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Comment by _7fvc | Hacker News Reader

I consider myself fairly knowledgable with cryptocurrency. I create and run a crypto project myself. I read this post and maybe understand 10% of it. This is probably the rate of things I read from Vitalik. Either Vitalik is extremely smart or he just doesn't know what he's talking about. Overall, his opinions are just confusing and distracting like the whole Ethereum ecosystem.

A warning for those who think getting a degree is useless. At least, it will force you to think deep about some problems. I hope Vitalik will find his focus and really solve a concrete problem.

For those who think I'm 10 times less smart than Vitalik. Here's my take on Ethereum and its prospect.

https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/16/ethereum-and-computer-l...

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> Either Vitalik is extremely smart or he just doesn't know what he's talking about. Overall, his opinions are just confusing and distracting like the whole Ethereum ecosystem.

Vitalik started out years ago with writings consisting entirely of self-citing the Ethereum echo-chamber. Judging by the citations here he's starting to understand the value in the works of the established institutions, tenured university professors, and career cryptographers -- people whom it's obvious in his circles are either loathed as some irrelevant elites or simply, wholly unknown.

Now that Vitalik has spent the last few years actually surveying the last decades of theoretical achievements in the literature, maybe it's time to build a secure distributed world-computer. Oh wait.

LOL. I can't stop. :)

I'm not going down the path of personal attack. Vitalik is smart. He lacks self criticism and focus. I do hope he'll find success.

Depending on your goals. He raises millions with bad ideas. From his perspective he is wildly successful

What is he really supposed to represent? Skipping all the hard work, middle-fingering the system, and getting rich quick? That's worth at most 15 minutes of fame, and a long long time ago. Mr. Buterin isn't in jail simply because no government has the slightest fucking idea how to parse this massive exabyte jumble of cryptocoin hodgepodge over the last decade.

Meanwhile, thousands of poor souls have been lost in the basements of universities doing real honest-to-god useful work which may never be understood and used by industry, or even see the light of day; they lack this disingenuous excessive hyper-promotion and the means to compete for media attention with our favorite cult heroes like Vitalik.

huycfhct is a troll account pushing the, Adam Back invented Bitcoin narrative. There are A LOT of these accounts, Adam is well known for employing these guys like Greg Maxwell to social engineer their narrative into sites like this.

> Vitalik started out years ago with writings consisting entirely of self-citing the Ethereum echo-chamber

He was involved in crypto prior to Ethereum; he was a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine.

He is, that's what Ethereum 2.0 is which is being released over the next couple years. He's also worked with academics from outside the crypto space since the beginning.

Always good to raise millions on a broken idea. Squandering it and then propose a nonsensical 2.0 version to solve all

How is Ethereum broken? It is working right now as we speak. ETH2 is just an upgrade of the network. Just because you percieve it as nonsensical doesn't mean it is and you provided no facts to back up your claims.

In what sense is it working? It's currently very expensive to use, almost all functional apps are essentially speculating, and the system is quickly outgrowing commodity hardware.

huycfhct is a troll account pushing the, Adam Back invented Bitcoin narrative.

There are A LOT of these accounts, Adam is well known for employing these guys like Greg Maxwell to social engineer their narrative into sites like this.

Vitalik is extremely smart, but even people that are 10 times less smart than Vitalik can create a crypto project ...

Assessing crypto problem is itself a problem. Vitalik maybe 10 times smarter than me. But his track record is poor. He hasn't really proposed a solution that is worthy contribution to crypto.

I have solutions to some of the problems he lists.

10. Stable-value cryptoassets

13. Proof of excellence

My solution is to add inflation into supply. A percentage point inflation, not tail emission.

Inflation will discourage HODL behavior and stabilize token price. It's not perfectly stable. But it'll be more stable, more efficient than DAI and its financial engineering on top of Ethereum volatile price. That solves #10.

For #13, with inflation, we don't have to worry about bag holders. Everyone has incentive to drive the system. Otherwise, their tokens will worth less over time.

I designed a crypto that can help bootstrap inflation. My solutions are simpler. I think they'll work.

https://bitflate.org/post/2019/04/14/bitflate-cryptocurrency...

At first glance, your coin looks like a copy and paste bitcoin clone with some tweaked parameters. If something like that was going to make a difference, I think we would have seen it happen in 2014 when a lot of copy and paste coins were being created.

I was involved with Dogecoin back then. I advocated for inflation for the same reasons you want it. It has not led to Dogecoin having any great breakthrough in usage.

I'm glad to find someone who has the same idea. Crypto is very niche and specific. From start, I think each coin has a narrative. It'll be very hard to change that narrative. I think Dogecoin started out as a meme and fun coin. It currently has tail emission which is not really percentage inflation. Long-term, tail emission behaves like zero supply. Adding inflation to Dogecoin won't change its narrative. I don't think its community will be supportive of a change that devalues their bags and change its narrative.

I want to create a chain that has inflation as its main feature. Its supply schedule is designed to bootstrap inflation. It looks like this:

0: 50 (supply: 10 million)

1: 25 (supply: 15 million)

2: 12.5

3: 6.25 (end of halving)

4: 6.56 (start of inflation 7%)

5: 7.02

6: 7.51

7: 8.04

8: 8.60

9: 9.20

10: 9.85 (supply: 31 million)

The chain has 7% inflation. It is a fairly high rate. It's designed to break out of Store of Value and HODL narrative.

In 2014, people were still attached to the idea of limited supply and Austrian economics. Maybe, in 2019, people will have second thought about Keynesian.

If you still have interest in the idea, please reach out to me contact@bitflate.org.

Hmm. As an outsider, having spent a year learning about this space, I was able to skim the article and recognize all the "problems" and I suppose "understand" them in that I could stand at whiteboard and explain what the problem is about. But these are mostly problems in the sense of Hilbert's problems: things that folk muse about for decades. They're not "engineering problems" as in something to be figured out and built in short order.

In general the blockchain space does have this syndrome where issues that boil down to "trans light speed travel?, discuss.." are conflated with things that are like "how to do trans sonic flight without breaking apart". This could be intentional as a way to get investors fired up.

For an analog in regular tech see: self driving cars.

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