block numbers and root hashes or that you'll be unable to find a verified 2020 blockchain, but I think your odds will be pretty good if the internet hasn't collapsed. Either way, as Vitalik pointed out, the odds are way higher you'll be able to find that compared to some data you entered into some SaaS in 2020.
The "if you join the network" is contingent on the network still being active and widely used; presumably with the Ethereum Foundation or some successor also still being active. I may not've made that fully clear in the first paragraph.
If that were the case, you could ask the same question right now. And the answer is that they publish an official client you can download and should be able to trust. This would be the case in 2040 if the network is still active and the foundation still exists.
If the foundation is gone and the network is mostly dead, then it'd indeed be much harder or perhaps impossible. The second part of my answer covers that scenario:
>If no one uses it anymore or if it's so little-used that it's schismed into tons of other chains over the years, I think you can still probably obtain the original data you're looking for, but it'll take more effort to verify its authenticity.
>Especially if the data you're looking for occurred at a time when the network was healthy and intact (like 2020), all you need to do in 2040 is find a block number and corresponding root hash that existed in 2020. I think these'll likely be possible to find even if the network's dead, and you can compare them against several different sources to increase confidence that they're not fake. Then as you scour the internet and download different published blockchain copies, you can truncate it back to that block number and compare the hash.
>It's possible your search will be futile and you'll be unable to find a trustworthy record of block numbers and root hashes or that you'll be unable to find a verified 2020 blockchain, but I think your odds will be pretty good if the internet hasn't collapsed. Either way, as Vitalik pointed out, the odds are way higher you'll be able to find that compared to some data you entered into some SaaS in 2020.
When the pillars of some derivative blockchain have collapsed, how will we be certain about which download is the untampered version?
I agree with this, a durable record of every transaction ever performed is in fact an anti-feature for a digital ledger.
Mimblewimble[0] is one interesting solution to this. Unfortunately, the requirement in current implementations (such as Grin) that both wallets be online to complete a transaction, eliminates some valuable types of transaction, such as sending coin to a cold wallet.
I do think for a 'world computer' like Ethereum, being able to ignore a substantial amount of old state is going to be critical for long-term use.
I also think that "blatant lie" is unnecessarily harsh. A blockchain is aspirationally forever, and it is a massively replicated data structure: it's certainly durable, and I would expect it to last a long time relative to, say, a random torrent.
This is my major concern with the direction Ethereum is going, which I could caricature as "scale up massively and keep everything forever": it becomes so expensive to keep copies of all data, that only large institutional players will bother, and not many of them. This makes blockchain integrity a "take my word for it" kind of thing, and the whole system is only as durable as the increasingly-enormous data centers which hold all that information.
[0]: https://scalingbitcoin.org/papers/mimblewimble.txt
Mimblewimble[0] is one interesting solution to this. Unfortunately, the requirement in current implementations (such as Grin) that both wallets be online to complete a transaction, eliminates some valuable types of transaction, such as sending coin to a cold wallet.
I do think for a 'world computer' like Ethereum, being able to ignore a substantial amount of old state is going to be critical for long-term use.
I also think that "blatant lie" is unnecessarily harsh. A blockchain is aspirationally forever, and it is a massively replicated data structure: it's certainly durable, and I would expect it to last a long time relative to, say, a random torrent.
This is my major concern with the direction Ethereum is going, which I could caricature as "scale up massively and keep everything forever": it becomes so expensive to keep copies of all data, that only large institutional players will bother, and not many of them. This makes blockchain integrity a "take my word for it" kind of thing, and the whole system is only as durable as the increasingly-enormous data centers which hold all that information.
[0]: https://scalingbitcoin.org/papers/mimblewimble.txt
Vitalik addresses that issue in the section on statelessness and state expiry.
>the whole system is only as durable as the increasingly-enormous data centers which hold all that information.
That is exactly what Ethereum's direction has been for years now. It is centralized on Amazon AWS via Infura's nodes (which they charge access to, mind you). It's not a world computer. It's EC2 with additional complexity (and fees).
That is exactly what Ethereum's direction has been for years now. It is centralized on Amazon AWS via Infura's nodes (which they charge access to, mind you). It's not a world computer. It's EC2 with additional complexity (and fees).
Nothing consensus critical on Ethereum runs on Infura nodes. Plenty of people run full nodes on hosted services like Infura, but that applies equally to the original cryptocurrency and current number 2 coin.
The delegation of node operation to third party services is done more for convenience/up-time guarantees than any node operation cost considerations, and Ethereum would be fine if these third party services were all coopted or forced to shut down, because again, Ethereum's consensus protocol has zero dependencies on them.
The delegation of node operation to third party services is done more for convenience/up-time guarantees than any node operation cost considerations, and Ethereum would be fine if these third party services were all coopted or forced to shut down, because again, Ethereum's consensus protocol has zero dependencies on them.
The blockhcain may be "forever" but the history is definitely is not. Its a lie because the most likely outcome are that Ethereum dies because the history cripples it to an unusable system (its a lie then) or the the history dependency is removed so it can keep working (its a lie then as well because which part of the history is preserved is up to whoever does want to preserve it and no longer "guaranteed by the system")
BTW history-sharding[1] isn't that complicated. If a DLT is build from the ground up with payment in mind and thus history is completely optional then you dont have to do any tech magic. But ofc this is not the case for Ethereum as it was not made for payment.
[1]https://xrpl.org/history-sharding.html
BTW history-sharding[1] isn't that complicated. If a DLT is build from the ground up with payment in mind and thus history is completely optional then you dont have to do any tech magic. But ofc this is not the case for Ethereum as it was not made for payment.
[1]https://xrpl.org/history-sharding.html
State expiry/rent is being worked on in Ethereum, and would totally solve the problem of indefinite state size growth. This article, courtesy again of the hard-working Buterin, details the designs under consideration:
https://hackmd.io/@vbuterin/state_expiry_paths
https://hackmd.io/@vbuterin/state_expiry_paths
If these schemes with inherent MLM-Ponzi structures crash, how long will mining be lucrative enough? Perhaps then mining will distribute to the holders to try to maintain some value or use?
But you conclude with your worry that there are real costs, and zero pitch decks or white papers I've seen include arguably the most important competitive factor: cost of "how people do it now" vs. cost doing it "this new way;" and in-person, real life networks of trust networks has been how we've become as successful as we have as a society - and so works quite well - and doesn't inherently lineup with "trustless" propaganda of these popular blockchains; if blockchain is a valuable tool, say for legal institutions, they could create their own and run it themselves under agreement.
But you conclude with your worry that there are real costs, and zero pitch decks or white papers I've seen include arguably the most important competitive factor: cost of "how people do it now" vs. cost doing it "this new way;" and in-person, real life networks of trust networks has been how we've become as successful as we have as a society - and so works quite well - and doesn't inherently lineup with "trustless" propaganda of these popular blockchains; if blockchain is a valuable tool, say for legal institutions, they could create their own and run it themselves under agreement.
Blockchains don't have a concept of a "current undisputed state". If you managed to create a longer (and valid) Bitcoin chain on your own than the longest one there is at this very moment, and publish it, all other clients will start using it as the new longest chain. And if two equally long chains are published at about the same time, and clients get split, things will probably get resolved in the next block. So, most of the time, the current longest chain won't probably change, and if you discount, say, the 6 newest blocks (using bitcoin as an example), then it will definitely not change. So, the "undisputed state" and the "current state" are actually separate concepts in a PoW blockchain.
Regarding storage, you argument that transactions shouldn't matter, since the important thing is the state. But then we're back to the fundamental problem. Why should we trust a state created from thin air that has no proof of how it was created? That's just a distributed database, which has is uses, but it's not a distributed blockchain.
Regarding storage, you argument that transactions shouldn't matter, since the important thing is the state. But then we're back to the fundamental problem. Why should we trust a state created from thin air that has no proof of how it was created? That's just a distributed database, which has is uses, but it's not a distributed blockchain.
Don't assume blockchains are bitcoin or BTC like systems.
I talk about the "current and undisputed or better indisputable (final) state". Bitcoin does not have this. Hence it can not function without history. This is a property of BTC not one of blockchains in general.
Plenty other systems have a current state and a final state and there is no "better state" that can comer around and replace it. Final really means final. Its often called a closed ledger. Other systems have checkpoints and what not to reach a similar goal.
BTCs "final" is just to wait some blocks its never final its just becomes incredibly unlikely to change the longer you wait. This is objectively worse than having a final state and on top of that it requires the history rather than just the last final state.
>Why should we trust a state created from thin air that has no proof of how it was created? That's just a distributed database, which has is uses, but it's not a distributed blockchain.
You have no choice. Either you agree with the current final state or you dont use the blockchain. Your choice is to use it or not. You choice is not to validate or not or validate and fix something if its wrong.
The act of validating doesn't do anything. No matter what your validating gives you in the end you can only accept the current final state of the running network or not use it at all.
Also its not created out of thin air. It was validated by the code. If there is a mistake it is there because of the code people used back when it happened. If you were there running your node it would have made the same mistake. whats the point to find it now? (beside the fact that it was already found and fixed) It doesn't change the state the state is final. Bugs happen. If you assume cheating however then well you should assume someone would have screamed back when it happens so you would already know that someone cheated somehow. Whats the point of validating it? you already know you dont want to use that chain. Zero reason to detect the cheating yourself.
We know pretty well from all incidents where blockchains had to be "fixed" there is no way someone would find an unknown incident by the placebo validation act.
I talk about the "current and undisputed or better indisputable (final) state". Bitcoin does not have this. Hence it can not function without history. This is a property of BTC not one of blockchains in general.
Plenty other systems have a current state and a final state and there is no "better state" that can comer around and replace it. Final really means final. Its often called a closed ledger. Other systems have checkpoints and what not to reach a similar goal.
BTCs "final" is just to wait some blocks its never final its just becomes incredibly unlikely to change the longer you wait. This is objectively worse than having a final state and on top of that it requires the history rather than just the last final state.
>Why should we trust a state created from thin air that has no proof of how it was created? That's just a distributed database, which has is uses, but it's not a distributed blockchain.
You have no choice. Either you agree with the current final state or you dont use the blockchain. Your choice is to use it or not. You choice is not to validate or not or validate and fix something if its wrong.
The act of validating doesn't do anything. No matter what your validating gives you in the end you can only accept the current final state of the running network or not use it at all.
Also its not created out of thin air. It was validated by the code. If there is a mistake it is there because of the code people used back when it happened. If you were there running your node it would have made the same mistake. whats the point to find it now? (beside the fact that it was already found and fixed) It doesn't change the state the state is final. Bugs happen. If you assume cheating however then well you should assume someone would have screamed back when it happens so you would already know that someone cheated somehow. Whats the point of validating it? you already know you dont want to use that chain. Zero reason to detect the cheating yourself.
We know pretty well from all incidents where blockchains had to be "fixed" there is no way someone would find an unknown incident by the placebo validation act.
> BTCs "final" is just to wait some blocks its never final its just becomes incredibly unlikely to change the longer you wait. This is objectively worse than having a final state and on top of that it requires the history rather than just the last final state.
You can have that type of finality with centralized protocols built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain — Lightning Network being the standout example.
N.B. this issue is nuanced in PoS due to the complete absence of a quantitative fork ranking protocol. The PoW blockchains pow1, pow2, pow3 can be algorithmically ranked according to cumulative hash difficulty unfakeable sans external input (electricity). High difficulty == high certainty. Conversely, the PoS blockchains pos1, pos2, pos3, cannot be compared sans external information/trust. All theoretical finality in PoS is based on trust in central authorities — this type of “finality” is similar to the finality you have in a particular OSS project’s Git history, insofar as the history is dictated by trusted authorities in all cases.
As many commentators have quipped historically, you can build centralized systems on top of decentralized ones, but the reverse isn’t true.
You can have that type of finality with centralized protocols built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain — Lightning Network being the standout example.
N.B. this issue is nuanced in PoS due to the complete absence of a quantitative fork ranking protocol. The PoW blockchains pow1, pow2, pow3 can be algorithmically ranked according to cumulative hash difficulty unfakeable sans external input (electricity). High difficulty == high certainty. Conversely, the PoS blockchains pos1, pos2, pos3, cannot be compared sans external information/trust. All theoretical finality in PoS is based on trust in central authorities — this type of “finality” is similar to the finality you have in a particular OSS project’s Git history, insofar as the history is dictated by trusted authorities in all cases.
As many commentators have quipped historically, you can build centralized systems on top of decentralized ones, but the reverse isn’t true.
>You can have that type of finality with centralized protocols built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain — Lightning Network being the standout example.
Whats the point? No one wants that beside that LN needs BTC on chain Tx which if you dont arbitrary define as final after some blocks makes it exactly the same - not final.
PoS/PoW is rather irrelevant. we already have solutions to make blocks/ledgers final its doesn't need PoW or PoS its just a properties that BTC doesn't have because it was designed without. There is no fundamental reason why it cant have it.
Whats the point? No one wants that beside that LN needs BTC on chain Tx which if you dont arbitrary define as final after some blocks makes it exactly the same - not final.
PoS/PoW is rather irrelevant. we already have solutions to make blocks/ledgers final its doesn't need PoW or PoS its just a properties that BTC doesn't have because it was designed without. There is no fundamental reason why it cant have it.
I don’t quite catch your point. The chances your brain continues functioning over the next twelve minutes is not 100%, but 100% less some infinitesimally small fraction. 99.999999...% is as close physical reality ever comes to 100%.
> PoS/PoW is rather irrelevant
It’s an incredibly relevant fact that PoS blockchains pos1, pos2, pos3 cannot be compared without overtly trusting central authorities to give you the “correct” answer. Conversely, the PoW blockchains pow1, pow2, and pow3 can be objectively ranked by cumulative hashrate using simple mathematical comparisons.
Contrary to popular belief — and despite the endless handwaiving PoS acolytes engage in over social media — PoS blockchains continue to lack a meaningful answer to this predicament which doesn’t boil down to overtly trusting central authorities. Which begs the question: why do they need a blockchain at all?
> PoS/PoW is rather irrelevant
It’s an incredibly relevant fact that PoS blockchains pos1, pos2, pos3 cannot be compared without overtly trusting central authorities to give you the “correct” answer. Conversely, the PoW blockchains pow1, pow2, and pow3 can be objectively ranked by cumulative hashrate using simple mathematical comparisons.
Contrary to popular belief — and despite the endless handwaiving PoS acolytes engage in over social media — PoS blockchains continue to lack a meaningful answer to this predicament which doesn’t boil down to overtly trusting central authorities. Which begs the question: why do they need a blockchain at all?
All block chains in practice require trusting central authorities (trust the code, trust the protocol, trust the math behind it, trust the hardware, trust people to honor their off-chain transactions, trust authorities to help when they don't etc.) so this whole fantasy about 'trustless systems' is meaningless anyway.
You can't create trustless electronic systems for humans. There is simply too much complexity in even the simplest hardware and software for any single person to be able to understand without trusting others. And this doesn't just apply to the 'unwashed masses', but to every single CS researcher, OS programmer or Linus Torvalds.
You can't create trustless electronic systems for humans. There is simply too much complexity in even the simplest hardware and software for any single person to be able to understand without trusting others. And this doesn't just apply to the 'unwashed masses', but to every single CS researcher, OS programmer or Linus Torvalds.
This is blatantly false. Bitcoin doesn't require anything at all besides the idea of a most work chain humanity produced. You just pick it and that's it. You cant pick wrong, there is no chain bigger.
All other cryptos are a fantasy and cannot provide any comparable guarantees.
All other cryptos are a fantasy and cannot provide any comparable guarantees.
>You cant pick wrong, there is no chain bigger.
It happened multiple times that a longer change was discoed shortly after. So in reality you have to wait some blocks to reduce the risk of a longer chain to almost zero.
Also the trust you missed is that you have to TRUST that at least 50% of the work is produces and controlled (pool owner) by honest humans, because if not they could collude and re-org/double-spend. which essentially means you will pick the wrong chain because they make you think its the longest while secretly mining a longer chain that will eventually repalce the once you picked. There is absolutely no way you would know before its to late so you blindly trust that from an unknown number of people the majority is honest.
If you take mining pools into account you trust a hand full of people who control them.
>All other cryptos are a fantasy and cannot provide any comparable guarantees.
Obvious nonsense, other tech has defined finality. Not pick the longest and if a longer shows up later you switch. These systems provide MORE guarantees.
It happened multiple times that a longer change was discoed shortly after. So in reality you have to wait some blocks to reduce the risk of a longer chain to almost zero.
Also the trust you missed is that you have to TRUST that at least 50% of the work is produces and controlled (pool owner) by honest humans, because if not they could collude and re-org/double-spend. which essentially means you will pick the wrong chain because they make you think its the longest while secretly mining a longer chain that will eventually repalce the once you picked. There is absolutely no way you would know before its to late so you blindly trust that from an unknown number of people the majority is honest.
If you take mining pools into account you trust a hand full of people who control them.
>All other cryptos are a fantasy and cannot provide any comparable guarantees.
Obvious nonsense, other tech has defined finality. Not pick the longest and if a longer shows up later you switch. These systems provide MORE guarantees.
How do you, personally, know that the chain is correct? Have you ever checked the hashes? Have you ever checked the transactions? Have you ever proved that the math they use is correct? Have you ever read the code for any BTC client?
You're trusting an awful lot of assumptions much more complex than 'the longest chain is right'.
You're trusting an awful lot of assumptions much more complex than 'the longest chain is right'.
How do you ensure that you got the correct code? Without the correct consensus rules that are encoded in the software, you can't be sure if the blockchain you are following is the right one.
> PoS blockchains pos1, pos2, pos3 cannot be compared without overtly trusting central authorities to give you the “correct” answer.
I have seen you make this point before on here but I don't see how that is true. Can you elaborate? Don't PoS chains typically choose forks based on how much is staked? Last time we discussed this you never explained what is wrong with that approach.
I have seen you make this point before on here but I don't see how that is true. Can you elaborate? Don't PoS chains typically choose forks based on how much is staked? Last time we discussed this you never explained what is wrong with that approach.
When the PoW chain ‘pow’ forks into pow1 and pow2 with both sides claiming to be the original ‘pow’, the general public can compare the cumulative hashrate of pow1 and pow2 to ascertain legitimacy (see: Bitcoin v Bcash, 2016).
In PoW, external input to the system — electricity — powers hashrate. Electricity is altogether foreign to the context of cryptocurrency, and by necessitating the wasting of electricity on one fork over another, PoW consensus systems ensure miners can vote on only one side of a fork without bearing additional costs.
When the PoS chain ‘pos’ forks into pos1 and pos2, however, with both sides claiming to be the original ‘pos’, there is no hashrate to base our decision on. External inputs are never burned in any PoS chain’s forward progress.
If a Bitcoin v Bcash political fork were to unfold in a pure PoS context, the general public would be faced with a situation where both pos1 and pos2 chains were equally secure. If pos1 claimed to be the rightful heir to the ‘pos’ title while defensively slashing pos2 sympathizers, it wouldn’t harm pos2’s ability to make forward progress on the pos2 chain while pos2 also slashes pos1 sympathizers and equally claims to be the rightful heir to the ‘pos’ title.
It’s as if an OSS project forked with both forks claiming to be the real thing. If both sides are steadfast, it is ultimately up to the public to pick winners and losers based on nothing besides social signaling. See: 2015-2017 block size debate in Bitcoin for pitfalls to this.
Notice how no math is involved whatsoever in the decision to pick pos1 over pos2.
Notice how human intervention is inherently required to reach a decision as to which side of the pos1/pos2 split is given title to ‘pos’.
Pure PoS consensus is substantially similar to Git repos. If people are just going to trust a nebulous human hierarchy to resolve disputes like this, then the system is de facto permissioned, and a public blockchain isn’t required.
In PoW, external input to the system — electricity — powers hashrate. Electricity is altogether foreign to the context of cryptocurrency, and by necessitating the wasting of electricity on one fork over another, PoW consensus systems ensure miners can vote on only one side of a fork without bearing additional costs.
When the PoS chain ‘pos’ forks into pos1 and pos2, however, with both sides claiming to be the original ‘pos’, there is no hashrate to base our decision on. External inputs are never burned in any PoS chain’s forward progress.
If a Bitcoin v Bcash political fork were to unfold in a pure PoS context, the general public would be faced with a situation where both pos1 and pos2 chains were equally secure. If pos1 claimed to be the rightful heir to the ‘pos’ title while defensively slashing pos2 sympathizers, it wouldn’t harm pos2’s ability to make forward progress on the pos2 chain while pos2 also slashes pos1 sympathizers and equally claims to be the rightful heir to the ‘pos’ title.
It’s as if an OSS project forked with both forks claiming to be the real thing. If both sides are steadfast, it is ultimately up to the public to pick winners and losers based on nothing besides social signaling. See: 2015-2017 block size debate in Bitcoin for pitfalls to this.
Notice how no math is involved whatsoever in the decision to pick pos1 over pos2.
Notice how human intervention is inherently required to reach a decision as to which side of the pos1/pos2 split is given title to ‘pos’.
Pure PoS consensus is substantially similar to Git repos. If people are just going to trust a nebulous human hierarchy to resolve disputes like this, then the system is de facto permissioned, and a public blockchain isn’t required.
I don't understand how the situations you are describing are different between PoW and PoS.
In either case, after a fork, sympathizers of chain A or chain B will start mining/staking on the chain they like.
In either case, members of the public who just want the chain with the most security can pick the one with the most energy burned or most coin-days staked (that's the "hash rate" equivalent/external input with which to base your decision on).
What is the difference? How is human intervention inherently required in the PoS case any more or less than it's required in the PoW case?
In either case, after a fork, sympathizers of chain A or chain B will start mining/staking on the chain they like.
In either case, members of the public who just want the chain with the most security can pick the one with the most energy burned or most coin-days staked (that's the "hash rate" equivalent/external input with which to base your decision on).
What is the difference? How is human intervention inherently required in the PoS case any more or less than it's required in the PoW case?
If “coin-days staked” is massively higher on one side of a PoS chain fork, that doesn’t impact the other side’s security in the way PoW hashrate imbalances would.
To use a real world example, Bitcoin PoW mining consumes in excess of 100 Terawatt hours of electricity per year. If Bitcoin were to undergo a repeat of 2016 today, and the Bcash blockchain were to be serviced by miners consuming less than 10% of the energy spend of the incumbent (Bitcoin), Bcash could be easily 51% attacked.
But in the PoS corollary to Bitcoin v Bcash, coin-days staked would have no bearing on Bcash’s ability to continue making forward progress. Just so long as it remained difficult to either disrupt 1/3 of Bcash validators or acquire 51% of it, Bcash would continue functioning perfectly well (see: Jude C. Nelson [1]). At that point the rightful heir to the Bitcoin title would have to be determined socially. It could not be determined without top-down human intervention.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26810619
To use a real world example, Bitcoin PoW mining consumes in excess of 100 Terawatt hours of electricity per year. If Bitcoin were to undergo a repeat of 2016 today, and the Bcash blockchain were to be serviced by miners consuming less than 10% of the energy spend of the incumbent (Bitcoin), Bcash could be easily 51% attacked.
But in the PoS corollary to Bitcoin v Bcash, coin-days staked would have no bearing on Bcash’s ability to continue making forward progress. Just so long as it remained difficult to either disrupt 1/3 of Bcash validators or acquire 51% of it, Bcash would continue functioning perfectly well (see: Jude C. Nelson [1]). At that point the rightful heir to the Bitcoin title would have to be determined socially. It could not be determined without top-down human intervention.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26810619
> But in the PoS corollary to Bitcoin v Bcash, coin-days staked would have no bearing on Bcash’s ability to continue making forward progress.
How wouldn't it? The ongoing coin-days staked in that fork specifically is what allows it to continue making forward progress. Just like how in a PoW fork, the ongoing consumption of energy in that specific fork is what determines the security of that fork.
The argument you link in that other thread is interesting but it doesn't appear to be exactly what you are talking about. They seem to be describing an attack where nodes are taken offline by the attacker.
How wouldn't it? The ongoing coin-days staked in that fork specifically is what allows it to continue making forward progress. Just like how in a PoW fork, the ongoing consumption of energy in that specific fork is what determines the security of that fork.
The argument you link in that other thread is interesting but it doesn't appear to be exactly what you are talking about. They seem to be describing an attack where nodes are taken offline by the attacker.
> The ongoing coin-days staked in that fork specifically is what allows it to continue making forward progress.
Coin-days staked has no bearing on a pure PoS chain’s risk of being 51% attacked, nor does it have any bearing on the risk 1/3 or more of its validators get disrupted. Not so with PoW hashrate: enormous hashrate imbalances between forked PoW chains directly translate into decreased data immutability per the risk of deep chain reorgs.
Those risks are simply not present in the PoS corollary.
Coin-days staked has no bearing on a pure PoS chain’s risk of being 51% attacked, nor does it have any bearing on the risk 1/3 or more of its validators get disrupted. Not so with PoW hashrate: enormous hashrate imbalances between forked PoW chains directly translate into decreased data immutability per the risk of deep chain reorgs.
Those risks are simply not present in the PoS corollary.
There is nothing wrong with it, the only trusted component is (obviously) in terms of the initial distribution of the staked coins, which is the central feature of proof of stake.
No matter what your validating gives you in the end you can only accept the current final state of the running network or not use it at all.
I'm a bit of a blockchain noob, but isn't this the opposite of how blockchain works?
What I mean is, yes, you can design it the way you're saying, but doesn't that open you up to double-spend attacks and enforced centralization? You need a central ledger at that point, since your "final state" has to come from somewhere.
I'm confused but intrigued.
EDIT: Ah, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259783 points out the problems with this approach much more eloquently than I did.
I'm a bit of a blockchain noob, but isn't this the opposite of how blockchain works?
What I mean is, yes, you can design it the way you're saying, but doesn't that open you up to double-spend attacks and enforced centralization? You need a central ledger at that point, since your "final state" has to come from somewhere.
I'm confused but intrigued.
EDIT: Ah, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259783 points out the problems with this approach much more eloquently than I did.
If you have a final state double-spend attacks are actually impossible. They are based on the fact that someone can insert a transaction then "overwrite" it by providing a longer chain where the transaction didn't happen or went somewhere else.
This is only ever possible if there is no final state.
Also not sure why you would need centralization for what. Simplified a final state is when a majority declares it as final not a central entity does that. A double spend would have to include both transaction into the final sate which obviously would violate the systems rules. You cant move the same balance again when you already move it away. So that just wont happen because the code does not allow it. The second Tx is simply invalid just like if you would try to move more coins than you have.
If you want to read more about final consensus see https://xrpl.org/consensus-network.html There are ofc other project with similar concepts this is just the oldest.
This is only ever possible if there is no final state.
Also not sure why you would need centralization for what. Simplified a final state is when a majority declares it as final not a central entity does that. A double spend would have to include both transaction into the final sate which obviously would violate the systems rules. You cant move the same balance again when you already move it away. So that just wont happen because the code does not allow it. The second Tx is simply invalid just like if you would try to move more coins than you have.
If you want to read more about final consensus see https://xrpl.org/consensus-network.html There are ofc other project with similar concepts this is just the oldest.
Why do you need a blockchain at all then? This is what I really don't get. If you have your "majority" available at all times they just agree on account balances and call it a day. Just like WebMoney did circa 1998.
You dont need a blockchain its a misleading term. There are distributed ledgers that dont requires a chain of blocks.
Also majority in a decentral system is not that simple. It can be done with FBA (Federated Byzantine Agreement). If that's the case, then yes, account balances are simply agreed on and they call it a day (or technically its called a closed ledger). Then they add the next. Now ledger are blocks of data and the best way to order them is to chain them with hashes depending on the previous ledger (block). And we are back to "blockchain". Its still misleading the "magic" part isn't the chain of blocks. Its the fact that the double spending problem can be solves without an arbiter of truth.
>Just like WebMoney did circa 1998.
I dont know about the technical way this was implemented back then but most likely the system was operated by a single entity. There is some kind of master balance database and the all other sync with that. A double spending can be prevented by rules applies to the master DB. AKA a write-sync is denied if it violates the balance rules. This is easy to do centralizes and obviously who ever controls it can circumvent the rules if he wants to.
Also majority in a decentral system is not that simple. It can be done with FBA (Federated Byzantine Agreement). If that's the case, then yes, account balances are simply agreed on and they call it a day (or technically its called a closed ledger). Then they add the next. Now ledger are blocks of data and the best way to order them is to chain them with hashes depending on the previous ledger (block). And we are back to "blockchain". Its still misleading the "magic" part isn't the chain of blocks. Its the fact that the double spending problem can be solves without an arbiter of truth.
>Just like WebMoney did circa 1998.
I dont know about the technical way this was implemented back then but most likely the system was operated by a single entity. There is some kind of master balance database and the all other sync with that. A double spending can be prevented by rules applies to the master DB. AKA a write-sync is denied if it violates the balance rules. This is easy to do centralizes and obviously who ever controls it can circumvent the rules if he wants to.
> Simplified a final state is when a majority declares it as final not a central entity does that.
A majority of what? How do you know if you really have a majority or someone is faking a lot of identities and/or hiding a lot of real ones from you?
And if you later find out you had the wrong "majority" what do you do, if the state is final from your perspective?
A majority of what? How do you know if you really have a majority or someone is faking a lot of identities and/or hiding a lot of real ones from you?
And if you later find out you had the wrong "majority" what do you do, if the state is final from your perspective?
A majority of nodes who listen to each other (mutual agreement).
>How do you know if you really have a majority or someone is faking a lot of identities and/or hiding a lot of real ones from you?
You decide in advance from which nodes you want to have a majority agreement. It doesn't matter how many are out there only the ones you listen to matter (for you). However if you choose 1000 nodes and 900 of them are offline then your node will halt because it can not reach a majority. In other words you are forced to listen to reliable nodes if you want to have a reliable node. Also if you listen to 10 but they are all owned by a single person. He can lie to your node. In other words you are forced to listen to nodes operated by different entities. In reality there are for example companies, universities, maybe states non-profit organizations etc. Anyone who wants to use it has aligned interest to not collude with others especially competing entities like 2 different banks or payment provider.
This leads to a core of nodes who mostly all listen to each other. If you want to know the final state without even running a node this would be it. You ask as man nodes as possible form that core of nodes. What the core or nodes made final is final.
Spinning up thousands of nodes dont matter. No one will listen to them. They can all listen to each-other then you essentially created a fork. No one cares, you can no affect what is final and you cant fool anyone unless the voluntary listen to your nodes.
>.... hiding a lot of real ones from you?
The node network is p2p with signed messages there is no hiding. There is relaying ofc so each messages can go the fastest way possible but due to privet/public key encryption there is no tampering possible. If a node would block traffic it just goes another way. If a node "disappears" its considered offline so it is ignored but only if the rest still reaches majority. If too many go offline the network halts until majority can be reached again.
>And if you later find out you had the wrong "majority" what do you do, if the state is final from your perspective?
There can not be a "wrong majority" unless you listen to the wrong network of nodes. If you intentionally dont listen to the current core of the network you basically choose to listen to another network aka a fork.
Its like if you listen to BCH instead of BTC you are free to do so.
https://xrpl.org/consensus-principles-and-rules.html#how-con...
>How do you know if you really have a majority or someone is faking a lot of identities and/or hiding a lot of real ones from you?
You decide in advance from which nodes you want to have a majority agreement. It doesn't matter how many are out there only the ones you listen to matter (for you). However if you choose 1000 nodes and 900 of them are offline then your node will halt because it can not reach a majority. In other words you are forced to listen to reliable nodes if you want to have a reliable node. Also if you listen to 10 but they are all owned by a single person. He can lie to your node. In other words you are forced to listen to nodes operated by different entities. In reality there are for example companies, universities, maybe states non-profit organizations etc. Anyone who wants to use it has aligned interest to not collude with others especially competing entities like 2 different banks or payment provider.
This leads to a core of nodes who mostly all listen to each other. If you want to know the final state without even running a node this would be it. You ask as man nodes as possible form that core of nodes. What the core or nodes made final is final.
Spinning up thousands of nodes dont matter. No one will listen to them. They can all listen to each-other then you essentially created a fork. No one cares, you can no affect what is final and you cant fool anyone unless the voluntary listen to your nodes.
>.... hiding a lot of real ones from you?
The node network is p2p with signed messages there is no hiding. There is relaying ofc so each messages can go the fastest way possible but due to privet/public key encryption there is no tampering possible. If a node would block traffic it just goes another way. If a node "disappears" its considered offline so it is ignored but only if the rest still reaches majority. If too many go offline the network halts until majority can be reached again.
>And if you later find out you had the wrong "majority" what do you do, if the state is final from your perspective?
There can not be a "wrong majority" unless you listen to the wrong network of nodes. If you intentionally dont listen to the current core of the network you basically choose to listen to another network aka a fork.
Its like if you listen to BCH instead of BTC you are free to do so.
https://xrpl.org/consensus-principles-and-rules.html#how-con...
> There is absolutely no reason to recreate the whole chain to come to the current state. You either use the current state or you cant participate. If you would find an error in the chain whatcha gonna do about? Nothing. The current majority accepted state is all that matters.
All that matters is the valid history with the largest weight (longest chain rule in PoW). If an invalid branch somehow acquires more weight, it simply gets ignored (except by SPV clients in bitcoin, which trust others to validate). Exchanges/pools that accept an invalid branch are completely untrustworthy and should similarly be ignored.
All that matters is the valid history with the largest weight (longest chain rule in PoW). If an invalid branch somehow acquires more weight, it simply gets ignored (except by SPV clients in bitcoin, which trust others to validate). Exchanges/pools that accept an invalid branch are completely untrustworthy and should similarly be ignored.
>All that matters is the valid history with the largest weight (longest chain rule in PoW).
No, that exactly the believe that comes from BTCs implementation and while it may be true for BTC its completely irrelevant for other systems.
Imagine there is a room full of people all have a paper with the exact same transactions in order on it. Now a new person joins and copies someones paper and then verifies all Tx. Ok, now he only has the chain for one person that's not enough he needs the chain form as much other people as possible to assure he has the longest. Its perfectly fine to ask the others to only tell him the hash of the whole thing to see if he has the same chain.
So why even copy the chain first he could just start asking for the hash of the whole thing and if they all have the same there is no point to copy the chain.
He just needs to copy the last state (balances) so he can add Tx as well. (BTC does not have accounts with balances so BTC does not have the concept of "only the last state" but instead of the whole chain only the ends of the tree can be used to reduce the size. but again this is ONLY relevant for BTC and BTC clones/forks its NOT a property of DLTs in general)
No, that exactly the believe that comes from BTCs implementation and while it may be true for BTC its completely irrelevant for other systems.
Imagine there is a room full of people all have a paper with the exact same transactions in order on it. Now a new person joins and copies someones paper and then verifies all Tx. Ok, now he only has the chain for one person that's not enough he needs the chain form as much other people as possible to assure he has the longest. Its perfectly fine to ask the others to only tell him the hash of the whole thing to see if he has the same chain.
So why even copy the chain first he could just start asking for the hash of the whole thing and if they all have the same there is no point to copy the chain.
He just needs to copy the last state (balances) so he can add Tx as well. (BTC does not have accounts with balances so BTC does not have the concept of "only the last state" but instead of the whole chain only the ends of the tree can be used to reduce the size. but again this is ONLY relevant for BTC and BTC clones/forks its NOT a property of DLTs in general)
The model you propose is weak to sybil attacks [1] and is based on trust, while the BTC model is based on zero-trust.
There is nothing stopping someone malicious from spinning up thousands of nodes that all say the current hash is Y (with transactions that break the rules of the blockchain) while the remaining minority of nodes say the hash is actually X (the original longest chain). It is only by calculating the hash yourself, based on the full transaction history, that your node can be satisfied that it is on the longest chain. _*After*_ you have confirmed that you have the valid chain, it is possible to prune all the history to just the balances and to only validate new blocks as they come in, but in the case of a fork or malicious actors, your node may end up out of sync.
There may be other ways of tackling this issue that I am not aware of, but this problem in particular is one of the fundamental problems that Blockchains / Bitcoin were designed to solve (consensus among peers that is not disrupted by hostile actors). I have yet to see a better solution for this particular problem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
There is nothing stopping someone malicious from spinning up thousands of nodes that all say the current hash is Y (with transactions that break the rules of the blockchain) while the remaining minority of nodes say the hash is actually X (the original longest chain). It is only by calculating the hash yourself, based on the full transaction history, that your node can be satisfied that it is on the longest chain. _*After*_ you have confirmed that you have the valid chain, it is possible to prune all the history to just the balances and to only validate new blocks as they come in, but in the case of a fork or malicious actors, your node may end up out of sync.
There may be other ways of tackling this issue that I am not aware of, but this problem in particular is one of the fundamental problems that Blockchains / Bitcoin were designed to solve (consensus among peers that is not disrupted by hostile actors). I have yet to see a better solution for this particular problem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
One way to sidestep this: every few minutes, post the longest hash to some distributed medium that can't be edited, like Twitter. Then the threat model moves to "do we trust the person with the keys to this twitter account?"
However, this is also "zero trust," because you can write a program to verify every tweet as it's tweeted, and run that on a server somewhere.
But, now that I've written this, I suppose Vitalik's "Limits to Blockchain Scalability" addresses this: even if it's theoretically possible to validate the hashes on a supercomputer somewhere, you want your users to be the ones doing this validation, because otherwise it would be possible to compromise the "zero trust" model described above by compromising one twitter account and N verification servers. When N is small, this might be a realistic concern, especially if the verification servers are continuously pulling code changes from a central source code repo.
However, this is also "zero trust," because you can write a program to verify every tweet as it's tweeted, and run that on a server somewhere.
But, now that I've written this, I suppose Vitalik's "Limits to Blockchain Scalability" addresses this: even if it's theoretically possible to validate the hashes on a supercomputer somewhere, you want your users to be the ones doing this validation, because otherwise it would be possible to compromise the "zero trust" model described above by compromising one twitter account and N verification servers. When N is small, this might be a realistic concern, especially if the verification servers are continuously pulling code changes from a central source code repo.
If you write out to a centralized service like Twitter than you may as well just use a centralized database, it's much more efficient than a blockchain. A core property of a decentralized blockchain is that every person using the chain has equal opportunity to participate in the security of the chain, there are no "blessed users" and you should be able to use it without trusting any other user on it.
>One way to sidestep this: every few minutes, post the longest hash to some distributed medium that can't be edited, like Twitter. Then the threat model moves to "do we trust the person with the keys to this twitter account?"
The XRPL does this by broadcasting. Every node tells everyone what they think is right, therefore everyone can see who lies and more importantly no one can see who you listen too. Its hard to trick me if you dont even know whom I listen too. And you cant test it because once you lie to me you lie to everyone and that the last time anyone listened to you.
The "zero trust" thing is an illusion. All decentral systems trust that the majority of something does "the right thing".
Some system use the majority of hashpower other use other metrics and some lets you pick and include or exclude participants. BTC for example doesn't give you any options you simply trust that from 100% hashpower more than 50% is controlled by honest people. Its not zero trust its more like zero choice trust.
The XRPL does this by broadcasting. Every node tells everyone what they think is right, therefore everyone can see who lies and more importantly no one can see who you listen too. Its hard to trick me if you dont even know whom I listen too. And you cant test it because once you lie to me you lie to everyone and that the last time anyone listened to you.
The "zero trust" thing is an illusion. All decentral systems trust that the majority of something does "the right thing".
Some system use the majority of hashpower other use other metrics and some lets you pick and include or exclude participants. BTC for example doesn't give you any options you simply trust that from 100% hashpower more than 50% is controlled by honest people. Its not zero trust its more like zero choice trust.
> All decentral systems trust that the majority of something does "the right thing".
There's a difference between assuming a majority of relevant nodes are honest and relying on your ability to identify that majority.
There's a difference between assuming a majority of relevant nodes are honest and relying on your ability to identify that majority.
Yes, one thing is unavoidable, you have to assume that the majority is honest else the system simply can not work.
Identifying the majority is however optional. BTC for example does not. You pick the longest chain you can find at a given time. You assume the majority saw the same as the longest. If a longer shows up you switch and again you assume the majority saw that too and switched swell.
Other systems like the XRPL dont assume, every node defines from whom they want a majority. If 99% of them made a Tx final then there is no way that at a later point in time this final state can be changed because 1% can not ever reach a majority. The only thing that could happen is that the network forks and different parts of the network reach majority on different states. This problem is solved by raising the majority needed to 80% rather than >50% and on top of that is is further reduced by intentionally overlapping the nodes who are defined by each node. Essentially you need many nodes who listen to each other both ways. So I choose your node to be part of my nodes that must reach majority and you list my node. If you have 10 nodes all listen to the other 9 and require that form the other 9 80% agree then there is no way the network can ever fork. No 2 different states could ever reach 80%, its just not possible.
Now these 10 nodes are publicly known so if you operate a node you have to pick from these nodes the one you want but you must make sure that your node can not reach a majority without them. So you could pick all 10 and then add for example 5 others. Your node can hen also not fork because the 5 alone can never reach an 80% majority. and so on and on. every new node must have ~80% overlap to prevent forking. And all of that is super simple because the nodes are public and use public key encryption to identify themself.
Identifying the majority is however optional. BTC for example does not. You pick the longest chain you can find at a given time. You assume the majority saw the same as the longest. If a longer shows up you switch and again you assume the majority saw that too and switched swell.
Other systems like the XRPL dont assume, every node defines from whom they want a majority. If 99% of them made a Tx final then there is no way that at a later point in time this final state can be changed because 1% can not ever reach a majority. The only thing that could happen is that the network forks and different parts of the network reach majority on different states. This problem is solved by raising the majority needed to 80% rather than >50% and on top of that is is further reduced by intentionally overlapping the nodes who are defined by each node. Essentially you need many nodes who listen to each other both ways. So I choose your node to be part of my nodes that must reach majority and you list my node. If you have 10 nodes all listen to the other 9 and require that form the other 9 80% agree then there is no way the network can ever fork. No 2 different states could ever reach 80%, its just not possible.
Now these 10 nodes are publicly known so if you operate a node you have to pick from these nodes the one you want but you must make sure that your node can not reach a majority without them. So you could pick all 10 and then add for example 5 others. Your node can hen also not fork because the 5 alone can never reach an 80% majority. and so on and on. every new node must have ~80% overlap to prevent forking. And all of that is super simple because the nodes are public and use public key encryption to identify themself.
> The only thing that could happen is that the network forks and different parts of the network reach majority on different states.
That's the main thing that Bitcoin solved, how to resolve this exact situation. You can't just ignore this problem and claim to have a similarly resilient design.
> This problem is solved by raising the majority needed to 80% rather than >50% and on top of that is is further reduced by intentionally overlapping the nodes who are defined by each node.
The first part just makes it slightly more expensive to do a sybil attack. The second part relies on someone deciding what the overlapping nodes are, now you have to trust them.
> If you have 10 nodes all listen to the other 9 and require that form the other 9 80% agree then there is no way the network can ever fork.
And now you have a network that can't grow beyond 10 nodes, and if more than 10 show up you need to somehow choose the ones that are honest. Or someone needs to decide which nodes get to be the "special 10".
> Now these 10 nodes are publicly known
And chosen by whom? Can you trust the entity that chooses them? Can you trust them not to be hacked and share malicious nodes instead?
That's the main thing that Bitcoin solved, how to resolve this exact situation. You can't just ignore this problem and claim to have a similarly resilient design.
> This problem is solved by raising the majority needed to 80% rather than >50% and on top of that is is further reduced by intentionally overlapping the nodes who are defined by each node.
The first part just makes it slightly more expensive to do a sybil attack. The second part relies on someone deciding what the overlapping nodes are, now you have to trust them.
> If you have 10 nodes all listen to the other 9 and require that form the other 9 80% agree then there is no way the network can ever fork.
And now you have a network that can't grow beyond 10 nodes, and if more than 10 show up you need to somehow choose the ones that are honest. Or someone needs to decide which nodes get to be the "special 10".
> Now these 10 nodes are publicly known
And chosen by whom? Can you trust the entity that chooses them? Can you trust them not to be hacked and share malicious nodes instead?
> some distributed medium that can't be edited, like Twitter.
It this supposed to be a joke? Twitter is the exact opposite of that.
> Then the threat model moves to "do we trust the person with the keys to this twitter account?"
> However, this is also "zero trust,"
Ok, it's a joke.
It this supposed to be a joke? Twitter is the exact opposite of that.
> Then the threat model moves to "do we trust the person with the keys to this twitter account?"
> However, this is also "zero trust,"
Ok, it's a joke.
The solution is to use the hash power between points of consensus. Aka everyone thinks node A is state last year and here are the next N transactions resulting in the current state X. Sybil attack says no it’s actually B and here are the next N transactions resulting in state Y.
You can compare the effort it takes for history A vs History B. Now, unlike traditional 51% attacks you don’t just need hashing power that instant but instead for very long periods. As such you can compute a minimum history such that actual 51% attacks are significantly cheaper.
That might seem weaker, but Bitcoin’s trust is simply an economic argument. The actual consensus risk is from someone hacking a few nodes thus enabling a 51% attack at near zero cost.
You can compare the effort it takes for history A vs History B. Now, unlike traditional 51% attacks you don’t just need hashing power that instant but instead for very long periods. As such you can compute a minimum history such that actual 51% attacks are significantly cheaper.
That might seem weaker, but Bitcoin’s trust is simply an economic argument. The actual consensus risk is from someone hacking a few nodes thus enabling a 51% attack at near zero cost.
You mean like hacking a few mining pools like 4 and then performer 51% attack at near zero cost. Sounds silly but you get the point. The hacking argument is just not realistic. And it gets less and less relisting to more nodes there are. (and more realistic the fewer mining pools are needed for a 51% attack)
BTW if you would have full control over any 4 XRPL validator nodes at your choice you could do absolutely nothing. No double spend, not even halt the network, nothing at all. You could turn them off and only a few nerds who constantly check the network would notice. User of the actual network would not.
BTW if you would have full control over any 4 XRPL validator nodes at your choice you could do absolutely nothing. No double spend, not even halt the network, nothing at all. You could turn them off and only a few nerds who constantly check the network would notice. User of the actual network would not.
The solution I posted isn’t based on consensus, like Bitcoin even 1 node with a stronger history should win.
Validator nodes aren’t the weak points. It’s as you say the mining pools themselves, internally they need to be coordinated and have access to the Bitcoin network so they can’t be air gapped. So while all major pools have solid network security as they’re major targets, it’s still an actual risk.
Validator nodes aren’t the weak points. It’s as you say the mining pools themselves, internally they need to be coordinated and have access to the Bitcoin network so they can’t be air gapped. So while all major pools have solid network security as they’re major targets, it’s still an actual risk.
The risk is probably way smaller than intentionally collude to make a shitton of money and let it crash and burn.
The perfect exist scam if you want. If china for example would actually put an ultimatum on chines miners to shut down. It could potentially make perfect financial sense to leave with a big boom and make as much money as possible before closing.
The perfect exist scam if you want. If china for example would actually put an ultimatum on chines miners to shut down. It could potentially make perfect financial sense to leave with a big boom and make as much money as possible before closing.
Checkpoints are definitely a thing that could be implemented, but you then need to either trust that the software developers have put a valid (or honest) checkpoint into the software... otherwise you are back to trying to determine consensus among hostile actors. A simple >95% consensus on a checkpoint is not enough when it effectively costs fractions of a cent to create thousands or millions of nodes that could all claim to have the "most correct" checkpoint.
Checkpoints are best validated as part of the blockchain. Assuming a weekly checkpoint you’re only using very old checkpoints so valid ones have a lot of hashing power behind them, it’s not based on a popularity contest.
> while the BTC model is based on zero-trust.
Its based on trusting that never more than 50% hashpower colludes You still trust its just no defined whom you trust. Its an illusion of no trust. Any decentral system can somehow be fooled if someone has a majority of "something". There is simply no way to prevent that. For BTC this is "something" is hashpower for other system like the XRPL it is the scarcity of mutual trust. But the quorum is actually 80%. And an attacker cannot know how much "mutual trust" his nodes have with others.
>There is nothing stopping someone malicious from spinning up thousands of nodes that all say the current hash is Y
Thats true but is irrelevant because the node decides whom it asks. And if it gets conflicting answers it would not accept a final state.
As the owner of a node you add a list of other nodes that should be asked. Lets say you have 20 nodes on that list the fact that someone spins up thousands of nodes doesn't mean anything. No one connects to them and if they do only to send data or receive data that can be validated like a signed Tx. The nodes have no power. Listing to a node is completely voluntary. Obviously people listen to nodes which are publicly known who operates them and therefore it also clear that they are not operated by the same entities. In reality such nodes are run by exchanges, companies that use the network and universities that do blockchain research. But anyone could its just up to you how you convince anyone to use yours. Maybe you can create one that almost everyone will use. maybe even two. But your army of thousand nameless nodes is never gonna be added by anyone. They are just listing and if they speak no on listens to them.
Also very important is the fact that a successful Sybil attack could not do much that's useful. Even if all the 20 nodes my node was told to listen to, declares a double spend as final, my node would not. You cant change the code I run and the code says the state is invalid. You created more tokens and that's not possible. It doesn't need to know the Tx that lead to this to know its wrong. The node would simply halt and all I have to do is remove the dishonest nodes from my list an add honest nodes and it keeps going. And the fact that a node lied is public so once an attack was attempted the node is "burned" no one will ever trust it again. In other words an immense amount of work and month and month more likely years of luring people into trusting all your nodes would give you the power to halt the network once (or more likely only a certain node) for an indefinite time (because it depend on human interaction) then all your work is toast. Assuming you would even manage to get enough nodes. You dont see who listens to your nodes so you fire blind and only have once shot.
>There may be other ways of tackling this issue that I am not aware of, but this problem in particular is one of the fundamental problems that Blockchains / Bitcoin were designed to solve (consensus among peers that is not disrupted by hostile actors). I have yet to see a better solution for this particular problem.
The fundamental problem it solved was the double-spending problem without an arbitrator of truth. But it is technically only partially solved because there is no final state.
However if you can reach decentral consensus over anything (a single bit) then the double spending problem isn't even a real problem anymore. If there are 2 conflicting transaction at the same time simply pick one that render the later one invalid because it attempts to move non-existing tokens[1].
Here is the doc about Sybil attacks on the XRPL https://xrpl.org/consensus-protections.html#sybil-attacks there is probably more technical stuff to read about it the official forum threads from 2013 or so.
[1] https://xrpl.org/consensus-principles-and-rules.html#the-dou...
Its based on trusting that never more than 50% hashpower colludes You still trust its just no defined whom you trust. Its an illusion of no trust. Any decentral system can somehow be fooled if someone has a majority of "something". There is simply no way to prevent that. For BTC this is "something" is hashpower for other system like the XRPL it is the scarcity of mutual trust. But the quorum is actually 80%. And an attacker cannot know how much "mutual trust" his nodes have with others.
>There is nothing stopping someone malicious from spinning up thousands of nodes that all say the current hash is Y
Thats true but is irrelevant because the node decides whom it asks. And if it gets conflicting answers it would not accept a final state.
As the owner of a node you add a list of other nodes that should be asked. Lets say you have 20 nodes on that list the fact that someone spins up thousands of nodes doesn't mean anything. No one connects to them and if they do only to send data or receive data that can be validated like a signed Tx. The nodes have no power. Listing to a node is completely voluntary. Obviously people listen to nodes which are publicly known who operates them and therefore it also clear that they are not operated by the same entities. In reality such nodes are run by exchanges, companies that use the network and universities that do blockchain research. But anyone could its just up to you how you convince anyone to use yours. Maybe you can create one that almost everyone will use. maybe even two. But your army of thousand nameless nodes is never gonna be added by anyone. They are just listing and if they speak no on listens to them.
Also very important is the fact that a successful Sybil attack could not do much that's useful. Even if all the 20 nodes my node was told to listen to, declares a double spend as final, my node would not. You cant change the code I run and the code says the state is invalid. You created more tokens and that's not possible. It doesn't need to know the Tx that lead to this to know its wrong. The node would simply halt and all I have to do is remove the dishonest nodes from my list an add honest nodes and it keeps going. And the fact that a node lied is public so once an attack was attempted the node is "burned" no one will ever trust it again. In other words an immense amount of work and month and month more likely years of luring people into trusting all your nodes would give you the power to halt the network once (or more likely only a certain node) for an indefinite time (because it depend on human interaction) then all your work is toast. Assuming you would even manage to get enough nodes. You dont see who listens to your nodes so you fire blind and only have once shot.
>There may be other ways of tackling this issue that I am not aware of, but this problem in particular is one of the fundamental problems that Blockchains / Bitcoin were designed to solve (consensus among peers that is not disrupted by hostile actors). I have yet to see a better solution for this particular problem.
The fundamental problem it solved was the double-spending problem without an arbitrator of truth. But it is technically only partially solved because there is no final state.
However if you can reach decentral consensus over anything (a single bit) then the double spending problem isn't even a real problem anymore. If there are 2 conflicting transaction at the same time simply pick one that render the later one invalid because it attempts to move non-existing tokens[1].
Here is the doc about Sybil attacks on the XRPL https://xrpl.org/consensus-protections.html#sybil-attacks there is probably more technical stuff to read about it the official forum threads from 2013 or so.
[1] https://xrpl.org/consensus-principles-and-rules.html#the-dou...
>So why even copy the chain first he could just start asking for the hash of the whole thing and if they all have the same there is no point to copy the chain.
Well if I control enough nodes I can send you fake hashes (51% attack).
Well if I control enough nodes I can send you fake hashes (51% attack).
51% is actually a different attack.
The type of attack you are thinking of is called a Sybil Attack [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
The type of attack you are thinking of is called a Sybil Attack [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
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See other message. Listening to a nodes is voluntary and secret you dont know who or if at all anyone listens to your node. If you simply created a bunch you can be sure no one will listen to them. It doesn't matter how many % they make up.
Imagine a peer goes offline and stuff happens on the network while its offline, when the peer goes back online what state does it follow, remember that it is a decentralized network what peer does it trust? This is where the chain of verifiable transactions come in. Also with this setup it is kind of easy to prevent double spending.
> BTW cash does not have a recorded Tx history
Sorta... The central banks know every coin that has been created and notes that have been printed. When you fill in your Tax forms you are creating this Tx history manually.
> BTW cash does not have a recorded Tx history
Sorta... The central banks know every coin that has been created and notes that have been printed. When you fill in your Tax forms you are creating this Tx history manually.
Not a problem if its a DLT with final state.
You just need to request the hash of the final state from enough nodes to assure its the real deal. They would all need to lie the same way to trick you. If they are all compromised then the system is rendered useless anyway.
Also basic properties like the total amount of tokens can be validated on the last state alone. You can assure no one added more tokens simply by summing all balances. You dont need any history data for that.
>Sorta... The central banks know every coin that has been created and notes that have been printed. When you fill in your Tax forms you are creating this Tx history manually.
Yeah no, you are moving and stretching the goal post to far here. Notes are unique but that's not a Tx history at all and neither is a Tax form.
Also basic properties like the total amount of tokens can be validated on the last state alone. You can assure no one added more tokens simply by summing all balances. You dont need any history data for that.
>Sorta... The central banks know every coin that has been created and notes that have been printed. When you fill in your Tax forms you are creating this Tx history manually.
Yeah no, you are moving and stretching the goal post to far here. Notes are unique but that's not a Tx history at all and neither is a Tax form.
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So you put the series numbers of each bank note on your tax forms? That must take a pretty long time...
>I dont care how my coins was moved 10 years ago. The only storage that is relevant for me, now, for value transfer is the current undisputed state
I don't have anything to add, but this has always struck me as inelegant, especially for Ethereum, which is more of a dApp platform. Can someone point me towards something that can run dApps and maintain current state with distributed consensus _without_ a blockchain (or explain why this is an ignorant question)? Also, what's wrong with truncating the chain after X blocks?
I don't have anything to add, but this has always struck me as inelegant, especially for Ethereum, which is more of a dApp platform. Can someone point me towards something that can run dApps and maintain current state with distributed consensus _without_ a blockchain (or explain why this is an ignorant question)? Also, what's wrong with truncating the chain after X blocks?
> Also, what's wrong with truncating the chain after X blocks?
I would say nothing. Truncating history isn't explicitly built into the protocol, but that's what most users do in practice. I believe Geth and Parity both prune old state by default. There are "achive" nodes that store all history, but they're in the minority.
Bitcoin Core also has options for pruning old state, and for disabling some validation of old history. Though, unfortunately, it will still download blocks from the genesis even if both options are enabled.
I would say nothing. Truncating history isn't explicitly built into the protocol, but that's what most users do in practice. I believe Geth and Parity both prune old state by default. There are "achive" nodes that store all history, but they're in the minority.
Bitcoin Core also has options for pruning old state, and for disabling some validation of old history. Though, unfortunately, it will still download blocks from the genesis even if both options are enabled.
That's more of a philosophical decision. Even if you don't want old blocks, someone else might want.
As part of your expected obligations of the network, you're asked to seed those blocks.
As part of your expected obligations of the network, you're asked to seed those blocks.
You mean something like Hyperdrive (formerly Dat) + Beaker browser?
what you're describing is simply a litenode vs a full node. You seem to be nitpicking the 'vision' of crypto in general, which you're right, is a very human thing.
The really obvious weakness in any blockchain setup is the software. Whoever controls the software upgrade channel will always have potential control of the blockchain, whether that's the official entity in charge, or some intermediary.
If you want really widespread distribution of full nodes, you need to make a consumer-friendly distribution of the node software, and package it and keep it updated in a way that regular users can run it and forget it. This same convenience introduces a centralization problem that obviates the whole point of running a distributed ledger.
This is a point so obvious I hesitate to make it, but I've learned that in blockchain territory there is no flaw too obvious to point out.
If you want really widespread distribution of full nodes, you need to make a consumer-friendly distribution of the node software, and package it and keep it updated in a way that regular users can run it and forget it. This same convenience introduces a centralization problem that obviates the whole point of running a distributed ledger.
This is a point so obvious I hesitate to make it, but I've learned that in blockchain territory there is no flaw too obvious to point out.
Ethereum proof of stake has 4 production implementations today that run the chain. They are from independent teams that are not part of the Ethereum Foundation
They are as independent as Mozilla is from Google. So they're not the same entity; but in practice they take orders from Eth foundation because they're funded by the Eth foundation.
Alternative interpretation is that while funded by the foundation, they follow what they think the community overall would like to follow, which is the protocol known as Eth 3.0. "Taking orders" being following specifications written by people who seem, after reviewing their work, to have a good heart in the direction of the project.
Jumping to "they are doing X because of Y" seems a bit intense, and would like to see how you're getting there.
What would it take for you to see it differently? That one of the clients diverge from the specifications to do their own thing? That's not in anyone's best interest either, so unlikely to happen.
Jumping to "they are doing X because of Y" seems a bit intense, and would like to see how you're getting there.
What would it take for you to see it differently? That one of the clients diverge from the specifications to do their own thing? That's not in anyone's best interest either, so unlikely to happen.
never seen this sentiment before. Can you provide some sources/ any insights into mozilla and google colluding?
That's why some blockchains have multiple implementations and don't use auto-updates. There's also some work on taking governance out of developer's hands (e.g. Tezos where users vote on new features).
Software like this shouldn't need to be constantly updated. Users should only update full node software when they understand and trust the changes made from their current version. Of course tons of people can't be bothered or don't know how to evaluate the security of their software. Hopefully those people are good judges of character.
I agree, updating full node software is a problem for normal users. However, if we can develop a core set of first layer software that's stable enough, it could go many years without needing an update. And individual users may only need to update some of those times. So at least the burden could be arbitrarily low. But we certainly shouldn't have set-and-forget auto updating software - that would be a huge security flaw.
I agree, updating full node software is a problem for normal users. However, if we can develop a core set of first layer software that's stable enough, it could go many years without needing an update. And individual users may only need to update some of those times. So at least the burden could be arbitrarily low. But we certainly shouldn't have set-and-forget auto updating software - that would be a huge security flaw.
Miners control bitcoin more than people realize.
And at the same time less than some realise. E.g. UASF.
Less than most actually. Most have no practical means to act against the interest of pools, whose operators have most of the real control that people ascribe to miners.
For Bitcoin, Stratum v2 will solve this problem and return block creation power to the miners instead of the handful of large pool operators, which will be a huge win. However, even then, miners are beholden to the actively spending economic majority.
Miners want ROI. Running your own block creation infrastructure offers no benefit and only drawbacks and more services to keep online.
"Miner-extractable value" changes this dynamic.
... You should look into what Stratum v2 is. By "running your own block creation infrastructure", do you mean running a pool? No infrastructure is needed. Creating a block is very easy and cheap. What's expensive is repeatedly hashing that block enough times to mine the block.
Stratum v2 doesn't get rid of mining pools, it just puts the block creation in the hands of individual miners. Pools still get a cut, and pool miners still share the rewards. This is because Stratum v2 makes certain requirements of blocks created by miners such that when they mine a block, the pool and everyone properly gets paid along with it.
Stratum v2 doesn't get rid of mining pools, it just puts the block creation in the hands of individual miners. Pools still get a cut, and pool miners still share the rewards. This is because Stratum v2 makes certain requirements of blocks created by miners such that when they mine a block, the pool and everyone properly gets paid along with it.
> you need to make a consumer-friendly distribution of the node software
https://bitcoinknots.org
It's a distribution of Bitcoin Core. It needs 5GB to store enough blockchain state to fully verify everything. AFAIK Bitcoin Core also has a convenient GUI interface.
I set up a node on my computer. I didn't touch the command-line once. It has a nice GUI and built-in wallet.
https://bitcoinknots.org
It's a distribution of Bitcoin Core. It needs 5GB to store enough blockchain state to fully verify everything. AFAIK Bitcoin Core also has a convenient GUI interface.
I set up a node on my computer. I didn't touch the command-line once. It has a nice GUI and built-in wallet.
I feel like the idea that "a million transactions per second ought to be enough for anybody" (not a quote, just a paraphrase echoing Gates for those who missed it) could come back as another storied mistaken estimate at some point.
Just taking the human population as a starting point, if we posit that in the future, non-human entities will also be doing transactions, and there may be orders of magnitude more of those entities than there are humans, and the entities will be networked and operating at machine speed… I don't know, but it seems like the thinking on scaling needs to be even more ambitious.
Just taking the human population as a starting point, if we posit that in the future, non-human entities will also be doing transactions, and there may be orders of magnitude more of those entities than there are humans, and the entities will be networked and operating at machine speed… I don't know, but it seems like the thinking on scaling needs to be even more ambitious.
Ambition isn't magic. The point of the post is that there are physical limits of how much you can scale up without compromising the integrity of the system.
This is a really good read. More of this and less of Elon's chatter needed!
I was trying to summarize, for an employee who got caught in “Elon Musk shouldn’t have manipulated the BTC” (!) (obviously the employee lost 25% of his savings), I was trying to summarize the list of dangers of having savings in BTC.
- Laws of any big country could change and trigger the sale for a lot of sellers of a country,
- Especially given BTC is used by Iran to bypass petrol restrictions, used by ransomware and all sort of dealers, as well as Chinese who want to flee,
- Currencies are in theory regalian = only emitted by the central bank;
- Once any country gets upset with this, they could blame terrorism on BTC and ask owners to prove their origin of wealth, which would be a major hurdle if the law was strict.
I’m adding this to the list. Volatility is desired because “you can make it big”, but the rest is only dangers.
- Laws of any big country could change and trigger the sale for a lot of sellers of a country,
- Especially given BTC is used by Iran to bypass petrol restrictions, used by ransomware and all sort of dealers, as well as Chinese who want to flee,
- Currencies are in theory regalian = only emitted by the central bank;
- Once any country gets upset with this, they could blame terrorism on BTC and ask owners to prove their origin of wealth, which would be a major hurdle if the law was strict.
I’m adding this to the list. Volatility is desired because “you can make it big”, but the rest is only dangers.
The price is manipulated by hedge funds and/or whales to fleece unsophisticated investors. Wyckoff pattern has described BTC this tear to a t.
It's genuinely concerning how 1:1 the Wyckoff pattern is for BTC at the moment [1].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lhf_2gJJS1I
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lhf_2gJJS1I
That was a month ago and it has since diverged, the same youtuber is performing even more mental gymnastics to try to explain the divergence
As anyone who was around to see the advent of “crypto TA” c. 2012 can attest, TA in the Bitcoin space started out as quantitative-themed narrative pumping, and it remains so to this very day. Crypto TA chartists self-promote and advertise coins in a furtive attempt to bolster speculation. They can then point to “trading volume” and speculation-fueled transactions to further boost perceptions of credibility — “$X zillion dollars were settled on this blockchain I’m invested in”.
He mentioned pretty early that he bought at 60k.
hindsight 20/20 I guess.
I suspect they are following sentiment analysis on social media and also have demand details on the exchanges.
I assume that soon they will let it drop to 9k and leave it there for a few years and the start the whole thing over again, with the next round of "investors". These "Maximalists" are unintentionally helping them set a floor.
I assume that soon they will let it drop to 9k and leave it there for a few years and the start the whole thing over again, with the next round of "investors". These "Maximalists" are unintentionally helping them set a floor.
> The price is manipulated
Clearly. Watch the price after Musk's announcements.
> fleece unsophisticated investors
Someone speculating in an unregulated asset that's seen massive growth in the past year should have no expectation of not being on the bad side of a trade.
Clearly. Watch the price after Musk's announcements.
> fleece unsophisticated investors
Someone speculating in an unregulated asset that's seen massive growth in the past year should have no expectation of not being on the bad side of a trade.
> Someone speculating in an unregulated asset that's seen massive growth in the past year should have no expectation of not being on the bad side of a trade.
And yet some people dump their life savings into it.
And yet some people dump their life savings into it.
Crypto adherents generally don't study history. I remember when in the late 90s everyone was investing in the stock market bubble. Some people made big but most were left holding the bag. None of this is new.
The price isn't manipulated - the price was overheated and we're closer to bear than most realize.
Which is good because crypto is a lot more fun in bear markets.
Which is good because crypto is a lot more fun in bear markets.
A friend who trades crypto tells me altcoin prices are all manipulated - the buyer and seller are the same person.
What's the point of ownership if the value of the stuff that is owned is centralized?
What's the point of ownership if the value of the stuff that is owned is centralized?
The first part of point #2 is interesting because it's a blessing or a curse depending on which side of the hegemony you're on. Hypothetically speaking, if the Soviet Union were the current dominant superpower, or if China were the dominant superpower 15 years from now, and the US were under sanctions, wouldn't point 2 be a blessing? Being able to circumvent the wishes of the superpower du jour, for better or worse, does give an inherent value to the network regardless of whether the energy used is green or not.
I think @laurent92 didn't say something like: Bitcoin is bad, because bad countries use it.
I think it was more like: There's a risk _for Bitcoin_ if the US brings out the ban hammer, because bad countries use it.
Nowadays a lot of people are not libertarians that would see the US opposing it as a proof it's valuable, but more speculators whom would have nothing left if Coinbase and co. were to shut down.
I think it was more like: There's a risk _for Bitcoin_ if the US brings out the ban hammer, because bad countries use it.
Nowadays a lot of people are not libertarians that would see the US opposing it as a proof it's valuable, but more speculators whom would have nothing left if Coinbase and co. were to shut down.
-Since it is a non productive investment without dividends or interests, making a profit entails someone else making a loss. It's a zero sum game. On average no money is made.
-If you follow the herd, if you buy when people are talking it up positively, you are probably buying high and making less than average (less than zero).
-Covid 19 probably made crypto investment frothy because of unprecedented amount of government stimulus and fewer places than normal to spend money. The government benefits are going to taper over the summer so crypto prices will lose an important support, and the gradual reopening of everything will give people more places to spend their money instead of bidding up digital coins. There could be a third downward force if high inflation takes hold and central banks starts fighting it. They do this by raising interest rates which literally means banks are paying people to hold fiat or government debt instead of other assets. Gold and stocks usually have lower than normal prices during periods of high interest rates, crypto could do the same. At least stocks should have accelerating dividends with higher inflation, not so for gold and crypto.
So if you really want to buy cryptocoins, wait to see what the economic conditions look like in the fall or next year, if the economy is near done working through the above dynamics, prices could be near their lows and it should be a less terrible time to buy.
-If you follow the herd, if you buy when people are talking it up positively, you are probably buying high and making less than average (less than zero).
-Covid 19 probably made crypto investment frothy because of unprecedented amount of government stimulus and fewer places than normal to spend money. The government benefits are going to taper over the summer so crypto prices will lose an important support, and the gradual reopening of everything will give people more places to spend their money instead of bidding up digital coins. There could be a third downward force if high inflation takes hold and central banks starts fighting it. They do this by raising interest rates which literally means banks are paying people to hold fiat or government debt instead of other assets. Gold and stocks usually have lower than normal prices during periods of high interest rates, crypto could do the same. At least stocks should have accelerating dividends with higher inflation, not so for gold and crypto.
So if you really want to buy cryptocoins, wait to see what the economic conditions look like in the fall or next year, if the economy is near done working through the above dynamics, prices could be near their lows and it should be a less terrible time to buy.
Are you missing the utility of transacting on the blockchain in your analysis?
You're right. It's even less than zero sum.
Data oracles? DeFI? liquidity providing? Banking the unbanked? Store of Value?
Any of these mean anything to ya?
Any of these mean anything to ya?
you can literally flip every single one of your arguments with a few words.
>[big purchases] of any big country could change and trigger the [purchase] for a lot of [buyers] of a country.
>Especially given BTC is used by Iran to bypass petrol restrictions, used by ransomware and all sort of dealers, as well as Chinese who want to flee.
[Didn't actually have to change this one, seems like buying pressure to me]
>Currencies are in theory regalian = only emitted by the central bank; [New world currency outside of central banks is the whole vision for crypto, so i don't see how this conflicts.]
>Once any country gets upset with this, they could blame terrorism on BTC and ask owners to prove their origin of wealth, which would be a major hurdle if the law was strict.[ Don't actually understand this one, how could you make me prove ownership of coins in a cold-wallet?]
>[big purchases] of any big country could change and trigger the [purchase] for a lot of [buyers] of a country.
>Especially given BTC is used by Iran to bypass petrol restrictions, used by ransomware and all sort of dealers, as well as Chinese who want to flee.
[Didn't actually have to change this one, seems like buying pressure to me]
>Currencies are in theory regalian = only emitted by the central bank; [New world currency outside of central banks is the whole vision for crypto, so i don't see how this conflicts.]
>Once any country gets upset with this, they could blame terrorism on BTC and ask owners to prove their origin of wealth, which would be a major hurdle if the law was strict.[ Don't actually understand this one, how could you make me prove ownership of coins in a cold-wallet?]
Yeah savings vs investment. Crypto is a very high risk investment and should be used as the high risk cherry on top of any portfolio pie! Unless you are minted and don't mind losing a tonne in which case go all in on eth :p
Crypto weak point is that nobody uses it to buy groceries or a Lamborghini.
You have to exchange it for €$¥ and that's where the government comes in.
Sanctions are not a good thing; they inevitably affect the common person much more than they affect sanctioned governments.
There is only a loss if you sell.
There are also big risks to fiat money, such having the entire economic output of your civilization be grossly distorted by central banks.
No one is saying that fiat money is perfect. This is a logical fallacy to jump to "Fiat has issues, therefore I will only own bitcoin". That is like saying "McDonalds is unhealthy, therefore I will only eat sand"
"Risk-free rate" as in "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" rather than "actually no risk".
Yeah - I had alot of friends that lost faith in Elon over alot of his crypto hype/ Sold alot of Tesla stock. He seemed to busy to actually research anything, flip-flopped alot on his rhetoric but had outsized influence on something he really didn't understand just because he's rich.
The notion of 'decentraliztion' as presented by the blockchain community is basically extremist/absolutist, and it's ruining their own projects.
Our entire civilization and everything in it depends on networks of trust. Without it, we'd fall down instantly.
To require a system of 'absolute decentralization' when 'partial decentralization' would work just as well, doesn't make sense.
We technical people have an odd way of falling into these kind of traps - we're trapped in theory, unable to map to the real world pragmatically.
DNS on the internet works on the basis of 'partial decentralization' and it works very well. There wouldn't be that much point in making it 'fully decentralized'. We could push it maybe a few inches more that way, but there's zero requirement to go 'fully decentralized' for it.
You get vastly diminishing marginal returns to effort when you start to go absolutist.
Much like Rust, which has some very nice outcomes but trades absolutely everything for those outcomes, some small tradeoffs in decentralization for Blockchain would yield probably some big benefits.
Our entire civilization and everything in it depends on networks of trust. Without it, we'd fall down instantly.
To require a system of 'absolute decentralization' when 'partial decentralization' would work just as well, doesn't make sense.
We technical people have an odd way of falling into these kind of traps - we're trapped in theory, unable to map to the real world pragmatically.
DNS on the internet works on the basis of 'partial decentralization' and it works very well. There wouldn't be that much point in making it 'fully decentralized'. We could push it maybe a few inches more that way, but there's zero requirement to go 'fully decentralized' for it.
You get vastly diminishing marginal returns to effort when you start to go absolutist.
Much like Rust, which has some very nice outcomes but trades absolutely everything for those outcomes, some small tradeoffs in decentralization for Blockchain would yield probably some big benefits.
Blockchain base layers have a stronger need to be close to absolutely decentralized than most other things. This is because base layers aren't applications, they're _the places where all the applications talk to each other_. So if a base layer has a trust dependency, that requires the entire ecosystem to be willing to agree on the same trust dependency.
Applications can be partially decentralized and that's often the best approach, sure.
Applications can be partially decentralized and that's often the best approach, sure.
There are a ton of newer blockchains using "progressive decentralization" or "minimum viable decentralization".
But with fiat there is no trust between the people, the trust is provided by the banks, they act as the arbitrators because humans cannot trust each other. When we used to barter we stopped because it was sometimes unfair (convert bread to chickens?) so we invented money (gold) which is natural occurring and rare so we trust it more. Later on we invented banks which are a third party we use them as arbitrators because we don't trust each other. Now we invented blockchains (distributed ledgers) so we can see all the changes being made on the ledger because we don't trust each other.
>When we used to barter we stopped because it was sometimes unfair (convert bread to chickens?) so we invented money (gold) which is natural occurring and rare so we trust it more.
That's wrong. Debt existed before money and barter didn't exist at all without a medium of exchange like metals or spices.
When you give someone a chicken and the other side gives you bread you remember or even write down that this person owes you more bread in the future and you trust that this person will uphold his promise, the same way you trust that his bread is not rotten.
That's wrong. Debt existed before money and barter didn't exist at all without a medium of exchange like metals or spices.
When you give someone a chicken and the other side gives you bread you remember or even write down that this person owes you more bread in the future and you trust that this person will uphold his promise, the same way you trust that his bread is not rotten.
First - the notion that 'we don't trust the banks' is false. We, you, everyone, trusts that system every single day, with all of our financing. There is an incredible amount of oversight in that system, the Fed publishes it's actions and balance sheets. The banks have immense scrutiny.
While we should never trust banks 'infallibly' we have layers and layers of protections.
We have 'backups' for regular people like FDIC insurance so when that trust invariably gets broken here and there - there are backups. How often has FDIC had to be used? Very rarely.
When someone steals your blockchain stash - which happens - where do you turn? Nowhere.
Commerce is subject to the Judicial system meaning that when there is a problem, we can backtrack and make ammends, people can sue one another there is accounting etc..
Second - it's well established that none of the cryptos thus far are usable as forms of currency, and frankly, they are poor stores of value.
Your local corner store does not accept BTC for the same reason they don't take Euros - because prices fluxuate wildly, far beyond their profit margin. To accept BTC is tantamount to wild currency speculation which, over time, is guaranteed to put them out of business. There's a 100% chance that BTC 'will go down' over some period below their operating credit and will kill them.
They could feasibly accept BTC and immediately transfer to USD, but what would be the point? You do that, it's your risk. And then it's 'not a currency'.
Third - the 'never talked about' Elephant in the room is Monetary Policy. The ability to control currency is extremely valuable - it's dangerous, yes - but also powerful. Using 'Gold' implies 'no monetary policy' but arguably more trust, however, we'd probably all be broke.
'Wars and Pandemics' illustrate this quite well - when a nation faces existential calamity, it definitely needs monetary policy above and beyond normal operations. The economic devastation of COVID without monetary policy would have knocked down the economy like a sequence of dominos and left nothing standing.
'No Monetary Policy' is like building 'Brick Homes in San Francisco'. Brick is 'stronger than wood' you say? Hello 7.7 earthquake, which is guaranteed to happen over time, and, which will knock down brick homes and leave the wood framed homes standing. 'Hard' things are often 'brittle' and without flexibility a single 'hard punch' will break it.
And those are just the obvious points.
So - instead of building something which is 'infinitely decentralized', you could feasibly build something that is partially decentralized and gain basically all of the advantages. Viatalin's notion of 'individuals running nodes' is essentially fundamentally flawed. Individuals should be 'running their own nodes' like they should be 'installing their own wiring, flooring, plumbing, adding their own additions without Engineering approved drawings'. Yes - you can do your own electrical work, but nobody does, because we have very effective division of labour and 'electricians' do that very well which is immensely valuable.
Let 3rd parties 'run nodes'. Make it so the tech requires minimal oversight. But there will never be 'no oversight', it's not feasible, and it never was.
I'd go so far as to argue that 'trust based systems' are probably a kind of biological development based on some kind of actual efficiency optimization: we 'trust our electrician' just like we 'trust the authority of the bank'. Neither are infallible, but it's better than doing it all yourself.
While we should never trust banks 'infallibly' we have layers and layers of protections.
We have 'backups' for regular people like FDIC insurance so when that trust invariably gets broken here and there - there are backups. How often has FDIC had to be used? Very rarely.
When someone steals your blockchain stash - which happens - where do you turn? Nowhere.
Commerce is subject to the Judicial system meaning that when there is a problem, we can backtrack and make ammends, people can sue one another there is accounting etc..
Second - it's well established that none of the cryptos thus far are usable as forms of currency, and frankly, they are poor stores of value.
Your local corner store does not accept BTC for the same reason they don't take Euros - because prices fluxuate wildly, far beyond their profit margin. To accept BTC is tantamount to wild currency speculation which, over time, is guaranteed to put them out of business. There's a 100% chance that BTC 'will go down' over some period below their operating credit and will kill them.
They could feasibly accept BTC and immediately transfer to USD, but what would be the point? You do that, it's your risk. And then it's 'not a currency'.
Third - the 'never talked about' Elephant in the room is Monetary Policy. The ability to control currency is extremely valuable - it's dangerous, yes - but also powerful. Using 'Gold' implies 'no monetary policy' but arguably more trust, however, we'd probably all be broke.
'Wars and Pandemics' illustrate this quite well - when a nation faces existential calamity, it definitely needs monetary policy above and beyond normal operations. The economic devastation of COVID without monetary policy would have knocked down the economy like a sequence of dominos and left nothing standing.
'No Monetary Policy' is like building 'Brick Homes in San Francisco'. Brick is 'stronger than wood' you say? Hello 7.7 earthquake, which is guaranteed to happen over time, and, which will knock down brick homes and leave the wood framed homes standing. 'Hard' things are often 'brittle' and without flexibility a single 'hard punch' will break it.
And those are just the obvious points.
So - instead of building something which is 'infinitely decentralized', you could feasibly build something that is partially decentralized and gain basically all of the advantages. Viatalin's notion of 'individuals running nodes' is essentially fundamentally flawed. Individuals should be 'running their own nodes' like they should be 'installing their own wiring, flooring, plumbing, adding their own additions without Engineering approved drawings'. Yes - you can do your own electrical work, but nobody does, because we have very effective division of labour and 'electricians' do that very well which is immensely valuable.
Let 3rd parties 'run nodes'. Make it so the tech requires minimal oversight. But there will never be 'no oversight', it's not feasible, and it never was.
I'd go so far as to argue that 'trust based systems' are probably a kind of biological development based on some kind of actual efficiency optimization: we 'trust our electrician' just like we 'trust the authority of the bank'. Neither are infallible, but it's better than doing it all yourself.
Thank you for the reply. I think you misread my comment, I never said 'we don't trust the banks', I wrote that we invented banks to act as third party arbitrators because we (humans) don't trust each other.
The XRPL was invented shortly after some BTC devs saw that BTCs approach was "to extremist" and could never scale.
It went online in 2013.
To this day most crypto people will tell you it is centralized and some buggy-man can turn it off/delete/revert etc.
While in reality it started as a cluster of nodes run by a single entity (centrally controlled just like BTC did) and moved to continually enlarge the number of entities to the point where the original nodes have absolutely no special permission or power left. There was even a software update amendment that was accepted by all other nodes but the original nodes so they overrules them. The system isn't based solely on trust however the people who run a node can pick trusted nodes[1]. This is important for reliability. If you trust crappy nodes that go offline your node could miss Tx and fork off with no way to detect that and if trusted nodes collude they could halt your node. However the validation is done locally there is no need to trust any other nodes to check if the Tx are valid. You see if a node lies and if you previously trusted that node you would simply remove it. You dont have to trust a single node you have to trust the majority of all nodes you trust. There is no way around the "trust the majority" anyway. In BTC for example you are forced to trust that 51% of hashing comes form honest people who do not collude. the difference here is you dont know who they are and you can neither pick the ones you trust nor exclude the once you dont trust or misbehave. Needless to says the this system outcompetes all the other systems for decentral consensus.
But Guess what. People still says the XRPL its centralized. Most people simply dont understand the tech in this space. They are in it for the gambling.
[1] https://xrpl.org/intro-to-consensus.html#trust-based-validat...
While in reality it started as a cluster of nodes run by a single entity (centrally controlled just like BTC did) and moved to continually enlarge the number of entities to the point where the original nodes have absolutely no special permission or power left. There was even a software update amendment that was accepted by all other nodes but the original nodes so they overrules them. The system isn't based solely on trust however the people who run a node can pick trusted nodes[1]. This is important for reliability. If you trust crappy nodes that go offline your node could miss Tx and fork off with no way to detect that and if trusted nodes collude they could halt your node. However the validation is done locally there is no need to trust any other nodes to check if the Tx are valid. You see if a node lies and if you previously trusted that node you would simply remove it. You dont have to trust a single node you have to trust the majority of all nodes you trust. There is no way around the "trust the majority" anyway. In BTC for example you are forced to trust that 51% of hashing comes form honest people who do not collude. the difference here is you dont know who they are and you can neither pick the ones you trust nor exclude the once you dont trust or misbehave. Needless to says the this system outcompetes all the other systems for decentral consensus.
But Guess what. People still says the XRPL its centralized. Most people simply dont understand the tech in this space. They are in it for the gambling.
[1] https://xrpl.org/intro-to-consensus.html#trust-based-validat...
Not mentioned in the bandwidth section is that residential connections in the US usually have a monthly data cap of ~1TB. Users are unlikely to tolerate a blockchain client using more than half of that. So if a full node sustains much more than 200KB/s then vanishingly few users in the US are going to run one.
But can we expect the future cryptocurrency of the world to be bottlenecked by average users needing to run full nodes on average laptops? Considering Bitcoin only has a total of 27 million addresses, couldn't we introduce some special blocks that consolidate the transaction history during a certain timespan so that nodes don't need to download the entire history?
Or we could simply not use a blockchain for Doritos purchases. If we’re willing to do that — if we’re able to trade off “Fort Knox” security for Doritos — we can get dramatically higher speed and efficiency for those transactions, and the options we have for implementing this significantly widen. Those options also tend to be inherently safer than their on-chain counterparts, because they both operate on an abstract level, and don’t impact the majority of investment capital entrusted to the network, which tends to lie dormant unmoving in cold wallets regardless.
But if we’re only willing to put Doritos purchases on-chain for some reason because we stubbornly refuse to give up Fort Knox security, and demand a permanent record of our Doritos transactions until the heat death of the universe, we end up with a lot less decentralization, and our options for scaling narrow and become increasingly complex (e.g. sharding).
Worse still, Visa does 50,000+ tps — and that’s just one credit card company. Storing every financial transaction every human in the world ever makes on a blockchain requires infeasibly large block sizes well in excess of 1GB. Meanwhile end users already struggle somewhat to keep up with 1MB blocks on consumer hardware with residential network connections.
(Bear in mind most people interested in extreme on-chain scaling like this have historically also wanted on-chain scaling to handle all forms of cash and credit transactions, plus derivatives trading, “NFTs”, “decentralized exchanges” etc etc, which would demand still more transactional capacity).
Bitcoin could conceivably only increase its block size by a factor of 10-100 before nodes become only possible to run in datacenters. Condemning nodes to forever run in datacenters — lest we forget gargantuan blocks can never be discarded by full nodes — would only allow Bitcoin to hit a measely couple thousand transactions per second at best. What’s the point of doing that at all?
(The choice was obvious to highly technical people at the time of the block size debate, but their voices were drowned out by populist appeals. Also sorry, forgot this was a thread about Ethereum.)
But if we’re only willing to put Doritos purchases on-chain for some reason because we stubbornly refuse to give up Fort Knox security, and demand a permanent record of our Doritos transactions until the heat death of the universe, we end up with a lot less decentralization, and our options for scaling narrow and become increasingly complex (e.g. sharding).
Worse still, Visa does 50,000+ tps — and that’s just one credit card company. Storing every financial transaction every human in the world ever makes on a blockchain requires infeasibly large block sizes well in excess of 1GB. Meanwhile end users already struggle somewhat to keep up with 1MB blocks on consumer hardware with residential network connections.
(Bear in mind most people interested in extreme on-chain scaling like this have historically also wanted on-chain scaling to handle all forms of cash and credit transactions, plus derivatives trading, “NFTs”, “decentralized exchanges” etc etc, which would demand still more transactional capacity).
Bitcoin could conceivably only increase its block size by a factor of 10-100 before nodes become only possible to run in datacenters. Condemning nodes to forever run in datacenters — lest we forget gargantuan blocks can never be discarded by full nodes — would only allow Bitcoin to hit a measely couple thousand transactions per second at best. What’s the point of doing that at all?
(The choice was obvious to highly technical people at the time of the block size debate, but their voices were drowned out by populist appeals. Also sorry, forgot this was a thread about Ethereum.)
At least a factor of 2-100 would solve the problem we're facing at this moment in time. We can explore solutions (like 2nd layer) while keeping everything usable.
One thing blockchain scalability conversations often miss is the concept of induced demand [1].
City streets and computer hardware and blockchain throughput. We dream that 'make bigger, make faster' will alleviate congestion in all of these places, and make our commute and compute as fast and cheap as we want it to be.
But in practice, commuters are programmers are blockchain users.
For commuters, if more lanes get added to a local highway, driving to work becomes traffic free - so why not drive when you used to take the train? With all this extra capacity, there's traffic again.
For programmers, faster computers mean less need to be efficient. Less worry about writing efficient code, seemingly as much JSON parsing as one can tolerate, more dependencies, and higher level languages that make programming more pleasant but less efficient. And so computers are 100000X faster than they used to be, but opening a text editor is about as slow as it was 10 years ago.
For blockchain users, it will be the same. As block space increases, the applications users dream up to run on the blockchain will as well. And so transactions will end up costing the same.
That being said, the total capacity will be higher! So we are scaling - I just don't think it's gonna be the utopia it might appear at first glance.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
City streets and computer hardware and blockchain throughput. We dream that 'make bigger, make faster' will alleviate congestion in all of these places, and make our commute and compute as fast and cheap as we want it to be.
But in practice, commuters are programmers are blockchain users.
For commuters, if more lanes get added to a local highway, driving to work becomes traffic free - so why not drive when you used to take the train? With all this extra capacity, there's traffic again.
For programmers, faster computers mean less need to be efficient. Less worry about writing efficient code, seemingly as much JSON parsing as one can tolerate, more dependencies, and higher level languages that make programming more pleasant but less efficient. And so computers are 100000X faster than they used to be, but opening a text editor is about as slow as it was 10 years ago.
For blockchain users, it will be the same. As block space increases, the applications users dream up to run on the blockchain will as well. And so transactions will end up costing the same.
That being said, the total capacity will be higher! So we are scaling - I just don't think it's gonna be the utopia it might appear at first glance.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
Induced demand is an argument frequently used against bigger roads but the reality is that the increase in road size takes many years before the road is at its maxed out capacity again so it definitely helps.
And it gave many more people the chance to make it from place A to place B in the process.
Induced demand is often misrepresented. Like any resource, the more of it there is, the cheaper it is to obtain, and the more of it people use. Roads are no different. "Induced demand" is just a biased way to talk about how normal supply and demand works.
And that is why scaling solutions like Polygon have a future if Ethereum has a future.
That’s just a narrative, though. The practical reality is cryptocurrency valuation is driven by these narratives 100%. The other practical reality is the people pretending as if this reality doesn’t exist are increasingly perceived to be engaged in biased sophistry.
Granted, low information people are still falling for it, but high information people increasingly aren’t, as evidenced by Ethereum failing to get even 3/4s of the way to its previous bitcoin-denominated valuation high over the most recent market cycle, despite ludicrous levels of hype.
Granted, low information people are still falling for it, but high information people increasingly aren’t, as evidenced by Ethereum failing to get even 3/4s of the way to its previous bitcoin-denominated valuation high over the most recent market cycle, despite ludicrous levels of hype.
I really don't know what you are talking about. ETH hit its all time high a few weeks ago (May 10th) both in terms of USD and BTC. Its still double it's ATH from its peak in 2018, before the crypto crash.
As to your other ramblings, mere snobbish tripe meant to demean and belittle those that disagree with your opinion. In other words, yours is a low information post.
As to your other ramblings, mere snobbish tripe meant to demean and belittle those that disagree with your opinion. In other words, yours is a low information post.
> I really don't know what you are talking about. ETH hit its all time high a few weeks ago (May 10th) both in terms of USD and BTC. Its still double it's ATH from its peak in 2018, before the crypto crash.
> As to your other ramblings, mere snobbish tripe meant to demean and belittle those that disagree with your opinion. In other words, yours is a low information post.
ETH broke 0.12 ETH/BTC last narrative cycle. This is trivial to fact check. Sorry to disturb you.
> As to your other ramblings, mere snobbish tripe meant to demean and belittle those that disagree with your opinion. In other words, yours is a low information post.
ETH broke 0.12 ETH/BTC last narrative cycle. This is trivial to fact check. Sorry to disturb you.
You are correct re BTC, but not it has well exceeded that re USD. Why BTC has some special place in terms of the utility of smart contract blockchain is questionable.
That’d be because Bitcoin awareness is c. 100% amongst altcoin investors. When an altcoin underperforms Bitcoin, its investors have traditionally realized the opportunity cost of holding it — particularly seeing as Bitcoin is the longest standing, most stable and widely recognized, original cryptocurrency with the simplest and safest technical implementation.
So, what happens when one of the shards goes offline, or forks? What are the cascading consequences for validators of other shards, if any?
Asking because I don't think there's a viable strategy for keeping all shard data around indefinitely, without giving up either scalability or durability:
* If the system requires cross-shard state-transitions to be mirrored to on a "central" chain (e.g. the beacon chain) in order to stave off unavailability, then that central chain's capacity is the scalability bottleneck.
* If the system requires cross-shard state-transitions to be mirrored instead to both shards in order to stave off unavailability, then ultimately all shards will host a non-trivial fraction of each others' state, meaning that the scalability bottleneck is the most-loaded shard.
* If the system requires some nodes to store full replicas of all shards in order to avert shard unavailability, then the system is no more scalable than the nodes required to carry this burden.
Asking because I don't think there's a viable strategy for keeping all shard data around indefinitely, without giving up either scalability or durability:
* If the system requires cross-shard state-transitions to be mirrored to on a "central" chain (e.g. the beacon chain) in order to stave off unavailability, then that central chain's capacity is the scalability bottleneck.
* If the system requires cross-shard state-transitions to be mirrored instead to both shards in order to stave off unavailability, then ultimately all shards will host a non-trivial fraction of each others' state, meaning that the scalability bottleneck is the most-loaded shard.
* If the system requires some nodes to store full replicas of all shards in order to avert shard unavailability, then the system is no more scalable than the nodes required to carry this burden.
Wouldn’t each shard itself be made up of thousands of nodes and thus not easily taken down? And there would be incentive to join the hampered shard to repair it given joining nodes would have a larger share of the hashing power than in non-hampered shards.
I don't think shards are powered by hashing? I think nodes participating in Ethereum 2.0 are assigned to shards by the beacon chain, and they work to grow the shard's transactions by deciding on transaction ordering and inclusion in a BFT manner.
Also, it's not clear to me that it's "thousands," nor is it clear to me that this even matters. If they're all in the same datacenter, and that datacenter temporarily gets disconnected from the other shards' nodes, then the shard is effectively dead as far as the rest of the network is concerned.
Also, it's not clear to me that it's "thousands," nor is it clear to me that this even matters. If they're all in the same datacenter, and that datacenter temporarily gets disconnected from the other shards' nodes, then the shard is effectively dead as far as the rest of the network is concerned.
Why would they all be in the same datacenter? The beacon chain will periodically select staking nodes at random to go in each shard, and there's an economic incentive for stakers not to use the same infrastructure as everyone else.
Why is the chain's liveness and resiliency to server failures dependent on where people happen to be keeping their validators? This isn't a problem in Ethereum 1.0.
I mean, if all the miners were on one datacenter and that datacenter went down, so would Ethereum 1.0. That's the same sort of failure you're worrying about for 2.0.
A blockchain's resiliency in part depends on how many full replicas are available -- if at least one replica exists somewhere, the chain can be resuscitated even if all block producers die.
In Ethereum 2.0, nodes don't maintain a full copy of the chainstate -- not even block producers do. Therefore, Ethereum 2.0's resiliency depends on the continued availability of N > 1 partial copies of the chainstate, such that the full chainstate can be reassembled from them. This is strictly less resilient.
In Ethereum 2.0, nodes don't maintain a full copy of the chainstate -- not even block producers do. Therefore, Ethereum 2.0's resiliency depends on the continued availability of N > 1 partial copies of the chainstate, such that the full chainstate can be reassembled from them. This is strictly less resilient.
The shards have thousands of different validators, all of which are staking their Ethereum on being accurate, and if they are malicious, they lose that Ethereum they staked. There are over 100k people signed up to this already (each staking 32+ ETH). So the likelihood of a shard going offline or forking is about as likely as AWS going down.
The beacon chain is the central chain, all shards write a hash of what they've done to this one. All nodes validate the shard they've been assigned to as well as the beacon chain.
The beacon chain is the central chain, all shards write a hash of what they've done to this one. All nodes validate the shard they've been assigned to as well as the beacon chain.
Validators != separate physical computers. Also, what happens if the nodes for shard S in epoch N fail to replicate the shard data to the nodes assigned to S in epoch N+1?
I used to be a skeptic of blockchain, but then I actually investigated what is going on in the industry. Yes there is a lot of fud, poor ideas, etc, but there are also lots of interesting cool ideas that just will not go away. Reminds me of the dotcom boom, actually.
Which ideas do you think will not go away?
Gambling is a given...paired with oracles (e.g. Link) for real world outcome verification to decide smart contract outcomes. I think applications to supply chain manufacturing would be useful to cut down the tons of fraud that happen in manufacturing. It is already finding use in cargo logistics. I believe Egypt has recently incorporated blockchain to imports (https://theloadstar.com/egypt-authorizes-cargox-as-the-block...). There are some interesting ideas about using it for increasing throughput for video streaming (see theta.tv). Non fungible tokens (NFT)are too hyped, but will find some permanent niches for digital trading economies and games..and perhaps uses that we do not foresee. In real estate, there is some movement to adopt blockchain to streamline an inefficient and byzantine process of title transfer and centralized solutions of final authority are not likely to be accepted by parties.
- Why 10% margins on average? What is exactly the risk profile?
- Why consider that a group of diverse group of developers is a governance danger while a group of users would be fine?
- What are the incentives to run a full node for an average user?
- Why consider that a group of diverse group of developers is a governance danger while a group of users would be fine?
- What are the incentives to run a full node for an average user?
For a blockchain to be decentralized, it's crucially important
for regular users to be able to run a node, and to have a
culture where running nodes is a common activity.
introduce a small form of reward for running a validating node and voila, nodes popping up everywhere.
Eth2 staking does this.
Decentralised communities used to exist without such bribery. I wonder why that's not really happening much any more. (Of course, the old ones still exist, and there are replacements to the ones that went defunct, but precious few new things work this way.)
except we're talking about a monetary system, not a community.
Potato potato. The set of people using the monetary system forms a community. “All Bitcoin miners” is a community, of sorts – one whose members trust SHA-256 but rarely each other, but a community nonetheless. (I do believe some of the more influential miners agreed that they wouldn't provide more than 30% or so of Bitcoin's computational power; that's the kind of move that naïve profit-seeking doesn't give you, so Bitcoin's miners already do act like a community.)
That’s not very Sybil-resistant: how do you prove that the node is actually verifying things?
The only remotely viable way would be to use recursive SNAKRs to prove that you verified block proofs in block chains like Mina
The only remotely viable way would be to use recursive SNAKRs to prove that you verified block proofs in block chains like Mina
Eth2 has the concept of slashing. If you see a validatoe acting maliciously, you can publish a proof and slash them. You receive a portion of the penalty.
So running full nodes will have a monetary benefit. Running two will only give you more benefit if they have improved network reachability and latency.
So running full nodes will have a monetary benefit. Running two will only give you more benefit if they have improved network reachability and latency.
Bold of Vitalik to mention CryptoKitties for two reasons. Not only did CryptoKitties overload he Ethereum chain in 2017, breaking usability for everyone, the founders of CryptoKitties, Dapper Labs, were forced to make their own blockchain, Flow, to actually serve customers the experience that’s become the first “mainstream” blockchain app, NBA Topshot.
That was bold, and his claim that Ethereum nodes need to be runnable on old laptops on residential internet is confused. Ethereum, worth many billions of dollars, most of which is controlled by whales and nerds with beefy gaming rigs, is deliberately sacrificing desperately needed scalability for a superficial narrative of “decentralization”.
I would almost get it if the post included a picture of some skinny African children; is “decentralization” just a euphemism for “diversity and inclusion” now?
Sometime soon, the DeFi “yield farming” free-money well is gonna run dry, and when it does, the Ethereum ecosystem will wake up in the freezing cold of a “dark forest” of their own creation.
But what about sharding? Sharding, like roll-ups, sidechains, and layer 2s including any of the forms of “Plasma”, are fundamentally less valuable than a high-scalability main chain. Reason being that transactions on the main chain are arbitrarily composable, while cross-shard communication with reasonable latency is an open problem.
And composability is important. Composability is an intrinsic aspect of DeFi, and the part that will remain even when the yields are brought down to parity with traditional finance.
That was bold, and his claim that Ethereum nodes need to be runnable on old laptops on residential internet is confused. Ethereum, worth many billions of dollars, most of which is controlled by whales and nerds with beefy gaming rigs, is deliberately sacrificing desperately needed scalability for a superficial narrative of “decentralization”.
I would almost get it if the post included a picture of some skinny African children; is “decentralization” just a euphemism for “diversity and inclusion” now?
Sometime soon, the DeFi “yield farming” free-money well is gonna run dry, and when it does, the Ethereum ecosystem will wake up in the freezing cold of a “dark forest” of their own creation.
But what about sharding? Sharding, like roll-ups, sidechains, and layer 2s including any of the forms of “Plasma”, are fundamentally less valuable than a high-scalability main chain. Reason being that transactions on the main chain are arbitrarily composable, while cross-shard communication with reasonable latency is an open problem.
And composability is important. Composability is an intrinsic aspect of DeFi, and the part that will remain even when the yields are brought down to parity with traditional finance.
Try running a full node for ETH on a beefy desktop and you quickly run into the limits. There is also the maximimum speed of light, which will make scaling interplanetary a bit difficult on high speed block times.
This "blockchain" space is getting so complicated that I can't see anymore what it is about. Is it a database? Is it a p2p network? Is it a currency?
Most of the "blockchains" listed on aggregators such as coinmarketcap.com are essentially clients communicating to a few nodes which, for all we know, sync up in a coordinated way to provide the illusion of a decentralized consensus system.
Like maybe we need to take a step back and ask "what problem are we actually trying to solve?".
Is an uncontrollable & anonymous currency truly the next big thing we need? Did we even stop to think of the potential issues of a system like that?
To me the future should be more audacious. Maybe we don't need some kind of unalterable decentralized database where capitalism can thrive from. Maybe we need to rethink society where money is not as crucial as it is today.
Hoping that the "next" cryptopunks can think of these ideas to really change the world for the better rather than ways to scale an unalterable database which, for all I can tell, just provides a distributed way to track who owes what to whom.
Most of the "blockchains" listed on aggregators such as coinmarketcap.com are essentially clients communicating to a few nodes which, for all we know, sync up in a coordinated way to provide the illusion of a decentralized consensus system.
Like maybe we need to take a step back and ask "what problem are we actually trying to solve?".
Is an uncontrollable & anonymous currency truly the next big thing we need? Did we even stop to think of the potential issues of a system like that?
To me the future should be more audacious. Maybe we don't need some kind of unalterable decentralized database where capitalism can thrive from. Maybe we need to rethink society where money is not as crucial as it is today.
Hoping that the "next" cryptopunks can think of these ideas to really change the world for the better rather than ways to scale an unalterable database which, for all I can tell, just provides a distributed way to track who owes what to whom.
Money is much older than agriculture. Recognizable money-like grave goods, in the form of shells of a consistent size with holes for stringing, date back 80,000 years.
That's about is Lindy as it gets. I'm dubious of anyone who supposes we can "rethink society" to make money less crucial. It seems simpler to assure that anyone who doesn't have enough money gets some.
It's a dangerous experiment we're running, to have all currencies in the modern world be government-issued paper. Such currencies have a known and spectacular failure mode, which continues to happen right now, and "it can't happen to us" is just a bet, not a law of nature.
I'm glad that cybercoins exist, as a hedge against that occurring. Gold is the old standard, but difficult to transfer other than hand-to-hand.
Maybe it won't happen, perhaps Modern Monetary Theory is perfectly correct and the Fed and ECB will keep on trucking indefinitely with a manageable and smooth inflation curve. I'd prefer that, of course, a currency collapse tends to be a regime-ending event as often as not, and it's bad for commerce, which I need in order to eat, clothe myself, and travel more than about ten miles in a day.
But I'm grateful that there exists at-least-one distributed and uncensorable way to "track who owes what to whom". We might all be grateful for it one day. Or we might not.
That's about is Lindy as it gets. I'm dubious of anyone who supposes we can "rethink society" to make money less crucial. It seems simpler to assure that anyone who doesn't have enough money gets some.
It's a dangerous experiment we're running, to have all currencies in the modern world be government-issued paper. Such currencies have a known and spectacular failure mode, which continues to happen right now, and "it can't happen to us" is just a bet, not a law of nature.
I'm glad that cybercoins exist, as a hedge against that occurring. Gold is the old standard, but difficult to transfer other than hand-to-hand.
Maybe it won't happen, perhaps Modern Monetary Theory is perfectly correct and the Fed and ECB will keep on trucking indefinitely with a manageable and smooth inflation curve. I'd prefer that, of course, a currency collapse tends to be a regime-ending event as often as not, and it's bad for commerce, which I need in order to eat, clothe myself, and travel more than about ten miles in a day.
But I'm grateful that there exists at-least-one distributed and uncensorable way to "track who owes what to whom". We might all be grateful for it one day. Or we might not.
It’s a network supporting both a decentralized data-store with a consistent view into valuable data and an a distributed computer with consistent results. What is so hard about this?
Yes but what problem is it trying to solve? It's a solution to a non existent problem.
Okay, decentralized currency is one idea. This can be used to implement some money with a monetary policy that is transparent and modified through consensus: eg bitcoin - deflationary via finite supply. Multi-party wallet is another. With this, cryptographic signatures from a majority of the owners is required to transfer currency/digital assets. Non-fungible tokens is another. This can be used to — as an example — publish land deeds and property deeds online and make them easily transferred as opposed to the current systems which are not fool-proof and are not as user friendly (look at selling a house and how expensive it is for no good reason). Or what about decentralized finance? A user can literally borrow money against Bitcoin without the need of an authority which can discriminate against him for no good reason. How nice is it that we can now operate such systems that are robust to censorship.
But you will just dismiss all these ideas. Same way people dismissed all the ideas people were imagining when the internet is young.
If you want to broaden your mind— just detach the idea of blockchain from the price of Bitcoin. Yes, it’s insane to the point of being obscene.
But you will just dismiss all these ideas. Same way people dismissed all the ideas people were imagining when the internet is young.
If you want to broaden your mind— just detach the idea of blockchain from the price of Bitcoin. Yes, it’s insane to the point of being obscene.
What stops the authority from blocking internet access they can't spy on..
That is a very different discussion altogether.
Its a major problem to all the hype around crypto - it relies on a centralized internet infrastructure.
If needed TOR is always available. Besides, internet may be vulnerable to ISP censorship for something like DNS but I would love to hear your approach for censoring something like the BTC network.
DPI can detect TOR for example. In the end your are still running on a centrally run network.
Some examples that are being worked on right now:
Trading of any financial asset - why do we need Robinhood / Fidelity etc to trade shares? If shares in companies can be listed on a blockchain then people can trade them anywhere anytime directly with each other even when they don't trust each other.
Larger markets for digital goods: Many games have started putting their items on Etherum (or layer 2 solutions) so that players can easily trade them without the developers needing to run their own marketplace. This can then extend to being able to use items across multiple games, or trade items from one game with items from another.
Now there's ethereum tokens that allow the original creator to get a cut of all trades of that item. This opens an interesting funding model where a company could create an open source permissionless game where you download the client, connect to the public chain, play and acquire items, trade those items with others, and the game creators gain funds based on a cut of all trade happening around the game which allows them to further development. Then because it's open source people can create forks with their own art styles and mod the game easily and people can participate in the same world with many different clients.
Trading of any financial asset - why do we need Robinhood / Fidelity etc to trade shares? If shares in companies can be listed on a blockchain then people can trade them anywhere anytime directly with each other even when they don't trust each other.
Larger markets for digital goods: Many games have started putting their items on Etherum (or layer 2 solutions) so that players can easily trade them without the developers needing to run their own marketplace. This can then extend to being able to use items across multiple games, or trade items from one game with items from another.
Now there's ethereum tokens that allow the original creator to get a cut of all trades of that item. This opens an interesting funding model where a company could create an open source permissionless game where you download the client, connect to the public chain, play and acquire items, trade those items with others, and the game creators gain funds based on a cut of all trade happening around the game which allows them to further development. Then because it's open source people can create forks with their own art styles and mod the game easily and people can participate in the same world with many different clients.
It's not hard, it's just an easy brain-free dunk.
Hard? Nothing. Useful? Nope.
That's why you should stick to Bitcoin, not Ethereum. While I find the problems and musings of the Ethereum crew fascinating, I have started to wonder if it is the crypto equivalent to a planning economy: they'll just add patch after patch to fix thing that are not fixable, making the system more and more complicated.
I understand Bitcoin (in principle), it is not that hard to understand. I don't understand most of Ethereum.
I understand Bitcoin (in principle), it is not that hard to understand. I don't understand most of Ethereum.
Bitcoin is a stagnant ecosystem. It’s not useful for everyday monetary transactions, and the developer community is too conservative to introduce features that would allow scaling up meaningfully (lightning is insufficiently decentralized)
I see it as a global, decentralized market anyone can participate in without restrictions.
For instance, if I feel my country's currency is heading towards hyperinflation, I can buy up tokenized USD as a hedge. There is no limit to how much I can buy nor do I ever need to visit a bank and comply with an oppressive regime - think Venezuela.
For instance, if I feel my country's currency is heading towards hyperinflation, I can buy up tokenized USD as a hedge. There is no limit to how much I can buy nor do I ever need to visit a bank and comply with an oppressive regime - think Venezuela.
Some really good points in there. Bottle necks are basically whack a mole. I wrote a related paper on scalability in the context of bitcoin: https://github.com/fresheneesz/bitcoinThroughputAnalysis
Hi. Bitcoin.org contributor[0] here. You can start and run a fully validating Bitcoin node with 7GB of storage space and 128MB-256MB RAM. Download the official GUI Bitcoin software here[1]. Enable pruning to store just 7GB. This validates all blocks.
The ability to prune older blockchain data is an inherent feature of blockchain, as explained by Satoshi himself:
> Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space. To facilitate this without breaking the block's hash, transactions are hashed in a Merkle Tree [7][2][5], with only the root included in the block's hash. Old blocks can then be compacted by stubbing off branches of the tree. The interior hashes do not need to be stored.
Only the recent several days need to be stored for security, which allows Bitcoin to run very securely with just 7GB of space.
[0]: https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/Bitcoin.org/pull/3624
[1]: https://bitcoincore.org/
The ability to prune older blockchain data is an inherent feature of blockchain, as explained by Satoshi himself:
> Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space. To facilitate this without breaking the block's hash, transactions are hashed in a Merkle Tree [7][2][5], with only the root included in the block's hash. Old blocks can then be compacted by stubbing off branches of the tree. The interior hashes do not need to be stored.
Only the recent several days need to be stored for security, which allows Bitcoin to run very securely with just 7GB of space.
[0]: https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/Bitcoin.org/pull/3624
[1]: https://bitcoincore.org/
> Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space.
Everyone should have this quote ready when there's an inevitable "but there's no tampering of the log, and all transactions are kept forever and can be verified!"
Everyone should have this quote ready when there's an inevitable "but there's no tampering of the log, and all transactions are kept forever and can be verified!"
This feels like a misunderstanding of how the syncing process works. You don't only download the last n blocks and assume the current state is accurate. You download the entire chain, validate it, and optionally discard the redundant information. As far as your client is concerned it still verified the entire chain end-to-end. The only difference with pruning is that you can't revalidate the chain end-to-end without redownloading the whole chain, but I'm not sure why you'd want to do that unless your machine was compromised.
what happens when everyone on the chain discards old transactions?
That would be bad. Archive nodes are needed.
So. What safeguards are in place against this?
Except, you know, "trust us, this will never happen". Given that blockchain size is now 346GB while it handles a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the number of transactions that the rest of the world runs.
Except, you know, "trust us, this will never happen". Given that blockchain size is now 346GB while it handles a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the number of transactions that the rest of the world runs.
Yes, the blockchain data structure ensures that if you verify the older transactions, the newer transactions on top of it are verified. If the old version was valid, the newer block built on top of it is too.
> Yes, the blockchain data structure ensures that if you verify the older transactions, the newer transactions on top of it are verified.
That is not enough.
Blockchain is proposed for various things like, for example, land registries. They have to be kept around indefinitely long. In many countries financial institutions are required by law to keep financial transactions around for 4 years. Ans so on.
But yeah, sure, go ahead and remove all historical data "because new transaction is mathematically valid".
That is not enough.
Blockchain is proposed for various things like, for example, land registries. They have to be kept around indefinitely long. In many countries financial institutions are required by law to keep financial transactions around for 4 years. Ans so on.
But yeah, sure, go ahead and remove all historical data "because new transaction is mathematically valid".
> Blockchain is proposed for various things like, for example, land registries. They have to be kept around indefinitely long. In many countries financial institutions are required by law to keep financial transactions around for 4 years. Ans so on.
If you have a copy of the latest block and the older verified block headers, you can trustlessly verify older blocks that people give you.
> But yeah, sure, go ahead and remove all historical data "because new transaction is mathematically valid".
Archival nodes– nodes that store full history– still exist and are still needed. You can query them from a normal full node and get their blocks.
If you have a copy of the latest block and the older verified block headers, you can trustlessly verify older blocks that people give you.
> But yeah, sure, go ahead and remove all historical data "because new transaction is mathematically valid".
Archival nodes– nodes that store full history– still exist and are still needed. You can query them from a normal full node and get their blocks.
> Archival nodes– nodes that store full history– still exist and are still needed.
Still needed as in "must be there for the chain to function"? Is it possible to have a situation where every node on the chain has truncated its history?
Note also that currently bitcoin needs 300 GB to store data for a fraction of a fraction of transactions needed for the world to run [1]. And crypto enthusiasts people want to move everything onto a blockchain.
[1]
- Total number of transactions is ~640 million: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions-total
- Visa alone processes 4.8 billion transactions per quarter: https://s1.q4cdn.com/050606653/files/doc_financials/2020/q3/... which amounts to ~52 million transaction per day
- To handle Visa traffic alone, for that same quarter, Bitcoin blockchain would grow by 9 terabytes. 36 terabytes a year.
And that's for Visa volumes alone. Even though Visa is the biggest one, there's the long tail as well.
"the total number of general purpose credit card transactions in the U.S. was 40.9 billion in 2018" https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/market-share-st...
So, how long before even the archive nodes start truncating data?
Still needed as in "must be there for the chain to function"? Is it possible to have a situation where every node on the chain has truncated its history?
Note also that currently bitcoin needs 300 GB to store data for a fraction of a fraction of transactions needed for the world to run [1]. And crypto enthusiasts people want to move everything onto a blockchain.
[1]
- Total number of transactions is ~640 million: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions-total
- Visa alone processes 4.8 billion transactions per quarter: https://s1.q4cdn.com/050606653/files/doc_financials/2020/q3/... which amounts to ~52 million transaction per day
- To handle Visa traffic alone, for that same quarter, Bitcoin blockchain would grow by 9 terabytes. 36 terabytes a year.
And that's for Visa volumes alone. Even though Visa is the biggest one, there's the long tail as well.
"the total number of general purpose credit card transactions in the U.S. was 40.9 billion in 2018" https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/market-share-st...
So, how long before even the archive nodes start truncating data?
There are some blockchains live that claim to be scalable. See [1]. Is that for real. And does "Elrond" have some connection to L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology?
[1] https://docs.elrond.com/
[1] https://docs.elrond.com/
"Elrond" is a character from Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings (as is "Arwen").
Is there anything blockchains can do in less time complexity than traditional computations?
Inherently no; consensus requires redundant computation.
It's so incredibly redundant I think people lack a mental model for just how many messages need to be sent for every node participant to ensure all others are reliable (byzantine fault tolerance).
The number of messages is is about n^3, so that's like asking 5 people to go to lunch with 125 emails.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thesaddestmo...
Lol, nice link. Why do you think number of messages is n^3? Each message only needs to be sent once to each network participant, that's n messages. Additional messages will be needed to tell their connections which messages they've received, but this can be a single metadata message talking about many primary messages. So if you send 1000 messages through a network of 3000 people, that's not 3000^3*1000 messages, it's 1000*3000 + a*3000 where a is how many metadata messages are sent per message (which likely would be more related to the rate at which messages are sent, rather than any kind of constant).
Because that's how many messages are required to solve for consensus given byzantine failures, at least with relatively simple algorithms like pratical byzantine fault tolerance (p-BFT).
The exact bound is O(m*N^2) for pBFT, where m is the number of rounds, at up to 1/3 of N. Blockchains use a different consensus mechanism, but the consensus mechanism is still incredible inefficient compared to something like 2PC which drives Paxos, and can make decisions in O(N) messages like you said.
http://www.cs.albany.edu/~maniatty/teaching/os/bft/lectnotes...
DTLs aren't "computers" its just that some build a computer into it to create a decentral computer.
In its raw form a DTL does not compute an output but ofc all participants compute signatures and such stuff to validate input and reach consensus.
This is not a competition to a single computer as load is no distributed its the exact opposite. Everyone checks the rules of the system. (not to be confused with mining that does nothing, its just a puzzle to decide who can write the next block)
In its raw form a DTL does not compute an output but ofc all participants compute signatures and such stuff to validate input and reach consensus.
This is not a competition to a single computer as load is no distributed its the exact opposite. Everyone checks the rules of the system. (not to be confused with mining that does nothing, its just a puzzle to decide who can write the next block)
What is DTL? Did you mean DLT (distributed ledger technology)?
I love that Vitalik is always being honest and admits when something is overpriced, or the fact that Blockchains have inherent limits to scalability.
The problem is the global consensus. It's a very expensive operation to do per block.
The problem is the global consensus. It's a very expensive operation to do per block.
The reason why there are so many scam projects in crypto is because big fiat power-brokers wanted to pump up the price of scam projects in order to draw attention to them in an effort to discredit the Blockchain/Cryptocurrency concept as a whole.
The problem is that they underestimated how much people hate the fiat monetary system and how far they are willing to deceive themselves in order to adopt and promote alternatives...
Some common cases of extreme self-deception:
- Bitcoin's measly 2 transactions per seconds is great, it's intentional to keep the size of the blockchain under control...
- Bitcoin consuming the same amount of electricity as an entire country is a good thing... It adds security, it uses mostly renewable energy and in fact, it speeds up the development of renewable energy technology.
- Proof of Work is better and more secure than Proof of Stake... The fact that everyone has to trust a tiny handful of companies who can produce Bitcoin mining hardware doesn't make it any less decentralized. The fact that the network can be hijacked by outsiders who have 0 stake in the network simply by buying or renting a lot of mining hardware doesn't impact security at all.
While this might sound like a critique of Bitcoin. I'm glad that people were able to do such extreme mental gymnastics to end up investing in Bitcoin because its success makes a mockery out of the entire financial system...
Bitcoin and Dogecoin are not so different. Their goal is to discredit the current financial system by showcasing its extreme inefficiency and stupidity. I chuckle to myself when I see Bitcoiners speaking about Dogecoiners in a condescending manner. They are both useful idiots.
Any intelligent person who understands what's going on can see that just about every aspect of our modern economy is at least as dumb as Bitcoin and that's the whole point. Satoshi was a comedian.
BTW, I'm bullish about crypto, but not about Bitcoin, Ethereum and all the other top scam coins which are hoarding all the attention away from genuine projects and starving them of funding.
The problem is that they underestimated how much people hate the fiat monetary system and how far they are willing to deceive themselves in order to adopt and promote alternatives...
Some common cases of extreme self-deception:
- Bitcoin's measly 2 transactions per seconds is great, it's intentional to keep the size of the blockchain under control...
- Bitcoin consuming the same amount of electricity as an entire country is a good thing... It adds security, it uses mostly renewable energy and in fact, it speeds up the development of renewable energy technology.
- Proof of Work is better and more secure than Proof of Stake... The fact that everyone has to trust a tiny handful of companies who can produce Bitcoin mining hardware doesn't make it any less decentralized. The fact that the network can be hijacked by outsiders who have 0 stake in the network simply by buying or renting a lot of mining hardware doesn't impact security at all.
While this might sound like a critique of Bitcoin. I'm glad that people were able to do such extreme mental gymnastics to end up investing in Bitcoin because its success makes a mockery out of the entire financial system...
Bitcoin and Dogecoin are not so different. Their goal is to discredit the current financial system by showcasing its extreme inefficiency and stupidity. I chuckle to myself when I see Bitcoiners speaking about Dogecoiners in a condescending manner. They are both useful idiots.
Any intelligent person who understands what's going on can see that just about every aspect of our modern economy is at least as dumb as Bitcoin and that's the whole point. Satoshi was a comedian.
BTW, I'm bullish about crypto, but not about Bitcoin, Ethereum and all the other top scam coins which are hoarding all the attention away from genuine projects and starving them of funding.
Blockchain, Decentralization and Smart Contracts have had nearly a decade to prove their value and disrupt the marketplace. So far nothing but whitepapers, pipe dreams and exit scams - nothing my mother can use. What's the point? Nobody is using crypto as an alternative to fiat. Prove me wrong.
This is a very limited and short-sighted view on the emergence and development of new technologies.
From the first petrol engine (1879) to the Ford Model T (1908), the Arpanet (1969) to the Internet (1990), as also software development (Cyberpunk 2077 was developed over 8 years), these things have one thing in common: they need time.
When one day your every breath (and its payment) is recorded on a blockchain then you should be aware that such a technology capable to do so does not exist yet, but its basic features do.
From the first petrol engine (1879) to the Ford Model T (1908), the Arpanet (1969) to the Internet (1990), as also software development (Cyberpunk 2077 was developed over 8 years), these things have one thing in common: they need time.
When one day your every breath (and its payment) is recorded on a blockchain then you should be aware that such a technology capable to do so does not exist yet, but its basic features do.
Yes I know it is very short sighted, but I am very open to being persuaded. I'm not trying to be negative, just trying to look for the real world "value".
For some reason bitcoin apologists always use cars, and the internet, and other actual disruptive technologies and inventions. Even though with each passing day it looks more like radioactive health products [1]
[1] https://interestingengineering.com/9-interesting-failed-inve...
[1] https://interestingengineering.com/9-interesting-failed-inve...
Debet cards took less than 20 years to become common which I think is a better comparison.
it is noticeably peculiar to compare one of the most significant technical inventions of our century with a half-baked hair dryer.
such innovations only appear now and then, one should have the intuition to recognize them as such, otherwise he will miss the opportunities of such developments.
such innovations only appear now and then, one should have the intuition to recognize them as such, otherwise he will miss the opportunities of such developments.
> one should have the intuition to recognize them as such, otherwise he will miss the opportunities of such developments.
That's the narrative of scam artists since before time.
That's the narrative of scam artists since before time.
its worth a dollar - its a scam.
its worth a hundred dollars, people use it to buy goods - its a scam.
its worth a thousand dollars, people start using it as a store of value and a hedge against inflation - its a scam.
its worth 65.000 dollars, theres also ethereum changing the face of banking forever - its a scam.
calling me a scam artist while disregarding all the givens of reality, at this point its really hard to convey how extraordinarily mind-bendingly narrow-minded this point of view is.
its worth a hundred dollars, people use it to buy goods - its a scam.
its worth a thousand dollars, people start using it as a store of value and a hedge against inflation - its a scam.
its worth 65.000 dollars, theres also ethereum changing the face of banking forever - its a scam.
calling me a scam artist while disregarding all the givens of reality, at this point its really hard to convey how extraordinarily mind-bendingly narrow-minded this point of view is.
> its worth... its worth... its worth... its worth... its worth...
Empty words
> people start using it as a store of value
People are using for speculation, not for the store of value.
> theres also ethereum changing the face of banking forever
Ethereum is changing literally nothing
> while disregarding all the givens of reality
What you're describing are fantasies that have little to no bearing on reality.
> at this point its really hard to convey how extraordinarily mind-bendingly narrow-minded this point of view is.
At this point it's really hard to understand how anyone who talks about reality can be so far removed from reality.
Empty words
> people start using it as a store of value
People are using for speculation, not for the store of value.
> theres also ethereum changing the face of banking forever
Ethereum is changing literally nothing
> while disregarding all the givens of reality
What you're describing are fantasies that have little to no bearing on reality.
> at this point its really hard to convey how extraordinarily mind-bendingly narrow-minded this point of view is.
At this point it's really hard to understand how anyone who talks about reality can be so far removed from reality.
[deleted]
Defi is only about 2-3 years old. It's indeed fair to say that bitcoin has completely failed in getting any adoption beyond speculation.
>Nobody is using crypto as an alternative to fiat.
Ethereum is the best way to save in dollars outside of the developed world. High single digit or double digit yields (powered by speculators borrowing to speculate) vs ~0% in the banking system. Also much safer. Not compared to an American bank, but to Russian/Lebanese/Brazilian etc.
>Nobody is using crypto as an alternative to fiat.
Ethereum is the best way to save in dollars outside of the developed world. High single digit or double digit yields (powered by speculators borrowing to speculate) vs ~0% in the banking system. Also much safer. Not compared to an American bank, but to Russian/Lebanese/Brazilian etc.
> Defi is only about 2-3 years old
The history of defi can be traced back to mid-2013 (mastercoin) or earlier (colored coins).
And what the cool kids are calling “defi” today was called “appcoins” and “utility coins” several years ago. It’s all just marketing spin.
> It's indeed fair to say that bitcoin has completely failed in getting any adoption beyond speculation.
Digital gold is a euphemism for speculative store of value. Gold itself is a speculative SoV. For Bitcoin, that’s a sign of success — which is reflected in its market price.
There is not one single cryptocurrency on the market today which isn’t a speculative store of value primarily by real world usage. Rather there is Bitcoin which is upfront about this, and then there are other coins whose skilled sophists promote it as being something other than a speculative store of value as a hollow front. Peak behind the curtain and you’ll find a speculative store of value in 100% of cases, absolutely without exception. If anything has failed here it’s the moral compass of altcoin promoters globally, and investors for being so easily misled by hype entrepreneurs.
The history of defi can be traced back to mid-2013 (mastercoin) or earlier (colored coins).
And what the cool kids are calling “defi” today was called “appcoins” and “utility coins” several years ago. It’s all just marketing spin.
> It's indeed fair to say that bitcoin has completely failed in getting any adoption beyond speculation.
Digital gold is a euphemism for speculative store of value. Gold itself is a speculative SoV. For Bitcoin, that’s a sign of success — which is reflected in its market price.
There is not one single cryptocurrency on the market today which isn’t a speculative store of value primarily by real world usage. Rather there is Bitcoin which is upfront about this, and then there are other coins whose skilled sophists promote it as being something other than a speculative store of value as a hollow front. Peak behind the curtain and you’ll find a speculative store of value in 100% of cases, absolutely without exception. If anything has failed here it’s the moral compass of altcoin promoters globally, and investors for being so easily misled by hype entrepreneurs.
>The history of defi can be traced back to mid-2013 (mastercoin) or earlier (colored coins).
I disagree. Defi started with lending and borrowing dapps. If just tokens themselves are 'defi' then bitcoin itself is defi, which would make the definition pointless. Finance requires lending and borrowing.
>Digital gold is a euphemism for speculative store of value. Gold itself is a speculative SoV. For Bitcoin, that’s a sign of success — which is reflected in its market price.
The title of the bitcoin whitepaper is 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' which means it objectively failed in its stated goal. Of course, it had to, as bitcoin is not backed by anything and money must be backed by something.
Now it's just a ponzi scheme that continues to make people poorer while fooling them that they're getting rich. The only way to make a profit on bitcoin is to take someone else's wealth - it's zero sum by itself. On top of that there's mining, which ensures bitcoin continuously destroys wealth and makes bitcoin buyers poorer as a group compared to everyone else.
I disagree. Defi started with lending and borrowing dapps. If just tokens themselves are 'defi' then bitcoin itself is defi, which would make the definition pointless. Finance requires lending and borrowing.
>Digital gold is a euphemism for speculative store of value. Gold itself is a speculative SoV. For Bitcoin, that’s a sign of success — which is reflected in its market price.
The title of the bitcoin whitepaper is 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' which means it objectively failed in its stated goal. Of course, it had to, as bitcoin is not backed by anything and money must be backed by something.
Now it's just a ponzi scheme that continues to make people poorer while fooling them that they're getting rich. The only way to make a profit on bitcoin is to take someone else's wealth - it's zero sum by itself. On top of that there's mining, which ensures bitcoin continuously destroys wealth and makes bitcoin buyers poorer as a group compared to everyone else.
> Finance requires lending and borrowing.
And representing corporate shares on a blockchain isn’t in the purview of “finance”?
Everything old is new again.
And representing corporate shares on a blockchain isn’t in the purview of “finance”?
Everything old is new again.
The original use case was for black markets such as silkroad. Then crypto made so much sense.
> nothing my mother can use
In developed countries, I can tap with my phone or card to pay instantly, there's Venmo, and fees are low-ish. Currently, no cryptocurrency has competitive advantages to traditional payments...unless it's illegal, but even then, certain cryptocurrences are a really bad choice.
Supposedly phone apps are used for payments in developing countries, but I'm not entirely sure.
In developed countries, I can tap with my phone or card to pay instantly, there's Venmo, and fees are low-ish. Currently, no cryptocurrency has competitive advantages to traditional payments...unless it's illegal, but even then, certain cryptocurrences are a really bad choice.
Supposedly phone apps are used for payments in developing countries, but I'm not entirely sure.
I'm a huge proponent of crypto and the many things it's going to make possible that were not previously possible. But the developing country angle is oversold usually by people just parroting it without really knowing what things are like in developing countries:
1. In many developing countries increasingly you can also use phone or card almost as conveniently as you can in the west. In fact some developing countries are more advanced as far as mobile payments go (out of necessity because of less developed banking systems) e.g Mpesa in Kenya. Generally visa/bank cards and payment apps are not as alien as you might think they are in many parts of Africa or India or South America
2. Using Bitcoins for transactions/moving money around with the current state of the art is a lot more difficult and less accessible than using western union and other financial services that are ubiquitous in these places. Since at present you can't really use Bitcoin for much you still have to convert it fiat which means using an exchange. Most exchanges have even more onerous kyc/id requirements than banks and many financial institutions in developing countries won't even touch bitcoin at all. And not even to talk of the relative technical sophistication required to use crypto services let alone maintain a wallet. As far as developing countries go crypto-currency at present is mostly a curiosity among the well-heeled and well-connected in the largest cities. It's going to be a long long time before the promise of crypto bringing salvation to the un-banked comes anywhere close to reality.
The internet was around a lot longer than a decade before aol showed up and started pressing CDs.
Imagine if after TCP/IP was invented, people hoarded IP addresses and they became worth millions of dollars, but no one used the internet. If you pointed this out, they got mad at you for being a luddite or a noiper.
That's the situation we're in with crypto.
That's the situation we're in with crypto.
The reverse is sort of happening with IPv4. ISPs are pushing more and more people behind CGNAT where multiple people share the same IPv4 address. This is a problem because some video games (Terraria) don't support IPv6.
People use Ethereum..
https://etherscan.io/chart/gasused
https://etherscan.io/chart/gasused
They use it to speculate. In the words of Mark Cuban, "Traders borrow to buy Eth, used eth to borrow alt/stable coin, used that to LP a high APY Pair, took the SLPs and staked them to maxout yield."
Whatever that means, this is the world they're building.
Whatever that means, this is the world they're building.
Crypto relies on the internet. It benefits from its adoption. It should be much faster. YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, Spotify, App Stores, etc. All of these advancements experienced rapid growth. Hell, even PayPal.
The internet built the network that made that rapid growth possible. Crypto is not reinventing the internet.
The internet built the network that made that rapid growth possible. Crypto is not reinventing the internet.
Nope, it wasn't.
ArpaNet wasn't an internet until at least 1983 when the military network was split off, and commercialisation began.
10 years after that we already had Tim Berners Lee inventing www in a lab that was connected to a global communications network and routinely used by hundreds of thousands of people.
Prior to that, for example, France had Minitel which already had distributed services, email, payments, orders and so on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
ArpaNet wasn't an internet until at least 1983 when the military network was split off, and commercialisation began.
10 years after that we already had Tim Berners Lee inventing www in a lab that was connected to a global communications network and routinely used by hundreds of thousands of people.
Prior to that, for example, France had Minitel which already had distributed services, email, payments, orders and so on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
Sources on that claim?
I would argue that many NFT platforms (such as Hicetnunc.xyz[1]) have already successfully "disrupted" traditional artist marketplaces (such as Etsy, Shopify, Bandcamp, etc), despite being only popular for a short few months.
I think many other participating artists would agree, if these decentralized platforms continue to be more profitable for creators than traditional options, there is no need to 'go back' to centralized fiat marketplaces.
I think the real question is whether this will continue long-term, and whether decentralized paradigms (digital ownership, DAOs, trustless execution, etc) can still hold value for the average user even if there was no high economic return.
[1] - https://restofworld.org/2021/inside-brazils-diy-nft-art-mark...
I think many other participating artists would agree, if these decentralized platforms continue to be more profitable for creators than traditional options, there is no need to 'go back' to centralized fiat marketplaces.
I think the real question is whether this will continue long-term, and whether decentralized paradigms (digital ownership, DAOs, trustless execution, etc) can still hold value for the average user even if there was no high economic return.
[1] - https://restofworld.org/2021/inside-brazils-diy-nft-art-mark...
Maybe I'm wrong but I see this perspective so often on HN. And I can't help but feel that this is because so many people on HN are already privileged - living in the first world, making software salaries, and generally have a world of opportunities available to them, especially when it comes to their money.
But coming from a third world country, the promise of a decentralized, permissionless market seems extremely promising. Particularly if it doesn't restrict me because of my location or capital or identity.
If the internet broke geographical barriers, this tech can break barriers of capital and identity and credentialsm.
While I won't talk about the idealized vision of blockchains, smart contracts can automate away a large number of fairly complex interactions. There is already a pretty thriving decentralized financial market that anyone can access from any part of the world with any amount of capital - no KYC or questions asked.
A very basic usage: using Curve.fi to swap between tokenized USD (USDC) and tokenized EURO (EURS) with minimal slippage and fees, all permissionless, all freely accessible. If I was an American and wanted to have Euro to spend on my vacation, would this not be a better way to go about it instead of going to the bank, dealing with someone, and paying their exorbitant fees?
The only missing part is the ability to easily spend this tokenized EURO, but that - I'm hoping - will come later. The core tech - smart contracts, blockchains - work.
A more advanced use case: deploy tokenized USD into a vault that lends it out according to a set strategy, earning the lender interest passively. The individual who created the strategy, in term, earns a fee based on their returns generated. Again, this individual can be from anywhere and doesn't have to have a fancy office and degrees to get investment "clients". Nor does the lender have to deal with anyone to lend out their money.
If this tech allows Raj from India to build a "hedge fund", and for Joe from America to invest with as little as $1, and the two never have to know each other, and can interact entirely with a smart contract available 24x7, what's there not to be excited about?
In the serious crypto world, there is a maxim: Code is Law.
I would reckon that alone should make HN bullish on crypto. When was the last time you worked at a tech company where Code was truly the Law?
=====
Some links if anyone wants to explore this further:
1. Uniswap.org - anyone can set up trading between any two tokenized assets. Want to trade between the price of gold and Venezuelan Bolivar? Sure, go ahead and use the price oracles from Chainlink to create these two tokens, set up a trading pair, and allow anyone to speculate on these two assets. Or you can just be a market maker (something only big funds can do in TradFi) and earn fees on the trades.
2. Curve.fi - swap between tokenized stable coins, such as EURO > USD, without ever having to visit the bank or paying their fees or doing their KYC.
3. AAVE.com - Lend or borrow between tokenized assets
But coming from a third world country, the promise of a decentralized, permissionless market seems extremely promising. Particularly if it doesn't restrict me because of my location or capital or identity.
If the internet broke geographical barriers, this tech can break barriers of capital and identity and credentialsm.
While I won't talk about the idealized vision of blockchains, smart contracts can automate away a large number of fairly complex interactions. There is already a pretty thriving decentralized financial market that anyone can access from any part of the world with any amount of capital - no KYC or questions asked.
A very basic usage: using Curve.fi to swap between tokenized USD (USDC) and tokenized EURO (EURS) with minimal slippage and fees, all permissionless, all freely accessible. If I was an American and wanted to have Euro to spend on my vacation, would this not be a better way to go about it instead of going to the bank, dealing with someone, and paying their exorbitant fees?
The only missing part is the ability to easily spend this tokenized EURO, but that - I'm hoping - will come later. The core tech - smart contracts, blockchains - work.
A more advanced use case: deploy tokenized USD into a vault that lends it out according to a set strategy, earning the lender interest passively. The individual who created the strategy, in term, earns a fee based on their returns generated. Again, this individual can be from anywhere and doesn't have to have a fancy office and degrees to get investment "clients". Nor does the lender have to deal with anyone to lend out their money.
If this tech allows Raj from India to build a "hedge fund", and for Joe from America to invest with as little as $1, and the two never have to know each other, and can interact entirely with a smart contract available 24x7, what's there not to be excited about?
In the serious crypto world, there is a maxim: Code is Law.
I would reckon that alone should make HN bullish on crypto. When was the last time you worked at a tech company where Code was truly the Law?
=====
Some links if anyone wants to explore this further:
1. Uniswap.org - anyone can set up trading between any two tokenized assets. Want to trade between the price of gold and Venezuelan Bolivar? Sure, go ahead and use the price oracles from Chainlink to create these two tokens, set up a trading pair, and allow anyone to speculate on these two assets. Or you can just be a market maker (something only big funds can do in TradFi) and earn fees on the trades.
2. Curve.fi - swap between tokenized stable coins, such as EURO > USD, without ever having to visit the bank or paying their fees or doing their KYC.
3. AAVE.com - Lend or borrow between tokenized assets
> But coming from a third world country, the promise of a decentralized, permissionless market seems extremely promising. Particularly if it doesn't restrict me because of my location or capital or identity.
Your entire argument is about the promise of blockchain and not the actual current applications people are using. Your argument is theoretical when OP is asking for practical use cases. You mention many hypotheticals but not a single "I use blockchain for X" or "my mother uses blockchain for X" which is what actually matters.
> While I won't talk about the idealized vision of blockchains
As far as I'm concerned that's all you talked about, and you don't even realize it.
Your entire argument is about the promise of blockchain and not the actual current applications people are using. Your argument is theoretical when OP is asking for practical use cases. You mention many hypotheticals but not a single "I use blockchain for X" or "my mother uses blockchain for X" which is what actually matters.
> While I won't talk about the idealized vision of blockchains
As far as I'm concerned that's all you talked about, and you don't even realize it.
I literally gave a real world example: Curve.fi that's used to swap between stablecoins. You can literally go right now to swap between tokenized USD and EURO.
Or you can go to the bank and pay their exchange rate. Maybe they'll ask you for your ID too.
Another example of the second kind: www.Ape.tax, where anyone can deploy an investment strategy and beta users can try them out, and if they are successful, they can be integrated - voted on by a DAO - into Yearn.finance, the primary project with several billion $ in investment.
There are existing projects already using the situations I talked about. It's not theory. It's not idealized vision. It's happening right now.
Blockchain is moving so fast that Yearn.finance, the platform with billions in investment, wasn't even a thing a year ago.
Or you can go to the bank and pay their exchange rate. Maybe they'll ask you for your ID too.
Another example of the second kind: www.Ape.tax, where anyone can deploy an investment strategy and beta users can try them out, and if they are successful, they can be integrated - voted on by a DAO - into Yearn.finance, the primary project with several billion $ in investment.
There are existing projects already using the situations I talked about. It's not theory. It's not idealized vision. It's happening right now.
Blockchain is moving so fast that Yearn.finance, the platform with billions in investment, wasn't even a thing a year ago.
You gave a hypothetical example, not something you use. And to answer your question in your original post - no, blockchain would not be more convenient than using my traditional bank. I can do it entirely on my phone inside an app. And every time I've compared it's significantly cheaper not to use blockchain to send someone actual money.
You're giving me possible applications, not talking about you being an actual user. There are products for lots of things, that doesn't mean they have enough people using them that they're going to last.
> Blockchain is moving so fast that Yearn.finance, the platform with billions in investment, wasn't even a thing a year ago.
You're talking about something I've never heard of before as proof of blockchain having made it. We are on different planes here and I don't see us getting through to each other.
Anyway, agree to disagree. Cheers.
You're giving me possible applications, not talking about you being an actual user. There are products for lots of things, that doesn't mean they have enough people using them that they're going to last.
> Blockchain is moving so fast that Yearn.finance, the platform with billions in investment, wasn't even a thing a year ago.
You're talking about something I've never heard of before as proof of blockchain having made it. We are on different planes here and I don't see us getting through to each other.
Anyway, agree to disagree. Cheers.
Curve did $1 billion in volume over the past 24 hours https://curve.fi
That isn’t hypothetical. It’s like you keep getting refuted and then ignore reality because it disagrees with you.
“Blockchain is unused.”
[a bunch of links with billions of dollars in actual daily usage provided]
“Oh, well, I’ve never heard of that before so it doesn’t matter.”
What kind of arguing is this?
That isn’t hypothetical. It’s like you keep getting refuted and then ignore reality because it disagrees with you.
“Blockchain is unused.”
[a bunch of links with billions of dollars in actual daily usage provided]
“Oh, well, I’ve never heard of that before so it doesn’t matter.”
What kind of arguing is this?
Much of HN is stuck in 2017 Blockchain era. Most haven't looked it serious since that crash. Many still think of Blockchain and can only think of BTC, LTC, Doge and ETH. DeFi is so new that it even caught HN off guard.
Much of HN is also middle of the curve and don't care/know about finance. Finance, financial engineering and P2P is a different beast compared to deploying bloated Docker containers running React frontends. It's a shame because there are a lot of smart people here that could help working on sustainable economics for fun and profit.
This seems to be one of the problems. The other is just a weird contrarianism -- many on HN want open source software and systems, but in no way do they want an open economy or money system.
Curve is just leverage for speculation: deposit token A, withdraw token B, earn the appreciation on both token A and B. Speculation is still the only use case.
DeFi provides absolutely nothing novel. Nobody said it wasn’t used. They asked for a non speculative, “real” use case.
DeFi provides absolutely nothing novel. Nobody said it wasn’t used. They asked for a non speculative, “real” use case.
By that standard, majority of Wall Street has no use case either, since much of the money is made entirely on speculation. Is betting on whether oil price will go up or down really that much of a use case?
Unless you count making money as not enough of a use case.
I give up though. HN will willfully ignore crypto and miss out not only on life changing money, but one of the few places in tech that is still fun and exciting and hasn’t been “corporatized”.
Unless you count making money as not enough of a use case.
I give up though. HN will willfully ignore crypto and miss out not only on life changing money, but one of the few places in tech that is still fun and exciting and hasn’t been “corporatized”.
> By that standard, majority of Wall Street has no use case either, since much of the money is made entirely on speculation. Is betting on whether oil price will go up or down really that much of a use case?
Absolutely. Price is the single encapsulation of all information in a market. But this is only the case because oil is a scarce resource, which needs allocating, and efforts are made to ensure that markets are fair. That is not true for crypto.
However, your presumption about “mostly speculation” also isn’t true and just reeks of someone who has no finance experience. I’ve spent my career as a hedge fund trader, focused in commods. Oil markets exist principally for bonafide hedgers to exchange risk. I cannot tell you how important hedging is to global market efficiencies.
Absolutely. Price is the single encapsulation of all information in a market. But this is only the case because oil is a scarce resource, which needs allocating, and efforts are made to ensure that markets are fair. That is not true for crypto.
However, your presumption about “mostly speculation” also isn’t true and just reeks of someone who has no finance experience. I’ve spent my career as a hedge fund trader, focused in commods. Oil markets exist principally for bonafide hedgers to exchange risk. I cannot tell you how important hedging is to global market efficiencies.
> Unless you count making money as not enough of a use case.
So then you're agreeing that the only real use case for crypto is speculation, and not something normal people should care about.
> By that standard, majority of Wall Street has no use case either, since much of the money is made entirely on speculation.
I think most educated people would agree that Wall St is a drain on society the same as targeted ads. The world is better without it. Are ads also useful because of how much money they make?
> HN will willfully ignore crypto and miss out not only on life changing money, but one of the few places in tech that is still fun and exciting and hasn’t been “corporatized”.
I really hope you're not so naïve that you don't realize crypto markets are being manipulated by big banks.
So then you're agreeing that the only real use case for crypto is speculation, and not something normal people should care about.
> By that standard, majority of Wall Street has no use case either, since much of the money is made entirely on speculation.
I think most educated people would agree that Wall St is a drain on society the same as targeted ads. The world is better without it. Are ads also useful because of how much money they make?
> HN will willfully ignore crypto and miss out not only on life changing money, but one of the few places in tech that is still fun and exciting and hasn’t been “corporatized”.
I really hope you're not so naïve that you don't realize crypto markets are being manipulated by big banks.
Right now, if I want to invest in US stocks, I have to go through a handful of local brokers. They want a minimum of 10k inr in the trading account. I have to clear kyc and get my account approved. Once approved, they can shut down the account anytime for any reason.
And all of these are recent developments - until a couple of years ago, it wasn’t even possible to invest in US stocks.
Alternatively, I can buy tokenized versions of popular stocks. This will be an erc-20 token that I will have full custody of at all times. I do not have to get “approved” or have a minimum amount in my account. I can be an investor in, say, AAPL with any amount of money from any part of the world. Unlike my own local stock markets that are filled with insider trading and subpar companies, I get to invest in and gain wealth from a more competitive market - without ever needing anyone’s permission.
Do you consider financial inclusivity a bad thing? Would you say that having control over your own money and removing gatekeepers is good?
And all of these are recent developments - until a couple of years ago, it wasn’t even possible to invest in US stocks.
Alternatively, I can buy tokenized versions of popular stocks. This will be an erc-20 token that I will have full custody of at all times. I do not have to get “approved” or have a minimum amount in my account. I can be an investor in, say, AAPL with any amount of money from any part of the world. Unlike my own local stock markets that are filled with insider trading and subpar companies, I get to invest in and gain wealth from a more competitive market - without ever needing anyone’s permission.
Do you consider financial inclusivity a bad thing? Would you say that having control over your own money and removing gatekeepers is good?
I know plenty of people in India who trade US stocks and they don't have to put up that much in assets. You've made so many other factually incorrect statements I don't know if you're lying or ignorant but I know for a fact you're wrong.
What do you mean is happening right now?
For example, you mention foreign currency exchanges. According to Wikipedia, trading in foreign exchange markets averaged $6.6 trillion per day (April 2019). [1] Is there any indication that foreign exchange markets are moving towards adopting this trading of tokenized currencies that apparently is so much better than the system they're using now?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_market
For example, you mention foreign currency exchanges. According to Wikipedia, trading in foreign exchange markets averaged $6.6 trillion per day (April 2019). [1] Is there any indication that foreign exchange markets are moving towards adopting this trading of tokenized currencies that apparently is so much better than the system they're using now?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_market
You're being disingenuous if you're trying to compare the mature foreign exchange market with a technology that's barely half a decade old and still obscure by most standards. Curve.fi, the example I shared, was launched in Jan 2020 and peaked at a daily volume of $1B.
Personally, I can't buy USD without going to the bank and filling out paperwork, submitting ID documents and clarifying why I need the USD and adhering to prescribed limits.
I have no such restrictions with their tokenized variants.
Personally, I can't buy USD without going to the bank and filling out paperwork, submitting ID documents and clarifying why I need the USD and adhering to prescribed limits.
I have no such restrictions with their tokenized variants.
But you said it was happening right now... no you say it isn't happening, okay.
> I have no such restrictions with their tokenized variants.
Regulations don't apply because you're trading fantasy money. Once you try to exchange these virtual tokens for real money, then you will be required to comply with the regulations.
> I have no such restrictions with their tokenized variants.
Regulations don't apply because you're trading fantasy money. Once you try to exchange these virtual tokens for real money, then you will be required to comply with the regulations.
Have you tried to convert currency these days? I do it on my credit card for 0% at the Reuters fix window. If you actually go through your process above, it is so much more expensive.
> coming from a third world country, the promise of a decentralized, permissionless market seems extremely promising
> A very basic usage: using Curve.fi to swap between tokenized USD (USDC) and tokenized EURO (EURS) with minimal slippage and fees, all permissionless, all freely accessible.
As a sibling comment noted, this is hypothetical usage, and a future 'promise,' not actual usable by or providing value to the average person.
I went to curve.fi, and from a first glance, anyone not first-world, techie, and extremely familiar with crypto would be completely bewildered by this.
"Select a wallet to connect to this dapp" — what is a wallet and what is a dapp?
"Swap using all Curve pools" — what's a Curve pool?
"Trade routed through alusd" — what does this even mean?
"Base APY" — what? I thought I was exchanging currency, not opening a bank account?
"veCRV holder/LP ratio (based on fees): 28.74" — This is where even first-world, college-educated people close the website in confusion.
> A very basic usage: using Curve.fi to swap between tokenized USD (USDC) and tokenized EURO (EURS) with minimal slippage and fees, all permissionless, all freely accessible.
As a sibling comment noted, this is hypothetical usage, and a future 'promise,' not actual usable by or providing value to the average person.
I went to curve.fi, and from a first glance, anyone not first-world, techie, and extremely familiar with crypto would be completely bewildered by this.
"Select a wallet to connect to this dapp" — what is a wallet and what is a dapp?
"Swap using all Curve pools" — what's a Curve pool?
"Trade routed through alusd" — what does this even mean?
"Base APY" — what? I thought I was exchanging currency, not opening a bank account?
"veCRV holder/LP ratio (based on fees): 28.74" — This is where even first-world, college-educated people close the website in confusion.
Bad UX in early technology is kind of expected, isn't it?
I'm sure lots of first-world, college-educated people were equally bewildered by email in 1995.
I'm sure lots of first-world, college-educated people were equally bewildered by email in 1995.
Agreed and it's expected, but the question posed was whether there's actual current instances of crypto helping people in the third-world, or whether it's just a bunch of hypothetical future promises of value.
Speaking as someone from the third world, absolutely.
I just implore anyone here to approach this with an open mind. There's lots of fraud, but that's also leading people to come up with newer, more exciting solutions. Like on-chain insurance (https://nexusmutual.io/) or tranches to compartmentalize risk (https://saffron.finance/) or creating entirely synthetic assets on-chain (https://synthetix.io/)
It's a weird space where finance and tech and design and culture are coming together, and frankly, it's the most fun I've had in tech in years.
Even though I feel that current valuations are grossly overheated, the stuff coming out on a daily basis is just a ton of fun.
I just implore anyone here to approach this with an open mind. There's lots of fraud, but that's also leading people to come up with newer, more exciting solutions. Like on-chain insurance (https://nexusmutual.io/) or tranches to compartmentalize risk (https://saffron.finance/) or creating entirely synthetic assets on-chain (https://synthetix.io/)
It's a weird space where finance and tech and design and culture are coming together, and frankly, it's the most fun I've had in tech in years.
Even though I feel that current valuations are grossly overheated, the stuff coming out on a daily basis is just a ton of fun.
> Like on-chain insurance
Doesn't need blockchain
> tranches to compartmentalize risk
Doesn't need blockchain
> creating entirely synthetic assets on-chain
What does it even mean? Also: doesn't require blockchain.
Doesn't need blockchain
> tranches to compartmentalize risk
Doesn't need blockchain
> creating entirely synthetic assets on-chain
What does it even mean? Also: doesn't require blockchain.
Blockchain is what makes it freely accessible to anyone from anywhere without requiring a sign up or kyc or local presence.
For instance, I can’t sign up for a US trading account without a certain amount of capital, going through a specialized broker, and clearing certain KYC rules.
I can do all of that without ever needing to go through a single centralized authority. I can buy a tokenized version of TSLA stock without going through a broker and having complete and 100% control over my capital at all times.
Unless you consider financial inclusivity and free and open financial markets a bad thing, of course.
All the criticism is so first world centric and elitist
For instance, I can’t sign up for a US trading account without a certain amount of capital, going through a specialized broker, and clearing certain KYC rules.
I can do all of that without ever needing to go through a single centralized authority. I can buy a tokenized version of TSLA stock without going through a broker and having complete and 100% control over my capital at all times.
Unless you consider financial inclusivity and free and open financial markets a bad thing, of course.
All the criticism is so first world centric and elitist
> Blockchain is what makes it freely accessible to anyone from anywhere without requiring a sign up
Except... You need to signup because there's literally no way to obtain anything on blockchain if you're not a miner.
Well, you could probably sell something for bitcoin, but then oops, you need to sign up somewhere to convert it into actual real money.
> I can’t sign up for a US trading account without a certain amount of capital, going through a specialized broker, and clearing certain KYC rules.
And there are reasons for that. And yes, similar crypto set ups quickly rediscover what those reasons are.
> I can do all of that without ever needing to go through a single centralized authority.
Until you pay for something and that something never arrives. Then you would be very glad to have a central authority.
> All the criticism is so first world centric and elitist
Ah yes. The tired old "but the poor people in poor countries" cries the person whose first example was "I can’t sign up for a US trading account without a certain amount of capital".
Because, as we all know, people not from the first world are flocking to open up US trading accounts and buy TSLA stocks.
Except... You need to signup because there's literally no way to obtain anything on blockchain if you're not a miner.
Well, you could probably sell something for bitcoin, but then oops, you need to sign up somewhere to convert it into actual real money.
> I can’t sign up for a US trading account without a certain amount of capital, going through a specialized broker, and clearing certain KYC rules.
And there are reasons for that. And yes, similar crypto set ups quickly rediscover what those reasons are.
> I can do all of that without ever needing to go through a single centralized authority.
Until you pay for something and that something never arrives. Then you would be very glad to have a central authority.
> All the criticism is so first world centric and elitist
Ah yes. The tired old "but the poor people in poor countries" cries the person whose first example was "I can’t sign up for a US trading account without a certain amount of capital".
Because, as we all know, people not from the first world are flocking to open up US trading accounts and buy TSLA stocks.
> Well, you could probably sell something for bitcoin, but then oops, you need to sign up somewhere to convert it into actual real money.
Not quite, you can cash out BTC without going through any KYC. You can use non-kyc exchanges like hodlhodl, ATMs which just give you cash, or in person p2p trading.
> Until you pay for something and that something never arrives. Then you would be very glad to have a central authority.
Lol, you clearly do not live in a country with double digit inflation, government mandated bank limits, oppression. Cryptocurrency is literally saving lives in some parts of the world
> Ah yes. The tired old "but the poor people in poor countries" cries the person whose first example was "I can’t sign up for a US trading account without a certain amount of capital".
And you clearly need to workout that empathy muscle
Not quite, you can cash out BTC without going through any KYC. You can use non-kyc exchanges like hodlhodl, ATMs which just give you cash, or in person p2p trading.
> Until you pay for something and that something never arrives. Then you would be very glad to have a central authority.
Lol, you clearly do not live in a country with double digit inflation, government mandated bank limits, oppression. Cryptocurrency is literally saving lives in some parts of the world
> Ah yes. The tired old "but the poor people in poor countries" cries the person whose first example was "I can’t sign up for a US trading account without a certain amount of capital".
And you clearly need to workout that empathy muscle
> ou can cash out BTC without going through any KYC. You can use non-kyc exchanges like hodlhodl, ATMs which just give you cash, or in person p2p trading.
So, all options significantly more involved or less accessible to people than regular cash.
> Lol, you clearly do not live in a country with double digit inflation, government mandated bank limits, oppression
I have. Moldova after the fall of the Soviet Union. Then in Turkey which historically had ~100% inflation for most of its history and then a crash in early 2000s.
I lived through it all.
"You need to set up a wallet for a digital token, somehow buy it for real money, then somehow convert it into real currency" is not an option for the absolute vast majority of people even in the countries with high levels of inflation, bank limits etc.
If anything, cryptocurrencies are a very, very first-world thing.
And, of course, there's also this, much more eloquently put: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259374
> Cryptocurrency is literally saving lives in some parts of the world
For a very small number of people.
> And you clearly need to workout that empathy muscle
I prefer reality to empathy when it comes to cryptocurrency.
So, all options significantly more involved or less accessible to people than regular cash.
> Lol, you clearly do not live in a country with double digit inflation, government mandated bank limits, oppression
I have. Moldova after the fall of the Soviet Union. Then in Turkey which historically had ~100% inflation for most of its history and then a crash in early 2000s.
I lived through it all.
"You need to set up a wallet for a digital token, somehow buy it for real money, then somehow convert it into real currency" is not an option for the absolute vast majority of people even in the countries with high levels of inflation, bank limits etc.
If anything, cryptocurrencies are a very, very first-world thing.
And, of course, there's also this, much more eloquently put: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259374
> Cryptocurrency is literally saving lives in some parts of the world
For a very small number of people.
> And you clearly need to workout that empathy muscle
I prefer reality to empathy when it comes to cryptocurrency.
What’s the advantage here over mpesa?
The insoluble problem is that any system of the kind you describe where the final tokens are ultimately spendable will be swamped by criminal use.
If you make an end run around the existing regulatory system through code, the people who are inhibited from transfering money by the current regulatory regime will all use your new system. And that traffic will be overwhelmingly criminal.
The amount of illicit money needing to move is overwhelmingly larger than the sums that honest people are prevented from transferring by corrupt governments or unjust restrictions. That is going to doom any attempt at creating a parallel money transfer system that works at scale.
If you make an end run around the existing regulatory system through code, the people who are inhibited from transfering money by the current regulatory regime will all use your new system. And that traffic will be overwhelmingly criminal.
The amount of illicit money needing to move is overwhelmingly larger than the sums that honest people are prevented from transferring by corrupt governments or unjust restrictions. That is going to doom any attempt at creating a parallel money transfer system that works at scale.
I think money transfer was Blockhain Era 1.0 use case. The use case has advanced - very rapidly - to money automation. This is all really new stuff, much of it barely a year old, and it has come so fast that even I've been surprised.
A smart contract can currently take your tokenized USD (we'll use USDC since its backed by Coinbase), use that as collateral to borrow ETH on AAVE.com (a lending protocol), use 50% of that ETH to buy up USDC again, use this USDC + ETH to create a liquidity pair on Uniswap, and earning 0.3% fees on any swaps made between USDC and ETH.
All in a single transaction.
A smart contract can currently take your tokenized USD (we'll use USDC since its backed by Coinbase), use that as collateral to borrow ETH on AAVE.com (a lending protocol), use 50% of that ETH to buy up USDC again, use this USDC + ETH to create a liquidity pair on Uniswap, and earning 0.3% fees on any swaps made between USDC and ETH.
All in a single transaction.
> A smart contract can currently take your tokenized USD (we'll use USDC since its backed by Coinbase), use that as collateral to borrow ETH on AAVE.com (a lending protocol), use 50% of that ETH to buy up USDC again, use this USDC + ETH to create a liquidity pair on Uniswap, and earning 0.3% fees on any swaps made between USDC and ETH.
And... What does this accomplish, exactly? Besides "get rich, quick, in virtual money that, for now, some folks will convert to real money, maybe"
And... What does this accomplish, exactly? Besides "get rich, quick, in virtual money that, for now, some folks will convert to real money, maybe"
This use case is gambling with extra steps, except the software that runs a slot machine is far better vetted for correctness than a smart contract.
Without money transfer, this system remains a toy system. With money transfer, it becomes a regulatory bypass. No amount of complexity layered on top fixes this.
Without money transfer, this system remains a toy system. With money transfer, it becomes a regulatory bypass. No amount of complexity layered on top fixes this.
Money transfer is impossible to stop as long as P2P exchange exists. My country banned crypto a few years back. I just bought in-person. Nigerian central bank banned crypto recently. Nigerians just exchanged it over Whatsapp
The fact that central bankers are busy banning it should give you an idea how disruptive it is.
The fact that central bankers are busy banning it should give you an idea how disruptive it is.
>> Nigerian central bank banned crypto recently
The Nigerian central actually prohibited banks from facilitating or participating in crypto based transactions. You can still trade legally however you want.
The Nigerian central actually prohibited banks from facilitating or participating in crypto based transactions. You can still trade legally however you want.
Wat. But... why?
Because its accessible from anyone from anywhere without requiring a sign up or kyc or any of the other hurdles that stop the flow of money and information between legal jurisdictions.
A banking and trading account where I can access multiple currencies without ever filling out a form or talking to a sales rep or being from the same country as the banking institution or passing some arbitrary credit check has to be worth something
I can’t buy AAPL here in India without going through a broker and clearing kyc and having certain amount of capital. I can buy tokenized AAPL that will sit in a wallet I control at all times, can buy with literally fractions of a dollar, and buy without ever going through a gatekeeper.
But again, you’re likely in the first world so it doesn’t matter to you. But here in the third world, people are willing to literally break local laws to access these markets.
A banking and trading account where I can access multiple currencies without ever filling out a form or talking to a sales rep or being from the same country as the banking institution or passing some arbitrary credit check has to be worth something
I can’t buy AAPL here in India without going through a broker and clearing kyc and having certain amount of capital. I can buy tokenized AAPL that will sit in a wallet I control at all times, can buy with literally fractions of a dollar, and buy without ever going through a gatekeeper.
But again, you’re likely in the first world so it doesn’t matter to you. But here in the third world, people are willing to literally break local laws to access these markets.
> I would reckon that alone should make HN bullish on crypto. When was the last time you worked at a tech company where Code was truly the Law?
Hell the fuck no.
Have you seen what kind of code people write?
"Code is law" is the last thing anyone with real tech experience should ever want. It's a terrifying prospect.
Code is buggy. I don't want my laws to be buggy and unfixable.
Hell the fuck no.
Have you seen what kind of code people write?
"Code is law" is the last thing anyone with real tech experience should ever want. It's a terrifying prospect.
Code is buggy. I don't want my laws to be buggy and unfixable.
hard agree on that one: it's a recipe for a cypto-hellscape.
You wouldn't know who to trust, and the time it takes to actually audit smart contracts for trust is enormous. What a joke.
The only missing part is the ability to easily spend this tokenized EURO, but that - I'm hoping - will come later.
Capital flows are massively rising without this centralized KYC/AML/CTF system of gatekeeping, tracking and surveillance:
https://money-movers.info/
The emerging surveillance system in the traditional finance system, with the creation of FinCEN in the US in 1990, and FinTRAC in Canada in 2000, is massively centralizing power and can exacerbate financial exclusion:
https://reddit.com/r/MakerDAO/comments/de0sys/kyc_is_absolut...
The existence of crime and terrorism does not justify warrantless mass-surveillance. People in a free society have a right to privacy, including in their financial transactions, even if that privacy may facilitate some criminal activity they may choose to engage in.
Absent a criminal conviction, or at least a court's ruling that there is probable cause, they should be presumed innocent and secure in their right to privacy, not presumed suspect, and obligated to disclose private data as a condition for being permitted to engage in interactions with other private citizens.
Beyond this consideration for basic human rights and the foundations of a free society, by some accounts, KYC is the most ineffective policy experiment in history:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...
https://money-movers.info/
The emerging surveillance system in the traditional finance system, with the creation of FinCEN in the US in 1990, and FinTRAC in Canada in 2000, is massively centralizing power and can exacerbate financial exclusion:
https://reddit.com/r/MakerDAO/comments/de0sys/kyc_is_absolut...
The existence of crime and terrorism does not justify warrantless mass-surveillance. People in a free society have a right to privacy, including in their financial transactions, even if that privacy may facilitate some criminal activity they may choose to engage in.
Absent a criminal conviction, or at least a court's ruling that there is probable cause, they should be presumed innocent and secure in their right to privacy, not presumed suspect, and obligated to disclose private data as a condition for being permitted to engage in interactions with other private citizens.
Beyond this consideration for basic human rights and the foundations of a free society, by some accounts, KYC is the most ineffective policy experiment in history:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...
Nothing stopping you from using a P2P exchange to turn that Euro into hard cash if you don't want to go through the KYC/AML. In fact that's exactly how I bought my BTC after the government here banned it.
I mean on a larger scale. The great promise of crypto, A billion plus “unbanked” people turning to a crypto enabled shadow banking system, will not happen without drawing the attention of the eye of sauron
Shouldn't the fact that central bankers want to ban crypto make you think that maybe there's something here more than ponzis and scams?
If the eye of sauron wants to destroy something, surely it can't be all bad?
If the eye of sauron wants to destroy something, surely it can't be all bad?
>> Shouldn't the fact that central bankers want to ban crypto make you think that maybe there's something here more than ponzis and scams?
Note that I do not support Gov banning crypto.
I see two things: 1. That there's a legitimate threat to their power and existence which they would do anything to mitigate.
2. Also, it could be that majority of their population are being exposed to unhealthy risk.
Take the case of Nigeria for example. MMM a ponzi scheme rocked the country in early 2017. People lost a total estimate of about 18 billion Naira (or $60m as of March 2017)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMM_Global
The Government actually warned people, but the Government has gained reputation for stifling any form of growth. Therefore, no one listened.
Note that I do not support Gov banning crypto.
I see two things: 1. That there's a legitimate threat to their power and existence which they would do anything to mitigate.
2. Also, it could be that majority of their population are being exposed to unhealthy risk.
Take the case of Nigeria for example. MMM a ponzi scheme rocked the country in early 2017. People lost a total estimate of about 18 billion Naira (or $60m as of March 2017)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMM_Global
The Government actually warned people, but the Government has gained reputation for stifling any form of growth. Therefore, no one listened.
Or it's so bad everyone agrees.
>> In the serious crypto world, there is a maxim: Code is Law.
Yeah, what's this thing of code is law. I was discussing with a friend today on how governments might have to come in to regulated some financial transactions with crypto based assets. And he vehemently kept repeating that no government can regulate crypto because "code is law". We went down to the physics level to see why it's not impossible to do. Only for me to come here again and start seeing code is law. High time someone explained it better.
Yeah, what's this thing of code is law. I was discussing with a friend today on how governments might have to come in to regulated some financial transactions with crypto based assets. And he vehemently kept repeating that no government can regulate crypto because "code is law". We went down to the physics level to see why it's not impossible to do. Only for me to come here again and start seeing code is law. High time someone explained it better.
When you put money in your bank account, where does it go? Who uses it? When you purchase shares, where do they come from? How many market makers were involved? How much profit did they make front-running your purchase?
All these things are currently completely opaque to the average person. Decentralized Finance fixes this. Every transaction and system you interact with is completely open source, transparent, and fair for everyone involved. There are no rich and powerful people taking a cut of your money every time you use the system, as it is in traditional finance.
You can see the exact code doing what you want done, and nobody can stop it doing that, or change the rules part way through (see: the Robinhood GME saga)
Traditionally the government set the rules, but the government can be corrupted. Most people know that wall street regularly breaks the law if the profit they make will be greater than `fines they pay * risk of getting caught`. Until now there was nothing we could do about this. Code can't be corrupted in the same way.
All these things are currently completely opaque to the average person. Decentralized Finance fixes this. Every transaction and system you interact with is completely open source, transparent, and fair for everyone involved. There are no rich and powerful people taking a cut of your money every time you use the system, as it is in traditional finance.
You can see the exact code doing what you want done, and nobody can stop it doing that, or change the rules part way through (see: the Robinhood GME saga)
Traditionally the government set the rules, but the government can be corrupted. Most people know that wall street regularly breaks the law if the profit they make will be greater than `fines they pay * risk of getting caught`. Until now there was nothing we could do about this. Code can't be corrupted in the same way.
> All these things are currently completely opaque to the average person. Decentralized Finance fixes this
Code is opaque to people as well, most SWEs struggle to understand distributed systems that are using consensus protocols much simpler than byzantine fault tolerance, or programming on environment are non-adversarial, unlike solidity. You can't just learn solidity and then trust smart contracts, it takes a lot of knowledge to avoid vulnerabilities.
> Code can't be corrupted in the same way.
If you think this, you might be in your a rude awakening. "Code" is being used in crypto-currencies for corruption all the time, and there is no inherent property of computers that protects you against malice, theft and vice.
I personally don't want to live in a world where I need to audit the code for every financial transaction I'm party to, and fortunately I live in a country with a mostly working legal system that already handles this for me.
Code is opaque to people as well, most SWEs struggle to understand distributed systems that are using consensus protocols much simpler than byzantine fault tolerance, or programming on environment are non-adversarial, unlike solidity. You can't just learn solidity and then trust smart contracts, it takes a lot of knowledge to avoid vulnerabilities.
> Code can't be corrupted in the same way.
If you think this, you might be in your a rude awakening. "Code" is being used in crypto-currencies for corruption all the time, and there is no inherent property of computers that protects you against malice, theft and vice.
I personally don't want to live in a world where I need to audit the code for every financial transaction I'm party to, and fortunately I live in a country with a mostly working legal system that already handles this for me.
> Code is opaque to people as well, most SWEs struggle to understand distributed systems that are using consensus protocols much simpler than byzantine fault tolerance, or programming on environment are non-adversarial, unlike solidity. You can't just learn solidity and then trust smart contracts, it takes a lot of knowledge to avoid vulnerabilities.
It's open source vs closed source arguments again. I have personally never looked at the Linux Kernel or Ubuntu source code, but I trust it more than I trust Windows because I know many thousands of people have looked at it before me and said it's secure.
> "Code" is being used in crypto-currencies for corruption all the time, and there is no inherent property of computers that protects you against malice, theft and vice.
I'm sure it is, code can also be used to create viruses and malware but that doesn't mean Linux is insecure. It's about the transparency of the code and systems you use. More transparency = more trust = better outcomes. I'd rather live in a transparent, fair world, than one where those with more power and money get to set the rules and hide the internal workings from everyone else.
It's open source vs closed source arguments again. I have personally never looked at the Linux Kernel or Ubuntu source code, but I trust it more than I trust Windows because I know many thousands of people have looked at it before me and said it's secure.
> "Code" is being used in crypto-currencies for corruption all the time, and there is no inherent property of computers that protects you against malice, theft and vice.
I'm sure it is, code can also be used to create viruses and malware but that doesn't mean Linux is insecure. It's about the transparency of the code and systems you use. More transparency = more trust = better outcomes. I'd rather live in a transparent, fair world, than one where those with more power and money get to set the rules and hide the internal workings from everyone else.
It essentially means that the Code is the product. Everything is visible and public. Every smart contract can be publicly viewed and verified. If the code isn't up to scratch, you can review it. If it has an exploit, you can detect it. Whatever it is doing, is transparent.
You can't say the same when you deposit money into, say, Robinhood. You don't know what the code is doing with that money.
You can't say the same when you deposit money into, say, Robinhood. You don't know what the code is doing with that money.
>> You can't say the same when you deposit money into, say, Robinhood
How do you know what the major exchanges are doing as well?
By the way, how did the exchanges wind up becoming so powerful and rich. Becoming almost a parallel Wall Street, just a smaller one, in a system that was supposed to ultimately democratise power. Some people with resources managed to emerge at the top in decision making...
How do you know what the major exchanges are doing as well?
By the way, how did the exchanges wind up becoming so powerful and rich. Becoming almost a parallel Wall Street, just a smaller one, in a system that was supposed to ultimately democratise power. Some people with resources managed to emerge at the top in decision making...
You don’t have to use an exchange at all. Decentralized exchanges have been around for quite a while and have massive volume. And their governance is entirely controlled by DAOs
Centralized exchanges are a necessary evil for now. DeFi (Decentralized Finance) is where code is law. Services like Uniswap, Curve, Aave etc are all just code that you interact with on Ethereum. Once you've onboarded into the decentralized world you can use them at will and eventually you'll be able to live your life without having to use centralized services again.
> Centralized exchanges are a necessary evil for now. DeFi (Decentralized Finance) is where code is law. Services like Uniswap, Curve, Aave etc are all just code that you interact with on Ethereum.
Code is not law and I doubt it can ever be. IIRC ethereum even had that saying on their web page until that stance threatened to lose a lot of money to people with power within ethereum.
Code is not law and I doubt it can ever be. IIRC ethereum even had that saying on their web page until that stance threatened to lose a lot of money to people with power within ethereum.
> the two never have to know each other, and can interact entirely with a smart contract available 24x7, what's there not to be excited about?
I tell you that I'm totally going to follow what a program tells me and you should give me your money to earn interest. Are you excited about the possible interest from this uninsured, pinky-swear promise exchange?
> Code is Law
"Code is law unless things go really bad." - DAO
I tell you that I'm totally going to follow what a program tells me and you should give me your money to earn interest. Are you excited about the possible interest from this uninsured, pinky-swear promise exchange?
> Code is Law
"Code is law unless things go really bad." - DAO
> I tell you that I'm totally going to follow what a program tells me and you should give me your money to earn interest. Are you excited about the possible interest from this uninsured, pinky-swear promise exchange?
It's a smart contract. You can review it publicly. If there are vulnerabilities, if the ownership is not renounced, it would be visible. Can you say the same about your investment bank?
You don't have to trust the coder or the platform or the exchange. Code is Law. Trust the code.
It's a smart contract. You can review it publicly. If there are vulnerabilities, if the ownership is not renounced, it would be visible. Can you say the same about your investment bank?
You don't have to trust the coder or the platform or the exchange. Code is Law. Trust the code.
But the smart contact cannot interact with real world. It's the party on the other side that ultimately gets the funds and acts on your behalf. That party can just take the money and go away.
Unless we're talking about purely on-chain strategies. But in that case why wouldn't you copy their public investment contract and execute it yourself?
> Can you say the same about your investment bank?
My investment bank has a tonne of regulation on it. If they go under and I can't claim insurance on it, then we have bigger issues where "money" may not be an answer anymore.
The workers also would be liable to local laws if they tried to literally walk away with money. (Sure, we have various enforcement issues, but the alternative of none-of-that doesn't sound great)
Unless we're talking about purely on-chain strategies. But in that case why wouldn't you copy their public investment contract and execute it yourself?
> Can you say the same about your investment bank?
My investment bank has a tonne of regulation on it. If they go under and I can't claim insurance on it, then we have bigger issues where "money" may not be an answer anymore.
The workers also would be liable to local laws if they tried to literally walk away with money. (Sure, we have various enforcement issues, but the alternative of none-of-that doesn't sound great)
All real and legit concerns. Fraud remains a big problem which is why returns are so high right now - we're all early adopters.
But there are new developments constantly. On-chain insurance against smart contract failure and hacks is a thing (see: https://nexusmutual.io/). More sophisticated insurance strategies to compartmentalize risk are coming up (see https://www.unn.finance/). Protocol design to reduce risk exposure are being experimented with (see: https://saffron.finance/).
It's all new and all very exciting. It's moving very fast and its really fun to be in. I haven't been this excited by anything since the early web.
But there are new developments constantly. On-chain insurance against smart contract failure and hacks is a thing (see: https://nexusmutual.io/). More sophisticated insurance strategies to compartmentalize risk are coming up (see https://www.unn.finance/). Protocol design to reduce risk exposure are being experimented with (see: https://saffron.finance/).
It's all new and all very exciting. It's moving very fast and its really fun to be in. I haven't been this excited by anything since the early web.
I can see where you're coming from. It is an opinion I have from privilege - I don't live a privileged life but I don't struggle either (middle income bracket).
After reading your use cases I do have empathy for people in those situations, where governments and centralized agencies are corrupt etc - just not entirely sure this solves any of that.
After reading your use cases I do have empathy for people in those situations, where governments and centralized agencies are corrupt etc - just not entirely sure this solves any of that.
man even if you're not a believer in the utility of it all, simply participating in crypto right now is loads of fun. Its a weird space where finance and culture and tech and design come together. For every fraudster, there are 10 people who are genuinely excited about this space and have a true hacker spirit.
I haven't seen that kind of energy on the web in years - so much of it is cleaned up and coporatized. Crypto is still wild and interesting and fun.
You can even consider entering it purely as a hobby - that's how I did, and ended up talking to developers about, say, creating undercollateralized synthetic assets that hold peg to their real world assets by constricting/increasing asset supply at timed intervals.
I haven't seen that kind of energy on the web in years - so much of it is cleaned up and coporatized. Crypto is still wild and interesting and fun.
You can even consider entering it purely as a hobby - that's how I did, and ended up talking to developers about, say, creating undercollateralized synthetic assets that hold peg to their real world assets by constricting/increasing asset supply at timed intervals.
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I am using Bitcoin as money and there are a lot of people like me. Just by saving in Bitcoin is using it. The primary purpose of money is to save your purchasing power. From my viewpoint, it is inevitable that Bitcoin replaces fiat currencies. Given free markets, people will eventually choose the most sound money.
I think, it will probably take another decade.
I think, BC could go to 5 million before it stablizes.
I think, BC could go to 5 million before it stablizes.
The dynamics of mining make this impossible. If Bitcoin were worth millions, then miners could spend millions on electricity to find each block and still make a profit. And because they're competing with hashrate, they would do exactly that.
If you do the math, you'll find that basically all electricity would go to mining.
Before we would get to that point, the electricity price would start going up of course. For everybody. And guess what governments will do when the population starts rioting because they can't afford electricity? They'll ban all proof-of-work coins. Maybe all crypto just to be on the safe side.
If you do the math, you'll find that basically all electricity would go to mining.
Before we would get to that point, the electricity price would start going up of course. For everybody. And guess what governments will do when the population starts rioting because they can't afford electricity? They'll ban all proof-of-work coins. Maybe all crypto just to be on the safe side.
I did some math and my idea was:
If the max amount of Bitcoin is 21mio and we assume that a huge chunk of the economy will be payable with these Bitcoin. Then on Bitcoin has to be worth (at least) 1/21mio of that economy chunk.
If the max amount of Bitcoin is 21mio and we assume that a huge chunk of the economy will be payable with these Bitcoin. Then on Bitcoin has to be worth (at least) 1/21mio of that economy chunk.
That is one way to estimate a maximum possible value.
My point is that by assuming "Bitcoin cannot consume more than X % of all electricity or there will be trouble", you can calculate another maximum value which turns out to be much lower.
In fact, if you assume Bitcoin can consume no more than 1% of all electricity (before regulatory trouble starts brewing) and electricity costs 0.05 USD/kWh, then you get a maximum price which is pretty close to the current price.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.05+USD%2FkWh+*+10+mi...
My point is that by assuming "Bitcoin cannot consume more than X % of all electricity or there will be trouble", you can calculate another maximum value which turns out to be much lower.
In fact, if you assume Bitcoin can consume no more than 1% of all electricity (before regulatory trouble starts brewing) and electricity costs 0.05 USD/kWh, then you get a maximum price which is pretty close to the current price.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.05+USD%2FkWh+*+10+mi...
NFTs disrupted the digital art marketplace.
I have responded to a thousand versions of your comment on HN. No matter what I write the haters never change their minds. HN is not an enthusiastic place for blockchain devs.
Perhaps we don’t change our minds because we haven’t seen a convincing counter-argument to the thesis that blockchains are fundamentally about getting rich quick through buying in early (or pre-mining) and then finding greater fools.
The most successful actual applications thus far, as far as I can tell, have been silk road and paying ransoms.
I know people that send money home and they don’t use cryptocoins. These remittances communities are savvy and price sensitive, if there was a superior product it would be spreading like wildfire.
The most successful actual applications thus far, as far as I can tell, have been silk road and paying ransoms.
I know people that send money home and they don’t use cryptocoins. These remittances communities are savvy and price sensitive, if there was a superior product it would be spreading like wildfire.
Polymarket is a real use case.
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Why do you need a blockchain for that? Gambling and Insurance existed both long before blockchains.
Polymarket is centralized, but one benefit of it is that you can sign up and fund your account anonymously (though you do require an email). Users are not restricted by state or national laws.
On a true decentralized gambling app, email would not be needed, just wallet. It would also be difficult to regulate (the team behind it could be anonymous).
And I'm not saying this is great or anything, but it shows how you can build something with a blockchain that you could not otherwise.
On a true decentralized gambling app, email would not be needed, just wallet. It would also be difficult to regulate (the team behind it could be anonymous).
And I'm not saying this is great or anything, but it shows how you can build something with a blockchain that you could not otherwise.
Because of the blackmarket nature of the betting, which is illegal in many countries.
That's because many of us already have changed our minds. Many of us were big fans of Bitcoin ten years ago and really excited about the prospect of trustless digital cash. We thought it would work. But now that a decade has passed, we've changed our minds.
I'm not a hater. I am just applying some critical thinking and design thinking to try to figure out where the value is in all of this to the customer. I am happy to say I'm wrong, and happy to backflip.
Please see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27258671
some links to complement the comment:
https://curve.fi/ - for exchanging different tokenized stable coins (such as USDC > EURO). Already has over $300M in daily volume exchange.
https://yearn.finance/ - a platform where anyone can code and deploy an investment strategy, provided it is voted on by people who hold the platform's governance tokens. Already has over $3B in assets locked in. Good idea to look at their governance platform as well: https://snapshot.org/#/yearn
https://aave.com/ - a platform to borrow or lend your tokenized assets. Already has over $9B in assets invested
some links to complement the comment:
https://curve.fi/ - for exchanging different tokenized stable coins (such as USDC > EURO). Already has over $300M in daily volume exchange.
https://yearn.finance/ - a platform where anyone can code and deploy an investment strategy, provided it is voted on by people who hold the platform's governance tokens. Already has over $3B in assets locked in. Good idea to look at their governance platform as well: https://snapshot.org/#/yearn
https://aave.com/ - a platform to borrow or lend your tokenized assets. Already has over $9B in assets invested
> https://curve.fi/ - for exchanging different tokenized stable coins (such as USDC > EURO). Already has over $300M in daily volume exchange.
I'm confused. How do you get EURO currency in your hand with this? i.e. either physical paper or in my bank account?
I'm confused. How do you get EURO currency in your hand with this? i.e. either physical paper or in my bank account?
1. Transfer to your bank account via an exchange (KYC applies)
2. Turn it into cold hard cash or a bank transfer via P2P (no KYC )
3. Withdraw cash directly from a Bitcoin ATM (KYC may apply depending on the exchange issuing the card)
4. Transfer to a crypto debit card and buy from stores directly (KYC may apply depending on the exchange issuing the debit card)
5. Pay directly with your crypto at relevant stores (projects like AMP - https://amptoken.org/ - US only for now)
2. Turn it into cold hard cash or a bank transfer via P2P (no KYC )
3. Withdraw cash directly from a Bitcoin ATM (KYC may apply depending on the exchange issuing the card)
4. Transfer to a crypto debit card and buy from stores directly (KYC may apply depending on the exchange issuing the debit card)
5. Pay directly with your crypto at relevant stores (projects like AMP - https://amptoken.org/ - US only for now)
1. But I still need a bank in the currency on the other end. So this might eliminate some forex fees, but that's it?
2. Again, still need a bank account on the end.
3. How pervasive are these? Can I find one on the street while traveling Munich for example? How do I get a card?
4/5. No one wants to use crypto because they get FOMO on price fluctuations. Until then it's basically useless.
Until crypto becomes pervasive as a medium of exchange it's as useless as a bar of gold.
2. Again, still need a bank account on the end.
3. How pervasive are these? Can I find one on the street while traveling Munich for example? How do I get a card?
4/5. No one wants to use crypto because they get FOMO on price fluctuations. Until then it's basically useless.
Until crypto becomes pervasive as a medium of exchange it's as useless as a bar of gold.
1. P2P exchanges can happen in cold hard cash. No bank account necessary.
2. Bitcoin is barely a decade old. Ethereum was launched in 2015. Most of the DeFi core projects were launched in 2019-2020. This is extremely early stage and comparing it to the ease and convenience of legacy financial systems is a little disingenuous. It might be complicated currently, but it works.
I give up. All I see on HN are people who’ve somehow dismissed an entire new tech sector without even being curious about it. The arguments are trite and shallow.
At the very least, if you are on HN, I expect you to be curious about the technology and make up your mind after satiating that curiosity.
2. Bitcoin is barely a decade old. Ethereum was launched in 2015. Most of the DeFi core projects were launched in 2019-2020. This is extremely early stage and comparing it to the ease and convenience of legacy financial systems is a little disingenuous. It might be complicated currently, but it works.
I give up. All I see on HN are people who’ve somehow dismissed an entire new tech sector without even being curious about it. The arguments are trite and shallow.
At the very least, if you are on HN, I expect you to be curious about the technology and make up your mind after satiating that curiosity.
> All I see on HN are people who’ve somehow dismissed an entire new tech sector without even being curious about it.
If I found a new animal species that walked and talked but lived using photosynthesis, I'd be asking all sorts of questions. "Does it breathe? Does it need water? Why does it need sun to live?"
So here we are now asking a bunch of questions and seeking clarifications.
> At the very least, if you are on HN, I expect you to be curious about the technology and make up your mind after satiating that curiosity.
"No true scotsman"...People are being critical because they ARE curious about crypto. How do you expect people to "make up their mind" when "Most of the DeFi core projects were launched in 2019-2020". That's exactly the issue.
If I found a new animal species that walked and talked but lived using photosynthesis, I'd be asking all sorts of questions. "Does it breathe? Does it need water? Why does it need sun to live?"
So here we are now asking a bunch of questions and seeking clarifications.
> At the very least, if you are on HN, I expect you to be curious about the technology and make up your mind after satiating that curiosity.
"No true scotsman"...People are being critical because they ARE curious about crypto. How do you expect people to "make up their mind" when "Most of the DeFi core projects were launched in 2019-2020". That's exactly the issue.
Here is one of many comments I have written https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25641940
But again, to those reading this thread, HN is not a place where you will find a lot of people who patiently defend crypto and blockchain. It garners a lot of downvotes.
But again, to those reading this thread, HN is not a place where you will find a lot of people who patiently defend crypto and blockchain. It garners a lot of downvotes.
I will read it without bias. Thank you.
>> But again, to those reading this thread, HN is not a place where you will find a lot of people who patiently defend crypto and blockchain. It garners a lot of downvotes.
Blockchain is a wonderful piece of technology. IMHO I do not think anyone really has personal beef with the technology. I think majority really want to understand, and if they're asking and posing questions it is because do not understand. There might be some that have their skin in it going south but I doubt that's the situation of many.
People really want to understand its use case as money.
Blockchain is a wonderful piece of technology. IMHO I do not think anyone really has personal beef with the technology. I think majority really want to understand, and if they're asking and posing questions it is because do not understand. There might be some that have their skin in it going south but I doubt that's the situation of many.
People really want to understand its use case as money.
That's because on HN we know that 99% of the blockchain hype is about people discovering asymmetric cryptography and pretending that the blockchain is the only way to use it.
The only real difference that blockchain solutions bring is decentralisation. I have to yet hear one single argument about why decentralisation is good. So far I have only heard the typical libertarianesque arguments about states, banks and inflation. As as I'm concerned, decentralisation is unnecessary and so are blockchain.
The only real difference that blockchain solutions bring is decentralisation. I have to yet hear one single argument about why decentralisation is good. So far I have only heard the typical libertarianesque arguments about states, banks and inflation. As as I'm concerned, decentralisation is unnecessary and so are blockchain.
Well I’m a libertarian and an Austrian economics / hard money enthusiast so I grant that my love of crypto is influenced by my politics. If you are a statist that loves government authority, its benefits will be be drawbacks as decentralized money is an obvious attack on state power.
The power of decentralization is to reduce the power of centralized entities. Even within decentralized networks, centralized nodes (companies) gain power. But in decentralized networks you can choose alternatives. In state-run networks, your only option is the state as guns prevent competitors. I like free markers / free minds / private wealth / private power.
The power of decentralization is to reduce the power of centralized entities. Even within decentralized networks, centralized nodes (companies) gain power. But in decentralized networks you can choose alternatives. In state-run networks, your only option is the state as guns prevent competitors. I like free markers / free minds / private wealth / private power.
Organized criminal activity is a powerful centralizing force that is always ignored in these discussions.
If HN was around in 1997, I bet half the comments would be about "internet is just scams and porn. Where's the use case apart from checking the weather?"
Wait, let's keep using this analogy. If the World Wide Web was invented in 1991 and by 2002 no one had created useful websites besides marketing for scams, drug marketplaces and sites to pay ransoms to, and the energy consumption of the World Wide Web was the country of Argentina... Wouldn't the critics have a pretty good point?
Please see some of these sites I shared earlier:
https://curve.fi/ - for exchanging different tokenized stable coins (such as USDC > EURO). Already has over $300M in daily volume exchange.
https://yearn.finance/ - a platform where anyone can code and deploy an investment strategy, provided it is voted on by people who hold the platform's governance tokens. Already has over $3B in assets locked in. Good idea to look at their governance platform as well: https://snapshot.org/#/yearn
https://aave.com/ - a platform to borrow or lend your tokenized assets. Already has over $9B in assets invested
Please see this with an open mind. And please see this from the perspective of someone not from privilege, from a third world country, or from someone facing an oppressive regime.
Money is freedom. And making that freely accessible to anyone from anywhere is important.
https://curve.fi/ - for exchanging different tokenized stable coins (such as USDC > EURO). Already has over $300M in daily volume exchange.
https://yearn.finance/ - a platform where anyone can code and deploy an investment strategy, provided it is voted on by people who hold the platform's governance tokens. Already has over $3B in assets locked in. Good idea to look at their governance platform as well: https://snapshot.org/#/yearn
https://aave.com/ - a platform to borrow or lend your tokenized assets. Already has over $9B in assets invested
Please see this with an open mind. And please see this from the perspective of someone not from privilege, from a third world country, or from someone facing an oppressive regime.
Money is freedom. And making that freely accessible to anyone from anywhere is important.
Yeah, and imagine further that people were bidding up the price of IP addresses in a speculative frenzy instead of actually using them.
People did bid up the price of domain names at least in a speculative frenzy instead of actually using them
New TLDs are a money grab as well. You're hoping that big companies like google buy your domains just to make sure nobody else has them.
Nonono, you're confounding the internet as it is now with the internet as it was 24 years ago. It's just the other way round.
On January 29, 1886, Carl Benz applied for a patent for his “vehicle powered by a gas engine.” The patent – number 37435 – may be regarded as the birth certificate of the automobile. In July 1886 the newspapers reported on the first public outing of the three-wheeled Benz Patent Motor Car, model no. 1.
And over the following years the automobile improved rapidly, becoming more capable, reliable, and gaining users as it went.
It didn't spend its first 13 years up on blocks while its supporters yelled at the skeptical and embezzled money from everyone else.
It didn't spend its first 13 years up on blocks while its supporters yelled at the skeptical and embezzled money from everyone else.
Yea. Its closer to the first 30 years of its existence doing pretty much nothing but being sport for rich people.
It was at least able to roll from point A to point B without consuming a small country's worth of power.
Do quote everything, while you're at it.
> The first production of automobiles was by Karl Benz in 1888 in Germany and, under license from Benz, in France by Emile Roger. There were numerous others, including tricycle builders Rudolf Egg, Edward Butler, and Léon Bollée. Bollée, using a 650 cc (40 cu in) engine of his own design, enabled his driver, Jamin, to average 45 kilometres per hour (28 mph) in the 1897 Paris-Tourville rally. By 1900, mass production of automobiles had begun in France and the United States.
So, 11 years after production started, gas-powered cars were not only rather common, but there were rallies involving them.
11 years from introduction, no one has come up with a use-case for blockchain: https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-... and https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
> The first production of automobiles was by Karl Benz in 1888 in Germany and, under license from Benz, in France by Emile Roger. There were numerous others, including tricycle builders Rudolf Egg, Edward Butler, and Léon Bollée. Bollée, using a 650 cc (40 cu in) engine of his own design, enabled his driver, Jamin, to average 45 kilometres per hour (28 mph) in the 1897 Paris-Tourville rally. By 1900, mass production of automobiles had begun in France and the United States.
So, 11 years after production started, gas-powered cars were not only rather common, but there were rallies involving them.
11 years from introduction, no one has come up with a use-case for blockchain: https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-... and https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
> 11 years from introduction, no one has come up with a use-case for blockchain
This seems an odd claim to make. Currently there's hundreds of Cryptocurrencies using blockchains as a foundation, and more than half a trillion dollars tied up in them. Right now it seems like they're at least speculative investments. If this does not count as a use-case then we'd better break the news to essentially all of finance.
Years ago before the values jumped you could do plenty of actual currency things with cryptocurrencies: there were ATMs, you could buy beers at a pub or pay for server hosting (something I did myself), etc. Because of all of the speculation cryptocurrencies have generally become too volatile for that. Nobody wants to find out at the pub there was a market crash and they can't cover their outing. At the time though, it all worked and had incredibly low transaction fees.
Then there's the applications for areas like logistics, supply chain, that are all under development. IMO it has absolutely established itself as a technology and like everything new people were quick to try to apply it to every problem and found it largely didn't fit most places. That doesn't mean it isn't useful.
This seems an odd claim to make. Currently there's hundreds of Cryptocurrencies using blockchains as a foundation, and more than half a trillion dollars tied up in them. Right now it seems like they're at least speculative investments. If this does not count as a use-case then we'd better break the news to essentially all of finance.
Years ago before the values jumped you could do plenty of actual currency things with cryptocurrencies: there were ATMs, you could buy beers at a pub or pay for server hosting (something I did myself), etc. Because of all of the speculation cryptocurrencies have generally become too volatile for that. Nobody wants to find out at the pub there was a market crash and they can't cover their outing. At the time though, it all worked and had incredibly low transaction fees.
Then there's the applications for areas like logistics, supply chain, that are all under development. IMO it has absolutely established itself as a technology and like everything new people were quick to try to apply it to every problem and found it largely didn't fit most places. That doesn't mean it isn't useful.
You can take any obscenely inefficient technology and apply it to anything and say "look, it's useful", but that doesn't make it a good idea or viable or really even not pointless.
I heard it best put as: blockchain provides trustlessness at very high operational cost -- do we have a business case where trustlessness is a competitive advantage? If not, just use a database or equivalent
So like yes, you can implement insurance and messaging and contracts with blockchain. Is there a need to do that? Does it make sense? Would that business work? (Zero percent of such businesses have worked)
The sending money part is certainly a legitimate use. Unfortunately it's being totally broken by speculation on all the coins (not to mention high gas).
I heard it best put as: blockchain provides trustlessness at very high operational cost -- do we have a business case where trustlessness is a competitive advantage? If not, just use a database or equivalent
So like yes, you can implement insurance and messaging and contracts with blockchain. Is there a need to do that? Does it make sense? Would that business work? (Zero percent of such businesses have worked)
The sending money part is certainly a legitimate use. Unfortunately it's being totally broken by speculation on all the coins (not to mention high gas).
> So like yes, you can implement insurance and messaging and contracts with blockchain. Is there a need to do that? Does it make sense? Would that business work? (Zero percent of such businesses have worked)
The tricky part of this, of course, is in the Bitcoin space “validity” hinges upon valuation. Unfortunately cryptocurrency valuation is based on narrative entirely, and narratives continue driving trading volumes even in the face of undeniable technological shortcomings, see e.g. the saga of continual unstable “stablecoin” implosions, or Ripple.
The tricky part of this, of course, is in the Bitcoin space “validity” hinges upon valuation. Unfortunately cryptocurrency valuation is based on narrative entirely, and narratives continue driving trading volumes even in the face of undeniable technological shortcomings, see e.g. the saga of continual unstable “stablecoin” implosions, or Ripple.
> Because of all of the speculation cryptocurrencies have generally become too volatile for that.
So, the great amazing disruptive technology that is going to completely change the world... broke as soon as a tiny fraction of the world start paying any attention to it.
> Then there's the applications for areas like logistics, supply chain, that are all under development.
Literally none of those applications require blockchain, and blockchain solves literally none of the problems in those domains.
> That doesn't mean it isn't useful.
You'd think that the great amazing disruptive technology that is going to completely change the world would actually show some useful applications by now.
So, the great amazing disruptive technology that is going to completely change the world... broke as soon as a tiny fraction of the world start paying any attention to it.
> Then there's the applications for areas like logistics, supply chain, that are all under development.
Literally none of those applications require blockchain, and blockchain solves literally none of the problems in those domains.
> That doesn't mean it isn't useful.
You'd think that the great amazing disruptive technology that is going to completely change the world would actually show some useful applications by now.
> So, the great amazing disruptive technology that is going to completely change the world... broke as soon as a tiny fraction of the world start paying any attention to it.
This is shifting the goalposts massively. The original comment was that there was no use-case for Blockchain. You are also talking about a component of cryptocurrencies as if they were the whole. The issue with the viability of cryptocurrencies is not tied to the blockchain but rather human investor behaviour.
> Literally none of those applications require blockchain, and blockchain solves literally none of the problems in those domains.
I'm not sure what you've imagined the applications in question are but you appear to have invented them and decided they don't work; I didn't provide any specific examples.
If you want a specific example of where it's addressing things and is being put to use: Provenance. If you don't mind a bit of dry reading the ieee has a decent writeup on the value this provides and the problems it can address: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8909921
This is shifting the goalposts massively. The original comment was that there was no use-case for Blockchain. You are also talking about a component of cryptocurrencies as if they were the whole. The issue with the viability of cryptocurrencies is not tied to the blockchain but rather human investor behaviour.
> Literally none of those applications require blockchain, and blockchain solves literally none of the problems in those domains.
I'm not sure what you've imagined the applications in question are but you appear to have invented them and decided they don't work; I didn't provide any specific examples.
If you want a specific example of where it's addressing things and is being put to use: Provenance. If you don't mind a bit of dry reading the ieee has a decent writeup on the value this provides and the problems it can address: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8909921
> This is shifting the goalposts massively.
We're literally in a comment thread to a comment that compared blockchains to cars. And that was made as an argument against "blockchains are not disruptive".
> The issue with the viability of cryptocurrencies is not tied to the blockchain but rather human investor behaviour.
It doesn't matter. If the only thing that people are doing with this "amazing tech" is speculation, that's all it's good for.
> I'm not sure what you've imagined the applications in question are but you appear to have invented them and decided they don't work; I didn't provide any specific examples.
Indeed, you didn't. Because blockchain apologists very rarely do, since for 100% of cases the proposed blockchain solution doesn't solve the posited problem.
What you did say though was "Then there's the applications for areas like logistics, supply chain, that are all under development". And all the ones that I know of have exactly zero need for blockchain, and blockchain solves none of the problems in those areas.
> If you want a specific example of where it's addressing things and is being put to use: Provenance
1. Doesn't need blockchain
2. Blockchain doesn't solve the problem of "ensuring integrity of food labeling and efficient management of quality and contamination issues."
Let me quote from an article [1]
=== start quote ===
An illustration of the difference: In 2006, Walmart launched a system to track its bananas and mangoes from field to store. In 2009 they abandoned it because of logistical problems getting everyone to enter the data, and in 2017 they re-launched it (to much fanfare) on blockchain. If someone comes to you with “the mango-pickers don’t like doing data entry,” “I know: let’s create a very long sequence of small files, each one containing a hash of the previous file” is a nonsense answer, but “What if everyone keeps their records in a tamper-proof repository not owned by anyone?” at least addresses the right question!
...
It’s true that tampering with data stored on a blockchain is hard, but it’s false that blockchain is a good way to create data that has integrity.
...
Blockchain systems do not magically make the data in them accurate or the people entering the data trustworthy, they merely enable you to audit whether it has been tampered with. A person who sprayed pesticides on a mango can still enter onto a blockchain system that the mangoes were organic.
=== end quote ===
Bute yeah, the article does have a high "bullshit hype per number of words" ratio: Blockchain! Internet of Things!
[1] Part I: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c...
Part II: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
We're literally in a comment thread to a comment that compared blockchains to cars. And that was made as an argument against "blockchains are not disruptive".
> The issue with the viability of cryptocurrencies is not tied to the blockchain but rather human investor behaviour.
It doesn't matter. If the only thing that people are doing with this "amazing tech" is speculation, that's all it's good for.
> I'm not sure what you've imagined the applications in question are but you appear to have invented them and decided they don't work; I didn't provide any specific examples.
Indeed, you didn't. Because blockchain apologists very rarely do, since for 100% of cases the proposed blockchain solution doesn't solve the posited problem.
What you did say though was "Then there's the applications for areas like logistics, supply chain, that are all under development". And all the ones that I know of have exactly zero need for blockchain, and blockchain solves none of the problems in those areas.
> If you want a specific example of where it's addressing things and is being put to use: Provenance
1. Doesn't need blockchain
2. Blockchain doesn't solve the problem of "ensuring integrity of food labeling and efficient management of quality and contamination issues."
Let me quote from an article [1]
=== start quote ===
An illustration of the difference: In 2006, Walmart launched a system to track its bananas and mangoes from field to store. In 2009 they abandoned it because of logistical problems getting everyone to enter the data, and in 2017 they re-launched it (to much fanfare) on blockchain. If someone comes to you with “the mango-pickers don’t like doing data entry,” “I know: let’s create a very long sequence of small files, each one containing a hash of the previous file” is a nonsense answer, but “What if everyone keeps their records in a tamper-proof repository not owned by anyone?” at least addresses the right question!
...
It’s true that tampering with data stored on a blockchain is hard, but it’s false that blockchain is a good way to create data that has integrity.
...
Blockchain systems do not magically make the data in them accurate or the people entering the data trustworthy, they merely enable you to audit whether it has been tampered with. A person who sprayed pesticides on a mango can still enter onto a blockchain system that the mangoes were organic.
=== end quote ===
Bute yeah, the article does have a high "bullshit hype per number of words" ratio: Blockchain! Internet of Things!
[1] Part I: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c...
Part II: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
> It doesn't matter. If the only thing that people are doing with this "amazing tech" is speculation, that's all it's good for.
This is a ridiculous statement. When electricity was first developed all it could do was kill animals. Does that mean that's all it's good for?
Because the current most popular use of it is something you've personally deemed as "not a use-case", phrasing which you have moved away from.
> Indeed, you didn't. Because blockchain apologists very rarely do, since for 100% of cases the proposed blockchain solution doesn't solve the posited problem.
This is inappropriate. I could easily have dismissed your initial arguments as simply being a blockchain hater and we'd get precisely nowhere.
> 1. Doesn't need blockchain > 2. Blockchain doesn't solve the problem of "ensuring integrity of food labeling and efficient management of quality and contamination issues."
This is a silly argument. Many things don't need electricity but electrifying them made them useful for certain new use-cases. Similar with Wifi, Bluetooth, etc. It's hardly "useless" to stick bluetooth and batteries into headphones but you can absolutely have them without it.
The idea that something doesn't "need" a technology has never been a driver of whether or not uses exist for applying that technology to that thing.
I provided a review of the data from the IEEE, a recognized industry standards body.
From the article you supplied:
> It didn’t take long for that dream to fall apart. For one thing, there’s already a costless, instant way to exchange value without a middleman: cash.
How does one exchange cash seamlessly and instantly with cash from say, California to Germany?
In the rest of that paragraph the author suggests that bitcoin wouldn't work but VISA and MasterCard absolutely can. What happens when VISA or Mastercard decide to cease business with an entity? Why is it okay to require a percentage to process transaction fees rather than a standard fee? How is a percentage with minimum cost model (Visa/Mastercard/Amex/etc.), which the author lays out later on about microtransactions, better for the business owner or the user? There are no sources on those particular points, there's no clarification as to why it's a superior system, the author doesn't discuss the history of the systems at all, etc. It's very lacking in context, research, and salient factual points.
In fact, almost every following example provided in the article falls into this trap: "Company X can already do this! blockchain was never needed" -- that is a poor argument.
To view that blog post as a reputable source seems very strange to me. If that view is where you're sourcing most of your opinions on the usefulness of blockchains, then I'd suggest looking for other viewpoints. I'm unsurprised that some in the financial industry don't want a nearly-free way to send money around the globe instantly, just as I would be if someone working at a large crypto exchange was spouting off about how cryptocurrencies are simply the greatest thing around, ever and you should sink your life savings into them.
This is a ridiculous statement. When electricity was first developed all it could do was kill animals. Does that mean that's all it's good for?
Because the current most popular use of it is something you've personally deemed as "not a use-case", phrasing which you have moved away from.
> Indeed, you didn't. Because blockchain apologists very rarely do, since for 100% of cases the proposed blockchain solution doesn't solve the posited problem.
This is inappropriate. I could easily have dismissed your initial arguments as simply being a blockchain hater and we'd get precisely nowhere.
> 1. Doesn't need blockchain > 2. Blockchain doesn't solve the problem of "ensuring integrity of food labeling and efficient management of quality and contamination issues."
This is a silly argument. Many things don't need electricity but electrifying them made them useful for certain new use-cases. Similar with Wifi, Bluetooth, etc. It's hardly "useless" to stick bluetooth and batteries into headphones but you can absolutely have them without it.
The idea that something doesn't "need" a technology has never been a driver of whether or not uses exist for applying that technology to that thing.
I provided a review of the data from the IEEE, a recognized industry standards body.
From the article you supplied:
> It didn’t take long for that dream to fall apart. For one thing, there’s already a costless, instant way to exchange value without a middleman: cash.
How does one exchange cash seamlessly and instantly with cash from say, California to Germany?
In the rest of that paragraph the author suggests that bitcoin wouldn't work but VISA and MasterCard absolutely can. What happens when VISA or Mastercard decide to cease business with an entity? Why is it okay to require a percentage to process transaction fees rather than a standard fee? How is a percentage with minimum cost model (Visa/Mastercard/Amex/etc.), which the author lays out later on about microtransactions, better for the business owner or the user? There are no sources on those particular points, there's no clarification as to why it's a superior system, the author doesn't discuss the history of the systems at all, etc. It's very lacking in context, research, and salient factual points.
In fact, almost every following example provided in the article falls into this trap: "Company X can already do this! blockchain was never needed" -- that is a poor argument.
To view that blog post as a reputable source seems very strange to me. If that view is where you're sourcing most of your opinions on the usefulness of blockchains, then I'd suggest looking for other viewpoints. I'm unsurprised that some in the financial industry don't want a nearly-free way to send money around the globe instantly, just as I would be if someone working at a large crypto exchange was spouting off about how cryptocurrencies are simply the greatest thing around, ever and you should sink your life savings into them.
What a strange response. Did you respond to the wrong comment?
It takes time.
In his own example, it went from patent to useful in a few months. Blockchain has not gone from idea to useful at all yet.
Scam after scam, that's all blockchain is. Just another way to fleece the average consumer.
There has not been a single valuable use, a single product, that actually improves anyone's day / process / life / anything. I am very open to changing my stance if someone presents evidence to the contrary.
There has not been a single valuable use, a single product, that actually improves anyone's day / process / life / anything. I am very open to changing my stance if someone presents evidence to the contrary.
Remittances are better/easier. That’s the only thing I’ve seen and the tech to do that is trivial now and Bitcoin is terrible for it specifically now.
How are remittances better/easier exactly? With BTC you need to exchange currencies at least 2 times, as opposed to one.
Are they? I've had no issues with remittances outside of blockchain. In places where I have heard remittances are difficult, it is usually due to regulation, something this does not solve either.
My Spanish teacher in Peru has to travel one hour by bus to reach the destination for Western Union money transfer. With crypto using local crypto exchange, he receives the money directly into his bank account.
Its difficult because it requires parked money (nostro accounts) in foreign currencies. This imposes a risk and act as "dead capital".
At some point the cost to maintain the corridor is higher than the profit so the corridor is closed. Transaction then are routed trough other corridors which means multiple currencies swaps. More loses and more parties who want their cut. + it can takes days and the system are one-way so you have to ask the recipient if he got it to know.
Public ledgers can make a difference See https://ripple.com/ripplenet/on-demand-liquidity/
Public ledgers can make a difference See https://ripple.com/ripplenet/on-demand-liquidity/
Monero.
It’s provided a private money for the internet.
That helps people. It’s valuable.
A permissionless, censorshipless decentralised private money.
It’s provided a private money for the internet.
That helps people. It’s valuable.
A permissionless, censorshipless decentralised private money.
Are there any other significant untraceable cryptos other than Monero and Zcash(using privacy fetures)?
I work in applied Cryptography so I’m well placed to judge.
Other than Monero and ZEC (the latter of which has some issues for me which I posted about before) Grin is the only other project that isn’t a clone.
Other than Monero and ZEC (the latter of which has some issues for me which I posted about before) Grin is the only other project that isn’t a clone.
Grin is currently not untraceable (it only hides amounts and addresses, but not input-output links, which are mostly visible in the mempool), but could be if the coinswap proposal [1] is implemented and widely deployed.
[1] https://forum.grin.mw/t/mimblewimble-coinswap-proposal
[1] https://forum.grin.mw/t/mimblewimble-coinswap-proposal
Ethereum via Aztec (zk.money)
Not default privacy, trusted setup.
OP listed Zcash which is the same so it seems fair game. I think it's also important to list it as Aztec can interact with DeFi privately and also be programmed which allows for complex interactions and an economy where money goes in and doesn't come back out often. This increases privacy and also allows people to actually use money instead of just temporarily hiding it.
Yeah I agree that Aztec is more flexible than ZEC. But their weaknesses are a dealbreaker for me.
If this scaling blog post is accurate, a global payment network at 1m transactions/second, decentralised, is massively valuable.
Imagine if the only way to send a message to someone was through fb messenger or WhatsApp, and then someone invented email. The UX might not be great, but the benefits are huge.
Additionally if the eth virtual computer can scale with very low gas costs, there’s a lot of accountancy and banking functions that can replaced with eth code. Potentially some legal functions as well.
Imagine if the only way to send a message to someone was through fb messenger or WhatsApp, and then someone invented email. The UX might not be great, but the benefits are huge.
Additionally if the eth virtual computer can scale with very low gas costs, there’s a lot of accountancy and banking functions that can replaced with eth code. Potentially some legal functions as well.
You should look at it as a public service of authenticity.
Notary services / time stamping. But also noncustodian assets. Although still not usable for daily life, I think the more we move into digital, the more we will want and need better licensing/ownership of digital content. For example when blizzard bans your wow account, which is worth many hours and dollars.
Big tech has too much control over these things, and the road to get a response se or to go to court is way too long and expensive for the average joe
Notary services / time stamping. But also noncustodian assets. Although still not usable for daily life, I think the more we move into digital, the more we will want and need better licensing/ownership of digital content. For example when blizzard bans your wow account, which is worth many hours and dollars.
Big tech has too much control over these things, and the road to get a response se or to go to court is way too long and expensive for the average joe
Your example makes no sense. How would blizzard banning a wow account (I don't know the game particularly well, but let's just use this since you brought it up) be solved w/ Blockchain?
Guessing that those accumulated digital assets couldn’t be wiped away with a key press and instead transferred to someone else.
Still nothing stopping WOW from simply ignoring those assets as part of account deletion process, rendering them worthless.
Still nothing stopping WOW from simply ignoring those assets as part of account deletion process, rendering them worthless.
This is what people mean usually when they make this argument:
Blizzard can ban WoW accounts and take away your hard-earned in-game assets, and that makes people unhappy. Therefore, because capitalism, a competitor to Blizzard's WoW can arise whose killer feature is "we technologically commit to not being able to take away your assets because those assets are distributed through a decentralized blockchain."
Of course, it's pretty far-fetched. The "banned account had lots of assets" problem happens to a tiny minority of people compared to how many enjoy WoW because Wizards and Goblins or whatever, so to compete with WoW on the basis of "we can't take away your assets and they can" is not going to appeal to anyone. You have to also be better than WoW in other aspects that would make people want to migrate.
But the general idea is, "if part of your offering is 'virtual assets' you can use this technology to commit yourself to never being able to take those assets away". Hence ICOs.
Blizzard can ban WoW accounts and take away your hard-earned in-game assets, and that makes people unhappy. Therefore, because capitalism, a competitor to Blizzard's WoW can arise whose killer feature is "we technologically commit to not being able to take away your assets because those assets are distributed through a decentralized blockchain."
Of course, it's pretty far-fetched. The "banned account had lots of assets" problem happens to a tiny minority of people compared to how many enjoy WoW because Wizards and Goblins or whatever, so to compete with WoW on the basis of "we can't take away your assets and they can" is not going to appeal to anyone. You have to also be better than WoW in other aspects that would make people want to migrate.
But the general idea is, "if part of your offering is 'virtual assets' you can use this technology to commit yourself to never being able to take those assets away". Hence ICOs.
- Fuels research for applied cryptography (example Zero knowledge cryptography) and privacy technologies.
- Pressures existing systems (Fiat, Paypal ...) to improve and keep up.
- Gives options to people living in censored governments
- Shows us that one of our most foundational systems (Money) can be re-engineered using modern tech and experience of studying what happened in the past.
- Pressures existing systems (Fiat, Paypal ...) to improve and keep up.
- Gives options to people living in censored governments
- Shows us that one of our most foundational systems (Money) can be re-engineered using modern tech and experience of studying what happened in the past.
Maybe try commenting something at least somewhat related to the content of the article?
A couple of points, the first is criticising lack of real-world use-cases for nascent technology is like criticising the web in the mid 90's. It's like expecting the cart to lead the horse.
Having said that, there's plenty of projects big and small that have merit. Granted, a lot of published "case studies" are just marketing fluff to attract search traffic, that shouldn't be an indictment of the technology itself which shows a lot of potential, especially where complex transactions need to be brokered between parties with competing interests.
DHL & Accenture have investigated and prototyped uses in supply chain logistics for pharmaceuticals -
- https://supplychaindigital.com/technology-4/dhl-and-accentur...
- https://www.dhl.com/au-en/home/insights-and-innovation/insig...
- [PDF warning DHL case study] dhl.com/content/dam/dhl/global/core/documents/pdf/glo-core-blockchain-trend-report.pdf
Banks are serious about blockchain for reconciliation -
- https://australianfintech.com.au/cba-westpac-back-r3-blockch...
Use case for trading distributed power generation with power ledger smart contracts -
https://www.powerledger.io/clients/tata-power-ddl-india
You'll find most of these projects are in prototype phase or early adoption, and as I said there's loads of disinformation, but if you filter through the crud and look for serious projects with demonstrated applications or investments you should be able to see the potential.
Again if you recall the mid 90's, companies like Amazon were just an online book shop, or Google was just an idea in a statistician's thesis. Far more ideas bombed that were successful; there was a time when the internet hadn't decided what to do about advertising and settled on Google's model. There was a bubble that popped and lots of investors were left in the lurch. But eventually the ideas that worked survived and these companies are the largest in the world today and spawned entire new industries.
In light of this, my view is that it's a stretch to say "scam after scam, that's all blockchain is." at this point, although there are plenty of scams surrounding it, definitely don't write it off entirely just yet.
Having said that, there's plenty of projects big and small that have merit. Granted, a lot of published "case studies" are just marketing fluff to attract search traffic, that shouldn't be an indictment of the technology itself which shows a lot of potential, especially where complex transactions need to be brokered between parties with competing interests.
DHL & Accenture have investigated and prototyped uses in supply chain logistics for pharmaceuticals -
- https://supplychaindigital.com/technology-4/dhl-and-accentur...
- https://www.dhl.com/au-en/home/insights-and-innovation/insig...
- [PDF warning DHL case study] dhl.com/content/dam/dhl/global/core/documents/pdf/glo-core-blockchain-trend-report.pdf
Banks are serious about blockchain for reconciliation -
- https://australianfintech.com.au/cba-westpac-back-r3-blockch...
Use case for trading distributed power generation with power ledger smart contracts -
https://www.powerledger.io/clients/tata-power-ddl-india
You'll find most of these projects are in prototype phase or early adoption, and as I said there's loads of disinformation, but if you filter through the crud and look for serious projects with demonstrated applications or investments you should be able to see the potential.
Again if you recall the mid 90's, companies like Amazon were just an online book shop, or Google was just an idea in a statistician's thesis. Far more ideas bombed that were successful; there was a time when the internet hadn't decided what to do about advertising and settled on Google's model. There was a bubble that popped and lots of investors were left in the lurch. But eventually the ideas that worked survived and these companies are the largest in the world today and spawned entire new industries.
In light of this, my view is that it's a stretch to say "scam after scam, that's all blockchain is." at this point, although there are plenty of scams surrounding it, definitely don't write it off entirely just yet.
All of these commercial blockchains should really just be "traditional" databases. Byzantine fault tolerance is a ridiculous requirement for a project that runs inside a trusted networked, or between trusted peers. These companies are doing blockchain for PR and/or as projects with consultents, not as serious integrated software projects to solve actual supply chain management problems.
In comparing it to the mid 90s web, you miss three things:
Everyone I knew was using 90's web. Home pages, websites for companies, movies, etc. It just wasn't really monetized or centralized into the big tech brands you listed. There was already real use for it, even if it wasn't remotely close to its final product form.
There was very little scamming involved. Nothing the likes of which we see with ICOs, pump and dump schemes, etc.
There was also a real spirit of openness and transparency, people pushing open source, an advocacy for a "world wide web", etc. Blockchain is the opposite, where everyone is trying to carve out their own little kingdom and push their own scam coins up.
Everyone I knew was using 90's web. Home pages, websites for companies, movies, etc. It just wasn't really monetized or centralized into the big tech brands you listed. There was already real use for it, even if it wasn't remotely close to its final product form.
There was very little scamming involved. Nothing the likes of which we see with ICOs, pump and dump schemes, etc.
There was also a real spirit of openness and transparency, people pushing open source, an advocacy for a "world wide web", etc. Blockchain is the opposite, where everyone is trying to carve out their own little kingdom and push their own scam coins up.
https://ripple.com/ripplenet/on-demand-liquidity/
This is a real product, real people use it (without knowing that they do).
This is a real product, real people use it (without knowing that they do).
Can you elaborate?
ODL is a product that uses a DLT (the XRPL) and a digital asset (XRP) to facilitate cross bolder transaction.
Instead of finding a bank or payment provider that hold the foreign currency you want to deliver somewhere and exchange it for you currency, this system converts you local currency to XRP send the XRP to the destination and sells it there for the local currency.
If you send money to the Philippines or Mexico you may have used it without knowing.
Instead of finding a bank or payment provider that hold the foreign currency you want to deliver somewhere and exchange it for you currency, this system converts you local currency to XRP send the XRP to the destination and sells it there for the local currency.
If you send money to the Philippines or Mexico you may have used it without knowing.
It's pretty useful for scammers, extortionists, drug sellers, money launderers and all other kind of people that want to bypass or break laws. But that's about it.
Silkroad, money laundering, tax evasion, exit scams, pump&dumps, crypto pyramids, ransomware – all this improves someone's day / process / life. Why don't you want to see the opportunities?
I can buy any amount of an asset that I think is more stable than my local currency.
Say, switching my Venezuelan Bolivar for USD, without restrictions.
Say, switching my Venezuelan Bolivar for USD, without restrictions.
> Just another way to fleece the average consumer
How? No one credible has claimed it's a good investment. The most you'll get is people suggesting bitcoin as an alternative asset that's a small portion of your portfolio.
How? No one credible has claimed it's a good investment. The most you'll get is people suggesting bitcoin as an alternative asset that's a small portion of your portfolio.
Someone from africa or russia can buy tokenized american stocks (like aapl/goog) that they wouldn't have access to easily in their national stock exchanges. I'm really excited to use tokenized stock projects like mirror that are popping up.
Only if you consider the ability to afford food an improvement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/22/world/middleeast/lebanon-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/22/world/middleeast/lebanon-...
1. Instant collateralized loans, e.g. BlockFi, with arbitrary complexity, all enforced in software
2. Fractional ownership and dividends for digital and real world assets, e.g. NFTs, real estate title
3. Tax optimization strategies
4. Hedges against nation-state fiscal policies that e.g. inflation - which in turn allow consumers and businesses to derisk investments
5. 24x7x365 financial transactions
6. tiny financial transactions without crazy fees
7. giant financial transactions without unnecessary paperwork or delays
I can keep going, but each is a multi-billion-dollar a year business.
2. Fractional ownership and dividends for digital and real world assets, e.g. NFTs, real estate title
3. Tax optimization strategies
4. Hedges against nation-state fiscal policies that e.g. inflation - which in turn allow consumers and businesses to derisk investments
5. 24x7x365 financial transactions
6. tiny financial transactions without crazy fees
7. giant financial transactions without unnecessary paperwork or delays
I can keep going, but each is a multi-billion-dollar a year business.
Blockchains subject to laws of logic and physics, confirmed.
[deleted]
"It's crucial for blockchain decentralization for regular users to be able to run a node"
Yea just like Larry Page is running Google server in his bedroom to help scale Google's infrastructure.
Nodes need to be in specialized server farms and compete with each other for profit. Capitalism is all about specialization and competition in order to improve quality not everybody doing the same thing and amounting to nothing at the end.
Yea just like Larry Page is running Google server in his bedroom to help scale Google's infrastructure.
Nodes need to be in specialized server farms and compete with each other for profit. Capitalism is all about specialization and competition in order to improve quality not everybody doing the same thing and amounting to nothing at the end.
All of the issues and limitations stated in this article have been resolved by Kadena.io . Over
All issues and limitations described in the article have been resolved by Kadena.io project. Over
You could also just not scale the blockchain, and instead use layer 2 solutions, which is the bitcoin approach.
BTC’s layer 2 method also doesn’t scale because (among other reasons) you still need on-chain transactions to handle opening connections and creating wallets, which the main chain does not have the throughput to do at scale. That’s also not to mention all the practical difficulties of using lightning (have to constantly monitor for fraudulent closing of connections, locks up liquidity, etc) and technical issues (route finding doesn’t scale, introduces massive DoS vulnerabilities).
Lightning channel factories will reduce the on-chain transaction requirements very significantly by batching many channels open/closes into a single transaction.
Lightning is not the only layer 2.
In fact, the most obvious layer 2 is simply to use custodial solutions.
However, I personally think lightning works better in practice than what you're saying.
In fact, the most obvious layer 2 is simply to use custodial solutions.
However, I personally think lightning works better in practice than what you're saying.
It clearly offers much improved scalability since 2 on-chain transactions can support hundreds of off-chain ones. Certainly, there are still limits on the number of transactions it can support in practice, but those numbers are orders of magnitude larger.
Don't worry, bitcoin will solve these problems... With a third layer!
Many of the problems listed are either overstated or have solutions already. eg.
>you still need on-chain transactions to handle opening connections and creating wallets, which the main chain does not have the throughput to do at scale
channel factories
>have to constantly monitor for fraudulent closing of connections
watchtowers (which are trustless) and you don't actually have to "constantly" monitor, more like once every 2 weeks.
>you still need on-chain transactions to handle opening connections and creating wallets, which the main chain does not have the throughput to do at scale
channel factories
>have to constantly monitor for fraudulent closing of connections
watchtowers (which are trustless) and you don't actually have to "constantly" monitor, more like once every 2 weeks.
Ethereum is doing that today with rollups, which are capable of several thousand tx/sec without security compromises. But you multiply that if you scale the first layer too.
But then what's the difference with the existing solutions involving central banks?
Because layer 2 solutions (eg. LN) are trustless. ie. it doesn't involve you depositing your coins with some third party and trusting that they don't run off with them.
And you've personally lost money from government regulated financial institutions?
1. I'm fortunate to live in a country with a stable enough banking system that I haven't ...yet. Others are not so lucky.
2. whether you "lost money" is also the wrong question to ask. eg. if there was a massive bank failure and the government decided to bail them out by printing massive amounts of cash, you'd technically gotten your money back but you still "lost" money.
3. this feels like a derail/moving the goalposts and eventually devolving to arguments about monetary policy, intrinsic value, and whether the state should have a monopoly on currencies.
2. whether you "lost money" is also the wrong question to ask. eg. if there was a massive bank failure and the government decided to bail them out by printing massive amounts of cash, you'd technically gotten your money back but you still "lost" money.
3. this feels like a derail/moving the goalposts and eventually devolving to arguments about monetary policy, intrinsic value, and whether the state should have a monopoly on currencies.
my USA bank re-arranged the order of my checks and ATM on a certain day in december of 2007 to create an overdraft, which then was charged large fees, several times. At a similar time, around dec 2007, I stood next to a BofA customer being told that his cash deposit at the BofA window, would be credited on the next business day. I believe that there are documented cases much, much larger, but involving commercial transactions, that ended up with large losses also.
That it's not centralized?
Yes if users don't validate the chain themselves the network reverts to an very expensive, untrusted SQL database
Funny for vitalik to highlight this obvious fact. Vitalik has often been considered a fraud for promotion Ethereum which is a network too large and bloated for a user to validate
Funny for vitalik to highlight this obvious fact. Vitalik has often been considered a fraud for promotion Ethereum which is a network too large and bloated for a user to validate
This is precisely what happened in 2017. Miners and exchanges unanimously supported increases Bitcoin's blocksize limit from 4MB to 8MB, in Segwit2x. However, users stopped them.
No, the miners did not fork away, so it's not at all like what's described here.
If Vitalik is correct that the only viable defense against the attack described in this article is users validating nodes en masse, then blockchain is doomed, because you're never going to convince more than a small percentage of users to validate blocks.
Personally, I think that custodial entities such as Coinbase (or in the future, banks) can probably be relied on to not do anything too controversial.
Personally, I think that custodial entities such as Coinbase (or in the future, banks) can probably be relied on to not do anything too controversial.
I don't think you're disagreeing as much as you think. A small percentage could still be 10,000 nodes or more which seems like a healthy number.
(Of course, even a billion nodes can't prevent attacks if they have no economic weight...)
(Of course, even a billion nodes can't prevent attacks if they have no economic weight...)
Yeah, I'm disagreeing with the notion that it matters whether you can run a full node on a laptop. Users casually running nodes on the hardware they have lying around is not a realistic model. Those 10000 nodes, to matter, will have to be representing economic interests that can't simply be ignored, and as such, will be able to afford whatever hardware is necessary.
If a decentralized technology has to rely on centralized custodians for scaling, then it is not decentralized
(It might still be useful, but you can’t call it decentralized or censorship-resistant or whatever)
(It might still be useful, but you can’t call it decentralized or censorship-resistant or whatever)
Looking forward to the bright future where we rely on centralized exchanges and banks!
So back to centralisation of power?
So many reputations and projects in blockchain rest on this flawed idea that users need to run nodes. Users do nothing to extend the chain! If a group of miners wants to change the protocol, it takes another group of miners to counter it. And there always will be another group, because miners compete. From the bitcoin whitepaper: "He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules". And let's get serious: users will hear about such a protocol war on news outlets, not by watching their node. Then they can choose which fork to buy, sell, and use.
> Then they can choose which fork to buy or sell.
Funny how this is now the only activity for this: buy and sell forks in a vacuum.
Because in actual real world scenarios users definitely don't chose that. Just go into a shop and watch people not chosing anything, but, you know, just paying.
Funny how this is now the only activity for this: buy and sell forks in a vacuum.
Because in actual real world scenarios users definitely don't chose that. Just go into a shop and watch people not chosing anything, but, you know, just paying.
Even granting that, it's still not user nodes that matter. We've seen from history (BCH/BSV/BCHA) that applications and exchanges decide which fork gets the ticker.
It was the other way around. Several exchanges publicly went all-in on various Bitcoin forks, only to turn around on them when all users and economic activity stayed with "regular" Bitcoin.
Many prominent people predicted the mainline Bitcoin chain dead when so many important exchanges and custodians promised to change the consensus rules. In retrospect it may sound like empty threats, it doesn't make much business sense to go up against economic activity, but at the time it was considered a real threat.
Many prominent people predicted the mainline Bitcoin chain dead when so many important exchanges and custodians promised to change the consensus rules. In retrospect it may sound like empty threats, it doesn't make much business sense to go up against economic activity, but at the time it was considered a real threat.
> So many reputations and projects in blockchain rest on this flawed idea that users need to run nodes.
BSV obviates the idea completely.
Any mistake the miners make, is forever.
Without this, miners could increase the money supply by indefinitely postponing the block reward.
> "He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules" > If a group of miners wants to change the protocol, it takes another group of miners to counter it.
No one is going to mine on a chain that produces worthless coins users don't accept. Users forced miners to activate Segwit in 2017, and almost all hashpower is still with Bitcoin.
BSV obviates the idea completely.
Any mistake the miners make, is forever.
Without this, miners could increase the money supply by indefinitely postponing the block reward.
> "He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules" > If a group of miners wants to change the protocol, it takes another group of miners to counter it.
No one is going to mine on a chain that produces worthless coins users don't accept. Users forced miners to activate Segwit in 2017, and almost all hashpower is still with Bitcoin.
Users forced miners to activate Segwit in 2017
Honestly, you don't know this. Users != nodes. A single individual could have spun up tons of nodes to vote for Segwit. Given the stakes and how manipulated social media was at the time, I consider this what likely happened. This is also what proof of work solves.
and almost all hashpower is still with Bitcoin.
Everyone knows the game by now. Whoever keeps the ticker keeps the hashpower. We saw this with BCH/BSV and also BCH/BCHA. Because most users don't follow these details. It doesn't mean users won.
Honestly, you don't know this. Users != nodes. A single individual could have spun up tons of nodes to vote for Segwit. Given the stakes and how manipulated social media was at the time, I consider this what likely happened. This is also what proof of work solves.
and almost all hashpower is still with Bitcoin.
Everyone knows the game by now. Whoever keeps the ticker keeps the hashpower. We saw this with BCH/BSV and also BCH/BCHA. Because most users don't follow these details. It doesn't mean users won.
They recently rewrote Bitcoin history due to government action.
This never happened. You are spreading lies.
This never happened. You are spreading lies.
A few questions re: why "Ethereum is not going further than quadratic [sharding]."
The first reason given: there's a minimum number of nodes required for shard for safety guarantees. So, a couple hundred shards, each with 1000 users seems like a limit. But I wonder: 10 years from now, if the blockchain (maybe pipe?) dreams succeed, then why do we expect 1000 * 500 = 5M nodes? This seems like it's quite small.
Especially if running a node on a phone ever becomes reasonable, or at least participating in the data availability process is possible here, then why would we not go further?
The second reason for non-super-quadratic sharding is data permanence. But here, couldn't we design different shards with different appetites for data permanence. Sure, NFTs currently are forever, but I can think of many applications where users do not give a damn about data permanence, and even some applications where users would prefer if data was just forgotten about.
In which case, what's stopping us from saying "these shards, we save. The other ones, who cares about." We would want users to opt into such guarantees, of course, but it seems reasonably possible.
Of course, let's get a good sharded blockchain before we optimize for more.
I'm excited to see how sharding research continues to involve and drives the cost per TX (economic and environmental) down. Consider me a cheerleader rooting for you all!