Hacker News Reader

Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

It's not 51% of people, it's 51% of computing power, or 51% of stake if Ethereum ever switches to proof of stake. Ethereum runs by capitalistic power, not democratic power.

I don't know if there's any alternative to that; any such system is going to have some means of enforcing truth and power, and means of gaining or losing it.

Cryptocurrencies are not a way of escaping that fundamental fact. They shift where the power is. Having that alternative to current ledger and contract systems can be valuable to people in certain situations.

Thinking that Ethereum or Bitcoin or any blockchain tech escapes these fundamental power relationships is exactly the type of inanity that makes the tech seem unserious. It's a hype train, it's not true, but there is still the potential for value.

View on HN

> It's not 51% of people, it's 51% of computing power,

Cool, so in reality a lot less than 51% of people can screw over every else.

Again, what is it that ETH provides society that's new and useful?

And proof of stake is likely to be even worse. The people with the most money decide who gets richer and who doesn't. What could possibly go wrong?

Not quite. The richest actually do the work to keep the system running. They need to stake their claim to the system to validate everyone else's trx. If is in their best interest not to mess up, otherwise they lose their stake in the system.

So those who benefit from cemented structures are incentivized to maintain status quo. Sounds like humanity, just a different set of masters.

Sounds like the banking system, but now you can vote with your wallet to buy the cryptocoin of your preference. Pretty much akin to how you can vote for a politician, or vote with your money by buying a product or not buying a product.

Not only do those who designed the cryptocoin plus early adapters (the former are the latter, but not necessarily vice versa) get more rich with thin air generated by electricity, they also get more powerful. No wonder these things rise up like mushrooms from the ground.

Man, if I were into this, I'd just convince people 24/7 to get into these cryptocoins. Best way to get rich doing virtually nothing but some marketing. Right?

Cool. So it’s a centralised system ran by the rich (which I don’t necessarily have a problem with).

Again, what is it that ETH provides society that's new and useful?

What do most financial products provide to society that's new and useful?

If you want to throw up your hands and declare this all a waste of time, feel free. You'll have lots of company, and for good reason, but setting some arbitrarily high goal such as "providing something new and useful to society" just makes it sound like you've got an axe to grind.

There's plenty of things about Ethereum (and blockchain exchanges and how they are used and hyped) to criticize legitimately, but this doesn't seem to be one of them.

In reality, you would be very hard pressed to get 51% of all global wealth to agree on anything. Today, it is pockets of ~1% wealth screwing over their regional 0.00001% constituents.

Ethereum forces a global authority :)

A decentralized computing network that can be used for anything essentially?

As long as "anything" is an algorithm expressible given Solidity's tremendous constraints

And if you're just going to use ETH to pay for real compute hardware in the cloud so you can run real software, at that point why not just use BTC?

Turing-completeness doesn't automatically make something useful.

> why not just use BTC?

By the very nature of your argument if a Turing-complete blockchain isn't inherently worth something than a stack-based language which isn't Turing complete is certainly worthless.

I feel like your arguing with me for the sake of arguing? What's your point ETH isn't perfect, so what, it's relatively new tech which is exploring an interesting problem. The fact it's valued X _may be_ a fair evaluation or even undervalued given it's impact. The upside being possibly a DAO controlled by an AI efficiently providing resources to humanity in a way human's can't given traditional power structures. Or maybe fiat isn't so bad and we don't want robot overlords so we scrap it all. At the end of the day who cares, as long as your smart about the money you've invested into to the ecosystem you won't be hurt by a Black Swan in the cryptosphere. I think anyone working on ETH up to Vitak would have the same sentiment.

"that can be used for anything essentially" is a pretty wild claim to make if you can't actually back it up with useful algorithms to run on the network. This doesn't mean it's useless (you can probably run interesting contracts and stuff on the network), but stop trying to make Ethereum into something it's not.

By the very nature of being Turing Complete it can do anything any other Turing Complete language can. I didn't claim anything about ease of use...or really any wild claim at all, except maybe a DAO being controlled by an AI..oh well. My point explicitly is ETH is a Turing Complete decentralized runtime.

If you want to build a better language for interfacing with the VM your free to do so.

Have you seen the fees associated with BTC... way too high. Plus the time until complete confirmation is so slow.

Here's an easy one: the ability to receive a payment for a service without relying on a third party to deliver that payment.

New: state-level actor(s) cannot stop an organization from receiving payment merely by forcing your third-party payment processor to freeze funds/stop payments.

Example: sci-hub. If they were receiving payments through Mastercard/Visa it would have almost certainly been frozen long ago. However, since they (apparently) get funded by receiving Bitcoin, they continue to operate. In the meantime, grad students and professors get the convenience of using sci-hub's interface to easily retrieve journal articles.

Even if sci-hub eventually gets taken down completely (or a researcher finds a catastrophic bug in all cryptocurrencies), the total time during which sci-hub served documents funded by Bitcoins was a benefit to society.

ETH allows fancier transaction scripts than Bitcoin, but the same argument holds-- a state level actor cannot just stop the contract from being executed simply by putting pressure on a third party.

Based on this article, I'd say there is value in ETH just as there is value in writing a complex, multi-threaded application in a memory-unsafe language. It's a bad idea, but for some special cases it may be better than doing nothing at all.

> a state level actor cannot just stop the contract from being executed simply by putting pressure on a third party.

They just haven't gotten around to it yet. The decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies increases the number of entities that need to be pressured, but doesn't make state-level actors completely powerless.

This is why some cryptocurrency communities like monero push for people to use smaller mining pools so the miners are more decentralized.

So we need some guidance. Oh that's what governments are for, definitely not a private company, which is not accountable by voters (with a wide voters base; if the voter base is not wide, made it so, don't discard democracy.)

Finally, there are a lot of good reasons why in democracy we vote per-head and not per-share. It's a big thing, but that is also being dismissed by cryptocurrencies.

They won't get around to it, because stopping the mining of all cryptocurrencies that sci-hub could use to pay for uptime is more work than stopping sci-hub.

Since stopping cryptocurrencies is harder than freezing third party payments (evidence: see Wikileaks), this is a single, narrow example of the usefulness of cryptocurrencies. Researchers get the convenience of sci-hub's frontend for longer than they would if sci-hub had relied on a third party payment system.

> a state level actor cannot just stop the contract from being executed simply by putting pressure on a third party.

They've forked before they could be forced to again.

Everytime I see the argument that smart contract allow for no third party payment I always think that people are diminishing the role of third party.

In most transaction, the third party also act as an insurance, a safety. If something goes wrong, the third party is supposed to be here to make sure everybody got their fair share without the need to take legal action, which can be difficult to near impossible sometime.

If I get scamed, does the smart contract allow a chargeback ? Who is going to make sure I was scam and not abusing ? etc.

It's almost like you read the two words "third party" in my response, then triggered a canned reply based on the existence of those words.

What insurance would you need when sending a Bitcoin donation to a site where thousands of researchers already benefited by retrieving scientific journal articles?

I didn't write, "cryptocurrencies will replace all third party payment systems." I gave a single example of a situation where third party payment systems don't function and Bitcoin does.

Actually, 51% of miners can't cause a hard fork (which TheDAO was).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com