The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ethereum
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wslyvh.com
The guide provides a starting point for developers who’re keen to learn more about blockchain and development on top of Ethereum.
This is the problem with "Blockchain" in one paragraph.
Notice how there's no statement of a problem? Notice how it leads with hype and technology? Notice how it tries to FOMO you into action?
The Bitcoin block chain has been tried in many different situations. So far there is very little show beyond electronic cash. Not inventory control, not voting, not land registration.
The one other application that might be considered mostly viable is timestamping. Bitcoin is a timestamping server, after all.
The good news is that the problems electronic cash solves are getting worse every year. Privacy. Deplatforming. Weaponization of the dollar and other local currencies.
The bad news is that Bitcoin is also good at running itself, which means there isn't a lot of room for startups in the traditional sense. There may be room for sponsored non-profits such as Blockstream and Lightning Labs. There the funder model seems to be "improve Bitcoin and the value of your holdings will increase."
But I don't agree with that. Check out some of the links from the 1st section: Blockchain foundations on why we need decentralized technologies, such as blockchain.
Our current internet is broken.
How should I picture "Hitchhiker" - in the book, isn't the main character an unintentional observer/participant? So is this a beginner?
Or perhaps a hitchhiker is a hardened, obstinate person who enjoys the frontier and moving around a lot?
I don't know; it never made sense to me.
I have always interpreted such titles to be a reference to this in-universe guide rather then to the novel or its characters.
We could split hairs over the fact the in-universe guide is more analogous to Wikipedia in scope and scale than a more condensed tutorial or primer, or whether the reference is obscure enough that it confuses, alienates, or distracts readers who aren't part of the intersection of Hackernews Readers and Hitchikers Guide fans.
It never really bothered me but I was a huge fan of the series when I was younger.
Edit to add: as I am a technical writer on the side, it's a timely reminder to avoid any analogies or cultural references that require knowledge others in my target audience might not share. So, interesting point!
That's the original inspiration for the in-universe Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and perhaps the better point of comparison for other guides that are named after it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitch-hiker's_Guide_to_Europe
I read some excerpts here https://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A4158164 and it definitely adds context that only really improves my interpretation of the Douglas Adams series.
"Always carry a towel" is one such reference that I can now replay and re-imagine as a parody of the original guide. I'd assumed them to just be a random amalgamation that parodies the overall genre of various guides and travel literature, it's fun to know there's a solid reference point.
As for the relevance of the "Hitchhiker's Guide to <subject>" title format in light of this information, I agree with you that the original source is a better comparison point; while there will be a lot of fans of the Adams work who can relate on that level, there will be others who either owned or knew about the original source of the parody who will interpret the format more closely to its intention. And ultimately it's a format that's so frequently used that there will be a broader spectrum of people for whom "Hitchiker's Guide..." is just synonymous with "down and dirty advice to get you started quickly, without pretension."
This has turned out to be an interesting rabbit hole, personally at least.
Good luck I guess.
Its properties make it enormously valuable for applications involving large numbers of people coordinating amongst each other.
Ethereum's DeFi has seen collateral increase from $750 million on April 1st to $2 billion today, so people are seeing utility in it.
We must be reading different sites.
https://louwrentius.com/cryptocurrencies-are-detrimental-to-...
I do have a few points for you to consider that might help you see the value of all this experimentation for society:
- Imagine someone living in a country such as Cuba or Venezuela or Iran that wants to buy things online (no, not heroin) and why they might find the existence of something like Bitcoin or Ethereum useful.
- You call for it all to be shut down, but how exactly would that be accomplished? (Most) cryptocurrencies are open source software and in a fringe scenario where experimentation here only serves to improve the anti-fraud precautions surrounding traditional currencies, isn't that still of some value to our society?
Some might argue that these supposed benefits don't outweigh the existing harm and therefore there isn't net value to society and there I'd just say we need to agree to disagree.
Have I perhaps changed your mind that cryptocurrencies don't have any value for our global society?
I'd recommend to check out some of the links from the 1st section: Blockchain foundations, on why we need decentralized technologies, such as blockchain.
Our current internet is broken and blockchain could potentially help to make a change.
Nothing world-changing has been delivered after the biggest hype-cycle in modern history...
In the meantime other contenders seem to have more momentum.
Case in point: CryptoKitties is leaving Ethereum because it lacked capacity and had high transaction fees.
Another exciting technology that is coming this year is optimistic rollups, which will provide the same level of scalability for arbitrary smart contracts.
"WARNING: zkSync v1.0 is in alpha. Blockchains and zero-knowledge proofs are still experimental technologies with rapidly evolving attack vectors. zkSync relies on cutting-edge cryptography that has never been used in production before. While Matter Labs is rigorously following scientific and engineering best practices with regard to security, we can not provide 100% fault-free guarantee. Use zkSync at your own risk and do not put more money into it than you can afford to lose."
That doesn't sound like 'scalable already', it sounds more like be prepared to lose your money.
Further, on the ZK-Rollups website, we have:
"The initial set up of ZK-Rollups promotes a centralized scheme The security scheme assumes a level of unverifiable trust
The initial setup of ZK-Rollups is assumed to be a trusted state, when this trust cannot be proven. A small group of developers will be subject matter experts on the initial trusted state. This undermines decentralization and opens the risk of social engineering hacking attacks by convincing a developer to manipulate code or provide vulnerability information."
This is not reliable scalable technology. It's centralised so it takes all the supposed advantages of blockchains away, at which point you are better off just using a single trusted database, instead of thousands of machines duplicating the same work.
Has anyone found a non-criminal use case for blockchain yet? Preferably one that isn't better addressed by a single Postgres instance?
https://reason.com/2018/07/27/markets-in-assassination-every...
They are not the assassination market thought experiment.
Am I looking at the wrong product website or is Auger a betting site?
The average person has absolutely no use for this. And a shitty government is not fixed with a rogue currency.
As others has pointed out, DeFi is impressive, though still mostly fueled by speculation at this point. Digital collectables is another (think digital trading cards with limited supply). Might sound silly at first, but could prove an economic lever for artists and game designers.
> Preferably one that isn't better addressed by a single Postgres instance?
And here's the problem. Blockchain is expensive. A central, trustworthy server is going to be ridiculously inexpensive in comparison. For all the cost, the major benefit is resilience.
Someone should build a way for people to pay 10 cents per article to read the New York Times without registering using this technology and a stable coin.
When the internet first came out people thought it was only for porn and criminals. Look at where it's at now.
Don't focus strictly on the negative aspects and instead look at the possible things that the technology unlocks that didn't exist before. For one, Ethereum has unlocked global banking through defi for anyone in the world.
This is such a bogus analogy, and cryptocurrency stans keep pushing it.
Not even counting the internet, ten years after the world wide web was opened to commercial use, we had Wikipedia, Google, eBay, Craigslist, MapQuest...
We're now 11+ years on from bitcoin's start, and what have you got to show for it? Not a single thing that any normal mainstream user would care about.
Saying bitcoin is a failure because mainstream users don't care about it is like saying electric cars are a failure because they've been around for decades and aren't mainstream yet. Disruptive technologies take time to become the de facto standard.
In a democracy, it is critical that legislators have access to verified sources. Most legislative assemblies in non-corrupt democracies don't allow representatives simply waving documents around to make a point if they aren't "tabled" - which is an entire verification process with a full chain of custody so that if as a result of some kind of negligence or nefarious intent certain "facts" which ultimately encourage an outcome that favours a particular agenda prove to be inaccurate (whether or not the legislators are aware of this at the time), the source of the inaccuracy can be traced, the cause investigated, and the situation remedied.
Current processes used by the less corrupt governments around the world ostensibly work, but they are labour intensive. Think carefully scheduled vans of printed documents moving between supreme courts where laws are passed, and humidity controlled vaults adjoining parliaments and senates with layers of approvals and security at each step.
These documents have been reviewed, verified, signed, stamped, approved, classified and filed.
These exact documents, that is, those specific printed copies. If a document or collection is lost, damaged, or otherwise tampered with, they must be resourced and re-validated. This manual and physical re-validation occurs whenever the contents of the document changes in any way.
Think about the EU parliament which moves from Brussels to Strasbourg every month, which costs €114m per year. A big portion of this cost is transporting the physical documents back and forth. They can't just print new copies at both ends, because you can't trust the version you're printing at one side or the other is the same document you think you're printing.
A digital solution could be more efficient but then you worry about the security of your database. All it would take if you have a single postgres instance is a single breach and every document in your system would be in question - you wouldn't know what to trust. The physical process currently used has that major selling point - if someone steals a box or a document at least you don't have to burn every document in the country and start over.
So what you could do is have all the documents in digital form in a single PostGres database, and stick that on a thumb drive. Now instead of trucking tons of printed material back and forth you only have to move a single thumbdrive. Or by this point, why not forget about the thumb drive and just email the copy to the destination. Or, why not just upload it to a server.
But how can you be certain that the database that ends up at the destination is the same database that came from the origin? How can you be certain that whoever emailed, drove, or uploaded the database didn't pull a switcheroo before they even sent it?
What you could do is, every time the database changes, you log who changed it, what they changed, and when exactly they changed it. Then both sides can compare their logs and if they differ, you know something is afoot. Then all you'd need to do is get the real, verified change log which starts from scratch, and replay all the changes to reconstitute the correct and verified data set right?
Ah, but where are the logs stored? Are they stored in the same or a separate database? Do we still need to go through a process of printing and verifying the logs through umpteen different government staff wherever the database needs to be used? I can't trust your version of the change logs is the real version and you can't trust that my version is the real version, so now what do we do?
Well, we know that if we just keep a log of changes that we can replay them. What we need is a consensus on which changes are actually official and which changes are nefarious or erroneous.
How can we build a consensus agreement?
With oversight.
So rather than having one PostGres database, we can install PostGres on 10, 100, 1000 computers, and every time someone logs a change, every one of those "nodes" verifies that the change is acceptable. But how would the nodes know if an incoming change is acceptable? How would the person making a real, official change know which node to send their changes to? If there's still just one central authority node, then you still have a single point of failure.
Thankfully we have cryptographic key pairs that can already be used to verify our identity. I can use my master key to encrypt my update to the nearest database. We can write some code that will use my public key to verify that I am who I say I am, and the other nodes in the network can then individually pick up my change, and if they agree that I am who I say I am, add my record to their log of changes too.
But how will they know who is who?
Each would individually need to be aware of the key pairs of every authorised person who is allowed to update the database. We can't have a central key register because again that's a single point of failure, so we need a method of securely distributing the authorised users list without relying on a centralised automated server, which could be compromised if someone honeytraps the system administrator. So, perhaps we just have a process that involves layers of government staff that verify keys, cross reference and double check, distribute globally via armed courier etc. More efficient than the current paper-based system, but still reliant on human processes that are slow (what if some corrupt official is fired, it still takes a week for the process to remove them...)
So what you could do is also have the access list shared. Not only is the information replicated automatically by all of the PostGres databases, but the authorised users list is as well. You'd have to write a ton of code, and ultimately blockchain or not there would still be a super-duper level of access to manage the keys, but you would eventually have a distributed, self-healing network of databases that can reject unauthorised changes.
Or, you can use a private blockchain with smart contracts, because they already do all of this stuff. You wouldn't have to necessarily store the digital assets in the blockchain itself, just reasonably collision-resistant hashes of them, but you could quickly verify whether or not a particular digital asset was legitimate at the click of a button. Corrupt officials could be expelled instantly and all of their updates immediately queried for further investigation.
I am skeptical of many of the "schemes" that crop up in the world of "distributed ledgers" but I think this is a valid usecase of blockchain and its derivatives worth further investigation.
You genuinely believe anyone is going to care about some hashes in distributed ledgers somewhere? Nobody can be fucked to digitally sign an email.
I never made any claim about what I believe, or what I expect other people to believe.
If you have an actual point on the actual use case of blockchain I would be happy to have a conversation about it, but it seems you didn't comprehend anything I wrote.
Edit: and to drive home my point, sure, as you say, the boxes of documents driving back and forth didn't fix politics, but that was never my argument.
And I agree that healthy skepticism is good, while we continue to explore such technologies
I haven't had anyone yet dismiss my digital provenance use case for any technical reason, just the usual political pearl clutching and strawmen.
Someone tell me why it's technically a worse idea than ad hoc custom built database driven applications.
There are also decentralized options to protect you from volatility https://opyn.co/ or https://www.hegic.co/
There are many alternatives to Tether, for example USDc or a decentralized stable coin like DAI.
Having trouble believing that, especially as I can see evidence of hundreds of the damn things after a simple search - https://ico.tokens-economy.com/statistics/country.html?count...
Sure, many of those won't be using ethereum, but they still happened. And that's before you dive into the IEOs and STOs, which appear to be more of the same.
Even with the options on ethereum, Tether alternatives, etc. involvement with cryptocurrencies has high risk for someone who doesn't have a strong understanding of how it all works at a technical level, which is what the parent comment stated.
Seriously, crypto is one of the shadiest things you can get into. Avoid it, and any exchanges, like the plague. It's interesting tech, but nothing more than that. Hugely speculative and not worth wasting hard earned money over.
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/understanding-dao-hack-journalists