Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore(timdaub.github.io)
timdaub.github.io
Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
https://timdaub.github.io/2021/02/22/ethereum-isnt-fun-anymore/
648 comments
After all those years, there's still not a single useful blockchain application around.
These days I see lots companies telling me, they put their "supply chain on blockchain" and while I understand what they probably want to tell me ("you can't tamper with where our stuff comes from") I don't see the point in that. If you've got trust issues with your subcontractors you should fix those and not "seal" the willingly wrong information in a blockchain.
Maybe we should just declare blockchain a "failed technology".
These days I see lots companies telling me, they put their "supply chain on blockchain" and while I understand what they probably want to tell me ("you can't tamper with where our stuff comes from") I don't see the point in that. If you've got trust issues with your subcontractors you should fix those and not "seal" the willingly wrong information in a blockchain.
Maybe we should just declare blockchain a "failed technology".
I think the decentralized web pieces are starting to fall in place: decentralized file storage, decentralized domain names, decentralized communities and streaming, decentralized payments, etc.
I wouldn't declare it "failed technology" just yet.
I wouldn't declare it "failed technology" just yet.
Just because something works doesn't make it a success (see Betamax, laser disc, steam powered cars etc.).
Just because something doesn't work in the first attempt doesn't mean it never will (see various attempts at ecommerce, online news, streaming video, or just general computer-network-for-the-masses attempts from the 80s and early 90s).
I never claimed it was. Read back what I said.
Did Filecoin actually gain any traction?
Seems they recently launched late last year [0], some of the miners went on strike seeing the actual mining deal worse than they expected in several ways [1], and current price is going up a bit in the last few days, but consistently down vs BTC [2].
They may be having some success on their original purpose, having just passed 2.5 billion GB on the network, i.e., 2.5 exabytes, and 1300 miners, 200+ projects and 5900+ GitHub contributors [3].
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/filecoin-mainnet-now-live [1] https://news.bitcoin.com/filecoin-miners-start-a-strike-fil-... [2] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/filecoin/ [3] https://siliconangle.com/2021/02/16/filecoins-decentralized-...
They may be having some success on their original purpose, having just passed 2.5 billion GB on the network, i.e., 2.5 exabytes, and 1300 miners, 200+ projects and 5900+ GitHub contributors [3].
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/filecoin-mainnet-now-live [1] https://news.bitcoin.com/filecoin-miners-start-a-strike-fil-... [2] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/filecoin/ [3] https://siliconangle.com/2021/02/16/filecoins-decentralized-...
Do you know if they list the price of storing/accessing 1 GB on Filecoin compared to say AWS?
It's obvious that people who own Bitcoin would want to use the system in order to show usefulness, demand, however I'm wondering if there's any use of people who aren't financially incentivized (like early adopters who have the most to gain).
It's obvious that people who own Bitcoin would want to use the system in order to show usefulness, demand, however I'm wondering if there's any use of people who aren't financially incentivized (like early adopters who have the most to gain).
Good question, but IDK. Current price is around $37/Filecoin, falling from $45 earlier in the week, but I have no idea what one Filecoin buys in terms of storage. Let me know if you find out more, and I'll do the same
Will do. It's always been odd to me that that is never listed prominently - as price is always the main competitive factor for anything, and even if it's 100x more expensive than similar solutions - at least people get a frame of reference to then see if the multiple is worth the value of storing in the Filecoin system; and with whatever risks may come with that.
Siacoin >>> Filecoin
I just don't get the logic behind going for PoW for Siacoin than going PoS. If people have to invest in hardware already, then why make them invest in even more unrelated hardware.
I know someone who got a 7 figure loan backed by cryptocurrency collateral in a matter of minutes using makerdao. The best part? They didn't even had to provide their name. This is the future folks, I highly recommend that you actually try some of these projects before writing them off.
You do realize it’s law and not technical incapability that prevents financial institutions from lending like this, right?
I don't think law would prevent a fully collateralized loan on the basis of borrower/lender risks.
AML seems a non issue too, as the loan only moves the question.
KYC remains one big problem but there are many startups providing those services and they are slowly gaining acceptance in courts.
Don't be impressed if a few years (and maybe even months) from now you start to see classical banks trading mortgages onchain.
AML seems a non issue too, as the loan only moves the question.
KYC remains one big problem but there are many startups providing those services and they are slowly gaining acceptance in courts.
Don't be impressed if a few years (and maybe even months) from now you start to see classical banks trading mortgages onchain.
The banking system doesn't work like a tech company. They're highly dependent on a credit eco-system. If the debt they sell is backed by highly volatile collateral, their own debts will become unsustainably expensive with the additional risk factors. Yes I know the future of crypto is sunshine and rainbows but the price swings of the past three months makes this a highly volatile asset class (regardless if the price is moving up). Even security backed debt negatively effects risk factors, but at least securities have accompanying rights to offset losses--crypto has absolutely zero safety nets.
I don't think law would prevent a fully collateralized loan on the basis of borrower/lender risks.
It doesn't.
AML seems a non issue too, as the loan only moves the question.
No, anti-money-laundering laws are at the heart of why the financial system can't do this. KYC laws apply at the customer level, so you only need to handle KYC once per customer. AML laws apply at the transaction level, so you need to apply them to each loan.
Cryptocurrency solves absolutely none of the existing legal reasons that banks can't issue large loans in minutes or seconds to existing (or new, well collateralized) clients.
It doesn't.
AML seems a non issue too, as the loan only moves the question.
No, anti-money-laundering laws are at the heart of why the financial system can't do this. KYC laws apply at the customer level, so you only need to handle KYC once per customer. AML laws apply at the transaction level, so you need to apply them to each loan.
Cryptocurrency solves absolutely none of the existing legal reasons that banks can't issue large loans in minutes or seconds to existing (or new, well collateralized) clients.
> Cryptocurrency solves absolutely none of the existing legal reasons that banks can't issue large loans in minutes or seconds to existing (or new, well collateralized) clients.
Yes, this is definitely correct in that crypto does nothing to solve the legal requirements of the banks and does not help the banks.
But it's worth mentioning that this sort of fully collateralized and anonymous borrowing does not (and would not) happen through banks, but through platforms like AAVE and Compound. It's a financial tool separate from banks. And these tools cannot be shutdown, as long as ethereum exists, these tools exist.
Yes, this is definitely correct in that crypto does nothing to solve the legal requirements of the banks and does not help the banks.
But it's worth mentioning that this sort of fully collateralized and anonymous borrowing does not (and would not) happen through banks, but through platforms like AAVE and Compound. It's a financial tool separate from banks. And these tools cannot be shutdown, as long as ethereum exists, these tools exist.
Banks don't need to issue fully collateralized loans. That is not a thing people need to do in the real world, because banks will gladly issue partially collateralized loans.
As for anonymous loans, those exist solely to service criminal customers, so that is not an advantage of cryptocurrency.
As for anonymous loans, those exist solely to service criminal customers, so that is not an advantage of cryptocurrency.
For people holding crypto assets which they don't plan to sell, it's a valid way to borrow other assets for use. Potentially for other investments. Definitely not just for criminals.
And overall, it's a demonstration of a financial product which can only be built in the space of decentralized finance. I do not know of another tool which allows anyone around the world to borrow significant amounts of money anonymously and without an account. Whether it's a net good for the world I don't know, but I do believe it's a powerful technology and space.
And overall, it's a demonstration of a financial product which can only be built in the space of decentralized finance. I do not know of another tool which allows anyone around the world to borrow significant amounts of money anonymously and without an account. Whether it's a net good for the world I don't know, but I do believe it's a powerful technology and space.
People who equate privacy from banks and the state with criminality are the reason the financial system has normalized mass-surveillance and the principle of 'guilty until proven innocent' inherent in AML laws, and the reason why the financial system has become so laden with financial friction, power disparities, and exclusion of marginalized populations.
You do realize that's a characteristic which gives decentralized finance an advantage over traditional financial institutions, right?
It is technical incapability of some financial institutions to set this up inside of their regulated position.
Other freely operating entities across the globe are not in the same position.
Other freely operating entities across the globe are not in the same position.
It's an interesting thought. Any online brokerage, lender or retail banker could probably set up an anonymous verification of asset ownership without going through background checks or credit agencies. You just need 2-party consent and verification, not a whole blockchain. The trick is not proving you own a thing, it's that you need to prove you haven't used it as collateral for anyone else or don't hold outstanding debts somewhere else. Blockchain will be completely useless for solving that. A universal identity (ie SSN) is the only option.
I mean I don't care why they can't, right? These financial systems are so old, corrupt and broken, you have to pretty much start from scratch in my opinion.
I really am struggling to see the practical value here. You have to provide collateral worth more than your borrowed amount. The rates are HORRIBLE for borrowers. Straight up predatory.
The anonymity part is cool, but if I want to borrow to get a mortgage how exactly does this help me? I do not have $500,000 in crypto laying around and a traditional lender will give me a 2% interest rate instead of 15%
The anonymity part is cool, but if I want to borrow to get a mortgage how exactly does this help me? I do not have $500,000 in crypto laying around and a traditional lender will give me a 2% interest rate instead of 15%
So the stability fee you pay is 4.50%. You're still holding on to your assets appreciation, so if Bitcoin continues to appreciate at 300% per year, the 4.50% is a drop in the bucket and you didn't have to pay a capital gains tax.
Eventually, some companies are working on tokenizing homes, so once that happens, you could potentially deposit that as collateral just as easily, but that's still far out.
Eventually, some companies are working on tokenizing homes, so once that happens, you could potentially deposit that as collateral just as easily, but that's still far out.
> So the stability fee you pay is 4.50%.
The fees I am seeing on Uniswap/Aave are much much higher than 4.5%. Even at 4.5% that equates to six figures of additional interest payments over my 30 year mortgage.
> and you didn't have to pay a capital gains tax.
This isn't true. Any conversion between crypto assets is technically a taxable event...even if we both can agree that the rules are silly.
> Eventually, some companies are working on tokenizing homes, so once that happens, you could potentially deposit that as collateral just as easily, but that's still far out.
Okay great, but how does this promised future development help me secure a loan for the home I want to buy? Or the business I want to start? Again, I do not have 500k in bitcoin laying around nor a "tokenized home."
It was super easy to get approved for a 500k mortgage just based on my income.
The fees I am seeing on Uniswap/Aave are much much higher than 4.5%. Even at 4.5% that equates to six figures of additional interest payments over my 30 year mortgage.
> and you didn't have to pay a capital gains tax.
This isn't true. Any conversion between crypto assets is technically a taxable event...even if we both can agree that the rules are silly.
> Eventually, some companies are working on tokenizing homes, so once that happens, you could potentially deposit that as collateral just as easily, but that's still far out.
Okay great, but how does this promised future development help me secure a loan for the home I want to buy? Or the business I want to start? Again, I do not have 500k in bitcoin laying around nor a "tokenized home."
It was super easy to get approved for a 500k mortgage just based on my income.
The idea is that it's not a conversion, it's a loan. The collateral is held in a smart contract and when you pay off the loan you get it back. In much the same way, people take out loans on their stock portfolios, and they don't pay capital gains either.
Is there any definitive source on this? I get lots of conflicting information from my brief google search. Equities and Cryptocurrencies are not treated the same for tax purposes by the IRS. It seems like they are treated as property and do not qualify as a "fungible" asset like stock or USD.
I don't know and I haven't consulted a CPA, which is why I described it as an "idea" instead of a fact. I know technically how it works, but not how the IRS will view it.
But to my amateur mind, treating it as property doesn't seem like a problem for this view. If you get a loan from a pawn shop, you're not selling them your property, you're just putting it up for collateral while you pay back the loan.
But to my amateur mind, treating it as property doesn't seem like a problem for this view. If you get a loan from a pawn shop, you're not selling them your property, you're just putting it up for collateral while you pay back the loan.
This. It took me a long time to understand this. I was so focused on the volatility that I failed to look at the larger trend. It clicked for me only a couple of months back.
Same here, it took me a while to understand why anyone would get an over-collaterized loan until it just clicked, then I was like this is the future, it doesn't make any sense to sell the most valuable and appreciating asset ever, but you can still use the money from it.
> sell the most valuable and appreciating asset ever
What happens when it stops appreciating? Or is the premise that bitcoin will alway outpace interest rates?
What happens when it stops appreciating? Or is the premise that bitcoin will alway outpace interest rates?
Do you not pay the loan back in Bitcoin? How would you exercise the 300% gain while also paying the loan back?
[deleted]
So if Bitcoin grows 300%, that means your collateral is now worth 300% more.
You can either withdraw a portion of it back to your normal wallet or you can just borrow more against the same collateral. So it's like a credit line that's always appreciating in value.
If one day, you need the whole collateral for whatever reason, then you'd pay the loan to unlock it fully and withdraw it.
You can either withdraw a portion of it back to your normal wallet or you can just borrow more against the same collateral. So it's like a credit line that's always appreciating in value.
If one day, you need the whole collateral for whatever reason, then you'd pay the loan to unlock it fully and withdraw it.
Antigravity for finance. The ages long problem of how to integrate debt and money into society is solved.
The value of that loan is less than the value of the collateral they put in though, that's how vaults work.
You're never going to get an amazing loan deal from a trustless system.
You're never going to get an amazing loan deal from a trustless system.
But you can access liquidity without selling your asset which is exactly what they want.
ie. So they can have cash while continuing to be speculatively exposed to eth.
I think that ethereum might have great applications, but a loan backed by more collateral than it is worth doesn't seem like one of them, unless Dao starts allowing for the use of collateral that is less liquid than eth.
The issue is that contracts don't have any way of "calling in" to the legal API, so you can't put up your house as collateral.
I think that ethereum might have great applications, but a loan backed by more collateral than it is worth doesn't seem like one of them, unless Dao starts allowing for the use of collateral that is less liquid than eth.
The issue is that contracts don't have any way of "calling in" to the legal API, so you can't put up your house as collateral.
They also avoid capital gains tax which would be pretty significant. They can use the money to hedge their bets against crypto by buying traditional markets if they wanted.
For house mortgages, there are companies that are "tokenizing" houses on the blockchain, so putting it up collateral would be as simple as depositing that token. That said, I think this is far from becoming reality anytime soon, just because there's lots of legal issues, etc. Nonetheless, the future is pretty exciting!
For house mortgages, there are companies that are "tokenizing" houses on the blockchain, so putting it up collateral would be as simple as depositing that token. That said, I think this is far from becoming reality anytime soon, just because there's lots of legal issues, etc. Nonetheless, the future is pretty exciting!
I believe that technically, any conversion between crypto assets is still a taxable event. If you want to follow the (silly) rules, you have to pay taxes on your gains once you purchase something using your borrowed stablecoin.
So yes, you'd pay capital gains tax on the DAI that you've borrowed when you transfer it back to USD, but DAI is a stablecoin that's pegged to 1$ and the volumes are pretty high on many exchanges.
Once you include your exchanges fees in your cost basis, you actually lost like 30-40$, so it's a taxable event with capital gains loss.
Once you include your exchanges fees in your cost basis, you actually lost like 30-40$, so it's a taxable event with capital gains loss.
This is more applicable to liquidity providers or things like AAVE and compound where your crypto is actually loaned out. With maker, your crypto doesn't move anywhere and isn't loaned out to anyone.
For what it's worth, if you use AAVE or Compound, you also have to declare interest income on what you've earned.
With maker, you'd be responsible for capital gains if it was liquidated because you fell below the 150% minimum ratio.
For what it's worth, if you use AAVE or Compound, you also have to declare interest income on what you've earned.
With maker, you'd be responsible for capital gains if it was liquidated because you fell below the 150% minimum ratio.
Admittedly, I am not familiar with maker I will have to go take a look.
I guess the difference between me and someone who would use these DeFi apps, is that they are using crypto as a speculative investment (which is fine, I speculate with other assets all the time). But most people do not have a significant portion of their net worth in crypto tokens. For me, it is much cheaper/easier/safer to just get a traditional loan.
I guess the difference between me and someone who would use these DeFi apps, is that they are using crypto as a speculative investment (which is fine, I speculate with other assets all the time). But most people do not have a significant portion of their net worth in crypto tokens. For me, it is much cheaper/easier/safer to just get a traditional loan.
Presumably the point is to avoid triggering capital gains tax with the low cost basis of your coins by borrowing someone else's coins to make purchases.
AFAIK, this isn't how MakerDAO loans are being treated right now.
How is being able to do this good? There are reasons why this shit has been regulated.
It gives freedom to people, how is that bad? The whole point is that it's a permissionless, borderless technology that anyone can participate in. There's really nothing holding innovation back.
Flash loans are an example of that innovation, where if you see an arbitrage opportunity in the market, you can profit from it even if you don't own huge capital, so it levels the playing field for all these financial actors.
Flash loans are an example of that innovation, where if you see an arbitrage opportunity in the market, you can profit from it even if you don't own huge capital, so it levels the playing field for all these financial actors.
This seems akin to looking at someone's code and saying "This is crap! We should throw it out and rewrite it from scratch" without understanding how and why it got the way it did.
See Chesterton's Fence: https://fs.blog/2020/03/chestertons-fence/
See Chesterton's Fence: https://fs.blog/2020/03/chestertons-fence/
> It gives freedom to people, how is that bad?
That's just a slogan. The devil is in the details. To use an extreme example: Murder laws removes my freedom to kill random people; how is that good?
That's just a slogan. The devil is in the details. To use an extreme example: Murder laws removes my freedom to kill random people; how is that good?
That impinges on someone else's freedom. I'd go with something like selling 2 kidneys or contracts that result in indentured servitude.
Everything we do impinges on someone else's freedom. Being legally allowed to walk in the street? Impinges on someone else's freedom to block me from walking in the street.
It is always a tradeoff. In the case of the particular tech discussed, it's a tradeoff between being able to somewhat control crime (e.g, making payment for human trafficking harder, making it possible to reverse theft) and financial privacy. It's freedom from having things stolen and freedom from being regulated.
It is always a tradeoff. In the case of the particular tech discussed, it's a tradeoff between being able to somewhat control crime (e.g, making payment for human trafficking harder, making it possible to reverse theft) and financial privacy. It's freedom from having things stolen and freedom from being regulated.
>It gives freedom to people, how is that bad?
Well it's great in theory until you hit a problem nobody was incentivized to guard against the resulting failure cascades.
Well it's great in theory until you hit a problem nobody was incentivized to guard against the resulting failure cascades.
> The best part? They didn't even had to provide their name.
The mafia probably doesn't need your name for a loan, too. They'll find you anyway.
But maybe I'm all alone in finding this somewhat shady.
The mafia probably doesn't need your name for a loan, too. They'll find you anyway.
But maybe I'm all alone in finding this somewhat shady.
> The mafia probably doesn't need your name for a loan, too.
What? They'll know your name, address and your whole family history usually.
It's just a smart contract execution on the global computer that is Ethereum, how is that shady?
What? They'll know your name, address and your whole family history usually.
It's just a smart contract execution on the global computer that is Ethereum, how is that shady?
There's a big cultural gap here, because your description sounds obviously shady to me. If my car financing agreement said "the terms of the loan are whatever happens when you run this program we wrote", I would never in a million years have signed it.
The code is immutable and open source, so you can inspect exactly what it does.
I can inspect the code I write professionally too, but I still end up shipping bugs from time to time. So I'm not really convinced that the ability to read the code will let me reliably determine what it does. Have you heard of the DAO hack?
Rich person gets easy loan and other news at 11.
That's what happens when you have an economy based on (interest bearing) loans.
Cryptocurrency's lack of regulation is not a feature.
Interesting. I think I know somebody who might be interested in something similar: ie, put X BTC as collateral for a loan, and pay it back after a year to get X BTC. Any pointers for where I could learn how this could work?
Or you could just treat that collateral as a credit line that's always growing, if it grows faster than your spending, just withdraw a portion of your collateral. Just look at Youtube videos on makerdao, there's some good ones out there and try it for yourself once you feel comfortable with small amounts.
Once you actually try it, you're going to be like "this is the future", every single one of my friends that tried came to the same conclusion.
Once you actually try it, you're going to be like "this is the future", every single one of my friends that tried came to the same conclusion.
Do you have any sense about what happens in the limit, like what if literally every person is sitting on a bunch of Bitcoin they earned at their job, which now pays in Bitcoin.
Everything is denominated in Bitcoin, which is always going up in price. Everyone borrows some lame legacy asset X and collateralixes with Bitcoin.
Do weird things happen? for example of Bitcoin is ubiquitous then the price of Bitcoin essentially gets factored out of the equation, so this magical leverage goes away. There are other effects but this idea that this is the future (or rather that this is a superior future ) seems a bit naive to me. Gravity will catch up to you no matter what.
Everything is denominated in Bitcoin, which is always going up in price. Everyone borrows some lame legacy asset X and collateralixes with Bitcoin.
Do weird things happen? for example of Bitcoin is ubiquitous then the price of Bitcoin essentially gets factored out of the equation, so this magical leverage goes away. There are other effects but this idea that this is the future (or rather that this is a superior future ) seems a bit naive to me. Gravity will catch up to you no matter what.
What happens in the event of default?
It's over-collaterized, so if you fall below the 150% minimum collateral ratio, maker smart contract could liquidate the asset to cover the loan and then return the remaining 50%-liquidation fees back to you. As long as you're conservative in your borrowing (as in you borrow up to 25%-50% of your holding), your chances of getting liquidated are pretty slim.
I think a big part of this is that old tech companies like IBM, Oracle and probably every big management consulting trying to hype the technology up. You see consultants recommend taking on big challenges, sort of like snake oil applying it to all kinds of nonsensical scenarios around finance, insurance, supply chain, regulatory reporting, etc.
Contrary to general perception it’s not a new data transfer cure all that will actually solve problems of sharing data between organizations. It also doesn’t replace hard work required to make a new industry standard. It’s barely useful in either of those but that’s the common misconception I usually hear from nontechnical people who seem to be excited about blockchain.
Are we just trapped in a hype cycle that will inevitably end or does Bitcoin growth spell forever renewing waves of hype?
Contrary to general perception it’s not a new data transfer cure all that will actually solve problems of sharing data between organizations. It also doesn’t replace hard work required to make a new industry standard. It’s barely useful in either of those but that’s the common misconception I usually hear from nontechnical people who seem to be excited about blockchain.
Are we just trapped in a hype cycle that will inevitably end or does Bitcoin growth spell forever renewing waves of hype?
I think it's being declared "failed technology" at least once a month since inception, no?
I mean it "works", but so do steam powered cars. The problem is most people don't actually use it, just trade it. The space used to mostly involve people who actually wanted to decentralize currencies, now it's almost exclusively "hodl $$$$$ to the moon etc". This article is articulating what's been clear to many people who really believed in the promise of decentralized currency: crypto in its current iteration has essentially failed. Time to try something else.
Maybe you're hearing only "hodl" because those people are loud? Just like Vitalik doesn't give a shit about making money on speculation, so do many people working around this tech, a lot don't hold anything in crypto or purely symbolic amounts, trading takes a lot of time, energy and can drain emotionally very quickly, with more than 80% of new traders loosing money after 1 year not everybody is interested in it.
To put it in other words - crypto trading is different kind of hobby than programming. Many people are interested in what kind of systems can be built and don't give much crap about monetizing it or worry about how many people are using it.
It's a bit like getting upset at Fabrice Bellard because he created quickjs that "nobody is using" - it's completely missing the point.
To put it in other words - crypto trading is different kind of hobby than programming. Many people are interested in what kind of systems can be built and don't give much crap about monetizing it or worry about how many people are using it.
It's a bit like getting upset at Fabrice Bellard because he created quickjs that "nobody is using" - it's completely missing the point.
Nevermind article like this one then: https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/05/03/jp-morgan-microso...
Exactly. Nevermind this article because Bitcoin and a blockchain from JP Morgan have nothing in common (also JP's enthusiasm for blockchains have been steadily waning and their earlier attempts are already dead on the vine). People have no interest in the tech, just gainz, bcs blockchain finance, consensus, future, JP Morgan and whatever word cloud pumpers want to use to get you excited don't actually reflect realities. If you have so much faith in the tech, start using it for real-world transactions, which you can do right now. If you're just hodling with some vague assumptions of moon money, you're not supporting the actual purpose of crypto. But let's be honest, most people aren't really supporting it or have any interest in actually using it, that's why crypto has been failing (even though it technically "works").
Not sure, but we should act more like that then.
Full supply chain documentation takes a long time to put together. If the application could generate the full supply chain documentation for an item with a certain serial number, that would be very useful.
It is also very common for suppliers and various intermediaries to have bad document management practices that get further muddled by digital file issues (e.g. people just generating documents from their software that may be different from the real invoice).
The issue with that is that not everyone involved wants transparency or wants to know, because you can get discounts from illegal or merely hinky behavior such as through gray market imports. There are good reasons as to why a lot of people involved in bringing products to customers want to see no evil / hear no evil / speak no evil. There's room here for the law to push people into adopting better technology than what is currently used.
This is another case in which the paper tech is better for fraud, negligence, and crime than the blockchain tech. It is also more forgiving because it prevents participants in the supply chain from becoming aware of fraud further up the chain, so it prevents them from taking on liability. Transparency sounds great until you learn it means that you have to pay more for the same units because the crime / lax practices that lubed the system up is now infeasible.
It is also very common for suppliers and various intermediaries to have bad document management practices that get further muddled by digital file issues (e.g. people just generating documents from their software that may be different from the real invoice).
The issue with that is that not everyone involved wants transparency or wants to know, because you can get discounts from illegal or merely hinky behavior such as through gray market imports. There are good reasons as to why a lot of people involved in bringing products to customers want to see no evil / hear no evil / speak no evil. There's room here for the law to push people into adopting better technology than what is currently used.
This is another case in which the paper tech is better for fraud, negligence, and crime than the blockchain tech. It is also more forgiving because it prevents participants in the supply chain from becoming aware of fraud further up the chain, so it prevents them from taking on liability. Transparency sounds great until you learn it means that you have to pay more for the same units because the crime / lax practices that lubed the system up is now infeasible.
Dumb this down for me, because it's unclear how blockchain would solve the issues you bring up.
Blockchain is just a ledger. So "the Blockchain" does not make anything significantly better. Its in fact ridiculously expensive.
The idea is that everytime sweat shop X finishes sewing sequins on a dress, they can scan the RFID tag on the dress with their smartphone, and the ledger gets updated, and then Walmart can prepare for that dress, the shipping company can print out labels etc.
Its a good idea.
Industries are supposed to work this out, create their own cheaper blockchains that just need some sort of simple KYC to get started, then its as cheap as email to add your little bit to the supply chain.
I dont know of any successful implementations
Edit: no blockchain will solve the grey market problems. Everything will have to be made genuninely on the chain. Which starts to lead to probelsm with if you cannot get permission to write to the chain ... etc etc
The idea is that everytime sweat shop X finishes sewing sequins on a dress, they can scan the RFID tag on the dress with their smartphone, and the ledger gets updated, and then Walmart can prepare for that dress, the shipping company can print out labels etc.
Its a good idea.
Industries are supposed to work this out, create their own cheaper blockchains that just need some sort of simple KYC to get started, then its as cheap as email to add your little bit to the supply chain.
I dont know of any successful implementations
Edit: no blockchain will solve the grey market problems. Everything will have to be made genuninely on the chain. Which starts to lead to probelsm with if you cannot get permission to write to the chain ... etc etc
I appreciate the response, but it's still entirely unclear how blockchain would help here. In a supply chain, why would blockchain be better than a centralized process? It seems to be trying to put a square peg in a round hole.
It's a fine question - I guess politics mostly
1. If the central database is proprietary then it is enforced (usually by a major retailer ie Walmart drives all sorts of RFID supply chain requirements for its suppliers. If blockchains come in this is likely how)
1.a. But which other retailer will sign up to walmart's versions ? So it is hard for all suppliers to sign up to the same standards
2. Open standards make it easier for anyone to write apps to join the chain.
3. it's not at all clear how this is better I will admit beyond "decentralised" and "open". But those are excellent places to start.
1. If the central database is proprietary then it is enforced (usually by a major retailer ie Walmart drives all sorts of RFID supply chain requirements for its suppliers. If blockchains come in this is likely how)
1.a. But which other retailer will sign up to walmart's versions ? So it is hard for all suppliers to sign up to the same standards
2. Open standards make it easier for anyone to write apps to join the chain.
3. it's not at all clear how this is better I will admit beyond "decentralised" and "open". But those are excellent places to start.
Tampering. Bribes, hacking, idiocy, whatever. A proper blockchain is tamper resistant, so everyone trusts it.
I will bribe people to put wrong information on the blockchain then.
I understand your point, nothing is perfect, but surely a public easily-audited blockchain does more to deter corruption and, if it occurs, find the perpetrators? As compared to a traditional system which is basically a log file that anyone with access (such as a rogue IT admin) can change?
You can sign entries but unless you have each subsequent entry build on what came before like in a blockchain, entries can be removed entirely and no one will know. There is a reason companies like DHL are interested in such things.
https://www.dhl.com/au-en/home/insights-and-innovation/insig...
Example: Our product is sourced from a company and this providence is on the blockchain. It comes to light they employ slave labour and we'd rather cover it up. How do we alter these original transactions without the evidence being in plain sight?
You can sign entries but unless you have each subsequent entry build on what came before like in a blockchain, entries can be removed entirely and no one will know. There is a reason companies like DHL are interested in such things.
https://www.dhl.com/au-en/home/insights-and-innovation/insig...
Example: Our product is sourced from a company and this providence is on the blockchain. It comes to light they employ slave labour and we'd rather cover it up. How do we alter these original transactions without the evidence being in plain sight?
:-)
Thank you
Thank you
I mean... there are a few.
Brave (the browser) uses blockchain in their privacy protecting ad technology.
Skynet uses a blockchain to allow users to share their extra computer storage space for a CDN.
And I'm sure there are a few others. It's just that the amount of use cases send legitimate applications using them are... limited. Most of the ones I'd consider valid uses have a substance-full technical goal, like the two I mentioned above.
Brave (the browser) uses blockchain in their privacy protecting ad technology.
Skynet uses a blockchain to allow users to share their extra computer storage space for a CDN.
And I'm sure there are a few others. It's just that the amount of use cases send legitimate applications using them are... limited. Most of the ones I'd consider valid uses have a substance-full technical goal, like the two I mentioned above.
> Brave (the browser) uses blockchain in their privacy protecting ad technology.
uBlock Origin works fine based on txt-files. Not sure how blockchain could improve this.
uBlock Origin works fine based on txt-files. Not sure how blockchain could improve this.
Iirc the idea behind brave is to create a sustainable alternative to the ad/data collection of big tech. They use blockchain to enable microtransactions for content.
So, we are back to flattr, PayPal recurring payments or whatnot again.
$localNewspaper not go through the hassle of dealing with payments through blockchain technology.
$localNewspaper not go through the hassle of dealing with payments through blockchain technology.
Not really. Some people do that. Most just leave it on auto-contribute which means you'd get paid per view.
It's also not terribly hard to get verified so you get paid. As long as someone is reasonably familiar with technology, I think it'd be pretty easy for them. Haven't tried it for myself though (but the guide is up there so you can see it for yourself if your curious).
It's also not terribly hard to get verified so you get paid. As long as someone is reasonably familiar with technology, I think it'd be pretty easy for them. Haven't tried it for myself though (but the guide is up there so you can see it for yourself if your curious).
>After all those years, there's still not a single useful blockchain application around.
Why are uniswap/none of these DeFi/DEx'es "not useful"?
https://defipulse.com/
Why are uniswap/none of these DeFi/DEx'es "not useful"?
https://defipulse.com/
There is Sia/Skynet which I think is really cool. Sia is the decentralized storage layer and Skynet provides file-sharing and HTTP-access through webportals. It's actually working and can compete with AWS S3 in terms of security, performance and price, while being completely decentralized. Check out https://siasky.net and the Skynet App Store: https://siasky.net/hns/skyapps/#/apps/all
Just because you don’t use it doesn’t mean it’s not useful. People called computers useless for a long time too. Some still do.
> If you've got trust issues with your subcontractors you should fix those and not "seal" the willingly wrong information in a blockchain.
In first world countries, yes. In third world countries, no.
In first world countries, yes. In third world countries, no.
> to digitise a sector that still uses millions of paper documents
So, they now use blockchain where sending documents as a PDF would have been sufficient...
I'm so proud!
edit: Read the article! That's truely their main selling point. Formerly it was done on/with paper, now it's "on the blockchain". This is another great example why we don't need blockchain.
So, they now use blockchain where sending documents as a PDF would have been sufficient...
I'm so proud!
edit: Read the article! That's truely their main selling point. Formerly it was done on/with paper, now it's "on the blockchain". This is another great example why we don't need blockchain.
What’s the point of a PDF when a fax would be sufficient?
The problem is that the purpose of the Blockchain is to achieve distributed trustless consensus. Any time the Blockchain interacts with the physical world you need to introduce a centralised trusted entity (the oracle problem)
i guess the whole point of tracking containers on blockchain was that you don't have to trust middlemen to do the right thing anymore.
I've read some detailed discussions from people in the industry explaining how blockchains don't help. And I've read some very high level, breezy assertions from people outside the industry asserting that blockchains can help (although they never spell out how, exactly).
As far as I can tell:
1. There's a pretty big issue with containers having the wrong contents (eg, counterfeit items loaded initially, or contraband added during transit). Current solutions are focused around physical security, seals, locks, etc., but it's fairly easy to bypass and forge these physical measures.
2. There's no real issue with tracking containers. We don't always know what's actually in them, but we know really well where they are and what's meant to be in them.
3. There's some efforts to try and replace the electronic systems for tracking where they are and what should be in them with blockchains. But as above, that's the bit that's currently working fine.
Not needing to trust middlemen is a good goal, I just don't see how tracking containers on blockchains reduces my need to trust middlemen. When Customs seizes the container at the border and finds someone has added 100kg of cocaine to the container, how does the blockchain prove who jimmied the lock open and then replaced the tamper seals?
As far as I can tell:
1. There's a pretty big issue with containers having the wrong contents (eg, counterfeit items loaded initially, or contraband added during transit). Current solutions are focused around physical security, seals, locks, etc., but it's fairly easy to bypass and forge these physical measures.
2. There's no real issue with tracking containers. We don't always know what's actually in them, but we know really well where they are and what's meant to be in them.
3. There's some efforts to try and replace the electronic systems for tracking where they are and what should be in them with blockchains. But as above, that's the bit that's currently working fine.
Not needing to trust middlemen is a good goal, I just don't see how tracking containers on blockchains reduces my need to trust middlemen. When Customs seizes the container at the border and finds someone has added 100kg of cocaine to the container, how does the blockchain prove who jimmied the lock open and then replaced the tamper seals?
This, a thousand times _this_!
I've worked in shipping for decades. There is no problem with BOLs magically changing with no traceability (which blockchain could solve, I guess, if that problem existed?). There is no problem with checking that the seal on a box at arrival is the same seal that was on the box when it departed.
The only viable purpose I've heard for blockchain is quasi-anonymous decentralized trust negotiation. This purpose doesn't match any real-world use case in shipping. A shipper doesn't want to ship product from an anonymous untrusted producer and no carrier wants to carry goods from an anonymous untrusted shipper.
Blockchain won't stop companies from misdeclaring hazardous (but otherwise legal) goods[1], it won't stop traffickers from misdeclaring illegal goods (or smuggling illegal goods among legal goods)[2], it won't stop trucks from running overweight[3], it won't stop ships from being misloaded[4]...
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Hyundai_Fortune
[2] https://www.freshplaza.com/article/9295962/cork-cocaine-valu...
[3] this sort of thing doesn't usually make the news so I don't have a link
[4] https://www.shippingandfreightresource.com/one-apus-containe...
I've worked in shipping for decades. There is no problem with BOLs magically changing with no traceability (which blockchain could solve, I guess, if that problem existed?). There is no problem with checking that the seal on a box at arrival is the same seal that was on the box when it departed.
The only viable purpose I've heard for blockchain is quasi-anonymous decentralized trust negotiation. This purpose doesn't match any real-world use case in shipping. A shipper doesn't want to ship product from an anonymous untrusted producer and no carrier wants to carry goods from an anonymous untrusted shipper.
Blockchain won't stop companies from misdeclaring hazardous (but otherwise legal) goods[1], it won't stop traffickers from misdeclaring illegal goods (or smuggling illegal goods among legal goods)[2], it won't stop trucks from running overweight[3], it won't stop ships from being misloaded[4]...
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Hyundai_Fortune
[2] https://www.freshplaza.com/article/9295962/cork-cocaine-valu...
[3] this sort of thing doesn't usually make the news so I don't have a link
[4] https://www.shippingandfreightresource.com/one-apus-containe...
Trust is a lower energy state than distrust. I find it unlikely that society wants to incur the massive expensive of climbing that trust gradient for no benefit.
Any society that adopts trust will be able to compete very well against a society of no trust.
Thst is my conjecture at any rate.
Any society that adopts trust will be able to compete very well against a society of no trust.
Thst is my conjecture at any rate.
And, more importantly, a blockchain provides a trustless data store. Why can't I just trust myself to keep the data?
"shit in, shit out" is still the working principle. I don't see why the middlemen should make true statements, if that's not in his interest after all. Instead he will just enter wrong information, which will then become "correct" information, "because it's on the blockchain!!11".
Are the middlemen competing with each other to change the supply chain tracking information after it's been recorded in a system over which the purchaser has no control? If so, then maybe blockchain could help with that specific risk. But it can do nothing to prevent middlemen from putting fraudulent information into the record in the first place.
Cryptokitties is actually great
They left Ethereum due to the high gas prices, didn't they?
How many MAU do they have?
Putting supply chain on a blockchain isn't about verifying the authenticity of the goods. Its about being able to buy and sell the goods at any time, hedge out price risk, etc.
> Its about being able to buy and sell the goods at any time, hedge out price risk, etc.
Can you explain this in greater detail? I don't wish to be a naysayer, but I don't understand how those concepts are blockchain-specific. Goods being re-sold/diverted while in transit was a regular occurrence prior to the existence of blockchain technologies. What is being brought to the table that is new?
Can you explain this in greater detail? I don't wish to be a naysayer, but I don't understand how those concepts are blockchain-specific. Goods being re-sold/diverted while in transit was a regular occurrence prior to the existence of blockchain technologies. What is being brought to the table that is new?
All actors having better access to these tools and others, more open markets. Someone with knowledge of new tools can build services aimed at various market participants, without needing much capital etc.
Goods were sold before the Internet, too.
The hardest pill to swallow is that we already had a very low cost of moving money around between hostile nation-states. And it's been around since the 8th century - read 700ACE-800ACE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala
Its money dealer to money dealer, and the money dealers keep scrips. Average fees are from 0.2% to 0.5% . It's definitely un-sexy since its not technology based. No chains of blocks or programmers needed. Fees are low, so the money transferrers can make a living, but not allow speculation or other hazardous acts.
And the only reason why it's not more massively used is because of the US's adherence that it's "terrorism".
I'd imagine that the terrorism angle is more of a "allows people to ignore central banks ran by USA and Europe"... as the US didn't much care when HSBC was financing drug cartels, terrorists, and the like ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2012/07/16/hsbc-h... )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala
Its money dealer to money dealer, and the money dealers keep scrips. Average fees are from 0.2% to 0.5% . It's definitely un-sexy since its not technology based. No chains of blocks or programmers needed. Fees are low, so the money transferrers can make a living, but not allow speculation or other hazardous acts.
And the only reason why it's not more massively used is because of the US's adherence that it's "terrorism".
I'd imagine that the terrorism angle is more of a "allows people to ignore central banks ran by USA and Europe"... as the US didn't much care when HSBC was financing drug cartels, terrorists, and the like ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2012/07/16/hsbc-h... )
>And the only reason why it's not more massively used is because of the US's adherence that it's "terrorism".
I don’t think so. A system with clear record keeping, auditable by third parties, and subject to the judiciary is far better than below:
> Trust and extensive use of connections are the components that distinguish it from other remittance systems. Hawaladar networks are often based on membership in the same family, village, clan, or ethnic group, and cheating is punished by effective excommunication and "loss of honour"—leading to severe economic hardship.[3]
Technology has obviated the need for unnecessary levels of allegiance to your tribe, as required in the above system.
I don’t think so. A system with clear record keeping, auditable by third parties, and subject to the judiciary is far better than below:
> Trust and extensive use of connections are the components that distinguish it from other remittance systems. Hawaladar networks are often based on membership in the same family, village, clan, or ethnic group, and cheating is punished by effective excommunication and "loss of honour"—leading to severe economic hardship.[3]
Technology has obviated the need for unnecessary levels of allegiance to your tribe, as required in the above system.
> I don’t think so. A system with clear record keeping, auditable by third parties, and subject to the judiciary is far better than below:
And we've learned that record-keeping has its own very strong negative side. It alone can establish ties between people, and serve to eliminate privacy all in the names of "transparency". (And I can hear it now too - "Why want privacy if you have done nothing wrong?"). I think we're only at the beginning of crypto-fraud arrests, because the ledger is the log - and that's a liability.
And the auditability is primarily a governmental requirement, usually based around fraud, financing terrorists, or the like. If cheating occurs, the excommunication from the network is the punishment - you are removed from your position of power. And frankly, we can look at our systems of how auditability doesnt stop the various failure modes: blatant financing of terrorism/HBSC, billions of $ transferred away from citizens with usurious fines, overleveraging finance side affecting savings/loan. In the end, auditability is just a way to assign blame. And that blame is never directed towards those at the top who manufacture and use illegal techniques - it is used to blame the rank and file; the cashier, the teller, the engineer, the low middle manager.
And subject to the judiciary is an interesting case you bring up... Because transfers in (I believe) all cryptocurrency is not subject to the judiciary. And in many more popular cryptosystems, that is seen as a strong anti-government bonus, and not a malus. And
Point being, is that the Hawala is the last millenium's Bitcoin.. And when compared to BTC or ETH now, is still strictly better. (And we haven't discussed the barrier to entry, wasted electrical power, e-waste, etc.)
And we've learned that record-keeping has its own very strong negative side. It alone can establish ties between people, and serve to eliminate privacy all in the names of "transparency". (And I can hear it now too - "Why want privacy if you have done nothing wrong?"). I think we're only at the beginning of crypto-fraud arrests, because the ledger is the log - and that's a liability.
And the auditability is primarily a governmental requirement, usually based around fraud, financing terrorists, or the like. If cheating occurs, the excommunication from the network is the punishment - you are removed from your position of power. And frankly, we can look at our systems of how auditability doesnt stop the various failure modes: blatant financing of terrorism/HBSC, billions of $ transferred away from citizens with usurious fines, overleveraging finance side affecting savings/loan. In the end, auditability is just a way to assign blame. And that blame is never directed towards those at the top who manufacture and use illegal techniques - it is used to blame the rank and file; the cashier, the teller, the engineer, the low middle manager.
And subject to the judiciary is an interesting case you bring up... Because transfers in (I believe) all cryptocurrency is not subject to the judiciary. And in many more popular cryptosystems, that is seen as a strong anti-government bonus, and not a malus. And
Point being, is that the Hawala is the last millenium's Bitcoin.. And when compared to BTC or ETH now, is still strictly better. (And we haven't discussed the barrier to entry, wasted electrical power, e-waste, etc.)
>And we've learned that record-keeping has its own very strong negative side. It alone can establish ties between people, and serve to eliminate privacy all in the names of "transparency".
Hawala people can establish ties too, unless they are somehow incorruptible. And electronic money transfer systems and SWIFT and whatnot aren't perfect, but my contention is they are more preferable to almost all people than Hawala. I am aware of the corruption with regards to HSBC, but I can't agree with
>billions of $ transferred away from citizens with usurious fines, overleveraging finance side affecting savings/loan
Keeping funds secure and moving money has never been so easy and so cheap for almost all people. Yes, you can get screwed if the government deems you a terrorist, and a more distributed system like Hawala might be more resilient to that kind of attack, but there's other costs to Hawala that the current system doesn't have.
>Point being, is that the Hawala is the last millenium's Bitcoin.. And when compared to BTC or ETH now, is still strictly better. (And we haven't discussed the barrier to entry, wasted electrical power, e-waste, etc.)
I can't comment on this since I don't know enough about BTC or ETH or Hawala.
Hawala people can establish ties too, unless they are somehow incorruptible. And electronic money transfer systems and SWIFT and whatnot aren't perfect, but my contention is they are more preferable to almost all people than Hawala. I am aware of the corruption with regards to HSBC, but I can't agree with
>billions of $ transferred away from citizens with usurious fines, overleveraging finance side affecting savings/loan
Keeping funds secure and moving money has never been so easy and so cheap for almost all people. Yes, you can get screwed if the government deems you a terrorist, and a more distributed system like Hawala might be more resilient to that kind of attack, but there's other costs to Hawala that the current system doesn't have.
>Point being, is that the Hawala is the last millenium's Bitcoin.. And when compared to BTC or ETH now, is still strictly better. (And we haven't discussed the barrier to entry, wasted electrical power, e-waste, etc.)
I can't comment on this since I don't know enough about BTC or ETH or Hawala.
Technology doesn't imply a good civil society (where you can, on average, trust people. Aka "social capital").
But does technology imply social capital? I don't think so.
So if you set up the dichotomy, and had to choose, I'd choose "social capital" every time.
I know, you didn't use this phrasing. But when I read "allegiance to your tribe", what does that even mean? If you're American and you support your troops, isn't that "allegiance to your tribe"?
But does technology imply social capital? I don't think so.
So if you set up the dichotomy, and had to choose, I'd choose "social capital" every time.
I know, you didn't use this phrasing. But when I read "allegiance to your tribe", what does that even mean? If you're American and you support your troops, isn't that "allegiance to your tribe"?
Technology removes the need for middlemen, and hence any trust needed for the middlemen.
Allegiance to the tribe means following the customs/social ordering/rules of the tribe. For example, how well would a gay/non religious/etc person fare in tribes that don't believe in civil liberties?
Allegiance to the tribe means following the customs/social ordering/rules of the tribe. For example, how well would a gay/non religious/etc person fare in tribes that don't believe in civil liberties?
> Technology removes the need for middlemen, and hence any trust needed for the middlemen.
Unfortunately, I see what happens when 'We' use technology to remove middlemen...
Apple: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/01/02/amphetamine-app-store-r...
Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22348568
(person 17h ago on HN talking about google acct ban remediation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26218795 )
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-users-locked-out-afte...
That's what technology has gotten us. Accounts get closed down due to automated systems. Something gets flagged as "fraud" and you lose access/money. Your previous business selling apps gets cancelled when your app is deregistered and removed.
At least, the recourse is "Complain on HN or Twitter". Worst case is you file a lawsuit against a multi-billion dollar company (hah!).
Now, what do you do to file a dispute against Ethereum or Bitcoin? Well, nobody. There is no clearinghouse and no masters - that's the selling point! But what about fraud or likewise? Too bad, so sad.
With the hawaladars, their word, ethics, and livelihood is on the line. You have a real human who can handle the squishy and nigh-unautmatable parts. And they can talk with the person trying to transfer money in case there is problems unforseen.
> Allegiance to the tribe means following the customs/social ordering/rules of the tribe.
Well, yes.
> For example, how well would a gay/non religious/etc person fare in tribes that don't believe in civil liberties?
But this seems like a veiled way to attack a way of moving money around solely because the name is Islamic. And hate crimes happen nearly everywhere. And there was the Kentucky county clerk who refused to sign marriage certificates because a couple was gay.... And unlike the hawaladars whom you can go to a different one, these people in the county had no such choice.
It's easy to set up a strawman that someone may not support your beliefs, but it's a false narrative to think that only those people do it.
Unfortunately, I see what happens when 'We' use technology to remove middlemen...
Apple: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/01/02/amphetamine-app-store-r...
Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22348568
(person 17h ago on HN talking about google acct ban remediation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26218795 )
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-users-locked-out-afte...
That's what technology has gotten us. Accounts get closed down due to automated systems. Something gets flagged as "fraud" and you lose access/money. Your previous business selling apps gets cancelled when your app is deregistered and removed.
At least, the recourse is "Complain on HN or Twitter". Worst case is you file a lawsuit against a multi-billion dollar company (hah!).
Now, what do you do to file a dispute against Ethereum or Bitcoin? Well, nobody. There is no clearinghouse and no masters - that's the selling point! But what about fraud or likewise? Too bad, so sad.
With the hawaladars, their word, ethics, and livelihood is on the line. You have a real human who can handle the squishy and nigh-unautmatable parts. And they can talk with the person trying to transfer money in case there is problems unforseen.
> Allegiance to the tribe means following the customs/social ordering/rules of the tribe.
Well, yes.
> For example, how well would a gay/non religious/etc person fare in tribes that don't believe in civil liberties?
But this seems like a veiled way to attack a way of moving money around solely because the name is Islamic. And hate crimes happen nearly everywhere. And there was the Kentucky county clerk who refused to sign marriage certificates because a couple was gay.... And unlike the hawaladars whom you can go to a different one, these people in the county had no such choice.
It's easy to set up a strawman that someone may not support your beliefs, but it's a false narrative to think that only those people do it.
>That's what technology has gotten us. Accounts get closed down due to automated systems. Something gets flagged as "fraud" and you lose access/money. Your previous business selling apps gets cancelled when your app is deregistered and removed.
Automated solutions do not preclude having human reviewers, and I do not think it's unreasonable for the government to step in and mandate quality (such as subjecting the automated solutions to a small claims court style jurisdiction).
>With the hawaladars, their word, ethics, and livelihood is on the line. You have a real human who can handle the squishy and nigh-unautmatable parts. And they can talk with the person trying to transfer money in case there is problems unforseen.
While there's plusses, there's also minuses. What happens when something goes wrong with a $100M+ transaction? What happens if your hawaladar or the other one burns you? There's 7B+ people in the world, eventually some organization to manage reputation will develop, maybe even by the hawaladars themselves, and you end up back where you started.
>But this seems like a veiled way to attack a way of moving money around solely because the name is Islamic.
I specifically wrote "etc" so I didn't have to specify each and every instance of discrimination, and my example of "gay" would certainly include the KY county clerk, so I don't see how you could claim I was attacking an Islamic concept because it's Islamic.
I'm not even attacking it, it's a perfectly valid way for transactions to work. In fact, my family has done it many, many times when they immigrated and they did it between various African countries, UK, USA, AUS, NZ. But that was during a time when transferring money was more costly and they didn't have another option. Now they might choose to use transferwise.
Automated solutions do not preclude having human reviewers, and I do not think it's unreasonable for the government to step in and mandate quality (such as subjecting the automated solutions to a small claims court style jurisdiction).
>With the hawaladars, their word, ethics, and livelihood is on the line. You have a real human who can handle the squishy and nigh-unautmatable parts. And they can talk with the person trying to transfer money in case there is problems unforseen.
While there's plusses, there's also minuses. What happens when something goes wrong with a $100M+ transaction? What happens if your hawaladar or the other one burns you? There's 7B+ people in the world, eventually some organization to manage reputation will develop, maybe even by the hawaladars themselves, and you end up back where you started.
>But this seems like a veiled way to attack a way of moving money around solely because the name is Islamic.
I specifically wrote "etc" so I didn't have to specify each and every instance of discrimination, and my example of "gay" would certainly include the KY county clerk, so I don't see how you could claim I was attacking an Islamic concept because it's Islamic.
I'm not even attacking it, it's a perfectly valid way for transactions to work. In fact, my family has done it many, many times when they immigrated and they did it between various African countries, UK, USA, AUS, NZ. But that was during a time when transferring money was more costly and they didn't have another option. Now they might choose to use transferwise.
Technology is itself a middleman in most cases. You still have to trust the technology itself and the person/persons who created it.
This statement about technology removing middlemen is not true it can be disproven with some handful of examples.
Cryptocurrencies can take the role of a settlement network between the money dealers. This allows money dealers who either don't fully trust each other, or simply need to settle debt internationally because the transaction flow is asymmetric, to make these transactions.
It also allows for a new kind of system where the money dealers act as access points to the network, and customers trust their local money dealer, but you don't need trust connections between the money dealers: If I want to send money to you from my remote village to yours, I ask you which money dealer you trust, go to my trusted money dealer, give him cash, and tell him that it is to go to your trusted money dealer.
The two money dealers don't have to trust each other for the transaction to work, and the transactions are much harder to disrupt than classic banking transactions.
It also allows for a new kind of system where the money dealers act as access points to the network, and customers trust their local money dealer, but you don't need trust connections between the money dealers: If I want to send money to you from my remote village to yours, I ask you which money dealer you trust, go to my trusted money dealer, give him cash, and tell him that it is to go to your trusted money dealer.
The two money dealers don't have to trust each other for the transaction to work, and the transactions are much harder to disrupt than classic banking transactions.
FX dealers I have dealt with definitely want to know who they are trading with. The information is extremely useful. It's not better for them not to know. If you lose trust in a counterparty, there is a reason.
Exchanges all over the world have membership comprised of people who voluntarily group together to create and enforce trust. Using a different denominator for transactions wont take away the forces that cause this state of affairs.
Exchanges all over the world have membership comprised of people who voluntarily group together to create and enforce trust. Using a different denominator for transactions wont take away the forces that cause this state of affairs.
How do you build initial trust though?
Kinda ...
Far more likely that money dealers held powerful positions, ensuring some very conservative social constructs stayed in place. People just routed around this by using "modern" technology.
And so the percentage of legitimate uses of the system dwindle, and the percentage of less legitimate increase till at some point you are no longer a useful social service but a money launderer for criminals who occasionally helps the diaspora send money home.
Far more likely that money dealers held powerful positions, ensuring some very conservative social constructs stayed in place. People just routed around this by using "modern" technology.
And so the percentage of legitimate uses of the system dwindle, and the percentage of less legitimate increase till at some point you are no longer a useful social service but a money launderer for criminals who occasionally helps the diaspora send money home.
Decentralisation is itself the killer app. If you live in the developed world all your life you’ll have a skewed view of this and not understand the true benefit here. As trust decays in the 1st world I sincerely hope you are open minded enough to change your
opinion.
Some more killer apps; - RENVM decentralized darkpools - Chainlink decentralized oracles - Deco by chainlink labs decentralized private information sharing - NFTs and NFT marketplaces. This one is going to be huge. - The entire defi space is pretty remarkable from Dexes to Bancor and Yearn to keeperdao
Respectfully comments like yours and others in this thread seem like people saying the internet wouldn’t take off in the 80s/90s. I don’t know how a technical audience like the one here doesn’t get it.
Sure there’s greed but that’s a feature of humans not crypto. We are most definitely in a bubble but the dot com bubble bore seeds which grew into trees that were mighty.
Some more killer apps; - RENVM decentralized darkpools - Chainlink decentralized oracles - Deco by chainlink labs decentralized private information sharing - NFTs and NFT marketplaces. This one is going to be huge. - The entire defi space is pretty remarkable from Dexes to Bancor and Yearn to keeperdao
Respectfully comments like yours and others in this thread seem like people saying the internet wouldn’t take off in the 80s/90s. I don’t know how a technical audience like the one here doesn’t get it.
Sure there’s greed but that’s a feature of humans not crypto. We are most definitely in a bubble but the dot com bubble bore seeds which grew into trees that were mighty.
Yep RenVM is a big deal. Iirc they had something called Cafe which demonstrated turning your bitcoins into a privacy coin, ZEC. I remember when REN was only 5 cents. Amazing how much it costs to run a darknode now! Truly a successful project.
Also another cool dApp is DyDx, margin trading platform
Also another cool dApp is DyDx, margin trading platform
The crypto killer app is using the money to buy illegal drugs. It always has been. Most of the people I knew who were into crypto early used it to buy weed online, not as an investment.
> The crypto killer app is using the money to buy illegal drugs.
Meeh! Not even that, anymore.
In Brazil there was a brief moment in 2014 when you could buy marijuana and cocaine with bitcoins. But now, with all this volatility, transfer costs and low liquidity, not even drug dealers want crypto currency.
Meeh! Not even that, anymore.
In Brazil there was a brief moment in 2014 when you could buy marijuana and cocaine with bitcoins. But now, with all this volatility, transfer costs and low liquidity, not even drug dealers want crypto currency.
Mining/Trading BTC over the counter since 2011.
I've never used a darknet market.
I read an article on slashdot in 2011 called "Bitcoin Mining for fun and profit" I bought a graphics card, it paid itself off in 21 days.
I bought 12 more graphics cards and sucked down 3kW for 24 months.
I do not regret this and every single person here that doesn't understand proof of work, doesn't understand a deflating asset with 8 (10 million) decimal places of trading precision against fiat currencies with only 2 decimal places...
Well I can't help people on the internet do math and make money, no one pays me to do that.
I've never used a darknet market.
I read an article on slashdot in 2011 called "Bitcoin Mining for fun and profit" I bought a graphics card, it paid itself off in 21 days.
I bought 12 more graphics cards and sucked down 3kW for 24 months.
I do not regret this and every single person here that doesn't understand proof of work, doesn't understand a deflating asset with 8 (10 million) decimal places of trading precision against fiat currencies with only 2 decimal places...
Well I can't help people on the internet do math and make money, no one pays me to do that.
I don't think one could claim mining bitcoin is the killer app of bitcoin. That's a reason why people would support bitcoin.
The killer app is the combination of economics, sociology, game theory and decentralized ledger blah blah blah
When you take one currency pair with 8 digits of precision that’s PROGRAMMED to deflate and trade that against an inflating currency with 2 digits of precision...
You’re going to need a whole lot of the inflating thing to buy the deflating thing, this is math.
Me personally, my electrical bills and the costs I’ve eaten has yielded tremendous value: for me. I mined, I was rewarded, I stimulated the economy.
Long before there was an economy.
When you take one currency pair with 8 digits of precision that’s PROGRAMMED to deflate and trade that against an inflating currency with 2 digits of precision...
You’re going to need a whole lot of the inflating thing to buy the deflating thing, this is math.
Me personally, my electrical bills and the costs I’ve eaten has yielded tremendous value: for me. I mined, I was rewarded, I stimulated the economy.
Long before there was an economy.
Don't forget ransomware payoffs
What about a voting system? That's the only application of a public, decentralized ledger that can kind of makes sense to me.
I'm from Switzerland, every few months we have a public voting for various changes to the federal or cantonal laws. I currently do not have a way to be certain that my vote is taken in account. With a public ledger I can check and be sure that my vote is correct.
I'm generally opposed to software voting because I have a complete distrust for such systems, but a public ledger (preferably not based on proof of work, so not ethereum) has interesting characteristics. And the price or inefficiency isn't an issue in this context.
Edit: people commenting seem to misunderstand the proposition. I'm perfectly aware of the privacy around voting and not advocating against it. It should be possible to have a system where your vote is registered publicly as a transaction between your wallet and a "referendum" wallet, in that case unless you have a way to link the public identity of a wallet to an identity (meaning people would somehow leak their public address somewhere) you do not have a way to know my vote. The only thing you could know is the number of total votes and their choice. You can of course generate a new wallet per voting as a way to not have a history.
Edit 2: the plausibility deniability is a fair point, I concede.
I'm generally opposed to software voting because I have a complete distrust for such systems, but a public ledger (preferably not based on proof of work, so not ethereum) has interesting characteristics. And the price or inefficiency isn't an issue in this context.
Edit: people commenting seem to misunderstand the proposition. I'm perfectly aware of the privacy around voting and not advocating against it. It should be possible to have a system where your vote is registered publicly as a transaction between your wallet and a "referendum" wallet, in that case unless you have a way to link the public identity of a wallet to an identity (meaning people would somehow leak their public address somewhere) you do not have a way to know my vote. The only thing you could know is the number of total votes and their choice. You can of course generate a new wallet per voting as a way to not have a history.
Edit 2: the plausibility deniability is a fair point, I concede.
> With a public ledger I can check and be sure that my vote is correct
Any voting system with a public ledger where you can later check your vote is a disaster for election integrity. It's probably surprising, and certainly counter-intuitive, but that's a vector for fraud.
That's why we have a long history of secret ballots. And no cameras in the voting booth.
From a comment a few weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25739051):
> you could look up your own vote and the votes of your friends to confirm
You can't do that because visibility causes voting fraud.
By coercion. If votes can be checked by other people, a very large number of people (enough to change the result) will be forced under threat by someone else to "vote correctly".
The same happens if you can check your own vote, because any mechanism that lets you do that can usually be used by someone else - "give me your phone so I can check you voted for X like I told you to" (while holding a gun).
That's why free & fair elections have secret ballots, without personal identification on the ballots. To prevent coercion fraud.
Any voting system with a public ledger where you can later check your vote is a disaster for election integrity. It's probably surprising, and certainly counter-intuitive, but that's a vector for fraud.
That's why we have a long history of secret ballots. And no cameras in the voting booth.
From a comment a few weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25739051):
> you could look up your own vote and the votes of your friends to confirm
You can't do that because visibility causes voting fraud.
By coercion. If votes can be checked by other people, a very large number of people (enough to change the result) will be forced under threat by someone else to "vote correctly".
The same happens if you can check your own vote, because any mechanism that lets you do that can usually be used by someone else - "give me your phone so I can check you voted for X like I told you to" (while holding a gun).
That's why free & fair elections have secret ballots, without personal identification on the ballots. To prevent coercion fraud.
First off, there have been many implementations of various forms of secret ballots on Ethereum using zero knowledge proofs. Mix and match your feature set of who can verify what and when, and there's a zero knowledge scheme that can do it.
Second, coercion has been rolled out as an excuse to disenfranchise voters for ages with no evidence that it's a real threat in the modern era. I live in Oregon, which has been doing mail in voting since the 70s. People argue all the time that mail in voting will lead to coercion, but it has literally never happened in Oregon.
Also, voter rolls are public information. I like collecting data, so I have voter rolls of most states, which often allows me to look up name, home address, phone number, and registered party of anyone who is registered to vote. A lot of states even have parts of voting history publicly available. It's super easy for any employer to figure out what party any employee is in, and exactly which candidates that they've donated money to, etc, yet coercion still isn't a thing.
If you look at the pure economics of coercion, it's pretty obvious why it isn't a thing. It just doesn't scale. Every person that gets added under a coercion scheme make it that much more likely that the person running the scheme is going to go to jail for the rest of their life. No one cares so much about politics that they're going to throw their life away for the potential of changing 5 or so votes.
Second, coercion has been rolled out as an excuse to disenfranchise voters for ages with no evidence that it's a real threat in the modern era. I live in Oregon, which has been doing mail in voting since the 70s. People argue all the time that mail in voting will lead to coercion, but it has literally never happened in Oregon.
Also, voter rolls are public information. I like collecting data, so I have voter rolls of most states, which often allows me to look up name, home address, phone number, and registered party of anyone who is registered to vote. A lot of states even have parts of voting history publicly available. It's super easy for any employer to figure out what party any employee is in, and exactly which candidates that they've donated money to, etc, yet coercion still isn't a thing.
If you look at the pure economics of coercion, it's pretty obvious why it isn't a thing. It just doesn't scale. Every person that gets added under a coercion scheme make it that much more likely that the person running the scheme is going to go to jail for the rest of their life. No one cares so much about politics that they're going to throw their life away for the potential of changing 5 or so votes.
> First off, there have been many implementations of various forms of secret ballots on Ethereum using zero knowledge proofs. Mix and match your feature set of who can verify what and when, and there's a zero knowledge scheme that can do it.
Yes, no problem with that. But the GP was arguing that it's better if ballots are not secret. I think it's a common misconception that if only all votes were open they would be more democratic.
At a small scale, I've directly witnessed people who decided not to vote on issues where their vote could be figured out by others, saying they didn't want social consequences of being seen to disagree. I've also known people afraid to vote with their conscience due to reprisals, and I do mean afraid.
> Second, coercion has been rolled out as an excuse to disenfranchise voters for ages with no evidence that it's a real threat in the modern era.
Good point. For the record, I'm pro mail-in voting too, especially during a pandemic. I'm not impressed by those who sought to disenfranchise votes in the USA this time around by arguing that mail-in votes should not be counted after they have been cast in good faith.
The mechanisms we use to protect vote integrity are meant to be a "best we can do" while still allowing people a reasonable way to actually vote. As soon as people are prevented from voting in the name of "integrity", that's not democracy any more.
Mail-in voting fraud has been found to a notable amount in the UK, though not enough to swing a result. But it did not come from individual homes. It's important to have mechanisms in place to look for it, if only to evaluate that it's not happening to a significant degree. Monitoring mail-in vote integrity should be on the look out for where ballots are posted from, and whether there are collisions with multiple votes from the same persons. If 10,000 votes are detected postmarked from the same employer warehouse with the same handwriting, that's time to be suspicious. When it's from 10,000 individual homes, each marked in a different style, you can be much more confident nobody has the capacity to go around every household to make that happen.
However, back to the technical suggestion of a public verifiable vote. If 10,000 people vote privately and then someone they have a commercial relationship with asks for proof they voted a particular way before they get a discount or whatever, that swings it from "nobody can visit every household" back to "systematic pressure is realistic", and it's not democracy any more.
> It's super easy for any employer to figure out what party any employee is in, and exactly which candidates that they've donated money to, etc, yet coercion still isn't a thing.
If people choose to announce their party affiliation, that's something else. Nothing stops people choosing to broadcast how they voted either. That's fine.
However in both cases, people are free to vote differently in secret than whatever they are broadcasting or socially going along with.
Polling data suggests there are plenty of people who are reluctant to truthfully say how they vote, even when told the polling is confidential. I'm sure there are people who leave it implied among their social groups that they lean one way, when in private they actually vote another way.
Yes, no problem with that. But the GP was arguing that it's better if ballots are not secret. I think it's a common misconception that if only all votes were open they would be more democratic.
At a small scale, I've directly witnessed people who decided not to vote on issues where their vote could be figured out by others, saying they didn't want social consequences of being seen to disagree. I've also known people afraid to vote with their conscience due to reprisals, and I do mean afraid.
> Second, coercion has been rolled out as an excuse to disenfranchise voters for ages with no evidence that it's a real threat in the modern era.
Good point. For the record, I'm pro mail-in voting too, especially during a pandemic. I'm not impressed by those who sought to disenfranchise votes in the USA this time around by arguing that mail-in votes should not be counted after they have been cast in good faith.
The mechanisms we use to protect vote integrity are meant to be a "best we can do" while still allowing people a reasonable way to actually vote. As soon as people are prevented from voting in the name of "integrity", that's not democracy any more.
Mail-in voting fraud has been found to a notable amount in the UK, though not enough to swing a result. But it did not come from individual homes. It's important to have mechanisms in place to look for it, if only to evaluate that it's not happening to a significant degree. Monitoring mail-in vote integrity should be on the look out for where ballots are posted from, and whether there are collisions with multiple votes from the same persons. If 10,000 votes are detected postmarked from the same employer warehouse with the same handwriting, that's time to be suspicious. When it's from 10,000 individual homes, each marked in a different style, you can be much more confident nobody has the capacity to go around every household to make that happen.
However, back to the technical suggestion of a public verifiable vote. If 10,000 people vote privately and then someone they have a commercial relationship with asks for proof they voted a particular way before they get a discount or whatever, that swings it from "nobody can visit every household" back to "systematic pressure is realistic", and it's not democracy any more.
> It's super easy for any employer to figure out what party any employee is in, and exactly which candidates that they've donated money to, etc, yet coercion still isn't a thing.
If people choose to announce their party affiliation, that's something else. Nothing stops people choosing to broadcast how they voted either. That's fine.
However in both cases, people are free to vote differently in secret than whatever they are broadcasting or socially going along with.
Polling data suggests there are plenty of people who are reluctant to truthfully say how they vote, even when told the polling is confidential. I'm sure there are people who leave it implied among their social groups that they lean one way, when in private they actually vote another way.
I'm a Judge of Elections in Pennsylvania, USA.
You write: > If people choose to announce their party affiliation, that's something else.
In PA (as in most states) one's party affiliation is public by law. In PA it's important because one can only vote in the primary for the party one is registered as a member of. (Voters who do not register an affiliation or are affiliated with a third party simply aren't allowed to vote during the primary.) So it's not really a case of "choosing" to announce their affiliation.
Also, I know multiple individuals in my neighborhood who have confided in me that they registered as members of one party but preferred to vote for the other party. Why? Because (at least historically) our county has a long history of being run by a single party and (to quote my neighbor), "If you are a member of the wrong party your trash won't get picked up."
The secret ballot really DOES prevent certain abuses.
You write: > If people choose to announce their party affiliation, that's something else.
In PA (as in most states) one's party affiliation is public by law. In PA it's important because one can only vote in the primary for the party one is registered as a member of. (Voters who do not register an affiliation or are affiliated with a third party simply aren't allowed to vote during the primary.) So it's not really a case of "choosing" to announce their affiliation.
Also, I know multiple individuals in my neighborhood who have confided in me that they registered as members of one party but preferred to vote for the other party. Why? Because (at least historically) our county has a long history of being run by a single party and (to quote my neighbor), "If you are a member of the wrong party your trash won't get picked up."
The secret ballot really DOES prevent certain abuses.
I must admit, the notion of being "in" a party in a way an employer can easily check, or party affiliation that is legally registered, is outside my experience. By affiliation I meant only the party a person tells other people they support, in a non-binding social sense. I'm not in the USA.
I agree, where affiliation with a party has greater meaning and consequences, and is practically required for access to ordinary local services, the secret ballot is even more important.
That neighbourhood is a great example.
I'm disappointed, really, that in 21st century USA those people are still disenfranchised by local politics from voting in the primary of the party they actually support. But presumably there are good reasons for legal registration.
I agree, where affiliation with a party has greater meaning and consequences, and is practically required for access to ordinary local services, the secret ballot is even more important.
That neighbourhood is a great example.
I'm disappointed, really, that in 21st century USA those people are still disenfranchised by local politics from voting in the primary of the party they actually support. But presumably there are good reasons for legal registration.
To be fair, even if you register for the opposing party, helping to choose the opponent is still useful. I've considered such plays before.
> And no cameras in the voting booth.
Even with cameras in the voting booth, voters still have plausible deniability because they can spoil their marked ballot (that they may have photographed) and request a fresh blank one.
In-person paper voting is pretty much the best voting method we have in terms of privacy, usability, scrutability, and reliability.
Even with cameras in the voting booth, voters still have plausible deniability because they can spoil their marked ballot (that they may have photographed) and request a fresh blank one.
In-person paper voting is pretty much the best voting method we have in terms of privacy, usability, scrutability, and reliability.
Isn't that already a risk though? I vote remotely by mail, you could coerce me to vote for something specific and even send the mail yourself if you want to be sure.
There is a difference between active coercion (someone goes to your house and forces you with a gun to vote their way) and passive coercion (if you vote for X in 20 years time your vote might be considered inappropriate and you will be fired from your job).
What about if in 20 years your social media comment was considered inappropriate? For this example let's say it was in a "private" forum but political in nature, would that also be an act of passive coercion to silence a political viewpoint?
Eg: We need to make a list of all his enablers before they delete their posts...
Eg: We need to make a list of all his enablers before they delete their posts...
Isn't this more about whom I trust less, the politicians or a third party (that might as well be the politicians)?
If so, why is it in the state's power to decree that we have to trust the politicians but not the 3rd parties?
If so, why is it in the state's power to decree that we have to trust the politicians but not the 3rd parties?
No it is isn't. Secret ballots aren't about whether you trust those administering the election, although that's a factor.
They are to let you vote as you privately decide with safety from everyone who has an interest in the vote, whether that's third parties, your boss, insurance company, local mafia, etc., or the state.
The state's role, in a democracy, is to ensure state-level elections take place with the various ingredients that ensure it has high integrity. That requires a lot of things; a lot of resources, making sure everyone knows about it, making it clear the result will be respected by the state itself, acting as a coordination point with some kind of authority so that people will tend to respect that an election actually took place.
If you have a third party available who can do that, by all means go for it, but generally you don't have one, and if you did you would start calling it the state.
However, in a democracy the electoral process should be administered as separately as possible from the politicians of the day. Politicians of the day should not be getting much involved, other than to ensure it takes place with all the usual resources.
Note that "the state" and "the politicians" are not the same thing in a democracy. The state consists of multiple institutions, many of which do not particularly trust politicians either.
The people most directly involved in actually running it should demonstrate a commitment to the integrity of the election itself foremost, ahead of their personal political views. On the principle that democracy itself is more valuable than winning any particular election, while still being drawn fairly from a range of people. But they should be observed (without interference) at multiple levels by representatives of different political groups.
Making a combination of people, systems and motivations to achieve integrity is the art of institution building (and maintenance), an electoral commission or something like that. Its independence from politicians of the day is one of its key features.
Regardless of who runs it and who you trust, you still need secret ballots to ensure integrity of the result.
They are to let you vote as you privately decide with safety from everyone who has an interest in the vote, whether that's third parties, your boss, insurance company, local mafia, etc., or the state.
The state's role, in a democracy, is to ensure state-level elections take place with the various ingredients that ensure it has high integrity. That requires a lot of things; a lot of resources, making sure everyone knows about it, making it clear the result will be respected by the state itself, acting as a coordination point with some kind of authority so that people will tend to respect that an election actually took place.
If you have a third party available who can do that, by all means go for it, but generally you don't have one, and if you did you would start calling it the state.
However, in a democracy the electoral process should be administered as separately as possible from the politicians of the day. Politicians of the day should not be getting much involved, other than to ensure it takes place with all the usual resources.
Note that "the state" and "the politicians" are not the same thing in a democracy. The state consists of multiple institutions, many of which do not particularly trust politicians either.
The people most directly involved in actually running it should demonstrate a commitment to the integrity of the election itself foremost, ahead of their personal political views. On the principle that democracy itself is more valuable than winning any particular election, while still being drawn fairly from a range of people. But they should be observed (without interference) at multiple levels by representatives of different political groups.
Making a combination of people, systems and motivations to achieve integrity is the art of institution building (and maintenance), an electoral commission or something like that. Its independence from politicians of the day is one of its key features.
Regardless of who runs it and who you trust, you still need secret ballots to ensure integrity of the result.
The main problem as I see it is that such a system would be completely inaccessible to anyone who is not a software developer.
With a paper-based system, all you need to understand is that your paper goes into a box and someone counts it later on. Everyone understands every step, including the steps required to secure that box. But once you require people to understand blockchain you are putting the intregrity of the election in the hands of a privileged elite.
With a paper-based system, all you need to understand is that your paper goes into a box and someone counts it later on. Everyone understands every step, including the steps required to secure that box. But once you require people to understand blockchain you are putting the intregrity of the election in the hands of a privileged elite.
It's sad so many technically-minded people fail to account for this when it comes to trust, especially in the context of voting. You can't get people to trust a system by cloaking it in cryptographic black magic. It has to be scrutable to the people participating in it, especially the voters and volunteer poll workers who most closely interact with it.
> But once you require people to understand blockchain you are putting the integrity of the election in the hands of a privileged elite.
I would say, even worse, we would have to require people to TRUST a system that uses blockchain in addition to understanding it. The fact that in some thin layer of a gigantic inscrutable system there's a mathematically irrefutable "truth" does NOT make people feel better about it.
Trust is NOT a mathematical concept.
In any case for blockchain to ever take off in common usage, it's going to have to overcome its association with scammy cryptocurrency schemes. That's going to be a while!
I would say, even worse, we would have to require people to TRUST a system that uses blockchain in addition to understanding it. The fact that in some thin layer of a gigantic inscrutable system there's a mathematically irrefutable "truth" does NOT make people feel better about it.
Trust is NOT a mathematical concept.
In any case for blockchain to ever take off in common usage, it's going to have to overcome its association with scammy cryptocurrency schemes. That's going to be a while!
I don't understand that system. I drop off a sealed ballot in a ballot box and then that's it. I just have to trust that the system works. I have to way to prove that my vote was counted. I have no way to count the votes for. I don't understand the process behind how my votes get counted and it would be fine if people didn't understand how blockchains work.
If you want to understand how your local elections work, just go volunteer when they ask for volunteers.
Yes, that's a very good point and another reason I personally advocate for paper ballots. But you can also see it the other way: anyone can learn how to check their entry in the ledger, that takes time but it's not some rocket science. That can be democratized in a way paper ballot cannot be as it requires a huge amount of people and has an important cost for the community.
> I currently do not have a way to be certain that my vote is taken in account.
That is something we do a lot of R&D on @Electis, along with the fine fellows from InfernoRed, Microsoft and others. Because the value of an election is the thrust that voters have in it!
It is part of what the homomorphic encryption protocol we use (electionguard) aims at solving. Your ballot is encrypted with a joint public key, and all the "artifacts" of the election are published after it closes. You can verify that your encrypted ballot is present in the artifacts, and that the whole artifacts archive verifies mathematically.
https://www.electionguard.vote/ https://electionguard-python.readthedocs.io/ https://www.electis.io/ https://electeez.com/
That is something we do a lot of R&D on @Electis, along with the fine fellows from InfernoRed, Microsoft and others. Because the value of an election is the thrust that voters have in it!
It is part of what the homomorphic encryption protocol we use (electionguard) aims at solving. Your ballot is encrypted with a joint public key, and all the "artifacts" of the election are published after it closes. You can verify that your encrypted ballot is present in the artifacts, and that the whole artifacts archive verifies mathematically.
https://www.electionguard.vote/ https://electionguard-python.readthedocs.io/ https://www.electis.io/ https://electeez.com/
That's great, thanks for sharing. That could be its own HN submission!
This may surprise you, but most voting systems make verification hard deliberately. If you can check your vote at home, others can verify your vote as well, which means you've lost the advantages of a secret ballot.
You can only know my vote if you have a way to associate an address with an identity. Unless that's the case, you may be able to check the set of votes, but that's it.
> You can only know my vote if you have a way to associate an address with an identity.
A secret ballot makes it impossible to verify votes even with collusion between the voter and interested party. That makes vote-purchasing infeasible, since I could take money to vote for you and still defect at the secret ballot box.
A cryptographically-secure secret ballot in this threat model would need to provide the voter with a valid zero-knowledge proof for their actual vote and an imposter zero-knowledge proof for their alternative vote. Something like "if I input A into the system, then it counted vote X; if I input B then it counted vote Y," with A/B remaining private to the voter.
A secret ballot makes it impossible to verify votes even with collusion between the voter and interested party. That makes vote-purchasing infeasible, since I could take money to vote for you and still defect at the secret ballot box.
A cryptographically-secure secret ballot in this threat model would need to provide the voter with a valid zero-knowledge proof for their actual vote and an imposter zero-knowledge proof for their alternative vote. Something like "if I input A into the system, then it counted vote X; if I input B then it counted vote Y," with A/B remaining private to the voter.
Whoever forces you to vote a certain way can force you to reveal your address too.
Fair point
Maybe I'm missing something, but I think the original point is that blockchain will help the voting process by providing the transparency and verification in the process. And part of that is everyone being able to see that yes the winner won because we can see every vote and clearly see who won.
However, that doesn't help unless you know that every vote was a legitimate and eligible vote. How do you know the votes are legitimate and eligible if the address is anonymous? You need some system to either publicly identify each address or you need a central authority saying which addresses are allowed to vote.
The latter goes right back to the situation we are in today and the blockchain becomes no more useful than a centralized database, because we are still reliant on the centralized authority to tell us how many valid votes mattered.
However, that doesn't help unless you know that every vote was a legitimate and eligible vote. How do you know the votes are legitimate and eligible if the address is anonymous? You need some system to either publicly identify each address or you need a central authority saying which addresses are allowed to vote.
The latter goes right back to the situation we are in today and the blockchain becomes no more useful than a centralized database, because we are still reliant on the centralized authority to tell us how many valid votes mattered.
You have a list of citizens, their personal information are stored in your country databases. They have a unique key pair assigned at some point during their life (let's call it Citizen Key, may be paired to a Citizen ID or something like this).
There is a new voting event, each citizen can now create a voting wallet using their Citizen Key then vote on the various motions by sending a transaction to a destination wallet created for this event.
At the end of the voting event, the votes are counted and no transaction can be send to the destination wallet.
You do have a central authority, it's the country (or state). Only citizens can vote, and only citizens have a valid set of keys.
The benefits is that anyone voting or people who want to verify the voting numbers can do, and without having to trust the software managing the database (I mean, you of course have to trust the blockchain itself...).
There is a new voting event, each citizen can now create a voting wallet using their Citizen Key then vote on the various motions by sending a transaction to a destination wallet created for this event.
At the end of the voting event, the votes are counted and no transaction can be send to the destination wallet.
You do have a central authority, it's the country (or state). Only citizens can vote, and only citizens have a valid set of keys.
The benefits is that anyone voting or people who want to verify the voting numbers can do, and without having to trust the software managing the database (I mean, you of course have to trust the blockchain itself...).
I'm against doing electronic voting and tracking [0]. Others have commented on the tracking/anonymous issues, so I'll leave that.
Make the whole system as hard as possible to manipulate by involving a lot of people who distrust the person they're working with.
There is a tiny chance your personal vote will get lost in all the paper handling, but you can be assured that the system is a lot harder to manipulate simply because of the sheer number of people involved.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
Make the whole system as hard as possible to manipulate by involving a lot of people who distrust the person they're working with.
There is a tiny chance your personal vote will get lost in all the paper handling, but you can be assured that the system is a lot harder to manipulate simply because of the sheer number of people involved.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
What about government spending? All the way from taking taxes to paying vendors. Including the spending of all politicians.
(Minus a reasonable “dark fund” for military and whatnot simply because it can be important to hide your cards from other countries)
If citizens can see exactly where their dollars go it could make corruption very difficult and lead citizens to be far more engaged in their democracies.
If citizens can see exactly where their dollars go it could make corruption very difficult and lead citizens to be far more engaged in their democracies.
You can see where your tax dollars go now (except for the classified items, but even there you can see the totals). You can get detailed breakdowns of nearly everything, including salaries. For example, you can see every NYC employee salary here https://www.seethroughny.net/payrolls. If you want, you can scroll through the massive list of federal, state, local gov contracts on a variety of websites today. For example, Florida state gov contracts https://www.dms.myflorida.com/contract_search
But the fact is, (almost) no one really cares. Many people want to believe they would care, but they don't really. Either way, knowing what's being spent where only makes corruption marginally more difficult. It certainly doesn't lead citizens to be any more engaged. We know this because what you want is already here and it has solved precisely nothing (IMO).
But the fact is, (almost) no one really cares. Many people want to believe they would care, but they don't really. Either way, knowing what's being spent where only makes corruption marginally more difficult. It certainly doesn't lead citizens to be any more engaged. We know this because what you want is already here and it has solved precisely nothing (IMO).
Very solid points.
I personally think the engagement part would come instead from "My $5000 in tax went through the system and was eventually spent on a federal initiative I don't agree with" (or since it's all granular: "only $13 of that $5000 went to anything that benefits my community?"). No, I'm not saying that everyone will care, but I think that more people will care.
I personally think the engagement part would come instead from "My $5000 in tax went through the system and was eventually spent on a federal initiative I don't agree with" (or since it's all granular: "only $13 of that $5000 went to anything that benefits my community?"). No, I'm not saying that everyone will care, but I think that more people will care.
I live in Florida, so they only non-federal tax I pay is property tax. (Excluding sales taxes, of course.) Every year, I get a full breakdown of exactly what mils go where with the bill. I bet we would have something similar at the federal level by now, except that stupidly we have to do the whole "guess the number I'm think of" game with the IRS instead of them sending a bill.
We could do that without bitcoin. Lot of things we can do, like make democracy more direct by allowing people to vote on issues from an app on their phone. The technology is there.
The difficulty with that is getting trusted information published, not storing it in a secured manner.
If citizens paid in COUNTRYCOIN (publicly-visible blockchain-based currency), all spending was done in COUNTRYCOIN, and all government loans (in or out) were in COUNTRYCOIN, then trusted information would be integral to the whole system.
Yes a contractor could still charge $10k for a hammer, but citizens would uncover that almost immediately.
Yes a contractor could still charge $10k for a hammer, but citizens would uncover that almost immediately.
That destroys plausible deniability, no? How would that system work?
A public ledger can be achieved without a blockchain right? My understanding is that a ledger can guarantee that your vote was counted, but it can't guarantee that all the other votes are legitimate.
That may be the case. My point was to say that there is at least one potential application for a blockchain. But I'm sure that's not the best way to approach the problem, just a potential solution I could think of.
>Face it, there is no sexy killer app for the masses.
It's not only the volatility but also the inefficiency which is the price that has to be paid for the decentralization. I really have trouble coming up with an app where the constant fees that have to be paid for actions are justified compared to a centralized solution.
It's not only the volatility but also the inefficiency which is the price that has to be paid for the decentralization. I really have trouble coming up with an app where the constant fees that have to be paid for actions are justified compared to a centralized solution.
> where the constant fees that have to be paid for actions
I agree, this has to change. I see Ethereum fees as the early days of the internet when we paid for every freaking minute! Today you can have high-speed internet with no bandwidth limit with a fixed monthly fee. The only limit is maximum download/upload speed and that's probably the key question: What is "maximum speed" for Ethereum? Instead of paying for every action, we would pay fixed daily/weekly/monthly fee, but it would be limited by that "maximum speed".
I agree, this has to change. I see Ethereum fees as the early days of the internet when we paid for every freaking minute! Today you can have high-speed internet with no bandwidth limit with a fixed monthly fee. The only limit is maximum download/upload speed and that's probably the key question: What is "maximum speed" for Ethereum? Instead of paying for every action, we would pay fixed daily/weekly/monthly fee, but it would be limited by that "maximum speed".
Decentralized uncensorable currency exchange is a real use case that is live today. Billions in real value change hands on DEXes run on ETH every day.
Great way to put it. Yes I got excited for crypto when it came out but long ago realised there's nothing emancipatory about it.
You'll be back. The fundamentals are strong and the technology is genuinely interesting, and real world use cases like Sia's Skynet are starting to finally hit stride.
The get rich quick crowd overwhelmed everything else but didn't suffocate it, just merely put it way in the background.
The get rich quick crowd overwhelmed everything else but didn't suffocate it, just merely put it way in the background.
> You'll be back. The fundamentals are strong and the technology is genuinely interesting, and real world use cases like Sia's Skynet are starting to finally hit stride.
Skynet feels more like the next step in P2P solutions like BitTorrent, than what most people think of when talking about blockchain solutions. It kind of also confirms that the only real use-cases of decentralized trustless solutions are relatively trivial problems like those involving purely digital assets (files, domains, etc)
I don't think anyone will claim that the technology isn't interesting. I think it's super interesting. But I think there's way too much hype, especially on the financial side (currencies, DeFi, etc)
Skynet feels more like the next step in P2P solutions like BitTorrent, than what most people think of when talking about blockchain solutions. It kind of also confirms that the only real use-cases of decentralized trustless solutions are relatively trivial problems like those involving purely digital assets (files, domains, etc)
I don't think anyone will claim that the technology isn't interesting. I think it's super interesting. But I think there's way too much hype, especially on the financial side (currencies, DeFi, etc)
You're missing the point, which was "there's nothing for the masses". Interesting technology is not a selling point for the masses. Strong fundamentals are not a selling point for the masses. Whether there's a get rich quick crowd around crypto (or not) is not a selling point for the masses.
The haber process feeds 4 billion people, and most don't know it exists. Not everything needs to be sold and popularised to the masses.
Again, that's not the point. The point isn't that something has to be for the masses but that there's nothing in crypto that's appealing for the masses. ASN.1 is used by everyone but that doesn't mean it's appealing to the masses.
What about browser-based payments? Fast forward 2 years, and assume Ethereum has implemented POS/sharding, and zkRollups have been adapted to fully utilize the data this makes available to them.
In this scenario, the world can execute 100-200,000 transactions per second on Ethereum, and people are able to execute these transactions from any software interface, including a browser wallet extension.
This would make electronic payments cheap - on order of costing $0.01 in fees - and you would be able to send a payment in a stablecoin, like USDC or DAI which track the value of 1 USD.
In this scenario, you could send micro-payments to any party on the internet, without having a pre-existing relationship with or divulging personal information to them, and without both parties relying on the same trusted third party payment system.
Imagine thousands of news sites all around the world offering short-term browsing access, like a 1 day browsing pass for $0.05, and all of these offerings being accessible with just one browser-based wallet.
This can become even more amenable to metered payments when combined with other scalability solutions, like Plasma chains and payment channel networks.
In such scenarios, fees would decline orders magnitude of more, making it possible to send fractions of a cent in value for consuming tiny amounts of goods/services. For instance, you pay 0.25 cents worth of a crypto asset to access one paywalled article. This can be done behind the scenes, with you simply pressing 'okay' on a consent form. No registration, or the divulging of private identification information or credit card details necessary. A single peer-to-peer transfer of electronic cash suffices.
Suddenly content providers have a massive new source of revenue apart from advertising that can sustain them, leading to the production of more quality content, and information consumers can avail themselves of this content with much greater convenience and privacy, and without the financial risk of laying our $20 for a subscription they may not use.
In this scenario, the world can execute 100-200,000 transactions per second on Ethereum, and people are able to execute these transactions from any software interface, including a browser wallet extension.
This would make electronic payments cheap - on order of costing $0.01 in fees - and you would be able to send a payment in a stablecoin, like USDC or DAI which track the value of 1 USD.
In this scenario, you could send micro-payments to any party on the internet, without having a pre-existing relationship with or divulging personal information to them, and without both parties relying on the same trusted third party payment system.
Imagine thousands of news sites all around the world offering short-term browsing access, like a 1 day browsing pass for $0.05, and all of these offerings being accessible with just one browser-based wallet.
This can become even more amenable to metered payments when combined with other scalability solutions, like Plasma chains and payment channel networks.
In such scenarios, fees would decline orders magnitude of more, making it possible to send fractions of a cent in value for consuming tiny amounts of goods/services. For instance, you pay 0.25 cents worth of a crypto asset to access one paywalled article. This can be done behind the scenes, with you simply pressing 'okay' on a consent form. No registration, or the divulging of private identification information or credit card details necessary. A single peer-to-peer transfer of electronic cash suffices.
Suddenly content providers have a massive new source of revenue apart from advertising that can sustain them, leading to the production of more quality content, and information consumers can avail themselves of this content with much greater convenience and privacy, and without the financial risk of laying our $20 for a subscription they may not use.
The people who got the initial bitcoin and held onto it still have the majority of it. I don't see that changing. It's not healthy for the monetary system having most people try to just get rich by holding onto the currency.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but this isn't the first time. The people who made the first money held onto that, and then used it to control their environment and make more money. When the British queen invested in that first wooden ship to bring back riches, she made a ton of money. Then she started the East India Company. I don't see those first BTC holders as worse?
The East India company which ruined Bengal, enriched a few English elite. Yeah sounds about right.
The inherent tension in the crypto space is that for early adopters crypto is the best thing imaginable: figuratively winning enormous sums with little to no effort. For anyone else, it is not only a generator of envy and bitterness but a burden on energy production, GPUs and whatnot.
The ideological aspect of crypto as a defense against the big bad system is dead in the water since early adopters are so massively powerful within the hypothetical new system, and nobody really wants to use it as a currency as opposed to a pyramid scheme.
The ideological aspect of crypto as a defense against the big bad system is dead in the water since early adopters are so massively powerful within the hypothetical new system, and nobody really wants to use it as a currency as opposed to a pyramid scheme.
That "for some reason" is that's obvious abd straight forward to anyone being honest and not trying to push propaganda is that Bitcoin, and other blockchains structures like it, are MLM schemes - and that it's decentralized and on a global scale is why it's been able to pick up so much energy - aligning people and industrial complexes globally to bring it mainstream.
Design a blockchain system where it's agreed upon consensus and use/adoption is voluntary through democratically elected processes (save regulatory capture), and we'll have a good system that's not unnecessarily and unreasonably transferring wealth from later adopters to earlier adopters. You won't be able to make a fortune on it by buying it and pumping it to make its value goes up, nor will you be able to make money selling shovels to desperate or greedy or gullible people once they catch wind of the "gold rush."
The one major benefit of all if this craziness is that the flood of money into blockchains has meant technology development and many more engineers with experience; whether there are engineers who'd work on non-Pyramid/MLM-Ponzi scheme blockchains though, if they're financially incentivized/aligned with Bitcoin et al, that's TBD.
Design a blockchain system where it's agreed upon consensus and use/adoption is voluntary through democratically elected processes (save regulatory capture), and we'll have a good system that's not unnecessarily and unreasonably transferring wealth from later adopters to earlier adopters. You won't be able to make a fortune on it by buying it and pumping it to make its value goes up, nor will you be able to make money selling shovels to desperate or greedy or gullible people once they catch wind of the "gold rush."
The one major benefit of all if this craziness is that the flood of money into blockchains has meant technology development and many more engineers with experience; whether there are engineers who'd work on non-Pyramid/MLM-Ponzi scheme blockchains though, if they're financially incentivized/aligned with Bitcoin et al, that's TBD.
Can you point to a legitimate problem that “blockchain” can solve, which can’t be solved with existing tools?
I think every smart person working on any kind of blockchain-related tech is seriously wasting their talent and life.
I think every smart person working on any kind of blockchain-related tech is seriously wasting their talent and life.
There may be existing tools that are foolproof that can provide an immutable ledger, I'm unsure if that's fully possible otherwise, however having all transactions and changes to said system being public would prevent things like nations printing money without reporting it accurately - helping to make sure everyone's playing a fair game; using such a ledger would have to be voluntary, with nations who are aligned with similar values.
Edit to add: This may in fact be the only important use case for blockchain, where nations under different groups of democratic-based control, agree to use the same blockchain - so they can all know no one else is cheating the system. The transparency could allow public, peer analysis of transactions as well - and who knows what insights or protections-security could come from having that crowdsourced witnessing occurring; perhaps distributing the mining amongst the citizens of each nation as well, if deemed necessary as a safeguard.
Serendipitously, this was just posted to HN: "Data Immutability, Verifiability and Integrity Without the Blockchain Overhead" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26221324
Edit to add: This may in fact be the only important use case for blockchain, where nations under different groups of democratic-based control, agree to use the same blockchain - so they can all know no one else is cheating the system. The transparency could allow public, peer analysis of transactions as well - and who knows what insights or protections-security could come from having that crowdsourced witnessing occurring; perhaps distributing the mining amongst the citizens of each nation as well, if deemed necessary as a safeguard.
Serendipitously, this was just posted to HN: "Data Immutability, Verifiability and Integrity Without the Blockchain Overhead" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26221324
You are trying to solve a problem that is a feature. Printing money is a feature to keep our societies afloat during dark times.
It is one of the tools to keep a currency stable.
Not to say that there aren't serious problems in the fin-tech world, but immutable ledgers and rigid currencies aren't going to solve those.
The key problem - and your post is yet another example - is that you can't replace trust with an immutable ledger.
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g...
The real problem - in my view - is that people don't understand the foundations of a society anymore, how to live together.
It is one of the tools to keep a currency stable.
Not to say that there aren't serious problems in the fin-tech world, but immutable ledgers and rigid currencies aren't going to solve those.
The key problem - and your post is yet another example - is that you can't replace trust with an immutable ledger.
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g...
The real problem - in my view - is that people don't understand the foundations of a society anymore, how to live together.
You're misunderstanding what I'm saying.
"... is that you can't replace trust with an immutable ledger."
"The real problem - in my view - is that people don't understand the foundations of a society anymore, how to live together."
I agree with you 100%. Also, I never said we should prevent printing money with blockchain - the purpose and value is so that if a nation does print money, they're open and honest about it. It would be their own democratic decision to do so, likewise in the blockchain system I envision - it would be that same democratic process, decision making, that they would want to join such a managed system that other trusted-democratic nations are part of - where they believe in the transparency of it all.
And I never even alluded to replacing trust with an immutable ledger, just that an immutable ledger becomes a witness that each nation would decide to be witnessed by by their peers.
All of my projects are health-wellness focused, in part to help people develop their self-awareness, to gain and maintain their health, and in part that is healing through community - building real community.
"... is that you can't replace trust with an immutable ledger."
"The real problem - in my view - is that people don't understand the foundations of a society anymore, how to live together."
I agree with you 100%. Also, I never said we should prevent printing money with blockchain - the purpose and value is so that if a nation does print money, they're open and honest about it. It would be their own democratic decision to do so, likewise in the blockchain system I envision - it would be that same democratic process, decision making, that they would want to join such a managed system that other trusted-democratic nations are part of - where they believe in the transparency of it all.
And I never even alluded to replacing trust with an immutable ledger, just that an immutable ledger becomes a witness that each nation would decide to be witnessed by by their peers.
All of my projects are health-wellness focused, in part to help people develop their self-awareness, to gain and maintain their health, and in part that is healing through community - building real community.
> Can you point to a legitimate problem that “blockchain” can solve, which can’t be solved with existing tools?
I will never understand this. The vast majority of problems have more than one solution, most of the time is just about solving something in a (much) better way.
If the bar for something to exist is "solve a problem that can't be solved with existing tools" then 99% of startups wouldn't exist.
I will never understand this. The vast majority of problems have more than one solution, most of the time is just about solving something in a (much) better way.
If the bar for something to exist is "solve a problem that can't be solved with existing tools" then 99% of startups wouldn't exist.
I think you misinterpret my statement.
Just as you have just a finite set of notes on a piano, you can create infinite music.
And even if IT has a finite set of regular tools like SQL databases, programming languages and protocols, it's the thing you create with that, what counts.
Blockchain is a tool that does nothing better than existing tools.
Blockchain is a solution to a problem nobody has.
Just as you have just a finite set of notes on a piano, you can create infinite music.
And even if IT has a finite set of regular tools like SQL databases, programming languages and protocols, it's the thing you create with that, what counts.
Blockchain is a tool that does nothing better than existing tools.
Blockchain is a solution to a problem nobody has.
I don't know if you'd count it as a blockchain solution but I constantly use crypto to send money to my family and it's the best solution that I've found.
And yes, I now about transferwise, paypal, swift, etc. And using crypto is faster and cheaper.
And yes, I now about transferwise, paypal, swift, etc. And using crypto is faster and cheaper.
I call maximum shenanigans on "cheaper" unless you're sending large amounts of money.
Bitcoin: ~$25
Ethereum (and all tokens): ~$17
For comparison, to burn that much in fees on Paypal (2.5% + 30c), I'd need to send around 10K.
Crypto is currently pointless for anything other than big transactions, and the unpredictability of the transaction fees, let alone the coin's value, is a big problem.
Bitcoin: ~$25
Ethereum (and all tokens): ~$17
For comparison, to burn that much in fees on Paypal (2.5% + 30c), I'd need to send around 10K.
Crypto is currently pointless for anything other than big transactions, and the unpredictability of the transaction fees, let alone the coin's value, is a big problem.
What are the tax implications for the receiving side?
System that can't be shut down by governments?
You mean that government that just shuts down internet, making your 'system' totally useless?
Yes, right!
You can't fix societal problems with tech.
Yes, right!
You can't fix societal problems with tech.
Yes you can, access to free information and finance should be a human right. Just like cash can be used by anyone, so electronic cash should be.
Cryptocurrencies and blockchain were never really about human rights.
It's all about making a quick buck. If that's at the expense of other people or our environment, who gives a fuck right?
It's all about making a quick buck. If that's at the expense of other people or our environment, who gives a fuck right?
Those crypto tools came from techno-anarchist circles, heavily based on academia research - not much of a quick buck there, more passion for privacy and aversion to government and any form of control. Speculators are great for funding and where is money you'll see scammers quickly as well.
Something to consider: shutting down the internet is very expensive for a government and is likely to results in social unrest and have a lot of other negative side effects.
For first-world countries yes, but we see second and third world countries do it all the time.
And that damages their reputation, creates social unrest, makes it difficult to do business from there, etc. I just want to say that yes, you can shut down the internet but that's already a quite high bar if that's the only way a government can stop a system.
It seems that the people who need it the most are least likely to gain utility from it.
Can you point to a legitimate problem that "whatsapp" solved that could not be solved with existing tools?
Between SMS, MMS, 'normal' calls and Skype, whatsapp added nothing technically new to the world.
Between SMS, MMS, 'normal' calls and Skype, whatsapp added nothing technically new to the world.
Whatsapp is an app not a technology - the protocols allowibg users to communicate through whatsapp are the real innovation there
Whatsapp was cross platform and free.
Skype was cross-platform and free too.
Also, we are talking technology, their pricing strategy is a different problem.
No, you have to take in the context and timeframe.
Skype was not a messaging platform that regular users used on their Phone.
iPhone and Android each were their own bubble and required paid expensive SMS messages to talk to each other.
Whatsapp was at least very populair in The Netherlands for this reason alone.
Pricing is important because that proves why it was useful to people. Also: ease of use, based on how Whatsapp works.
We are not talking just technologies but technologies in a context.
Skype was not a messaging platform that regular users used on their Phone.
iPhone and Android each were their own bubble and required paid expensive SMS messages to talk to each other.
Whatsapp was at least very populair in The Netherlands for this reason alone.
Pricing is important because that proves why it was useful to people. Also: ease of use, based on how Whatsapp works.
We are not talking just technologies but technologies in a context.
Could be an antidote to spam and ai generated content? It could be used as a signal in the noise because of skin in the game for the participants in the network. One could look at it as a common backend for anyone to build clients that combine and present these feeds.
Perhaps we're not seeing the forest because we're looking at the monetization capabilities in the wood.
Perhaps we're not seeing the forest because we're looking at the monetization capabilities in the wood.
Micropayments to prevent spam has been attempted a number of times in the past and it has never really worked.
> Building something useful on something that is primarily used
What is built on something often determines the way it is used.
What is built on something often determines the way it is used.
> "that is primarily used as highly volatile financial speculation instrument "
How is that different from any other asset; stocks, land, property. It's all speculation nowadays.
From what I've read there are pretty much three use cases:
1. store of value akin to gold (bitcoin)
2. decentralised privacy money (monero etc, to avoid taxes?)
3. a platform on which to build decentralised technologies (ethereum, ada, thorchain...countless others - some with specific niches: gaming, streaming etc)
I think your evaluation is bit unfair and shortsighted.
Maybe we are not "there" yet, but why should we be? It is still a nascent technology and I think it would be foolish, and history has shown that, to dismiss it.
Of course, like other asset classes, crypto is now infested with shills, scammers and their jargon designed to confuse and obfuscate in order to take money from the naive.
How is that different from any other asset; stocks, land, property. It's all speculation nowadays.
From what I've read there are pretty much three use cases:
1. store of value akin to gold (bitcoin)
2. decentralised privacy money (monero etc, to avoid taxes?)
3. a platform on which to build decentralised technologies (ethereum, ada, thorchain...countless others - some with specific niches: gaming, streaming etc)
I think your evaluation is bit unfair and shortsighted.
Maybe we are not "there" yet, but why should we be? It is still a nascent technology and I think it would be foolish, and history has shown that, to dismiss it.
Of course, like other asset classes, crypto is now infested with shills, scammers and their jargon designed to confuse and obfuscate in order to take money from the naive.
> How is that different from any other asset, stocks, land, property.
You're putting completely different things in the same bag. I would say you're right that crypto currencies and stocks are kind of similar, but stocks at least have a small (very tenuous, I admit) connection to reality. Stocks are related to real-world companies that deal things people are willing to pay for with real money. Stocks go up and down based on how much money the companies are making, not only based on how much speculation their stocks are being subjected to.
Crypto is purely and solely speculation. There's no one actually trading anything else other than the crypto coins themselves! That's quite different in my opinion.
Now, even though, sometimes, land and property are used as instruments of speculation, they're still connected strongly to the real world, real people. If the world forbid speculation overnight, people would still need to own property and land to survive, and they would still be willing to buy it in exchange for their work or other assets.
If crypto were forbidden overnight, the real world would be unaffected. Some people would lose savings they bet on a fictional economy, but beyond that, nothing would change. These things are fundamentally different.
You're putting completely different things in the same bag. I would say you're right that crypto currencies and stocks are kind of similar, but stocks at least have a small (very tenuous, I admit) connection to reality. Stocks are related to real-world companies that deal things people are willing to pay for with real money. Stocks go up and down based on how much money the companies are making, not only based on how much speculation their stocks are being subjected to.
Crypto is purely and solely speculation. There's no one actually trading anything else other than the crypto coins themselves! That's quite different in my opinion.
Now, even though, sometimes, land and property are used as instruments of speculation, they're still connected strongly to the real world, real people. If the world forbid speculation overnight, people would still need to own property and land to survive, and they would still be willing to buy it in exchange for their work or other assets.
If crypto were forbidden overnight, the real world would be unaffected. Some people would lose savings they bet on a fictional economy, but beyond that, nothing would change. These things are fundamentally different.
> How is that different from any other asset, stocks, land, property. It's all speculation nowadays. Just look at the housing market in London and other places.
This is a common talking point but it's not actually true. 99% of London housing is used for living in.
This is a common talking point but it's not actually true. 99% of London housing is used for living in.
> 99% of London housing is used for living in.
Are they all owners or the owners actually "invested" in a piece of property calculating the rent passive income and the possible increase in market value as part of the overall rentability of their investment?
Are they all owners or the owners actually "invested" in a piece of property calculating the rent passive income and the possible increase in market value as part of the overall rentability of their investment?
Even owner-occupiers may be "investors" - plenty of people's retirement plan involves selling their London home. But the houses are being lived in and are therefore providing real-world value, which is the main thing IMO - speculators can toss money back and forth all day, as long as the useful thing keeps happening.
Land (for example) is NOT primarily used as a speculation instrument. Speculation on land is theoretically a bet on whether the inherent value will go up.
I don't want to call cryptocurrency as money because they're not circulating as you'd expect from money. Globally limited transaction rate, relatively long confirmation time, and few adoption.
An ACH transfer through my bank takes multiple days. I've only made a few transactions on crypto, but confirmation was more like seconds to minutes.
> An ACH transfer through my bank takes multiple days
But that's just a regulation and/or implementation issue.
You can transfer in minutes between countries in different currencies without blockchain.
The fact that your country is stuck in the stone age in this regard isn't really a good argument that cryptocurrencies fundamentally provide value over a solution without blockchains.
I guess the main value blockchain could provide here is to give banks and politicians a kick in the butt, and force them to invest in solutions and regulations that speed up money transfers.
But that's just a regulation and/or implementation issue.
You can transfer in minutes between countries in different currencies without blockchain.
The fact that your country is stuck in the stone age in this regard isn't really a good argument that cryptocurrencies fundamentally provide value over a solution without blockchains.
I guess the main value blockchain could provide here is to give banks and politicians a kick in the butt, and force them to invest in solutions and regulations that speed up money transfers.
In practical terms the main value of cripto is to people that are legally forbidden to access these kind of services. Even if the Nigerian prince was a scan there are many countries where limited access to financial services is unescapable; it is to them that crypto has the greatest value proposition (whether it will be good or bad in reality I have no idea)
That’d be true if the BCH people won, but btc as a mechanism to evade oppressive governments doesn’t work for the masses when transaction costs are so high.
Yes, nowadays Bitcoin is just a shell of its former self. It simply is not practical for anything other than Tulip manias. That's incredibly sad. Practical usage of Bitcoin doesn't even compete with the speculation beyond transaction capacity. If anything speculators would prefer an economy built on Bitcoin that actually guarantees that it's more than just an instrument for speculation.
In euro area we have SEPA instant payments. Cross border payments that take place in real-time (10 seconds max).
Took some time for the old banks to wake up, but I think they have been doing decent work on catching up.
Took some time for the old banks to wake up, but I think they have been doing decent work on catching up.
I was imagining paying subway for my lunch using money.
Most people use debit/credit cards which batch process in the evening and the store doesn't get the funds until some time after that. And the fees to merchants on those cards are in the range of 2%.
>How is that different from any other asset; stocks, land, property. It's all speculation nowadays. How is that different from any other asset; stocks, land, property. It's all speculation nowadays.
Just because other people are insane doesn't mean you should be insane too.
You can sanely invest into stocks, land and property. You can never sanely invest into cryptocurrencies, the same way nobody invests into dollars. No, buying dollars when your national currency is hyperinflating is not an investment since you merely expect your purchasing power to stay the same.
Just because other people are insane doesn't mean you should be insane too.
You can sanely invest into stocks, land and property. You can never sanely invest into cryptocurrencies, the same way nobody invests into dollars. No, buying dollars when your national currency is hyperinflating is not an investment since you merely expect your purchasing power to stay the same.
> At the end of the day, crypto is mountain you can't ignore anymore
Is it really? Is there anyone that can say that a company has suffered because it didn't adopt crypto? It seems like it's perfectly safe to ignore crypto completely. You could gain a bit of advantage. You can use it as a marketing tool, or to attract certain kinds of investors, by cashing in on the blockchain hype. But I haven't seen that there's any advantage yet in using the technology itself.
Regarding the use-cases you mention:
> 1 store of value akin to gold (bitcoin)
Bitcoin is not a store of value. It's a destructor or sink of value. A store of value should have some reserves behind them or some physical asset. Something that has value to others that have not invested in it. Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrency only has value to those that hold them. The value of Bitcoin could crash to 0 tomorrow, and nobody except the investors would care at all. If the gold price crashed I'd be very interested. Would be cool to buy some gold just to play with. Maybe make my own jewelry. But WAY before that there'd be plenty of others buying it for a higher price, for jewelry or manufacturing.
> 2 decentralised privacy money (monero etc)
Aka a gift to crime. I mean, in an ideal world it'd be amazing to have a currency like this. But in practice it does more damage to good. Yes, IMO it's a bad thing even in corrupt countries where you might have legitimate reasons to hide from the state. Because having currency like that doesn't solve all the other problems with having a corrupt government, so it's really just a distraction from solving real problems.
> 3 a platform on which to build decentralised technologies
This is the only legitimate use-case IMO. But it has yet to be proven that using a platform like this has a real advantage.
I think the issue is that problems that you can solve with trustless decentralized algorithms are mostly very trivial. Who has ever had issues with a bank money transfer itself? Meanwhile, the problems we'd really like to solve around currencies, payment and financial services, are basically impossible to solve with trustless. The real problem in payment is to ensure that the seller delivers the product. The real problem in lending is to ensure that the borrower can afford the loan and uses the money on what he says he will.
So you really can't get rid of the human component in most of these applications, if you want a solution that's as good as what you're trying to replace. And in that case, the blockchain is just a fancy and expensive implementation detail that serves little to no practical purpose.
There may be some crossover point where these technologies provide some value. But I suspect it's a much smaller niche than most blockchain proponents would like to admit. I think settling international transactions between banks is one of the very few use-cases where it may be valuable.
Is it really? Is there anyone that can say that a company has suffered because it didn't adopt crypto? It seems like it's perfectly safe to ignore crypto completely. You could gain a bit of advantage. You can use it as a marketing tool, or to attract certain kinds of investors, by cashing in on the blockchain hype. But I haven't seen that there's any advantage yet in using the technology itself.
Regarding the use-cases you mention:
> 1 store of value akin to gold (bitcoin)
Bitcoin is not a store of value. It's a destructor or sink of value. A store of value should have some reserves behind them or some physical asset. Something that has value to others that have not invested in it. Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrency only has value to those that hold them. The value of Bitcoin could crash to 0 tomorrow, and nobody except the investors would care at all. If the gold price crashed I'd be very interested. Would be cool to buy some gold just to play with. Maybe make my own jewelry. But WAY before that there'd be plenty of others buying it for a higher price, for jewelry or manufacturing.
> 2 decentralised privacy money (monero etc)
Aka a gift to crime. I mean, in an ideal world it'd be amazing to have a currency like this. But in practice it does more damage to good. Yes, IMO it's a bad thing even in corrupt countries where you might have legitimate reasons to hide from the state. Because having currency like that doesn't solve all the other problems with having a corrupt government, so it's really just a distraction from solving real problems.
> 3 a platform on which to build decentralised technologies
This is the only legitimate use-case IMO. But it has yet to be proven that using a platform like this has a real advantage.
I think the issue is that problems that you can solve with trustless decentralized algorithms are mostly very trivial. Who has ever had issues with a bank money transfer itself? Meanwhile, the problems we'd really like to solve around currencies, payment and financial services, are basically impossible to solve with trustless. The real problem in payment is to ensure that the seller delivers the product. The real problem in lending is to ensure that the borrower can afford the loan and uses the money on what he says he will.
So you really can't get rid of the human component in most of these applications, if you want a solution that's as good as what you're trying to replace. And in that case, the blockchain is just a fancy and expensive implementation detail that serves little to no practical purpose.
There may be some crossover point where these technologies provide some value. But I suspect it's a much smaller niche than most blockchain proponents would like to admit. I think settling international transactions between banks is one of the very few use-cases where it may be valuable.
A part of what was not mentioned is that it is used as a gambling chip. Plain and simple. Sure, not the cheapest lottery ticket you can find but hey, your chances of making money are probably higher with crypto than the average lottery.
Is gambling useful to the society as whole? Probably not. But it does make things interesting and alas, Bitcoin (and other cryptos) intersect in a most curious way where you are gambling but also have a very easy method to move those assets around.
And I think cryptos do save money when making larger transactions between entities. So there is something real there, although it's not very tangible. For the average Joe, I agree. I don't think they really provide that much value except your average thrill at the casino (with better odds, sure).
Is gambling useful to the society as whole? Probably not. But it does make things interesting and alas, Bitcoin (and other cryptos) intersect in a most curious way where you are gambling but also have a very easy method to move those assets around.
And I think cryptos do save money when making larger transactions between entities. So there is something real there, although it's not very tangible. For the average Joe, I agree. I don't think they really provide that much value except your average thrill at the casino (with better odds, sure).
> The real problem in lending is to ensure that the borrower can afford the loan and uses the money on what he says he will.
So the lender pays the money into a multisignature 2-of-3 wallet, gives 1 key to the borrower, and if when the borrower signs a transaction with that key to spend the funds is buying what they are authorised to buy, countersigns, else does not. And then you wrap this up in a smart contract, call it DeFi, have a liquidity pool for people to loan out a token for car financing, and if those people don't want to perform the check themselves, plug in an oracle like chainlink to deal with the real world part. On the repayment side, if repayment not made, a company can buy the debt and chase it, or can be hired to chase it. Wall torn down around car (insert asset here) financing..
So the lender pays the money into a multisignature 2-of-3 wallet, gives 1 key to the borrower, and if when the borrower signs a transaction with that key to spend the funds is buying what they are authorised to buy, countersigns, else does not. And then you wrap this up in a smart contract, call it DeFi, have a liquidity pool for people to loan out a token for car financing, and if those people don't want to perform the check themselves, plug in an oracle like chainlink to deal with the real world part. On the repayment side, if repayment not made, a company can buy the debt and chase it, or can be hired to chase it. Wall torn down around car (insert asset here) financing..
The repossession is the hard part. Let’s say I lend ten grand to some wallet so they can buy a car. They do so. Now they’ve got a car. They now move all their wealth to other wallets or fiat and refuse to pay me back. I need some mechanism of repossessing their car, which only works if I have state infrastructure and a legal system attached to my contract.
“Btc bounty hunters” isn’t a good enough explanation.
“Btc bounty hunters” isn’t a good enough explanation.
Your correct to say the debt would need to be legally recognised, before it could be sold on to a legally registered debt collector. Aave for example has a UK Electronic Money Institution license, you might need some legal entity to take part in what I describe until laws catch up with innovation. Self driving cars, uber, Airbnb, face similar issues with regulation needing to adjust, that doesn't invalidate the innovation.
I think the comparison to airbnb is revealing.
Airbnb allowed individuals to rent their home to other individuals. But this is done through a centralized service. Scams and abuse exist, but the centralized service offers some nice benefits like reviews and bans for abusive participants. The innovative part was the new model of what you could rent, not the how of how you rent it.
In comparison, the defi loan innovation is "how" rather than "what". As a borrower I still get some cash and pay interest on it. Same as with a bank. As a lender I still deposit some cash and obtain interest on it. Same as with a bank. And a centralized service provides some nice guarantees about checking that my money isn't going to criminal organizations or that I have some guarantee that I can withdraw my money when needed and risk is amortized. Like with airbnb, I'd expect a centralized model to be more appealing to many people than a decentralized model. And we already have a centralized model. They are called banks.
Airbnb succeeded because it created a product that didn't exist before.
I only think that the defi loan system is interesting if it enables a ton of people to obtain a different thing than the thing they can already get from a bank. This matters for people with bad credit and people without access to banking institutions... but how many people are super excited to personally lend to those people?
Airbnb allowed individuals to rent their home to other individuals. But this is done through a centralized service. Scams and abuse exist, but the centralized service offers some nice benefits like reviews and bans for abusive participants. The innovative part was the new model of what you could rent, not the how of how you rent it.
In comparison, the defi loan innovation is "how" rather than "what". As a borrower I still get some cash and pay interest on it. Same as with a bank. As a lender I still deposit some cash and obtain interest on it. Same as with a bank. And a centralized service provides some nice guarantees about checking that my money isn't going to criminal organizations or that I have some guarantee that I can withdraw my money when needed and risk is amortized. Like with airbnb, I'd expect a centralized model to be more appealing to many people than a decentralized model. And we already have a centralized model. They are called banks.
Airbnb succeeded because it created a product that didn't exist before.
I only think that the defi loan system is interesting if it enables a ton of people to obtain a different thing than the thing they can already get from a bank. This matters for people with bad credit and people without access to banking institutions... but how many people are super excited to personally lend to those people?
I suppose, with software eating the world, I want to believe we will collectively own and operate that software, rather than a particular company, that it will be open source, and if those who own it charge too much someone will fork it and outcompete them.
That might be nice, but it isn't a feature. Vanishingly few people consider "the product is collectively owned and open source" to be a feature that they are willing to prioritize over other things. As such, it is hard to support any very large endeavor just off this thing. There is a reason why Blender shows up over and over and over and over again on "lists of awesome FLOSS apps" and that is because it has damn good features. Decentralization is not itself a business strategy outside of niche cases.
I think you're conflating two things. Collectively owned, as in how large companies are owned by their shareholders. Decentralized, as in instead of a company, its a piece of software, that we are collectively funding the development of and profiting from. As more business can be done with software, with less people, I see this as a way for us to own that software, and contribute to it. If some group of owners charge too much, it can be forked, similar to how a business can be undercut by a competitor if they charge too much.
At the moment DeFi loans are fully collateralized, with the loan to value ratio affecting the interest rate you pay. If your collateral drops in value you have to recollateralize the loan, or are liquidated.
I don't understand. Why would I need a loan for $X if I already have $X to put up as collateral?
I have been trying to understand this too. Best I can figure, it's basically a short sell on USD.
The key element is that the loan is not denominated in BTC, but a stablecoin pegged to fiat. DAI is one of these pegged 1:1 to USD.
Say you are holding Bitcoin and think it's going to the moon. You tie up your Bitcoin as collateral and take out a loan of roughly 75% of its value, in DAI. Then you spend that DAI to buy more Bitcoins. Now you are exposed to Bitcoin's price movements on two ends: the BTC you bought with your loan, and the BTC you put up as collateral. If Bitcoin's DAI price goes up by more than the interest rate on the loan, you can sell and have more than enough to repay the loan. The extra is pure profit and plus your collateral grew in value in the meantime too, so you're a winner on both fronts.
On the other hand, if Bitcoin's price goes down by too much and you can't repay the loan, your collateral could be liquidated and become property of the lender. You lose everything.
Color me surprised that the amazing decentralized finance, the future of banking, etc. is... yet another way to speculate on "number go up".
The key element is that the loan is not denominated in BTC, but a stablecoin pegged to fiat. DAI is one of these pegged 1:1 to USD.
Say you are holding Bitcoin and think it's going to the moon. You tie up your Bitcoin as collateral and take out a loan of roughly 75% of its value, in DAI. Then you spend that DAI to buy more Bitcoins. Now you are exposed to Bitcoin's price movements on two ends: the BTC you bought with your loan, and the BTC you put up as collateral. If Bitcoin's DAI price goes up by more than the interest rate on the loan, you can sell and have more than enough to repay the loan. The extra is pure profit and plus your collateral grew in value in the meantime too, so you're a winner on both fronts.
On the other hand, if Bitcoin's price goes down by too much and you can't repay the loan, your collateral could be liquidated and become property of the lender. You lose everything.
Color me surprised that the amazing decentralized finance, the future of banking, etc. is... yet another way to speculate on "number go up".
DAI is mostly minted from ETH, at a rate of $150 collateral to $100 DAI. https://daistats.com/#/. The $200m DAI minted from WBTC represents 0.02% of Bitcoin's market cap.
Is what I outlined still basically correct in terms of describing the utility of an overcollateralized loan? That is: Use crypto for collateral to borrow stablecoins, to buy more crypto, to make profit (hopefully exceeding loan interest) when the crypto price goes up.
Or do I have that all wrong? I really am not sure that I grok how this works, at all. I'm trying to figure out what is going on in this space and you seem to know a lot more about it than I do. I couldn't figure out another good reason to use an overcollateralized loan but it's clearly something people are interested in and using as a selling point for DeFi.
What actually happens if the borrower defaults on the loan? Do they "just" lose their collateral, or can they be held to account for the DAI somehow too?
Or do I have that all wrong? I really am not sure that I grok how this works, at all. I'm trying to figure out what is going on in this space and you seem to know a lot more about it than I do. I couldn't figure out another good reason to use an overcollateralized loan but it's clearly something people are interested in and using as a selling point for DeFi.
What actually happens if the borrower defaults on the loan? Do they "just" lose their collateral, or can they be held to account for the DAI somehow too?
If what you are saying is true then this is literally the housing crisis with variable rate loans and a collapsing market putting everybody underwater. If the value of the item used as collateral sinks then you go from fine to broke in an instant.
The total being used as collateral can be seen here https://defipulse.com/defi-lending, and https://nexostatistics.com/loans/.
A small proportion of market cap, and these loans have low loan to value ratios - typically 20%; no-one wants to risk liquidation.
Incidentally, it is my hope that once laws change the collateral can be any type of asset, not only digital assets. The collateral could also be some sort of tokenized reputation issued by a collective, whom have decided you are worthy of credit. Perhaps they are affiliated with your employer or have enough knowledge to assess the stability of your income due to their knowledge of your skillset. The lenders would then be paid by them, by proxy - allowing those capable of assessing risk, and those with sufficient funds to lend, to be distinct.
Incidentally, this is all bleeding edge, let's see what is actually built and what works with all this new possibility.
To avoid triggering the taxes (and in many cases, never paying them).
Now I'm wondering if software contracts have ever been legally tested. I'd enjoy a lawyer reading out the relevant if statement to the court.
I certainly don't think it is impossible. But the "defi will let everybody make 8% on their savings accounts by loaning cash to people around the world with no barriers" folks need to provide some evidence that I'm not actually going to lose everything to people just refusing to pay me back.
While it is interesting that you can implement this on block-chain this is a perfect example of how block-chain does not provide more than just being trustless.
(personally I like having trusted third parties)
(personally I like having trusted third parties)
> If the gold price crashed I'd be very interested.
Imo central banks are in a tough spot now. They've issued huge amounts of bonds, and cannot raise interest rates. If inflation rises, they will be unable to raise rates - unless they want to pay incredible amounts of interest to the banks. If they do decide to do so, they will need to sell large quantities of gold to help pay for that, which will be a heavy downward pressure on the price of gold. More likely is they allow fiat to devalue, in turn making the loans easier to pay off in the future, with the side effect of averting any trouble brewing in the stock market - people won't exit their positions to cash if stocks continue to climb (even if it is due to a devaluing currency). Just my opinion.
Imo central banks are in a tough spot now. They've issued huge amounts of bonds, and cannot raise interest rates. If inflation rises, they will be unable to raise rates - unless they want to pay incredible amounts of interest to the banks. If they do decide to do so, they will need to sell large quantities of gold to help pay for that, which will be a heavy downward pressure on the price of gold. More likely is they allow fiat to devalue, in turn making the loans easier to pay off in the future, with the side effect of averting any trouble brewing in the stock market - people won't exit their positions to cash if stocks continue to climb (even if it is due to a devaluing currency). Just my opinion.
Central banks do not issue bonds. What they've been doing is buying bonds issued by national governments. Usually on the public markets, not directly. Where do they get the money to buy the bonds? Why they just magically create it. That's their job.
Central banks do not care, per se, if they have to "pay incredible amounts of interest to the banks" since they literally create (and destroy) money. Central banks do not need to buy or sell gold to create money since money is no longer gold backed. Operationally, central banks can create any amount of money they want anytime they want. Obviously, there are political considerations though.
"More likely is they allow fiat to devalue", yes. That is exactly what they will do if inflation increases substantially. Though not because it will make their loans "loans easier to pay off" since central banks have no loans to pay off; instead they get paid coupons and principal on they bonds.
Central banks do not care, per se, if they have to "pay incredible amounts of interest to the banks" since they literally create (and destroy) money. Central banks do not need to buy or sell gold to create money since money is no longer gold backed. Operationally, central banks can create any amount of money they want anytime they want. Obviously, there are political considerations though.
"More likely is they allow fiat to devalue", yes. That is exactly what they will do if inflation increases substantially. Though not because it will make their loans "loans easier to pay off" since central banks have no loans to pay off; instead they get paid coupons and principal on they bonds.
Thanks, your understanding is better than mine. Its the national governments who would have to pay the incredible amounts of interest, and may fund that by selling the gold they own (https://www.usfunds.com/investor-library/frank-talk-a-ceo-bl...).
Interested to hear whether you think gold will increase or decrease its value, over the next years.
Rising interest rates will only make new debt more expensive for governments. Existing debt will actually become cheaper as rates rise. If rates rise high enough, they could actually call (buy back) the bonds early for less than face value. This is because most government debt is fixed rate.
To use an example, you issue a 10 year bond with a face value of $100 with a 1.00% coupon (i.e. you need to pay $1/yr for 10 years and then $100 at maturity after 10 years). Fast forward 5 years -- rates have risen for similar risk debt rise to 5.00%. You've paid out $5 so far in coupons... but that bond (now 5 years to maturity) will cost $84 on the open market. So you simply buy it back for $84. That means you spent $84 + $5 = $89 for $100. Woohoo!
One financial strategy for governments would be to 1) issue excessive debt when rates are very low, 2) don't spend all the money, 3) buy back some of the debt when rates go up for less than you issued it, thus further lowering the cost of debt for the portion you did spend. Sadly, most governments have trouble with step #2.
As for gold, I have no idea. Historically, gold was an inflation hedge (i.e. it's price rose with inflation). But so are a lot of other things. At this point, there's nothing special about gold except that it stays shiny forever.
To use an example, you issue a 10 year bond with a face value of $100 with a 1.00% coupon (i.e. you need to pay $1/yr for 10 years and then $100 at maturity after 10 years). Fast forward 5 years -- rates have risen for similar risk debt rise to 5.00%. You've paid out $5 so far in coupons... but that bond (now 5 years to maturity) will cost $84 on the open market. So you simply buy it back for $84. That means you spent $84 + $5 = $89 for $100. Woohoo!
One financial strategy for governments would be to 1) issue excessive debt when rates are very low, 2) don't spend all the money, 3) buy back some of the debt when rates go up for less than you issued it, thus further lowering the cost of debt for the portion you did spend. Sadly, most governments have trouble with step #2.
As for gold, I have no idea. Historically, gold was an inflation hedge (i.e. it's price rose with inflation). But so are a lot of other things. At this point, there's nothing special about gold except that it stays shiny forever.
Rising stock price due to currency devaluation is already happening.
>A store of value should have some reserves behind them or some physical asset
Nope. This is old people thinking. Young people are used to digital items being worth money. People spend real money on cosmetics in video games despite there being nothing physical about them. These "imaginary" things spawned into existence can have value.
Nope. This is old people thinking. Young people are used to digital items being worth money. People spend real money on cosmetics in video games despite there being nothing physical about them. These "imaginary" things spawned into existence can have value.
Have you considered that your use of the term "real money" undermines your position a bit?
People spend money on things with little tangible value all the time. The benchmark, IMHO, is whether others accept these things as payment. It's generally pretty hard to pay your utility bill with Farmville coins, or buy groceries with Angry Birds Mighty Eagles.
People spend money on things with little tangible value all the time. The benchmark, IMHO, is whether others accept these things as payment. It's generally pretty hard to pay your utility bill with Farmville coins, or buy groceries with Angry Birds Mighty Eagles.
You can't pay your utility bill with Apple stock, or buy groceries with crude oil ETFs. You have to convert them into money first. Does this mean that they are not a store of value?
[deleted]
The article states plainly:
“What’s Ethereum’s killer app?” we asked ourselves not long ago. Now we know. It’s the world’s best publicly-accessible settlement platform for financial transactions. In a way, that’s exciting. The markets think so too.
“What’s Ethereum’s killer app?” we asked ourselves not long ago. Now we know. It’s the world’s best publicly-accessible settlement platform for financial transactions. In a way, that’s exciting. The markets think so too.
The alternative is building on AWS or whatever, where a big company can just decide arbitrarily to kill your startup at any arbitrary moment by shutting down your access, or confiscating your funds.
This happens all the time.
This happens all the time.
In countries with working currencies like EU and US, yes almost all crypto is speculation. BUT, countries that have poor banking system a poorly managed/trusted economy don't have access to even banks, let alone investments and stocks. Crypto lets those people participate in the global market.
Trading assets is a fundamental cooperative human activity that allows us to coordinate our actions at scale to reach much higher levels of collective productivity.
The idea that profit-motivated exchange and investment is a useless human activity is a layman's understanding of economics.
The idea that profit-motivated exchange and investment is a useless human activity is a layman's understanding of economics.
I think that if you come across some well known crypto, it is better you just hold on to it and pray for appreciation due to high demand rather than trading in and out of it frequently.
Isn't cryptocurrencies used all over the Darknet ? I know that is not "the masses" but it is still a non-negligeable usage which is unlikely to stop, no?
Can you give better examples of funding your idea to change the internet/world/whatever? Taking aside if your idea is great or dumb.
There is a killer app for crypto: international money laundering and untraceable transfers.
Crypto transfers are the opposite of untraceable. I’m not sure why that sentiment is so prevalent.
This same comment appears on every single crypto post. if it was actually true do you think people would have stopped posting about crypto in the past six years or so?
Plenty of bubbles take time to fully pop.
It can both be true that cryptocurrency is nifty and has real world applications, and is at also widely speculative currently.
It can both be true that cryptocurrency is nifty and has real world applications, and is at also widely speculative currently.
I don't think people would have stopped posting for a few reasons:
1. There are currently useful applications. 2. It currently brings value to some people in one way or another. 3. If there are no killer apps, it's not obvious to a large swath of the population.
I try not to be one who invests too much into the wisdom of the crowd. I also try not to dismiss them either. We can be both clever and easily fooled.
1. There are currently useful applications. 2. It currently brings value to some people in one way or another. 3. If there are no killer apps, it's not obvious to a large swath of the population.
I try not to be one who invests too much into the wisdom of the crowd. I also try not to dismiss them either. We can be both clever and easily fooled.
>if it was actually true do you think people would have stopped posting about crypto in the past six years or so?
I think crypto posts continue to appear because the idea is sexy, but I also think the parent poster is correct: the realized applications are not.
Crypto captures the imagination, but it's a disappointment in practice.
I think crypto posts continue to appear because the idea is sexy, but I also think the parent poster is correct: the realized applications are not.
Crypto captures the imagination, but it's a disappointment in practice.
Greed is perhaps one of the most powerful motivators known to man.
Probably because it largely acts as a proxy for survival mechanisms.
Give most people want they need and a little of what they want and you'll find most greed driven behaviors largely disappear except for a select few who I'd argue have dysfunctions or lack basic social maturity.
Give most people want they need and a little of what they want and you'll find most greed driven behaviors largely disappear except for a select few who I'd argue have dysfunctions or lack basic social maturity.
The Mouse Utopia study from the 1960's suggest otherwise.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-...
To prove the comment wrong you just have to provide a single example, but you can't do that so instead you're criticizing the complaint and saying it isn't novel (which is true, but irrelevant to its validity).
Nope, I'm criticizing the complaint because it's vapid, which it is.
Interesting concept I learned when I stopped drinking -- you aren't owed a rebuttal when your argument is stupid!
Interesting concept I learned when I stopped drinking -- you aren't owed a rebuttal when your argument is stupid!
You still can't provide a single example, and playing games about how you don't need to rebut a vapid argument only makes this more obvious to everyone else.
Bro you already won the HN argument, you don't need to keep replying unless you want to hang out sometime. Just let me know
Anyone who knows about Ray Peat and Terry Davis is alright in my book, so my email is in my profile if you're ever in Utah.
[deleted]
HN loves bashing crypto because as tech nerds, we all knew about Bitcoin/Ether at their inception, but missed the boat. Now we all watch as our weird crypto friends get rich, and we have to bash Bitcoin, predicting its inevitable decline, so that we can feel better about our past decisions.
[deleted]
they stopped for the past 2 years until it went up again. similiar to people who won’t stop selling their herbalife shakes
[deleted]
Largely agree. It's what makes Bitcoin different. Bitcoin's killer app is the network itself. The fact that you can send money/transfer wealth instantly without a bank to tell you what you can and can't do IS the value of Bitcoin and why it's not some purely speculative ponzhi scheme. As far as I understand, you can't reaaally use Ethereum for the same purpose because of high fees.
That's one of the point that makes little sense to me. The government/bank regulation kicks in when you try to convert to your local currency. They now have your full history of transactions and can decide to refuse your bitcoins or find you guilty of fraud or whatever illegal thing you tried to hide. Regulations will always be present at the edge.
I didn't say that it has to be for illegal things or avoiding regulation. I said it's a trust-less global payment infrastructure. Say I need to send $500k to a relative in a third world country at 12AM on a Sunday. A completely legal transfer of money that I plan to disclose to the government. 100% regulated. But I need the transaction to go through very quickly. What are my options? Chase? Paypal? Western Union? What if Paypal decides this transaction is fraudulent and says "no". What if Western Union decides to limit my account? What if Chase wire transfer to third world bank takes 5 days? With Bitcoin, you can just send the money, legally, but without a private third party as a middleman. There is value in that.
You can use Ethereum for the same purpose. The transaction fees for sending Ether in a reasonable amount of time stands at sub $5. To send the same amount in the same time on Bitcoin's network is higher. Ethereum's high fees mainly hinder smart contract usage, which, depending on the complexity of the contract, may incur up to hundreds if not thousands of dollars at current gas prices.
Transaction fees appear to be significantly higher than $5 at the moment (see e.g. https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-transaction-fees-hit-recor...).
>Bitcoin's killer app is the network itself. The fact that you can send money/transfer wealth instantly
Instantly?
>can't reaaally use Ethereum for the same purpose because of high fees
BTC fees are also high?
Instantly?
>can't reaaally use Ethereum for the same purpose because of high fees
BTC fees are also high?
Yes, that assertion sound like it's coming from someone who has never actually used Bitcoin.
There are cryptos which are instant and without transaction fees (e.g. Nano for payments and maybe in the future IOTA as an alternative to Ethereum). So there is some hope for the technology, but it remains to be seen if any of this actually takes off.
There are cryptos which are instant and without transaction fees (e.g. Nano for payments and maybe in the future IOTA as an alternative to Ethereum). So there is some hope for the technology, but it remains to be seen if any of this actually takes off.
This is really short sighted thinking. The web had no "killer app" in the first 10+ years. It was obscure technology with thousands of naysayers laughing at us "web nerds" because we thought it would change everything.
Cryptocurrency is very young. While its hard to say if BTC or ETH or something yet to be invented will be part of the digital money future, it is absolutely reasonable to expect this technology will have a role in the world. Of course people will make and lose "quick dough" but that's like saying the web failed because some idiot made or lost money on Pets.com or AOL stock.
Trade volume just means that the idea is in circulation, people of many walks of life are seeing what is there. Feel free to ignore those people, but to write off the entire concept as "about making quick dough" is asinine.
Cryptocurrency is very young. While its hard to say if BTC or ETH or something yet to be invented will be part of the digital money future, it is absolutely reasonable to expect this technology will have a role in the world. Of course people will make and lose "quick dough" but that's like saying the web failed because some idiot made or lost money on Pets.com or AOL stock.
Trade volume just means that the idea is in circulation, people of many walks of life are seeing what is there. Feel free to ignore those people, but to write off the entire concept as "about making quick dough" is asinine.
Bloomberg and Wired went online 4 years after the invention of the World Wide Web. In the first ten years, Amazon, eBay, Google, and PayPal were all founded. Technology adoption curves have only gotten steeper since then (e.g. iPhone/Android was basically the dominant consumer computing platform 10 years after its introduction).
You are comparing touchscreen mobile phones with a technology delving into what both gold / hard value stores AND cash do for society. That is not a typical technology adoption cycle. I’m not an extremist to say Bitcoin will eat the world or even replace any existing system entirely, but I still disagree with those that say it has no utility beyond get rich quick scheme.
Referencing Wired as the killer app of the early Internet is good comedy. Bloomberg terminals were already connected, just not by this new tech.
Referencing Wired as the killer app of the early Internet is good comedy. Bloomberg terminals were already connected, just not by this new tech.
M-Pesa was used by over 90% of Kenyan households in about 2 years after its launch. I could go on.
Mobile computing has changed the entire world; it’s not plainly obvious that cryptocurrency would change it even more or is substantially more difficult to execute on.
Mobile computing has changed the entire world; it’s not plainly obvious that cryptocurrency would change it even more or is substantially more difficult to execute on.
M-Pesa is very important, society changing financial app/system that did not need iPhone or Android to be dominant. It was built on SMS and why it could achieve such market share. Don't give smartphones credit for putting interfaces on successful technology.
Mobile computing is obviously important, but its importance says zero about the possibility - and that's all I argued - that cryptocurrency could also be very important.
Mobile computing is obviously important, but its importance says zero about the possibility - and that's all I argued - that cryptocurrency could also be very important.
Yes but, bet on BLOCKCHAIN not a cryptocurrency(at least for now?)
Satoshi Nakamoto created something truly revolutionary; a complex method of processing and recording data in a system, quickly began to overturn everything. Microsoft Word was the dominant word processing software for over a decade, with the creation of this new system, however, something similar arrived: Google Docs, Instead of one person editing a document, and being locked out when the other person began to edit, multiple people could now edit documents. That opened an entire world of possibility, from collaborative conferences online to fiction writing with both people online, using Google Docs. Microsoft Word was obsolete(even if still many people use it). Blockchain is a technology that outshines the concept of Google Docs collaboration like a spark versus a star.
Blockchain runs on a principle similar to the collaborative ability of Google Docs, by having multiple computers check to ensure that digital information is recorded accurately, millions of computers, called nodes, check this data and record it perfectly, trying to hack Blockchain is like trying to write swears in Google Docs: Everyone notices immediately. Blockchain-based businesses are growing exponentially as the technology improves. Blockchain technologies are not dominated by large industries yet. The entire industry of Blockchain technology is empty except for a few small yet growing businesses. Anyone can use this technology, and anyone can learn about it. In fact, by creating a startup focused on some sort of Blockchain transaction, whether it’s for transporting value across the internet, or general information, or financial records, you’re democratizing the entire process and keeping it away from FAANG or even Govs. Blockchain has been compared to the Internet. The Internet was extremely profitable and Blockchain arguably has the potential to be more so, simply by upgrading the existing framework. The person who sets their mind to creating a Blockchain technology has the potential to be unbelievably successful beyond simply creating a profitable niche industry.
Satoshi Nakamoto created something truly revolutionary; a complex method of processing and recording data in a system, quickly began to overturn everything. Microsoft Word was the dominant word processing software for over a decade, with the creation of this new system, however, something similar arrived: Google Docs, Instead of one person editing a document, and being locked out when the other person began to edit, multiple people could now edit documents. That opened an entire world of possibility, from collaborative conferences online to fiction writing with both people online, using Google Docs. Microsoft Word was obsolete(even if still many people use it). Blockchain is a technology that outshines the concept of Google Docs collaboration like a spark versus a star.
Blockchain runs on a principle similar to the collaborative ability of Google Docs, by having multiple computers check to ensure that digital information is recorded accurately, millions of computers, called nodes, check this data and record it perfectly, trying to hack Blockchain is like trying to write swears in Google Docs: Everyone notices immediately. Blockchain-based businesses are growing exponentially as the technology improves. Blockchain technologies are not dominated by large industries yet. The entire industry of Blockchain technology is empty except for a few small yet growing businesses. Anyone can use this technology, and anyone can learn about it. In fact, by creating a startup focused on some sort of Blockchain transaction, whether it’s for transporting value across the internet, or general information, or financial records, you’re democratizing the entire process and keeping it away from FAANG or even Govs. Blockchain has been compared to the Internet. The Internet was extremely profitable and Blockchain arguably has the potential to be more so, simply by upgrading the existing framework. The person who sets their mind to creating a Blockchain technology has the potential to be unbelievably successful beyond simply creating a profitable niche industry.
The Hacker News community has long been anti-crypto, and as someone deeply involved in the space, these long threads of complaints and diatribes are difficult to handle. Everyone is missing so much context.
Ethereum gas prices are astronomical because there's unprecedented demand to use the network: NFT art and collectibles are exploding (NBA TopShot, Foundation, SuperRare, Rarible, OpenSea, etc.) at the same time DeFi applications (Uniswap, Compound, Maker, Aave, Balancer, etc.) are at all time highs.
This is the time, in my mind, that it's most exciting to work in crypto, and on Ethereum: demand has been proven and has been sustained (every block full for 1+ year).
The naysayers who think this is all for a quick buck are missing the pattern and listening too much to the (admittedly, insanely loud and annoying) shills.
Ethereum gas prices are astronomical because there's unprecedented demand to use the network: NFT art and collectibles are exploding (NBA TopShot, Foundation, SuperRare, Rarible, OpenSea, etc.) at the same time DeFi applications (Uniswap, Compound, Maker, Aave, Balancer, etc.) are at all time highs.
This is the time, in my mind, that it's most exciting to work in crypto, and on Ethereum: demand has been proven and has been sustained (every block full for 1+ year).
The naysayers who think this is all for a quick buck are missing the pattern and listening too much to the (admittedly, insanely loud and annoying) shills.
I feel like the general tendency on HN (and my personal feeling about the subject) is one of interest in the tech and applications, but a feeling that the hype is bigger than the truth.
The ideas that Ethereum is innovative, that there are lots of possibilities in cryptocurrencies/blockchain, that at the moment the scene has major environmental issues, and that the current high valuations are unjustified, to my mind can all be true at the same time.
The ideas that Ethereum is innovative, that there are lots of possibilities in cryptocurrencies/blockchain, that at the moment the scene has major environmental issues, and that the current high valuations are unjustified, to my mind can all be true at the same time.
The key innovation and premise behind Ethereum was to use a virtual machine to enable smart contracts on blockchains. Now virtual machine interpreters for blockchains is common if not standard. Tough to imagine Ethereum failing any promises based on that premise.
Blockchain dapps can potentially threaten HN jobs so its not exactly a hit on here.
> The naysayers who think this is all for a quick buck are missing the pattern and listening too much to the (admittedly, insanely loud and annoying) shills.
I'm part of a community that's currently being overtaken by the crypto art craze, and I'm still convinced it's "all for a quick buck".
The crypto art economy seems to be driven by "collectors" who will drop thousands of dollars on anyone who can get them more exposure. People who have no followers and aren't tweeting about NFTs every day generally don't get their art bought. Some of these kids who made $10,000 off a png then feel some social pressure to put some of that money back into the community, so they purchase more crypto art with the proceeds.
Some collectors openly advertise their ongoing bids on social media. They want people to see that they're dropping big money on art. If it was a true art collector, wouldn't they not want to be outbid? Wouldn't they be hoping that there were as few people in the auction as possible? None of it smells right to me.
I'm part of a community that's currently being overtaken by the crypto art craze, and I'm still convinced it's "all for a quick buck".
The crypto art economy seems to be driven by "collectors" who will drop thousands of dollars on anyone who can get them more exposure. People who have no followers and aren't tweeting about NFTs every day generally don't get their art bought. Some of these kids who made $10,000 off a png then feel some social pressure to put some of that money back into the community, so they purchase more crypto art with the proceeds.
Some collectors openly advertise their ongoing bids on social media. They want people to see that they're dropping big money on art. If it was a true art collector, wouldn't they not want to be outbid? Wouldn't they be hoping that there were as few people in the auction as possible? None of it smells right to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
A lot of people buy art not because they like looking at it, but because they want everyone to know that they have lots of money to drop on worthless art purchases. This motivation is reinforced if a.) everybody knows how much money they're dropping on art purchases and b.) the price keeps going up, yet they still win the bid. They want the price to go up, since a higher price just signifies how baller they are.
A lot of people buy art not because they like looking at it, but because they want everyone to know that they have lots of money to drop on worthless art purchases. This motivation is reinforced if a.) everybody knows how much money they're dropping on art purchases and b.) the price keeps going up, yet they still win the bid. They want the price to go up, since a higher price just signifies how baller they are.
How does anyone know that they aren't already connected to the seller, and just passing 10,000 dollars from one wallet address they own, to another they also own, to create the appearance of a sale?
You get the same veblen bragging rights, the artist (assuming they are not simply your own alter ego) gets a visibility boost and nobody is going to be motivated enough to go digging around the custody trail to prove this was a sham.
This sleight of hand (in a slightly modified form) is standard operating procedure for inflating the value of ICO offerings (and by extension, crypto as a whole); I don't see why people wouldn't do it for NFTs, with the same motivations at work.
You get the same veblen bragging rights, the artist (assuming they are not simply your own alter ego) gets a visibility boost and nobody is going to be motivated enough to go digging around the custody trail to prove this was a sham.
This sleight of hand (in a slightly modified form) is standard operating procedure for inflating the value of ICO offerings (and by extension, crypto as a whole); I don't see why people wouldn't do it for NFTs, with the same motivations at work.
If that's the case, why hide behind a pseudonym that seems like it was created purely for buying crypto art? I'm looking at one right now -- their Twitter says they're a "rare digital art collector", and links to their pages on SuperRare and MakersPlace, but doesn't have any tweets, and there's otherwise no identifiable information.
They've succeeded in demonstrating their wealth, but no one has any idea who they are, which seems to poke a hole in that theory.
They've succeeded in demonstrating their wealth, but no one has any idea who they are, which seems to poke a hole in that theory.
Probably still just a big money laundering/tax evasion operation, like much of the real art world...
As an outsider missing context, what are the answers to the following? They are all valid questions that come up every time, and aren't well answered, given my research into them.
- Is the long term alternatives to PoW actually viable, given the huge power consumption of cryptocurrency currently?
- Are the valid use cases (other than drugs, ransomware and speculation) worth the valuation?
- If Tether collapses, due to the reports of its sketchiness, what will the shock to cryptocurrency, broadly speaking, be?
- Is the long term alternatives to PoW actually viable, given the huge power consumption of cryptocurrency currently?
- Are the valid use cases (other than drugs, ransomware and speculation) worth the valuation?
- If Tether collapses, due to the reports of its sketchiness, what will the shock to cryptocurrency, broadly speaking, be?
> - Is the long term alternatives to PoW actually viable, given the huge power consumption of cryptocurrency currently?
PoS and derived schemes like DPoS have been sound on paper. Their drawbacks have largely been accepted by the community as a good tradeoff for most usage models. However, it can take years of "production" usage to get a good feeling about the long term macro economics, so I wouldn't expect a straight answer to this. The good news is that there will be plenty of big tier networks like ETH2 and EOS experimenting with different variants.
PoS and derived schemes like DPoS have been sound on paper. Their drawbacks have largely been accepted by the community as a good tradeoff for most usage models. However, it can take years of "production" usage to get a good feeling about the long term macro economics, so I wouldn't expect a straight answer to this. The good news is that there will be plenty of big tier networks like ETH2 and EOS experimenting with different variants.
> - Are the valid use cases (other than drugs, ransomware and speculation) worth the valuation?
I think it's fair to say that the current valuation of cryptocurrencies have nothing to do with their tech or use cases. These markets have the same signs as the dot com bubble. However, there are valid use cases if you're willing to search for them. One of them is decentralized DNS name registration without third parties like GoDaddy or ICANN (https://handshake.org/), though this is a market, not a currency per say.
I think it's fair to say that the current valuation of cryptocurrencies have nothing to do with their tech or use cases. These markets have the same signs as the dot com bubble. However, there are valid use cases if you're willing to search for them. One of them is decentralized DNS name registration without third parties like GoDaddy or ICANN (https://handshake.org/), though this is a market, not a currency per say.
That reminds me of Namecoin
- Is there anything actually wrong with PoW? It's fun to say it's "wasted" electricity, but we "waste" more power, resources, and man-hours in other trivialities (eg. video games) without really caring.
- Read the whitepaper of whichever crypto you're asking about. The answer is "it depends", because each one exists to fill a different niche.
- Nobody really cares about Tether, so probably nothing.
- Read the whitepaper of whichever crypto you're asking about. The answer is "it depends", because each one exists to fill a different niche.
- Nobody really cares about Tether, so probably nothing.
> Is there anything actually wrong with PoW?
There’s more wrong with PoW besides just environmental effects. PoW creates different incentives for a blockchain’s miners than for its users. Often these are conflicting, and have a tendency to gridlock the protocol development. This is especially pronounced today in Ethereum where the majority of users are in favor of certain protocol upgrades that would scale throughput, but miners are opposed to it because it comes at an economic cost to them.
There’s no inherent reason for this dichotomy between users and miners: if it’s the same people using the protocol as securing it, you’d expect to have better outcomes for everyone. PoS makes it so that the users are also the ones securing the protocol. It’s not _perfect_ alignment, but it is much more aligned than the miner/user split in POW.
There’s more wrong with PoW besides just environmental effects. PoW creates different incentives for a blockchain’s miners than for its users. Often these are conflicting, and have a tendency to gridlock the protocol development. This is especially pronounced today in Ethereum where the majority of users are in favor of certain protocol upgrades that would scale throughput, but miners are opposed to it because it comes at an economic cost to them.
There’s no inherent reason for this dichotomy between users and miners: if it’s the same people using the protocol as securing it, you’d expect to have better outcomes for everyone. PoS makes it so that the users are also the ones securing the protocol. It’s not _perfect_ alignment, but it is much more aligned than the miner/user split in POW.
If actual, real consumers and professionals can't buy gear because it's being hoarded by miners, yeah, that's pretty wasteful (as in, a thing that consumes vast resources without benefiting very many people).
Agreed. ASICs have really destroyed the spirit of mining, and may hint that the Bitcoin style PoW algorithms are in fact not a senible type of proof.
Memory-hard PoW algorithms, rather than computational ones, might be one way to reduce the amount of energy. Memory is expensive regardless of whether you make ASICs or use regular PCs.
Memory-hard PoW algorithms, rather than computational ones, might be one way to reduce the amount of energy. Memory is expensive regardless of whether you make ASICs or use regular PCs.
Heaven forbid the manufacturers actually, you know, increase production to meet the demand for their hardware.
Haha. That doesn't always work.
The present demand is spurred by the boom phase of a potential boom-bust cycle (similar to oil). You have two (actually more) sources of demand: crypto, conventional buyers (retail and industry customers). If they adjust production upward (which requires an investment of capital) to meet the present demand then they reduce their profit, prices will go up (at least a bit) to compensate. But they also face another risk: what if there's a bust? If the crypto demand for hardware bottoms out (whether because of a change in crypto or having satisfied the demand) they will be left with excess capacity and potentially excess inventory. The increased production capacity may be able to be redirected to other productive endeavors, or it may just end up idle. And the excess inventory has to be sold off at a potential loss as the hardware becomes worth less and less as each day passes (plus holding inventory costs money).
Instead, if they leave production as is (or only increase it slightly) they can virtually guarantee their products will sell out and increase the prices because they know people will continue to buy it. Obviously, the retail and industry customers get screwed because they have less profit to make (if any) directly off the hardware purchase, but the miners will continue to buy almost without regard to the price because their profits (presently) justify the investment.
The present demand is spurred by the boom phase of a potential boom-bust cycle (similar to oil). You have two (actually more) sources of demand: crypto, conventional buyers (retail and industry customers). If they adjust production upward (which requires an investment of capital) to meet the present demand then they reduce their profit, prices will go up (at least a bit) to compensate. But they also face another risk: what if there's a bust? If the crypto demand for hardware bottoms out (whether because of a change in crypto or having satisfied the demand) they will be left with excess capacity and potentially excess inventory. The increased production capacity may be able to be redirected to other productive endeavors, or it may just end up idle. And the excess inventory has to be sold off at a potential loss as the hardware becomes worth less and less as each day passes (plus holding inventory costs money).
Instead, if they leave production as is (or only increase it slightly) they can virtually guarantee their products will sell out and increase the prices because they know people will continue to buy it. Obviously, the retail and industry customers get screwed because they have less profit to make (if any) directly off the hardware purchase, but the miners will continue to buy almost without regard to the price because their profits (presently) justify the investment.
A failure of tether would certainly cause a ton of market volatility, but there's enough tether substitutes for the markets to adjust pretty quickly. Sure, the failure might freeze a lot of funds and depress market caps a bit in the process.
Personally I doubt it. Look at the market volumes -- everyone who wants to trade shitcoins just does it with BTC pairs, and most of the big boy exchanges support USD-BTC directly.. tether was a good idea when exchanges didn't want to mess with USD but that's not really the case anymore.
I think for many people it's still hard to temporarily and quickly exit a long BTC or long ETH position, but daytraders want to do this with great frequency.
This is doubly true for people outside the US, not to mention people who are trying to skirt capgain taxes. Of course, an argument could also be made that a tether failure would cause people to flee to BTC or ETH and paradoxically cause prices to rise.
This is doubly true for people outside the US, not to mention people who are trying to skirt capgain taxes. Of course, an argument could also be made that a tether failure would cause people to flee to BTC or ETH and paradoxically cause prices to rise.
1. This has been resolved for years. See Celo and NEAR as examples of fully-programmable Proof of Stake blockchains that are live.
2. Yes.
3. It'll be a significant issue for decentralized exchanges and liquidity pools, but far from existential. The seasonal Tether FUD is generally overstated. (I have done a detailed analysis of this, but it exceeds the scope of this conversation.)
2. Yes.
3. It'll be a significant issue for decentralized exchanges and liquidity pools, but far from existential. The seasonal Tether FUD is generally overstated. (I have done a detailed analysis of this, but it exceeds the scope of this conversation.)
> 2. Yes.
This is sadly a non-answer to the question posed.
I am asked this question all the time by people I know, and the best I can come up with is illegal activities, super niche tech applications (e.g., DNS name reg), and libertarian fantasies.
You have an audience here at HN who is more than willing to advocate for cryptocurrencies if they/we can be shown a compelling use case.
“Yes” is not an obvious compelling use case.
Please elaborate.
This is sadly a non-answer to the question posed.
I am asked this question all the time by people I know, and the best I can come up with is illegal activities, super niche tech applications (e.g., DNS name reg), and libertarian fantasies.
You have an audience here at HN who is more than willing to advocate for cryptocurrencies if they/we can be shown a compelling use case.
“Yes” is not an obvious compelling use case.
Please elaborate.
I have this discussion at least once a week. What would you build if you could deploy an uninterruptible, transparently verifiable, fully autonomous software application? I promise you that we can discuss many examples (any kind of marketplace or platform but with community governance and no rents, decentralized exchanges, global-by-default payments, highly interoperable and efficient financial infrastructure), but what would you build?
That's the answer to your question.
That's the answer to your question.
I will be sure to relay this answer to my non-tech friends who ask about cryptocurrencies.
I’m sure this answer will send them running to buy.
/s
All joking aside, for a conversation you say you have weekly, this is a really lame answer due to the abstractness of it.
My guess is the reason you don’t give concrete answers is because either tech already exists for that use case or non-crypto tech could be easily developed if it doesn’t already exist.
Please, please, prove me wrong. I want to be a crypto fan, but vague answers like the ones you provided above are the reason a lot of people think crypto is smoke and mirrors and/or snake oil salesmen.
I’m sure this answer will send them running to buy.
/s
All joking aside, for a conversation you say you have weekly, this is a really lame answer due to the abstractness of it.
My guess is the reason you don’t give concrete answers is because either tech already exists for that use case or non-crypto tech could be easily developed if it doesn’t already exist.
Please, please, prove me wrong. I want to be a crypto fan, but vague answers like the ones you provided above are the reason a lot of people think crypto is smoke and mirrors and/or snake oil salesmen.
GP is incredibly "concrete":
>...any kind of marketplace or platform but with community governance and no rents, decentralized exchanges, global-by-default payments, highly interoperable and efficient financial infrastructure...
As seen in various forms here: https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/
I can only guess that you are not familiar with the technical jargon.
Your pleading strikes me as potentially disingenuous, but I will speak earnestly in spite of that.
You will or (will not) be a "crypto fan" after you've absorbed enough technical literature to make your own judgement about what is happening. If you have the time, I recommend starting with the Bitcoin and Ethereum whitepapers.
>...any kind of marketplace or platform but with community governance and no rents, decentralized exchanges, global-by-default payments, highly interoperable and efficient financial infrastructure...
As seen in various forms here: https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/
I can only guess that you are not familiar with the technical jargon.
Your pleading strikes me as potentially disingenuous, but I will speak earnestly in spite of that.
You will or (will not) be a "crypto fan" after you've absorbed enough technical literature to make your own judgement about what is happening. If you have the time, I recommend starting with the Bitcoin and Ethereum whitepapers.
I have read the white papers.
I am familiar with the jargon.
The list that was provided was of abstract ideas without stating a specific market — any market.
The ethereum apps you linked to might be interesting from a technological standpoint, but they don’t really add value — they just are [banking function] or [payment function] with cryptocurrency.
The most generous example that I can come up with is that crypto makes it possible to displace PayPal and similar payment processing middlemen, but I’m not sure most people (outside of a few legal outliers) actually want those middlemen replaced. So even then, the issue isn’t that crypto is so great, it’s just that the fiat currency system is slightly inefficient while being incredibly fixable.
I guess I just don’t see the demand in the marketplace for what crypto is providing the supply for (other than as a tool for speculation... it’s really good at that).
I am familiar with the jargon.
The list that was provided was of abstract ideas without stating a specific market — any market.
The ethereum apps you linked to might be interesting from a technological standpoint, but they don’t really add value — they just are [banking function] or [payment function] with cryptocurrency.
The most generous example that I can come up with is that crypto makes it possible to displace PayPal and similar payment processing middlemen, but I’m not sure most people (outside of a few legal outliers) actually want those middlemen replaced. So even then, the issue isn’t that crypto is so great, it’s just that the fiat currency system is slightly inefficient while being incredibly fixable.
I guess I just don’t see the demand in the marketplace for what crypto is providing the supply for (other than as a tool for speculation... it’s really good at that).
Check out UniSwap and Aave if you haven't before. If those aren't compelling use cases, tell your friends to stay away.
It's sort of a chain letter. You already have to be in the game pretty deep to think these are revolutionary.
I will offer some criticisms:
Aave - Earning interest on a speculative asset with counter party risk seems a bit silly. Most of the risk is bundled in the asset itself. If you invested $1,000 in a token as a small percentage of your retirement portfolio you're probably hoping the return is 20x. In this incredibly logical scenario 2% is meaningless.
Uniswap - It's cool if you trade tokens because it skips the extra step of sending the asset to a centralized exchange, trading it, and withdrawing it. The centralized scenario might actually be cheaper. Either way it's only impressive if trading tokens is impressive. And at this point it's not.
I will offer some criticisms:
Aave - Earning interest on a speculative asset with counter party risk seems a bit silly. Most of the risk is bundled in the asset itself. If you invested $1,000 in a token as a small percentage of your retirement portfolio you're probably hoping the return is 20x. In this incredibly logical scenario 2% is meaningless.
Uniswap - It's cool if you trade tokens because it skips the extra step of sending the asset to a centralized exchange, trading it, and withdrawing it. The centralized scenario might actually be cheaper. Either way it's only impressive if trading tokens is impressive. And at this point it's not.
I showed them to two of my non-tech friends.
They both said some variation of “why would I want to use that?”
The product of crypto does a crappy job of selling itself.
They both said some variation of “why would I want to use that?”
The product of crypto does a crappy job of selling itself.
1. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/proof-stake-pos.asp Yes, proof of stake is exactly that.
2. Read the above comment and search some of those companies
3. Binance props Tether up, so the largest Centralized exchange may suffer dramatically, but a Tether collapse would likely drive users into better stablecoin projects like USDC and DAI, being generally good for the space
I kind of agree with what I interpret the article as saying - It was fun to work in the Ethereum space when people where there to have fun and there wasn’t so much money involved.
It’s certainly not fun to contribute to Geth nowadays when every bug can have huge consequences, and the community constantly demands more performance so they can have lower costs. Peter was very clear about the burnout this causes.
You can simplify that to - It’s fun to work on things when there isn’t pressure to work on them.
I’ve run into this multiple times in my life, including in the blockchain space, but it isn’t really anything specific to Ethereum. Though I do feel like the author has a limited view and is attributing this to be something Ethereum specific.
It’s certainly not fun to contribute to Geth nowadays when every bug can have huge consequences, and the community constantly demands more performance so they can have lower costs. Peter was very clear about the burnout this causes.
You can simplify that to - It’s fun to work on things when there isn’t pressure to work on them.
I’ve run into this multiple times in my life, including in the blockchain space, but it isn’t really anything specific to Ethereum. Though I do feel like the author has a limited view and is attributing this to be something Ethereum specific.
Not really something to be disappointed by, considering that money would eventually have to be involved in fintech?
I'm going to agree
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852
The only surprise is that HN is still a terrible place to discuss crypto. Not many posters or commenters seem to have much knowledge, which is strange for HN
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852
The only surprise is that HN is still a terrible place to discuss crypto. Not many posters or commenters seem to have much knowledge, which is strange for HN
Maybe somehow they simultaneously have plenty of knowledge and don't agree with you.
So in the spirit of education - what amazing things are there about ethereum or Bitcoin that will change my mind about their intrinsic value that I don't already know? (My current opinion is that the intrinsic value of PoW systems is negative due to low actual utility and very high cost.)
So in the spirit of education - what amazing things are there about ethereum or Bitcoin that will change my mind about their intrinsic value that I don't already know? (My current opinion is that the intrinsic value of PoW systems is negative due to low actual utility and very high cost.)
I tend to agree with your point of view that the utility (non-bitcoin) cryptocurrencies are something people who don't fully understand are really excited about, but that some experts dismiss.
For me in my daily work, this manifests itself as companies that want to use more obscure currencies as a transaction method in games. I say: "That currency is not on a lot of servers, how will you protect against 51% attacks?" They say: "All transactions are also verified by trusted servers.." So does the person understand what they are talking about, or are they used to talking to people (investors / business partners) who don't have a great understanding. Doubts raised.
However: There are times when experts dismiss new things and are wrong. So I try to keep an open mind.
For me in my daily work, this manifests itself as companies that want to use more obscure currencies as a transaction method in games. I say: "That currency is not on a lot of servers, how will you protect against 51% attacks?" They say: "All transactions are also verified by trusted servers.." So does the person understand what they are talking about, or are they used to talking to people (investors / business partners) who don't have a great understanding. Doubts raised.
However: There are times when experts dismiss new things and are wrong. So I try to keep an open mind.
That is just boring...
I like seeing things that have deep criticism of crypto and not just cheerleader blog posts. There are few on HN, the only notable ones aside from this post is the Tether fiasco. Most commenters did not seem very familiar with either subject vs others on HN. Maybe it's my imagination?
It's true there hasn't been a lot interesting going on. Though I'd argue the Dark Forest articles on Ethereum recovery were quite fascinating for illuminating a possibility I hadn't predicted and doing so quite lucidly. Of course, the message I took from the series as a whole was that this is a world full of people out to exploit your mistakes and the way to get around them is to have private connections external to the blockchain, so... It didn't shine a positive light, either.
But really, it kind of feels like the Tether investigation is the only thing shaking up the ecosystem in an interesting way, and it's doing so at a glacial pace. There really isn't much else new to say.
But really, it kind of feels like the Tether investigation is the only thing shaking up the ecosystem in an interesting way, and it's doing so at a glacial pace. There really isn't much else new to say.
What's the intrinsic value of USD? It's a garbage pre-mined token that's continually debased at the behest of a cabal of rich bankers so they can purchase real assets and consolidate the world's wealth. The petrodollar isn't exactly efficient either, considering the costs of the military industrial complex.
Every year the USD is worth less. Every year BTC is worth more.
Hope that helps.
Every year the USD is worth less. Every year BTC is worth more.
Hope that helps.
Nope. That's the sort of argument that makes your position weaker. You see, USD has a government that asserts it is legal tender for all debts within its borders and military power to back up those assertions.
These are the sort of real-world constraints that you can't just ignore. Attempting to do so makes me less charitable towards other assertions you might make. You come across as an idealist talking about their perfect dream world, not someone describing reality. Now don't get me wrong - it's important to have a perfect dream world. If you aren't working towards something, what are you doing?
But at the same time, you have to accept that "this system is perfect, if you also change these thousand other things" is not compelling to someone who doesn't share your idea of utopia. To convince someone like me, you have to explain how the system improves the world as it exists now.
These are the sort of real-world constraints that you can't just ignore. Attempting to do so makes me less charitable towards other assertions you might make. You come across as an idealist talking about their perfect dream world, not someone describing reality. Now don't get me wrong - it's important to have a perfect dream world. If you aren't working towards something, what are you doing?
But at the same time, you have to accept that "this system is perfect, if you also change these thousand other things" is not compelling to someone who doesn't share your idea of utopia. To convince someone like me, you have to explain how the system improves the world as it exists now.
> These are the sort of real-world constraints that you can't just ignore.
These constraints were drafted by a handful of rich white bankers in a secret meeting. I have no problem ignoring their constraints. It seems you do.
Can you imagine all the hot-takes HN would generate if email were invented today?
"You can't just encroach on the sovereignty of USPS like that" "Electronic Mail doesn't do anything the pony-express can't do" "If we allow Electron Mail then how do we attach a postage stamp"
Email adoption, like Crypto doesn't require convincing the entire population. The laggards will join eventually.
These constraints were drafted by a handful of rich white bankers in a secret meeting. I have no problem ignoring their constraints. It seems you do.
Can you imagine all the hot-takes HN would generate if email were invented today?
"You can't just encroach on the sovereignty of USPS like that" "Electronic Mail doesn't do anything the pony-express can't do" "If we allow Electron Mail then how do we attach a postage stamp"
Email adoption, like Crypto doesn't require convincing the entire population. The laggards will join eventually.
While it's tempting to conflate the beneficiaries of our problems with those who created them, reality is not that simple. Blaming things on an all-powerful cabal of bankers is nearing QAnon levels of seeking a small number of people to blame for systemic issues. That sort of reductionism isn't useful. Action taken based on it is going to never touch any real problem. At most it'll change who benefits from them.
I think we can do better.
(As for your email counterfactual... Why? Do you find it an effective rhetorical tactic to imagine what people might do instead of looking at what people have done?)
I think we can do better.
(As for your email counterfactual... Why? Do you find it an effective rhetorical tactic to imagine what people might do instead of looking at what people have done?)
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies," Jefferson wrote. "If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around(these banks) will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
This Jeff guy, what a radical. Probably will never amount to anything.
This Jeff guy, what a radical. Probably will never amount to anything.
That is not even a real Thomas Jefferson quote.
I remember when email became a thing.
No one said those things. Why would they?
No one said those things. Why would they?
Not strange at all!
HN seems wildly pro crypto compared to most places. It’s like Tesla which isn’t universally supported, but still gets a lot more coverage than Ford.
People do bring up quite reasonable objections like environmental costs, but it stories get a lot of upvotes and suggesting many people are strong supporters.
People do bring up quite reasonable objections like environmental costs, but it stories get a lot of upvotes and suggesting many people are strong supporters.
Re environmental costs, I have yet to hear anyone make an analysis of the environmental cost of the banking system or an equivalent; that is, how much to warm all the offices, the computers and servers, the transportation costs of cars & planes for all the employees.
Also, proof of stake will reduce 99% of the environmental cost.
Also, proof of stake will reduce 99% of the environmental cost.
> I have yet to hear anyone make an analysis of the environmental cost of the banking system
I immediately found this: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-26/is-bit...
"One Bitcoin transaction would generate the CO2 equivalent to 706,765 swipes of a Visa credit card,"
Another way to look at it:
Bitcoin uses over 0.5% of the world's electricity: https://interestingengineering.com/why-bitcoin-mining-consum...
With that, Bitcoin does about 300,000 transactions a day. https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-b...
But there are over a billion daily credit card transactions alone - 3000 times as much.
So if each credit card transaction were replaced by a Bitcoin transaction, we'd use 30 times as much electricity as the entire planet produces.
---
These numbers are so grossly lopsided and so widely bandied about that when I hear someone say, "I have yet to hear anyone make an analysis of the environmental cost" I think, "Perhaps you don't want to hear it."
I immediately found this: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-26/is-bit...
"One Bitcoin transaction would generate the CO2 equivalent to 706,765 swipes of a Visa credit card,"
Another way to look at it:
Bitcoin uses over 0.5% of the world's electricity: https://interestingengineering.com/why-bitcoin-mining-consum...
With that, Bitcoin does about 300,000 transactions a day. https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-b...
But there are over a billion daily credit card transactions alone - 3000 times as much.
So if each credit card transaction were replaced by a Bitcoin transaction, we'd use 30 times as much electricity as the entire planet produces.
---
These numbers are so grossly lopsided and so widely bandied about that when I hear someone say, "I have yet to hear anyone make an analysis of the environmental cost" I think, "Perhaps you don't want to hear it."
The banking system _exists_. It's what powers all our daily transactions. It's what has been tried and tested for hundreds of years, and got regulated. Even if Ethereum or coin-of-the-week takes off, this existing banking system will not go away. What you're doing is a well known crypto-lover tactic to distract from the fact that cryptocurrencies are an ecological catastrophe.
Meanwhile, we're burning coal to produce bitcoin whose only value is that number gets green and goes up. Eth is slightly better on that point, but still wasted multiple TWh of electricity while it was in PoW mode, and it still is today.
Meanwhile, we're burning coal to produce bitcoin whose only value is that number gets green and goes up. Eth is slightly better on that point, but still wasted multiple TWh of electricity while it was in PoW mode, and it still is today.
I strongly disagree with this loaded characterization of mining as "waste". Converting power into value is the opposite of waste, and that's not even addressing the network security that it provides. Mining provides useful work. If you don't like cryptocurrency, fine, but don't pretend that no value is being created or that no purpose exists.
Waste would be an incandescent bulb that throws away the majority of its energy generating heat that isn't used for any purpose.
Waste would be an incandescent bulb that throws away the majority of its energy generating heat that isn't used for any purpose.
The issue isn’t the useful product of light or a functional crypto system, the issue is the amount of waste heat produced by the light bulb or data center.
This should be obvious when you consider proof of work systems that generate less waste heat by using a memory bound rather than a computationally bound algorithm. They both operate on the principle of wealth destruction as all proof of work algorithms do, but you get different externalities.
Interestingly, if you found something really useful to do with the waste heat of crypto then the systems would become roughly equivalent.
PS: The idea of a memory bound algorithm is 1 million dollars of RAM consumes less energy than 1 million dollars of ASIC’s.
This should be obvious when you consider proof of work systems that generate less waste heat by using a memory bound rather than a computationally bound algorithm. They both operate on the principle of wealth destruction as all proof of work algorithms do, but you get different externalities.
Interestingly, if you found something really useful to do with the waste heat of crypto then the systems would become roughly equivalent.
PS: The idea of a memory bound algorithm is 1 million dollars of RAM consumes less energy than 1 million dollars of ASIC’s.
the issue is the amount of waste heat produced by the light bulb or data center.
..which in the case of the average crypto, is overshadowed many times over. One block mined equates to $333K worth BTC generated alone, and that's not counting the value of every transaction included in that block. A block happens every 10 minutes give or take, so in an hour, that's about 2 million worth of coin generated and 13K transactions.
There's no way on earth every bitcoin miner, combined, is using $2M+ worth of electricity every hour, even factoring in negative environmental externalities (which in the case of crypto mining, will be lower than most people think given their proximity to renewable, hence cheap, energy.)
It is, objectively speaking, not a waste.
..which in the case of the average crypto, is overshadowed many times over. One block mined equates to $333K worth BTC generated alone, and that's not counting the value of every transaction included in that block. A block happens every 10 minutes give or take, so in an hour, that's about 2 million worth of coin generated and 13K transactions.
There's no way on earth every bitcoin miner, combined, is using $2M+ worth of electricity every hour, even factoring in negative environmental externalities (which in the case of crypto mining, will be lower than most people think given their proximity to renewable, hence cheap, energy.)
It is, objectively speaking, not a waste.
Coal power plants generate more value in the from of electricity than they lose value as waste heat. Otherwise they wouldn’t operate. But, clearly the creation of value is independent of something being wasted as you can have more or less efficient power plants that generate the same value using more or less fuel and thus more or less waste heat.
Similarly, as I just pointed out different algorithms would use more or less energy and therefore be more or less efficient. Thus the heat produced is a waste byproduct mining, and electricity is the fuel. A more efficient process simply uses less fuel though it may have higher capital costs.
The same is true of say cars, you’re burning gas because driving is useful. But, increasing efficiency means less fuel while creating identical value etc etc.
Similarly, as I just pointed out different algorithms would use more or less energy and therefore be more or less efficient. Thus the heat produced is a waste byproduct mining, and electricity is the fuel. A more efficient process simply uses less fuel though it may have higher capital costs.
The same is true of say cars, you’re burning gas because driving is useful. But, increasing efficiency means less fuel while creating identical value etc etc.
But that heat you speak of applies to any kind of long-running computation. Whether that be render farms, ML model training, distributed computing like BOINC, or anything else with similar properties.
It seems to me that crypto is being unfairly singled out. Things that are digital have meaningful existence.
It seems to me that crypto is being unfairly singled out. Things that are digital have meaningful existence.
Increasing efficiency is a huge aspect of every other field in computing with companies literally spend 10’s of billions of dollars increasing efficiency of software and hardware every year.
It’s directly offensive to many people in the field that an inefficient first implementation is maintained because people’s investments in hardware are considered more valuable than anything else. Not latency, not transactions per second, not environmental costs, just maximize the value of their hardware investments.
Completely understandable, yet still horrific.
It’s directly offensive to many people in the field that an inefficient first implementation is maintained because people’s investments in hardware are considered more valuable than anything else. Not latency, not transactions per second, not environmental costs, just maximize the value of their hardware investments.
Completely understandable, yet still horrific.
It's a complete waste. It turns energy into nothing at all.
Comparing the banking sector to crypto is wildly optimistic. Crypto is still smaller than just the Gold market both in number of transactions and total stored value of 9.4 trillion. Gold transactions, mining, and storage still produces significantly less CO2 while also being useful in industry.
That’s not meant as an attack, it’s simply a ballpark comparison. For those pro crypto take it a sign of possible future growth.
That’s not meant as an attack, it’s simply a ballpark comparison. For those pro crypto take it a sign of possible future growth.
The banking system does a lot of other things than transaction processing. Mortgages, loans commercial banking, trade finance, acquisition financing etc are 95% of what banks do, and cryptocoins won't replace them in any way.
Of course even if you count all that, the power consumption per transaction will be at least five orders of magnitude lower than the 0.6MWh per transaction in BTC.
Of course even if you count all that, the power consumption per transaction will be at least five orders of magnitude lower than the 0.6MWh per transaction in BTC.
This whataboutism ignores the logic of the question: the banking system is not incentivized to burn power. You would expect each node to try to minimize their input costs to maximize returns. For a given unit of compute, putting in more energy does not increase profits for any participant in the traditional banking system. This isn’t the case for cryptocurrencies, so they are asked a fair question.
What do you see as the killer use case for crypto currency/blockchain/smart contracts, etc.? I mined a few Eth in the very early days, and hung onto it until selling recently. I sold because I couldn't convince myself they had any value not based on the "greater fool theory". Was I wrong?
I have the same question too. Beyond speculation/greed, what are real world use cases of blockchain that can't be done with existing/mature tech? Nano seems nice for instant fee-less transfer. Other than that?
Take for instance, my cousin's husband in India, who currently holds a bunch of black money in either INR or in gold, can buy stablecoins such as DAI, then park it in various DeFi solutions to earn a nice return on it. So not only he is gaining an exposure in Dollar instead of a highly inflationary currency like INR, he is also able to make it work instead of burying it in a bag until he needs it.
Before you start with the morality of the situation, just ignore that. You wanted to see a real use case, and I am telling you about it.
As it turns out, not everyone shares your moral code, or lives in the similar legal system which allows them the similar property rights.
Replace that person with a Venezuelan whose currency is completely destroyed and Venezuelan Americans are trying to provide their families with money.
Before you start with the morality of the situation, just ignore that. You wanted to see a real use case, and I am telling you about it.
As it turns out, not everyone shares your moral code, or lives in the similar legal system which allows them the similar property rights.
Replace that person with a Venezuelan whose currency is completely destroyed and Venezuelan Americans are trying to provide their families with money.
Ok, that makes sense. I need to read up on DeFi, don't know much about it.
Borrowing, lending, decentralized exchanges, innovations like flash loans that are just not possible in current financial system.
The sky is the limit in terms of innovations possible, it's literally some code running on the global computer that is Ethereum.
The sky is the limit in terms of innovations possible, it's literally some code running on the global computer that is Ethereum.
How does borrowing work in an automated, trustless environment? Doesn’t someone have to decide whether you’re likely to pay back the loan with money you haven’t earned yet?
It's over-collaterized, so you put more crypto than the loan value.
You might say "why the hell would I do that?", in order of importance: 1) you hold on to your asset's appreciation, 2) access the liquidity, 3) avoid capital gains tax.
You might say "why the hell would I do that?", in order of importance: 1) you hold on to your asset's appreciation, 2) access the liquidity, 3) avoid capital gains tax.
So the killer use case is a scheme to avoid capital gains taxes? Sounds about right.
You realize elites are already doing this with USD. It's not unique to crypto.
I think in the past someone mentioned about under-collaterized loan. It's based on your reputation. The idea is you use your Ethereum account to do activities. Based on these activities, people could give you a loan. Such activities can be something like answering questions (imagine Stackoverflow but the authentication runs on Ethereum).
Okay, but that seems like a pretty small niche? Most people don’t borrow just to save money on taxes on their cryptocurrency gains.
They might borrow to hold on to their asset's appreciation.
You could lock in the gain by selling at the current price, so that still sounds like tax avoidance. Or possibly leverage, if you think the price will go up more?
Yes, you could leverage, you could hedge yourself by buying stocks. Or you could just spend the money on whatever else you want.
Look up Aave it’s Open Source, I was surprised at first but it seems to work. Also flash loans are an interesting new financial tool previously not available for individuals.
You have to put down collateral. Same idea as reverse mortgages on houses, or taking out an RSP-backed LOC.
Not only are all those things possible (other than decentralized, because that has a high cost and no tangible benefit) in the normal banking system but there's apps for them already. And they are from regulated companies and you have legal protections.
Flash loans aren't really; nobody will lend you money against zero collateral that you pay back instantaneously after a transaction, because in the traditional banking system there's always a risk of default and a transaction cost for enforcing your rights in case of default. With a flash loan the whole transaction fails if at the end of the transaction you don't have sufficient funds to pay it back, while you're guaranteed payback if it succeeds.
A flash loan is a loan you pay back immediately...
So you're right, this isn't a thing that exists today outside of crypto because it's not needed outside of crypto. Someone who can pay a loan back as part of the same transaction in which the loan is issued is not a default risk, and in the real world you just don't bother with the loan: you just pay for the underlying transaction directly.
So you're right, this isn't a thing that exists today outside of crypto because it's not needed outside of crypto. Someone who can pay a loan back as part of the same transaction in which the loan is issued is not a default risk, and in the real world you just don't bother with the loan: you just pay for the underlying transaction directly.
Maybe people are tired of getting an anal probe just to open an account and move money/ complete financial transactions today?
One, IMO, is a provably fair casino (Blackjack, Poker, etc.) that is decentralized and unregulatable.
>The Hacker News community has long been anti-crypto
Are we really allowing blockchains to annex the word "crypto"? "Crypto" is "cryptography". HN is not "anti-crypto", it is staunchly pro-encryption.
Are we really allowing blockchains to annex the word "crypto"? "Crypto" is "cryptography". HN is not "anti-crypto", it is staunchly pro-encryption.
Help me understand the appeal of NFT art. I love digital art, but I don't see the appeal of spending money to get the token certifying you as the owner. The image/work is still out there and can be viewed/downloaded by other people. You don't even control it, unless the artist agrees to send you all of the files and delete them on his or her system. Your name doesn't even appear next to the piece when people look at it.
Sure, usually the tokens come with a print, and you support the artist, but those are things you can do via other means. What is the NFT adding? It seems only slightly more authentic than "buying" a star from a star registry.
Sure, usually the tokens come with a print, and you support the artist, but those are things you can do via other means. What is the NFT adding? It seems only slightly more authentic than "buying" a star from a star registry.
NFT art seems like the dumbest/faddiest/scammiest idea to come out of the crypto sure yet, and not just because the art market is super faddy and maybe scammy already.
I know artists that think this is going to be their ticket. But it was never the lack of crypto that kept them from making money. It was the lack of any consumer value to their art.
There are two ways to make money as an artist: you either make a few, huge pieces that sell to very rich people (making your yearly bank on one or two pieces), or you make a huge number of easily reproduceable pieces that sell to the general populace. The difficulty in both is not the creation of the pieces. It's the marketing and sales pipeline. Both rely on selling a purchaser a narrative on what the art will mean to them. Exclusivity in the former, worldliness in the latter.
If you can't crack that marketing problem, you're going to ask equally zero pieces as NFT than as any other medium. And if you can crack that marketing problem, selling it as NFT does nothing for you as the artist.
I know artists that think this is going to be their ticket. But it was never the lack of crypto that kept them from making money. It was the lack of any consumer value to their art.
There are two ways to make money as an artist: you either make a few, huge pieces that sell to very rich people (making your yearly bank on one or two pieces), or you make a huge number of easily reproduceable pieces that sell to the general populace. The difficulty in both is not the creation of the pieces. It's the marketing and sales pipeline. Both rely on selling a purchaser a narrative on what the art will mean to them. Exclusivity in the former, worldliness in the latter.
If you can't crack that marketing problem, you're going to ask equally zero pieces as NFT than as any other medium. And if you can crack that marketing problem, selling it as NFT does nothing for you as the artist.
Why do people buy originals rather than prints, often at a 10x markup? Why do they get certified dog breeds rather than mutts from the animal shelter? Why do people pay for skins and unique items in video games? Why will people spend $300K on a college degree when the coursework itself is available for free on the Internet?
A lot of times, people just want a limited-supply token from a third-party saying "yes, I paid for this, and that distinguishes me from the hoi polloi who got it for free".
A lot of times, people just want a limited-supply token from a third-party saying "yes, I paid for this, and that distinguishes me from the hoi polloi who got it for free".
A digital mcguffin doesn't have the properties of a unique painting on a canvas.
NFTs are not easy to understand, but sit within the intersection of these two questions:
1. What is the value of art?
2. What is the value of money?
When we look for analogues, they're of the industrial era, things about intellectual property, branding, merchandise etc. This is a way of directly speculating on an idea. Is it a good idea? If so, then other people will want it, right? Then, the token must have value. There are no gatekeepers or enforcers to say otherwise.
We have barely begun to grasp what that means.
1. What is the value of art?
2. What is the value of money?
When we look for analogues, they're of the industrial era, things about intellectual property, branding, merchandise etc. This is a way of directly speculating on an idea. Is it a good idea? If so, then other people will want it, right? Then, the token must have value. There are no gatekeepers or enforcers to say otherwise.
We have barely begun to grasp what that means.
It creates artificial scarcity for a digital product
It's been ten years. The killer app for crypto is just one thing - crime. Money laundering, tax evasion, purchasing contraband.
And yes, people have made a lot of money on pure speculation too. That's not an application.
Until we see some actual real-world uses for crypto - full-time, serious uses, not someone buying a pizza as a demo - that aren't crime, we have every logical reason to be desperately skeptical of this overhyped technology.
And yes, people have made a lot of money on pure speculation too. That's not an application.
Until we see some actual real-world uses for crypto - full-time, serious uses, not someone buying a pizza as a demo - that aren't crime, we have every logical reason to be desperately skeptical of this overhyped technology.
If you joined the Ethereum community in 2014-2016, topics like DeFi and NFT were not in the discussions. These things are pure speculative bullshit imported wholesale from the established financial system.
The point of Ethereum was to build an open world computer, to decentralize power, to build collective intelligence, and to supersede the corrupt global financial system with non-speculative economic models that served the needs of humanity and the planet.
The point of Ethereum was to build an open world computer, to decentralize power, to build collective intelligence, and to supersede the corrupt global financial system with non-speculative economic models that served the needs of humanity and the planet.
Yep, this is it. There has been a graduation from toy to tool. And...there is also rising demand for lower overheads to get the same functionality, which means there is serious competition for good tech now. If BTC and ETH are examples of "worse is better", there are some Right Things just around the corner.
Tech has major entrenched interests in maintening the financial status quo
HN doesnt like blockchain because its disrupting their jobs.
I really, really don't understand where cryptocurrencies are going. Billions have been poured in this technology for almost no actual return technologically wise.
And I understand, because interest are not aligned. It really seems like nobody actually care about advancing the state of art, except actual researcher who work in universities and not in crypto startups...
Cryptocurrencies had a goal and a usefulness when they were at least used to buy drugs online and send a few bucks to your friends. Now you cannot even use them for that. Everybody saw the rise of the bitcoin valuation and since then, all that matter is how much you can make by trading crypto. The actual usefulness of the crypto, what it can do, is utterly irrelevant. This is proven by btc being one of the most traded and valuable crypto even though it is one of the crypto with the less feature. Most btc trade are not even going through the bitcoin network but through third party, so btc even fail at its own goal.
And because crypto are seen as an investment, everybody is holding, and nobody is using it, and you would be a fool to do so, since tomorrow, your 1 shitcoin might be worth 3 times what you brought it for. And no, "stable coin" is not an answer since the only thing they have been used for is to trade between crypto...
Then, to make matter even worse, the crypto community is its own worst enemy. Since it has been proven that, to make a few buck, all it takes is "creating" your own crypto and mining the first few block before other get in on it, you get thousand of startup coming out of nowhere proposing new crypto that are literally clone of other crypto. Tell me, what is the difference between Polkadot and Kusama ? Or is there even a significant technological difference between Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc ?
We are more than 5 years into this crypto mania with an ungodly amount of money being thrown at it and there has been no significant technological progress, no crypto that is useful enough to be used by anybody else but crypto-fanatic trying to pump and dump it, and this is now becoming one of the worse climate disaster in a while. And all the while, every people invested in crypto will just talk about price, valuation, investment, hodling, etc. It is clear what is their real purpose.
If you want to see actual progress in distributed computing, look for scientific paper coming from universities.
And I understand, because interest are not aligned. It really seems like nobody actually care about advancing the state of art, except actual researcher who work in universities and not in crypto startups...
Cryptocurrencies had a goal and a usefulness when they were at least used to buy drugs online and send a few bucks to your friends. Now you cannot even use them for that. Everybody saw the rise of the bitcoin valuation and since then, all that matter is how much you can make by trading crypto. The actual usefulness of the crypto, what it can do, is utterly irrelevant. This is proven by btc being one of the most traded and valuable crypto even though it is one of the crypto with the less feature. Most btc trade are not even going through the bitcoin network but through third party, so btc even fail at its own goal.
And because crypto are seen as an investment, everybody is holding, and nobody is using it, and you would be a fool to do so, since tomorrow, your 1 shitcoin might be worth 3 times what you brought it for. And no, "stable coin" is not an answer since the only thing they have been used for is to trade between crypto...
Then, to make matter even worse, the crypto community is its own worst enemy. Since it has been proven that, to make a few buck, all it takes is "creating" your own crypto and mining the first few block before other get in on it, you get thousand of startup coming out of nowhere proposing new crypto that are literally clone of other crypto. Tell me, what is the difference between Polkadot and Kusama ? Or is there even a significant technological difference between Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc ?
We are more than 5 years into this crypto mania with an ungodly amount of money being thrown at it and there has been no significant technological progress, no crypto that is useful enough to be used by anybody else but crypto-fanatic trying to pump and dump it, and this is now becoming one of the worse climate disaster in a while. And all the while, every people invested in crypto will just talk about price, valuation, investment, hodling, etc. It is clear what is their real purpose.
If you want to see actual progress in distributed computing, look for scientific paper coming from universities.
IOHK who is behind Cardano does quite a lot of scentific research and formalized and developed innovative concepts: https://iohk.io/en/research/library/.
It's still very experimental and yes, there are no clear applications yet, but there is some genuine research being made.
It's still very experimental and yes, there are no clear applications yet, but there is some genuine research being made.
The same can be said about Lisk with 35 blockchain technology research papers already published and another 19 blockchain interoperability research papers to be published in spring.
https://github.com/LiskHQ/lips
https://github.com/LiskHQ/lips
> Polkadot and Kusama
I don't think you're actually expecting an answer, but the main difference is that Kusama is a "canary chain" with faster iteration speed (governance votes last 7 days instead of 28 days for Polkadot).
https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/en/learn-kusama-vs-polkad...
You can see it as a long-living testnet.
I don't think you're actually expecting an answer, but the main difference is that Kusama is a "canary chain" with faster iteration speed (governance votes last 7 days instead of 28 days for Polkadot).
https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/en/learn-kusama-vs-polkad...
You can see it as a long-living testnet.
Actually it was nice to have an answer :) . So at least this one make sense.
Same. I was super excited for bitcoin ten years ago, but now I've experienced first hand how bad bitcoin is as a currency. Most people aren't even thinking of using it like that. It's just sitting in their coinbase account. So you've just got a bunch of people who all expect to make money from each other. Without any actual value it's a zero sum game, folks!
In practice you are waiting for technologically illiterate people to lose their Bitcoin or old people to pass away without revealing their wallet to anyone. That's a pretty weird form of "investment".
Thats actually pretty similar to people that invest in collectible cards (e.g. sports or trading card games like Magic). One part of the value increasing is due to supply attrition. Existing cards get either damaged or lost.
This is itself a (funny?) form of a Tontine!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine
> Without any actual value it's a zero sum game, folks!
It's less than zero-sum. A significant portion of what's being put into the system, is just being burned, in the form of converting electricity to heat without doing much if any useful work.
It's less than zero-sum. A significant portion of what's being put into the system, is just being burned, in the form of converting electricity to heat without doing much if any useful work.
Look at the Bitcoin as the defacto reference of value for other crypto that do solve other problems. It's import to have a store of value that's not traditional fiat (like USD).
>Or is there even a significant technological difference between Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc ?
I would like to argue that the difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash isn't even a technological one. Every dunce can increase the block size. It's purely a political/social difference. It's laughable that cryptocurrencies market themselves as avoiding government control but yet they suffer from the exact same problems.
I would like to argue that the difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash isn't even a technological one. Every dunce can increase the block size. It's purely a political/social difference. It's laughable that cryptocurrencies market themselves as avoiding government control but yet they suffer from the exact same problems.
Arguably most crypto currencies are run by oligopolies, putting them in a worse place than even the troubled democracies of the west. How small is the pool of people who control 51% of the hashing power for any given currency? Probably not terribly large.
>Billions have been poured in this technology for almost no actual return technologically wise.
This is just ignorance. There are plenty of projects out there that are building off each other, improving, and trying new things. Later in your post you mention several projects yet there you are claiming there is no new technology being done?
>It really seems like nobody actually care about advancing the state of art, except actual researcher who work in universities and not in crypto startups...
So researchers are doing research as opposed to startups. I am falling to see the problem with your statement. Yes, people intentionally trying to find new solutions to problems cryptocurrency offers will be the ones finding solutions.
>This is proven by btc being one of the most traded and valuable crypto even though it is one of the crypto with the less feature.
I am sure you can find plenty of companies that had better technology but are doing worse than their competitors whether it be because of bad marketing, first mover advantage / network effects, etc.
>And because crypto are seen as an investment, everybody is holding, and nobody is using it
Oh please. You can go to any block explore and see tons of transactions going on. People are using smart contracts all the time.
>And no, "stable coin" is not an answer since the only thing they have been used for is to trade between crypto...
This is short sighted. There is a desire for being able to know that your money isn't going to crash before you have to pay your bills. It will be easier to onboard people to using crypto if it is just using something like dollars. It also gets lid of problems like buying crypto to buy something then the price crashes and you can no longer afford what you wanted to bought. Or the opposite where you buy something and then the crypto doubles and you get mad for "overpaying."
>you get thousand of startup coming out of nowhere proposing new crypto that are literally clone of other crypto
So what? If you don't want to use a fork, then don't use it. This is how open source works. Anyone can take your code and create a company around it.
>Tell me, what is the difference between Polkadot and Kusama ? Or is there even a significant technological difference between Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc ?
How about you look up the differences yourself. Not everyone agrees with what design decisions get made so forks are created that are free to make different decisions.
This is just ignorance. There are plenty of projects out there that are building off each other, improving, and trying new things. Later in your post you mention several projects yet there you are claiming there is no new technology being done?
>It really seems like nobody actually care about advancing the state of art, except actual researcher who work in universities and not in crypto startups...
So researchers are doing research as opposed to startups. I am falling to see the problem with your statement. Yes, people intentionally trying to find new solutions to problems cryptocurrency offers will be the ones finding solutions.
>This is proven by btc being one of the most traded and valuable crypto even though it is one of the crypto with the less feature.
I am sure you can find plenty of companies that had better technology but are doing worse than their competitors whether it be because of bad marketing, first mover advantage / network effects, etc.
>And because crypto are seen as an investment, everybody is holding, and nobody is using it
Oh please. You can go to any block explore and see tons of transactions going on. People are using smart contracts all the time.
>And no, "stable coin" is not an answer since the only thing they have been used for is to trade between crypto...
This is short sighted. There is a desire for being able to know that your money isn't going to crash before you have to pay your bills. It will be easier to onboard people to using crypto if it is just using something like dollars. It also gets lid of problems like buying crypto to buy something then the price crashes and you can no longer afford what you wanted to bought. Or the opposite where you buy something and then the crypto doubles and you get mad for "overpaying."
>you get thousand of startup coming out of nowhere proposing new crypto that are literally clone of other crypto
So what? If you don't want to use a fork, then don't use it. This is how open source works. Anyone can take your code and create a company around it.
>Tell me, what is the difference between Polkadot and Kusama ? Or is there even a significant technological difference between Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc ?
How about you look up the differences yourself. Not everyone agrees with what design decisions get made so forks are created that are free to make different decisions.
It's going slower than the WWW but I feel it could be just as big. There are major problems with big banks, social networks, and the advertising model of the web and crypto can solve all of this: decentralization, democratization, and micropayments all in one. No doubt it will create its own problems but there is big potential. Just look at what's going on with Ethereum and Defi instead of the older generation of deflationary currencies.
But you are right, there are way too many attempts at new networks and currencies, when we need to be consolidating around the best of those and building up the application layer. I think there are huge opportunities for people who create the killer apps for crypto.
But you are right, there are way too many attempts at new networks and currencies, when we need to be consolidating around the best of those and building up the application layer. I think there are huge opportunities for people who create the killer apps for crypto.
Why do people still lump crypto and micropayments together? Decentralization is always going to be less efficient and thus more costly than centralized equivalents which makes it just about the worst solution for micropayments.
There's a big difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash: the intent to scale on-chain while Bitcoin has given up that leading to today's ridiculous transaction fees.
Monero is the best approach to actual privacy as it conceals sender, receiver and transaction amount for all transactions.
I do agree that the speculation focus is misguided, but there are cryptos that are useful the way Bitcoin was meant to be.
Monero is the best approach to actual privacy as it conceals sender, receiver and transaction amount for all transactions.
I do agree that the speculation focus is misguided, but there are cryptos that are useful the way Bitcoin was meant to be.
I consider Monero useful but most of its users are unethical. It's pretty telling that the author of the blog post bashes it in the exact way you should. "Don't buy it" as if it was meant to be speculated with.
Wasn’t Bitcoin painted in a similar light before it became mainstream? Monero’s users being unethical (in your opinion) is a testament to the usefulness of the technology, not the other way around. Would you say the same thing about Tor?
All the claims of Bitcoin being anonymous were either incredibly misguided or delusional. Bitcoin is arguably far less anonymous than even cash, as it creates a permanent record of transactions. If your account is ever de-anonymized, and there are good techniques to do that, then any transaction you’ve ever sent ever is going to be visible. The only privacy benefit Bitcoin has over cash is that it’s easier to transmit it remotely, which eliminates in person risk.
Monero is at least designed to be anonymous. It’s possible that some flaw or mistake will eventually be uncovered that will break its privacy, but the underlying structure is better.
Monero is at least designed to be anonymous. It’s possible that some flaw or mistake will eventually be uncovered that will break its privacy, but the underlying structure is better.
i would replace unethical with illegal and that would be right.
IIRC Dogecoin was born as a meme. And now I'm supposed to believe it is a serious investment or cryptocurrency?
Dogecoin is, and always was, a meme; a joke cryptocurrency. But it developed a life of its own and, unfortunately, opportunists have been putting Doge on fish hooks and, surprisingly, catching a helluva lot of fish.
It is not, and never will be, a serious investment. The problem is, there are still fish that will believe it is a serious "opportunity" if they're shown the right kind of profit figures, truthful or otherwise.
It is not, and never will be, a serious investment. The problem is, there are still fish that will believe it is a serious "opportunity" if they're shown the right kind of profit figures, truthful or otherwise.
Nobody is claiming that it's a serious investment.
It's unfortunate that most cryptocurrencies are just as serious as Dogecoin.
> And no, "stable coin" is not an answer since the only thing they have been used for is to trade between crypto...
Our (blockchain-adjacent) company received millions in equity investment in the form of stablecoin transfers. Those investors were so heavily “in” crypto, that they didn’t have any liquidity of useful size in any actual fiat currency, so they wouldn’t have been able to invest in us in “real money.” We only got those investments by being willing to accept stablecoins.
Compounding that advantage, there were no exchange fees at any point during the transaction for accepting investments from foreign holders (as they were already holding USDC—where a foreign investor would find it a lot harder to hold actual USD in their local banks); and there were only minimal, flat transfer fees (i.e. gas) to get the whole investment done, as opposed to the percentile fees charged for international wire transfers. I would say that that was a pretty useful use-case for stablecoins.
Of course, when we received these stablecoin investments, we gradually offramped them for actual fiat money. What were we going to do, pay our employees in stablecoins? And at that point we had to pay exchange fees, because we aren’t even a US company ourselves, and so we were off-ramping for our own local currency, not USD. (Though this was cheaper than expected, as we directly off-ramped the USDC to our local currency through a provider that kept liquidity in our local currency. We never needed to get the regular banking infrastructure involved until the final step—depositing fiat money already denominated in our local currency, into our local banks.)
But just because we didn’t have a reason to keep/spend the original stablecoins, doesn’t mean it wasn’t useful for the asset to remain in stablecoin form until it reached us. It was certainly more useful to our investors to hold USDC than to hold fiat currency.
> Tell me, what is the difference between Polkadot and Kusama ? Or is there even a significant technological difference between Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc ?
Is there a significant technological difference between the central banks of the US, India, China, Canada, Japan, the UK, etc.? Not really. The difference is that different countries are running them, and those countries are effectively different “political technologies.” The choice comes down to the relative merits of the political technology driving the progress and decision-making in the monetary technology.
In this sense, it’s sort of like if there’s a single open-source project that was originally BSD/MIT-licensed, that has been forked a bunch of times, with each fork replacing that license with something else and establishing a separate “structure” to its maintainership (e.g. one fork being an Apache Software Foundation project; one fork being a reference implementation governed by an enterprise “open-membership” body; one fork being GPLed, run by a BDFL who accepts PRs, but is very opinionated, and suggests you fork their fork if you want to go a different way; etc.) Those are all different “political technologies” driving the same project forward in different directions!
Our (blockchain-adjacent) company received millions in equity investment in the form of stablecoin transfers. Those investors were so heavily “in” crypto, that they didn’t have any liquidity of useful size in any actual fiat currency, so they wouldn’t have been able to invest in us in “real money.” We only got those investments by being willing to accept stablecoins.
Compounding that advantage, there were no exchange fees at any point during the transaction for accepting investments from foreign holders (as they were already holding USDC—where a foreign investor would find it a lot harder to hold actual USD in their local banks); and there were only minimal, flat transfer fees (i.e. gas) to get the whole investment done, as opposed to the percentile fees charged for international wire transfers. I would say that that was a pretty useful use-case for stablecoins.
Of course, when we received these stablecoin investments, we gradually offramped them for actual fiat money. What were we going to do, pay our employees in stablecoins? And at that point we had to pay exchange fees, because we aren’t even a US company ourselves, and so we were off-ramping for our own local currency, not USD. (Though this was cheaper than expected, as we directly off-ramped the USDC to our local currency through a provider that kept liquidity in our local currency. We never needed to get the regular banking infrastructure involved until the final step—depositing fiat money already denominated in our local currency, into our local banks.)
But just because we didn’t have a reason to keep/spend the original stablecoins, doesn’t mean it wasn’t useful for the asset to remain in stablecoin form until it reached us. It was certainly more useful to our investors to hold USDC than to hold fiat currency.
> Tell me, what is the difference between Polkadot and Kusama ? Or is there even a significant technological difference between Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc ?
Is there a significant technological difference between the central banks of the US, India, China, Canada, Japan, the UK, etc.? Not really. The difference is that different countries are running them, and those countries are effectively different “political technologies.” The choice comes down to the relative merits of the political technology driving the progress and decision-making in the monetary technology.
In this sense, it’s sort of like if there’s a single open-source project that was originally BSD/MIT-licensed, that has been forked a bunch of times, with each fork replacing that license with something else and establishing a separate “structure” to its maintainership (e.g. one fork being an Apache Software Foundation project; one fork being a reference implementation governed by an enterprise “open-membership” body; one fork being GPLed, run by a BDFL who accepts PRs, but is very opinionated, and suggests you fork their fork if you want to go a different way; etc.) Those are all different “political technologies” driving the same project forward in different directions!
So why didn’t your investors offramp to fiat themselves, and then transfer you USD? Or are you saying they were in foreign countries and had non-USD denominated bank accounts, this you saved them currency conversion costs?
> I need a hero, and by that, I mean that I need a usable methodology for building scaleable decentralized apps. Yes, you've heard that right. We don't need more "Ethereum killers" that can do 10x more tx/s than Ethereum. Those are useless.
> Instead, we need an approach for the average Joe developer to create their idea within the Ethereum ecosystem without the need for hardcore unproven technologies.
So instead of fixing the actual problem, Ethereum scalability, we will do what? This technology was developed by a few guys, most of them already left. It was meant to fix Bitcoin "smart contracts" (there is a such thing).
Tech behind Ethereum is outdated. Even newer versions rehash the same broken idea with sharding. We got 10 years and billions poured into consensus research. There are actual papers and universities doing this stuff. There are github projects that do stuff like decentralized auctions, mixers...
> Instead, we need an approach for the average Joe developer to create their idea within the Ethereum ecosystem without the need for hardcore unproven technologies.
So instead of fixing the actual problem, Ethereum scalability, we will do what? This technology was developed by a few guys, most of them already left. It was meant to fix Bitcoin "smart contracts" (there is a such thing).
Tech behind Ethereum is outdated. Even newer versions rehash the same broken idea with sharding. We got 10 years and billions poured into consensus research. There are actual papers and universities doing this stuff. There are github projects that do stuff like decentralized auctions, mixers...
Hey, I think you're making a valid point and I probably should have explained more what I meant by my statement.
IMO, there's a middle ground we can go between slow PoW on L1 and scaleability. I think that it can be done by having tools that give us the same guarantees like deploying a smart contract on the main chain. It's difficult to explain: But what I want is Plasma but as a framework to develop dapps.
This project is going that route: https://github.com/hoytech/quadrable
IMO, there's a middle ground we can go between slow PoW on L1 and scaleability. I think that it can be done by having tools that give us the same guarantees like deploying a smart contract on the main chain. It's difficult to explain: But what I want is Plasma but as a framework to develop dapps.
This project is going that route: https://github.com/hoytech/quadrable
You might consider taking a look at Celo. They have ultra-light client support [0], it's proof-of-stake with single-block finality, and they run a true EVM that you can program in Solidity. It's mobile-first but since it's fundamentally a fork of Ethereum it is also web3 compatible -- there's a metamask fork here that should soon be functional [1]. Gas is payable in multiple ERC20 tokens, and should remain cheap as the network scales. Not sure if this falls under your "ethereum killers that can do 10x transactions/second" so apologies for shilling if it's not interesting to you.
[0] https://docs.celo.org/celo-codebase/protocol/plumo
[1] https://github.com/dsrvlabs/celo-extension-wallet
[0] https://docs.celo.org/celo-codebase/protocol/plumo
[1] https://github.com/dsrvlabs/celo-extension-wallet
We're building this, but on Bitcoin ("Plasma but as a framework for dapps" [with a focus on developer experience]) [0]. There's already robust infrastructure for L2 contracts in Bitcoin-land, and we've already heavily optimized the L1 to prepare for the load that a global, ubiquitous solution would need.
Honestly, I see no use for Ethereum (or other Turing Complete L1s) looking forward — smart contracts can be purely peer-to-peer, with the only pressure applied to L1 being dispute resolution. By pushing complex contracts up into Layer 2, we can keep the dangerous, money-destroying, theft-enabling Turing machines away from the main chain.
[0]: https://fabric.pub
Honestly, I see no use for Ethereum (or other Turing Complete L1s) looking forward — smart contracts can be purely peer-to-peer, with the only pressure applied to L1 being dispute resolution. By pushing complex contracts up into Layer 2, we can keep the dangerous, money-destroying, theft-enabling Turing machines away from the main chain.
[0]: https://fabric.pub
If you want a Layer2 plasma with similar guarantees to Ethereum (account based, not zero knowledge) then you may like Gluon.network once they roll out EVM support.
> Tech behind Ethereum is outdated.
Well Eth 2.0 is applying the latest and the greatest in Crypto research to a real coin.
In terms of scalabliltiy Ethereum is already way past bitcoin slow transaction rates.
Well Eth 2.0 is applying the latest and the greatest in Crypto research to a real coin.
In terms of scalabliltiy Ethereum is already way past bitcoin slow transaction rates.
The idea of a new version of your currency somewhat speaks against the utility of the whole thing surely?
There is utility in being able to evolve the protocols without giving up the integrity of the previous version.
Eth2 isn't a different currency, it's a replacement system that links with Eth1 to provide continuity. The ETH coins are not being replaced; both systems transact in ETH and are linked. That's why they are being careful with how it's evolved and how the economic links and incentives, and smart contracts and data sources, are set up in the transition.
There are many changes being implemented through this evolution. From PoW to PoS, single chain to cross-linked sharding (while managing the incentives to maintain the integrity of the network), various improvements to faster synchronisation, lower storage requirements, distributed storage of the state.
Being able to release v2, v3, v4 of software while staying compatible with all the work you did using v1 is a good thing. Same idea with evolving Ethereum.
Contrast it with the numerous new coin networks that use newer cryptographic ideas but each start their own separate networks. That's also evolution, but they don't provide continuity in the same way; instead they are a series of competing products.
Eth2 isn't a different currency, it's a replacement system that links with Eth1 to provide continuity. The ETH coins are not being replaced; both systems transact in ETH and are linked. That's why they are being careful with how it's evolved and how the economic links and incentives, and smart contracts and data sources, are set up in the transition.
There are many changes being implemented through this evolution. From PoW to PoS, single chain to cross-linked sharding (while managing the incentives to maintain the integrity of the network), various improvements to faster synchronisation, lower storage requirements, distributed storage of the state.
Being able to release v2, v3, v4 of software while staying compatible with all the work you did using v1 is a good thing. Same idea with evolving Ethereum.
Contrast it with the numerous new coin networks that use newer cryptographic ideas but each start their own separate networks. That's also evolution, but they don't provide continuity in the same way; instead they are a series of competing products.
Absolutely not. ETH2 is poorly named, it is an "in-place-upgrade" whose core design principles (PoS, Sharding) have been part of the ETH roadmap since 1.0.
Why Does it speak against its utility to update to a new version? what is the problem with printing a new dollar bill, or everyone using windows 10 instead of windows seven?
USD has gone through many iterations in its history. Even quite fundamental ones.
If I had to choose between scalability and better (more useful, more accessible, more maintainable) apps I would pick the apps. Ways to do real-world interesting things for people, buildable without any rocket science.
For the same reason that a startup with duct-tape code, scrambling to scale is better than a startup with no genuine demand.
For the same reason that a startup with duct-tape code, scrambling to scale is better than a startup with no genuine demand.
What are good examples of what you talk about in your last paragraph?
[deleted]
I think many developers getting sucked into a new exciting technology feel similarly at some point once it gets enough traction. "I know; it's such a hipster statement." might be all there is to it, and that's fine. I had the same phases with web and ML and I'm not ashamed to say I'm a bit of a hipster in that sense.
I think your feelings are perfectly valid and you should listen to yourself, but also realize that you'd do best in not generalizing it to be anything but personal.
...And from someone who was deep into Ethereum tech starting 2014-2015, I recently got surprisingly really hooked again on Bitcoin. Lightning is fun and addictive, and it feels like we're close to some kind of watershed there.
Hopefully you'll find something new to be excited about soon (or take a break from it all, sometimes that's what we need as well).
---
The reason I'm fed up with Ethereum right now is mostly the "defi" hype where it's mostly anything but decentralized in any way if you look just a bit closer. This goes for pretty much all the projects with significant traction today. So many corners are cut just to be able to ride the wave of the hype train. "The admin with full control is only until we are out of beta, for safety", "The centralized coordinator on AWS will be replaced with a gossip protocol by V2", "The owner multisig will be replaced by a DAO", "the project leads will do all the coordination for now" and other BS rationalizations all completely antithetical to the ideology.
One major strength of Ethereum for many years have been the community. Recently I feel like greed has taken over.
I think your feelings are perfectly valid and you should listen to yourself, but also realize that you'd do best in not generalizing it to be anything but personal.
...And from someone who was deep into Ethereum tech starting 2014-2015, I recently got surprisingly really hooked again on Bitcoin. Lightning is fun and addictive, and it feels like we're close to some kind of watershed there.
Hopefully you'll find something new to be excited about soon (or take a break from it all, sometimes that's what we need as well).
---
The reason I'm fed up with Ethereum right now is mostly the "defi" hype where it's mostly anything but decentralized in any way if you look just a bit closer. This goes for pretty much all the projects with significant traction today. So many corners are cut just to be able to ride the wave of the hype train. "The admin with full control is only until we are out of beta, for safety", "The centralized coordinator on AWS will be replaced with a gossip protocol by V2", "The owner multisig will be replaced by a DAO", "the project leads will do all the coordination for now" and other BS rationalizations all completely antithetical to the ideology.
One major strength of Ethereum for many years have been the community. Recently I feel like greed has taken over.
Vitalik is always bitching about the greedy community, but that's really not what is killing Ethereum. What is killing Ethereum is its glacial development pace.
It took so many years for Ethereum 2 to be deployed, and even now it's deployed it's a weak shell of what it should have been.
An argument against that could be that it's simply a hard problem to solve, but then the question becomes if they've solved any other easier problems, and it seems to me like they haven't.
This is their page on smart contracts, arguably the only justification for Ethereum's existance:
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/smart-contracts/lang...
It not only still mentions Solidity, a language which is one of the worst mistakes in IT history, it lists it as the first choice in a set of 2 options, of which the latter is only marginally superior to it. This was acceptable in 2017, a year after the realization of how huge a fuckup Solidity is, since a year might be a short time for a language to be developed and matured enough, but it's now 2021, 5 years later!
It makes me feel Ethereum just isn't managed adequately, despite being a multi-billion dollar operation.
It took so many years for Ethereum 2 to be deployed, and even now it's deployed it's a weak shell of what it should have been.
An argument against that could be that it's simply a hard problem to solve, but then the question becomes if they've solved any other easier problems, and it seems to me like they haven't.
This is their page on smart contracts, arguably the only justification for Ethereum's existance:
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/smart-contracts/lang...
It not only still mentions Solidity, a language which is one of the worst mistakes in IT history, it lists it as the first choice in a set of 2 options, of which the latter is only marginally superior to it. This was acceptable in 2017, a year after the realization of how huge a fuckup Solidity is, since a year might be a short time for a language to be developed and matured enough, but it's now 2021, 5 years later!
It makes me feel Ethereum just isn't managed adequately, despite being a multi-billion dollar operation.
> What is killing Ethereum is its glacial development pace.
With hindsight, it seems pretty naive to make the early core devs multimillionaires, then expect them to do anything except retire.
With hindsight, it seems pretty naive to make the early core devs multimillionaires, then expect them to do anything except retire.
Agreed. Anyone who's been in software long enough can take one look at Ethereum and see the telltale signs of puttering, meandering development. Creating solutions in search of problems, and favoring whats clever over what works.
It seems that the Ethereum core development community puts overly high value on cleverness and not nearly enough on hardcore engineering fundamentals.
It seems that the Ethereum core development community puts overly high value on cleverness and not nearly enough on hardcore engineering fundamentals.
If you want to work on a blockchain where greed can't takeover, an inevitable unavoidable pitfall if you design the blockchains to inherently also have an MLM structure, is to design a blockchain that doesn't have financial gain as an incentive to align people to adopt it but a different form of consensus like democratic processes (save regulatory capture) where it's voted into use.
I think Uniswap is incorporated this way.
Thanks for that comment :)
| "What's Ethereum's killer app?" we asked ourselves not long ago. Now we know. It's the world's best publicly-accessible settlement platform for financial transactions.
I don't see any evidence of this being true.
I don't see any evidence of this being true.
I would say that the killer app currently is decentralised finance, lending and trading for example on the chain. The second killer app is NFTs, basically the exchange of art on the chain.
> The second killer app is NFTs, basically the exchange of art on the chain.
NFTs aren’t exclusively art. For example, I previously worked at https://unlock-protocol.com/ which uses NFTs to signify membership
NFTs aren’t exclusively art. For example, I previously worked at https://unlock-protocol.com/ which uses NFTs to signify membership
> The second killer app is NFTs, basically the exchange of art on the chain
Art is probably the worst use-case for NFT. NFT work well for memberships, tickets, virtual land in games, etc. For art, not so much.
It doesn't solve ownership: any one else can "own" the same piece of art, it's only the NFT that is unique. It doesn't solve scarcity: the author can make more copies and wrap them into other NFTs. It doesn't solve authenticity: any one can wrap existing art into an NFT and sell it.
Basically the only thing NFT art solve is anteriority and possibly authorship: you can prove that you made a piece of art before a certain date, and that you published it first.
Art is probably the worst use-case for NFT. NFT work well for memberships, tickets, virtual land in games, etc. For art, not so much.
It doesn't solve ownership: any one else can "own" the same piece of art, it's only the NFT that is unique. It doesn't solve scarcity: the author can make more copies and wrap them into other NFTs. It doesn't solve authenticity: any one can wrap existing art into an NFT and sell it.
Basically the only thing NFT art solve is anteriority and possibly authorship: you can prove that you made a piece of art before a certain date, and that you published it first.
Hypothetically, NFTs are amazing. They have the potential to revolutionise royalties and help artist directly profit from the success of their work. There are successful marketplaces like Nifty Gateway for visual NFT's and some under development for music NFTs.
But...
Right now, Etheriums soaring 'gas' prices are basically freezing new entrants into the market. The cost of 'minting' a token on the blockchain right now - say an image or animation on rarible.com, is enormous. Worse, the gas cost of purchasing an NFT can be triple the sale price. It's the equivalent of a varying, unpredictable rate of VAT in the hundreds of percent. This is having a knock on effect on all the NFT markets. Maybe it can be solved by Etherium 2.0, but right now Ether isn't fit for purpose for NFTs. Tying the cost of smart contract 'gas' to the value of the digital currency made this inevitable.
But...
Right now, Etheriums soaring 'gas' prices are basically freezing new entrants into the market. The cost of 'minting' a token on the blockchain right now - say an image or animation on rarible.com, is enormous. Worse, the gas cost of purchasing an NFT can be triple the sale price. It's the equivalent of a varying, unpredictable rate of VAT in the hundreds of percent. This is having a knock on effect on all the NFT markets. Maybe it can be solved by Etherium 2.0, but right now Ether isn't fit for purpose for NFTs. Tying the cost of smart contract 'gas' to the value of the digital currency made this inevitable.
Couldn't agree more that NFTs are theoretically very interesting but the way they work right now is absolute garbage. See this experience report: https://freezine.xyz/4/nfts/index.html
I don't think this is particularly an issue with the way NFTs work - except in regard to their choice of Ether, and Ether's current issue with gas prices. I think there's a lot of potential in the existing markets. It's really specifically a problem with the economics of trading them, caused by the inflation in transaction costs of Ether.
Article you linked the artists issue is that he couldn't find a market for his art. Which kind of misses the point.
"Then I asked around if anyone wanted to buy it. The boys in the groupchat weren't interested. Neither were any of my twitter followers. Damn."
Sure you could get lucky with being early into a highly speculative market, but by and large this is like patreon or kickstarter or anything else online. If there's a potential market for what you're making or doing, it's a new (and potentially lucrative) way to tap into it. It doesn't generate a new demand for work that doesn't have (or can't generate) an audience on its own. NFTs aren't a form of advertising, certainly not a particularly effective one.
Also the artist initially used Zora (which I've never heard of), rather than Rarible or Opensea, or Mintable or Snark or any of the better known open markets.
On rarible he set his royalties to 25% (rather than the usual 10%) which obviously discourages speculative investment. He also set the cost of his first art piece to 1 ETH! Crazy high for an unknown artist.
The article kind of seems like a snarky joke, but if it is one I'm not sure what the punchline is, given he really did spend the money and really does seem to want to sell the NFTs. I think it's more likely a case of irony employed as a defence mechanism.
We have someone who self confesses he doesn't understand the market, making a remix piece quickly and half assedly, selling it at a high rate across multiple markets, without an audience or any interest in what is popular there. I mean I get it, who wants to miss the gold rush? But it's not a useful barometer of NFTs.
Currently all the real money is being made by selective services who primarily work with digital artists who have an existing following, or make work they think will reach an audience - sites like niftygateway.com or superrare.co
The work that's selling well is generally excellent. And sure, there is something inherently ridiculous in the idea of 'owning' a piece of digital art. But no more so that owning a numbered print or piece of video art by a renowned artist, or hell a cardigan owned by Kurt Cobain. All of which have real, established and ongoing value.
Article you linked the artists issue is that he couldn't find a market for his art. Which kind of misses the point.
"Then I asked around if anyone wanted to buy it. The boys in the groupchat weren't interested. Neither were any of my twitter followers. Damn."
Sure you could get lucky with being early into a highly speculative market, but by and large this is like patreon or kickstarter or anything else online. If there's a potential market for what you're making or doing, it's a new (and potentially lucrative) way to tap into it. It doesn't generate a new demand for work that doesn't have (or can't generate) an audience on its own. NFTs aren't a form of advertising, certainly not a particularly effective one.
Also the artist initially used Zora (which I've never heard of), rather than Rarible or Opensea, or Mintable or Snark or any of the better known open markets.
On rarible he set his royalties to 25% (rather than the usual 10%) which obviously discourages speculative investment. He also set the cost of his first art piece to 1 ETH! Crazy high for an unknown artist.
The article kind of seems like a snarky joke, but if it is one I'm not sure what the punchline is, given he really did spend the money and really does seem to want to sell the NFTs. I think it's more likely a case of irony employed as a defence mechanism.
We have someone who self confesses he doesn't understand the market, making a remix piece quickly and half assedly, selling it at a high rate across multiple markets, without an audience or any interest in what is popular there. I mean I get it, who wants to miss the gold rush? But it's not a useful barometer of NFTs.
Currently all the real money is being made by selective services who primarily work with digital artists who have an existing following, or make work they think will reach an audience - sites like niftygateway.com or superrare.co
The work that's selling well is generally excellent. And sure, there is something inherently ridiculous in the idea of 'owning' a piece of digital art. But no more so that owning a numbered print or piece of video art by a renowned artist, or hell a cardigan owned by Kurt Cobain. All of which have real, established and ongoing value.
We don’t have to wait for Eth2, there are several L2 solutions in the works right now like Optimism and Polygon
They're not supported on any of the popular NFT trading / minting sites. That economy is currently built around ETH.
Opensea currently uses Matic/Polygon, in addition to L1 https://matic.opensea.io/
>The second killer app is NFTs, basically the exchange of art on the chain.
There's this story from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26196027
I'm not sure whether it's a good sign or a bad sign. On one hand it shows NFTs being serious because there's a huge ($500+k) transaction behind it. On the other hand it shows how frothy the market is given how someone just dropped $500k for a few hundred bits.
There's this story from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26196027
I'm not sure whether it's a good sign or a bad sign. On one hand it shows NFTs being serious because there's a huge ($500+k) transaction behind it. On the other hand it shows how frothy the market is given how someone just dropped $500k for a few hundred bits.
I would say NFT and micropayments are killer apps. It would be fantastic if we had browser addon where you can 1-click pay something like 0.01$ to read article.
NFT for gaming is going to be huge industry eg pro-gamers could sell their character skins same way now eg basketball players sell their jerseys or you could import that Hearthstone deck to complete new game.
NFT for gaming is going to be huge industry eg pro-gamers could sell their character skins same way now eg basketball players sell their jerseys or you could import that Hearthstone deck to complete new game.
For micropayments, there has been flattr. Wasn't really accepted and won't get better if you somehow put a blockchain in there.
For the second: Just go with gumroad or Paypal or whatnot.
Your points just prove, that there's no need for blockchain after all.
For the second: Just go with gumroad or Paypal or whatnot.
Your points just prove, that there's no need for blockchain after all.
Maybe nanopayment would be better term I mean like truly small amounts not something like 3$ like flattr or 1$ like Gumroad.
Just flattr more things so your monthly amount get distributed more. I think that should work and there's no "lower limit" on how much a single click is worth.
But yeah, it would be nice if you could set a fixed amount per button, like 10 Cent for an article or something like that.
But yeah, it would be nice if you could set a fixed amount per button, like 10 Cent for an article or something like that.
| 1-click pay something like 0.01$ to read article.
How would this work in a way that takes gas/fees into consideration?
How would this work in a way that takes gas/fees into consideration?
That's kind of the point: it's completely infeasible to do microtransactions with Ethereum, much less Bitcoin. At time of writing it costs around $23 (!) to do a single ETH transaction.
It’ll be possible with L2 like Optimism which will be out for the public next month.
We can if the network is not full of professional miners. If every user has a practical chance to pack their transaction into a block.
There are several lightning network (payment channel layer on top of bitcoin) paywalls where you can pay 1/10 of a cent to read an article. The tech exists, its now an adoption problem
Do it in a state channel or rollup.
I present you https://yalls.org/
I also see no evidence, but many hints.
Most people use ethereum to send eth or ERC20 tokens.
There are not many who use the smart contracts for anything else.
I'm not a huge fan of lawyers and bankers, but I'd take my chances with them any day over this kind of platform: https://medium.com/@danrobinson/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest-ec...
It's not. Maybe if somehow egass fees go down, right now they are so high that even bitcoin is a better alternative.
I think the author is equating ethereum with stable coins?
I think the author is equating ethereum with stable coins?
Are you familiar with the “DeFi revolution?”
> Where there was a feeling of revolution and new beginnings, now there are people in suits talking corporate.
I read both "Digital Gold" by Nathaniel Popper about the early days of Bitcoin and "The Infinite Machine" by Camila Russo about the inception of Ethereum and the difference between the early sentiment in those two projects is striking.
Bitcoin came from a cypherpunk background and was very anti establishment whereas Ethereum seems to have been setup and conducted like a startup company. There was much more money involved starting the latter project.
I can relate to the sentiment of the author though, money sucks the fun out of many things. But finance is at the heart of both projects, so it's too be expected that they get more professional and more business-like while they grow.
I read both "Digital Gold" by Nathaniel Popper about the early days of Bitcoin and "The Infinite Machine" by Camila Russo about the inception of Ethereum and the difference between the early sentiment in those two projects is striking.
Bitcoin came from a cypherpunk background and was very anti establishment whereas Ethereum seems to have been setup and conducted like a startup company. There was much more money involved starting the latter project.
I can relate to the sentiment of the author though, money sucks the fun out of many things. But finance is at the heart of both projects, so it's too be expected that they get more professional and more business-like while they grow.
Both of ETH and BTC's points these days is speculative gambling by people who care enough about finance to understand that, so people being shocked that finance people are invovled in something that it's possible to gamble on is a bit rich.
It certainly isn't useful as "the world computer" or whatever: have you seen gwei lately??
It certainly isn't useful as "the world computer" or whatever: have you seen gwei lately??
> I need a hero, and by that, I mean that I need a usable methodology for building scaleable decentralized apps. Yes, you've heard that right. We don't need more "Ethereum killers" that can do 10x more tx/s than Ethereum. Those are useless.
Having worked on large Ethereum smart contracts (running a decentralized auction on chain) over two years, I fully agree with this. Ethereum needs better smart contract languages, better compilers and better dev tooling.
As our smart contract written in Vyper (for ease of auditing) grew larger and larger, eventually we failed to deploy on the testnet, and closer inspection reveal that the compiler was blowing up code size which I had to patch[0]. Down the line upstream further increased gas costs by emitting code that zeroed out every member of an array (note the EVM already has all memory set to 0). To support efficient insertion/deletion of bids we had to handroll a skip list on the blockchain(!), because there are no Vyper libraries.
On the language development side, things don't look too pretty either, I ended up having to write an EVM assembler from scratch[1], but deeper still are problems such as a lack of a separate call stack in EVM, so procedure calls always end up clunky and implementation-dependent. LLVM to EVM[2] is still experimental, so anyone who is writing a compiler will have to write codegen from scratch.
Perhaps eWASM will alleviate some of these concerns. But until then, the entire dev process for writing smart contracts is painful.
[0] https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper/pull/1488
[1] https://github.com/ActorForth/evm-assembler/blob/master/docs...
[2] https://github.com/etclabscore/evm_llvm
Having worked on large Ethereum smart contracts (running a decentralized auction on chain) over two years, I fully agree with this. Ethereum needs better smart contract languages, better compilers and better dev tooling.
As our smart contract written in Vyper (for ease of auditing) grew larger and larger, eventually we failed to deploy on the testnet, and closer inspection reveal that the compiler was blowing up code size which I had to patch[0]. Down the line upstream further increased gas costs by emitting code that zeroed out every member of an array (note the EVM already has all memory set to 0). To support efficient insertion/deletion of bids we had to handroll a skip list on the blockchain(!), because there are no Vyper libraries.
On the language development side, things don't look too pretty either, I ended up having to write an EVM assembler from scratch[1], but deeper still are problems such as a lack of a separate call stack in EVM, so procedure calls always end up clunky and implementation-dependent. LLVM to EVM[2] is still experimental, so anyone who is writing a compiler will have to write codegen from scratch.
Perhaps eWASM will alleviate some of these concerns. But until then, the entire dev process for writing smart contracts is painful.
[0] https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper/pull/1488
[1] https://github.com/ActorForth/evm-assembler/blob/master/docs...
[2] https://github.com/etclabscore/evm_llvm
If you're working on "large Ethereum smart contracts" you've missed the point. On chain logic should always be as minimal as possible. Uniswap v1 was two vyper files. One was 46 lines, and the other was 496 lines[1]. It took like 20 minutes to read through the code thoroughly, and was one of the most impactful contracts ever deployed to the network.
Solidity also matured a lot, which is why Uniswap v2 moved back. If you find yourself writing an EVM assembler from scratch, and you're trying to build something other than a compiler, you have veered way way off course, and need to re-evaluate your system architecture.
Feature creep might work well if you're trying to leech money from a government contract or something, or being paid by line of code you contribute, but it's fatal in the Ethereum world. I consulted for a number of projects that made the exact same mistake, and most of them aren't around anymore.
[1] https://github.com/Uniswap/uniswap-v1/tree/master/contracts
Solidity also matured a lot, which is why Uniswap v2 moved back. If you find yourself writing an EVM assembler from scratch, and you're trying to build something other than a compiler, you have veered way way off course, and need to re-evaluate your system architecture.
Feature creep might work well if you're trying to leech money from a government contract or something, or being paid by line of code you contribute, but it's fatal in the Ethereum world. I consulted for a number of projects that made the exact same mistake, and most of them aren't around anymore.
[1] https://github.com/Uniswap/uniswap-v1/tree/master/contracts
> On chain logic should always be as minimal as possible.
The goal of the project was to make the auction as transparent as possible, doesn't that imply moving as much of the logic on chain as possible?
> If you find yourself writing an EVM assembler from scratch, and you're trying to build something other than a compiler, you have veered way way off course, and need to re-evaluate your system architecture.
This was a different project aimed at implementing a new smart contract language. Didn't take off internally though because of shift in direction.
The goal of the project was to make the auction as transparent as possible, doesn't that imply moving as much of the logic on chain as possible?
> If you find yourself writing an EVM assembler from scratch, and you're trying to build something other than a compiler, you have veered way way off course, and need to re-evaluate your system architecture.
This was a different project aimed at implementing a new smart contract language. Didn't take off internally though because of shift in direction.
> The goal of the project was to make the auction as transparent as possible, doesn't that imply moving as much of the logic on chain as possible?
Not really. Unsure of the specifics of the project that you were working on, but a standard auction house type interface shouldn't be that much code. You have listings, and bids. A listing should only be a timestamp for when the listing was placed, a timestamp for when the listing should end, maybe a minimum bid, and then a hash pointing to IPFS with all the less relevant meta-details. Bids would just be a price and a timestamp, though the timestamp probabally isn't even needed. You could just keep a record of the highest bid in the listing itself, and any time a new bid comes in, refund the previous bid to the previous highest bidder, and lock the current bid, so bids don't even need to allocate any new memory.
If you really really need on-chain arbitration, you can do it with a simple ownership contract for starters, then switch over to a governance contract as the arbitration needs become more complex for whatever reason.
Not really. Unsure of the specifics of the project that you were working on, but a standard auction house type interface shouldn't be that much code. You have listings, and bids. A listing should only be a timestamp for when the listing was placed, a timestamp for when the listing should end, maybe a minimum bid, and then a hash pointing to IPFS with all the less relevant meta-details. Bids would just be a price and a timestamp, though the timestamp probabally isn't even needed. You could just keep a record of the highest bid in the listing itself, and any time a new bid comes in, refund the previous bid to the previous highest bidder, and lock the current bid, so bids don't even need to allocate any new memory.
If you really really need on-chain arbitration, you can do it with a simple ownership contract for starters, then switch over to a governance contract as the arbitration needs become more complex for whatever reason.
I was away from the crypto space for a while and I decided to try shorting some currencies yesterday using a DEX based on Ethereum. I wanted to create a position with 1000 dollars. The estimated fee for my transaction was 490 dollars. Something is broken in this environment.
How does that even happen?
Three things.
1. The contract in questions is doing a lot more on chain logic than it should be doing.
2. The network is currently incredibly active, pushing up the average gas cost per transaction.
3. The price of Ethereum itself, in which gas price is denominated, has risen about 10x in the past few months.
Usually the prices die down in a couple weeks, but if there is concern that people are being priced out of the network for an extended period of time, miners will raise the global gas limit, and things will rapidly go back to "normal".
The thing is though, people are paying the high fees. This chart has a really great breakdown of where all the fees have been going to in the past 30 days: https://ethgasstation.info/
1. The contract in questions is doing a lot more on chain logic than it should be doing.
2. The network is currently incredibly active, pushing up the average gas cost per transaction.
3. The price of Ethereum itself, in which gas price is denominated, has risen about 10x in the past few months.
Usually the prices die down in a couple weeks, but if there is concern that people are being priced out of the network for an extended period of time, miners will raise the global gas limit, and things will rapidly go back to "normal".
The thing is though, people are paying the high fees. This chart has a really great breakdown of where all the fees have been going to in the past 30 days: https://ethgasstation.info/
The short version is that a seemingly large number of people are willing to pay out of this world fees to trade on a decentralized, uncensorable currency exchange. This is consuming the entire chains resources at the moment. The good news is that Uniswap (the top gas guzzler) is trying to move to L2 within 90 days. That will allow cheap/instant trades and L1 fees/usage will only occur when depositing or withdrawing. This should free up a lot of network capacity, and the high fees incentivize the devs to hurry up.
Limited transaction throughput (given by block size * block time) + an open fee market where people outbid each other to get priority.
The only reason it's this expensive is that there's enough capital willing to pay the price.
The only reason it's this expensive is that there's enough capital willing to pay the price.
Congested network + fees dictated by the complexity of smart contracts being used (which would be much higer for something like a DEX transaction).
For some reason ethereum devs refuse to (recommend to) increase the gas limit, even though it's the only short-term way to decrease fees while increasing decentralization, in a mistaken idea that if a node doesn't run on a raspberry pi (it does) the network isn't decentralized.
People run nodes when they need them. Decentralization is a function of fees and node costs, not just node costs. Right now deploying a large contract costs more than a good gaming pc while a node to verify blocks can be a pi with a ssd for a small fraction of the cost. As a result normal people just stay away - fees too high decrease decentralization regardless of node costs. The opposite would make much more sense: few dollars for deployment, gaming pc for nodes. More people would actually run nodes in this scenario.
As long as a node only requires a high end pc rather than a server in a datacenter the network can stay decentralized. Even current (very underinvested) geth could handle 50M blocks, which would provide relief until rollups get going and prevent activity from relocating elsewhere.
This is the most dangerous, with the danger completely self-imposed, time for ethereum ever. Maybe everything works out and rollups release soon enough, but the risk calculus is completely bonkers.
People run nodes when they need them. Decentralization is a function of fees and node costs, not just node costs. Right now deploying a large contract costs more than a good gaming pc while a node to verify blocks can be a pi with a ssd for a small fraction of the cost. As a result normal people just stay away - fees too high decrease decentralization regardless of node costs. The opposite would make much more sense: few dollars for deployment, gaming pc for nodes. More people would actually run nodes in this scenario.
As long as a node only requires a high end pc rather than a server in a datacenter the network can stay decentralized. Even current (very underinvested) geth could handle 50M blocks, which would provide relief until rollups get going and prevent activity from relocating elsewhere.
This is the most dangerous, with the danger completely self-imposed, time for ethereum ever. Maybe everything works out and rollups release soon enough, but the risk calculus is completely bonkers.
The hardware it takes to run a node now isn't the only consideration. Higher gas limit means the storage size of the history grows at a faster rate; every single full node needs to store that history forever.
By the time it becomes a real problem (when the db containing state starts to approach 4TB) presumably some other solution would be in place, like state witnesses in blocks (verification without needing to access local state), or other ideas like reducing the size of 'hot' state and requiring witnesses for old state.
In any case, it's better to have ethereum with heavier nodes than everything move to a completely centralized DPoS or PoA network.
Face it - there are no users for Dapps.
Top apps get ~50k users. That's nothing.
Whenever I think about creating something in Ether, I apply the "do I really need blockchain" question to it, and combined with low user count I realize I'll have a much larger audience without Ether.
Maiar has hundreds of thousands.
Does it? does this app that lauched January this year, the ONLY app on the Elrund blockchain, which itself launched last year, have hundreds of thousands of users?
Simple answer - no, it does not.
Simple answer - no, it does not.
This constant whining is getting popular nowadays, specially on hn.
>ooohh this thing I got in early is now popular
Give me a break.
Alot of smart people here think they know what matters but they don't.
They often point at the technology and this and that, but it doesn't matter, they are all wrong. The price chart is the only thing that matters. Even if you had the best scalable crypto. Would it matter if nobody could make money on it?
People only adopt these things to make money because it's not a necessity, unlike In your country where you need, your government's printed money to buy food and survive.
Theories sometimes make alot of sense in paper, but reality proves otherwise.
In crypto all it matters is price performance.
When there is a bear market most people don't want to talk or touch crypto at all. They all want to stay a away, like it is a leprous dog.
You can pay for less shit with bitcoin today, than in 2017.
It shouldn't need to be said, but preference is individual. If I dislike something, a high price tag won't change my preference.
In the case of crypto, it probably should. The reality is that there is so much compute power aimed at BTC/ETH, that if you try to use a 'cheap' crypto currency, it is susceptible to compute power attacks or at the very least, hasn't been battle tested against non-compute attacks.
IMO, if you are going to write a smart-contract or "invest" in crypto, you should have an extremely good reason to do it anywhere but ETH/BTC.
The price and value of the chain give an signal of security.
IMO, if you are going to write a smart-contract or "invest" in crypto, you should have an extremely good reason to do it anywhere but ETH/BTC.
The price and value of the chain give an signal of security.
Price isn't equal to utility.
You can illuminate your home cheaply with electricity or expensively with candles. Yet the lower priced version is more effective.
Technology advances. Technology is a means to an end. Examine the merits of the technology to determine if it provides utility to help you achieve the ends you desire.
You can illuminate your home cheaply with electricity or expensively with candles. Yet the lower priced version is more effective.
Technology advances. Technology is a means to an end. Examine the merits of the technology to determine if it provides utility to help you achieve the ends you desire.
> they are all wrong
That's pretty absolutist. So, if one's right, that makes you all wrong?
That's pretty absolutist. So, if one's right, that makes you all wrong?
Tech Heads believe that the better technically performing coin will surface as the best performer in ROI.
Unfortunately the majority of people investing just want to make a buck more than they care about the tech involved.
That's when you realise this has more to do with money, than tech.
Unfortunately the majority of people investing just want to make a buck more than they care about the tech involved.
That's when you realise this has more to do with money, than tech.
The solidity language was never fun to me. I abandoned experiments before vyper and yul, the alternatives I know about, were out. Everything felt at the same time fragile and definitive. Bad things would happen if you “deployed” a flawed contract without the ever growing best practices of layers and proxies.
I have had more fun learning about finance and creating indices than I have ever had coding on ethereum.
I have had more fun learning about finance and creating indices than I have ever had coding on ethereum.
Agree. Sadly both solidity and all the tools around it feel like a pile of broken things over other broken things over a lot of things who where brought up in a few days and forgotten in the todo world, and no one has the time or the will to fix them.
The ethereum foundation should focus far far far more in tools implementation
The ethereum foundation should focus far far far more in tools implementation
Totally. None of this felt safe, or sane, ever.
Yeah, that was my feeling about Bitcoin a few years ago after dabbling in it and then getting out (to the tune of 1.25 million... which of course would be much greater now, had I held any... sigh)
I originally got into it for the technical aspects of mining being interesting. Then all the speculators came in, then I realized that (perhaps due to my Psych major) I was pretty good at predicting local price maxima, but then after a time that felt too much like stealing from the dumber, which is not a vibe that brings happiness to me, so I got out of it. I'd rather use my intelligence to produce value by coding.
I originally got into it for the technical aspects of mining being interesting. Then all the speculators came in, then I realized that (perhaps due to my Psych major) I was pretty good at predicting local price maxima, but then after a time that felt too much like stealing from the dumber, which is not a vibe that brings happiness to me, so I got out of it. I'd rather use my intelligence to produce value by coding.
When do people expect Ethereum gas prices to come down? Right now if I want to move 1ETH its costing me $109 from one exchange.
Supply and demand affecting gas prices is considered a feature, so it seems quite possible gas prices will only go higher if ETH becomes even more popular.
Once Uniswap moves to Optimism sometime in the next few months, gas fee should drop drastically across the network
Right after the Tether/Bitcoin bubble pops.
Tether bubble? As in crashing from $1.002 to $1? USDT can always just be cashed out for regular money.
For values of "always" that depend on whether Tether actually has $34B in reserves to back the 34B USDT currently in circulation.
Call me crazy, but I'd bet on the "under" here.
Call me crazy, but I'd bet on the "under" here.
Doesn't Tether have to provide 3rd party audited accounts as to what they actually hold in reserve?
No. They have occasionally claimed to be independently audited, but never provided proof.
Article summarizes to:
"high gas fees are ruining ethereum for me. Other people need to quit using it for things that I personally don't get value from, to free up block space. Or the devs need to scale capacity. I'm a dev, but I don't like contributing to projects which have grown as large as ethereum, or I don't want to do that work. Somebody else please do it for me."
Sure, there's truth to it. And if the author reflected more before writing their rant, maybe they could have gotten to some interesting ideas worth discussing:
- How do you design a base layer which is general enough to do all the things author enjoys doing with Ethereum? - How do you make this base layer capable of scaling as more people want to use it?
These are the existential questions that blockchains like Ethereum have been facing for years. Ethereum has some paths forward: rollups and sharding, and there's a lot of active work on both of these right now. Maybe there's room for useful discussion around why these are taking relatively long to ship, and how can we ship them faster or avoid hitting these same limitations in the future?
But I feel like these discussions are already happening, every day in this space and in a hundred different forums. There are hundreds of people all working to address the author's pain points across dozens of different projects. These things are being worked on. It just takes time. Nothing happens overnight.
"high gas fees are ruining ethereum for me. Other people need to quit using it for things that I personally don't get value from, to free up block space. Or the devs need to scale capacity. I'm a dev, but I don't like contributing to projects which have grown as large as ethereum, or I don't want to do that work. Somebody else please do it for me."
Sure, there's truth to it. And if the author reflected more before writing their rant, maybe they could have gotten to some interesting ideas worth discussing:
- How do you design a base layer which is general enough to do all the things author enjoys doing with Ethereum? - How do you make this base layer capable of scaling as more people want to use it?
These are the existential questions that blockchains like Ethereum have been facing for years. Ethereum has some paths forward: rollups and sharding, and there's a lot of active work on both of these right now. Maybe there's room for useful discussion around why these are taking relatively long to ship, and how can we ship them faster or avoid hitting these same limitations in the future?
But I feel like these discussions are already happening, every day in this space and in a hundred different forums. There are hundreds of people all working to address the author's pain points across dozens of different projects. These things are being worked on. It just takes time. Nothing happens overnight.
Ethereum was a very respectable proof of concept, but it's time is past. It gave a glimpse of a future that is really incredible for those of us who had time to poke around before fees got out of control. Sadly, Eth 2.0 does not look to be the messiah many seem to be preaching about. Sharding is a very questionable design decision.
My take away from dabbling in Ethereum land is that Ethereans, and crypto folks in general, got their values mixed up. They hold decentralization to the highest standard above all else. But upon close inspection, virtually nothing in the Ethereum ecosystem actually lives up to the standard of decentralization. The kinds of decentralization you see are very superficial and largely seem to be intended to dodge regulation above all else (which I have no problem with, but we need to be honest with ourselves).
After using the tech, you realize that whats really valuable about these systems is open APIs for value exchange, permissionlessness, and censorship resistance. The decentralization is not a value add. It is a hedge against counter-party risk. And that is important, especially as we go head first into an increasingly dystopic looking global financial system. But teasing apart these different aspects gives you a much better idea of what to focus on if you want to build the next generation of blockchain technology.
My take away from dabbling in Ethereum land is that Ethereans, and crypto folks in general, got their values mixed up. They hold decentralization to the highest standard above all else. But upon close inspection, virtually nothing in the Ethereum ecosystem actually lives up to the standard of decentralization. The kinds of decentralization you see are very superficial and largely seem to be intended to dodge regulation above all else (which I have no problem with, but we need to be honest with ourselves).
After using the tech, you realize that whats really valuable about these systems is open APIs for value exchange, permissionlessness, and censorship resistance. The decentralization is not a value add. It is a hedge against counter-party risk. And that is important, especially as we go head first into an increasingly dystopic looking global financial system. But teasing apart these different aspects gives you a much better idea of what to focus on if you want to build the next generation of blockchain technology.
>They announced the "Monero Enterprise Alliance." An inside joke, supposed to piss off other projects that had started to take themselves too seriously. Being slightly confused that day myself, I now can't recall if the effort had ever been successful. But in any case, I can't recommend buying Monero. It's useless.
Why is Monero useless? Is because of transaction fee too high?
Why is Monero useless? Is because of transaction fee too high?
It's a meme in the monero community. "Don't buy monero".
Monero fees are actually really low. On average 0.021 cents right now.
Well, for the gas fees and scalability issues there's always avalanche [1] ...
I feel like there's a project that already solves most of ethereum problems now, but it's been slept on for a while.
[1] https://www.avalabs.org/
I feel like there's a project that already solves most of ethereum problems now, but it's been slept on for a while.
[1] https://www.avalabs.org/
How about https://www.algorand.com/
The team is promising and also their sdk is quite good.
I know that they use the same Clarity[1] smart contract language as Stacks. I like that it's not turing complete.
The more I've read about Stacks, the more I like it. But I haven't done a deep dive into Algorand. Do you know offhand how they differ / what they're going for?
[1]: https://clarity-lang.org/
The more I've read about Stacks, the more I like it. But I haven't done a deep dive into Algorand. Do you know offhand how they differ / what they're going for?
[1]: https://clarity-lang.org/
Very glad to see Algorand in this thread. People need to talk about it more. It doesn't have most of the problems people have with crypto, and unlike cardano, it's here today and it works.
I like the Algorand team -- first blockchain project where I used an app I wanted to use and only afterwards realised it was using their blockchain.
That's great. Do you mind sharing the name of that project?
They store the data of FIDE Online chess matches, so the officially ranked games that you can play for online titles. Not sure why they chose a blockchain - perhaps they're actually used for identity too, so there's some p2p elements of arranging matches, but as I said I didn't even know they were involved until I saw an advert one day mentioning it.
ah i see, they do have some small write up here as well https://worldchess.com/algorand/
>"What's Ethereum's killer app?" we asked ourselves not long ago. Now we know. It's the world's best publicly-accessible settlement platform for financial transactions.
Hit the nail on the head - for now.
Yes, DeFi is what kicked things off last year and people can now trade their favourite altcoins, borrow crypto, and even leverage trade on decentralized exchanges. It's also true that what everyone is trading are mostly other coins and other projects that they're speculating on - and those projects are just newer forms of the same projects that exist now.
We've seen countless projects pop up that are all copies or trying to do similar things; increase throughput, connect blockchains, provide oracles, implement faster and cheaper smart contracts, etc.
So, it's easy to look at all this cynically, but I like to hope that eventually this will end up somewhere good - I mean, there is financial incentive, there is the 'new toy' angle, and there are countless talented people who are genuinely curious and trying to improve the various crypto ecosystems.
I guess we'll see where this all ends up in 5-10 years.
Hit the nail on the head - for now.
Yes, DeFi is what kicked things off last year and people can now trade their favourite altcoins, borrow crypto, and even leverage trade on decentralized exchanges. It's also true that what everyone is trading are mostly other coins and other projects that they're speculating on - and those projects are just newer forms of the same projects that exist now.
We've seen countless projects pop up that are all copies or trying to do similar things; increase throughput, connect blockchains, provide oracles, implement faster and cheaper smart contracts, etc.
So, it's easy to look at all this cynically, but I like to hope that eventually this will end up somewhere good - I mean, there is financial incentive, there is the 'new toy' angle, and there are countless talented people who are genuinely curious and trying to improve the various crypto ecosystems.
I guess we'll see where this all ends up in 5-10 years.
Wasn't cardano supposed to fix this?
yes, its been 4 years now and cardano doesnt even have smart contracting capabilities yet
They are rolling them out in the next 2 months. I've played with their playground, looked at what they are doing and see little reason to doubt the planned launch will go well.
I think they're making good, solid progress. They should be rolling smart contracts with Gougen in Q2 this year, and indications so far are that they should be on time
Goguen, which is phase 3 of the roadmap and gives smart contracts, is expected to be released in March 2021.
But sure, it's all taking very long.
But sure, it's all taking very long.
Native tokens(also part of Goguen) will be released on 1st of March but smart contracts in Q2
4 years of doing it right and academically proven
Cardano project looks pretty much like Hardon Collider in the making
4 years of research & dev. All has come / is coming :
- rich metadatas in transactions (done)
- token locking (done)
- native tokens almost on par with ADA ( on mainnet 05/03/2021 )
- Plutus & Marlowe ( smart contracts ). Testnet in March, mainnet early to late Q2, depending on testnet quality.
[The internet isn't fun anymore - 2014](https://www.puregeekery.net/2014/11/17/internet-isnt-fun-any...)
[Computers aren't fun anymore - 2011](https://www.twingalaxies.com/showthread.php/132771-Why-compu...)
It seems much of Tim's arguments revolve around the expense of transactions. But what about building on Nano if the cost on etherium is too high? Or any other lower cost alternatives? I'll admit, I have no idea what the transaction cost on Polkadot is, but there are lots of other interesting projects.
I agree with Tim's disappointment that the cost has risen to the point where it is likely hindering experimentation, which is probably what the crypto space still requires, but if that is the problem, let's focus on that.
It seems much of Tim's arguments revolve around the expense of transactions. But what about building on Nano if the cost on etherium is too high? Or any other lower cost alternatives? I'll admit, I have no idea what the transaction cost on Polkadot is, but there are lots of other interesting projects.
I agree with Tim's disappointment that the cost has risen to the point where it is likely hindering experimentation, which is probably what the crypto space still requires, but if that is the problem, let's focus on that.
Vitalik recently blogged [0] that prediction markets might be there most important thing in Ethereum.
> it is one of the Ethereum applications that have provided to me the most concrete value.
[0] https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/02/18/election.html
> it is one of the Ethereum applications that have provided to me the most concrete value.
[0] https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/02/18/election.html
That's a short-sighted, american-centric view. In the rest of the world, prediction markets (e.g. Betfair) have existed for decades. It's not a technology that needs decentralisation or its own currency, so why on earth is it expected to be a killer app for crypto?
Not everyone has a million dollars lying around to earn a 5% return, if your bet is correct...
Well.. Ethereum isn't very trendy anymore, that's true. But I still think it has tons of promise and they are making a lot of progress on 2.0. I feel like its amazing some people are thinking of giving up on it before 2.0 gets launched.
I did actually buy some DOT on Kraken today though. Because that also looks like an amazing project. And in the end, everything is basically a popularity contest. So regardless of technicals, momentum, or anything else, Ethereum could actually become completely uncool in X months or years. And PolkaDOT or something no one knows about could be what everyone uses. Maybe after WWIII its the digitual yuan for a few years.. but then the superintelligent robots take over a few years later and everyone has to use metashekels or whatever that human brains can't even comprehend.
libp2p looks really useful by the way.
I did actually buy some DOT on Kraken today though. Because that also looks like an amazing project. And in the end, everything is basically a popularity contest. So regardless of technicals, momentum, or anything else, Ethereum could actually become completely uncool in X months or years. And PolkaDOT or something no one knows about could be what everyone uses. Maybe after WWIII its the digitual yuan for a few years.. but then the superintelligent robots take over a few years later and everyone has to use metashekels or whatever that human brains can't even comprehend.
libp2p looks really useful by the way.
Around 2015 Vitalik Buterin was one of the few crypto geniuses and leaders. For many years the Ethereum project leaders promised ETH 2 to solve some of the issues pointed in the article but they never delivered. It is understandable that they never delivered because there was a lot of complexity involved in improving permissionless blockchains BUT seeing a new wave of blockchains with good foundations makes one think they never delivered because they have not tried enough. Vitalik and his troop have enough financial resources to stimulate or hire top blockchain researchers from top universities around the world. It seems like they never pushed hard to move Ethereum. With enough resources you should think like you are doing the Manhattan or Apollo 11 projects.
seeing a new wave of blockchains with good foundations
Can you name a few? I don't know much about this space, just curious
Can you name a few? I don't know much about this space, just curious
> Can you name a few?
Yes, sure: Avalanche [1], Algorand [2], Solana [3], DFINITY [4], Conflux [5]
[1] https://www.avalabs.org/
[2] https://algorand.foundation/
[3] https://solana.com/
[4] https://dfinity.org/
[5] https://confluxnetwork.org/
Yes, sure: Avalanche [1], Algorand [2], Solana [3], DFINITY [4], Conflux [5]
[1] https://www.avalabs.org/
[2] https://algorand.foundation/
[3] https://solana.com/
[4] https://dfinity.org/
[5] https://confluxnetwork.org/
Asking for Ethereum to be usable by anybody is like asking for machine code to be usable by anyone.
Ethereum should focus on innovation (desperately) whilst other smart people and entrepreneurs should be working layers on top of ethereum so its more accessable to people like us.
Ethereum should focus on innovation (desperately) whilst other smart people and entrepreneurs should be working layers on top of ethereum so its more accessable to people like us.
This is so true. I was playing with Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) to create artworks a few weeks ago. It seemed like a fun side-project even if I'm not likely to get rich producing something.
That died right about the time when it was going to cost me ~$135 in fees to mint the artwork[1]. While I followed through and completed the one artwork, most of the successful artworks are a series of collections.
Minting those was prohibitively expensive at the time of writing.
[1]: https://vertis.io/2021/02/03/exploring-nfts/
That died right about the time when it was going to cost me ~$135 in fees to mint the artwork[1]. While I followed through and completed the one artwork, most of the successful artworks are a series of collections.
Minting those was prohibitively expensive at the time of writing.
[1]: https://vertis.io/2021/02/03/exploring-nfts/
The underlying problem with bitcoin is the same one with P2P and it's still has not been solved. IE, scalability of a decentralized network. Internet went the other way with a live-able scaling solution based on mixing non decentralized with decentralized.
My prediction is that it will go the way of internet in that a set of orgs that are transparent will form the centralized structure to scale it at live-able terms and scaling.
Does that mean pure P2P is not a scalable solve-able solution?
It's a 5 systems level problem which means it takes more time, money, and sacrifice than people think to reach a discoverable solution.
IMHO
My prediction is that it will go the way of internet in that a set of orgs that are transparent will form the centralized structure to scale it at live-able terms and scaling.
Does that mean pure P2P is not a scalable solve-able solution?
It's a 5 systems level problem which means it takes more time, money, and sacrifice than people think to reach a discoverable solution.
IMHO
Try Bitcoin Cash. It's the one that implemented Satoshi's suggested upping of the block size limit, has the same block history as BTC up until the fork, and solves moving value at low fees. This operation is the one people should care about the most. Fancier things will take time. The community hangs out at r/btc by historical accident.
It lost its way in 2017 during the first bubble when all of the cryptobro speculators flooded the scene.
The Sydney Ethereum meetup I started in 2014 suddenly jumped in numbers and became full of wankers in suits wanting to discuss the price, wanting to apply the tech inside financial institutions and explore new regulations.
2017 was worrying. 2018 solidified that Ethereum was merely going to serve the interests of the established financial apparatus.
There's no revolution or cryptoanarchy here; only power grabs and new oligarchies.
The Sydney Ethereum meetup I started in 2014 suddenly jumped in numbers and became full of wankers in suits wanting to discuss the price, wanting to apply the tech inside financial institutions and explore new regulations.
2017 was worrying. 2018 solidified that Ethereum was merely going to serve the interests of the established financial apparatus.
There's no revolution or cryptoanarchy here; only power grabs and new oligarchies.
>But I'm telling you that no sane Joe will touch that shit without a serious cryptographic specialist by their side.
One would think so, but people in the space are calling each other "degens", one of the best Ethereum devs joked about "testing in production", and for the past year there have been dozens of +1M USD hacks in the space.
So yeah, projects are already launching based on zk-rollups and other complex cryptography without "serious cryptographic specialist by their side".
One would think so, but people in the space are calling each other "degens", one of the best Ethereum devs joked about "testing in production", and for the past year there have been dozens of +1M USD hacks in the space.
So yeah, projects are already launching based on zk-rollups and other complex cryptography without "serious cryptographic specialist by their side".
If you share sentiments in this article, checkout cheapETH (cheapeth.org). It's created as a utility token to solve the extremely high gas price problem on the ETH network.
All the fun of the ETH network with none of the crazy fees and high barrier of entry.
Not trying to shill anything. I missed the boat on early Ethereum and never got a chance to really experiment with the network. I've been doing that with cheapETH and its been a great learning experience.
All the fun of the ETH network with none of the crazy fees and high barrier of entry.
Not trying to shill anything. I missed the boat on early Ethereum and never got a chance to really experiment with the network. I've been doing that with cheapETH and its been a great learning experience.
While there are many people out to make a quick buck in the crypto world, investment fuels innovation. It gives people incentive to build decentralized ecosystems.
Given that we are more than ever moving toward a centalised society where corporations have an increasingly tightened grip over the people, decentalised technologies are in my opinion a glimmer of technological hope.
Given that we are more than ever moving toward a centalised society where corporations have an increasingly tightened grip over the people, decentalised technologies are in my opinion a glimmer of technological hope.
Compared with Ethereum, "the global computer", zeronet is free as it doesn't require transaction fee to function.
ZeroNet is about storage and distribution, not computation or a ledger.
I would argue ethereum (network) is about distribution as well. As the computation is done repeatedly by each machine locally.
The advantage of ethereum over zeronet is it support more flexible verification (via smart contract) while zeronet mainly verify by signature without customizable logics.
The advantage of ethereum over zeronet is it support more flexible verification (via smart contract) while zeronet mainly verify by signature without customizable logics.
And there I was entertaining the idea of becoming a smart contract developer for fun and profit. Programmable money sounds very appealing and I can see so many usecases... if only we could use a proper language like Kotlin to develop smart contracts..
Any solidity dev that can give us some feedback of what it's like to work full time on this platform? P
Any solidity dev that can give us some feedback of what it's like to work full time on this platform? P
Short answer: it is Hell.
Long answers:
- "linking libraries" between FE and blockchains are constantly broken, have _a_lot_ of undefined behaviours, and their error codes are few and totally opaque to what's really happening. Bonus part: they also change fast, a lot, and mostly with breaking changes. See web3.js and ether.js issues if you wanna cry
- you mostly will have to use third party services like infura or web browser plugins like metamask to get a working user experience but it will be an extremely poor user experience. We currently use metamask and we had a lot of problems with it, and also it randomly fails making ofc the whole app unresponsive if you don't code defensively of this behaviour. Did I also said they frequently update it deprecating methods and behaviours they suggested just some releases ago? Yeah, enjoy.
- solidity is the standard language to write contracts and it is literally the worst language I ever used, with a lot of undefined behaviours I encounter daily. I cannot count the times I had to spend a dozen of hours to find information in obscure blogposts or issues about "hey don't use this language construct with this evm version while passing this type of parameter or the compiler will put a sort-of-nop instead of what you really want". You better create an internal wiki or you'll lose track of what you have to know to avoid to shoot yourself in the foot constantly.
- The tools around solidity (Eg the whole Truffle suite) are full of major and minor bugs, will fail on you without explicitly telling why and the documentation is basically not existent. The remix ide is barely passable but you have to use a bunch of disconnected plugins to get something useful. The plugins for common ides (webstorm) or text editor (vscode) are useless at the moment of writing.
I'll be honest, I am still working on these dapps just because I believe in the team I am in. If it was for the current state of the technology and the relative constant feeling of burnout I am accumulating, I would have RUN away months ago and moved to a corp job in a super ""boring"" stack (currently thinking about going the .netcore route).
Long answers:
- "linking libraries" between FE and blockchains are constantly broken, have _a_lot_ of undefined behaviours, and their error codes are few and totally opaque to what's really happening. Bonus part: they also change fast, a lot, and mostly with breaking changes. See web3.js and ether.js issues if you wanna cry
- you mostly will have to use third party services like infura or web browser plugins like metamask to get a working user experience but it will be an extremely poor user experience. We currently use metamask and we had a lot of problems with it, and also it randomly fails making ofc the whole app unresponsive if you don't code defensively of this behaviour. Did I also said they frequently update it deprecating methods and behaviours they suggested just some releases ago? Yeah, enjoy.
- solidity is the standard language to write contracts and it is literally the worst language I ever used, with a lot of undefined behaviours I encounter daily. I cannot count the times I had to spend a dozen of hours to find information in obscure blogposts or issues about "hey don't use this language construct with this evm version while passing this type of parameter or the compiler will put a sort-of-nop instead of what you really want". You better create an internal wiki or you'll lose track of what you have to know to avoid to shoot yourself in the foot constantly.
- The tools around solidity (Eg the whole Truffle suite) are full of major and minor bugs, will fail on you without explicitly telling why and the documentation is basically not existent. The remix ide is barely passable but you have to use a bunch of disconnected plugins to get something useful. The plugins for common ides (webstorm) or text editor (vscode) are useless at the moment of writing.
I'll be honest, I am still working on these dapps just because I believe in the team I am in. If it was for the current state of the technology and the relative constant feeling of burnout I am accumulating, I would have RUN away months ago and moved to a corp job in a super ""boring"" stack (currently thinking about going the .netcore route).
You know what? That makes me think. So I applied for YC with a non-blockchain startup. In the application form, they asked whether I had another idea. So I answered a development tool for smart contracts / blockchain applications. A Jetbrain IDE but for smart contracts.
I already develop Mamba (https://mamba.black). It's like Truffle but for Python instead of JavaScript.
We'll see how it goes.
I already develop Mamba (https://mamba.black). It's like Truffle but for Python instead of JavaScript.
We'll see how it goes.
Amazing, continue! There is a huge demand for it I'm sure. I know I do.
Thanks for your feedback!
I guess the grass always seem greener on the other side. I'm the type of guy who don't enjoy spending time around tooling build configs- I think I'll wait until better tools come around. I believe they will, and when the average developer can develop smart contracts easily, it will be a lot of fun then.
Have you done any coding in Haskell? Any thoughts on Cardano's decision to go with Haskell?: https://forum.cardano.org/t/why-cardano-chose-haskell-and-wh...
I still hold firm to my belief that, whatever the initial intentions the idea of cryptocurrency had, since 5 or 6 years ago, cryptocurrencies are the MLM of the tech world.
I even knew a few non-techies acquaintances that almost got roped into it (in the figure of thousands of USD) with the same pyramid scheme manipulation techniques and terminology.
I even knew a few non-techies acquaintances that almost got roped into it (in the figure of thousands of USD) with the same pyramid scheme manipulation techniques and terminology.
Personally, I find the crypto-skepticism on HN a strong indicator that I should buy more.
@timdaub - try Celo (celo.org). Full EVM compatibility, low gas prices, mobile-first money legos. There's your hero.
can recommend!
There are some ongoing (and somewhat controversial) efforts to make Ethereum fun for developers again: https://cheapeth.org/, https://www.deveth.org/.
As a dapp dev for work, I totally feel the mental fatigue of constantly fighting the ever changing tool, the broken libraries, the inconsistent errors management and the cascade of breaking changes any modify causes. It feels like js frontend framework madness x 10
> Instead, we need an approach for the average Joe developer to create their idea within the Ethereum ecosystem without the need for hardcore unproven technologies.
Are you familiar with "The Island, The Ocean and the Pond" presentation by Charles Hoskinson?
Are you familiar with "The Island, The Ocean and the Pond" presentation by Charles Hoskinson?
Given the hacking climate in our world. And the zero data integrity policy given by the corpo scummies, you have to be a total dumbass bear to think ethereum and block chain technology doesn't have a huge future.
A little OT but seems the right place to ask.
Is there any 'mainstream' crypto useful for micro-transactions with low-latency and low-transaction fees?
Or mainstream is what kills actually kills it?
Or mainstream is what kills actually kills it?
Out of all the options I've researched, the one I'm considering investing my development time into is Nano. 0 transaction fees, <<1s transaction times, already decentralized and a great community. It's a very polarizing coin (people either love it or dismiss it), but what won me over is that it's not built on promises: it does exactly what it says on the tin, already.
Nano. High throughoutput, no transaction fees. Works well for years already.
Having some level of transaction fees could be important for preventing DOS attacks.
I also like the idea of forming a treasury from a cut of the transaction fees to fund proposals for future projects from within the community as Cardano and Polkadot have done.
I also like the idea of forming a treasury from a cut of the transaction fees to fund proposals for future projects from within the community as Cardano and Polkadot have done.
> Having some level of transaction fees could be important for preventing DOS attacks.
Agreed. Their mitigation approach is somewhat interesting as well though (dynamic PoW [1]). Thanks to the independent nature of the blocks, signing difficulty of the transactions can be raised and lowered dynamically making spam incrementally more expensive for the spammers.
[1] https://medium.com/nanocurrency/dynamic-proof-of-work-priori...
Agreed. Their mitigation approach is somewhat interesting as well though (dynamic PoW [1]). Thanks to the independent nature of the blocks, signing difficulty of the transactions can be raised and lowered dynamically making spam incrementally more expensive for the spammers.
[1] https://medium.com/nanocurrency/dynamic-proof-of-work-priori...
Can you explain in simple words, how they achieve this?
Every account in the network is a chain of blocks, with each block signed by the private key of that account. So only the owner of the account can add a block to their chain. To send money from A to B, A will add a 'spend' block to her chain, and B will add a 'receive' block to his chain. If B is offline, he can claim that receive later.
The speed comes from the fact that spends from A to B can be processed independently of spends from C to D. So all independent transactions occur in parallel (and as you can imagine most transactions are independent).
Every block addition is voted on by all participating nodes, and they vote as quickly as possible, so they're limited by internet bandwidth/latency, as well public/private key signature verification and generation. Most transactions complete within less than a second.
New blocks do need a PoW signature, but these are much much smaller than other PoW signatures. Additionally, they are usually generated by the account performing the transaction, so they will typically run on your phone or browser wallet app.
Finally, the entire system was feeless from inception. That's just a design decision. I guess people run nodes because they want the whole thing to live.
The speed comes from the fact that spends from A to B can be processed independently of spends from C to D. So all independent transactions occur in parallel (and as you can imagine most transactions are independent).
Every block addition is voted on by all participating nodes, and they vote as quickly as possible, so they're limited by internet bandwidth/latency, as well public/private key signature verification and generation. Most transactions complete within less than a second.
New blocks do need a PoW signature, but these are much much smaller than other PoW signatures. Additionally, they are usually generated by the account performing the transaction, so they will typically run on your phone or browser wallet app.
Finally, the entire system was feeless from inception. That's just a design decision. I guess people run nodes because they want the whole thing to live.
Yes, but you sacrifice security for scalability. One of the ethereum layer 2's seem to be the most promising but are yet to gain major traction. Loopring seems to be in a pretty good place right now though. You could also use some other crypto like BCH, which vitalik once suggested could be used to store ethereum state. So if its good enough for him, it might be good enough for you.
There's Cheap Eth which is an Ethereum fork with cheaper prices: https://cheapeth.org/ .
Yeah, where author hardcoded himself 25m coins [1] and bans everyone who mentions it from the official discord. Currency of the future indeed.
[1] https://github.com/cheapETH/go-ethereum/commit/412c38434d8d8...
[1] https://github.com/cheapETH/go-ethereum/commit/412c38434d8d8...
Didn't know about that. If the point is to just be able to play around with Solidity and smart contracts it doesn't seem like a big deal. The Discord banning sounds sketchy though so maybe not something to use beyond testing.
Have you looked at building dapps on Bitcoin/Stacks (STX)? Clarity, Radiks and Gaia by Blockstack offer scalability and an easy on-ramp to smart contact development.
Its the stack. I can't get interested in any crypto currency or related technology that doesn't provide, at a minimum, a linkable C library or .. even better .. a luarocks module .. to do all the work.
If I even have to think about using npm or javascript to join the new hipster cult, I'm out. These tools are not up to snuff.
C'mon crypto guys, give us systems programmers the libs we need. Javascript is OUT. Your fancy DSL is OUT. Go C/C++ native, or GTFO ...
If I even have to think about using npm or javascript to join the new hipster cult, I'm out. These tools are not up to snuff.
C'mon crypto guys, give us systems programmers the libs we need. Javascript is OUT. Your fancy DSL is OUT. Go C/C++ native, or GTFO ...
Entire industries have been built on top of JavaScript, from rags to the most valuable companies in the world reinvesting back into it. It’s getting mature, too.
As someone who 5 years ago refused to learn JavaScript and was firmly in your camp, I don’t really see an “up to snuff” argument to be made anymore. All languages have quirks and JavaScript definitely has them, but it’s not alone in that regard, especially comparing to C/C++/Go. Besides, you don’t want a systems programming language to write code that runs in the EVM, or when running others untrusted code.
Use the right tool for the right job.
As someone who 5 years ago refused to learn JavaScript and was firmly in your camp, I don’t really see an “up to snuff” argument to be made anymore. All languages have quirks and JavaScript definitely has them, but it’s not alone in that regard, especially comparing to C/C++/Go. Besides, you don’t want a systems programming language to write code that runs in the EVM, or when running others untrusted code.
Use the right tool for the right job.
Entire industries have been built on Cobol, and Emacs-as-a-Lisp-host, and Visual Basic too, but that doesn't mean we should be using any of it for a next-generation financial trading scheme.
There aren't any good reasons to avoid producing viable C/C++ libraries to implement this kind of technology - only developer complacency and laziness.
Want me to adopt your new fintech? Let me embed it in ANY app I might write, not just the browser, not just cli-Javascript ..
There aren't any good reasons to avoid producing viable C/C++ libraries to implement this kind of technology - only developer complacency and laziness.
Want me to adopt your new fintech? Let me embed it in ANY app I might write, not just the browser, not just cli-Javascript ..
What do you want to embed? web3.js? My guess is that is low hanging fruit, given that it’s mostly interacting with Ethereum nodes over HTTP and websockets, so if someone wants to do this, they could pretty straightforward. If their primary user of their integration are people on the web and cell phones, I think this was a good, scope limiting decision.
Or is it something else?
Or is it something else?
I would love to be able to incorporate Ethereum features in my apps - which are written in C/C++-friendly languages, and which avoid any and all use of Javascript, at all cost.
I don't think the decision to use Javascript for this kind of functionality was wise, or practical. The cyclomatic complexity of managing a web-installable javascript codebase compared to a C/C++ module is just too damn high.
I don't think the decision to use Javascript for this kind of functionality was wise, or practical. The cyclomatic complexity of managing a web-installable javascript codebase compared to a C/C++ module is just too damn high.
[deleted]
[deleted]
> Entire industries have been built on top of JavaScript, from rags to the most valuable companies in the world reinvesting back into it. It’s getting mature, too.
This is a fallacy argument. Because other users it, doens't mean its good.
This is a fallacy argument. Because other users it, doens't mean its good.
Thanks for pointing this out. While I think that speaks to the productivity it has provided (I guess that’s a stretch / could be coincidence), what I really should have conveyed is that through a thriving ecosystem and updated standards, it’s gotten a lot better over time. Node v8+ and latest versions of NPM are very far from where they used to be. Again, JavaScript is not without it’s quirks, but I don’t think any language is free from that statement, and JavaScript’s are easily managed in my opinion.
It’s single threaded, but again, right tool for the right job.
It’s single threaded, but again, right tool for the right job.
There's a thriving ecosystem because you are forced to use it. Do you think there wouldn't be a thriving perl ecosystem if perl was the only language you could use to execute code in a web browser?
Very likely; although JavaScript became much more popular after it was available outside the browser, that probably was a factor.
It doesn’t affect my argument that it is a thriving ecosystem that has made it worth much more than the negative sentiment it has received in the past, and that it is not a bad choice.
It doesn’t affect my argument that it is a thriving ecosystem that has made it worth much more than the negative sentiment it has received in the past, and that it is not a bad choice.
Its a bad choice because you have to use Javascript, and Javascript is a shitty technology akin to Visual Basic.
Collective adoption of a technology doesn't make it 'good'. It makes it 'available'. Those things are not always equivalent.
Collective adoption of a technology doesn't make it 'good'. It makes it 'available'. Those things are not always equivalent.
While the ecosystem contributes value for many use cases, I don't think you can make use of such things when writing smart contracts that run on a very slow and very expensive computer.
[deleted]
[deleted]
[deleted]
>Go C/C++ native, or GTFO ...
I don't think memory-safety issues are the killer app for Ethereum. The lack of C/C++ is one of the best things about the Ethereum ecosystem.
I don't think memory-safety issues are the killer app for Ethereum. The lack of C/C++ is one of the best things about the Ethereum ecosystem.
Memory-safety issues are a thing of the 20th century, if you still have them in this day and age as a C/C++ developer you probably should put the real compiler down, kid ..
Besides which, you're never going to convince me that Javascript/NPM have fewer issues with leaks and holes than a well engineered C/C++ lib would. I mean, come on ..
Besides which, you're never going to convince me that Javascript/NPM have fewer issues with leaks and holes than a well engineered C/C++ lib would. I mean, come on ..
As a security guy I love when people have your perspective on memory safety, guarantees my job for a couple more decades.
Memory issues are still the source of the biggest and best bugs. I have no doubt I can find huge security issues in your native code.
Memory issues are still the source of the biggest and best bugs. I have no doubt I can find huge security issues in your native code.
I'm a SIL-4 programmer. If you can find security issues in my code, its because it hasn't .. yet .. been through the rigors of my teams safety certification and validation processes. Check back in a year, and don't forget to start with the code coverage counts.
While I certainly concur with your perspective, the context is, C/C++ vs. Javascript. You have so many low hanging fruit in the npm eco-system, you'd be a fool wasting time on my code. Which, incidentally, is protecting millions of peoples lives in 40 countries, while they commute to work every single day... its not exactly the kind of stuff that teenagers unpack for use in searching strings for things ..
Finance code should be much, much better tested than the Javascript eco-system allows. There is no reason not to write finance/cryptocurrency code with the same vigor as transportation safety modules. You're totally right that, if my C/C++ codebase were treated the same way as the average Javascript module, you'd be having a field day.
But, done properly, you'd have your job cut out for you. And thats exactly what I'm asking for, from those building 'next generation finance software': get it to SIL-4.
While I certainly concur with your perspective, the context is, C/C++ vs. Javascript. You have so many low hanging fruit in the npm eco-system, you'd be a fool wasting time on my code. Which, incidentally, is protecting millions of peoples lives in 40 countries, while they commute to work every single day... its not exactly the kind of stuff that teenagers unpack for use in searching strings for things ..
Finance code should be much, much better tested than the Javascript eco-system allows. There is no reason not to write finance/cryptocurrency code with the same vigor as transportation safety modules. You're totally right that, if my C/C++ codebase were treated the same way as the average Javascript module, you'd be having a field day.
But, done properly, you'd have your job cut out for you. And thats exactly what I'm asking for, from those building 'next generation finance software': get it to SIL-4.
[deleted]
Most everything fun thing that I used to do is no longer fun anymore.
Timduab should check out cheapETH. Its Eth but cheap. ....
It sounds like the only issue is high fees..?
Avalanche offers the EVM, fast transactions and low fees. And a lot more than just the EVM on the C chain. Sounds like the ticket, doesn't it?
If all you want is smart contracts then why stick to ethereum? As you stated there are plenty of different projects wich are far more scalable.
Please name five of many.
I'll happily take your etherium if it's no fun any more. I'm low on cash and rent needs paying.
0x9a31DDDC8ddD0949a4Ee6aA6c297e5f517E62d59
0x9a31DDDC8ddD0949a4Ee6aA6c297e5f517E62d59
Make Ethereum great again?
Check Cosmos(Tendermint).
I was told blockchain would be the solution to many problems
Timdaub should check out cheapETH ... it Eth but cheap...
Why would someone expect cryptocurrencies to be fun? It’s fintech. Money isn’t fun, it’s money.
A lot of bitcoin/cryptocurrency early adopters were there because it's fun.
Especially in 2009 and 2010 before bitcoin proved it could have value, but even up to about 2016, a lot of people still seemed to be attracted due to the fun.
And a lot of those people ended up in leadership positions.
Especially in 2009 and 2010 before bitcoin proved it could have value, but even up to about 2016, a lot of people still seemed to be attracted due to the fun.
And a lot of those people ended up in leadership positions.
There's more than money. Some coins like Ethereum have a network behind them on top of which you can do a lot of stuff.
Like sia (siacoin) which is used to pay for distributed storage. But still needs mining to keep going, which distracts from it's purpose. Rent and lend storage space. I which there where some other distributed consensus mechanism which doesn't rely on massive mining.
Lots of uses other than pure fin transactions. Most people are blind to this.
E.g. https://golem.network/
E.g. https://golem.network/
yeah I'm having a blast
you can pre-purchase gas when gas prices are low and use it when gas prices are high like now
there are a lot of currently advanced ways to use Ethereum, and all EVMs
The EVM is the thing to learn, being aware of the decentralization ideology is a nice to have and really irrelevant
(which is hilarious argument to have with Ethereum bulls regarding other less secured EVMs because the bitcoiners and no-coiners and general Ethereum detractors don't even consider Ethereum decentralized)
you can pre-purchase gas when gas prices are low and use it when gas prices are high like now
there are a lot of currently advanced ways to use Ethereum, and all EVMs
The EVM is the thing to learn, being aware of the decentralization ideology is a nice to have and really irrelevant
(which is hilarious argument to have with Ethereum bulls regarding other less secured EVMs because the bitcoiners and no-coiners and general Ethereum detractors don't even consider Ethereum decentralized)
why is the decentralization irrelevant?
Because using an EVM in production is acknowledging what the market can bear and that market is worth trillions
Like any public equity there can be centralized services worth more a lot, as they’re just platforms
Being aware of what Ethereum mainnet does is okay but shouldn’t guide any of your decisions of whether you want to build on or be bullish on Binance Smart Chain or somebody’s deployment of any other EVM
Like any public equity there can be centralized services worth more a lot, as they’re just platforms
Being aware of what Ethereum mainnet does is okay but shouldn’t guide any of your decisions of whether you want to build on or be bullish on Binance Smart Chain or somebody’s deployment of any other EVM
are you of the opinion that BSC might be a better choice than eth2?
Face it, there is no sexy killer app for the masses. Wait. There is one: Crypto trading to... make quick dough. And the cryptonerds seeing the high trade volume then go and call this a success of crypto. lol