As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually delivers on its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero. Sure, it's all drugs and stolen credit cards, but it does undeniably solve a real world problem for its users instead of just being used as a vehicle for speculative investment.
With that said, I think if anyone comes up with a "killer-app" for crypto, then it'll be on the Ethereum chain. They seem to be the only ones who consistently work towards adding capabilities to the core technology.
Edit: I realize I haven't commented on the article at all. This sentence stood out to me:
> Today, we have all the tools we'll need, and indeed most of the tools we'll ever have, to build applications that are simultaneously cypherpunk and user-friendly. And so we should go out and do it.
Clearly, this is an important step. But the two examples he provides as a beacon of what's possible (Daimo and Farcaster) don't inspire a lot of enthusiasm. Daimo is just a decentralized version of Venmo and Farcaster is a protocol to build social networks on the blockchain, which is yet another tool and not an application.
I do still like reading Vitaliks thoughts. He's a pretty good writer, and it's evident that he spends a lot of time actually thinking about the topics he writes about.
>As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually delivers on its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero. Sure, it's all drugs and stolen credit cards, but it does undeniably solve a real world problem for its users instead of just being used as a vehicle for speculative investment.
This is exactly my use case (the former not later) with Monero and it's been amazing. Only marginally more difficult than to shop on amazon and feels a million times less sketchy than trying to find something locally. The speculative nature of crypto is therefore more of an annoyance as it causes the price to fluctuate too much between paying, shipping, and fund-release.
So you pay with monero but you still need to give them an address to ship to which some probably store somewhere where the police might eventually find it ?
I guess depending on the local police the chances of that leading to any trouble are lower than getting stabbed by a tweaker when you go out into the community to purchase your stuff
The risk is not just 'stabbed by a tweaker' but 'surprise fentanyl'. And police are very unlikely to come after some random online buyer who is not distributing/reselling.
If your sample is cross contaminated with fentanyl e.g. from a scale there is a chance the portion of the sample you sent for testing doesn’t have any fentanyl. These aren’t homogeneously mixed substances its someone loading a dime bag in a bedroom.
I've heard that drug abusers exploit legally protected status of snail mail to avoid search, and have substances sent to an innocent third party as a dead drop or a dummy address to be intercepted. I'd assume authorities will get to you anyway, though.
If someone sends any comm without PGP or I heard a vendor they are not using it witb someone else and I'm never interacting again. It really is that simple!
It was dropped because they would have no luck proving anything. But if they had your credit card making the purchase, things would have turned out differently.
imo this is less of a technical issue and more of a regulatory one in 2024. Sending and receiving large amounts of btc/eth for instance might take a minute. For lower value point of sale transactions you don't really have to wait. And that's money in your pocket at that point not an IOU like a pending transaction at a US bank. Paying capital gains on transactions and constantly changing value dampens adoption quite a bit though
It exists in the US as well (Zelle), except due to the super high number of banks, not all will have feature parity / have it enabled. The major banks like Chase support QR code scanning for instant transfers, smaller ones might require a phone number or email input via keyboard.
It will exist soon in the US since FedPay was rolled out this year. It will take a while for banks to support it, but my guess is everyone will support it as replacement to ACH.
I don't think Venmo will die since there is a need for app to provide nice interface. But Zelle has been lobbying against FedPay since it will destroy them.
Vitalik gave goals of 1.33 MB per second in blob space, and a compressed tx size of 25 bytes. This gives around 50,000 transactions per second, which seems like a worthy goal.
I would have sworn I read it in the linked article, but it's sure not there when I read it again. And it's not in the oldest archive.org copy either. I can only conclude I hallucinated it, which makes me uncomfortable.
The reason L2s can scale that high is every machine doesn't have to process every transaction.
Each L2 is its own chain that uses its own sequencer/s. The blocks from this chain are then compressed into a single blob of data with a ZK proof that the transactions are valid. The validators on L1 only need to verify that ZK proof matches the hash of the submitted data, which can be done in a few ms even if the L2 did 1M+ transactions.
Capital gains tax is not a technical issue per se. People also don't buy coffee with wire transfers, but nobody says wire transfers are a failure. btc/eth are better at doing what wire transfers were designed to do. The point is the tech is much better than people who have been sleeping on crypto seem to realize
This was my use case for bitcoin years ago when my wife and I had just got married. She is a foreigner and was finishing school, so I'd sometimes send her bitcoin instead of wire. Back then bitcoin was only worth a few hundred, and sending her a 1-3 hundred a month is what she needed. To wire 300 dollars is simply not worth it, at least back then. I'm not sure if it has changed at all now though.
Something that has likely slowed down adoption: Current payment methods (CC, debit, tap, chip, etc) artificially appear faster than they are.
When someone taps, 99% of the time the payment processor is not waiting for the funds. It’s all trust and calculations of acceptable risk (that’s why the tap limit).
Crypto can adopt that approach as well.
Yes, CCs/debit went through a period (as did cheques) where that trust was wildly abused and it’s likely any trust layer on top of crypto would have to go through the same period of abuse, but solutions [c|w]ould be implemented fairly quickly since it’s all tech.
Yup. eth transactions could happen in the time it takes to run a credit card if you wait for just a couple confirmations, which should be acceptable risk for point of sale. Bitcoin has lightning.
As to your last point: credit card fraud is still rampant and hardly anyone accepts checks outside of contractual b2b transactions. The issues with those technologies are technical in nature. Sending a crypto transaction doesn't allow someone to fraudulently charge your account like those technologies do. Whether chargebacks should even exist in a secure transaction system by default is debatable. I personally don't think that kangaroo court service is worth the fraud + global ~3% fees. Think about all the chargebacks you've made in your life that weren't related to credit cards just being insecure. I'm certain they are not worth 3% of your total spending.
Wire Transfers are a logistic service you may have someone perform for you in exchange for cash.
Half the point of a digital cash is that you never need a wire transfer because you can just exchange the digital cash directly. Effectively the same as handing someone an envelope full of physical cash.
The currency exchange step needed to convert that BTC back into real money is probably more annoying than just dealing with a wire transfer. And that is essentially my point. If you send someone USD, they can use that directly to pay for expenses like food or rent. If you send someone BTC, they need to first convert that into a real currency before they can use it. That is what I am referencing when I say "The 'Killer App' for a cryptocurrency would be the ability to use it as a currency".
I don't want instant transactions. Clawbacks are very useful. Now the trick is to get that decentralized which means things like smart contracts? But still I haven't seen a good solution.
Well everyone pays an extra ~3% on all of their transactions for that privilege, plus whatever costs retailers factor in for rampant credit card fraud. I wouldn't consider Visa the gold standard of how financial transactions should work the whole system is very clunky and prone to abuse.
I'm really surprised sellers aren't trying to use it at all. There was a small push awhile ago ~2015/16 where a bunch of online stores started accepting bitcoin but IIRC they all stopped once the BTC/USD started to decrease.
I guess credit card fees are <4% so there might not be a big enough discount to offer consumers to make them figure out how to get crypto (without paying more than 4% fees somewhere). Perhaps a chargeback heavy industry such as porn or political groups could benefit from non-chargebackable transactions.
The high bitcoin fees killed adoption more than the price drop.
I worked on OpenBazaar, a decentralized marketplace using bitcoin, and no one wants to spend $5 just to buy something. Artificially reducing block sizes killed adoption.
"Bitcoin but its anonymous" does not make Monero a real currency.
I guess it helps that its value is relatively stable.
But I still can't realistically use it. I can't walk in a store, buy something, then pay with Monero which is obviously disqualifying on it's own. But in addition to that, if I want to give a friend some Monero I would have to walk them through making a new account with some new app which they won't do because it's pointless anyways.
"I can't realistically use credit cards. I can't walk in a store and pay using my credit card. And if I want to send some money to my friend, I have to walk them through of opening a bank account which they won't do because it's pointless anyway and I can just hand them the $50 dollar bill" - Someone years ago.
Do you expect every store to start accepting it instantly?
Your argument does not disqualify Monero as a real currency. It is a real currency, it's used every day for transactions. Just because you don't find use for it in your life does not disqualify it.
Monero is nine years old, Bitcoin is fifteen years old.
I looked up the history of the credit card on Wikipedia to see how fast that caught on. It seems it had a slow start as well. Things only changed when a big bank put all of its weight behind it. I don;t think something like that will ever happen with cryptocoins, since there are no big institutions that would benefit from it becoming widespread.
> I can't realistically use credit cards. I can't walk in a store and pay using my credit card
That was true at some point and I would agree that as long as it remained true "Why should I carry a credit card that I can't use anywhere?" would be a perfectly reasonable thing to say.
> And if I want to send some money to my friend, I have to walk them through of opening a bank account which they won't do because it's pointless anyway and I can just hand them the $50 dollar bill"
This is completely disconnected from reality. People very commonly use bank accounts and checks. I know they must exist but I cant think of a single person in my life who would need my help dealing with a check.
> It is a real currency, it's used every day for transactions. Just because you don't find use for it in your life does not disqualify it.
You could say the same thing about V Bucks but that doesn't make it a real currency.
> That was true at some point and I would agree that as long as it remained true "Why should I carry a credit card that I can't use anywhere?" would be a perfectly reasonable thing to say.
But using it as an argument against credit cards is dumb.
> People very commonly use bank accounts and checks
Yes, now they do. Used to be that most people held their wealth in gold or literal cash.
> You could say the same thing about V Bucks but that doesn't make it a real currency.
V Bucks (to my knowledge) can only be used to buy Fortnite stuff. Can I even send it to anyone I want? Guessing not. And I'm pretty sure I can't sell it on a market to anyone else either.
It's maybe quick with low fees now while no one is using it.
It has the exact same practical problems every other distributed cryptocurrency has preventing it from being useful as an actual currency. If Monero ever started seeing adoption as an actual currency it would fall apart just like Bitcoin.
I can't walk into a store and pay with USD either. It doesn't mean USD is not a currency, it's just not usually accepted by stores in my country.
I use Monero semi-regularly to pay for things online (usually privacy products, because sadly nobody is interested in selling me groceries in exchange for xmr). You can absolutely buy things with it.
One of the things that made me less skeptical of Ethereum was that Vitalik has consistently argued based on his view of "Ether as digital oil to power the blockchain", which is to say that the point is not to just hodl, but to create a core technology that can enable different applications.
I still think that we should not forget the "I need a censorship-proof way to send money to someone overseas" story, but mostly as a hedge against the existing institutions, not as an immediate need.
The problem is that this gospel has been said for almost a decade now and despite, literally, billion dollars of assets that Vitalik has, and others flowing this is not happening.
Not saying that this could not happen as an hypotheses but cryptocurrency foundations are far far from business execution basic practices.
As an insider I can say that most money flows to a very small group of people and the governance is not really decentralized. For example, very few people can decide on Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol changes, and these people cannot be changed...
It does seem slow, but they did manage the proof-of-stake transition pretty smoothly despite delays and widespread skepticism, so I give them some credit for that.
He was talking about proof-of-stake since the beginning and every year was talking about the next year. Not blaming Vitalik himself but the whole thing, it is bad to give false expectations.
Another thing, no pun intended, is that the proof-of-stake upgrade maintains prohibitive the network fees for transactions while other technologies have low fees.
> I have no idea what Vitalik is funding. Do you?
The funding of projects is through the foundation but if I remember well the original people and contributors received the ~50% of the total ethers until now.
Consensus algorithms have nothing to do with transaction fees.
> while other technologies have low fees.
Any "Ethereum killer" that showed up turned out to have the same if not worse problems as Ethereum in the moment they started dealing with minimal real-world traction.
> contributors received the ~50% of the total ethers until now.
First: source?
Second: "50% of total ETH until now" is doing a lot of work here. How much was during the pre-mine and how much was due to the sale? The pre-mine sale raised < 20 million USD. Are you counting the people who bought ETH in the pre-mine as "original contributors"?
> Consensus algorithms have nothing to do with transaction fees.
Please don't tell bullshit. Look at Algorand and other protocols, consensus has a relationship with fees because it is linked with the cost of reaching consensus!
You can even read that in the Ethereum subreddit [0].
> Source?
It is repeated ad nauseam in Internet [1] and you can analyze the blockchain genesis to check it.
> Ethereum killer?
It is not about the protocol but the community you create. Algorand has solved the PoS before Cardano and Ethereum but they are #58 now and the creator is one of the parents of modern cryptography, Turing Prize, etc. Solana is #5. Beyond comparing the Solana protocol with Algorand it is a matter of "business" execution, technology is a smaller part. Probably if Livra from Meta was accepted it would be in the top 10.
Even when you think about Solidity as a programming language, it was not well designed (e.g. security) but that doesn't matter.
I asked for "source" because I know that this is "repeated ad nauseam in the Internet" while being provably false.
The very first result on your google query is a bitcoin.com page that is 404, but archive.org has this:
The Ethereum network started off with a supply of 72 million Ether (ETH).
Eighty-three percent of that (60 million) was distributed to people who had
purchased ETH in a crowd sale that was conducted in July and August of 2014.
(...)
Of the remaining 12 million ETH distributed at the launch of the network in 2015,
half was split amongst 83 early contributors to the protocol based mostly on time
contributed. The other half were set aside for the Ethereum Foundation.
So, the "50% to contributors" is actually 8.33%.
> consensus has a relationship with fees because it is linked with the cost of reaching consensus!
Wrong. Fees are determined by network activity and the amount of transactions competing to get into the block being "mined". The cost to validate a full block is not really different than the cost to validate a block that is not completely full.
If Algorand or Cardano ever got close to the transaction volume from Ethereum, you can bet that their average transaction fees would go up accordingly.
> If Algorand or Cardano ever got close to the transaction volume from Ethereum, you can bet that their average transaction fees would go up accordingly.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I don't know about Algorand or Cardano transaction volume, but many EVM-based blockchains process a similar number of transactions to ethereum (or more), with lower fees. They do all have different (proof of stake still) consensus models though
Let's get Polygon out, because they are not a base-layer blockchain.
> a similar number of transactions to ethereum (or more), with lower fees.
Are we talking about the base currency (Wei) or the dollar-equivalent amount? If Wei, the only way that the transaction fees can be lower is if the chain has a different set of costs for the operations.
If you are talking about the dollar-equivalent amount, then yes, transactions are going to be "more expensive". But even then, it is not related to the consensus algorithm and just the "price of the base token".
Transaction volume meaning.. the number of transactions processed by the network?
If you meant monetary volume, you should have used a different term than one which is well-recognized to refer to the number of transactions (both in and out of blockchain applications of that term)
edit: I see, you're suggesting the fees are cheaper because the token is cheaper, and somehow seem to think EVM networks will have a straightforward relationship between the number of transactions and the cost denominated in their gas token.
I don't see how this follows. The fees are entirely a function of network constants and usage, which have more to do with what people are willing to pay to get their transaction into a block.
Ethereum has a limited amount of block-space, and a fixed number of blocks per year. The gas price isn't entirely a bidding system, because there's basically a floating multiplier which adjusts automatically based on the "fullness" of the most recent however many blocks, but the principle is that you need some form of congestion control
In blockchains which have larger blocks, or more numerous blocks, or a number of blocks/block-size which adjust based on usage, it is not as costly to get a transaction included.
So I don't know about Cardano or Algorand, but many networks can handle as many transactions as ethereum while having much cheaper transaction fees, which seemed to be the point you were arguing against
You know that Algorand and Solana supports a bigger number of TPSs that Ethereum and with lower fees and different consensus mechanisms, if you don't know that I am talking about someone that tries to show expertise but don't have any real one. It is a fact.
Initial investors are also contributors. The number allocated initially is really huge.
I also know that Solana had frequent outages and issues where they could resolve their transaction sequence, because their hardware and connectivity requirements make it prohibitive for "casual enthusiasts" to run a node.
And if "initial investors are also contributors", then you are just parroting the "Ethereum is pre-mined" from Bitcoiners, and we can safely end the discussion here.
I didn't mention Algorand because its overall network is a blip compared with Ethereum and Solana in any metric, and it can barely be considered as Battle-Tester in a "real world" scenario.
If doing DeFI on Algorand is so much better/cheaper than on Ethereum, then why is it only 1/500th of Ethereum's size?
Mind you, it seems that this calculation is not attributing "bridged" TVL as related to the chain size and activity. If it were, there are 330 Billion USD that depend on Ethereum's base layer security.
This has made you less skeptical of what he’s peddling? That slogan is a series of red flags in only eight words. He could be selling actual snake oil.
The origin story of the snake oil trope is kinda cool. Apparently the concept was brought over to the US by Chinese railroad workers. It was made from the oil of the Chinese water snake which is high in omega-3's that actually do reduce inflammation. Unfortunately there were no Chinese water snakes in America, and the American hucksters started juicing rattlesnakes. And then... other even cheaper substitutes like beef tallow, mineral oil and turpentine. [1]
I suspect the Erabu sea snake is the Chinese water snake that was originally juiced? I don't think rattlesnake oil would have the same effect :)
I'll rephrase a bit for the HN crowd: "The Ethereum currency (Ether) value proposition is that it is used to pay for decentralized apps on the Ethereum Blockchain. The more application and users are there, the more Ether is needed and hence it's value goes up". At least that's how I understand it.
OPs point is that most cryptocurrency advocates go for "but my token and hold, it is sure to grow 10x in a few months" and I (like probably OP) consider it misleading baseless hope at best, fraud usually.
Should you not want the price to be stable? If an arcade game’s price went from 50 cents per play to 5 dollars per play because more people are using a delivery application on the other side of the world that doesn’t make much sense from a consumer perspective.
There are definitely bitcoin diehards out there who look at the price of everything relative to bitcoin.
From a practical standpoint, I think most people would prefer it if the currency used by their country of residence increased in value relative to other global currencies, rather than just staying stable (though for hyperinflationary countries, even that would be a major improvement).
Although stability relative to another currency (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_exchange_rate_system) is considered (by many) disadvantageous for countries with strong economies, because you strip away the central bank's power to manage the supply. This is basically the whole Gold Standard debate.
For blockchain users who want reduced volatility and stability relative to a fiat currency, there are always stablecoins.
But the argument is that the grandparent comment is making is that you should build your application on the ethereum network, eth is the “oil” of this machine, and the more people who use it the higher the value of eth is.
So if I make a game, or an uber for dog walkers, or a global shipping service, or some SaaS app on the ethereum blockchain, then my customers will have to pay more or less (or my costs will be higher or lower) depending on how active the network is.
That makes no sense. Day to day price and gas fee fluctuations make it hard to long term plan. Just saying that if you want price stability use a stablecoin doesn’t address that issue because we are not building the app on the blockchain of the stablecoin. There isn’t an eth stable coin that is always 1 blip to 1 eth exchange rate.
> or a global shipping service, or some SaaS app on the ethereum blockchain, then my customers will have to pay more or less (or my costs will be higher or lower) depending on how active the network is.
Only if you want to have these applications fully running on the base layer, which is frankly nonsense.
To give you one practical example: Storj can provide a object storage service at AWS scale, and its pricing has nothing to do network activity and the price of storage does not change based on the amount of transactions per minute. Unless you want to be paid in real-time and account for every byte that you are storing and transmitting, there is no need to put all of the business logic in the blockchain.
I don't agree with this, but also think you're arguing a different point.
My point was that prices being "stable" isn't actually what's desirable, prices being nonvolatile is.
> So if I make a game, or an uber for dog walkers, or a global shipping service
I mean this is exactly how many of these things work. Uber pricing fluctuates based on demand. So do global shipping prices in many cases. So do game prices on Steam.
Even if the price was the same in the currency you're using (say USD), the value of USD is constantly changing.
> and the more people who use it the higher the value of eth is.
And I'm not sure how this follows. The more people who purchase ETH, the higher the value is.
But using the ethereum network doesn't require you to transact in ETH, only that you pay for the transaction fee (the network cost that makes it possible to to store and execute your transaction essentially) in ETH
If the stakes of the arcade game were so high that people wanted to have its logic running on the base-layer - e.g, high prizes for winners, or the possibility of using power ups obtained in other games - then the price to play would have to depend on the network activity.
But because these games don't, it should be totally fine to delegate this application to a layer-2 system like a roll-up or a payment channel.
But does the layer 2 coin have a stable exchange rate with the layer 1 coin?
And again, we are talking about just to pay to play the game. Today an arcade that uses dollars may charge you 50 cents for a life. Or the equivalent in tokens (layer 2). If suddenly the value of 50 cents could pay for 10 lives, do I need to now charge customers more tokens to play? How do I plan long term with hiring or my utilities if the price I could be paying month to month can fluctuate as much as cryptocurrency does?
Why not just use a stable currency to price your "game token"? Once you are out of the base layer, there is no need to tie any transaction costs to the base layer token.
So, in your example, the game company could easily just say "pay us X amount of dollars however you want, and you will receive the exact same amount on the layer-2 to play".
I feel like we are right back to why even bother using cryptocurrency for this if the fundamentals of it aren’t stable enough for day to day transactions.
My example was talking about using a layer 2 token. Now you’re telling me that it’s simple just use a completely different currency to buy tokens?
Absolutely not. Bitcoin's initial narrative was "digital cash", i.e, digital payments and microtransactions. Given that transaction costs became prohibitive, it switched to "digital gold", or store of value, meaning that Bitcoiners defend the idea that Bitcoin's reason d'être is just to hold it.
I've never seen Vitalik or any of the core Ethereum developers talking about the value of Ether being a fundamental metric of any kind. The incentives are made in a way to maximize utility of the blockchain, not the value of its base currency.
The "beginning of crypto" was with Bitcoin, can we agree to that?
Can we agree that Bitcoin was not claiming to "be a general platform to power distributed applications"? If you disagree, refer to the whitepaper that says "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".
Can we agree that before Ethereum each chain was just a fork of Bitcoin, and that the token (aka "the currency") was "sold" to others as something that would have its value determined by supply and demand, but that the blockchain had no use that was not connected to transactions related to the token? As in: fundamentally speaking, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Cash... are the same?
Can we agree that Ethereum (the blockchain) enables distributed applications where people do not care at all about the price of Ether? E.g, I can host files on Storj and pay with credit card, the people hosting data are being paid in Storj's token, and everyone involved in this economy is directly using the Ethereum blockchain, but don't need to hold any Ether at all?
BTC (and derivatives) were very much "just for holding". The fact that they hoped it could be used for day-to-day value transfers does not negate the fact that the system can only work with a continuous influx of capital. "You should pay something with BTC, but if possible buy back the USD-equivalent amount" was standard advice already in 2011.
> Saying you have some other use case besides asset appreciation is not a unique proposition.
>they hoped it could be used for day-to-day value transfers
And they said this, including Satoshi. Yes they were wrong, but they said it.
>Now, it isn't
It's never been unique, because every coin has said it including, as you have mentioned in every response so far, Bitcoiners.
You've also said Eth guys have said. What are we left with? Every other **coin has obviously said it. I'm not arguing they all mean it, or they've been right. I'm arguing they all said it.
> I'm not arguing they all mean it, or they've been right. I'm arguing they all said it.
Then this whole discussion is pointless. Why should we care about what people say or believe, unless it can be backed by their actions?
Instead of putting them all in the same bucket because on what they said, let's judge them based on what they did. And Vitalik has consistently shown that his work is aligned with the stated plans and vision for Ethereum.
You started the thread by saying you trust the intentions of a coin project based on them saying they're not in it for the money.
I just meant to point out that this was no special characteristic, as they all have done this. "Crypto" has been professing "use cases" since the beginning.
>Then this whole discussion is pointless.
Yes it certainly was, since you wanted to argue that you believe him, yet got caught up in trying to refute for some reason the point that they all say it. You say trust actions instead. Great, as long as we agree words are irrelevant particularly when they all say the same thing.
No, I said that he has argued (to justify the project decisions and work) based on his view.
I never said "I believe on what he has promised". I said "all he has done and delivered has been consistent with his professed views". It's completely different, and I honestly do not see how you could interpret what I said in such a twisted way.
The whitepaper's plan wasn't, but that's not true at all for Bitcoin itself. Satoshi included OP_RETURN which allowed smart contracts - mastercoin being the first L2 (on Bitcoin). He also wanted to increase the blocksize to allow scaling. Vitalik started Ethereum because the "core devs" (bank incumbent funded usurpers) refused to cooperate. This is also the reason the original maintainers like Gavin and Mike Hearn split off to Bitcoin Cash and other alt-coins.
This is all pretty much boring, tired lies that altcoin profiteers like to trot out apparently assuming nobody is still around who is interested in contradicting them.
The purpose of OP_RETURN was to end the script. It was not designed for rando garbage overlays that are worthless; Satoshi's views on scaling were ambiguous—rather than say it "should" he was instead correcting people who thought you could break consensus by simply setting the value higher. There was absolutely zero communication between Vitalik and anybody about his "plans" to dump an overlay into Bitcoin, and his current story about 80-to-40 bytes is a pure, often debunked lie. There isn't a single communication that Vitalik himself can point to anywhere which shows he was interested in "cooperating" and then core turned him down.
His typical lie was that he was interested in stuffing data into Bitcoin, but then core devs "stopped that" by reducing the amount he could stuff into Bitcoin by half—from 80 to 40 bytes—but when he says that he also never points at any discussion, and in any event the direct history contradicts this—no versions of Bitcoin from back then ever reduced anything. It was only ever an increase: from 0, to 40, to 80 in released versions.
There no evidence these people ever give which shows some lack of cooperation with Vitalik is the reason why Hearn and Andresen "split off" to make an altcoin, which itself is quite the absurdity, and if true just means they would have been ethereum pumpers anyway.. so..
This is the same tired misinformation you are spreading from 2017+ and I will prove it with primary sources.
Also, why are the comments on your account 90% calling other people liars about cryptocurrency?
Satoshi's views on scaling were NOT ambiguous. He planned to increase the blocksize and have users switch to SPV wallets. Read section 8 of the Bitcoin white paper:
if (blocknumber > 115000)
maxblocksize = largerlimit
It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.
When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade."
Regarding OP_RETURN, both mastercoin and counterparty existed because of OP_RETURN, so no, it's not "garbage". It's a data field that can be used to link L2's to the Bitcoin blockchain by embedding them in transactions. These projects, factom, and countless others that built off of OP_RETURN had to abandon Bitcoin for other chains because of the core developers' gatekeeping.
> original maintainers like Gavin and Mike Hearn split off to Bitcoin Cash and other alt-coins.
So what developments in Bitcoin Cash have been made in that direction? Why is is that all of the "ideological" forks of Bitcoin do nothing but tweak some parameter size in the network settings and do not go beyond that?
> As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually delivers on its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero.
In the last two weeks I've paid to people who cleaned my air conditioning, my girlfriend's nails, our lawyer, for delivery of some goods from US, for food delivery, for a sightseeing tour, and for exchange to local currency (delivered to my home) — all in USDT. I've also got USDT from a friend for booking Airbnb for him (he couldn't do it on his own account because of reasons). At this point, most of services in local community are advertised with payment in USDT first: via binance and bybit internal transfer, or just on trc-20.
Buenos Aires, and yes — community of (mostly political) Russian immigrants. I don't think USDT gets much use in Izhevsk though, Russian local financial services are pretty good, especially compared to Europe or US.
Is running an app on ethereum still over 100x the cost to run it on, say, AWS?
I hear CEOs talk about how this will revolutionize the world, but realistically no one needs a cryptographically secure immutable ledger to validate that someone is the true owner of concert tickets or whatever.
I do wonder, if the only real-world application that needs a cryptographically secure immutable ledger, is cryptocurrency.
Farcaster is not a tool for building social applications. It is a social network with 70k+ DAU [1]
You can use it through multiple frontends, the officially developed one is Warpcast [2]
And lots of people pay for lots of things with bitcoin, today. It works fine, even if the confirmation takes 15-20 minutes and it costs five bucks. For some things where you prefer discretion, it's fine.
For privacy, just use a coinjoining wallet. It's a solved problem for a long time.
Commenters here are sour over bitcoin, for a variety of reasons, and ignorant at the same time.
Does moving funds between compartmentalized economies count as "currency" use? I know quite a few cases of using it to move money from Russia or China.
I think thats only a subset of people offshoring money. Many more who might have more means and therefore more pressure to offshore that means would probably opt to offshore that money by buying a vancouver condo they will never see.
They aren't. Zcash has opt-in privacy, which I think we've established doesn't work. By this logic BTC also has opt-in privacy – just use a mixer. Well, except that your BTC will be tainted if you do it, which effectively makes BTC non-fungible for all intents and purposes.
The only way to have a private, fungible cryptocurrency is to make privacy mandatory and not "something you enable because you are a drug dealer". Does this mean that everyone using Monero is automatically a drug dealer? Even if it does, it's waaay better to have consistency vs having a cryptocurrency partitioned into "normal coins" and "darknet market coins"
I think it's more useful to think of ZCash's featureset not as privacy defaulting to on or off, but as giving you the option to have pseudonyms.
If you were running a non profit and you wanted people to be able to anonymously contribute to it, but you wanted to prove to your anonymous donors that all of their donations were being spent in accordance with the goals of the nonprofit, you might use ZCash transparent vs shielded addresses as a way to create that division between transparent and opaque.
As for t-addresses having been default, that's a regulatory hack. Exchanges have a better shot at being compliant if they can use the chain as a source of truth. So t-addresses let them create a space where they can do that, and then you as a user can privately move funds out of the exchange's domain and into a black hole without having to get your hands dirty with some other exchange.
Yes I know that monero let's you generate keys for this on a tx by tx basis, but it's not the same. It's just different privacy properties with different use cases.
Monero, however, has the objectively superior CLI. It's fantastic.
You could just as accurately say Zcash has opt-out privacy too. And the privacy is much more than a mixer since you got ZKPs.
Opting out of privacy gives it more plausible deniability, which is why you can find it on coinbase. Not that you should need deniability, since no one has any business knowing what you're doing with your money.
> Opting out of privacy gives it more plausible deniability
So if you actually want to interact with the real world, you have to opt out of privacy? And if you enable privacy you are automatically treated as a weirdo? I don't get the whole point of Zcash.
It's the same issue as with Bitcoin – you can make your transactions private, but it's not the default and not obvious for new users, and anyone who does it is subject to suspicion.
It really looks to me like this "privacy" aspect of Zcash is just a marketing gimmick. It doesn't have any advantages to just using Monero in the first place.
Shielded by default or opt in depends on the wallet you use. As you can imagine, a lot of people like shielded by default. There are reasons to have transparent transactions btw. You may want public proof.
Again, it is not the same as bitcoin. Using a mixer does not come with ZKPs. The transactions are also still public. You can see how much was put in and how much was taken out. Worse, you now potentially have traceable tainted coins and a target on your back.
The point of Zcash is the Z. Zero knowledge proofs. Monero uses differential privacy. Zcash has much stronger privacy guarantees.
Hmm ... "proto-danksharding" which activated the "blobscriptions protocol" so that blobs are "much cheaper than calldata", all of this helping it to become an "L2-centric ecosystem". In the end, this leaves them "not confident enough in the complex code of an optimistic or SNARK-based EVM verifier".
I'm sold ... just tell me where to transfer the money.
There's actually interesting technology being developed here in the areas of distributed computation and zero trust systems. The implementations of Zero Knowledge Proofs and ongoing work on ZK-SNARKS I personally find most fascinating.
There's a lot more to this ecosystem than just speculation. At it's core is a distributed world computer but all anyone knows about is money.exe because this stuff is immensely complex.
If you look into the researcher rather than paying attention to the soyjack youtube thumbnails you'll find the actual substance. Nobody is going do the work for you. Or you know, just write it all off with a snide joke because "crypto bad".
Since distributed blockchains / databases are distributed and therefore need partition tolerance by definition, that leaves consistency or availability for the shortfall in computation.
I'm guessing any "crypto-kinda-currency" is picking eventual consistency as a core mechanic. Think about the word EVENTUAL though.
If the core function of the crypto is a ledger, then it makes sense, it EVENTUALLY gets transacted, and in practical terms you take the faith in the distributed system from a flawless previous record in reconciliation, probably before the actual completion of the transaction.
Now, a distributed major blockchain has ... how many nodes? Thousands or more? That is a long time for reconciliation of the consistency, even with great dedicated internal networks. What? This is over a heterogenous global internet network? That implies EVENTUAL has some bad worst cases.
"Smart contracts" or "distributed trustless computation". Whatever, getting the value of calculation from a node and getting the value stored in the node is essentially the same thing in terms of determining an answer to a query.
It implies a horrendous performance, one you have little control over. I don't think Kubernetes is shaking in its boots.
It's interesting Aphyr never does any crypto analyses, although he makes his bones running a test suite. How do you test a scaled cryptocurrency?
> At it's core is a distributed world computer but all anyone knows about is money.exe because this stuff is immensely complex.
Alternatively, because the only way to use the aforementioned distributed world computer is to engage with money.exe and buy more CoinTokens. Imagine all the kids out there who will be delighted to learn a pay-per-use code interpreter. "Hey mom, I need your credit card to cover the gas while I debug my smart contract."
But assuming you have the money to spend, it's a whole universe of possibilities! Just make sure to cash in before actually trying to use any of them.
How did you not realize that one can run/evaluate code without actually broadcasting it? All you need is access to a node (plenty of public ones) and you can "simulate" any transaction(code) you would like.
Testing a dapp off the mainnet is like ensuring your website works on localhost. It will find some issues, but it's not representative of how it will look in deployment.
In any case, for actual usage it should surprise nobody why everyone conflates Ethereum with money. No, your L2 chain does not qualify as an official solution.
> Testing a dapp off the mainnet is like ensuring your website works on localhost
I would argue the exact opposite. A website will be deployed to different versions of different browsers on different operating systems. A smart contract will exist on a single distributed computer. It sounds like the actual problem is people treating smart contract development as cavalierly as web app development
The problem with this statement is in assuming that any of this is actually ready for the average user, like a minor with their parents credit card. It's really unfortunate that the space received all of the attention it did during the pandemic, as that only managed to bring in misaligned expectations fueled by grifters making impossible claims.
There are a number of planned upgrades on the roadmap[1], such as layer 2 blobs, that will eventually drive the cost per transaction closer to zero, however we're still a decade away from that being the case. In the meantime you can debug your smart contracts on a testnet for $0
Layer 2 blobs aren't even a solution either, arguably. You have to then engineer the layer 2 bridge to have it's own anonymization and escrow handling technology that is disconnected to the Ethereum network entirely. And realistically speaking, "closer to zero" does not mean free (or even at negligible cost). L2 chains can only exist when transactions on the mainnet are made impossible due to unbalanced gas prices. It's a catch-22.
The actual quote is "we are not *currently* at the point where we can be confident enough in the complex code of an optimistic or SNARK-based EVM verifier". The article seems to imply that "in the end", they will be.
Unlike the parent, the full quote gives me more confidence that they're being serious about the upgrades to the Ethereum protocol. This stuff is all cutting edge distribute systems and zero-knowledge proofs work, so of course it's going to take a while to reach confidence in how it'll work.
Something tells me that even if/when the optimistic or SNARK-based EVM verifier is production-ready, the person you're replying to will still feel somewhat unconvinced.
Very likely, but if they get it sorted out one day he will be using it without knowing.
If you have no interest whatsoever and they start explaining to you all the cryptography behind establishing a secure connection to your bank most people would dismiss it as mumbo-jumbo. But now you can tell your grandma to look out for the little green lock on the web that makes her account secure.
I will know. Not because of the "little green lock".
I will know in the same way I know this site is secure. In this case, because of PKCS #1 SHA-256 (aka CKM_SHA1_RSA_PKCS_PSS). Cert issued by DigiCert Global Root G2 and valid until one second before midnight UTC on 3/29/31.
That's where I guess I'm losing sight of the vision.
It's tested, it's proven, it's secure, it works, no "gas", no fees ... I don't know. Maybe I'm just missing something.
The only reason it's foreign to you is because you are not familiar with any of the technology. It's no different that having no idea about LLMs or ML or transformers etc., or if you are not a programmer than being confused by arrays and recursion and TCP/IP...
When setting up my DWS on the chain I performed a fresh implementation of the flex spanning system so that sharded stakes were accordingly modulated when dilution factors are on the rise. Retro validators should never rely on the sole consideration of performative liquidity, and that's why in most use-cases, distributive-non-passing underfitted categorization of assets is preferable. Every DNP-uca implementation has proto-failure systems that allow for better mining experiences, in fact every time assets are minted you obtain by-products of the initial dilution thanks to the false commitment that is produced when pseudo-stakers correct the current derivation according to the relative spike index. That's why the tech interested me at first.
Just because you're unfamiliar with the technology doesn't mean it's nonsense. The failing is yours in actually looking into these things rather than trying to be funny.
If you explain to most people how a TLS handshake works it will sound to them as equally nonsensical. This technology is complicated, this article is targeted at an audience that understands the technology, not one that needs a "My first introduction to distributed computing"
Ethereum should also make plenty of sense to an average programmer who understands basic cryptography. The concept of a distributed virtual machine shouldn't be difficult to grasp.
You could dive deeper into either of the topics you mentioned and start losing people - for example how QUIC carries a TLS handshake, or why enshrined proposer-builder separation is important to Ethereum. All that means is that both protocols hide complexity under the surface.
That's a pretty bombastic claim with no supporting evidence. What exactly makes the design a clusterfuck, and what do newer chains do that is a significant improvement?
So far all of the alternative chains have been plagued with downtime and centralization of nodes into supernodes (at least in the ones that weren't centralized from the start).
> Many have argued that the lack of large-scale applications for the past ten years proves that crypto is useless. I have always argued against this: pretty much every crypto application that is not financial speculation depends on low fees - and so while we have high fees, we should not be surprised that we mainly see financial speculation!
> Now that we have blobs, this key constraint that has been holding us back all this time is starting to melt away. Fees are finally much lower; my statement from seven years ago that the internet of money should not cost more than five cents per transaction is finally coming true.
---
All of this depends on so called "Layer 2s", which adds a great deal of UX complexity to the end user. I'm skeptical that this is best way to solve the scalability issues that plague cryptocurrency, but I will say that this looks to me like it has a much better shot of succeeding that anything Bitcoin has ever attempted to do on this front.
5 cents per transaction is high for many parts of the world, and exceptionally high if every interaction in normal life is turned into a financial transaction.
If their vision is "applications" it feels like any price is too high. Would you sign up for hn if it cost 5 cents? Even though that is nothing in terms of money (for most of us), the friction of money actually being involved in and of itself probably makes it not worth it. Especially when its just a silly internet thing.
I think it's helpful to realize that most everything on the internet is already financialized by default. Whenever you post a comment, upvote, or "write", it costs some company somewhere an amount of money to maintain the marginal amount of server capacity required to process your request. And if you aren't paying for the product, then you are the product of course (ads).
So blockchains don't necessarily financialize things that aren't already financialized, they just tend to make money flow in a more direct way from a group of people using a service to a group of people hosting/providing it. Instead of paying using a micropayment of attention that gets monetized through a complex and often bespoke advertising arrangement, you can pay using a micropayment of a recognizable asset that has actual market value.
Personally, if I could click a single Apple-pay-like button in my browser to attach say 0.5 cents of postage to this Hacker News comment to get it to post, I doubt I would think twice about it. In fact, I would probably participate more confidently knowing it's a deterrent for bots (less of a problem for Hacker News, but a huge problem on Reddit and Xitter).
> they just tend to make money flow in a more direct way from a group of people using a service to a group of people hosting/providing
I suppose there is a certain sense that transaction fees go to people providing services to the blockchain... but i would mostly describe it as paying rent and not actually paying the person responsible for the service.
Farcaster is doing it (allowing posting, upvoting etc) with a pragmatic architecture with different degrees of decentralization (identity onchain, posts on a p2p storage à la bittorrent), and it's going pretty fine... https://warpcast.com/
I'd happily pay a subscription to a closed community if I thought the value of the community was higher than the entry cost. However, I'm glad Hacker News is open and democratic.
If that was the cost of decentralization I am sure a lot of users and especially content creators would consider it. I would rather pay 5c per year on Twitter and own my social graph, rather than pay 0c and leave the platform in the hands of the highest bidder.
Credit card users pay $1+ fees per transaction all the time. They don’t complain only because vendors usually eat the fees on their behalf to obscure the issue.
I have a “2% cash back on everything” card which I know is actually a “we charged your vendor 4% and shared half of that with people like you who clicked the right button” card. I don’t like it. But, that’s the game.
People complain about the impossibility of crypto having fees of pennies with settlement times of minutes while constantly using credit cards that have fees of dollars with a settlement time of days.
I totally agree. The perception that, say, credit cards are fast and free is completely wrong, and based on the comfortably ignorant idea that things that only impact other people don't really exist.
If there's one useful thing to take from it, it's that I think it does usefully highlight just how critical that perception is for adoption -- specifically, how thoroughly it dominates technical concerns like throughput and latency. Perhaps if shop owners were prepared to eat the bitcoin transaction fee the same way they eat the credit card fee, bitcoin might have a resurgence as a cash alternative. There would still be the transaction speed issue -- I think it would require a third party to step in to provide merchants with guarantees (in exchange for a fee), so that the merchant wouldn't have to wait for the transaction to go through. But that's not a tech problem -- it's the same problem that credit cards already have, and have already solved.
What parts of the world? In non developed countries bank fees are actually higher than in the West.
In Bosnia a most basic bank account costs about $3 per month, or 60 Ethereum transactions (most people usually have 10 - 20 transaction per month). For paying bills banks usually charge a commission fee of 1%. And if you want to send money to someone 50 kms away but across the border the fee is $20 with few days wait for money to be received.
Most major developing countries in Asia have p2p instant payments and bank accounts for free or with minimum balance requirement.
UPI (Indian market) launched cross border support with a couple countries starting this year. 118 billion transactions happen via UPI annually.
I do think there is some niche market where ethereum payments will shine but hard to beat free and instant systems already in place at far bigger scale.
Which is great when sending to someone in the same country, but we live in a globalized world.
Sending between countries (except within EU) is best done using crypto.
In many parts of the world people are basically cash-only and don't pay fees for handling money most of the time. The "unbanked". This is the market Ethereum wants to serve.
Also I'd challenge 10-20 transactions per month. I think in many near cash-less societies it might be closer to 5 per day.
> The "unbanked". This is the market Ethereum wants to serve
M-Pesa got there first, and without the taint of cryptocurrency. It's a real, deployed, working system at scale, and has been for years. The idea that a "hope to serve" after a bit more crypto tech innovation will open an untapped market ... well, I wouldn't take it seriously. It's wishful thinking at both ends of the supply and demand equation.
>adds a great deal of UX complexity to the end user
Considering there are people who don't understand the bitcoins aren't INSIDE a physical wallet, that ship has sailed and made a revolution or two already.
In the many, many years they have spent building a pile of gibberish tech, traditional finance has begun transitioning to T-0 settlement on centralized platforms. FedNow is going to replace ACH and wires and allow 24/7 real-time transactions.
It hasn't at all. If you try to transfer money internationally, you will still pay huge fees and it will take sometimes days to settle. Crypto is truly international, and ERC20s like USDC remain fully programmable in a way that cash will never be. It makes things like permissionless 24/7 exchanges (see Uniswap) possible. Which is more than just point to point or account to account transfers. It's an exchange from one asset to another controlled completely by an automated market making algorithm. You cannot find that in trad fi.
> FedNow is going to allow 24/7 real-time transactions.
Following in the steps of what EU and UK did few years ago. (1)
And which always made this cryptocurrency fast settlement stuff sound laughable - like they're describing just what a regular bank account does, and it's supposedly their special magic, so what?
People need to look outside of the USA to understand the state of the art.
You can even find these systems in Africa already (2)
> People need to look outside of the USA to understand the state of the art.
And yet people need only to look down at their smartphone, no matter where in the world they are located, to understand the state of the art in public ledgers.
Regarding "unbanked" people who are "anywhere in the world" but have " their smartphone": Cryptocurrency is not only the wrong product, but also in this case a future functionality would be the wrong time. The market gap for that has closed already due to better systems including M-PESA
As I mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39857944
The consistently ignorant rhetoric here on HN about this supposedly unserved market for cryptocurrency is discouraging. Again, people need to look outside of the USA to understand the state of the art.
I think that if you read my above comments very closely, I am advancing the idea that the state of the art is not evenly distributed, and so your comment is in agreement with that. And further, I am hinting that looking around widely to what other countries do, rather than being parochial, is a good idea.
> Basically, Ethereum is no longer just a financial ecosystem. It's a full-stack replacement for large parts of "centralized tech", and even provides some things that centralized tech does not (eg. governance-related applications). And we need to build with this broader ecosystem in mind.
I have respect for ethereum. It seems like one of the few cryptocurrency projects actually trying to push those ideas as far as they'll go, instead of just being endless scams.
But still, at the end of the day, this feels like endless complexity and in the end we are just back we started: applications we could already do much better using traditional technologies.
What even is the elevator pitch use case of all this?
My (non-crypto) company uses USDC daily on L2 Arbitrum for international settlement, and have seen the fees drop to a few cents per transaction with the release of blobs. We have replaced the need for wires/TransferWise/Revolut on several of our routes.
There is absolutely no reason for USDC to be on a blockchain other than to interact with DeFi. Once DeFi hype dies USDC will be outcompeted by a centralized solution. It's multisig controlled anyway so it's the same thing.
Why is it that no other solution has been developed in the 40 years of the internet, but you believe now is a particularly ripe time for one to pop up?
Because there's not enough demand to justify the regulatory headache for most types of international payments, unless you have the added benefit of interacting with DeFi protocols during a massive shitcoin bubble.
Sorry, but I thought you said in your last comment that you believe USDC will be outcompeted by a centralized solution. Do you believe that, or do you believe that there is not enough demand to justify the regulatory headache of launching a centralized solution? Those seem to me to be opposing viewpoints.
Yes, because Circle will either start using whitelists at which point it will shrink to the point where competition is trivial or it'll just shut down completely. If for some reason there's massive demand in the next decade for sub-minute international money transfers then surely CashApp will get back on that. There's just not, existing slower solutions work fine in most cases and not enough people need something better.
Also important to emphasize, I know I said it'll be outcompeted by a centralized solution. But actually USDC is centralized because it has a multisig, and all of its contracts are 100% upgradeable. So it's like a very inefficient centralized solution that really doesn't belong on a blockchain or at least not a popular one with high fees. But again, DeFi protocols exist, and people want to swap USDC for crypto hedge funds to frontrun.
That's because it has regulatory approval (for now). It's not because of a blockchain.
You can start the thought experiment by asking why USDC is on Ethereum and other popular chains rather than own private blockchain. People could make payments faster. Fees would be lower or more likely zero.
No one would use it because people don't actually want to send money internationally badly enough to create a profit opportunity. They want to interact with DeFi protocols, that's why USDC exists on eth, once the DeFi protocols die then so will USDC.
There's no good other way because people don't actually want to send money internationally badly enough to create a profit opportunity.
Huh? International payments are a HUGE industry. What are you talking about? Western Union and Transferwise are both huge companies that specialize in international payments.
DeFi protocols are a benefit, but even without it USDC would still persist.
There's no good other way because of extreme regulations that harm law abiding citizens under the guise of AML and other junk.
If your application is evading AML then your scale will always be limited. I don’t know how you could possibly feel like that’s a serious pitch. Sounds like, “We’ll just evade the law”. I guess ICOs got away with it for a bit.
They want it sure, but again, not enough to create a profit opportunity. Profit is revenue minus costs, so there's a lot of revenue opportunity (from the bank deposits by the way, not the payments), but the costs are huge. The revenue has to justify the legal headache involved with processing payments in under a minute. That's why the only live solution needs a DeFi bubble to support it.
AML is good, no I don’t. My turn to ask the questions. Is there literally any scenario where you'd accept that maybe crypto isn't actually useful and maybe it is just a big scam? Think about it hard, otherwise you'll waste years of your life in an internet libertarian larp. Bro USDC is multisig'd, it isn't decentralizing anything and it doesn't even need a blockchain except to interact with DeFi.
Kinda crazy how willing you are to let government step all over you under the disguise of AML, when it does jackshit for it. Soon enough you will be convinced that government being able to intercept all communication is good because think of the children!
> Is there literally any scenario where you'd accept that maybe crypto isn't actually useful and maybe it is just a big scam?
What scenario? Crypto is useful in current world. Not useful to everyone, that's fine, no one is forcing you to use it, but a lot of people do find it useful, myself included. Disregarding something as a scam just because you don't find it useful in your life is shortsighted. Think about it hard, otherwise you'll waste years of your life whining about how others are enjoying their lives and you will miss out on yours.
Blockchain/DeFi allows USDC to exist, even you admitted to that. The fact is, USDC exists on the blockchain. Sending international payments is the easiest with blockchain (provided both parties have a way to ramp on/off).
Idk what to tell you. Profit model that can’t work without a speculative DeFi bubble, which will die eventually because it’s not useful. AML is good and there’s a lot of history there. I don’t care much about the libertarian stuff.
The blockchain's security depends on native token value and the native token is a memecoin with no backing and if there's a speculative dump then the network has no security, so no not quite impossible.
ETH is not a memecoin and it has a real economic model. It's used to pay transaction fees, which are mostly burned. There's a small amount of issuance but most of the time that's less than the burn, so the supply shrinks. You can model it as a company, where fee burn is revenue, issuance is cost, the net is earnings, and earnings are distributed to ETH holders like a company doing stock buybacks. You can calculate a PE ratio; when I checked sometime last year the PE was around 100.
Having an economic model doesn't make it not a memecoin. LINK has an economic model and most would agree that there's no reason for it to exist other than to dump on retail. The burn is there in large part to enshrine ETH so that investors can dump on retail, otherwise fees could be paid in other ways. It provides no liquidation or dividend rights. The closest thing to that is rights to MEV, which the base fee controller actively prevents. Value is speculative and if it went to zero then the network would completely die unless it forked to disable the burn.
You need ETH to pay transaction fees. As long as there's more demand for blockspace than the space available, ETH will have a non-speculative value.
The reason for the burn was the 1559 upgrade, which fixed the horrible user experience of guessing what minimum fee level would get your transaction through in a timely manner, and often either overpaying, or underpaying and suffering long delays. If not for the fee burn, the 1559 protocol would be trivial for validators to exploit.
Basically you're arguing for chartalism, it has value because validators say it's the only thing they'll accept. That can change at any time, it's not the same as a company's stock's value being backed by liquid revenue. Imagine situations where the network just decides they want to accept other tokens at the expense of ETH. Imagine what happens to network security if there's a huge speculative dump - would network hard fork to avoid other protocols getting owned? What happens to ETH then?
Not at all. The validators get a small portion of the transaction fee for themselves and certainly they could ask for something different. But the ETH burn is built into the protocol. In theory that could be changed, if you got agreement not just from validators but from the rest of the ecosystem too. But nobody wants to change it. 1559 became very popular within days of hitting production, since it improved user experience so much. And the bigger the ecosystem gets, the harder it is to make fundamental changes.
But sure, in theory all the protocol rules could be changed. In theory Bitcoin could change their 21M supply limit. In theory, a company could sell its fixed assets and pivot to an entirely different business, or the US could change its constitution and take away property rights. But in practice, we usually estimate values based on the way things are working now, and put little weight on unlikely fundamental changes that might happen someday.
The difference is that the US would not do that in response to a speculative dump. With ETH, the system stops working and everything breaks without a HF. So it’s valuable because it’s valuable.
If the company pivoted to a different business, it would likely violate securities laws. Corporate governance is in place to stop that from happening.
US taking away all property rights is significantly less likely than an ETH hard fork. Hard forks have happened.
Ecosystem is getting smaller because everyone knows there are currently no useful DeFi projects. ETH is failing to pump again so this is the peak of network security.
Bitcoin is also a memecoin for the same reason, but at least it’s a credibly neutral memecoin unlike ETH.
Ethereum would not stop working just due to a price crash. It would get cheaper for an attacker to purchase majority stake, but good luck purchasing that much without making the price go back up.
To me, the pitch is take whatever you wanted to do with traditional technology and run a distributed lottery game for cash and prizes on top of it.
A database with a game show component for cash and prizes.
People want exactly this coupled with a bunch of hand waiving to obfuscate this reality so it has more emotional impact when you win the lottery. The traditional lottery is too obviously random with such poor odds. People want a more distributed lottery payout and crypto has delivered.
There is nothing wrong with this. No one pretends though that the state lottery is some mathematical investigation into the dynamics of a stochastic process. Playing the state lottery is not doing research in stochastic calculus. I suspect if the state lottery had started for the first time today though that is exactly how it would be marketed.
For businesses, doing the same thing for transactions between businesses that ERP systems did for internal transactions. Right now there's a lot of cumbersome and expensive mutual auditing, and nobody wants to put it all on a centralized third-party database because inevitably the third party will charge a lot of money once they're hard to replace.
Paul Brody is head of the Ethereum effort at EY, and wrote a book about this called Ethereum for Business. He includes a lot of specific examples. As Vitalik mentioned in the article, most of it is waiting for scaling.
It looks like not a single HN reader is using blockchain technology for anything.
If nobody is using blockchain technology outside of blockchain projects, what are the reasons we expect that some day we will? What could be a near term use case?
Its main purpose is internet currency. The only serious uses surround that via smart contracts, like decentralized exchanges or provably fair gambling (unsavory as that is). Any time someone says "the currency aspect is separate from blockchain," I'd be wary, seeing how the entire point of blockchain is decentralization via proof of work or stake.
NFTs can make sense in theory as an alternative to the already-popular video game collectibles, as silly as that premise is, but they never really got traction, and again that's related to currency. There's been a lot of vaporware around things like corporate blockchains to track assets, which don't even make sense in theory.
Users dislike paying on the web because it is a security risk. Because of this insane system of credit cards, where you give the other party a "secret" which enables them to take the money from you.
If you could just send the money, the barrier to pay would be 100x lower.
Most websites pay the bills via ads. And make less than $0.001 per visitor. If they could sell a monthly membership for a one-time payment of $1, they would have a way better business model.
There are traditional ways to send money without giving out a secret, like Apple Pay. But there's plenty of fraud in the other direction, people accepting charges with stolen payment info that end up being reversed. It's always a little the merchant's job to decide whose "money is no good here," and that's because of laws.
No, that's not how it works at all. Apple is neither in the authorization nor the transaction clearing/settlement flow.
> How do you pay Apple without giving them a secret?
Credit cards being effectively unrestricted bearer tokens isn't nearly the only way to do payments. For example you could send a signed message to your bank instructing them to pay Apple (in a world in which you'd be paying them; again, Apple Pay is not that).
I think Apple has some special relationship with banks, so it's not this simple. But yeah, one way or another you're trusting Apple Pay, which presumably is more trustworthy than a gas station sale terminal.
And if you were signing your own payments, you'd still have to trust your computing device and the bank.
With crypto, you would not have to trust your computing device nor your bank.
You would send $100 to your computing device every now and then. And use that for day to day spendings. If the device turns out to be malicious, you lost only the $100 and stay away from the brand that made the device.
But you're sending that $100 from another computing device, and if you're not trusting a bank-like entity to hold the cryptocurrency for you, you're responsible for securing all your money on that device without locking yourself out.
On the other hand, having some money outside a bank is nice. I've had them freeze my assets before just cuz they felt like it, until I spent a whole day telling them to fix it.
Having a couple hardware wallets in different places + a paper backup split in a couple pieces gives you enough redundancy not to worry about this. Source: my own experience of close to 10 years now.
Unfortunately I will never be willing to entrust my financial safety solely to an algorithm.
An algorithm cannot be reasoned with, it cannot understand that your house burned down and destroyed your ID. It cannot accept liability for it's actions.
If I lose my bank card I go to a branch, verify my ID, and get a replacement. The bank is liable if they allow somebody other then me access to my accounts, regardless of how convincing the fraudster might have been.
Exactly. I've held large amounts of Bitcoin for years but always been too intimidated by hardware wallets or the fancier security schemes. It takes time to learn and try that stuff to the point of 100% trusting it, and I'd rather be called obtuse than overconfident like this guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/TREZOR/comments/s9lgyy/5eth_bounty_...
My solution in the end hinged on a paper recovery phrase, stored in... a bank.
Yes, the barrier is high because paying is a high-friction activity whenever cards are involved. That's why the various quick checkouts are all the rage the past 10 years or so.
This has very little to do with the original claim of "Users dislike paying on the web because it is a security risk". Users have no issues paying for stuff online.
> If you could just send the money, the barrier to pay would be 100x lower.
We can already do that here in Brazil: the web site displays a QR code (plus its contents in text form), the user scans the QR code (or copies the text) into their banking app, and confirms it on the app to send the money.
I hasn't AFAIK made any meaningful difference for websites. What people dislike isn't the inconvenience of credit cards, it's the inconvenience of having any paywall at all.
That was possible 30 years ago. There have been probably been a dozen schemes that tried something like that over the decades, starting with DigiCash from before the WWW existed.
They all failed not because of fees, not because of security concerns, but because even having to think about whether you want to pay for something and how much incurs a mental cost that people avoid.
Free beets cheap by a margin that has nothing to do with how cheap or how easy.
> The day a network exists where you can reliably send like $0.001 of value with little/no fees is the day the internet changes forever.
It will change absolutely nothing whatsoever.
> So many ideas are infeasible right now because CC fees are high, and making any payment is extremely high friction.
Making payments will always be, is inherently high friction, and reducing the amount does nothing below a threshold that is much, much higher than $0.001.
There have been lots and lots of micropayment schemes, and they have all failed because the very fact that there is a payment already introduces mental friction that's effectively higher than current CC fees.
Any idea that is infeasible because there is no way to reliably send $0.001 is in fact easily feasible today by monetizing it some other way, usually via ads.
Lower fees are only relevant for high-volume fully automated transactions with a substantial financial incentive behind them, and those can already be done basically for zero marginal cost, see HFT. The only micropayments that people are willing to engage in individually is when they involve addiction, and that as well can and is already done in gambling apps masquerading as games.
This is something that feels pretty lost in most modern crypto discussion.
It's evident in literally the first line of the bitcoin whitepaper:
"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution"
If paying a random person online was as easy as dropping a quarter in a cup the internet could be a very different place.
I think the part about not going through a financial institution is brought up pretty often, but that line doesn't mention the payment being especially small or quick.
> The day a network exists where you can reliably send like $0.001 of value with little/no fees is the day the internet changes forever.
Why do you set the bar at $0.001? Even sending $1 reliably and with low fees (which has been doable with crypto since its inception) would be revolutionary in my opinion.
Then it could be way shittier because every GET request will be monetized. Also your whole browsing history will be public if you're ever tied to a wallet address.
Are you talking about SCT Inst? It seems like there are no fees built into the protocol itself, but your bank can still charge you to use the service, and it seems many banks charge between 1 and 7 euros:
I didn’t mean a specific protocol, just based on my experience. But where do you see 7€ in this document? I see lot of banks offering zero or below 1€ fees. The highest I see is Novo Banco at 5.20€ (page 18).
Besides SEPA which mandated the upper ceiling and an upcoming regulation which forbids banks from de-prioritising payments to/from other banks (can't remember what it's called now) many European countries have had instant bank transfers locally. For example, Swish in Sweden: https://www.swish.nu/about-swish
NFTs make absolutely no sense for video games collectables. As it is, video game collectables work just fine, NFTs add nothing except cost and complexity.
It took work by a large parent company. And I don't know how third-party websites can trade those, but it must mean either Valve is managing an API or people are doing something hacky to work around that.
It's what I said above, it's a lot of work for a new game to create/maintain its own collectibles marketplace that people can trust, and even a well-established game like Counterstrike doesn't properly support third-party trades. Ethereum provides all that out of the box with NFTs.
There's also the issue that Valve controls all the assets, but that's mostly a moot point because they control the game anyway. I guess someone could honor NFT skins in a separate game if they really wanted, but that's getting theoretical.
They can't. There are third party websites but there is no way for them to initiate trades. They work around this bysome crazy peer-to-peer trust-me-bro scheme.
I’ve been paying multiple people and teams remotely via btc in the past years. Even if you can send a wire, sometimes it can be cheaper/easier to send crypto. But in many cases it’s not even possible to send large amounts of money without incurring massive fees (international paypal, western union, etc). Moved hundeds of thousands of dollars this way by now for purely legal economical reasons, helping a bunch of people make money they would not make otherwise.
Edit: relatedly, not everybody wants to pay their local taxes (and who am I to judge people in various life situations?). This itself is a _massive_ saver for the folks. Send somebody $5k usd a couple times and their bank will start asking complicated questions.
Seems pretty easy. My country's tax forms dont distinguish between how you got paid, just that you got paid. Gov doesn't care if it was through a bank, in gold bars, bitcoin, etc (capital gains they care more about of course)
Reading through the page, that sounds super complicated though.
Couldn't the podcasts simply put a lightning invoice (Which is just a string of text I guess?) on their website with a text like "Support us via Lightning: 1f73ac220b9..."?
A lot of the work with Podcasting 2.0 is moving things into apps like Fountain or Castamatic. By all accounts, people are way way more likely to engage if they don't have to leave their app.
There's crypto-less features that Podcasting 2.0 adds like livestream notifications and transcriptions. Apple actually just added transcriptions to their app officially!
What's wrong about the web for listening to podcasts? Why do I need an app?
And couldn't the "Support us via lightning: 1f73ac220b9..." link have a protocol like "lightning://" prefixed, so when the users clicks it, their preferred payment method pops up?
With a regular cryptocurrency they could just post an address or QR code and anyone can send it using a wallet at any time (no need for them to be online or anything).
Lightning allows single sats worth of micro-payments in real-time, perfect for tossing a few bucks someone's way vs. paying much higher fees and waiting for blocks.
The Podcasting 2.0 spec also includes the "Boostgrams" feature allowing you to send messages to the creator with your payment.
Speaking of offline support the recently announced Hedgehog protocol builds off of lightning and is much more asynchronous.
I use it everywhere where it's an option (so not very often, let's say once a month). I also only use privacy services (vpn for example) where you can pay using cryptocurrency, otherwise what's the point
There was a sketchy looking file sharing website where someone had posted some incredibly hard to find audio tracks that I really wanted, but the website required a subscription. Paying with a cc meant automatically-recurring payments, but I paid with bitcoin, got my files, and knew the website couldn’t get any money from me after that.
If anything will get us out of this ad-ridden hellhole of the centralized internet, I think it'll be cryptocurrency that allows users to transfer tiny amounts of money to a site instead of an ad platform paying the site fractions of a cent for my view.
Like if all I need to do is transfer $0.00001 to the site for my view and it's guaranteed to be free from ads or data hoarding, sign me tf up.
Once you set that up as crypto, thats it, thats the price. With the present model ad agencies can play all sorts of games with this price, inflating or deflating it to suit immediate business needs. Its a whole meta that will poof into smoke. So unless the new crypto meta captures the benefits to ad agencies the current “estimate” model of pricing has, it won’t see daylight.
I think it could be used for some kind of permissioned, collectively crowdsourced database that's (mostly) free from the control of a single group of administrators/gatekeepers. I guess kind of like a decentralized wiki.
In my view, blockchains shine where you need auditable global state, bonus points if you don't want central control in your operations (obviously this then kicks the can to the core devs). This use-case is fairly miniscule for most applications, though.
As far as currency, I think they also have their use-cases as well but most people don't want a global audit trail of all their purchases. Things like Monero and Zcash shine here. The value fluctuations are obnoxious, though.
I'm saying this as a big blockchain skeptic. I think most of the things people use them for are silly.
I think a shared, "slow" database could be useful for property deeds. Give the state admin access to override the typical transfer process in case of theft, and then you're left with a 24/7 accessible public database of property deeds, where the current owner and full history of a deed (transfers, liens, easements) can be accessed and verified by any joe with a computer.
It could be useful for professional licenses, too. Everyone could have a verifiable history of someone's professional license - when it was issued, when it was revoked, again mathematically verifiable. You could be sure that someone's record was never changed or deleted without leaving an audit trail.
Though to be fair, the important part of this is the chain of cryptographically signed and timestamped events. It could work without strictly being a blockchain. You could imagine something that behaves more like a git repository with a flat file database in it.
My non-techie brother has been staking his 1 ETH he bought couple of years ago and has earned today, in his words, “slightly more than from my insurance savings account in the past 10 years”. I think that’s a really nice use case.
I have personally used cryptocurrency (Monero) to buy small quantities of substances for personal use from darkweb marketplaces a while ago.
This has been a great experience, I think the system of public vendor reputation , reviews, user discussions, independently published test results etc. adds a significant layer of safety to this process compared to random local 'street' type transactions of this sort.
Whether you approve of this or not, crypto is a very important layer in this system, I feel like this is the only actual use it has currently, although it's obviously not something crypto advocates like to advertise.
There's many more. Many don't have a lot of adoption, and I don't know if they will. But at the very least it's often interesting to see how traditional systems are reimagined in order to enable decentralized, trustless, computer programs (with humans interacting at the perimeter) to fulfill roles which would traditionally be filled by centralized, trusted intermediaries (often humans).
If for no other reason than getting a front seat as many of them fall apart spectacularly but also because it's intellectually fascinating to see problems approached in an inverted manner.
> But at the very least it's often interesting to see how traditional systems are reimagined in order to enable decentralized, trustless, computer programs
They are not re-imagined. It's a combination of a still on-ongoing gold rush (well, the end tail of it) and people pretending there are purely technical solutions to all problems.
Almost every single of those "interesting re-imagining" projects rather quickly rediscovers why traditional systems are the way they are, and end up being shittier versions of those.
Whatever your feelings on the impact of the technology are, you can't possibly know this
> Almost every single of those "interesting re-imagining" projects rather quickly rediscovers why traditional systems are the way they are, and end up being shittier versions of those.
I pretty much agree with this, though I'd suggest "most" rather than "almost every".
Most scientific studies may fail to support their hypothesis also, that doesn't make them uninteresting.
Some days ago ICP showed it can run ML on a blockchain.
While this is nice and does show that distributed computing is a real possibility I also don't think that anyone is going to switch from Amazon/Azure to ICP any time soon.
But I must say the idea is really nice. It's very easy to develop Actor model based software and deploy it on ICP.
I would actually love it if you had a link with more info on that. Don't take this the wrong way, but my first guess would be that that basically isn't true; either it's not actually machine learning (as is understood today) or it isn't actually a blockchain but rather normal distributed computing being "verified" via blockchain somehow?
There are basically two approaches to on-chain inference: consensus-based approaches (several parties run inference and give a claimed result), and zkML (one party runs inference and proves the result cryptographically).
zkML can be done using general-purpose ZK libraries (since they support arbitrary computations), or there are some specialized tools for proving ML inference, such as https://github.com/ddkang/zkml. It's currently pretty expensive to prove huge models like LLMs, but there's a lot of work being done to make it more practical.
a better question is to look at how people use it, the frictions they encounter, and who works on solving those frictions
just saying “speculation” as if thats not a use case misses that “financial services” are our biggest industry on the planet and thats mirrored in the blockchain space, many people solve frictions and compete with each other. it willfully ignores that all currencies are 99% held as stores of value and the M0 money supply is a tiny fraction used as cash and for merchant transactions, a distribution also mirrored in the blockchain space but ignorantly used to discredit it despite ironically showing how well it works as a parallel economy.
additionally due to the structure of blockchains as a pay to write database, most use cases that aren't related to stores of value or trading are intrinsically tied to something financial which makes the standard impossible
Given that we are now entering another crypto hype cycle and blockchain technology, discussions often veer towards crypto and the allure of embedded tokens. I’m going to stick to the realty and opportunity: utilizing blockchain in fixed income finance.
Having spent two decades navigating the complexities of Wall Street, I know the critical problem plaguing the fixed income market: the overwhelming amount of data generated during the origination of debt instruments and the subsequent challenges in reconciliation during clearing and settlement. Night cycles, calling Bloomberg to fix security master. Calling DTCC to settle trades. Blockchain is the best technology to solve this. Only if applied correctly. Otherwise, it’s a waste.
We started with a fundamental goal: to debunk the myths and misconceptions surrounding blockchain in the securities space. Despite the pervasive FUD propagated by the media, we have now proved to regulators that securities originated on blockchain are indeed securities – not merely speculative digital assets.
At its core, we are looking to address the root cause of friction in fixed income trading: the lack of direct origination and data quality across market participants. By leveraging a permissioned network, we have proved by recording of municipal loans and securities on our blockchain. While it may not be the flashy product that garners headlines, this milestone marks a significant step forward. We also trained all of FINRA’s fixed income examiners….
Our next step is to bring brokered CDs, directly to the investors, giving them access to negotiate with the issuers. From there the goal is to extend to real-time clearing and settlement, streamlining processes and enhancing efficiency across the fixed income ecosystem.
Aware - and kudos to them for using Ethereum - It's a word play to confuse the market. Notice they don't say on Public Net. The installation is permissioned. I was involved with the first Yankee CD trade in 2018 with JPM. No investor can buy this without the KYC/AML checks, means if there's a wallet it's just a brokerage account - the underlying security is at a custodian not on-chain and the TA is still involved in registering the ownership of the share.
Great, yeah are you going to move off the permissions blockchain to just permissioned smart contracts on a public blockchain?
Capital formation has been occurring this way for at least 12 years on public blockchains.
Satoshidice was one of the first companies and its shareholders created a vibrant secondary market onchain. They did dividends daily and it always went out to every shareholder daily. What happens now is so much more advanced but even more frictionless for crypto native issuers and traders.
One day DTCC and FINRA and the Fed will conform it to their redundant processes so that registered securities can do the same, using the same public utilities as everyone else.
>yeah are you going to move off the permissions blockchain to just permissioned smart contracts on a public blockchain?
Perhaps for clearing - ownership wise I think it stays permissioned - no investor wants to loose the wallet and not be able to recover their asset.
>One day DTCC and FINRA and the Fed will conform it to their redundant processes so that registered securities can do the same, using the same public utilities as everyone else.
100% - that's the plan but it's a massive regulatory capture to fight. Akin to launching a rocket and you need DoD and hundred other permissions.
One thing to keep in mind - Sec Act of 1933 and 1934 are here to stay - they may get new regs under them but ownership needs to be transferable outside just the normal case of trading i.e. trust, death, divorce, birth blah blah...
smart contracts on public blockchains can handle all those custodial aspects
the smart contracts can be permissioned and have multiple signers and beneficiaries and payable on death conditions, the oracles and admins can be multi signer accounts too
I’m just trying to figure out what false dilemmas you are operating under, the examples already exist
You’re the advocate, in your world, but seemingly stuck in their myriad of concerns that are based on incomplete information
reminds me of how the substitute meat is repulsive to omnivores and vegans alike. hyperledger vibes
the challenge with hyperledger is that there you can run unlimited arbitrary executions of any computational time, but have to run all other nodes’ arbitrary executions of any computational time, so the whole network is DDOSing each other with these stupidly expensive computations all for the sake of saying “blockchain without crypto!”
as if the crypto didn't serve the specific purpose of putting a cost on computational transactions, creating limited block space, so that people wouldn't do expensive computations
it doesn’t solve any problem that blockchain set out to solve, its nice that you found a way to have a shared google spreadsheet with macros without having to debate over whose account made the doc or organization, but its not a technological improvement that presents a novel alternative to a fungible data writing credit that crypto is, the only improvement is catering to a gullible enterprise audience who simply asked for a no-coin version of blockchain so they could say they have a blockchain strategy, grifting to enterprise clients is fine until those users act like they solved a deficiency of speculation as if thats a problem at all
public blockchains and smart contracts have a solution for the problems you mentioned so far, those are the myriad of concerns I’m referring to. Public blockchains also provide benefits to transparency and security that make the SROs and securities regulator redundant in their current form. There is another more productive way they can improve the things deployed on blockchains and give confidence to investors, but that’s only going to come from the blockchain space’s own regulatory capture, ironically thanks to speculation creating new consolidation of power and interest.
> the root cause of friction in fixed income trading: the lack of direct origination and data quality across market participants. By leveraging a permissioned network,
Blockchain has nothing to do with "data quality across market participants". Bad data entered into blockchain remains bad data.
Basically, you're lacking a platform that brings all those things together.
What blockchains may give you is a slow append-only log, which is a very minor part of that platform. And making everyone move to that platform is a much bigger challenge :)
>just saying “speculation” as if thats not a use case misses that “financial services” are our biggest industry on the planet and thats mirrored in the blockchain space
This is such a great comparison! Crypto and "financial services" are both a massive waste of labor that produces zero material wealth and mainly exist to facilitate money laundering and further upward siphoning of wealth.
This is why Janet Yellen is currently throwing a tantrum that those big meanies in China aren't playing fair by using their labor to actually manufacture things instead of shuffle fake money back and forth between different buckets until more money appears out of thin air: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/yellen-intends-warn-...
People love shitting on NFTs, but there's still a really good art scene based on NFTs and smart contracts. And once you have digital objects that you actually care about, all the web3 infrastructure is surprisingly useful.
> It looks like not a single HN reader is using blockchain technology for anything.
> If nobody is using blockchain technology outside of blockchain projects
HN is very adverse to the blockchain space. This is not the best place to look for people using the technology since 9/10 times you would get downvoted to oblivion
7. The blockchain is now at a stage in its development equivalent to where
the internet was in or around 1995. The internet was unstoppable in 1995
and blockchain technology is unstoppable now. It will become ubiquitous
in all major industrial and financial sectors, simply because it allows for the
immutable recording of data, thereby reducing friction in commercial and
consumer transactions and obliterating the scope for dispute as to what
has occurred.
8. As the Master of the Rolls and Head of Civil Justice in England and Wales,
I hold an office that pre-dates modern trade in derivatives and
reinsurance, even steam engines, powered flight, and certainly the
internet. I am particularly and obviously concerned about the reputation
and development of English law and the jurisdiction of England and Wales.
9. Many people do not realise that English law governs trading in €600 trillion
of OTC derivatives annually, in €11.6 trillion in metals trading, in £250
billion in M&A deals, and in £80 billion in insurance contracts every year –
just to take a few examples. My hope is that English law will prove to be
the law of choice for borderless blockchain technology as its take up grows
exponentially in the months and years to come.
I still don’t understand what a fully realized crypto ecosystem would allow people to do that isn’t already being done well by standard technology. Like it or not, for most people doing most things, the government or large companies are suitable enough of a store of trust which is the problem crypto solves by being decentralized. I think it’s a neat technology for tech people but I still struggle to see why normal people doing most things would want to pay for things with bitcoin.
1) governments didn’t get to print money at will until they went off the gold standard, and the financial regime we have now is worse than the gold era. (Highly dubious, I don’t buy this entirely)
2) blockchain done right gives hub-and-spoke efficiency without creating hegemons like VISA, SWIFT and PayPal to boss around their users with impunity.
There are still significant fees doing transactions over blockchain and those giant hegemonies are what allow things like charge backs and fraud detection while if somone hacks your wallet and steals all your crypto, it’s gone forever. It’s great if you’re trying to launder money or pay for sketchy things but I still don’t get the draw for the average person, just decentralization is not that valuable
People use VISA because they like the convenience and assurance it gives them over cash or a bank transfer, both of which don’t have a fee. Crypto both has neither and is more expensive per transaction.
For anyone interested in in-depth details of Ethereum protocol and upgrades, checkout the Protocol Study Group. Yesterday's presentation was about scaling and Danksharding, given by its creator https://epf.wiki/
What's coming... With the current number of blobs Ethereum will likely be able to do up to ~500 tps on average. ~1000 tps in burst mode. But in coming upgrades the blobs will be sharded through Data Availability Sampling, allowing validators to verify only a subset while being sure that the rest of blobs are validated and available by the rest of the network. This will allow to scale Ethereum up to 256 blobs. Which will give Ethereum a throughput of around ~100K tps.
For context, Visa and MasterCard combined average 10k's tps, and are capable of processing 100k's tps at peak. So if it works out, that would put Ethereum in the same ballpark.
Thank-you for the helpful links. Can you share some resources to learn about data availability sampling?
Also, have folks invented a cheap/fast way of going from L2 <-> L2 without having to do an L1 tx?
I fear that L2s may never be adopted due to network segmentation, but if it's possible for all L2s to interchange with each other cheaply, then it's just as good as L1 IMO.
To transfer assets from L2 to L2, of course the naive implementation is to use a centralized intermediary, of which there are currently many that are reasonably priced. There are ways to go between zk-L2s without any central broker in theory; I’m not sure whether that’s also true of optimistic-L2s.
Attempts to do this trustlessly without relying on a liquidity provider do exist, but they're not mature enough to mention yet. They usually rely on zk proofs to validate that an asset was bridged from one chain to another.
L2s are presently already supporting more activity than L1, with 4 L2s regularly doing more TPS than L1. Agreed that fragmentation is a concern, but I think we'll get there soon where the UX is abstracted away for users and the assets flow cheaply.
I used to think it had something to do with dank memes, but I recently learned it's named after Ethereum researcher Dankrad Feist who came up with the idea.
There's a security researcher who calls herself Isis Agora Lovecruft and I'm pretty sure it's not her real name. I thought it might be the same with this guy, but Dankrad seems to be an actual German name meaning something like "thanks for the advice"
I dunno, seems like a plausible trans person name, since we get to pick our own. Also, their twitter profile currently indicates that they use they/them pronouns, not she/her.
Ethereum actually has excellent documentation... it's just that there's a mindboggling amount of it. Apparently it's quite complicated to make a worldwide trustlessly distributed computer that runs on imaginary money which nonetheless needs to be secure.
I'm with you, they feel a bit redundant and uninteresting at this point. Like we get it, a spade's a spade, no reason to go on about it. Imagine people commented "postgres is a database" on every postgres related post.
It's funny how many times in my career I've heard someone say "____ is not a database, it's a datastore" referring to something they made that's basically Postgres with extra steps.
I was just repeating the quoted comment from the post I was replying to. Wasn't intending to say that the article was about tokens.
More generally, I would say that Etherium itself is mostly nonsense. I will admit I don't understand very well what the purpose of the "blobs" are that are being discussed in the article, but from my perspective the entire idea of blockchain technology is not useful. I have yet to be convinced that there is any real problem being solved by it, but there are a lot of problems that are created, which then need to be resolved with ever more esoteric and unproven solutions, like what is described in this article.
>More generally, I would say that Etherium itself is mostly nonsense.
It's "Ethereum". You can't even write the name of the project correctly, so how can I trust you expertise on that?
>I will admit I don't understand very well what the purpose of the "blobs" are
But we're talking under a link to a post about blobs? Sounds like an important context.
>from my perspective the entire idea of blockchain technology is not useful
Instead of trying to discuss that (and I could) - on HN there are plenty links to thinks I don't consider useful, like retrocomputing, programming in AGDA or yet another rust rewrite of some tool. I don't go around and leave nonproductive comments there, i just don't click them. Why do you feel a need to do so?
> Instead of trying to discuss that (and I could) - on HN there are plenty links to thinks I don't consider useful, like retrocomputing, programming in AGDA or yet another rust rewrite of some tool. I don't go around and leave nonproductive comments there, i just don't click them. Why do you feel a need to do so?
Mostly because unlike those other examples, cryptocurrency is actively doing harm to society by accelerating climate change, enabling various forms of crime, and doing financial damage to many people who have been convinced to put their savings into various ponzi schemes. So I view it as a sort of moral obligation to be a dissenting voice in these conversations.
I don't intent to be actively nonproductive with things I say though, and you might be right that it would be better to not engage with my original comment. The parent comment I replied to was not very productive either though. Mostly just "this is good". So my intention was just to represent the opposition and say something like "I disagree, and think this is part of something that is harmful."
> accelerating climate change, enabling various forms of crime, and doing financial damage to many people who have been convinced to put their savings into various ponzi schemes
Bitcoin accelerates climate change - no other cryptocurrency has a measurable environmental impact. The internet also enabled various forms of crime. Bank wires do financial damage to people who invest in ponzi schemes, in more volume than blockchain transactions do if I'm not mistaken.
Basically, I don't look at distributed ledger systems and think immediately of all the crimes that they enable. But I also don't look at a knife and immediately think of all the crimes that have been committed with knives. On the other hand though I've never known anyone who was a victim of a knife-related crime, so perhaps my opinion would be different if that were the case.
I'm so out of the loop these days...I've written off blockchain junk almost entirely. Can someone break down what blobs are? Is this some kind of temporary place for transactions to go so they aren't charged fees individually?
Blobs are a temporary form of data storage that are only required to be held by Ethereum nodes for 18 days. Archival nodes are free to store it forever if they wish, with a 1/N trust mechanism to verify an archived blob. Blobs contrast with permanent data storage in calldata, which is very expensive (due to its permanence).
Layer 2's are currently significantly more centralized than Ethereum L1, but this is not a fundamental technological limitation, and can be improved significantly with more resources and time. L2s right now have fragmentation concerns, where users have poor experiences interacting with a ecosystem of 10+ L2s, but this is largely a UX concern that can be solved in my view, and shared sequencers can help this on a technical level. I wouldn't say Layer 2's have many intrinsic fundamental technological trade-offs.
Faster, cheaper, possibly ceases to exist. If that happens there's (supposedly) a way for you to slowly get your funds back by exiting on L1. The blob stuff is about "ok if that's a thing how do I prove to some L1 contract that I own these L2 funds?".
The actual proving mechanism is either a) too amazing for me to understand or b) not quite figured out yet. But first blobs..
Hey! I'm one of the developers working on Arbitrum's next iteration of optimistic proofs. It's a really fun problem of many parties resolving disputes about a deterministic state. Happy to answer any questions
I'm pretty sure that this is part of the code that implements fraud proofs on Arbitrum One, which is one of the few L2s to currently have fraud proofs.
It seems to me that Optimism is lagging way behind - I'm not sure if they have fraud proofs yet even to this day. I consider Arbitrum to have "picked up the torch" so-to-say.
Right now at least, layer 2s are somewhat immature. Many of them do host billions in assets, but they each have different tech stacks backing them up that are at varying levels of maturity and decentralization. L2Beat does a great job of breaking down the L2 ecosystem:
Note the pie chart in the row for each L2. That pie chart notes the security risks for each one based on their tech stack. Ideally, the top L2s should strive to reach "Stage 2" which could be considered as secure as L1 itself, but no general purpose L2 is at that stage yet and most are still at Stage 0.
As I always do when someone pops off with a phrase like “blockchain junk” I’ll remind everyone that Barbara Liskov, who is the second female recipient of the Turing Award (and narrowly missed being the first, Frances Allen received the honor in 2006, Professor Liskov did in 2008), the John von Neumann Medal, an honors doctorate from ETH Zurich (received alongside Donald Knuth), countless other honors, and was the doctoral advisor to Sanjay Ghemawat (with his own trophy case of stratospheric achievement) devoted much of her career to the rigorous study of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (known colloquially as “pBFT”) which is the consensus mechanism used in a number of blockchain-style data structures many if not most of which have at least peripheral connections to what people typically mean when throwing around the term blockchain. I haven’t followed her career closely over the last few years, but long into the BitCoin era she was leading a group at MIT studying exactly this set of topics.
Furthermore, she is only one example of staggeringly recognized, decorated, acknowledged pillars of computer science who either is now or recently has been doing real, substantial, academically sound, and novel research in this field: Philip Waller of functional programming and category theory fame works (or did recently) at IO/HK, a shop with more Fields/Turing/ACM-type honors than they have places to put all the plaques.
So with all respect to a fellow community member, easy there with the “junk” stuff.
If you want to say: “2017-era ICO exit scam junk”, or “pump-and dump altcoin junk circa 2022”, be my guest as long as you cite examples, there was plenty of fraud during those bubbles just like there is always fraud in speculative asset bubbles, and fraud is bad (whatever Greenspan and Summers are on the record as saying and they are both on the record as saying financial fraud shouldn’t be prosecuted).
But even there, I’ll remind you that the conventional financial system sets no enviable record for either asset bubbles or the attendant fraud: quite the contrary, no one of any real seniority suffered so much as house arrest or community service let alone prison in 1987, 1999, 2001, 2008-2009, or whatever we’re calling this. With three notable exceptions: Sam Blankman Fried is serving 25 years for things that happen on Wall St. every day of the week, and if CZ misses serious jail time it will be by the skin of his teeth. Do Kwon is facing trial for felony market manipulation in absentia.
To my untrained eye, it looks an awful lot like cryptocurrency is the one place in the modern digital financial system where fraud is investigated, prosecuted, where people who go jail, and where the victims of that fraud receive at least some of their money back (I have a friend who held significant FTT and is already sure he’s getting something back, though these proceedings are complicated and we’re frankly a bit out of practice because we stopped prosecuting financial fraud in the late-Reagan/early-Clinton era, so he’s not sure how much yet).
Maybe I’m missing something here, my financial credentials are modest if that, perhaps you or another commenter could explain why the superficial analysis that indicates that crypto is the best-regulated of all the very rough financial markets in the world is deficient?
This must be the weirdest call to authority I've ever seen.
Consens algorithms are important in both safety and distributed (High Availibility) scenarios.
There's no necessary link from research into that, and blockchain in general, and the Proof of X style crypto blockchains specifically.
Can you point to some research of Waller? I've tried to find it to see if it's more directly related, but the only somewhat famous person under that name I can find is a historian, not an expert in computing related topics.
There's some interesting technology blockchains lean on (remember, git storage is a blockchain) but the value proposition of crypo currency blockchains (largely 0 trust) have so far not materialized outside speculative currency.
Which is partially due to misaligned incentives (the developers of e.g. game assets in the NFT case) where the party that would have to enable something do not have an incentive to give up controle.
I made a typographical error because I typed that with my thumb: the gentleman’s name is Dr. Philip Wadler FRS FRSE (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Wadler), I also forgot his proper title as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
The contributions that merited his inclusion in a group that includes (in computing alone) people like Charles Babbage KH FRS and Alan Turing OBE FRS are too numerous for any HN comment: he’s got something like 20k citations of hundreds of papers.
His contributions while working at IOHK were IIRC substantially around advanced formal proof systems for typed lambda calculus, the most recent of his IOHK papers I read was describing a System F implementation in the Agda proof system.
I don’t think it’s called an appeal to authority when the topic is the merit of a field of study (I’ve never heard it referred to as a call to authority at all): when an overwhelming consensus of basically every reputable academic and scientific honor and award in the field (some among the highest honors in any field) are attached to research done over decades and reviewed, debated, cited, and recognized by a robust consensus, that’s an argument that the study was important, novel, rigorous, valuable and worthwhile. I cited the consensus of the entire reputable academic and scientific world because that’s how we codify a consensus into a formal recognition that a researcher has in the past, is currently, or is likely to again do important research. I think GP was mistaken to call this research junk or even imply it if someone is going to try to parse it that finely, and I thought that citing the ACM was a better citation than my own opinion.
I agree that git is a blockchain, though not a particularly Byzantine Fault Tolerant one, along with Mercurial and Nix and many other tools many of us use daily.
The broader convergence around previously disparate parts of the digital financial economy is just unambiguously happening: things like FedNow at the high end or Apple Pay / Venmo / Zelle / Wize / WeChat / etc. on a more retail level are arriving faster and faster, placing ever-greater demands on the technology involved, and similar pressures are producing related solutions: the NBBO system in US equities trading to name one example, the consolidated tape that results and the records around it used to be backed by all trades taking place on recorded phone lines, before that by taking place in a room full of witnesses, and before that in coffee shops and other gathering places. All of these systems were workable if imperfect solutions to questions of trust, escrow, reversibility or its converse, and broadly the ways in which Ricardian contracts are generally, in isolation, inadequate to promote a sufficient atmosphere of trust to admit active and reasonably efficient markets.
Cryptographically durable and tamper-resistant ledgers remain in a sort of transitional state where they back non-trivial commerce and much more but still comparatively small amounts of speculation/price discovery: the jury is out on whether or not cryptography and BFT research is going to hit the truly big leagues in terms of notional value: right now they’re somewhere in the rough ballpark of equities transactions daily in the maybe mid tens to low hundreds of billions in notional USD, making both a flea on the ass of an elephant compared to say global forex at something like 5-10 trillion a day, and derivatives are just really hard to estimate, but the notional value of all derivatives contracts is like, easily in the hundreds of trillions and there are days when a lot of that moves quickly.
But I wasn’t making the case that this stuff is like 100% locked-in the future, I was making a much weaker claim: that it’s dismissive and ignorant to call it “junk” and that what limited consequences fraudsters face for financial fraud are tightly clustered in this area.
It’s well-understood that the mechanism design of a combination of a floating transaction fee structure (gas) and a market in that unit of account with a lot of speculative activity in it is problematic to put it mildly: transactions become too expensive to facilitate significant commerce rather often. A lot of things are being tried to improve the emergent incentives, some with more noble motives than others, but that’s finance: if you’re under any illusion that innovation in finance is a constant battle between people trying to generate better outcomes and people trying to game the thing then you can easily disabuse yourself of that notion by learning about the history of finance and I’ll recommend two excellent places to start: the emergence of massive OTC derivatives markets that began in the 1980s but really got big a decade later, and the emergence of fully-digital equities and futures markets around the turn of the millennium.
Wait, isn't git more of a merkle-DAG? I thought one of the defining features of blockchains was effectively branchless global state. My understanding is that DAGs are a superset of blockchains. Is this a wrong?
My comment about "blockchain junk" is mainly in response to the fact that it's nearly impossible to find any investment/involvement in the space without running into complete fraudsters and starry-eyed "entrepreneurs" who view blockchain as some sort of god technology that will lift us out of poverty and/or upend the corporate control mechanisms. AKA a bandaid fix by people who don't understand its actual limitations or the dynamics of the systems they supposedly oppose.
As a system for maintaining auditable global state/knowledge in the face of sybil attacks, yes, it's impressive. However 99% of the projects people reach for it do not require it, hence the term "junk." It's more a condemnation of the space surrounding the technology than the technology itself. I figured that would be somewhat obvious.
You sound like someone who knows your stuff on this and I regret if I was in any way making it sound personal or disrespectful to you personally. I maintain it’s an unfortunate if not offensive phrasing, but I’m in no position to carry rocks around glass houses: I say unfortunately or offensively-phrased things too.
There isn’t really a robust consensus that I’m aware of as to what constitutes a blockchain per se: Wikipedia lists git as one, and I suppose that’s as good a source as any absent such consensus.
git is an (often if not typically in practice degenerate) Merkle Tree, the contents of one atomic (and sometimes de facto immutable) node contain a hash (O(1)-verifiably k-equivalent… you know the drill) of ancestors.
In more pragmatic/colloquial usage I might define a blockchain loosely as a “tamper-resistant, directed, and typically acyclic / bounded-cyclic data structure with an implied machine economics optimization around infrequent but critically important fully-verifiable history subject to heuristically-determined / freely parameterized bounds on branching factor, duration in branched states, and a bounded susceptibility to adversarial interference in a verifiable consensus on the periodic elimination of branching on some semi-predicable cadence”, which is pretty hand-wavy but I think captures the spirit of the general usage. By that definition git is only a blockchain by common convention, there’s nothing preventing or even discouraging arbitrary, unbounded branching other than it doesn’t have a ton of widely valued use cases: most any time you’re fine with a branch that never has any scope to interact with any other via rebase or merge you could just make a copy or maybe a copy and a copy of some metadata/history, though git in practical terms is a good tool for such a copy.
And I think you’re right that as with any over-hyped technology, it gets attached to projects that don’t need it when it’s “hot”, preoccupies both investors and entrepreneurs without better ideas for how to deploy their time and money when it’s “in”, and is therefore constantly oscillating between being a magnet for snake-oil types and being out in the cold.
Throw in a bunch of electricity consumption that’s maybe net driving up carbon emissions and maybe net attaching a financial incentive to electricity so cheap that it basically has to be renewable but it’s kinda too soon to tell, and I think I’m now having trouble seeing how crypto three years ago and “AI” last year are any different along these dimensions.
The difference in my view is that AI is probably higher variance by a lot on social welfare, and not because of some dumbass “paperclip-indifferent AGI” tripe.
Blockchain as applied to finance has the scope to create transparency into financial markets and compel governments to open the books on what is and isn’t legal regarding money, for who, and why. It will never like, totally disintermediate government from money, because money is the #1 national security priority of any functioning government, so inventing money that the government can’t control is more likely to buy you a R9x than a Turing Award (in a macabre way it’s darkly amusing to contemplate the fact that it could buy you both). It also has a positive (in my view) externality of creating broad-spectrum incentives for the public to understand a little better how important digital identity, security, privacy, and autonomy are in 2024 and build at least a little muscle memory around running a slightly or maybe even substantially tighter ship on personal digital footprint. I’ve apologized to two friends this week because I lied to them about something that is now news that recently broke on the Onavo/Meta thing TechCrunch ran and I wanted them to hear it from me. I lied about this because before it hit the press, I felt it would have been detrimental to the national security of the United States to talk about it, but what I really wish is that we wouldn’t end up in situations where anyone faces such dilemmas in private industry.
AI has more obviously useful applications at the consumer level (though it’s largely a solution to itself as a way to get information one could previously get from a search engine before it ruined the indexes of search engines by making arbitrarily persuasive falsehoods too cheap to meter, we’ve had spam for a long time, but spam so good it’s convincing to experts in anything other than a bad mood? That’s new.). The danger with AI is that it winds up being something other than “available weight” and “operator-aligned”, i.e. whoever is the last man standing has arbitrary unaccountable power to convince anyone of anything and prevent that from being accessed by anyone else.
> You sound like someone who knows your stuff on this and I regret if I was in any way making it sound personal or disrespectful to you personally. I maintain it’s an unfortunate if not offensive phrasing, but I’m in no position to carry rocks around glass houses: I say unfortunately or offensively-phrased things too.
I didn't take offense at all. I find your knowledge of the space refreshing. I have watched blockchains carefully from the sidelines for some time because of my interest in the intersection of economics, state, and technology and how blockchains might change those things. Over time I became more jaded because the scaling problems blockchains run into seem to be almost insurmountable, so my interest has pivoted into less-global, more-scalable approaches (like merkle-DAG CRDTs with some external form of validation).
> There isn’t really a robust consensus that I’m aware of as to what constitutes a blockchain per se: Wikipedia lists git as one, and I suppose that’s as good a source as any absent such consensus.
Fair enough.
> In more pragmatic/colloquial usage I might define a blockchain loosely as a “tamper-resistant, directed, and typically acyclic / bounded-cyclic data structure with an implied machine economics optimization around infrequent but critically important fully-verifiable history subject to heuristically-determined / freely parameterized bounds on branching factor, duration in branched states, and a bounded susceptibility to adversarial interference in a verifiable consensus on the periodic elimination of branching on some semi-predicable cadence”, which is pretty hand-wavy but I think captures the spirit of the general usage.
Have you considered a career in poetry?? Joking aside, this pretty much sums up my view as well. A DAG with a strong gravitational pull towards a master branch with somewhat infrequently changing data. Which also includes git, so you're right.
> Throw in a bunch of electricity consumption that’s maybe net driving up carbon emissions and maybe net attaching a financial incentive to electricity so cheap that it basically has to be renewable but it’s kinda too soon to tell, and I think I’m now having trouble seeing how crypto three years ago and “AI” last year are any different along these dimensions.
Yes, agreed. Let's spin up an immense amount of computing power to train a model that hallucinates when asked basic questions. Again, there is a space where the marriage of a large dataset of knowledge and an automated linguistic system searching that knowledge has great use-cases, but throwing "AI" at every problem is just another eye-rolley fad.
> The difference in my view is that AI is probably higher variance by a lot on social welfare, and not because of some dumbass “paperclip-indifferent AGI” tripe.
What do you mean by this?
> Blockchain as applied to finance has the scope to create transparency into financial markets and compel governments to open the books on what is and isn’t legal regarding money, for who, and why.
This is one of the things I was originally most excited about. Make politicians receive all wages, contributions, etc through some auditable public currency. If you're going to work in the public sector, then you have to consent to transparency. I have my own issues with money (mainly its deficiency for economic transactions) but cryptocurrencies are certainly a step up from it. But like you said, you can't just release some new currency and expect the government to bless it. Some empires had their armies, some their navies, but we have our banks. Our empire is a financial one, and a currency that replaces the USD is a direct attack against the heart of the empire. Many mountains would have to move before that is possible, unless Wall St finds some extra utility in it that allows them to extract more.
> the public to understand a little better how important digital identity, security, privacy, and autonomy are in 2024
100%...cryptographic identity is going to be huge in the next few years (I'm betting on it quite heavily https://stamp-protocol.github.io/).
> AI has more obviously useful applications at the consumer level (though it’s largely a solution to itself as a way to get information one could previously get from a search engine before it ruined the indexes of search engines by making arbitrarily persuasive falsehoods too cheap to meter, we’ve had spam for a long time, but spam so good it’s convincing to experts in anything other than a bad mood? That’s new.).
Yes, exactly, LLMs as they are are a glorified search engine. Search engines have consumed themselves trying to tailor results to their users instead of just fucking showing objective information and are becoming essentially obsolete pay-to-play ad machines.
> The danger with AI is that it winds up being something other than “available weight” and “operator-aligned”, i.e. whoever is the last man standing has arbitrary unaccountable power to convince anyone of anything and prevent that from being accessed by anyone else.
Well, there's more here. As AI markets itself as this sort of objective intelligence machine, it garners more and more trust. As this solidifies it has the potential to shape perception over time to the benefit of the operators/controllers. The obvious conclusion is snuck in advertising, but I'm thinking much more sinister like the editorialization of information to protect the owner classes and the state from any kind of scrutiny. Effectively, a Big Brother that instead of using fear for compliance, softly whispers in your ear. Pair this with the immense surveillance apparatus we've spent decades perfecting (but it's in the private sector! so it's ok!!1) and we're setting ourselves up for a hellscape dystopia.
Hence my explicitly noting that Dr. Liskov continued this research and grew it in scope long after it had become clear that one of if not the primary application was clearly going to be tamper-resistant ledgers of financial transactions.
It’s also why I gave the example of Dr. Wadler FRS FRSE as someone who even more explicitly did extremely sophisticated research well-received by the academic community unambiguously in this context.
I just do not understand what it is about this topic that turns a normally very thoughtful community of people with a generally very high regard for the research agendas of noted computer scientists into spinal-reflex, knee-jerk critics on a dime.
You hear all kinds of arguments but they generally boil down to some version of “blockchain is for cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency is for financial fraud and financial fraud has no place in our society”.
But every link in that chain is either incorrect or selectively tolerant of wrongdoing.
Tamper-resistant ledgers have applications outside of finance.
“Everyone knows I mean crypto.”
Ok, cryptocurrencies have complex outcomes attached to them, some positive, some negative.
“I’m talking about the fraud which is rampant and the main/only use case.”
Eh, not really, speculation isn’t by itself fraud, although it is true that markets (say, OTC derivatives markets) with a high ratio of speculation to other non-speculative activities generally have more fraud in them, so more or less rampant than conventional digital finance?
“More both relatively and absolutely.”
No. Neither. Trivially false. You think that because you have no fucking clue how much fraud happens either relatively or absolutely in conventional financial markets. Furthermore, the fraud that does happen is dramatically more likely to be investigated and prosecuted, and the victims of that fraud are dramatically more likely to be recognized as victims (unlike for example victims of predatory lending in 2005-2007 who lost their homes and got called criminals into the bargain”.
I don’t want to believe that it’s just the banal fact that we all know someone who got stinking rich speculating in crypto markets and we didn’t (I’ve never speculated in crypto markets and am not in the same galaxy as well-off: I went into debt when the tech job market collapsed last year, with uh, a little help).
But I’m really struggling here to find a more charitable conclusion.
I'm not against cryptocurrency at all, but you're saying that Dr. Liskov was researching algorithms for that purpose when she really wasn't. Byzantine fault tolerance has lots of other applications, in fact if you search "currency" in the paper she worked on, you'll only find a single match: "concurrency."
I didn’t say Dr. Liskov was doing pBFT research for the express purpose of promoting cryptocurrency as an application, I said Professor Liskov was working on “blockchain tech”, it’s therefore pretty cheeky to call “blockchain” “junk”, and I said that she not only persisted in but increased the scope of such research during a period of time when it was impossible not to know this is how the technology is being adopted.
If you’re going to nitpick in an effort to discredit a robust argument by beam-searching for the weakest-looking link in the argument and go directly after it, then at a minimum, be right.
We’ve reached my limit on the nesting of a contentious sub-thread (frankly I’m surprised we haven’t reached HN’s limit on such).
If I’m mistaken about this, I want to be educated about it, I hold all of the famous computer scientists I’ve mentioned in extremely high regard and if I’ve been inadvertently spreading falsehoods it’s a priority to me to both stop doing that and depending on the degree of such an error if it is one, a formal apology could even be in order.
I do not think that this remains a useful or even acceptable forum for that conversation however.
If you know or strongly believe that I’ve made statements about public figures that I admire and that are inaccurate, I’d not only invite but explicitly request that you contact me directly to straighten it out without the distractions and perverse incentives of an audience to a debate that has become more than “spirited”.
I’m reachable at b7r6@b7r6.net and I hope to continue this discussion in a more productive forum than this particular sub-thread.
Just a note, the person you’ve responded to is different from the person who made the “joke,” (if that is the right interpretation. I don’t really get the joke, fwiw).
It doesn’t really make sense anyway; if the joke is that the comment is “backed” by the fact that HN users are upvoting it—comment scores aren’t visible to people other than the posters, right? So all we know is that it wasn’t smote into the hidden state.
It's confusing because we went from "decentralized" meaning "an inverted hierarchy" to "decentralized" meaning "a hierarchy seen from the other direction".
Banking is a centralized model. Participantation in banking can be said to be, from the perspective of the participant, decentralized. The participant's perspective on the hierarchy is inverted, but the model itself is unchanged.
Etherium is a decentralized model. Its model is an actually inverted hierarchy.
> Today, we have all the tools we'll need, and indeed most of the tools we'll ever have, to build applications that are simultaneously cypherpunk and user-friendly.
Really looking forward to the next couple years. Everyone has been writing this off as "no killer apps after 10 years" but there's a lot that's been happening to support adoption, from scaling to improved UX. In the next couple years those should percolate to production apps.
The primary improvements have been rollups, blobs, account abstraction, and chain abstraction.
What value proposition does crypto offer that existing solutions do not?
The only reasonable answer crypto advocates can ever offer is “decentralization” and the lack of trust required.
The problem is, most people are perfectly fine trusting their financial institutions.
Another commenter was downvoted for saying “No one cares”, but a more precise way of putting this is “the average person doesn’t care about decentralization” and this is spot on.
It’s cool tech, but it reminds me a bit of math research - towers of abstractions built over decades, with little effect on the real world. We can only hope that some benefits will be uncovered down the line.
That’s what blockchain technology is: interesting research which will never be popular with or relevant to a lay person (outside of speculative bubbles)
> The only reasonable answer crypto advocates can ever offer is “decentralization” and the lack of trust required.
That a very big "only". For me that's the killer app. I do not trust financial institutions and the ones that I trust do not want to accept me as their customer.
> “the average person doesn’t care about decentralization”
It's like saying "the average person does not care about a system of interconnected computer networks that communicates through TCP/IP". The average person cares about watching reels on Instagram or sending messages through WhatsApp.
> That’s what blockchain technology is: interesting research which will never be popular
I have no doubt that someone said the same regarding the Internet.
Lots of that advanced math research finds its way into practical engineering (cryptography, digital media, compression, physics, AI, and so on). The average layperson does not care about mathematics, period.
You may see a similar situation one day: some application might move to settle their economic value on Eth L2 rather than Stripe, eg for more control or lower fees. To the average layperson, they wouldn’t know/care about how the app works under the hood.
If you ascertain some value to the permissionless and self-custodial value of cash. And you see value in the internet's ability to connect the entire world. Then it follows immediately that you see value in cryptocurrency.
Because you cannot use cash to transact globally, and you cannot use digital forms of central bank issued currency permissionlessly or have self-custody. Cryptocurrency gives you all those three properties.
So you must give up something. HNers typically are willing to give up the permissionless and self-custody properties. After all, most of HN audience lives in developed democratic countries where personal freedoms are considered fundamental pillars and protected. But at a minimum you should consider that, not all the world lives under those circumstances. And that there are no guarantees that those circumstances will always be preserved in your cozy first world country. Certainly if you are willing to give them up so easily.
Don't be so quick to assume it cannot happen where you live. One day they may go after some fringe truckers protesting in Canada. Another day they may go after some camgirls earning a living in ways that some executive board of a payment processor considers reprobable. Maybe one day they will tell you in what you can or cannot spend your money or where you can invest it and how much.
> If you ascertain some value to the permissionless and self-custodial value of cash. And you see value in the internet's ability to connect the entire world. Then it follows immediately that you see value in cryptocurrency.
Those two separate sentences do not immediately team up to somehow lead to the third sentence.
> After all, most of HN audience lives in developed democratic countries where personal freedoms are considered fundamental pillars and protected.
As do most crypto proponents who imagine the world outside the "enlightened West" as barbaric lawless lands governed by roaming bands Mad Max-style.
Even though than we can take a popular online service that people pay for and see in which countries it's available. For example, Spotify says it's available in 238 countries and territories: https://support.spotify.com/us/article/where-spotify-is-avai.... It does not accept any form of crypto currency as payment. This means that people in these countries have enough financial institutions and methods, and enough security to be able to pay for an international music streaming service [1].
> Maybe one day they will tell you in what you can or cannot spend your money or where you can invest it and how much.
Or some day the Mad Max-style roaming gang will break down your door and steal all your cash. Or break all your fingers until you give them access to all your wallets.
Exactly. I mean, you don't even have to trust financial institutions. You only have to trust the institutions that are in charge of maintaining law and order. Everything else follows from that. And if you can't trust those, then you have bigger problems that cannot be fixed with some damn cryptocurrency.
Decentralization of compute is perhaps a more compelling story. There have been many recent complaints of massive digital networks being at the whim of centralized IP and platform owners making unpopular decisions - whether in social media or games. Even non-profit and volunteer projects collapse when leaders abandon ship or become tyrants. What if open source code could also be extended to open decentralized hosting via micropayments - the direction of which all decided by users in a participatory format - whether via representative republic, direct democracy, or elected dictator?
The obstacle is human nature and ease-of-use friction - taking responsibility for maintenance and innovation and imposing a participatory need requires a modicum of awareness and willingness to contribute - even if only with pennies. This is annoying and wasteful red tape for most, and so corporations with strong advertisers and investors who can provide it cheaper or for free are obviously seen as the better choice. Co-ops and communes have this problem.
I don't understand half of this. How do I go from "yay, I read the bitcoin paper" to this? A single comprehensive resource so I'm not hoovering crumbs from site to site.
There is a lot to learn but it's all well-organized here: https://a16z.com/tag/the-canons/ It would take even a bright student a year or two to go through all of this so pick and choose as you see fit. a16z has an excellent AI canon as well for self-study: https://a16z.com/ai-canon/
Maybe ETH should focus on solving their scaling so the layer 1 doesn't cost arm and leg to do transfer on. Layer 2 becoming expensive as well and people already talking about Layer 3.
Eventually, statelessness will help increase gas limit on L1.
However, Ethereum L1 is supposed to be the settlement layer for rollups, and high security requirement transactions, not for shitcoin trading.
Recursive rollups (L3s,L4s) have also been talked about for years now, and it should be pursued; that's how you can increase transaction throughput and decrease fees with the magic of zk.
> On March 13, the Dencun hard fork activated, enabling one of the long-awaited features of Ethereum: proto-danksharding (aka EIP-4844, aka blobs). Initially, the fork reduced the transaction fees of rollups by a factor of over 100, as blobs were nearly free. In the last day, we finally saw blobs spike up in volume and the fee market activate as the blobscriptions protocol started to use them. Blobs are not free, but they remain much cheaper than calldata.
> proto-danksharding
> rollups
> blobscriptions
> calldata
I realize this post is the High Priest of Ethereum preaching to his disciples, but we are deep deep into "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" territory here.
Does anyone know if you can use multiple slurp juices on a single danksharded blob?
Typically when there's a highly technical topic on HN that I don't understand, I don't comment on the thread about the domain jargon going over my head.
I didn't go into today's Babylon thread and comment "Node geometry? Gaussian splat rendering? We are deep into angels dancing on a pin territory. Just use jQuery."
I just don't understand the mentality of comments like yours, I suppose.
I suppose the difference is that in most technical topics the complexity is either inherent (quantum mechanics just is this way) or exists for a good reason (consensus algorithms are complicated but they solve a hard problem).
IMHO this is not true in cryptocurrency, which is more akin to a self-sustaining pyramid scheme where the complexity serves to obscure the reality of the thing and draw in more rubes. All the nonsensical jargon around NFTs was trying to hide the fact that paying money for a URL to a jpeg of a monkey is stupid. As best I can gather, all this new "layer 2" nonsense is to try and hide the fact that blockchain is a slow, crappy database.
You're entitled to your opinion on that, I suppose. As someone who actually does understand most of the jargon (because it's what I do for a living), data availability sampling feels to me just as inherent to good blockchain design as fast fourier transforms are to good digital signal processing.
> consensus algorithms are complicated but they solve a hard problem
Ironically, this article is about an algorithm that comes to consensus on and distributes data. Yes it's a hard problem, thus the article.
This is not really an article about cryptocurrency or monkey jpegs, it's a nitty-gritty article about the design of a computer protocol, written for the benefit of protocol researchers and implementers. If it's nonsensical to you, perhaps consider that you're not the target audience.
> perhaps consider that you're not the target audience.
I literally said, "I realize this post is the High Priest of Ethereum preaching to his disciples" before going on to laugh at his gibberish.
It's fine if you're into this stuff, but the cryptocurrency people can't seem to decide if they're a bunch of nerd hobbyists or the Future of Finance.
If you want to be HAM radio, then fine, nobody except your club needs to understand or care what you're talking about. If you think you're going to upend the world economy and force all the rest of us to use your bullshit, then you better expect the rest of us to demand explanations in plain English.
I could tell my grandma what TCP/IP is and why it's important. Cryptocurrency proponents have been trying (and failing) to do the same to me for over a decade now.
> the cryptocurrency people can't seem to decide if they're a bunch of nerd hobbyists or the Future of Finance
I think it's strange to take a diverse set of people from around the world, from hobbyists to open source developers to fortune 500 teams, and group them all together as "cryptocurrency people", as if they represent a united movement towards a single goal.
It's as if I said "those Linux people can't decide whether they want to be nerd hobbyists or the future of server computing" while pointing out the seeming contradiction between Red Hat Linux and Hannah Montana Linux, both produced by the same "group" of "those Linux people".
Or it's as if I compared a unicycle to a fighter jet, both made by "those vehicle people".
> If you want to be HAM radio, then fine, nobody except your club needs to understand or care what you're talking about.
It doesn't matter much what I want it to be. It just is.
I find it unorthodox to compare a software standard to a "club". I'm imagining someone refer to the worldwide group of Linux users as a "club". Much like Linux, I don't need to explain to the world how cryptocurrency works in order for it to be useful to me, nor do I consider myself part of a club for using it. It's just there and I use it. As Andreessen Horowitz said many years ago, "It’s becoming like air or water. It just is, like it or hate it. It just is."
> If you think you're going to upend the world economy and force all the rest of us to use your bullshit, then you better expect the rest of us to demand explanations in plain English.
I don't know where you're getting this adversarial tone from. Nobody was or is "forced" to do anything. This is not "me vs you". We're commenting on a post about a piece of software.
It seems to me like you're trying to defend something or express some deeper frustration, and I'd be curious to know what it is. To you it's not just a piece of accounting software, is it? This software must represent some ideological point that is dear to you.
> I could tell my grandma what TCP/IP is and why it's important. Cryptocurrency proponents have been trying (and failing) to do the same to me for over a decade now.
This really seems to me like it goes far beyond jargon. Are you perhaps frustrated that cryptocurrency's continued adoption conflicts with your world view that it is unimportant? That's not necessarily something I can help with, beyond saying something trite like "each individual person has their own reasons for adopting a technology" or "there's some kind of social aspect that nobody has really been able to properly measure" or simply "protocols can be sticky".
I mean, it's a technical piece of code (ETH, that is), and every new piece gets a new name. It's not a more complicated terminology than you'd get for compilers or protocols - TCP wikipedia has "TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of octets " which has 6 (or 5, depending how you'd count it), technical terms. They're not very abstract, sure, but it's just TCP, and we think that's completely normal.
A logic class will suddenly try to teach you "eqvuilance relations", "Equivalence class", "Quotient set", "Projection", "Kernel" (Specifically in the Eqvuilance relation meaning), "partition", and that's only the terms I found in wikipedia. The class I help along has one more under this subject, and this is a first semester topic that is taught in a few weeks. All of those are technical, and all of those build on some other technical terms such as relations, functions, sets...
I concede that crypto has a bad naming scheme. It all sounds silly.
I can explain TCP for a general audience: "TCP is the primary system computers use to talk to each other over a network these days. All the data is broken down into tiny little bits called 'packets' and sent out over the wire. TCP is important because it specifies how the computers should perform 'handshakes' at the start of the conversation, and includes rules for checking the data for errors, and resending corrupted or missing packets."
I know (more or less) what Ethereum is, and I understand (more or less) that these 'blobs' are yet another attempt to work around the fundamental inefficiencies inherent when trying to make a giant distributed system for ideological reasons (rather than a small centralized system).
This is a highly technical article written by a protocol researcher to be read by other protocol researchers and implementers. I'm not really sure what level of jargon you expected.
This article is akin to an aircraft architect writing about engine design to engine manufacturers - there's no reason to spell things out that the target audience already knows well.
> Today, we have all the tools we'll need, and indeed most of the tools we'll ever have, to build applications that are simultaneously cypherpunk and user-friendly.
> The Daimo wallet is explicitly describing itself as Venmo on Ethereum, aiming to combine Venmo's convenience with Ethereum's decentralization
I will forever point this out, but Venmo has a “Private” setting. Your balance on Ethereum is public, as is any transaction you send.
Because transaction fees on blockchains run as an auction market, low-cost transactions are enabled by high transaction throughput, at least relative to demand. In other words, any chain that has high throughput and/or low demand will have low-cost transactions. Solana and Ethereum attempt to achieve high throughput in very different ways.
Ethereum blobs create transaction space that has a 0-of-n trust model (for zk-roll-ups) or a 1-of-n trust model (for optimistic roll-ups). This means that there needs to be either zero or one honest participant who carefully receives, processes and validates every single roll-up transaction in order for an outsider to be able to prove that the chain was not tampered with.
In contrast, Solana achieves throughput by taking the classic blockchain structure (with its n-of-n trust model) and cranking the parameters up to 11. Basically they said "be a standard blockchain, but do everything a hundred times faster on expensive servers with beefy CPUs and datacenter connections". The advantages are that it took less development time and there are less moving parts in the stack. The disadvantage is that the Solana blockchain is not actually verifiable, in the sense that you or I could download a piece of software onto our home computer and follow along with the chain to make sure it's valid. Ethereum is verifiable in this way, even down through all of its (properly-designed and fully implemented) L2s.
To distill the entire situation: In order to scale, Solana gives up some of the fundamental properties that make blockchains powerful. Ethereum, scaling with blobs, retains these fundamental blockchain properties.
> On March 13, the Dencun hard fork activated, enabling one of the long-awaited features of Ethereum: proto-danksharding (aka EIP-4844, aka blobs). Initially, the fork reduced the transaction fees of rollups by a factor of over 100, as blobs were nearly free. In the last day, we finally saw blobs spike up in volume and the fee market activate as the blobscriptions protocol started to use them. Blobs are not free, but they remain much cheaper than calldata.
Can someone please confirm this isn’t the incipit from an unpublished Douglas Adams novel?
Chill, I guess?
The technical jargon sounds stylistically a lot more made up and playful than the one you suggested.
When did HN become so unbearably stuck-up?
With that said, I think if anyone comes up with a "killer-app" for crypto, then it'll be on the Ethereum chain. They seem to be the only ones who consistently work towards adding capabilities to the core technology.
Edit: I realize I haven't commented on the article at all. This sentence stood out to me:
> Today, we have all the tools we'll need, and indeed most of the tools we'll ever have, to build applications that are simultaneously cypherpunk and user-friendly. And so we should go out and do it.
Clearly, this is an important step. But the two examples he provides as a beacon of what's possible (Daimo and Farcaster) don't inspire a lot of enthusiasm. Daimo is just a decentralized version of Venmo and Farcaster is a protocol to build social networks on the blockchain, which is yet another tool and not an application.
I do still like reading Vitaliks thoughts. He's a pretty good writer, and it's evident that he spends a lot of time actually thinking about the topics he writes about.
This is exactly my use case (the former not later) with Monero and it's been amazing. Only marginally more difficult than to shop on amazon and feels a million times less sketchy than trying to find something locally. The speculative nature of crypto is therefore more of an annoyance as it causes the price to fluctuate too much between paying, shipping, and fund-release.
You can get quantitative GC/MS tests in addition to fentanyl / nitazene test strips.
Excuse me.
The issue is that if it's too much they will still raid your place even if the evidence might not be that clear and they might ignore politicians.
Good luck defending this, it will still be annoying as fuck If your PC is gone for month
If they had proof you paid you would probably be in jail.
Can still be painful, but way better than if they had proof you bought it.
(Also, if any of your drugs dont arrive or were opened, never order any more)
It was from the state and it was dropped.
In Australia, we have instant transfers between bank accounts.
I imagine the US will get to that point soon in which case there is no benefit to crypto for this use case.
I don't think Venmo will die since there is a need for app to provide nice interface. But Zelle has been lobbying against FedPay since it will destroy them.
That's at least two decimal orders of magnitude away from being a global payment solution. It's a joke.
Vitalik gave goals of 1.33 MB per second in blob space, and a compressed tx size of 25 bytes. This gives around 50,000 transactions per second, which seems like a worthy goal.
Each L2 is its own chain that uses its own sequencer/s. The blocks from this chain are then compressed into a single blob of data with a ZK proof that the transactions are valid. The validators on L1 only need to verify that ZK proof matches the hash of the submitted data, which can be done in a few ms even if the L2 did 1M+ transactions.
When someone taps, 99% of the time the payment processor is not waiting for the funds. It’s all trust and calculations of acceptable risk (that’s why the tap limit).
Crypto can adopt that approach as well.
Yes, CCs/debit went through a period (as did cheques) where that trust was wildly abused and it’s likely any trust layer on top of crypto would have to go through the same period of abuse, but solutions [c|w]ould be implemented fairly quickly since it’s all tech.
As to your last point: credit card fraud is still rampant and hardly anyone accepts checks outside of contractual b2b transactions. The issues with those technologies are technical in nature. Sending a crypto transaction doesn't allow someone to fraudulently charge your account like those technologies do. Whether chargebacks should even exist in a secure transaction system by default is debatable. I personally don't think that kangaroo court service is worth the fraud + global ~3% fees. Think about all the chargebacks you've made in your life that weren't related to credit cards just being insecure. I'm certain they are not worth 3% of your total spending.
Half the point of a digital cash is that you never need a wire transfer because you can just exchange the digital cash directly. Effectively the same as handing someone an envelope full of physical cash.
The currency exchange step needed to convert that BTC back into real money is probably more annoying than just dealing with a wire transfer. And that is essentially my point. If you send someone USD, they can use that directly to pay for expenses like food or rent. If you send someone BTC, they need to first convert that into a real currency before they can use it. That is what I am referencing when I say "The 'Killer App' for a cryptocurrency would be the ability to use it as a currency".
You do realize crypto currencies have transaction fees, right?
Yes, I'm willing to pay for goods and services.
I guess credit card fees are <4% so there might not be a big enough discount to offer consumers to make them figure out how to get crypto (without paying more than 4% fees somewhere). Perhaps a chargeback heavy industry such as porn or political groups could benefit from non-chargebackable transactions.
I worked on OpenBazaar, a decentralized marketplace using bitcoin, and no one wants to spend $5 just to buy something. Artificially reducing block sizes killed adoption.
I guess it helps that its value is relatively stable.
But I still can't realistically use it. I can't walk in a store, buy something, then pay with Monero which is obviously disqualifying on it's own. But in addition to that, if I want to give a friend some Monero I would have to walk them through making a new account with some new app which they won't do because it's pointless anyways.
Do you expect every store to start accepting it instantly?
Your argument does not disqualify Monero as a real currency. It is a real currency, it's used every day for transactions. Just because you don't find use for it in your life does not disqualify it.
I looked up the history of the credit card on Wikipedia to see how fast that caught on. It seems it had a slow start as well. Things only changed when a big bank put all of its weight behind it. I don;t think something like that will ever happen with cryptocoins, since there are no big institutions that would benefit from it becoming widespread.
> I can't realistically use credit cards. I can't walk in a store and pay using my credit card
That was true at some point and I would agree that as long as it remained true "Why should I carry a credit card that I can't use anywhere?" would be a perfectly reasonable thing to say.
> And if I want to send some money to my friend, I have to walk them through of opening a bank account which they won't do because it's pointless anyway and I can just hand them the $50 dollar bill"
This is completely disconnected from reality. People very commonly use bank accounts and checks. I know they must exist but I cant think of a single person in my life who would need my help dealing with a check.
> It is a real currency, it's used every day for transactions. Just because you don't find use for it in your life does not disqualify it.
You could say the same thing about V Bucks but that doesn't make it a real currency.
But using it as an argument against credit cards is dumb.
> People very commonly use bank accounts and checks
Yes, now they do. Used to be that most people held their wealth in gold or literal cash.
> You could say the same thing about V Bucks but that doesn't make it a real currency.
V Bucks (to my knowledge) can only be used to buy Fortnite stuff. Can I even send it to anyone I want? Guessing not. And I'm pretty sure I can't sell it on a market to anyone else either.
Monero could be used in a store and some stores do take monero! Its quick, with low fees
It has the exact same practical problems every other distributed cryptocurrency has preventing it from being useful as an actual currency. If Monero ever started seeing adoption as an actual currency it would fall apart just like Bitcoin.
The fact people aren't using it. It's just a PoW coin with some special sauce. Same grey goo energy and equipment dynamics.
I use Monero semi-regularly to pay for things online (usually privacy products, because sadly nobody is interested in selling me groceries in exchange for xmr). You can absolutely buy things with it.
Could you offer examples? Straight-up curious.
I still think that we should not forget the "I need a censorship-proof way to send money to someone overseas" story, but mostly as a hedge against the existing institutions, not as an immediate need.
Not saying that this could not happen as an hypotheses but cryptocurrency foundations are far far from business execution basic practices.
As an insider I can say that most money flows to a very small group of people and the governance is not really decentralized. For example, very few people can decide on Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol changes, and these people cannot be changed...
I have no idea what Vitalik is funding. Do you?
Another thing, no pun intended, is that the proof-of-stake upgrade maintains prohibitive the network fees for transactions while other technologies have low fees.
> I have no idea what Vitalik is funding. Do you?
The funding of projects is through the foundation but if I remember well the original people and contributors received the ~50% of the total ethers until now.
Consensus algorithms have nothing to do with transaction fees.
> while other technologies have low fees.
Any "Ethereum killer" that showed up turned out to have the same if not worse problems as Ethereum in the moment they started dealing with minimal real-world traction.
> contributors received the ~50% of the total ethers until now.
First: source?
Second: "50% of total ETH until now" is doing a lot of work here. How much was during the pre-mine and how much was due to the sale? The pre-mine sale raised < 20 million USD. Are you counting the people who bought ETH in the pre-mine as "original contributors"?
Please don't tell bullshit. Look at Algorand and other protocols, consensus has a relationship with fees because it is linked with the cost of reaching consensus!
You can even read that in the Ethereum subreddit [0].
> Source?
It is repeated ad nauseam in Internet [1] and you can analyze the blockchain genesis to check it.
> Ethereum killer?
It is not about the protocol but the community you create. Algorand has solved the PoS before Cardano and Ethereum but they are #58 now and the creator is one of the parents of modern cryptography, Turing Prize, etc. Solana is #5. Beyond comparing the Solana protocol with Algorand it is a matter of "business" execution, technology is a smaller part. Probably if Livra from Meta was accepted it would be in the top 10.
Even when you think about Solidity as a programming language, it was not well designed (e.g. security) but that doesn't matter.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/ru9dsq/the_proof_...
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+the+original+contri...
The very first result on your google query is a bitcoin.com page that is 404, but archive.org has this:
So, the "50% to contributors" is actually 8.33%.> consensus has a relationship with fees because it is linked with the cost of reaching consensus!
Wrong. Fees are determined by network activity and the amount of transactions competing to get into the block being "mined". The cost to validate a full block is not really different than the cost to validate a block that is not completely full.
If Algorand or Cardano ever got close to the transaction volume from Ethereum, you can bet that their average transaction fees would go up accordingly.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I don't know about Algorand or Cardano transaction volume, but many EVM-based blockchains process a similar number of transactions to ethereum (or more), with lower fees. They do all have different (proof of stake still) consensus models though
For comparison: https://etherscan.io/chart/tx
Polygon: https://polygonscan.com/chart/tx
Polygon is an L2, so arguably not as decentralized.
But then there's Avalanche: https://avascan.info/stats/network-activity
Or Fantom: https://ftmscan.com/chart/tx
> a similar number of transactions to ethereum (or more), with lower fees.
Are we talking about the base currency (Wei) or the dollar-equivalent amount? If Wei, the only way that the transaction fees can be lower is if the chain has a different set of costs for the operations.
If you are talking about the dollar-equivalent amount, then yes, transactions are going to be "more expensive". But even then, it is not related to the consensus algorithm and just the "price of the base token".
If you meant monetary volume, you should have used a different term than one which is well-recognized to refer to the number of transactions (both in and out of blockchain applications of that term)
edit: I see, you're suggesting the fees are cheaper because the token is cheaper, and somehow seem to think EVM networks will have a straightforward relationship between the number of transactions and the cost denominated in their gas token.
I don't see how this follows. The fees are entirely a function of network constants and usage, which have more to do with what people are willing to pay to get their transaction into a block.
Ethereum has a limited amount of block-space, and a fixed number of blocks per year. The gas price isn't entirely a bidding system, because there's basically a floating multiplier which adjusts automatically based on the "fullness" of the most recent however many blocks, but the principle is that you need some form of congestion control
In blockchains which have larger blocks, or more numerous blocks, or a number of blocks/block-size which adjust based on usage, it is not as costly to get a transaction included.
So I don't know about Cardano or Algorand, but many networks can handle as many transactions as ethereum while having much cheaper transaction fees, which seemed to be the point you were arguing against
Initial investors are also contributors. The number allocated initially is really huge.
And if "initial investors are also contributors", then you are just parroting the "Ethereum is pre-mined" from Bitcoiners, and we can safely end the discussion here.
TVL for Ethereum, 53B USD: https://defillama.com/chain/Ethereum
If doing DeFI on Algorand is so much better/cheaper than on Ethereum, then why is it only 1/500th of Ethereum's size?
Mind you, it seems that this calculation is not attributing "bridged" TVL as related to the chain size and activity. If it were, there are 330 Billion USD that depend on Ethereum's base layer security.
This has made you less skeptical of what he’s peddling? That slogan is a series of red flags in only eight words. He could be selling actual snake oil.
Effect of Erabu Sea Snake (Laticauda semifasciata) Lipids on the Swimming Endurance of Mice https://karger.com/anm/article-abstract/51/3/281/41756/Effec...
I suspect the Erabu sea snake is the Chinese water snake that was originally juiced? I don't think rattlesnake oil would have the same effect :)
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/26/215761377...
OPs point is that most cryptocurrency advocates go for "but my token and hold, it is sure to grow 10x in a few months" and I (like probably OP) consider it misleading baseless hope at best, fraud usually.
From a practical standpoint, I think most people would prefer it if the currency used by their country of residence increased in value relative to other global currencies, rather than just staying stable (though for hyperinflationary countries, even that would be a major improvement).
Although stability relative to another currency (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_exchange_rate_system) is considered (by many) disadvantageous for countries with strong economies, because you strip away the central bank's power to manage the supply. This is basically the whole Gold Standard debate.
For blockchain users who want reduced volatility and stability relative to a fiat currency, there are always stablecoins.
So if I make a game, or an uber for dog walkers, or a global shipping service, or some SaaS app on the ethereum blockchain, then my customers will have to pay more or less (or my costs will be higher or lower) depending on how active the network is.
That makes no sense. Day to day price and gas fee fluctuations make it hard to long term plan. Just saying that if you want price stability use a stablecoin doesn’t address that issue because we are not building the app on the blockchain of the stablecoin. There isn’t an eth stable coin that is always 1 blip to 1 eth exchange rate.
Only if you want to have these applications fully running on the base layer, which is frankly nonsense.
To give you one practical example: Storj can provide a object storage service at AWS scale, and its pricing has nothing to do network activity and the price of storage does not change based on the amount of transactions per minute. Unless you want to be paid in real-time and account for every byte that you are storing and transmitting, there is no need to put all of the business logic in the blockchain.
- storage nodes getting audits and the results being stored in a smart contract.
- calculation of payouts.
- payouts to storage nodes with their token.
My point was that prices being "stable" isn't actually what's desirable, prices being nonvolatile is.
> So if I make a game, or an uber for dog walkers, or a global shipping service
I mean this is exactly how many of these things work. Uber pricing fluctuates based on demand. So do global shipping prices in many cases. So do game prices on Steam.
Even if the price was the same in the currency you're using (say USD), the value of USD is constantly changing.
> and the more people who use it the higher the value of eth is.
And I'm not sure how this follows. The more people who purchase ETH, the higher the value is.
But using the ethereum network doesn't require you to transact in ETH, only that you pay for the transaction fee (the network cost that makes it possible to to store and execute your transaction essentially) in ETH
But because these games don't, it should be totally fine to delegate this application to a layer-2 system like a roll-up or a payment channel.
And again, we are talking about just to pay to play the game. Today an arcade that uses dollars may charge you 50 cents for a life. Or the equivalent in tokens (layer 2). If suddenly the value of 50 cents could pay for 10 lives, do I need to now charge customers more tokens to play? How do I plan long term with hiring or my utilities if the price I could be paying month to month can fluctuate as much as cryptocurrency does?
So, in your example, the game company could easily just say "pay us X amount of dollars however you want, and you will receive the exact same amount on the layer-2 to play".
My example was talking about using a layer 2 token. Now you’re telling me that it’s simple just use a completely different currency to buy tokens?
This is has been said about every coin since the beginning of crypto.
I've never seen Vitalik or any of the core Ethereum developers talking about the value of Ether being a fundamental metric of any kind. The incentives are made in a way to maximize utility of the blockchain, not the value of its base currency.
The "beginning of crypto" was with Bitcoin, can we agree to that?
Can we agree that Bitcoin was not claiming to "be a general platform to power distributed applications"? If you disagree, refer to the whitepaper that says "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".
Can we agree that before Ethereum each chain was just a fork of Bitcoin, and that the token (aka "the currency") was "sold" to others as something that would have its value determined by supply and demand, but that the blockchain had no use that was not connected to transactions related to the token? As in: fundamentally speaking, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Cash... are the same?
Can we agree that Ethereum (the blockchain) enables distributed applications where people do not care at all about the price of Ether? E.g, I can host files on Storj and pay with credit card, the people hosting data are being paid in Storj's token, and everyone involved in this economy is directly using the Ethereum blockchain, but don't need to hold any Ether at all?
Saying you have some other use case besides asset appreciation is not a unique proposition.
> Saying you have some other use case besides asset appreciation is not a unique proposition.
Now, it isn't. In 2015, it pretty much was.
And they said this, including Satoshi. Yes they were wrong, but they said it.
>Now, it isn't
It's never been unique, because every coin has said it including, as you have mentioned in every response so far, Bitcoiners.
You've also said Eth guys have said. What are we left with? Every other **coin has obviously said it. I'm not arguing they all mean it, or they've been right. I'm arguing they all said it.
Then this whole discussion is pointless. Why should we care about what people say or believe, unless it can be backed by their actions?
Instead of putting them all in the same bucket because on what they said, let's judge them based on what they did. And Vitalik has consistently shown that his work is aligned with the stated plans and vision for Ethereum.
I just meant to point out that this was no special characteristic, as they all have done this. "Crypto" has been professing "use cases" since the beginning.
>Then this whole discussion is pointless.
Yes it certainly was, since you wanted to argue that you believe him, yet got caught up in trying to refute for some reason the point that they all say it. You say trust actions instead. Great, as long as we agree words are irrelevant particularly when they all say the same thing.
I never said "I believe on what he has promised". I said "all he has done and delivered has been consistent with his professed views". It's completely different, and I honestly do not see how you could interpret what I said in such a twisted way.
The purpose of OP_RETURN was to end the script. It was not designed for rando garbage overlays that are worthless; Satoshi's views on scaling were ambiguous—rather than say it "should" he was instead correcting people who thought you could break consensus by simply setting the value higher. There was absolutely zero communication between Vitalik and anybody about his "plans" to dump an overlay into Bitcoin, and his current story about 80-to-40 bytes is a pure, often debunked lie. There isn't a single communication that Vitalik himself can point to anywhere which shows he was interested in "cooperating" and then core turned him down.
His typical lie was that he was interested in stuffing data into Bitcoin, but then core devs "stopped that" by reducing the amount he could stuff into Bitcoin by half—from 80 to 40 bytes—but when he says that he also never points at any discussion, and in any event the direct history contradicts this—no versions of Bitcoin from back then ever reduced anything. It was only ever an increase: from 0, to 40, to 80 in released versions.
There no evidence these people ever give which shows some lack of cooperation with Vitalik is the reason why Hearn and Andresen "split off" to make an altcoin, which itself is quite the absurdity, and if true just means they would have been ethereum pumpers anyway.. so..
Also, why are the comments on your account 90% calling other people liars about cryptocurrency?
Satoshi's views on scaling were NOT ambiguous. He planned to increase the blocksize and have users switch to SPV wallets. Read section 8 of the Bitcoin white paper:
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Also, direct Satoshi quote from bitcointalk about increasing the blocksize and hard forking to do it:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg153...
"It can be phased in, like:
if (blocknumber > 115000) maxblocksize = largerlimit
It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.
When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade."
Regarding OP_RETURN, both mastercoin and counterparty existed because of OP_RETURN, so no, it's not "garbage". It's a data field that can be used to link L2's to the Bitcoin blockchain by embedding them in transactions. These projects, factom, and countless others that built off of OP_RETURN had to abandon Bitcoin for other chains because of the core developers' gatekeeping.
So what developments in Bitcoin Cash have been made in that direction? Why is is that all of the "ideological" forks of Bitcoin do nothing but tweak some parameter size in the network settings and do not go beyond that?
I agree with everything about the bastardization of Bitcoin, but I don't think this is why Vitalik created Ethereum
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7umljb/vitalik_buterin...
https://www.reddit.com/r/decred/comments/6wxueo/comment/dmce...
In the last two weeks I've paid to people who cleaned my air conditioning, my girlfriend's nails, our lawyer, for delivery of some goods from US, for food delivery, for a sightseeing tour, and for exchange to local currency (delivered to my home) — all in USDT. I've also got USDT from a friend for booking Airbnb for him (he couldn't do it on his own account because of reasons). At this point, most of services in local community are advertised with payment in USDT first: via binance and bybit internal transfer, or just on trc-20.
I hear CEOs talk about how this will revolutionize the world, but realistically no one needs a cryptographically secure immutable ledger to validate that someone is the true owner of concert tickets or whatever.
I do wonder, if the only real-world application that needs a cryptographically secure immutable ledger, is cryptocurrency.
[1] https://twitter.com/dwr/status/1774490997789241709 [2] https://www.farcaster.xyz/
I know it’s hard to imagine for the west but places exist where working around the local financial system is a huge benefit.
For privacy, just use a coinjoining wallet. It's a solved problem for a long time.
Commenters here are sour over bitcoin, for a variety of reasons, and ignorant at the same time.
The only way to have a private, fungible cryptocurrency is to make privacy mandatory and not "something you enable because you are a drug dealer". Does this mean that everyone using Monero is automatically a drug dealer? Even if it does, it's waaay better to have consistency vs having a cryptocurrency partitioned into "normal coins" and "darknet market coins"
If you were running a non profit and you wanted people to be able to anonymously contribute to it, but you wanted to prove to your anonymous donors that all of their donations were being spent in accordance with the goals of the nonprofit, you might use ZCash transparent vs shielded addresses as a way to create that division between transparent and opaque.
As for t-addresses having been default, that's a regulatory hack. Exchanges have a better shot at being compliant if they can use the chain as a source of truth. So t-addresses let them create a space where they can do that, and then you as a user can privately move funds out of the exchange's domain and into a black hole without having to get your hands dirty with some other exchange.
Yes I know that monero let's you generate keys for this on a tx by tx basis, but it's not the same. It's just different privacy properties with different use cases.
Monero, however, has the objectively superior CLI. It's fantastic.
You could just as accurately say Zcash has opt-out privacy too. And the privacy is much more than a mixer since you got ZKPs.
Opting out of privacy gives it more plausible deniability, which is why you can find it on coinbase. Not that you should need deniability, since no one has any business knowing what you're doing with your money.
So if you actually want to interact with the real world, you have to opt out of privacy? And if you enable privacy you are automatically treated as a weirdo? I don't get the whole point of Zcash.
It's the same issue as with Bitcoin – you can make your transactions private, but it's not the default and not obvious for new users, and anyone who does it is subject to suspicion.
It really looks to me like this "privacy" aspect of Zcash is just a marketing gimmick. It doesn't have any advantages to just using Monero in the first place.
Again, it is not the same as bitcoin. Using a mixer does not come with ZKPs. The transactions are also still public. You can see how much was put in and how much was taken out. Worse, you now potentially have traceable tainted coins and a target on your back.
The point of Zcash is the Z. Zero knowledge proofs. Monero uses differential privacy. Zcash has much stronger privacy guarantees.
Monero has view keys for that.
> Zcash has much stronger privacy guarantees
This is false. The fact that it uses ZKP doesn't make it's privacy stronger.
I'm not going to state more points on why Monero is ultimately better than Zcash because this has been done before: https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/u3saom/eli5_whats_t...
I'm sold ... just tell me where to transfer the money.
There's a lot more to this ecosystem than just speculation. At it's core is a distributed world computer but all anyone knows about is money.exe because this stuff is immensely complex.
If you look into the researcher rather than paying attention to the soyjack youtube thumbnails you'll find the actual substance. Nobody is going do the work for you. Or you know, just write it all off with a snide joke because "crypto bad".
I'm guessing any "crypto-kinda-currency" is picking eventual consistency as a core mechanic. Think about the word EVENTUAL though.
If the core function of the crypto is a ledger, then it makes sense, it EVENTUALLY gets transacted, and in practical terms you take the faith in the distributed system from a flawless previous record in reconciliation, probably before the actual completion of the transaction.
Now, a distributed major blockchain has ... how many nodes? Thousands or more? That is a long time for reconciliation of the consistency, even with great dedicated internal networks. What? This is over a heterogenous global internet network? That implies EVENTUAL has some bad worst cases.
"Smart contracts" or "distributed trustless computation". Whatever, getting the value of calculation from a node and getting the value stored in the node is essentially the same thing in terms of determining an answer to a query.
It implies a horrendous performance, one you have little control over. I don't think Kubernetes is shaking in its boots.
It's interesting Aphyr never does any crypto analyses, although he makes his bones running a test suite. How do you test a scaled cryptocurrency?
Alternatively, because the only way to use the aforementioned distributed world computer is to engage with money.exe and buy more CoinTokens. Imagine all the kids out there who will be delighted to learn a pay-per-use code interpreter. "Hey mom, I need your credit card to cover the gas while I debug my smart contract."
But assuming you have the money to spend, it's a whole universe of possibilities! Just make sure to cash in before actually trying to use any of them.
In any case, for actual usage it should surprise nobody why everyone conflates Ethereum with money. No, your L2 chain does not qualify as an official solution.
I would argue the exact opposite. A website will be deployed to different versions of different browsers on different operating systems. A smart contract will exist on a single distributed computer. It sounds like the actual problem is people treating smart contract development as cavalierly as web app development
It's absolutely representive of how it looks in deployment. You can test transactions EXACTLY how they would happen on mainnet.
I don't get your second point.
There are a number of planned upgrades on the roadmap[1], such as layer 2 blobs, that will eventually drive the cost per transaction closer to zero, however we're still a decade away from that being the case. In the meantime you can debug your smart contracts on a testnet for $0
[1] https://notes.ethereum.org/@domothy/roadmap
If you have no interest whatsoever and they start explaining to you all the cryptography behind establishing a secure connection to your bank most people would dismiss it as mumbo-jumbo. But now you can tell your grandma to look out for the little green lock on the web that makes her account secure.
I will know. Not because of the "little green lock".
I will know in the same way I know this site is secure. In this case, because of PKCS #1 SHA-256 (aka CKM_SHA1_RSA_PKCS_PSS). Cert issued by DigiCert Global Root G2 and valid until one second before midnight UTC on 3/29/31.
That's where I guess I'm losing sight of the vision.
It's tested, it's proven, it's secure, it works, no "gas", no fees ... I don't know. Maybe I'm just missing something.
If you explain to most people how a TLS handshake works it will sound to them as equally nonsensical. This technology is complicated, this article is targeted at an audience that understands the technology, not one that needs a "My first introduction to distributed computing"
Ethereums problem is that it is a badly designed clusterfuck. The newer blockchains will likely take over.
You could dive deeper into either of the topics you mentioned and start losing people - for example how QUIC carries a TLS handshake, or why enshrined proposer-builder separation is important to Ethereum. All that means is that both protocols hide complexity under the surface.
So far all of the alternative chains have been plagued with downtime and centralization of nodes into supernodes (at least in the ones that weren't centralized from the start).
Wait, this isn't reddit.
> Many have argued that the lack of large-scale applications for the past ten years proves that crypto is useless. I have always argued against this: pretty much every crypto application that is not financial speculation depends on low fees - and so while we have high fees, we should not be surprised that we mainly see financial speculation!
> Now that we have blobs, this key constraint that has been holding us back all this time is starting to melt away. Fees are finally much lower; my statement from seven years ago that the internet of money should not cost more than five cents per transaction is finally coming true.
---
All of this depends on so called "Layer 2s", which adds a great deal of UX complexity to the end user. I'm skeptical that this is best way to solve the scalability issues that plague cryptocurrency, but I will say that this looks to me like it has a much better shot of succeeding that anything Bitcoin has ever attempted to do on this front.
> the friction of money actually being involved ... makes it not worth it
This is it. There are very few people who live for this level of financialisation.
So blockchains don't necessarily financialize things that aren't already financialized, they just tend to make money flow in a more direct way from a group of people using a service to a group of people hosting/providing it. Instead of paying using a micropayment of attention that gets monetized through a complex and often bespoke advertising arrangement, you can pay using a micropayment of a recognizable asset that has actual market value.
Personally, if I could click a single Apple-pay-like button in my browser to attach say 0.5 cents of postage to this Hacker News comment to get it to post, I doubt I would think twice about it. In fact, I would probably participate more confidently knowing it's a deterrent for bots (less of a problem for Hacker News, but a huge problem on Reddit and Xitter).
I suppose there is a certain sense that transaction fees go to people providing services to the blockchain... but i would mostly describe it as paying rent and not actually paying the person responsible for the service.
Credit card users pay $1+ fees per transaction all the time. They don’t complain only because vendors usually eat the fees on their behalf to obscure the issue.
I have a “2% cash back on everything” card which I know is actually a “we charged your vendor 4% and shared half of that with people like you who clicked the right button” card. I don’t like it. But, that’s the game.
People complain about the impossibility of crypto having fees of pennies with settlement times of minutes while constantly using credit cards that have fees of dollars with a settlement time of days.
If there's one useful thing to take from it, it's that I think it does usefully highlight just how critical that perception is for adoption -- specifically, how thoroughly it dominates technical concerns like throughput and latency. Perhaps if shop owners were prepared to eat the bitcoin transaction fee the same way they eat the credit card fee, bitcoin might have a resurgence as a cash alternative. There would still be the transaction speed issue -- I think it would require a third party to step in to provide merchants with guarantees (in exchange for a fee), so that the merchant wouldn't have to wait for the transaction to go through. But that's not a tech problem -- it's the same problem that credit cards already have, and have already solved.
In Bosnia a most basic bank account costs about $3 per month, or 60 Ethereum transactions (most people usually have 10 - 20 transaction per month). For paying bills banks usually charge a commission fee of 1%. And if you want to send money to someone 50 kms away but across the border the fee is $20 with few days wait for money to be received.
UPI (Indian market) launched cross border support with a couple countries starting this year. 118 billion transactions happen via UPI annually.
I do think there is some niche market where ethereum payments will shine but hard to beat free and instant systems already in place at far bigger scale.
Also I'd challenge 10-20 transactions per month. I think in many near cash-less societies it might be closer to 5 per day.
M-Pesa got there first, and without the taint of cryptocurrency. It's a real, deployed, working system at scale, and has been for years. The idea that a "hope to serve" after a bit more crypto tech innovation will open an untapped market ... well, I wouldn't take it seriously. It's wishful thinking at both ends of the supply and demand equation.
My budget is $20 dollars a day.
Lmao people are so out of touch with reality.
5 transactions a day? For what? Honestly can I get off this train.
Not exactly, L2s are being abstracted away, end users eventually wont even be aware what chain they are interacting with without tracing the tx
Considering there are people who don't understand the bitcoins aren't INSIDE a physical wallet, that ship has sailed and made a revolution or two already.
There are some wallets that make this a pain (Metamask) but newer wallets like Rabby (https://rabby.io) and Rainbow are huge improvements.
Following in the steps of what EU and UK did few years ago. (1)
And which always made this cryptocurrency fast settlement stuff sound laughable - like they're describing just what a regular bank account does, and it's supposedly their special magic, so what?
People need to look outside of the USA to understand the state of the art.
You can even find these systems in Africa already (2)
1) https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/instant_pa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments
2) https://www.mfw4a.org/news/instant-payment-transactions-afri...
And yet people need only to look down at their smartphone, no matter where in the world they are located, to understand the state of the art in public ledgers.
The consistently ignorant rhetoric here on HN about this supposedly unserved market for cryptocurrency is discouraging. Again, people need to look outside of the USA to understand the state of the art.
I have respect for ethereum. It seems like one of the few cryptocurrency projects actually trying to push those ideas as far as they'll go, instead of just being endless scams.
But still, at the end of the day, this feels like endless complexity and in the end we are just back we started: applications we could already do much better using traditional technologies.
What even is the elevator pitch use case of all this?
Also important to emphasize, I know I said it'll be outcompeted by a centralized solution. But actually USDC is centralized because it has a multisig, and all of its contracts are 100% upgradeable. So it's like a very inefficient centralized solution that really doesn't belong on a blockchain or at least not a popular one with high fees. But again, DeFi protocols exist, and people want to swap USDC for crypto hedge funds to frontrun.
You can start the thought experiment by asking why USDC is on Ethereum and other popular chains rather than own private blockchain. People could make payments faster. Fees would be lower or more likely zero.
It's not on it's own private blockchain because then no one would use it.
There's no good other way because people don't actually want to send money internationally badly enough to create a profit opportunity.
DeFi protocols are a benefit, but even without it USDC would still persist.
There's no good other way because of extreme regulations that harm law abiding citizens under the guise of AML and other junk.
They want it sure, but again, not enough to create a profit opportunity. Profit is revenue minus costs, so there's a lot of revenue opportunity (from the bank deposits by the way, not the payments), but the costs are huge. The revenue has to justify the legal headache involved with processing payments in under a minute. That's why the only live solution needs a DeFi bubble to support it.
> The revenue has to justify the legal headache involved with processing payments in under a minute.
See how AML regulations just harm law abidding citizens?
Please explain how defi bubble is supporting it.
Kinda crazy how willing you are to let government step all over you under the disguise of AML, when it does jackshit for it. Soon enough you will be convinced that government being able to intercept all communication is good because think of the children!
> Is there literally any scenario where you'd accept that maybe crypto isn't actually useful and maybe it is just a big scam?
What scenario? Crypto is useful in current world. Not useful to everyone, that's fine, no one is forcing you to use it, but a lot of people do find it useful, myself included. Disregarding something as a scam just because you don't find it useful in your life is shortsighted. Think about it hard, otherwise you'll waste years of your life whining about how others are enjoying their lives and you will miss out on yours.
Blockchain/DeFi allows USDC to exist, even you admitted to that. The fact is, USDC exists on the blockchain. Sending international payments is the easiest with blockchain (provided both parties have a way to ramp on/off).
And of those remaining the overwhelming majority deserve it.
So you're trying to convince people to adopt Etheruem, Blockchain etc to solve a problem no one has.
https://github.com/erthink/libmdbx
Not to mention all of the users banned from social media at the request(pressured) of the government [1][2]?
1: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-bowed-to-white-house-p... 2: https://reason.com/2023/07/28/biden-white-house-pressured-fa...
The reason for the burn was the 1559 upgrade, which fixed the horrible user experience of guessing what minimum fee level would get your transaction through in a timely manner, and often either overpaying, or underpaying and suffering long delays. If not for the fee burn, the 1559 protocol would be trivial for validators to exploit.
But sure, in theory all the protocol rules could be changed. In theory Bitcoin could change their 21M supply limit. In theory, a company could sell its fixed assets and pivot to an entirely different business, or the US could change its constitution and take away property rights. But in practice, we usually estimate values based on the way things are working now, and put little weight on unlikely fundamental changes that might happen someday.
If the company pivoted to a different business, it would likely violate securities laws. Corporate governance is in place to stop that from happening.
US taking away all property rights is significantly less likely than an ETH hard fork. Hard forks have happened.
Ecosystem is getting smaller because everyone knows there are currently no useful DeFi projects. ETH is failing to pump again so this is the peak of network security.
Bitcoin is also a memecoin for the same reason, but at least it’s a credibly neutral memecoin unlike ETH.
> It's a full-stack replacement for large parts of "centralized tech"
Anti-censorship, permissionless data that lasts longer than centralized companies..?
A database with a game show component for cash and prizes.
People want exactly this coupled with a bunch of hand waiving to obfuscate this reality so it has more emotional impact when you win the lottery. The traditional lottery is too obviously random with such poor odds. People want a more distributed lottery payout and crypto has delivered.
There is nothing wrong with this. No one pretends though that the state lottery is some mathematical investigation into the dynamics of a stochastic process. Playing the state lottery is not doing research in stochastic calculus. I suspect if the state lottery had started for the first time today though that is exactly how it would be marketed.
Paul Brody is head of the Ethereum effort at EY, and wrote a book about this called Ethereum for Business. He includes a lot of specific examples. As Vitalik mentioned in the article, most of it is waiting for scaling.
I asked this in an Ask HN today, but got no answer so far:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39852389
It looks like not a single HN reader is using blockchain technology for anything.
If nobody is using blockchain technology outside of blockchain projects, what are the reasons we expect that some day we will? What could be a near term use case?
NFTs can make sense in theory as an alternative to the already-popular video game collectibles, as silly as that premise is, but they never really got traction, and again that's related to currency. There's been a lot of vaporware around things like corporate blockchains to track assets, which don't even make sense in theory.
So many ideas are infeasible right now because CC fees are high, and making any payment is extremely high friction.
Users dislike paying on the web because it is a security risk. Because of this insane system of credit cards, where you give the other party a "secret" which enables them to take the money from you.
If you could just send the money, the barrier to pay would be 100x lower.
Most websites pay the bills via ads. And make less than $0.001 per visitor. If they could sell a monthly membership for a one-time payment of $1, they would have a way better business model.
How do you pay Apple without giving them a secret?
> How do you pay Apple without giving them a secret?
Credit cards being effectively unrestricted bearer tokens isn't nearly the only way to do payments. For example you could send a signed message to your bank instructing them to pay Apple (in a world in which you'd be paying them; again, Apple Pay is not that).
And if you were signing your own payments, you'd still have to trust your computing device and the bank.
You would send $100 to your computing device every now and then. And use that for day to day spendings. If the device turns out to be malicious, you lost only the $100 and stay away from the brand that made the device.
A bank would not be involved at all.
On the other hand, having some money outside a bank is nice. I've had them freeze my assets before just cuz they felt like it, until I spent a whole day telling them to fix it.
An algorithm cannot be reasoned with, it cannot understand that your house burned down and destroyed your ID. It cannot accept liability for it's actions.
If I lose my bank card I go to a branch, verify my ID, and get a replacement. The bank is liable if they allow somebody other then me access to my accounts, regardless of how convincing the fraudster might have been.
Source, been using banks for 30 years now.
My solution in the end hinged on a paper recovery phrase, stored in... a bank.
I wonder how small independent sites like Amazon and eBay exist then if people dislike paying on the web because of the security risk.
The reality is that people have literally no problem paying for stuff on the internet.
It's a high barrier for users to pay online. That's why they don't pay $1 on a whim on a small site, even if it offers something they like.
Paying online is more like a marriage these days. You pray that the other side will not disappoint you and then you jump in.
That's why big popular sites with brand names worth billions gobble up unproportional more paying users.
This has very little to do with the original claim of "Users dislike paying on the web because it is a security risk". Users have no issues paying for stuff online.
We can already do that here in Brazil: the web site displays a QR code (plus its contents in text form), the user scans the QR code (or copies the text) into their banking app, and confirms it on the app to send the money.
I hasn't AFAIK made any meaningful difference for websites. What people dislike isn't the inconvenience of credit cards, it's the inconvenience of having any paywall at all.
They all failed not because of fees, not because of security concerns, but because even having to think about whether you want to pay for something and how much incurs a mental cost that people avoid.
Free beets cheap by a margin that has nothing to do with how cheap or how easy.
It will change absolutely nothing whatsoever.
> So many ideas are infeasible right now because CC fees are high, and making any payment is extremely high friction.
Making payments will always be, is inherently high friction, and reducing the amount does nothing below a threshold that is much, much higher than $0.001.
There have been lots and lots of micropayment schemes, and they have all failed because the very fact that there is a payment already introduces mental friction that's effectively higher than current CC fees.
Any idea that is infeasible because there is no way to reliably send $0.001 is in fact easily feasible today by monetizing it some other way, usually via ads.
Lower fees are only relevant for high-volume fully automated transactions with a substantial financial incentive behind them, and those can already be done basically for zero marginal cost, see HFT. The only micropayments that people are willing to engage in individually is when they involve addiction, and that as well can and is already done in gambling apps masquerading as games.
It's evident in literally the first line of the bitcoin whitepaper:
"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution"
If paying a random person online was as easy as dropping a quarter in a cup the internet could be a very different place.
Why do you set the bar at $0.001? Even sending $1 reliably and with low fees (which has been doable with crypto since its inception) would be revolutionary in my opinion.
(pdf reference) https://www.beuc.eu/sites/default/files/publications/beuc-x-...
For example from Germany to Austria, sending 1200€, I see multiple providers with no fees for quick transfers.
You can also check https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/news-insights/videos/...
There's a reason you can't bring your Fortnite skin into a Lord of the Rings game, and it has very little to do with "central companies" and "APIs"
There's also the issue that Valve controls all the assets, but that's mostly a moot point because they control the game anyway. I guess someone could honor NFT skins in a separate game if they really wanted, but that's getting theoretical.
I don't know anyone who paid anything with it in the last 12 months.
Edit: relatedly, not everybody wants to pay their local taxes (and who am I to judge people in various life situations?). This itself is a _massive_ saver for the folks. Send somebody $5k usd a couple times and their bank will start asking complicated questions.
Reading through the page, that sounds super complicated though.
Couldn't the podcasts simply put a lightning invoice (Which is just a string of text I guess?) on their website with a text like "Support us via Lightning: 1f73ac220b9..."?
There's crypto-less features that Podcasting 2.0 adds like livestream notifications and transcriptions. Apple actually just added transcriptions to their app officially!
And couldn't the "Support us via lightning: 1f73ac220b9..." link have a protocol like "lightning://" prefixed, so when the users clicks it, their preferred payment method pops up?
By all accounts though (podcasting stats) people almost always listen to them on mobile devices, an app being the logical choice there.
The hosted lightning wallet Alby does have similar functionality you're thinking of, it's built as a browser plugin though. https://getalby.com
The Podcasting 2.0 spec also includes the "Boostgrams" feature allowing you to send messages to the creator with your payment.
Speaking of offline support the recently announced Hedgehog protocol builds off of lightning and is much more asynchronous.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/super-testnet-introduces-hed...
And how is the situation around the world - are retailers who offer digital goods/services allowed to accept crypto as payments?
Like if all I need to do is transfer $0.00001 to the site for my view and it's guaranteed to be free from ads or data hoarding, sign me tf up.
In my view, blockchains shine where you need auditable global state, bonus points if you don't want central control in your operations (obviously this then kicks the can to the core devs). This use-case is fairly miniscule for most applications, though.
As far as currency, I think they also have their use-cases as well but most people don't want a global audit trail of all their purchases. Things like Monero and Zcash shine here. The value fluctuations are obnoxious, though.
I'm saying this as a big blockchain skeptic. I think most of the things people use them for are silly.
It could be useful for professional licenses, too. Everyone could have a verifiable history of someone's professional license - when it was issued, when it was revoked, again mathematically verifiable. You could be sure that someone's record was never changed or deleted without leaving an audit trail.
Though to be fair, the important part of this is the chain of cryptographically signed and timestamped events. It could work without strictly being a blockchain. You could imagine something that behaves more like a git repository with a flat file database in it.
I have personally used cryptocurrency (Monero) to buy small quantities of substances for personal use from darkweb marketplaces a while ago.
This has been a great experience, I think the system of public vendor reputation , reviews, user discussions, independently published test results etc. adds a significant layer of safety to this process compared to random local 'street' type transactions of this sort.
Whether you approve of this or not, crypto is a very important layer in this system, I feel like this is the only actual use it has currently, although it's obviously not something crypto advocates like to advertise.
Alright, I'll bite, here are some projects that use blockchain for things besides trading tokens or improving blockchain technology:
- https://sarcophagus.io/
- https://www.gitcoin.co/
- https://docs.kleros.io/
There's many more. Many don't have a lot of adoption, and I don't know if they will. But at the very least it's often interesting to see how traditional systems are reimagined in order to enable decentralized, trustless, computer programs (with humans interacting at the perimeter) to fulfill roles which would traditionally be filled by centralized, trusted intermediaries (often humans).
If for no other reason than getting a front seat as many of them fall apart spectacularly but also because it's intellectually fascinating to see problems approached in an inverted manner.
They are not re-imagined. It's a combination of a still on-ongoing gold rush (well, the end tail of it) and people pretending there are purely technical solutions to all problems.
Almost every single of those "interesting re-imagining" projects rather quickly rediscovers why traditional systems are the way they are, and end up being shittier versions of those.
Whatever your feelings on the impact of the technology are, you can't possibly know this
> Almost every single of those "interesting re-imagining" projects rather quickly rediscovers why traditional systems are the way they are, and end up being shittier versions of those.
I pretty much agree with this, though I'd suggest "most" rather than "almost every".
Most scientific studies may fail to support their hypothesis also, that doesn't make them uninteresting.
The absolute vast majority (outside of scams, obviously).
> Most scientific studies may fail to support their hypothesis also, that doesn't make them uninteresting.
Scientific studies don't pretend to be re-imagining anything.
While this is nice and does show that distributed computing is a real possibility I also don't think that anyone is going to switch from Amazon/Azure to ICP any time soon.
But I must say the idea is really nice. It's very easy to develop Actor model based software and deploy it on ICP.
I would actually love it if you had a link with more info on that. Don't take this the wrong way, but my first guess would be that that basically isn't true; either it's not actually machine learning (as is understood today) or it isn't actually a blockchain but rather normal distributed computing being "verified" via blockchain somehow?
Would love to be proven wrong though.
zkML can be done using general-purpose ZK libraries (since they support arbitrary computations), or there are some specialized tools for proving ML inference, such as https://github.com/ddkang/zkml. It's currently pretty expensive to prove huge models like LLMs, but there's a lot of work being done to make it more practical.
A YT video about this: https://youtu.be/wk3FxuA5DKs
I am still very sceptical about this because it looks very slow, but it seems to work.
just saying “speculation” as if thats not a use case misses that “financial services” are our biggest industry on the planet and thats mirrored in the blockchain space, many people solve frictions and compete with each other. it willfully ignores that all currencies are 99% held as stores of value and the M0 money supply is a tiny fraction used as cash and for merchant transactions, a distribution also mirrored in the blockchain space but ignorantly used to discredit it despite ironically showing how well it works as a parallel economy.
additionally due to the structure of blockchains as a pay to write database, most use cases that aren't related to stores of value or trading are intrinsically tied to something financial which makes the standard impossible
Having spent two decades navigating the complexities of Wall Street, I know the critical problem plaguing the fixed income market: the overwhelming amount of data generated during the origination of debt instruments and the subsequent challenges in reconciliation during clearing and settlement. Night cycles, calling Bloomberg to fix security master. Calling DTCC to settle trades. Blockchain is the best technology to solve this. Only if applied correctly. Otherwise, it’s a waste.
We started with a fundamental goal: to debunk the myths and misconceptions surrounding blockchain in the securities space. Despite the pervasive FUD propagated by the media, we have now proved to regulators that securities originated on blockchain are indeed securities – not merely speculative digital assets.
At its core, we are looking to address the root cause of friction in fixed income trading: the lack of direct origination and data quality across market participants. By leveraging a permissioned network, we have proved by recording of municipal loans and securities on our blockchain. While it may not be the flashy product that garners headlines, this milestone marks a significant step forward. We also trained all of FINRA’s fixed income examiners….
Our next step is to bring brokered CDs, directly to the investors, giving them access to negotiate with the issuers. From there the goal is to extend to real-time clearing and settlement, streamlining processes and enhancing efficiency across the fixed income ecosystem.
Here's how a trade moves through our system in current state…it’s a mental journey. https://www.chicagofed.org/markets/view-lasalle-street/us-re...
And here the press release: https://securitize.io/learn/press/blackrock-launches-first-t...
Capital formation has been occurring this way for at least 12 years on public blockchains.
Satoshidice was one of the first companies and its shareholders created a vibrant secondary market onchain. They did dividends daily and it always went out to every shareholder daily. What happens now is so much more advanced but even more frictionless for crypto native issuers and traders.
One day DTCC and FINRA and the Fed will conform it to their redundant processes so that registered securities can do the same, using the same public utilities as everyone else.
Perhaps for clearing - ownership wise I think it stays permissioned - no investor wants to loose the wallet and not be able to recover their asset.
>One day DTCC and FINRA and the Fed will conform it to their redundant processes so that registered securities can do the same, using the same public utilities as everyone else.
100% - that's the plan but it's a massive regulatory capture to fight. Akin to launching a rocket and you need DoD and hundred other permissions.
One thing to keep in mind - Sec Act of 1933 and 1934 are here to stay - they may get new regs under them but ownership needs to be transferable outside just the normal case of trading i.e. trust, death, divorce, birth blah blah...
the smart contracts can be permissioned and have multiple signers and beneficiaries and payable on death conditions, the oracles and admins can be multi signer accounts too
I’m just trying to figure out what false dilemmas you are operating under, the examples already exist
You’re the advocate, in your world, but seemingly stuck in their myriad of concerns that are based on incomplete information
reminds me of how the substitute meat is repulsive to omnivores and vegans alike. hyperledger vibes
define "their" myriad concern? this is not moving from a self managed data center to a cloud server.
And curious what you think is the challenge with hyperleder other than it hasn't been pumped up by the VC's like SOL and others..
as if the crypto didn't serve the specific purpose of putting a cost on computational transactions, creating limited block space, so that people wouldn't do expensive computations
it doesn’t solve any problem that blockchain set out to solve, its nice that you found a way to have a shared google spreadsheet with macros without having to debate over whose account made the doc or organization, but its not a technological improvement that presents a novel alternative to a fungible data writing credit that crypto is, the only improvement is catering to a gullible enterprise audience who simply asked for a no-coin version of blockchain so they could say they have a blockchain strategy, grifting to enterprise clients is fine until those users act like they solved a deficiency of speculation as if thats a problem at all
public blockchains and smart contracts have a solution for the problems you mentioned so far, those are the myriad of concerns I’m referring to. Public blockchains also provide benefits to transparency and security that make the SROs and securities regulator redundant in their current form. There is another more productive way they can improve the things deployed on blockchains and give confidence to investors, but that’s only going to come from the blockchain space’s own regulatory capture, ironically thanks to speculation creating new consolidation of power and interest.
"they" being the SROs and securities regulators, here.
The comment above seems more of religious believe and understanding on your part or maybe practical experience. I can't tell.
Blockchain has nothing to do with "data quality across market participants". Bad data entered into blockchain remains bad data.
What blockchains may give you is a slow append-only log, which is a very minor part of that platform. And making everyone move to that platform is a much bigger challenge :)
Speed or throughput is not a challenge for origination - no one is mining a Bitcoin here!
This is such a great comparison! Crypto and "financial services" are both a massive waste of labor that produces zero material wealth and mainly exist to facilitate money laundering and further upward siphoning of wealth.
This is why Janet Yellen is currently throwing a tantrum that those big meanies in China aren't playing fair by using their labor to actually manufacture things instead of shuffle fake money back and forth between different buckets until more money appears out of thin air: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/yellen-intends-warn-...
Is that a "good art" scene, or a "good" art scene?
I'm still not quite getting the idea here—these assets only really "exist" in web3 apps, right?
Banks don’t want to deal with treasury departments nor do the banks want to be beholden to federal governments regarding prime rates.
Ethereum allows banks to circumvent these types of issues because rates are dictated by banks not by governments and their treasury departments.
Crypto currency is coming soon. It’s only a matter of time and validating processes now.
Isn't "debt" a contract between the bank and a user? How do you transfer that and to whom?
And at the same time it's not battle tested. Any CFO who signs of on something like that risks shareholder fury when anything goes wrong.
> If nobody is using blockchain technology outside of blockchain projects
HN is very adverse to the blockchain space. This is not the best place to look for people using the technology since 9/10 times you would get downvoted to oblivion
What people like you usually miss.. hodling bitcoin IS one of its uses, store of value.
> It looks like not a single HN reader is using blockchain technology for anything.
You haven't missed anything, that's why we say bitcoin, not blockchain.
https://securitize.io/learn/press/blackrock-launches-first-t...
Ransomware, evading currency controls, funding North Korea.
8. As the Master of the Rolls and Head of Civil Justice in England and Wales, I hold an office that pre-dates modern trade in derivatives and reinsurance, even steam engines, powered flight, and certainly the internet. I am particularly and obviously concerned about the reputation and development of English law and the jurisdiction of England and Wales. 9. Many people do not realise that English law governs trading in €600 trillion of OTC derivatives annually, in €11.6 trillion in metals trading, in £250 billion in M&A deals, and in £80 billion in insurance contracts every year – just to take a few examples. My hope is that English law will prove to be the law of choice for borderless blockchain technology as its take up grows exponentially in the months and years to come.
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Speech-M...
Case closed.
1) governments didn’t get to print money at will until they went off the gold standard, and the financial regime we have now is worse than the gold era. (Highly dubious, I don’t buy this entirely)
2) blockchain done right gives hub-and-spoke efficiency without creating hegemons like VISA, SWIFT and PayPal to boss around their users with impunity.
This I believe entirely.
Not sure if that's possible or if it violates any HN policies about how links are displayed, apologies if it's a silly/useless suggestion.
Edit: Not sure how popularis eth.limo w.r.t. to HN submissions, but the full domain should probably be displayed for any eth.limo submission.
See Ethereum scale day by day (today Ethereum is doing 160 tps, more than 10x its initial throughput): https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity
You can now settle your transactions on rollups for mere cents: https://fees-growthepie.streamlit.app/
Neat dashboards regarding blob usage: https://dune.com/hildobby/blobs
What's coming... With the current number of blobs Ethereum will likely be able to do up to ~500 tps on average. ~1000 tps in burst mode. But in coming upgrades the blobs will be sharded through Data Availability Sampling, allowing validators to verify only a subset while being sure that the rest of blobs are validated and available by the rest of the network. This will allow to scale Ethereum up to 256 blobs. Which will give Ethereum a throughput of around ~100K tps.
Also, have folks invented a cheap/fast way of going from L2 <-> L2 without having to do an L1 tx?
I fear that L2s may never be adopted due to network segmentation, but if it's possible for all L2s to interchange with each other cheaply, then it's just as good as L1 IMO.
https://ethresear.ch/t/from-4844-to-danksharding-a-path-to-s...
To transfer assets from L2 to L2, of course the naive implementation is to use a centralized intermediary, of which there are currently many that are reasonably priced. There are ways to go between zk-L2s without any central broker in theory; I’m not sure whether that’s also true of optimistic-L2s.
There are bridge providers like Connext (https://www.connext.network/), Hop (https://portal.arbitrum.io/projects/bridges-and-on-ramps?pro...), LayerZero (https://layerzero.network/) etc that provide liquidity across L2s to make it simple and cheap for common assets like USDC, ETH, etc.
Attempts to do this trustlessly without relying on a liquidity provider do exist, but they're not mature enough to mention yet. They usually rely on zk proofs to validate that an asset was bridged from one chain to another.
L2s are presently already supporting more activity than L1, with 4 L2s regularly doing more TPS than L1. Agreed that fragmentation is a concern, but I think we'll get there soon where the UX is abstracted away for users and the assets flow cheaply.
The "growthepie" link above wasn't working in my browser due to "lack of WebGL support".
Points for unique naming
https://ethereum.org/en/roadmap/danksharding/
What a name!
"Rat" as in "advice" is spelled with a T, but the name might be older than that spelling.
Apparently the name Tanqueray, like the gin brand, is related.
Names are fun!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tancred
You're trying to imagine away the use cases because you don't agree with them.
If you believe blobs are "nonsense" that should be called out, I think that's an interesting discussion space to enter.
More generally, I would say that Etherium itself is mostly nonsense. I will admit I don't understand very well what the purpose of the "blobs" are that are being discussed in the article, but from my perspective the entire idea of blockchain technology is not useful. I have yet to be convinced that there is any real problem being solved by it, but there are a lot of problems that are created, which then need to be resolved with ever more esoteric and unproven solutions, like what is described in this article.
It's "Ethereum". You can't even write the name of the project correctly, so how can I trust you expertise on that?
>I will admit I don't understand very well what the purpose of the "blobs" are
But we're talking under a link to a post about blobs? Sounds like an important context.
>from my perspective the entire idea of blockchain technology is not useful
Instead of trying to discuss that (and I could) - on HN there are plenty links to thinks I don't consider useful, like retrocomputing, programming in AGDA or yet another rust rewrite of some tool. I don't go around and leave nonproductive comments there, i just don't click them. Why do you feel a need to do so?
Mostly because unlike those other examples, cryptocurrency is actively doing harm to society by accelerating climate change, enabling various forms of crime, and doing financial damage to many people who have been convinced to put their savings into various ponzi schemes. So I view it as a sort of moral obligation to be a dissenting voice in these conversations.
I don't intent to be actively nonproductive with things I say though, and you might be right that it would be better to not engage with my original comment. The parent comment I replied to was not very productive either though. Mostly just "this is good". So my intention was just to represent the opposition and say something like "I disagree, and think this is part of something that is harmful."
Bitcoin accelerates climate change - no other cryptocurrency has a measurable environmental impact. The internet also enabled various forms of crime. Bank wires do financial damage to people who invest in ponzi schemes, in more volume than blockchain transactions do if I'm not mistaken.
Basically, I don't look at distributed ledger systems and think immediately of all the crimes that they enable. But I also don't look at a knife and immediately think of all the crimes that have been committed with knives. On the other hand though I've never known anyone who was a victim of a knife-related crime, so perhaps my opinion would be different if that were the case.
EDIT: NVM, I RTFMed https://ethereum.org/en/layer-2/. I wonder what the trade-offs of layer 2 protocols are. Less secure?
Layer 2's are currently significantly more centralized than Ethereum L1, but this is not a fundamental technological limitation, and can be improved significantly with more resources and time. L2s right now have fragmentation concerns, where users have poor experiences interacting with a ecosystem of 10+ L2s, but this is largely a UX concern that can be solved in my view, and shared sequencers can help this on a technical level. I wouldn't say Layer 2's have many intrinsic fundamental technological trade-offs.
The actual proving mechanism is either a) too amazing for me to understand or b) not quite figured out yet. But first blobs..
Rollups use either optimistic proofs or zero knowledge proofs for settlement
> The blob stuff is about "ok if that's a thing how do I prove to some L1 contract that I own these L2 funds?".
It's about data availability
> there's (supposedly) a way for you to slowly get your funds back by exiting on L1
They're called escape hatches, you can view the state of each L2 on L2Beat: https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary
Can you post an example of a code that implements either of these? (the fraud proof, not the happy path)
I ask because in the past when I researched L2s such as Optimism, that code was "to be developed".
Sequencer side:
https://github.com/OffchainLabs/nitro/blob/d28682b9300d50214...
Contract side:
https://github.com/OffchainLabs/nitro-contracts/blob/90037b9...
It seems to me that Optimism is lagging way behind - I'm not sure if they have fraud proofs yet even to this day. I consider Arbitrum to have "picked up the torch" so-to-say.
https://github.com/search?q=test+repo%3AOffchainLabs%2Fnitro...
Not sure why it doesn't show up in GitHub's search, but it's right there in front of both of our faces.
https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary
Note the pie chart in the row for each L2. That pie chart notes the security risks for each one based on their tech stack. Ideally, the top L2s should strive to reach "Stage 2" which could be considered as secure as L1 itself, but no general purpose L2 is at that stage yet and most are still at Stage 0.
I predict that by 2030 the cryptocurrency nerds will have discovered SQL and transaction audits.
Furthermore, she is only one example of staggeringly recognized, decorated, acknowledged pillars of computer science who either is now or recently has been doing real, substantial, academically sound, and novel research in this field: Philip Waller of functional programming and category theory fame works (or did recently) at IO/HK, a shop with more Fields/Turing/ACM-type honors than they have places to put all the plaques.
So with all respect to a fellow community member, easy there with the “junk” stuff.
If you want to say: “2017-era ICO exit scam junk”, or “pump-and dump altcoin junk circa 2022”, be my guest as long as you cite examples, there was plenty of fraud during those bubbles just like there is always fraud in speculative asset bubbles, and fraud is bad (whatever Greenspan and Summers are on the record as saying and they are both on the record as saying financial fraud shouldn’t be prosecuted).
But even there, I’ll remind you that the conventional financial system sets no enviable record for either asset bubbles or the attendant fraud: quite the contrary, no one of any real seniority suffered so much as house arrest or community service let alone prison in 1987, 1999, 2001, 2008-2009, or whatever we’re calling this. With three notable exceptions: Sam Blankman Fried is serving 25 years for things that happen on Wall St. every day of the week, and if CZ misses serious jail time it will be by the skin of his teeth. Do Kwon is facing trial for felony market manipulation in absentia.
To my untrained eye, it looks an awful lot like cryptocurrency is the one place in the modern digital financial system where fraud is investigated, prosecuted, where people who go jail, and where the victims of that fraud receive at least some of their money back (I have a friend who held significant FTT and is already sure he’s getting something back, though these proceedings are complicated and we’re frankly a bit out of practice because we stopped prosecuting financial fraud in the late-Reagan/early-Clinton era, so he’s not sure how much yet).
Maybe I’m missing something here, my financial credentials are modest if that, perhaps you or another commenter could explain why the superficial analysis that indicates that crypto is the best-regulated of all the very rough financial markets in the world is deficient?
Consens algorithms are important in both safety and distributed (High Availibility) scenarios. There's no necessary link from research into that, and blockchain in general, and the Proof of X style crypto blockchains specifically.
Can you point to some research of Waller? I've tried to find it to see if it's more directly related, but the only somewhat famous person under that name I can find is a historian, not an expert in computing related topics.
There's some interesting technology blockchains lean on (remember, git storage is a blockchain) but the value proposition of crypo currency blockchains (largely 0 trust) have so far not materialized outside speculative currency.
Which is partially due to misaligned incentives (the developers of e.g. game assets in the NFT case) where the party that would have to enable something do not have an incentive to give up controle.
The contributions that merited his inclusion in a group that includes (in computing alone) people like Charles Babbage KH FRS and Alan Turing OBE FRS are too numerous for any HN comment: he’s got something like 20k citations of hundreds of papers.
His contributions while working at IOHK were IIRC substantially around advanced formal proof systems for typed lambda calculus, the most recent of his IOHK papers I read was describing a System F implementation in the Agda proof system.
I don’t think it’s called an appeal to authority when the topic is the merit of a field of study (I’ve never heard it referred to as a call to authority at all): when an overwhelming consensus of basically every reputable academic and scientific honor and award in the field (some among the highest honors in any field) are attached to research done over decades and reviewed, debated, cited, and recognized by a robust consensus, that’s an argument that the study was important, novel, rigorous, valuable and worthwhile. I cited the consensus of the entire reputable academic and scientific world because that’s how we codify a consensus into a formal recognition that a researcher has in the past, is currently, or is likely to again do important research. I think GP was mistaken to call this research junk or even imply it if someone is going to try to parse it that finely, and I thought that citing the ACM was a better citation than my own opinion.
I agree that git is a blockchain, though not a particularly Byzantine Fault Tolerant one, along with Mercurial and Nix and many other tools many of us use daily.
The broader convergence around previously disparate parts of the digital financial economy is just unambiguously happening: things like FedNow at the high end or Apple Pay / Venmo / Zelle / Wize / WeChat / etc. on a more retail level are arriving faster and faster, placing ever-greater demands on the technology involved, and similar pressures are producing related solutions: the NBBO system in US equities trading to name one example, the consolidated tape that results and the records around it used to be backed by all trades taking place on recorded phone lines, before that by taking place in a room full of witnesses, and before that in coffee shops and other gathering places. All of these systems were workable if imperfect solutions to questions of trust, escrow, reversibility or its converse, and broadly the ways in which Ricardian contracts are generally, in isolation, inadequate to promote a sufficient atmosphere of trust to admit active and reasonably efficient markets.
Cryptographically durable and tamper-resistant ledgers remain in a sort of transitional state where they back non-trivial commerce and much more but still comparatively small amounts of speculation/price discovery: the jury is out on whether or not cryptography and BFT research is going to hit the truly big leagues in terms of notional value: right now they’re somewhere in the rough ballpark of equities transactions daily in the maybe mid tens to low hundreds of billions in notional USD, making both a flea on the ass of an elephant compared to say global forex at something like 5-10 trillion a day, and derivatives are just really hard to estimate, but the notional value of all derivatives contracts is like, easily in the hundreds of trillions and there are days when a lot of that moves quickly.
But I wasn’t making the case that this stuff is like 100% locked-in the future, I was making a much weaker claim: that it’s dismissive and ignorant to call it “junk” and that what limited consequences fraudsters face for financial fraud are tightly clustered in this area.
It’s well-understood that the mechanism design of a combination of a floating transaction fee structure (gas) and a market in that unit of account with a lot of speculative activity in it is problematic to put it mildly: transactions become too expensive to facilitate significant commerce rather often. A lot of things are being tried to improve the emergent incentives, some with more noble motives than others, but that’s finance: if you’re under any illusion that innovation in finance is a constant battle between people trying to generate better outcomes and people trying to game the thing then you can easily disabuse yourself of that notion by learning about the history of finance and I’ll recommend two excellent places to start: the emergence of massive OTC derivatives markets that began in the 1980s but really got big a decade later, and the emergence of fully-digital equities and futures markets around the turn of the millennium.
Wait, isn't git more of a merkle-DAG? I thought one of the defining features of blockchains was effectively branchless global state. My understanding is that DAGs are a superset of blockchains. Is this a wrong?
My comment about "blockchain junk" is mainly in response to the fact that it's nearly impossible to find any investment/involvement in the space without running into complete fraudsters and starry-eyed "entrepreneurs" who view blockchain as some sort of god technology that will lift us out of poverty and/or upend the corporate control mechanisms. AKA a bandaid fix by people who don't understand its actual limitations or the dynamics of the systems they supposedly oppose.
As a system for maintaining auditable global state/knowledge in the face of sybil attacks, yes, it's impressive. However 99% of the projects people reach for it do not require it, hence the term "junk." It's more a condemnation of the space surrounding the technology than the technology itself. I figured that would be somewhat obvious.
There isn’t really a robust consensus that I’m aware of as to what constitutes a blockchain per se: Wikipedia lists git as one, and I suppose that’s as good a source as any absent such consensus.
git is an (often if not typically in practice degenerate) Merkle Tree, the contents of one atomic (and sometimes de facto immutable) node contain a hash (O(1)-verifiably k-equivalent… you know the drill) of ancestors.
In more pragmatic/colloquial usage I might define a blockchain loosely as a “tamper-resistant, directed, and typically acyclic / bounded-cyclic data structure with an implied machine economics optimization around infrequent but critically important fully-verifiable history subject to heuristically-determined / freely parameterized bounds on branching factor, duration in branched states, and a bounded susceptibility to adversarial interference in a verifiable consensus on the periodic elimination of branching on some semi-predicable cadence”, which is pretty hand-wavy but I think captures the spirit of the general usage. By that definition git is only a blockchain by common convention, there’s nothing preventing or even discouraging arbitrary, unbounded branching other than it doesn’t have a ton of widely valued use cases: most any time you’re fine with a branch that never has any scope to interact with any other via rebase or merge you could just make a copy or maybe a copy and a copy of some metadata/history, though git in practical terms is a good tool for such a copy.
And I think you’re right that as with any over-hyped technology, it gets attached to projects that don’t need it when it’s “hot”, preoccupies both investors and entrepreneurs without better ideas for how to deploy their time and money when it’s “in”, and is therefore constantly oscillating between being a magnet for snake-oil types and being out in the cold.
Throw in a bunch of electricity consumption that’s maybe net driving up carbon emissions and maybe net attaching a financial incentive to electricity so cheap that it basically has to be renewable but it’s kinda too soon to tell, and I think I’m now having trouble seeing how crypto three years ago and “AI” last year are any different along these dimensions.
The difference in my view is that AI is probably higher variance by a lot on social welfare, and not because of some dumbass “paperclip-indifferent AGI” tripe.
Blockchain as applied to finance has the scope to create transparency into financial markets and compel governments to open the books on what is and isn’t legal regarding money, for who, and why. It will never like, totally disintermediate government from money, because money is the #1 national security priority of any functioning government, so inventing money that the government can’t control is more likely to buy you a R9x than a Turing Award (in a macabre way it’s darkly amusing to contemplate the fact that it could buy you both). It also has a positive (in my view) externality of creating broad-spectrum incentives for the public to understand a little better how important digital identity, security, privacy, and autonomy are in 2024 and build at least a little muscle memory around running a slightly or maybe even substantially tighter ship on personal digital footprint. I’ve apologized to two friends this week because I lied to them about something that is now news that recently broke on the Onavo/Meta thing TechCrunch ran and I wanted them to hear it from me. I lied about this because before it hit the press, I felt it would have been detrimental to the national security of the United States to talk about it, but what I really wish is that we wouldn’t end up in situations where anyone faces such dilemmas in private industry.
AI has more obviously useful applications at the consumer level (though it’s largely a solution to itself as a way to get information one could previously get from a search engine before it ruined the indexes of search engines by making arbitrarily persuasive falsehoods too cheap to meter, we’ve had spam for a long time, but spam so good it’s convincing to experts in anything other than a bad mood? That’s new.). The danger with AI is that it winds up being something other than “available weight” and “operator-aligned”, i.e. whoever is the last man standing has arbitrary unaccountable power to convince anyone of anything and prevent that from being accessed by anyone else.
So probably higher stakes.
I didn't take offense at all. I find your knowledge of the space refreshing. I have watched blockchains carefully from the sidelines for some time because of my interest in the intersection of economics, state, and technology and how blockchains might change those things. Over time I became more jaded because the scaling problems blockchains run into seem to be almost insurmountable, so my interest has pivoted into less-global, more-scalable approaches (like merkle-DAG CRDTs with some external form of validation).
> There isn’t really a robust consensus that I’m aware of as to what constitutes a blockchain per se: Wikipedia lists git as one, and I suppose that’s as good a source as any absent such consensus.
Fair enough.
> In more pragmatic/colloquial usage I might define a blockchain loosely as a “tamper-resistant, directed, and typically acyclic / bounded-cyclic data structure with an implied machine economics optimization around infrequent but critically important fully-verifiable history subject to heuristically-determined / freely parameterized bounds on branching factor, duration in branched states, and a bounded susceptibility to adversarial interference in a verifiable consensus on the periodic elimination of branching on some semi-predicable cadence”, which is pretty hand-wavy but I think captures the spirit of the general usage.
Have you considered a career in poetry?? Joking aside, this pretty much sums up my view as well. A DAG with a strong gravitational pull towards a master branch with somewhat infrequently changing data. Which also includes git, so you're right.
> Throw in a bunch of electricity consumption that’s maybe net driving up carbon emissions and maybe net attaching a financial incentive to electricity so cheap that it basically has to be renewable but it’s kinda too soon to tell, and I think I’m now having trouble seeing how crypto three years ago and “AI” last year are any different along these dimensions.
Yes, agreed. Let's spin up an immense amount of computing power to train a model that hallucinates when asked basic questions. Again, there is a space where the marriage of a large dataset of knowledge and an automated linguistic system searching that knowledge has great use-cases, but throwing "AI" at every problem is just another eye-rolley fad.
> The difference in my view is that AI is probably higher variance by a lot on social welfare, and not because of some dumbass “paperclip-indifferent AGI” tripe.
What do you mean by this?
> Blockchain as applied to finance has the scope to create transparency into financial markets and compel governments to open the books on what is and isn’t legal regarding money, for who, and why.
This is one of the things I was originally most excited about. Make politicians receive all wages, contributions, etc through some auditable public currency. If you're going to work in the public sector, then you have to consent to transparency. I have my own issues with money (mainly its deficiency for economic transactions) but cryptocurrencies are certainly a step up from it. But like you said, you can't just release some new currency and expect the government to bless it. Some empires had their armies, some their navies, but we have our banks. Our empire is a financial one, and a currency that replaces the USD is a direct attack against the heart of the empire. Many mountains would have to move before that is possible, unless Wall St finds some extra utility in it that allows them to extract more.
> the public to understand a little better how important digital identity, security, privacy, and autonomy are in 2024
100%...cryptographic identity is going to be huge in the next few years (I'm betting on it quite heavily https://stamp-protocol.github.io/).
> AI has more obviously useful applications at the consumer level (though it’s largely a solution to itself as a way to get information one could previously get from a search engine before it ruined the indexes of search engines by making arbitrarily persuasive falsehoods too cheap to meter, we’ve had spam for a long time, but spam so good it’s convincing to experts in anything other than a bad mood? That’s new.).
Yes, exactly, LLMs as they are are a glorified search engine. Search engines have consumed themselves trying to tailor results to their users instead of just fucking showing objective information and are becoming essentially obsolete pay-to-play ad machines.
> The danger with AI is that it winds up being something other than “available weight” and “operator-aligned”, i.e. whoever is the last man standing has arbitrary unaccountable power to convince anyone of anything and prevent that from being accessed by anyone else.
Well, there's more here. As AI markets itself as this sort of objective intelligence machine, it garners more and more trust. As this solidifies it has the potential to shape perception over time to the benefit of the operators/controllers. The obvious conclusion is snuck in advertising, but I'm thinking much more sinister like the editorialization of information to protect the owner classes and the state from any kind of scrutiny. Effectively, a Big Brother that instead of using fear for compliance, softly whispers in your ear. Pair this with the immense surveillance apparatus we've spent decades perfecting (but it's in the private sector! so it's ok!!1) and we're setting ourselves up for a hellscape dystopia.
Definitely higher stakes, I'd say.
It’s also why I gave the example of Dr. Wadler FRS FRSE as someone who even more explicitly did extremely sophisticated research well-received by the academic community unambiguously in this context.
I just do not understand what it is about this topic that turns a normally very thoughtful community of people with a generally very high regard for the research agendas of noted computer scientists into spinal-reflex, knee-jerk critics on a dime.
You hear all kinds of arguments but they generally boil down to some version of “blockchain is for cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency is for financial fraud and financial fraud has no place in our society”.
But every link in that chain is either incorrect or selectively tolerant of wrongdoing.
Tamper-resistant ledgers have applications outside of finance.
“Everyone knows I mean crypto.”
Ok, cryptocurrencies have complex outcomes attached to them, some positive, some negative.
“I’m talking about the fraud which is rampant and the main/only use case.”
Eh, not really, speculation isn’t by itself fraud, although it is true that markets (say, OTC derivatives markets) with a high ratio of speculation to other non-speculative activities generally have more fraud in them, so more or less rampant than conventional digital finance?
“More both relatively and absolutely.”
No. Neither. Trivially false. You think that because you have no fucking clue how much fraud happens either relatively or absolutely in conventional financial markets. Furthermore, the fraud that does happen is dramatically more likely to be investigated and prosecuted, and the victims of that fraud are dramatically more likely to be recognized as victims (unlike for example victims of predatory lending in 2005-2007 who lost their homes and got called criminals into the bargain”.
I don’t want to believe that it’s just the banal fact that we all know someone who got stinking rich speculating in crypto markets and we didn’t (I’ve never speculated in crypto markets and am not in the same galaxy as well-off: I went into debt when the tech job market collapsed last year, with uh, a little help).
But I’m really struggling here to find a more charitable conclusion.
https://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/osdi99.pdf
If you’re going to nitpick in an effort to discredit a robust argument by beam-searching for the weakest-looking link in the argument and go directly after it, then at a minimum, be right.
Don’t refute intentional misquotations.
If I’m mistaken about this, I want to be educated about it, I hold all of the famous computer scientists I’ve mentioned in extremely high regard and if I’ve been inadvertently spreading falsehoods it’s a priority to me to both stop doing that and depending on the degree of such an error if it is one, a formal apology could even be in order.
I do not think that this remains a useful or even acceptable forum for that conversation however.
If you know or strongly believe that I’ve made statements about public figures that I admire and that are inaccurate, I’d not only invite but explicitly request that you contact me directly to straighten it out without the distractions and perverse incentives of an audience to a debate that has become more than “spirited”.
I’m reachable at b7r6@b7r6.net and I hope to continue this discussion in a more productive forum than this particular sub-thread.
Unless I’m remembering incorrectly, you need a ton of eth to partake in eth PoS voting.
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
It doesn’t really make sense anyway; if the joke is that the comment is “backed” by the fact that HN users are upvoting it—comment scores aren’t visible to people other than the posters, right? So all we know is that it wasn’t smote into the hidden state.
Etherium is a decentralized model. Its model is an actually inverted hierarchy.
Really looking forward to the next couple years. Everyone has been writing this off as "no killer apps after 10 years" but there's a lot that's been happening to support adoption, from scaling to improved UX. In the next couple years those should percolate to production apps.
The primary improvements have been rollups, blobs, account abstraction, and chain abstraction.
An example of a new onboarding process being developed by coinbase can be seen here: https://twitter.com/WilsonCusack/status/1764355750149710190
Yes, the “killer app” of internet currency is going to be money transfers. That is not surprising, non-trivial, and quite valuable.
The only reasonable answer crypto advocates can ever offer is “decentralization” and the lack of trust required.
The problem is, most people are perfectly fine trusting their financial institutions.
Another commenter was downvoted for saying “No one cares”, but a more precise way of putting this is “the average person doesn’t care about decentralization” and this is spot on.
It’s cool tech, but it reminds me a bit of math research - towers of abstractions built over decades, with little effect on the real world. We can only hope that some benefits will be uncovered down the line.
That’s what blockchain technology is: interesting research which will never be popular with or relevant to a lay person (outside of speculative bubbles)
That a very big "only". For me that's the killer app. I do not trust financial institutions and the ones that I trust do not want to accept me as their customer.
> “the average person doesn’t care about decentralization”
It's like saying "the average person does not care about a system of interconnected computer networks that communicates through TCP/IP". The average person cares about watching reels on Instagram or sending messages through WhatsApp.
> That’s what blockchain technology is: interesting research which will never be popular
I have no doubt that someone said the same regarding the Internet.
You may see a similar situation one day: some application might move to settle their economic value on Eth L2 rather than Stripe, eg for more control or lower fees. To the average layperson, they wouldn’t know/care about how the app works under the hood.
Most people also don't need free speech, because they have nothing to say.
Because you cannot use cash to transact globally, and you cannot use digital forms of central bank issued currency permissionlessly or have self-custody. Cryptocurrency gives you all those three properties.
So you must give up something. HNers typically are willing to give up the permissionless and self-custody properties. After all, most of HN audience lives in developed democratic countries where personal freedoms are considered fundamental pillars and protected. But at a minimum you should consider that, not all the world lives under those circumstances. And that there are no guarantees that those circumstances will always be preserved in your cozy first world country. Certainly if you are willing to give them up so easily.
Don't be so quick to assume it cannot happen where you live. One day they may go after some fringe truckers protesting in Canada. Another day they may go after some camgirls earning a living in ways that some executive board of a payment processor considers reprobable. Maybe one day they will tell you in what you can or cannot spend your money or where you can invest it and how much.
Those two separate sentences do not immediately team up to somehow lead to the third sentence.
> After all, most of HN audience lives in developed democratic countries where personal freedoms are considered fundamental pillars and protected.
As do most crypto proponents who imagine the world outside the "enlightened West" as barbaric lawless lands governed by roaming bands Mad Max-style.
Even though than we can take a popular online service that people pay for and see in which countries it's available. For example, Spotify says it's available in 238 countries and territories: https://support.spotify.com/us/article/where-spotify-is-avai.... It does not accept any form of crypto currency as payment. This means that people in these countries have enough financial institutions and methods, and enough security to be able to pay for an international music streaming service [1].
> Maybe one day they will tell you in what you can or cannot spend your money or where you can invest it and how much.
Or some day the Mad Max-style roaming gang will break down your door and steal all your cash. Or break all your fingers until you give them access to all your wallets.
[1] The number of ways people pay in various countries is staggering. See e.g. what Adyen (the payment integrator that companies like Spotify, Uber, eBay etc. use) has integrated with: https://docs.adyen.com/payment-methods/ and https://docs.adyen.com/unified-commerce/pay-by-link/supporte... and https://docs.adyen.com/point-of-sale/what-we-support/payment...
The complete willful ignorance and obliviousness that the absolute various majority of crypto proponents exhibit is no less staggering.
The obstacle is human nature and ease-of-use friction - taking responsibility for maintenance and innovation and imposing a participatory need requires a modicum of awareness and willingness to contribute - even if only with pennies. This is annoying and wasteful red tape for most, and so corporations with strong advertisers and investors who can provide it cheaper or for free are obviously seen as the better choice. Co-ops and communes have this problem.
However, Ethereum L1 is supposed to be the settlement layer for rollups, and high security requirement transactions, not for shitcoin trading.
Recursive rollups (L3s,L4s) have also been talked about for years now, and it should be pursued; that's how you can increase transaction throughput and decrease fees with the magic of zk.
> proto-danksharding
> rollups
> blobscriptions
> calldata
I realize this post is the High Priest of Ethereum preaching to his disciples, but we are deep deep into "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" territory here.
Does anyone know if you can use multiple slurp juices on a single danksharded blob?
I didn't go into today's Babylon thread and comment "Node geometry? Gaussian splat rendering? We are deep into angels dancing on a pin territory. Just use jQuery."
I just don't understand the mentality of comments like yours, I suppose.
IMHO this is not true in cryptocurrency, which is more akin to a self-sustaining pyramid scheme where the complexity serves to obscure the reality of the thing and draw in more rubes. All the nonsensical jargon around NFTs was trying to hide the fact that paying money for a URL to a jpeg of a monkey is stupid. As best I can gather, all this new "layer 2" nonsense is to try and hide the fact that blockchain is a slow, crappy database.
> consensus algorithms are complicated but they solve a hard problem
Ironically, this article is about an algorithm that comes to consensus on and distributes data. Yes it's a hard problem, thus the article.
This is not really an article about cryptocurrency or monkey jpegs, it's a nitty-gritty article about the design of a computer protocol, written for the benefit of protocol researchers and implementers. If it's nonsensical to you, perhaps consider that you're not the target audience.
I literally said, "I realize this post is the High Priest of Ethereum preaching to his disciples" before going on to laugh at his gibberish.
It's fine if you're into this stuff, but the cryptocurrency people can't seem to decide if they're a bunch of nerd hobbyists or the Future of Finance.
If you want to be HAM radio, then fine, nobody except your club needs to understand or care what you're talking about. If you think you're going to upend the world economy and force all the rest of us to use your bullshit, then you better expect the rest of us to demand explanations in plain English.
I could tell my grandma what TCP/IP is and why it's important. Cryptocurrency proponents have been trying (and failing) to do the same to me for over a decade now.
I think it's strange to take a diverse set of people from around the world, from hobbyists to open source developers to fortune 500 teams, and group them all together as "cryptocurrency people", as if they represent a united movement towards a single goal.
It's as if I said "those Linux people can't decide whether they want to be nerd hobbyists or the future of server computing" while pointing out the seeming contradiction between Red Hat Linux and Hannah Montana Linux, both produced by the same "group" of "those Linux people".
Or it's as if I compared a unicycle to a fighter jet, both made by "those vehicle people".
> If you want to be HAM radio, then fine, nobody except your club needs to understand or care what you're talking about.
It doesn't matter much what I want it to be. It just is.
I find it unorthodox to compare a software standard to a "club". I'm imagining someone refer to the worldwide group of Linux users as a "club". Much like Linux, I don't need to explain to the world how cryptocurrency works in order for it to be useful to me, nor do I consider myself part of a club for using it. It's just there and I use it. As Andreessen Horowitz said many years ago, "It’s becoming like air or water. It just is, like it or hate it. It just is."
> If you think you're going to upend the world economy and force all the rest of us to use your bullshit, then you better expect the rest of us to demand explanations in plain English.
I don't know where you're getting this adversarial tone from. Nobody was or is "forced" to do anything. This is not "me vs you". We're commenting on a post about a piece of software.
It seems to me like you're trying to defend something or express some deeper frustration, and I'd be curious to know what it is. To you it's not just a piece of accounting software, is it? This software must represent some ideological point that is dear to you.
> I could tell my grandma what TCP/IP is and why it's important. Cryptocurrency proponents have been trying (and failing) to do the same to me for over a decade now.
This really seems to me like it goes far beyond jargon. Are you perhaps frustrated that cryptocurrency's continued adoption conflicts with your world view that it is unimportant? That's not necessarily something I can help with, beyond saying something trite like "each individual person has their own reasons for adopting a technology" or "there's some kind of social aspect that nobody has really been able to properly measure" or simply "protocols can be sticky".
A logic class will suddenly try to teach you "eqvuilance relations", "Equivalence class", "Quotient set", "Projection", "Kernel" (Specifically in the Eqvuilance relation meaning), "partition", and that's only the terms I found in wikipedia. The class I help along has one more under this subject, and this is a first semester topic that is taught in a few weeks. All of those are technical, and all of those build on some other technical terms such as relations, functions, sets...
I concede that crypto has a bad naming scheme. It all sounds silly.
I know (more or less) what Ethereum is, and I understand (more or less) that these 'blobs' are yet another attempt to work around the fundamental inefficiencies inherent when trying to make a giant distributed system for ideological reasons (rather than a small centralized system).
This article is akin to an aircraft architect writing about engine design to engine manufacturers - there's no reason to spell things out that the target audience already knows well.
> The Daimo wallet is explicitly describing itself as Venmo on Ethereum, aiming to combine Venmo's convenience with Ethereum's decentralization
I will forever point this out, but Venmo has a “Private” setting. Your balance on Ethereum is public, as is any transaction you send.
It just isn’t a viable replacement for cash
(Sincere question; I don’t follow cryptocurrencies very closely.)
Ethereum blobs create transaction space that has a 0-of-n trust model (for zk-roll-ups) or a 1-of-n trust model (for optimistic roll-ups). This means that there needs to be either zero or one honest participant who carefully receives, processes and validates every single roll-up transaction in order for an outsider to be able to prove that the chain was not tampered with.
In contrast, Solana achieves throughput by taking the classic blockchain structure (with its n-of-n trust model) and cranking the parameters up to 11. Basically they said "be a standard blockchain, but do everything a hundred times faster on expensive servers with beefy CPUs and datacenter connections". The advantages are that it took less development time and there are less moving parts in the stack. The disadvantage is that the Solana blockchain is not actually verifiable, in the sense that you or I could download a piece of software onto our home computer and follow along with the chain to make sure it's valid. Ethereum is verifiable in this way, even down through all of its (properly-designed and fully implemented) L2s.
To distill the entire situation: In order to scale, Solana gives up some of the fundamental properties that make blockchains powerful. Ethereum, scaling with blobs, retains these fundamental blockchain properties.
Can someone please confirm this isn’t the incipit from an unpublished Douglas Adams novel?
I didn't go into today's Babylon thread and comment "Node geometry? Gaussian splat rendering? Sounds like a Douglas Adams novel."
So I guess just don't really understand the mentality.