Ethereum Now Handles More Transactions Than All Digital Currencies Combined
trustnodes.com
trustnodes.com
2) It's believed that 68% of all ethereum transaction value is controlled by just one system - https://blog.cyber.fund/huge-ethereum-mixer-6cf98680ee6c - A large number of ethereum transactions are just mixing coins to hide ownership.
I'm not aware of other fully-public blockchains that have comparably high levels, though maybe I'm missing something. With permissioned chains it's much easier to reach high throughput.
The so-called mixer has been debunked here before. It actually looks like exchanges, and the temporary addresses they generate for deposits. That does mean that a large portion of transactions are with exchanges, but that shouldn't surprise anyone, and would be the same on Bitcoin.
And the transactions in Steemit at least are generally very low value, with 1-cent upvotes and article/comment entries making up the bulk of them. In comparison, the average value of an Ethereum transaction is $10,000.
The value of the transactions may differ, but at least the Steem transactions are more likely to be 'real', that is to say they are transferring value from one person to another. See my earlier comment about how a large proportion of ethereum 'value' is merely shuffling coins between different wallets of the same owners.
In any case, the end result is the same. There's a large amplification factor in ethereum transactions, since many transactions are just the shuffling of coins without any value actually changing hands.
(However, the story isn't crystal clear about what they mean by the 'rotation' of transactions. It says 'rotated 80 times' but I'm not sure if that means each input address goes through 80 transactions before going to an output.)
Which?
The construction of the network/consensus protocol means that Ripple would have to get a majority of all validators on the majority of everyone's UNLs to lie to reverse a transaction. Ripple likely does not have such influence /or/ if they do, then you are free to select a larger UNL set, along with the rest of the community, such that they /do not/.
The selection of protocols is indeed quite selective.
Disclaimer: I work on IOTA.
Are we anywhere near close enough to get rid of the centralization?
I’m really excited about the project
As for the other question: once the network is more - next year?
but the title says "Ethereum Now Handles More Transactions Than All Digital Currencies Combined". note "Digital Currencies", not "blockchain currencies".
Isn't that the definition of laundering?
This might be tax evasion if you hide it from the IRS, but that's not laundering.
IANAL, of course.
As we see with the adoption of credit and debit cards, mobile billing, and things like ApplePay, most people don't mind having their transactions recorded. Indeed, for a lot of people it's a benefit; I avoid paying with cash so that I can easily use things like Mint to have a better understanding of my spending.
Criminals, on the other hand, strongly value secrecy over convenience, and tracking money is one of the best ways to keep crime in check. So unless you find some way to eliminate crime, being secretive about money flows will always put you in company with criminals.
IMHO, lack of anti-crime controls was one of Bitcoin's biggest early mistakes. It was much worse for, say, buying a book online. But it was much better for crime, including digital extortion and fraud. It quickly picked up a taint that it's never really been able to shake. Let that be a lesson to startup founders everywhere: your early adopters can easily define your company.
What about people who pay with cash? I know people who use cash for privacy reasons but society doesn't treat them like criminals.
Even under that level, though, some level of suspicion attaches to large wads of cash. I've had vendors ask for cash payment for things in the $1-5k range, and it was pretty clear to me that they had tax evasion in mind.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_transaction_report
It matters what is being kept secret from whom. I don't tell the general public about my finances. I do accurately tell the tax authorities what I am required to disclose, and I can back that up by accounting for all (material) transactions that I have made. This is what distinguishes me from money launderers.
It's perfectly reasonable to attempt to hide in a public blockchain while simultaneously maintaining private records and making the appropriate declarations to the authorities.
As you're not an authority, you will never see the legal side of it. But that doesn't put anyone in the company of criminals any more than the fact that you don't publish your finances online puts you in the company of criminals.
> It was much worse for, say, buying a book online. But it was much better for crime, including digital extortion and fraud. It quickly picked up a taint that it's never really been able to shake.
I would argue that it is the most useful cryptocurrency that attracts legitimate and criminal users alike. It's not a "taint" caused by a consequence of some criminal-friendly design. Any higher level of criminality is a direct consequence of being the most used cryptocurrency. If something else takes over, then the criminals will switch too.
The most useful cryptocurrency is not as broadly useful as other means of moving money around. So if it has advantages for criminals, criminals will use it disproportionately. Ransomware generally doesn't take Visa and Mastercard. The Silk Road was Bitcoin's most prominent early adopter. And the early Bitcoin market was also rife with scams, fraud, Ponzi schemes, and all manner of other criminal idiocy: https://www.amazon.com/Attack-50-Foot-Blockchain-Contracts-e...
Elimination of privacy is not an "anti-crime control".
Much of cryptocurrency's value comes from the privacy it gives its users.
"Whoever, knowing that the property involved in a financial transaction represents the proceeds of some form of unlawful activity, conducts or attempts to conduct such a financial transaction which in fact involves the proceeds of specified unlawful activity—"
Even thought the ICOs are in a clear bubble right now, the mechanism behind the ICOs is a solid one and could provide low friction VC funding for the next generation of Start Ups. Taking out rent seeking institutions like Private Equity banks, VCs and traditional banks will create a lot of value.
Ethereums first mover advantage for the ICO market will proof to be of a huge value in the race for the dominating world crypto currency.
Only if you ignore the very large risk of SEC enforcement, given that most ICOs are securities. (and claiming that ICO investments are 'donations', like some have tried, isn't going to cut it!)
But it won't matter - the SEC won't have to do anything.
After the flood of ICO's this year - investor will see how most of them are bust, and will pull their money out.
The market will correct itself on that one.
Sure markets correct, but somehow the ride continued.
I love how Silicon Valley was ridiculing industries like print, brick and mortar commerce and old-media for not adopting to the new future technologies.
But now that something appeared that challenges SVs status quo, they do just the same and dismiss it. I think this shows that legacy thinking is a psychological problem and not an IQ problem.
I basically see the future as being both really dystopic and utopic at the same time:
So (mostly rich) people will be able to invest their money without any friction, but this will destroy the rent-seeking institutions that weren't meant to exist in the first place
=> power to the geeks and the rich, but you won't be able to make any money by just making "deals".
Would love to be convinced otherwise though....
ICOs are challenging nothing.
ICOers are selling 'numbers' for real money - and the value of those 'numbers' is going to zero pretty quickly.
BTC will be around for a while, but these ICO-ers are selling nothing in return for real money, and that won't last. It will end soon.
Nobody has a 'lock' on the 'VC' model. Anyone can invest - including you. The issue relates mostly to regulations, which are there to protect you - and also actual ownership of assets, which is a pretty big deal.
The US stock market is 39% of all publicly traded stocks. The US market is bigger than the next 8 countries put together. Source: https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/CM.MKT.LCAP.CD/r...
Moreover, countries with successful stock markets tend to follow similar rules because they coordinate with one another. The US is a leader in that.
In other words, it's not really production-ready until the SEC is unable to harass, intimidate, and target.
No - selling a 'fantasy number' in exchange for real currency is not 'solid' model.
ICO's have been big recently because buyers were hoping to get in early on a pyramid-like scheme. (Yes, I know it's not quite pyramid), i.e. it's been hype.
Because ICO's offer no ownership of assets ... well ... in the long run they're not worth much.
And 'ownerhip of an economy' is not saying much if there is no economy.
Kik's Kin coins are down 80% and not only that - Kik has 900 Billion of the Kins they can dilute the 100 Billion in market with, meaning another 90% devaluation is coming.
And Kin's get you a share of what economy exactly? The 'Kik' economy? There is no Kik economy.
Countries like Switzerland and Singapore created and will further create a legal structure to connect the real world transactions to the tokens.
Sure some countries will ban it, just like China has banned free internet access, this doesn't mean that free internet access is bad.
But here are a two.
Startup that issues you a Mastercard that is backed by your BTC, ETC. So you can shop at any store that accepts CCs, but never hold actual Fiat currencies. You recieve tokens as a form of cashback for your CC revenue. And all tokenholder get a share of all the revenue that happens on all the TenX issued CCs. https://www.tenx.tech/
An online casino that shares it profits with the tokenholders (shareholders) https://www.edgeless.io/#!/index
They're almost all flat.
Why does anyone think that anyone will be interested in buying 'Kin' tokens?
These tokens are magic numbers that someone made up.
You people are buying Monopoly money. Worse - Monopoly money is at least made of paper you could use for something possibly.
Kik's Kin tokens are way down, and they are not coming back up. Why on earth would they?
Billions of people around the world are going to start sinking all their money into thousands of fantasy tokens that have no use, and have no value? I don't think so.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/opskins-founders-to...
https://www.visa.com/splisting/searchGrsp.do?companyNameCrit...
(I don't own any, but I've been watching it since I heard)
no, that's dismissing the mechanism (buying stuff over the internet). the problem with ICOs is that they're essentially penny stocks, but worse (at least penny stocks are somewhat regulated). ability to raise funds anonymously + promise of riches + unregulated market = maximum potential for scams.
a more accurate description would be to dismiss online pyramid schemes (not saying all ICOs are pyramid schemes, but bare with me) because their offline counterpart is flawed, and doing it online doesn't address any of the issues.
Sure people will get scammed a ton. But we can't ignore the insane liquidity that those types of fundraises allow. This has huge overall benefits for the society, after the first few waves of mania settle down.
After a while some people will stay away from it, others will benefit.
We have a ton of high variance financial instruments on the market already, like options, and tons of people got burned. We kept the financial instruments because they were overall beneficial for price discovery and liquidity in the market. The people that got burned now stay away and we didn't need to ban anything.
What I always notice is that those discussion tend to be very nationalistic, which means that its usually 95% of the world is excluded from the picture.
There are maybe guys in Israel, Ukraine, Singapore, Japan etc. that want to raise money with an ICO or that fund to fund an ICO with 100$ or 10000$.
I think the next silicon valley will be the jurisdiction that will offer the best legal structure to run serious ICOs. It will be a no-brainer for the founding teams to move to this jurisdictions. Just like many international startups setup offices in Silicon Valley to get better access to capital.
Your point that most ICOs so far were shitty companies actually shows how much potential this mechanism has. Serious founders with a track record will be able to raise billions this way.
that seems like a liberterian cop-out, and it doesn't take into account that it takes time and energy to do due diligence, most people are naive and can't do due diligence, and there's a huge incentive for ICO founders to lie, which creates an asymmetry of information.
>We have a ton of high variance financial instruments on the market already, like options, and tons of people got burned. We kept the financial instruments because they were overall beneficial for price discovery and liquidity in the market. The people that got burned now stay away and we didn't need to ban anything.
at least with those instruments, you know what you were getting into. all of that goes out the window when it comes to unregulated securities, where the seller can outright lie to you.
>What I always notice is that those discussion tend to be very nationalistic, which means that its usually 95% of the world is excluded from the picture.
how? is it the mention of the SEC?
>I think the next silicon valley will be the jurisdiction that will offer the best legal structure to run serious ICOs. It will be a no-brainer for the founding teams to move to this jurisdictions. Just like many international startups setup offices in Silicon Valley to get better access to capital.
SV = in US = SEC jurisdiction. the ideal jurisdiction would be somewhere where banking privacy is high, and securities regulation is low. so probably a random Caribbean island.
People learn surprisingly quickly. A consumer base has a sort of collective wisdom that evolves as it gains experiences. Years ago, people would trust fly by night Bitcoin wallets that store the bitcoin client-side, and numerous scams and hacks cost people hundreds of thousands of bitcoin as a result.
Now everyone stays away, even new users, because only highly secure and reputable wallets that store cryptocurrency client side, or credible exchanges with cold-storage, are recommended on all major information portals, and everyone (including any likely first contact point for a new cryptocurrency user) strongly warns users to avoid storing their cryptocurrency on untrusted websites.
>people would trust fly by night Bitcoin wallets that store the bitcoin client-side,
A lot of people will lose a lot of money, and some will come out of it with huge profits. The problem is we don't reliably know which will fail and which will succeed.
And come to think of it, I think Flooz reached better merchant adoption than any blockchain-based digital currency has managed to get.
In contrast, I'd be willing to bet that the bulk of ICOs to date will in 10 years time be seen as failures.
The only real difference is the lack of oversight and "common rules" - both of which I value when I invest my own money...
Stock (or bonds for that matter) have a long and stable legal history and are mostly standardized and well understood. (Not that investing in them is easy, I primarily buy ETFs).
ICOs are more wild-west anything goes, which just opens up so many cans of worms IMHO.. And if/when it gets too big or to wild-west all financial bodies declares the securities and they are then under the exact same rules...
No - they don't.
'Shares' give you ownership of the companies assets.
ICO 'Coins' give you ownership of a made up number - nothing more.
How are fantasy numbers any worse than fantasy equity of a new startup?
When you buy tokens, you're buying nothing.
So - ownership of something that may have value, vs. ownership of nothing.
(For more established companies, their equity's value works more like bitcoin: they might still go bankrupt and be worthless in eg thirty years, but they are unlikely to totally crash in the next few months.)
Don't you think if a better alternative comes up companies could deprecate tokens and relaunch them on another blockchain?
But I’m not nearly as certain as you that a pure digital cash will have no value in that world. Yes, Ethereum’s practical value (as a token redeemable for computation) adds volume and provides a price floor, which could make it a more stable store of value. But it also places it in a competitive landscape with other tokens that can perform the same function.
Bitcoin is a pure finance play, which should make modeling it much easier, which should give it some unique appeal. Plus the first mover advantage is huge.
Even if BTC never works out its transaction rate issues, I think it could solidify as a simple, auditable, modelable store for large value transactions.
Sometimes adding features makes a product worse. Twitter was more than Blogger even though it ostensibly did less. In the same sense, I’m not convinced Bitcoin++ will beat Bitcoin.
I am very intrigued though. The “BTC is Friendster” hypothesis is an ok one.
so people will invest money for free via ICOs?
The protocol has so many other issues.
Anyone who has worked with ETH will tell you that it isn’t really designed as a currency.
A large chunk of the transactions are exchanged who must transfer deposits to other addresses.
This is a hack that everyone does because Ethereum doesn’t allow you to send from multiple addresses reliably.
Also tracking deposits from contracts is a nightmare. The nodes don’t work well at scale. Contracts can’t be changes (so you have things like the issues with parity multi sig contracts).
The list goes on and on.
Hah wow you weren't kidding. Amateur hour.
To add to your list: no checksum for addresses. If you typo the recipient address, the client will happily render your ether unspendable.
Also, there are checksums for addresses: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-55.md I don't know anyone who would manually type an address though.
While you may not know anyone who manually types in an address, there are plenty of stories about people who do (and make a typo) on reddit & other discussion boards.
Not too much work to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, though. Ofc something so simple is an EIP.
Is it then a good idea to have these features at all if they introduce new risks? I believe so, they enable many interesting projects that are hard to develop on other blockchains. The growth of Ethereum is an attestation to this. As a consequence, many skilled developers are now creating solutions to the (relatively minor) remaining issues.
For bigger issues, like privacy and scalability, no-one has a good answer yet. The Ethereum community is working on promising solutions (Casper, Plasma, zkSNARKs, eWasm).
Contracts can be changed if they're made upgradeable. The execution environment is Turing Complete, so it's up to the developer to make contracts secure, upgradeable, etc.
From Vitalik, on the link you shared:
> That chart is highly misleading. 300 GB is the size of a full archive node, which stores the history, present state and all historical states. The state itself is only ~1-2 GB and the history is ~10 GB. A pruned node would still store the full state and history, and so would be able to recompute any historical state if you really needed it, but it would only consume around 20 GB. If you only care about present state, you can go much lower.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6zcoja/10_gb_in_2...
More interesting details in this subthread: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6zcoja/10_gb_in_2...
doesn't bitcoin also have a feature similar to this? except bitcoin's pruned node takes ~3GB rather than etherum's 20GB.
No, not in the same way. A pruned Bitcoin node loses validation/state that you can't reconstruct, it does not have the same security properties. See the links in my comment.
So a pruned Ethereum node and a Bitcoin full node both have the entire transaction history and the current state.
Digital currency does not require decentralization, not sure why you and others keep bringing this up. They aren't claiming to be the biggest decentralized, they're claiming to be the biggest digital currency period.
In your case, you're wrong because Digital Currency means "Only Digital", where the form of exchange is of information not something physical. FIAT currencies are pretty much all excluded by definition.
Digital currency is the criteria THEY specified. When making vague hand wavey claims to your superiority, you should expect people to point out how silly it is to make vague hand wavey claims and how that usually means the claim is BS.
If they wanted to compare to decentralized blockchain based p2p currency then they should have said that. They didn't, so any digital currency that beats them in transactions proves them wrong.
Its really not that hard to make truthful statements. "We're the highest transaction decentralized digital currency on the market". One additional word to clarify and no one here is arguing this point.
Keep up to date with the live forecasts at https://bitbank.nz
Ethereum doing fairly well recently