Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
timdaub.github.io
timdaub.github.io
Face it, there is no sexy killer app for the masses. Wait. There is one: Crypto trading to... make quick dough. And the cryptonerds seeing the high trade volume then go and call this a success of crypto. lol
The get rich quick crowd overwhelmed everything else but didn't suffocate it, just merely put it way in the background.
In this scenario, the world can execute 100-200,000 transactions per second on Ethereum, and people are able to execute these transactions from any software interface, including a browser wallet extension.
This would make electronic payments cheap - on order of costing $0.01 in fees - and you would be able to send a payment in a stablecoin, like USDC or DAI which track the value of 1 USD.
In this scenario, you could send micro-payments to any party on the internet, without having a pre-existing relationship with or divulging personal information to them, and without both parties relying on the same trusted third party payment system.
Imagine thousands of news sites all around the world offering short-term browsing access, like a 1 day browsing pass for $0.05, and all of these offerings being accessible with just one browser-based wallet.
This can become even more amenable to metered payments when combined with other scalability solutions, like Plasma chains and payment channel networks.
In such scenarios, fees would decline orders magnitude of more, making it possible to send fractions of a cent in value for consuming tiny amounts of goods/services. For instance, you pay 0.25 cents worth of a crypto asset to access one paywalled article. This can be done behind the scenes, with you simply pressing 'okay' on a consent form. No registration, or the divulging of private identification information or credit card details necessary. A single peer-to-peer transfer of electronic cash suffices.
Suddenly content providers have a massive new source of revenue apart from advertising that can sustain them, leading to the production of more quality content, and information consumers can avail themselves of this content with much greater convenience and privacy, and without the financial risk of laying our $20 for a subscription they may not use.
Skynet feels more like the next step in P2P solutions like BitTorrent, than what most people think of when talking about blockchain solutions. It kind of also confirms that the only real use-cases of decentralized trustless solutions are relatively trivial problems like those involving purely digital assets (files, domains, etc)
I don't think anyone will claim that the technology isn't interesting. I think it's super interesting. But I think there's way too much hype, especially on the financial side (currencies, DeFi, etc)
It's not only the volatility but also the inefficiency which is the price that has to be paid for the decentralization. I really have trouble coming up with an app where the constant fees that have to be paid for actions are justified compared to a centralized solution.
I agree, this has to change. I see Ethereum fees as the early days of the internet when we paid for every freaking minute! Today you can have high-speed internet with no bandwidth limit with a fixed monthly fee. The only limit is maximum download/upload speed and that's probably the key question: What is "maximum speed" for Ethereum? Instead of paying for every action, we would pay fixed daily/weekly/monthly fee, but it would be limited by that "maximum speed".
Design a blockchain system where it's agreed upon consensus and use/adoption is voluntary through democratically elected processes (save regulatory capture), and we'll have a good system that's not unnecessarily and unreasonably transferring wealth from later adopters to earlier adopters. You won't be able to make a fortune on it by buying it and pumping it to make its value goes up, nor will you be able to make money selling shovels to desperate or greedy or gullible people once they catch wind of the "gold rush."
The one major benefit of all if this craziness is that the flood of money into blockchains has meant technology development and many more engineers with experience; whether there are engineers who'd work on non-Pyramid/MLM-Ponzi scheme blockchains though, if they're financially incentivized/aligned with Bitcoin et al, that's TBD.
I think every smart person working on any kind of blockchain-related tech is seriously wasting their talent and life.
Yes, right!
You can't fix societal problems with tech.
It's all about making a quick buck. If that's at the expense of other people or our environment, who gives a fuck right?
Edit to add: This may in fact be the only important use case for blockchain, where nations under different groups of democratic-based control, agree to use the same blockchain - so they can all know no one else is cheating the system. The transparency could allow public, peer analysis of transactions as well - and who knows what insights or protections-security could come from having that crowdsourced witnessing occurring; perhaps distributing the mining amongst the citizens of each nation as well, if deemed necessary as a safeguard.
Serendipitously, this was just posted to HN: "Data Immutability, Verifiability and Integrity Without the Blockchain Overhead" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26221324
It is one of the tools to keep a currency stable.
Not to say that there aren't serious problems in the fin-tech world, but immutable ledgers and rigid currencies aren't going to solve those.
The key problem - and your post is yet another example - is that you can't replace trust with an immutable ledger.
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g...
The real problem - in my view - is that people don't understand the foundations of a society anymore, how to live together.
"... is that you can't replace trust with an immutable ledger."
"The real problem - in my view - is that people don't understand the foundations of a society anymore, how to live together."
I agree with you 100%. Also, I never said we should prevent printing money with blockchain - the purpose and value is so that if a nation does print money, they're open and honest about it. It would be their own democratic decision to do so, likewise in the blockchain system I envision - it would be that same democratic process, decision making, that they would want to join such a managed system that other trusted-democratic nations are part of - where they believe in the transparency of it all.
And I never even alluded to replacing trust with an immutable ledger, just that an immutable ledger becomes a witness that each nation would decide to be witnessed by by their peers.
All of my projects are health-wellness focused, in part to help people develop their self-awareness, to gain and maintain their health, and in part that is healing through community - building real community.
I will never understand this. The vast majority of problems have more than one solution, most of the time is just about solving something in a (much) better way.
If the bar for something to exist is "solve a problem that can't be solved with existing tools" then 99% of startups wouldn't exist.
Just as you have just a finite set of notes on a piano, you can create infinite music.
And even if IT has a finite set of regular tools like SQL databases, programming languages and protocols, it's the thing you create with that, what counts.
Blockchain is a tool that does nothing better than existing tools.
Blockchain is a solution to a problem nobody has.
And yes, I now about transferwise, paypal, swift, etc. And using crypto is faster and cheaper.
Bitcoin: ~$25
Ethereum (and all tokens): ~$17
For comparison, to burn that much in fees on Paypal (2.5% + 30c), I'd need to send around 10K.
Crypto is currently pointless for anything other than big transactions, and the unpredictability of the transaction fees, let alone the coin's value, is a big problem.
Between SMS, MMS, 'normal' calls and Skype, whatsapp added nothing technically new to the world.
Skype was not a messaging platform that regular users used on their Phone.
iPhone and Android each were their own bubble and required paid expensive SMS messages to talk to each other.
Whatsapp was at least very populair in The Netherlands for this reason alone.
Pricing is important because that proves why it was useful to people. Also: ease of use, based on how Whatsapp works.
We are not talking just technologies but technologies in a context.
Instantly?
>can't reaaally use Ethereum for the same purpose because of high fees
BTC fees are also high?
There are cryptos which are instant and without transaction fees (e.g. Nano for payments and maybe in the future IOTA as an alternative to Ethereum). So there is some hope for the technology, but it remains to be seen if any of this actually takes off.
How is that different from any other asset; stocks, land, property. It's all speculation nowadays.
From what I've read there are pretty much three use cases:
1. store of value akin to gold (bitcoin)
2. decentralised privacy money (monero etc, to avoid taxes?)
3. a platform on which to build decentralised technologies (ethereum, ada, thorchain...countless others - some with specific niches: gaming, streaming etc)
I think your evaluation is bit unfair and shortsighted.
Maybe we are not "there" yet, but why should we be? It is still a nascent technology and I think it would be foolish, and history has shown that, to dismiss it.
Of course, like other asset classes, crypto is now infested with shills, scammers and their jargon designed to confuse and obfuscate in order to take money from the naive.
But that's just a regulation and/or implementation issue.
You can transfer in minutes between countries in different currencies without blockchain.
The fact that your country is stuck in the stone age in this regard isn't really a good argument that cryptocurrencies fundamentally provide value over a solution without blockchains.
I guess the main value blockchain could provide here is to give banks and politicians a kick in the butt, and force them to invest in solutions and regulations that speed up money transfers.
Took some time for the old banks to wake up, but I think they have been doing decent work on catching up.
Is it really? Is there anyone that can say that a company has suffered because it didn't adopt crypto? It seems like it's perfectly safe to ignore crypto completely. You could gain a bit of advantage. You can use it as a marketing tool, or to attract certain kinds of investors, by cashing in on the blockchain hype. But I haven't seen that there's any advantage yet in using the technology itself.
Regarding the use-cases you mention:
> 1 store of value akin to gold (bitcoin)
Bitcoin is not a store of value. It's a destructor or sink of value. A store of value should have some reserves behind them or some physical asset. Something that has value to others that have not invested in it. Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrency only has value to those that hold them. The value of Bitcoin could crash to 0 tomorrow, and nobody except the investors would care at all. If the gold price crashed I'd be very interested. Would be cool to buy some gold just to play with. Maybe make my own jewelry. But WAY before that there'd be plenty of others buying it for a higher price, for jewelry or manufacturing.
> 2 decentralised privacy money (monero etc)
Aka a gift to crime. I mean, in an ideal world it'd be amazing to have a currency like this. But in practice it does more damage to good. Yes, IMO it's a bad thing even in corrupt countries where you might have legitimate reasons to hide from the state. Because having currency like that doesn't solve all the other problems with having a corrupt government, so it's really just a distraction from solving real problems.
> 3 a platform on which to build decentralised technologies
This is the only legitimate use-case IMO. But it has yet to be proven that using a platform like this has a real advantage.
I think the issue is that problems that you can solve with trustless decentralized algorithms are mostly very trivial. Who has ever had issues with a bank money transfer itself? Meanwhile, the problems we'd really like to solve around currencies, payment and financial services, are basically impossible to solve with trustless. The real problem in payment is to ensure that the seller delivers the product. The real problem in lending is to ensure that the borrower can afford the loan and uses the money on what he says he will.
So you really can't get rid of the human component in most of these applications, if you want a solution that's as good as what you're trying to replace. And in that case, the blockchain is just a fancy and expensive implementation detail that serves little to no practical purpose.
There may be some crossover point where these technologies provide some value. But I suspect it's a much smaller niche than most blockchain proponents would like to admit. I think settling international transactions between banks is one of the very few use-cases where it may be valuable.
So the lender pays the money into a multisignature 2-of-3 wallet, gives 1 key to the borrower, and if when the borrower signs a transaction with that key to spend the funds is buying what they are authorised to buy, countersigns, else does not. And then you wrap this up in a smart contract, call it DeFi, have a liquidity pool for people to loan out a token for car financing, and if those people don't want to perform the check themselves, plug in an oracle like chainlink to deal with the real world part. On the repayment side, if repayment not made, a company can buy the debt and chase it, or can be hired to chase it. Wall torn down around car (insert asset here) financing..
(personally I like having trusted third parties)
“Btc bounty hunters” isn’t a good enough explanation.
Airbnb allowed individuals to rent their home to other individuals. But this is done through a centralized service. Scams and abuse exist, but the centralized service offers some nice benefits like reviews and bans for abusive participants. The innovative part was the new model of what you could rent, not the how of how you rent it.
In comparison, the defi loan innovation is "how" rather than "what". As a borrower I still get some cash and pay interest on it. Same as with a bank. As a lender I still deposit some cash and obtain interest on it. Same as with a bank. And a centralized service provides some nice guarantees about checking that my money isn't going to criminal organizations or that I have some guarantee that I can withdraw my money when needed and risk is amortized. Like with airbnb, I'd expect a centralized model to be more appealing to many people than a decentralized model. And we already have a centralized model. They are called banks.
Airbnb succeeded because it created a product that didn't exist before.
I only think that the defi loan system is interesting if it enables a ton of people to obtain a different thing than the thing they can already get from a bank. This matters for people with bad credit and people without access to banking institutions... but how many people are super excited to personally lend to those people?
The key element is that the loan is not denominated in BTC, but a stablecoin pegged to fiat. DAI is one of these pegged 1:1 to USD.
Say you are holding Bitcoin and think it's going to the moon. You tie up your Bitcoin as collateral and take out a loan of roughly 75% of its value, in DAI. Then you spend that DAI to buy more Bitcoins. Now you are exposed to Bitcoin's price movements on two ends: the BTC you bought with your loan, and the BTC you put up as collateral. If Bitcoin's DAI price goes up by more than the interest rate on the loan, you can sell and have more than enough to repay the loan. The extra is pure profit and plus your collateral grew in value in the meantime too, so you're a winner on both fronts.
On the other hand, if Bitcoin's price goes down by too much and you can't repay the loan, your collateral could be liquidated and become property of the lender. You lose everything.
Color me surprised that the amazing decentralized finance, the future of banking, etc. is... yet another way to speculate on "number go up".
Or do I have that all wrong? I really am not sure that I grok how this works, at all. I'm trying to figure out what is going on in this space and you seem to know a lot more about it than I do. I couldn't figure out another good reason to use an overcollateralized loan but it's clearly something people are interested in and using as a selling point for DeFi.
What actually happens if the borrower defaults on the loan? Do they "just" lose their collateral, or can they be held to account for the DAI somehow too?
Imo central banks are in a tough spot now. They've issued huge amounts of bonds, and cannot raise interest rates. If inflation rises, they will be unable to raise rates - unless they want to pay incredible amounts of interest to the banks. If they do decide to do so, they will need to sell large quantities of gold to help pay for that, which will be a heavy downward pressure on the price of gold. More likely is they allow fiat to devalue, in turn making the loans easier to pay off in the future, with the side effect of averting any trouble brewing in the stock market - people won't exit their positions to cash if stocks continue to climb (even if it is due to a devaluing currency). Just my opinion.
Central banks do not care, per se, if they have to "pay incredible amounts of interest to the banks" since they literally create (and destroy) money. Central banks do not need to buy or sell gold to create money since money is no longer gold backed. Operationally, central banks can create any amount of money they want anytime they want. Obviously, there are political considerations though.
"More likely is they allow fiat to devalue", yes. That is exactly what they will do if inflation increases substantially. Though not because it will make their loans "loans easier to pay off" since central banks have no loans to pay off; instead they get paid coupons and principal on they bonds.
To use an example, you issue a 10 year bond with a face value of $100 with a 1.00% coupon (i.e. you need to pay $1/yr for 10 years and then $100 at maturity after 10 years). Fast forward 5 years -- rates have risen for similar risk debt rise to 5.00%. You've paid out $5 so far in coupons... but that bond (now 5 years to maturity) will cost $84 on the open market. So you simply buy it back for $84. That means you spent $84 + $5 = $89 for $100. Woohoo!
One financial strategy for governments would be to 1) issue excessive debt when rates are very low, 2) don't spend all the money, 3) buy back some of the debt when rates go up for less than you issued it, thus further lowering the cost of debt for the portion you did spend. Sadly, most governments have trouble with step #2.
As for gold, I have no idea. Historically, gold was an inflation hedge (i.e. it's price rose with inflation). But so are a lot of other things. At this point, there's nothing special about gold except that it stays shiny forever.
Is gambling useful to the society as whole? Probably not. But it does make things interesting and alas, Bitcoin (and other cryptos) intersect in a most curious way where you are gambling but also have a very easy method to move those assets around.
And I think cryptos do save money when making larger transactions between entities. So there is something real there, although it's not very tangible. For the average Joe, I agree. I don't think they really provide that much value except your average thrill at the casino (with better odds, sure).
Nope. This is old people thinking. Young people are used to digital items being worth money. People spend real money on cosmetics in video games despite there being nothing physical about them. These "imaginary" things spawned into existence can have value.
People spend money on things with little tangible value all the time. The benchmark, IMHO, is whether others accept these things as payment. It's generally pretty hard to pay your utility bill with Farmville coins, or buy groceries with Angry Birds Mighty Eagles.
You're putting completely different things in the same bag. I would say you're right that crypto currencies and stocks are kind of similar, but stocks at least have a small (very tenuous, I admit) connection to reality. Stocks are related to real-world companies that deal things people are willing to pay for with real money. Stocks go up and down based on how much money the companies are making, not only based on how much speculation their stocks are being subjected to.
Crypto is purely and solely speculation. There's no one actually trading anything else other than the crypto coins themselves! That's quite different in my opinion.
Now, even though, sometimes, land and property are used as instruments of speculation, they're still connected strongly to the real world, real people. If the world forbid speculation overnight, people would still need to own property and land to survive, and they would still be willing to buy it in exchange for their work or other assets.
If crypto were forbidden overnight, the real world would be unaffected. Some people would lose savings they bet on a fictional economy, but beyond that, nothing would change. These things are fundamentally different.
This is a common talking point but it's not actually true. 99% of London housing is used for living in.
Are they all owners or the owners actually "invested" in a piece of property calculating the rent passive income and the possible increase in market value as part of the overall rentability of their investment?
Just because other people are insane doesn't mean you should be insane too.
You can sanely invest into stocks, land and property. You can never sanely invest into cryptocurrencies, the same way nobody invests into dollars. No, buying dollars when your national currency is hyperinflating is not an investment since you merely expect your purchasing power to stay the same.
These days I see lots companies telling me, they put their "supply chain on blockchain" and while I understand what they probably want to tell me ("you can't tamper with where our stuff comes from") I don't see the point in that. If you've got trust issues with your subcontractors you should fix those and not "seal" the willingly wrong information in a blockchain.
Maybe we should just declare blockchain a "failed technology".
To put it in other words - crypto trading is different kind of hobby than programming. Many people are interested in what kind of systems can be built and don't give much crap about monetizing it or worry about how many people are using it.
It's a bit like getting upset at Fabrice Bellard because he created quickjs that "nobody is using" - it's completely missing the point.
As far as I can tell:
1. There's a pretty big issue with containers having the wrong contents (eg, counterfeit items loaded initially, or contraband added during transit). Current solutions are focused around physical security, seals, locks, etc., but it's fairly easy to bypass and forge these physical measures.
2. There's no real issue with tracking containers. We don't always know what's actually in them, but we know really well where they are and what's meant to be in them.
3. There's some efforts to try and replace the electronic systems for tracking where they are and what should be in them with blockchains. But as above, that's the bit that's currently working fine.
Not needing to trust middlemen is a good goal, I just don't see how tracking containers on blockchains reduces my need to trust middlemen. When Customs seizes the container at the border and finds someone has added 100kg of cocaine to the container, how does the blockchain prove who jimmied the lock open and then replaced the tamper seals?
I've worked in shipping for decades. There is no problem with BOLs magically changing with no traceability (which blockchain could solve, I guess, if that problem existed?). There is no problem with checking that the seal on a box at arrival is the same seal that was on the box when it departed.
The only viable purpose I've heard for blockchain is quasi-anonymous decentralized trust negotiation. This purpose doesn't match any real-world use case in shipping. A shipper doesn't want to ship product from an anonymous untrusted producer and no carrier wants to carry goods from an anonymous untrusted shipper.
Blockchain won't stop companies from misdeclaring hazardous (but otherwise legal) goods[1], it won't stop traffickers from misdeclaring illegal goods (or smuggling illegal goods among legal goods)[2], it won't stop trucks from running overweight[3], it won't stop ships from being misloaded[4]...
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Hyundai_Fortune
[2] https://www.freshplaza.com/article/9295962/cork-cocaine-valu...
[3] this sort of thing doesn't usually make the news so I don't have a link
[4] https://www.shippingandfreightresource.com/one-apus-containe...
Any society that adopts trust will be able to compete very well against a society of no trust.
Thst is my conjecture at any rate.
So, they now use blockchain where sending documents as a PDF would have been sufficient...
I'm so proud!
edit: Read the article! That's truely their main selling point. Formerly it was done on/with paper, now it's "on the blockchain". This is another great example why we don't need blockchain.
Can you explain this in greater detail? I don't wish to be a naysayer, but I don't understand how those concepts are blockchain-specific. Goods being re-sold/diverted while in transit was a regular occurrence prior to the existence of blockchain technologies. What is being brought to the table that is new?
Contrary to general perception it’s not a new data transfer cure all that will actually solve problems of sharing data between organizations. It also doesn’t replace hard work required to make a new industry standard. It’s barely useful in either of those but that’s the common misconception I usually hear from nontechnical people who seem to be excited about blockchain.
Are we just trapped in a hype cycle that will inevitably end or does Bitcoin growth spell forever renewing waves of hype?
I wouldn't declare it "failed technology" just yet.
They may be having some success on their original purpose, having just passed 2.5 billion GB on the network, i.e., 2.5 exabytes, and 1300 miners, 200+ projects and 5900+ GitHub contributors [3].
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/filecoin-mainnet-now-live [1] https://news.bitcoin.com/filecoin-miners-start-a-strike-fil-... [2] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/filecoin/ [3] https://siliconangle.com/2021/02/16/filecoins-decentralized-...
It's obvious that people who own Bitcoin would want to use the system in order to show usefulness, demand, however I'm wondering if there's any use of people who aren't financially incentivized (like early adopters who have the most to gain).
Other freely operating entities across the globe are not in the same position.
AML seems a non issue too, as the loan only moves the question.
KYC remains one big problem but there are many startups providing those services and they are slowly gaining acceptance in courts.
Don't be impressed if a few years (and maybe even months) from now you start to see classical banks trading mortgages onchain.
It doesn't.
AML seems a non issue too, as the loan only moves the question.
No, anti-money-laundering laws are at the heart of why the financial system can't do this. KYC laws apply at the customer level, so you only need to handle KYC once per customer. AML laws apply at the transaction level, so you need to apply them to each loan.
Cryptocurrency solves absolutely none of the existing legal reasons that banks can't issue large loans in minutes or seconds to existing (or new, well collateralized) clients.
Yes, this is definitely correct in that crypto does nothing to solve the legal requirements of the banks and does not help the banks.
But it's worth mentioning that this sort of fully collateralized and anonymous borrowing does not (and would not) happen through banks, but through platforms like AAVE and Compound. It's a financial tool separate from banks. And these tools cannot be shutdown, as long as ethereum exists, these tools exist.
As for anonymous loans, those exist solely to service criminal customers, so that is not an advantage of cryptocurrency.
And overall, it's a demonstration of a financial product which can only be built in the space of decentralized finance. I do not know of another tool which allows anyone around the world to borrow significant amounts of money anonymously and without an account. Whether it's a net good for the world I don't know, but I do believe it's a powerful technology and space.
You're never going to get an amazing loan deal from a trustless system.
I think that ethereum might have great applications, but a loan backed by more collateral than it is worth doesn't seem like one of them, unless Dao starts allowing for the use of collateral that is less liquid than eth.
The issue is that contracts don't have any way of "calling in" to the legal API, so you can't put up your house as collateral.
For house mortgages, there are companies that are "tokenizing" houses on the blockchain, so putting it up collateral would be as simple as depositing that token. That said, I think this is far from becoming reality anytime soon, just because there's lots of legal issues, etc. Nonetheless, the future is pretty exciting!
Once you include your exchanges fees in your cost basis, you actually lost like 30-40$, so it's a taxable event with capital gains loss.
For what it's worth, if you use AAVE or Compound, you also have to declare interest income on what you've earned.
With maker, you'd be responsible for capital gains if it was liquidated because you fell below the 150% minimum ratio.
I guess the difference between me and someone who would use these DeFi apps, is that they are using crypto as a speculative investment (which is fine, I speculate with other assets all the time). But most people do not have a significant portion of their net worth in crypto tokens. For me, it is much cheaper/easier/safer to just get a traditional loan.
Flash loans are an example of that innovation, where if you see an arbitrage opportunity in the market, you can profit from it even if you don't own huge capital, so it levels the playing field for all these financial actors.
See Chesterton's Fence: https://fs.blog/2020/03/chestertons-fence/
That's just a slogan. The devil is in the details. To use an extreme example: Murder laws removes my freedom to kill random people; how is that good?
It is always a tradeoff. In the case of the particular tech discussed, it's a tradeoff between being able to somewhat control crime (e.g, making payment for human trafficking harder, making it possible to reverse theft) and financial privacy. It's freedom from having things stolen and freedom from being regulated.
Well it's great in theory until you hit a problem nobody was incentivized to guard against the resulting failure cascades.
The mafia probably doesn't need your name for a loan, too. They'll find you anyway.
But maybe I'm all alone in finding this somewhat shady.
What? They'll know your name, address and your whole family history usually.
It's just a smart contract execution on the global computer that is Ethereum, how is that shady?
The anonymity part is cool, but if I want to borrow to get a mortgage how exactly does this help me? I do not have $500,000 in crypto laying around and a traditional lender will give me a 2% interest rate instead of 15%
Eventually, some companies are working on tokenizing homes, so once that happens, you could potentially deposit that as collateral just as easily, but that's still far out.
You can either withdraw a portion of it back to your normal wallet or you can just borrow more against the same collateral. So it's like a credit line that's always appreciating in value.
If one day, you need the whole collateral for whatever reason, then you'd pay the loan to unlock it fully and withdraw it.
The fees I am seeing on Uniswap/Aave are much much higher than 4.5%. Even at 4.5% that equates to six figures of additional interest payments over my 30 year mortgage.
> and you didn't have to pay a capital gains tax.
This isn't true. Any conversion between crypto assets is technically a taxable event...even if we both can agree that the rules are silly.
> Eventually, some companies are working on tokenizing homes, so once that happens, you could potentially deposit that as collateral just as easily, but that's still far out.
Okay great, but how does this promised future development help me secure a loan for the home I want to buy? Or the business I want to start? Again, I do not have 500k in bitcoin laying around nor a "tokenized home."
It was super easy to get approved for a 500k mortgage just based on my income.
But to my amateur mind, treating it as property doesn't seem like a problem for this view. If you get a loan from a pawn shop, you're not selling them your property, you're just putting it up for collateral while you pay back the loan.
What happens when it stops appreciating? Or is the premise that bitcoin will alway outpace interest rates?
It's a scarce/deflationary/limited supply asset which is compared against an endless money printer.
Once you actually try it, you're going to be like "this is the future", every single one of my friends that tried came to the same conclusion.
Everything is denominated in Bitcoin, which is always going up in price. Everyone borrows some lame legacy asset X and collateralixes with Bitcoin.
Do weird things happen? for example of Bitcoin is ubiquitous then the price of Bitcoin essentially gets factored out of the equation, so this magical leverage goes away. There are other effects but this idea that this is the future (or rather that this is a superior future ) seems a bit naive to me. Gravity will catch up to you no matter what.
Why are uniswap/none of these DeFi/DEx'es "not useful"?
Brave (the browser) uses blockchain in their privacy protecting ad technology.
Skynet uses a blockchain to allow users to share their extra computer storage space for a CDN.
And I'm sure there are a few others. It's just that the amount of use cases send legitimate applications using them are... limited. Most of the ones I'd consider valid uses have a substance-full technical goal, like the two I mentioned above.
uBlock Origin works fine based on txt-files. Not sure how blockchain could improve this.
$localNewspaper not go through the hassle of dealing with payments through blockchain technology.
It's also not terribly hard to get verified so you get paid. As long as someone is reasonably familiar with technology, I think it'd be pretty easy for them. Haven't tried it for myself though (but the guide is up there so you can see it for yourself if your curious).
It is also very common for suppliers and various intermediaries to have bad document management practices that get further muddled by digital file issues (e.g. people just generating documents from their software that may be different from the real invoice).
The issue with that is that not everyone involved wants transparency or wants to know, because you can get discounts from illegal or merely hinky behavior such as through gray market imports. There are good reasons as to why a lot of people involved in bringing products to customers want to see no evil / hear no evil / speak no evil. There's room here for the law to push people into adopting better technology than what is currently used.
This is another case in which the paper tech is better for fraud, negligence, and crime than the blockchain tech. It is also more forgiving because it prevents participants in the supply chain from becoming aware of fraud further up the chain, so it prevents them from taking on liability. Transparency sounds great until you learn it means that you have to pay more for the same units because the crime / lax practices that lubed the system up is now infeasible.
The idea is that everytime sweat shop X finishes sewing sequins on a dress, they can scan the RFID tag on the dress with their smartphone, and the ledger gets updated, and then Walmart can prepare for that dress, the shipping company can print out labels etc.
Its a good idea.
Industries are supposed to work this out, create their own cheaper blockchains that just need some sort of simple KYC to get started, then its as cheap as email to add your little bit to the supply chain.
I dont know of any successful implementations
Edit: no blockchain will solve the grey market problems. Everything will have to be made genuninely on the chain. Which starts to lead to probelsm with if you cannot get permission to write to the chain ... etc etc
1. If the central database is proprietary then it is enforced (usually by a major retailer ie Walmart drives all sorts of RFID supply chain requirements for its suppliers. If blockchains come in this is likely how)
1.a. But which other retailer will sign up to walmart's versions ? So it is hard for all suppliers to sign up to the same standards
2. Open standards make it easier for anyone to write apps to join the chain.
3. it's not at all clear how this is better I will admit beyond "decentralised" and "open". But those are excellent places to start.
Thank you
You can sign entries but unless you have each subsequent entry build on what came before like in a blockchain, entries can be removed entirely and no one will know. There is a reason companies like DHL are interested in such things.
https://www.dhl.com/au-en/home/insights-and-innovation/insig...
Example: Our product is sourced from a company and this providence is on the blockchain. It comes to light they employ slave labour and we'd rather cover it up. How do we alter these original transactions without the evidence being in plain sight?
In first world countries, yes. In third world countries, no.
What is built on something often determines the way it is used.
I'm generally opposed to software voting because I have a complete distrust for such systems, but a public ledger (preferably not based on proof of work, so not ethereum) has interesting characteristics. And the price or inefficiency isn't an issue in this context.
Edit: people commenting seem to misunderstand the proposition. I'm perfectly aware of the privacy around voting and not advocating against it. It should be possible to have a system where your vote is registered publicly as a transaction between your wallet and a "referendum" wallet, in that case unless you have a way to link the public identity of a wallet to an identity (meaning people would somehow leak their public address somewhere) you do not have a way to know my vote. The only thing you could know is the number of total votes and their choice. You can of course generate a new wallet per voting as a way to not have a history.
Edit 2: the plausibility deniability is a fair point, I concede.
That is something we do a lot of R&D on @Electis, along with the fine fellows from InfernoRed, Microsoft and others. Because the value of an election is the thrust that voters have in it!
It is part of what the homomorphic encryption protocol we use (electionguard) aims at solving. Your ballot is encrypted with a joint public key, and all the "artifacts" of the election are published after it closes. You can verify that your encrypted ballot is present in the artifacts, and that the whole artifacts archive verifies mathematically.
https://www.electionguard.vote/ https://electionguard-python.readthedocs.io/ https://www.electis.io/ https://electeez.com/
However, that doesn't help unless you know that every vote was a legitimate and eligible vote. How do you know the votes are legitimate and eligible if the address is anonymous? You need some system to either publicly identify each address or you need a central authority saying which addresses are allowed to vote.
The latter goes right back to the situation we are in today and the blockchain becomes no more useful than a centralized database, because we are still reliant on the centralized authority to tell us how many valid votes mattered.
There is a new voting event, each citizen can now create a voting wallet using their Citizen Key then vote on the various motions by sending a transaction to a destination wallet created for this event.
At the end of the voting event, the votes are counted and no transaction can be send to the destination wallet.
You do have a central authority, it's the country (or state). Only citizens can vote, and only citizens have a valid set of keys.
The benefits is that anyone voting or people who want to verify the voting numbers can do, and without having to trust the software managing the database (I mean, you of course have to trust the blockchain itself...).
A secret ballot makes it impossible to verify votes even with collusion between the voter and interested party. That makes vote-purchasing infeasible, since I could take money to vote for you and still defect at the secret ballot box.
A cryptographically-secure secret ballot in this threat model would need to provide the voter with a valid zero-knowledge proof for their actual vote and an imposter zero-knowledge proof for their alternative vote. Something like "if I input A into the system, then it counted vote X; if I input B then it counted vote Y," with A/B remaining private to the voter.
Any voting system with a public ledger where you can later check your vote is a disaster for election integrity. It's probably surprising, and certainly counter-intuitive, but that's a vector for fraud.
That's why we have a long history of secret ballots. And no cameras in the voting booth.
From a comment a few weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25739051):
> you could look up your own vote and the votes of your friends to confirm
You can't do that because visibility causes voting fraud.
By coercion. If votes can be checked by other people, a very large number of people (enough to change the result) will be forced under threat by someone else to "vote correctly".
The same happens if you can check your own vote, because any mechanism that lets you do that can usually be used by someone else - "give me your phone so I can check you voted for X like I told you to" (while holding a gun).
That's why free & fair elections have secret ballots, without personal identification on the ballots. To prevent coercion fraud.
If so, why is it in the state's power to decree that we have to trust the politicians but not the 3rd parties?
They are to let you vote as you privately decide with safety from everyone who has an interest in the vote, whether that's third parties, your boss, insurance company, local mafia, etc., or the state.
The state's role, in a democracy, is to ensure state-level elections take place with the various ingredients that ensure it has high integrity. That requires a lot of things; a lot of resources, making sure everyone knows about it, making it clear the result will be respected by the state itself, acting as a coordination point with some kind of authority so that people will tend to respect that an election actually took place.
If you have a third party available who can do that, by all means go for it, but generally you don't have one, and if you did you would start calling it the state.
However, in a democracy the electoral process should be administered as separately as possible from the politicians of the day. Politicians of the day should not be getting much involved, other than to ensure it takes place with all the usual resources.
Note that "the state" and "the politicians" are not the same thing in a democracy. The state consists of multiple institutions, many of which do not particularly trust politicians either.
The people most directly involved in actually running it should demonstrate a commitment to the integrity of the election itself foremost, ahead of their personal political views. On the principle that democracy itself is more valuable than winning any particular election, while still being drawn fairly from a range of people. But they should be observed (without interference) at multiple levels by representatives of different political groups.
Making a combination of people, systems and motivations to achieve integrity is the art of institution building (and maintenance), an electoral commission or something like that. Its independence from politicians of the day is one of its key features.
Regardless of who runs it and who you trust, you still need secret ballots to ensure integrity of the result.
Eg: We need to make a list of all his enablers before they delete their posts...
Second, coercion has been rolled out as an excuse to disenfranchise voters for ages with no evidence that it's a real threat in the modern era. I live in Oregon, which has been doing mail in voting since the 70s. People argue all the time that mail in voting will lead to coercion, but it has literally never happened in Oregon.
Also, voter rolls are public information. I like collecting data, so I have voter rolls of most states, which often allows me to look up name, home address, phone number, and registered party of anyone who is registered to vote. A lot of states even have parts of voting history publicly available. It's super easy for any employer to figure out what party any employee is in, and exactly which candidates that they've donated money to, etc, yet coercion still isn't a thing.
If you look at the pure economics of coercion, it's pretty obvious why it isn't a thing. It just doesn't scale. Every person that gets added under a coercion scheme make it that much more likely that the person running the scheme is going to go to jail for the rest of their life. No one cares so much about politics that they're going to throw their life away for the potential of changing 5 or so votes.
Yes, no problem with that. But the GP was arguing that it's better if ballots are not secret. I think it's a common misconception that if only all votes were open they would be more democratic.
At a small scale, I've directly witnessed people who decided not to vote on issues where their vote could be figured out by others, saying they didn't want social consequences of being seen to disagree. I've also known people afraid to vote with their conscience due to reprisals, and I do mean afraid.
> Second, coercion has been rolled out as an excuse to disenfranchise voters for ages with no evidence that it's a real threat in the modern era.
Good point. For the record, I'm pro mail-in voting too, especially during a pandemic. I'm not impressed by those who sought to disenfranchise votes in the USA this time around by arguing that mail-in votes should not be counted after they have been cast in good faith.
The mechanisms we use to protect vote integrity are meant to be a "best we can do" while still allowing people a reasonable way to actually vote. As soon as people are prevented from voting in the name of "integrity", that's not democracy any more.
Mail-in voting fraud has been found to a notable amount in the UK, though not enough to swing a result. But it did not come from individual homes. It's important to have mechanisms in place to look for it, if only to evaluate that it's not happening to a significant degree. Monitoring mail-in vote integrity should be on the look out for where ballots are posted from, and whether there are collisions with multiple votes from the same persons. If 10,000 votes are detected postmarked from the same employer warehouse with the same handwriting, that's time to be suspicious. When it's from 10,000 individual homes, each marked in a different style, you can be much more confident nobody has the capacity to go around every household to make that happen.
However, back to the technical suggestion of a public verifiable vote. If 10,000 people vote privately and then someone they have a commercial relationship with asks for proof they voted a particular way before they get a discount or whatever, that swings it from "nobody can visit every household" back to "systematic pressure is realistic", and it's not democracy any more.
> It's super easy for any employer to figure out what party any employee is in, and exactly which candidates that they've donated money to, etc, yet coercion still isn't a thing.
If people choose to announce their party affiliation, that's something else. Nothing stops people choosing to broadcast how they voted either. That's fine.
However in both cases, people are free to vote differently in secret than whatever they are broadcasting or socially going along with.
Polling data suggests there are plenty of people who are reluctant to truthfully say how they vote, even when told the polling is confidential. I'm sure there are people who leave it implied among their social groups that they lean one way, when in private they actually vote another way.
You write: > If people choose to announce their party affiliation, that's something else.
In PA (as in most states) one's party affiliation is public by law. In PA it's important because one can only vote in the primary for the party one is registered as a member of. (Voters who do not register an affiliation or are affiliated with a third party simply aren't allowed to vote during the primary.) So it's not really a case of "choosing" to announce their affiliation.
Also, I know multiple individuals in my neighborhood who have confided in me that they registered as members of one party but preferred to vote for the other party. Why? Because (at least historically) our county has a long history of being run by a single party and (to quote my neighbor), "If you are a member of the wrong party your trash won't get picked up."
The secret ballot really DOES prevent certain abuses.
I agree, where affiliation with a party has greater meaning and consequences, and is practically required for access to ordinary local services, the secret ballot is even more important.
That neighbourhood is a great example.
I'm disappointed, really, that in 21st century USA those people are still disenfranchised by local politics from voting in the primary of the party they actually support. But presumably there are good reasons for legal registration.
Even with cameras in the voting booth, voters still have plausible deniability because they can spoil their marked ballot (that they may have photographed) and request a fresh blank one.
In-person paper voting is pretty much the best voting method we have in terms of privacy, usability, scrutability, and reliability.
Make the whole system as hard as possible to manipulate by involving a lot of people who distrust the person they're working with.
There is a tiny chance your personal vote will get lost in all the paper handling, but you can be assured that the system is a lot harder to manipulate simply because of the sheer number of people involved.
With a paper-based system, all you need to understand is that your paper goes into a box and someone counts it later on. Everyone understands every step, including the steps required to secure that box. But once you require people to understand blockchain you are putting the intregrity of the election in the hands of a privileged elite.
I would say, even worse, we would have to require people to TRUST a system that uses blockchain in addition to understanding it. The fact that in some thin layer of a gigantic inscrutable system there's a mathematically irrefutable "truth" does NOT make people feel better about it.
Trust is NOT a mathematical concept.
In any case for blockchain to ever take off in common usage, it's going to have to overcome its association with scammy cryptocurrency schemes. That's going to be a while!
If citizens can see exactly where their dollars go it could make corruption very difficult and lead citizens to be far more engaged in their democracies.
Yes a contractor could still charge $10k for a hammer, but citizens would uncover that almost immediately.
But the fact is, (almost) no one really cares. Many people want to believe they would care, but they don't really. Either way, knowing what's being spent where only makes corruption marginally more difficult. It certainly doesn't lead citizens to be any more engaged. We know this because what you want is already here and it has solved precisely nothing (IMO).
I personally think the engagement part would come instead from "My $5000 in tax went through the system and was eventually spent on a federal initiative I don't agree with" (or since it's all granular: "only $13 of that $5000 went to anything that benefits my community?"). No, I'm not saying that everyone will care, but I think that more people will care.
Perhaps we're not seeing the forest because we're looking at the monetization capabilities in the wood.
Satoshi Nakamoto created something truly revolutionary; a complex method of processing and recording data in a system, quickly began to overturn everything. Microsoft Word was the dominant word processing software for over a decade, with the creation of this new system, however, something similar arrived: Google Docs, Instead of one person editing a document, and being locked out when the other person began to edit, multiple people could now edit documents. That opened an entire world of possibility, from collaborative conferences online to fiction writing with both people online, using Google Docs. Microsoft Word was obsolete(even if still many people use it). Blockchain is a technology that outshines the concept of Google Docs collaboration like a spark versus a star.
Blockchain runs on a principle similar to the collaborative ability of Google Docs, by having multiple computers check to ensure that digital information is recorded accurately, millions of computers, called nodes, check this data and record it perfectly, trying to hack Blockchain is like trying to write swears in Google Docs: Everyone notices immediately. Blockchain-based businesses are growing exponentially as the technology improves. Blockchain technologies are not dominated by large industries yet. The entire industry of Blockchain technology is empty except for a few small yet growing businesses. Anyone can use this technology, and anyone can learn about it. In fact, by creating a startup focused on some sort of Blockchain transaction, whether it’s for transporting value across the internet, or general information, or financial records, you’re democratizing the entire process and keeping it away from FAANG or even Govs. Blockchain has been compared to the Internet. The Internet was extremely profitable and Blockchain arguably has the potential to be more so, simply by upgrading the existing framework. The person who sets their mind to creating a Blockchain technology has the potential to be unbelievably successful beyond simply creating a profitable niche industry.
Give most people want they need and a little of what they want and you'll find most greed driven behaviors largely disappear except for a select few who I'd argue have dysfunctions or lack basic social maturity.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-...
I think crypto posts continue to appear because the idea is sexy, but I also think the parent poster is correct: the realized applications are not.
Crypto captures the imagination, but it's a disappointment in practice.
1. There are currently useful applications. 2. It currently brings value to some people in one way or another. 3. If there are no killer apps, it's not obvious to a large swath of the population.
I try not to be one who invests too much into the wisdom of the crowd. I also try not to dismiss them either. We can be both clever and easily fooled.
It can both be true that cryptocurrency is nifty and has real world applications, and is at also widely speculative currently.
Interesting concept I learned when I stopped drinking -- you aren't owed a rebuttal when your argument is stupid!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala
Its money dealer to money dealer, and the money dealers keep scrips. Average fees are from 0.2% to 0.5% . It's definitely un-sexy since its not technology based. No chains of blocks or programmers needed. Fees are low, so the money transferrers can make a living, but not allow speculation or other hazardous acts.
And the only reason why it's not more massively used is because of the US's adherence that it's "terrorism".
I'd imagine that the terrorism angle is more of a "allows people to ignore central banks ran by USA and Europe"... as the US didn't much care when HSBC was financing drug cartels, terrorists, and the like ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2012/07/16/hsbc-h... )
I don’t think so. A system with clear record keeping, auditable by third parties, and subject to the judiciary is far better than below:
> Trust and extensive use of connections are the components that distinguish it from other remittance systems. Hawaladar networks are often based on membership in the same family, village, clan, or ethnic group, and cheating is punished by effective excommunication and "loss of honour"—leading to severe economic hardship.[3]
Technology has obviated the need for unnecessary levels of allegiance to your tribe, as required in the above system.
And we've learned that record-keeping has its own very strong negative side. It alone can establish ties between people, and serve to eliminate privacy all in the names of "transparency". (And I can hear it now too - "Why want privacy if you have done nothing wrong?"). I think we're only at the beginning of crypto-fraud arrests, because the ledger is the log - and that's a liability.
And the auditability is primarily a governmental requirement, usually based around fraud, financing terrorists, or the like. If cheating occurs, the excommunication from the network is the punishment - you are removed from your position of power. And frankly, we can look at our systems of how auditability doesnt stop the various failure modes: blatant financing of terrorism/HBSC, billions of $ transferred away from citizens with usurious fines, overleveraging finance side affecting savings/loan. In the end, auditability is just a way to assign blame. And that blame is never directed towards those at the top who manufacture and use illegal techniques - it is used to blame the rank and file; the cashier, the teller, the engineer, the low middle manager.
And subject to the judiciary is an interesting case you bring up... Because transfers in (I believe) all cryptocurrency is not subject to the judiciary. And in many more popular cryptosystems, that is seen as a strong anti-government bonus, and not a malus. And
Point being, is that the Hawala is the last millenium's Bitcoin.. And when compared to BTC or ETH now, is still strictly better. (And we haven't discussed the barrier to entry, wasted electrical power, e-waste, etc.)
Hawala people can establish ties too, unless they are somehow incorruptible. And electronic money transfer systems and SWIFT and whatnot aren't perfect, but my contention is they are more preferable to almost all people than Hawala. I am aware of the corruption with regards to HSBC, but I can't agree with
>billions of $ transferred away from citizens with usurious fines, overleveraging finance side affecting savings/loan
Keeping funds secure and moving money has never been so easy and so cheap for almost all people. Yes, you can get screwed if the government deems you a terrorist, and a more distributed system like Hawala might be more resilient to that kind of attack, but there's other costs to Hawala that the current system doesn't have.
>Point being, is that the Hawala is the last millenium's Bitcoin.. And when compared to BTC or ETH now, is still strictly better. (And we haven't discussed the barrier to entry, wasted electrical power, e-waste, etc.)
I can't comment on this since I don't know enough about BTC or ETH or Hawala.
But does technology imply social capital? I don't think so.
So if you set up the dichotomy, and had to choose, I'd choose "social capital" every time.
I know, you didn't use this phrasing. But when I read "allegiance to your tribe", what does that even mean? If you're American and you support your troops, isn't that "allegiance to your tribe"?
Allegiance to the tribe means following the customs/social ordering/rules of the tribe. For example, how well would a gay/non religious/etc person fare in tribes that don't believe in civil liberties?
Unfortunately, I see what happens when 'We' use technology to remove middlemen...
Apple: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/01/02/amphetamine-app-store-r...
Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22348568
(person 17h ago on HN talking about google acct ban remediation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26218795 )
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-users-locked-out-afte...
That's what technology has gotten us. Accounts get closed down due to automated systems. Something gets flagged as "fraud" and you lose access/money. Your previous business selling apps gets cancelled when your app is deregistered and removed.
At least, the recourse is "Complain on HN or Twitter". Worst case is you file a lawsuit against a multi-billion dollar company (hah!).
Now, what do you do to file a dispute against Ethereum or Bitcoin? Well, nobody. There is no clearinghouse and no masters - that's the selling point! But what about fraud or likewise? Too bad, so sad.
With the hawaladars, their word, ethics, and livelihood is on the line. You have a real human who can handle the squishy and nigh-unautmatable parts. And they can talk with the person trying to transfer money in case there is problems unforseen.
> Allegiance to the tribe means following the customs/social ordering/rules of the tribe.
Well, yes.
> For example, how well would a gay/non religious/etc person fare in tribes that don't believe in civil liberties?
But this seems like a veiled way to attack a way of moving money around solely because the name is Islamic. And hate crimes happen nearly everywhere. And there was the Kentucky county clerk who refused to sign marriage certificates because a couple was gay.... And unlike the hawaladars whom you can go to a different one, these people in the county had no such choice.
It's easy to set up a strawman that someone may not support your beliefs, but it's a false narrative to think that only those people do it.
Automated solutions do not preclude having human reviewers, and I do not think it's unreasonable for the government to step in and mandate quality (such as subjecting the automated solutions to a small claims court style jurisdiction).
>With the hawaladars, their word, ethics, and livelihood is on the line. You have a real human who can handle the squishy and nigh-unautmatable parts. And they can talk with the person trying to transfer money in case there is problems unforseen.
While there's plusses, there's also minuses. What happens when something goes wrong with a $100M+ transaction? What happens if your hawaladar or the other one burns you? There's 7B+ people in the world, eventually some organization to manage reputation will develop, maybe even by the hawaladars themselves, and you end up back where you started.
>But this seems like a veiled way to attack a way of moving money around solely because the name is Islamic.
I specifically wrote "etc" so I didn't have to specify each and every instance of discrimination, and my example of "gay" would certainly include the KY county clerk, so I don't see how you could claim I was attacking an Islamic concept because it's Islamic.
I'm not even attacking it, it's a perfectly valid way for transactions to work. In fact, my family has done it many, many times when they immigrated and they did it between various African countries, UK, USA, AUS, NZ. But that was during a time when transferring money was more costly and they didn't have another option. Now they might choose to use transferwise.
Far more likely that money dealers held powerful positions, ensuring some very conservative social constructs stayed in place. People just routed around this by using "modern" technology.
And so the percentage of legitimate uses of the system dwindle, and the percentage of less legitimate increase till at some point you are no longer a useful social service but a money launderer for criminals who occasionally helps the diaspora send money home.
It also allows for a new kind of system where the money dealers act as access points to the network, and customers trust their local money dealer, but you don't need trust connections between the money dealers: If I want to send money to you from my remote village to yours, I ask you which money dealer you trust, go to my trusted money dealer, give him cash, and tell him that it is to go to your trusted money dealer.
The two money dealers don't have to trust each other for the transaction to work, and the transactions are much harder to disrupt than classic banking transactions.
Exchanges all over the world have membership comprised of people who voluntarily group together to create and enforce trust. Using a different denominator for transactions wont take away the forces that cause this state of affairs.
Meeh! Not even that, anymore.
In Brazil there was a brief moment in 2014 when you could buy marijuana and cocaine with bitcoins. But now, with all this volatility, transfer costs and low liquidity, not even drug dealers want crypto currency.
I've never used a darknet market.
I read an article on slashdot in 2011 called "Bitcoin Mining for fun and profit" I bought a graphics card, it paid itself off in 21 days.
I bought 12 more graphics cards and sucked down 3kW for 24 months.
I do not regret this and every single person here that doesn't understand proof of work, doesn't understand a deflating asset with 8 (10 million) decimal places of trading precision against fiat currencies with only 2 decimal places...
Well I can't help people on the internet do math and make money, no one pays me to do that.
When you take one currency pair with 8 digits of precision that’s PROGRAMMED to deflate and trade that against an inflating currency with 2 digits of precision...
You’re going to need a whole lot of the inflating thing to buy the deflating thing, this is math.
Me personally, my electrical bills and the costs I’ve eaten has yielded tremendous value: for me. I mined, I was rewarded, I stimulated the economy.
Long before there was an economy.
This happens all the time.
Cryptocurrency is very young. While its hard to say if BTC or ETH or something yet to be invented will be part of the digital money future, it is absolutely reasonable to expect this technology will have a role in the world. Of course people will make and lose "quick dough" but that's like saying the web failed because some idiot made or lost money on Pets.com or AOL stock.
Trade volume just means that the idea is in circulation, people of many walks of life are seeing what is there. Feel free to ignore those people, but to write off the entire concept as "about making quick dough" is asinine.
Referencing Wired as the killer app of the early Internet is good comedy. Bloomberg terminals were already connected, just not by this new tech.
Mobile computing has changed the entire world; it’s not plainly obvious that cryptocurrency would change it even more or is substantially more difficult to execute on.
Mobile computing is obviously important, but its importance says zero about the possibility - and that's all I argued - that cryptocurrency could also be very important.
Some more killer apps; - RENVM decentralized darkpools - Chainlink decentralized oracles - Deco by chainlink labs decentralized private information sharing - NFTs and NFT marketplaces. This one is going to be huge. - The entire defi space is pretty remarkable from Dexes to Bancor and Yearn to keeperdao
Respectfully comments like yours and others in this thread seem like people saying the internet wouldn’t take off in the 80s/90s. I don’t know how a technical audience like the one here doesn’t get it.
Sure there’s greed but that’s a feature of humans not crypto. We are most definitely in a bubble but the dot com bubble bore seeds which grew into trees that were mighty.
Also another cool dApp is DyDx, margin trading platform
The ideological aspect of crypto as a defense against the big bad system is dead in the water since early adopters are so massively powerful within the hypothetical new system, and nobody really wants to use it as a currency as opposed to a pyramid scheme.
The idea that profit-motivated exchange and investment is a useless human activity is a layman's understanding of economics.
“What’s Ethereum’s killer app?” we asked ourselves not long ago. Now we know. It’s the world’s best publicly-accessible settlement platform for financial transactions. In a way, that’s exciting. The markets think so too.
Ethereum gas prices are astronomical because there's unprecedented demand to use the network: NFT art and collectibles are exploding (NBA TopShot, Foundation, SuperRare, Rarible, OpenSea, etc.) at the same time DeFi applications (Uniswap, Compound, Maker, Aave, Balancer, etc.) are at all time highs.
This is the time, in my mind, that it's most exciting to work in crypto, and on Ethereum: demand has been proven and has been sustained (every block full for 1+ year).
The naysayers who think this is all for a quick buck are missing the pattern and listening too much to the (admittedly, insanely loud and annoying) shills.
People do bring up quite reasonable objections like environmental costs, but it stories get a lot of upvotes and suggesting many people are strong supporters.
Also, proof of stake will reduce 99% of the environmental cost.
Meanwhile, we're burning coal to produce bitcoin whose only value is that number gets green and goes up. Eth is slightly better on that point, but still wasted multiple TWh of electricity while it was in PoW mode, and it still is today.
Waste would be an incandescent bulb that throws away the majority of its energy generating heat that isn't used for any purpose.
This should be obvious when you consider proof of work systems that generate less waste heat by using a memory bound rather than a computationally bound algorithm. They both operate on the principle of wealth destruction as all proof of work algorithms do, but you get different externalities.
Interestingly, if you found something really useful to do with the waste heat of crypto then the systems would become roughly equivalent.
PS: The idea of a memory bound algorithm is 1 million dollars of RAM consumes less energy than 1 million dollars of ASIC’s.
..which in the case of the average crypto, is overshadowed many times over. One block mined equates to $333K worth BTC generated alone, and that's not counting the value of every transaction included in that block. A block happens every 10 minutes give or take, so in an hour, that's about 2 million worth of coin generated and 13K transactions.
There's no way on earth every bitcoin miner, combined, is using $2M+ worth of electricity every hour, even factoring in negative environmental externalities (which in the case of crypto mining, will be lower than most people think given their proximity to renewable, hence cheap, energy.)
It is, objectively speaking, not a waste.
Similarly, as I just pointed out different algorithms would use more or less energy and therefore be more or less efficient. Thus the heat produced is a waste byproduct mining, and electricity is the fuel. A more efficient process simply uses less fuel though it may have higher capital costs.
The same is true of say cars, you’re burning gas because driving is useful. But, increasing efficiency means less fuel while creating identical value etc etc.
It seems to me that crypto is being unfairly singled out. Things that are digital have meaningful existence.
It’s directly offensive to many people in the field that an inefficient first implementation is maintained because people’s investments in hardware are considered more valuable than anything else. Not latency, not transactions per second, not environmental costs, just maximize the value of their hardware investments.
Completely understandable, yet still horrific.
Of course even if you count all that, the power consumption per transaction will be at least five orders of magnitude lower than the 0.6MWh per transaction in BTC.
That’s not meant as an attack, it’s simply a ballpark comparison. For those pro crypto take it a sign of possible future growth.
I immediately found this: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-26/is-bit...
"One Bitcoin transaction would generate the CO2 equivalent to 706,765 swipes of a Visa credit card,"
Another way to look at it:
Bitcoin uses over 0.5% of the world's electricity: https://interestingengineering.com/why-bitcoin-mining-consum...
With that, Bitcoin does about 300,000 transactions a day. https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-b...
But there are over a billion daily credit card transactions alone - 3000 times as much.
So if each credit card transaction were replaced by a Bitcoin transaction, we'd use 30 times as much electricity as the entire planet produces.
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These numbers are so grossly lopsided and so widely bandied about that when I hear someone say, "I have yet to hear anyone make an analysis of the environmental cost" I think, "Perhaps you don't want to hear it."
Before you start with the morality of the situation, just ignore that. You wanted to see a real use case, and I am telling you about it.
As it turns out, not everyone shares your moral code, or lives in the similar legal system which allows them the similar property rights.
Replace that person with a Venezuelan whose currency is completely destroyed and Venezuelan Americans are trying to provide their families with money.
The sky is the limit in terms of innovations possible, it's literally some code running on the global computer that is Ethereum.
So you're right, this isn't a thing that exists today outside of crypto because it's not needed outside of crypto. Someone who can pay a loan back as part of the same transaction in which the loan is issued is not a default risk, and in the real world you just don't bother with the loan: you just pay for the underlying transaction directly.
You might say "why the hell would I do that?", in order of importance: 1) you hold on to your asset's appreciation, 2) access the liquidity, 3) avoid capital gains tax.
- Is the long term alternatives to PoW actually viable, given the huge power consumption of cryptocurrency currently?
- Are the valid use cases (other than drugs, ransomware and speculation) worth the valuation?
- If Tether collapses, due to the reports of its sketchiness, what will the shock to cryptocurrency, broadly speaking, be?
- Read the whitepaper of whichever crypto you're asking about. The answer is "it depends", because each one exists to fill a different niche.
- Nobody really cares about Tether, so probably nothing.
This is doubly true for people outside the US, not to mention people who are trying to skirt capgain taxes. Of course, an argument could also be made that a tether failure would cause people to flee to BTC or ETH and paradoxically cause prices to rise.
The present demand is spurred by the boom phase of a potential boom-bust cycle (similar to oil). You have two (actually more) sources of demand: crypto, conventional buyers (retail and industry customers). If they adjust production upward (which requires an investment of capital) to meet the present demand then they reduce their profit, prices will go up (at least a bit) to compensate. But they also face another risk: what if there's a bust? If the crypto demand for hardware bottoms out (whether because of a change in crypto or having satisfied the demand) they will be left with excess capacity and potentially excess inventory. The increased production capacity may be able to be redirected to other productive endeavors, or it may just end up idle. And the excess inventory has to be sold off at a potential loss as the hardware becomes worth less and less as each day passes (plus holding inventory costs money).
Instead, if they leave production as is (or only increase it slightly) they can virtually guarantee their products will sell out and increase the prices because they know people will continue to buy it. Obviously, the retail and industry customers get screwed because they have less profit to make (if any) directly off the hardware purchase, but the miners will continue to buy almost without regard to the price because their profits (presently) justify the investment.
Memory-hard PoW algorithms, rather than computational ones, might be one way to reduce the amount of energy. Memory is expensive regardless of whether you make ASICs or use regular PCs.
There’s more wrong with PoW besides just environmental effects. PoW creates different incentives for a blockchain’s miners than for its users. Often these are conflicting, and have a tendency to gridlock the protocol development. This is especially pronounced today in Ethereum where the majority of users are in favor of certain protocol upgrades that would scale throughput, but miners are opposed to it because it comes at an economic cost to them.
There’s no inherent reason for this dichotomy between users and miners: if it’s the same people using the protocol as securing it, you’d expect to have better outcomes for everyone. PoS makes it so that the users are also the ones securing the protocol. It’s not _perfect_ alignment, but it is much more aligned than the miner/user split in POW.
2. Yes.
3. It'll be a significant issue for decentralized exchanges and liquidity pools, but far from existential. The seasonal Tether FUD is generally overstated. (I have done a detailed analysis of this, but it exceeds the scope of this conversation.)
This is sadly a non-answer to the question posed.
I am asked this question all the time by people I know, and the best I can come up with is illegal activities, super niche tech applications (e.g., DNS name reg), and libertarian fantasies.
You have an audience here at HN who is more than willing to advocate for cryptocurrencies if they/we can be shown a compelling use case.
“Yes” is not an obvious compelling use case.
Please elaborate.
That's the answer to your question.
I’m sure this answer will send them running to buy.
/s
All joking aside, for a conversation you say you have weekly, this is a really lame answer due to the abstractness of it.
My guess is the reason you don’t give concrete answers is because either tech already exists for that use case or non-crypto tech could be easily developed if it doesn’t already exist.
Please, please, prove me wrong. I want to be a crypto fan, but vague answers like the ones you provided above are the reason a lot of people think crypto is smoke and mirrors and/or snake oil salesmen.
>...any kind of marketplace or platform but with community governance and no rents, decentralized exchanges, global-by-default payments, highly interoperable and efficient financial infrastructure...
As seen in various forms here: https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/
I can only guess that you are not familiar with the technical jargon.
Your pleading strikes me as potentially disingenuous, but I will speak earnestly in spite of that.
You will or (will not) be a "crypto fan" after you've absorbed enough technical literature to make your own judgement about what is happening. If you have the time, I recommend starting with the Bitcoin and Ethereum whitepapers.
I am familiar with the jargon.
The list that was provided was of abstract ideas without stating a specific market — any market.
The ethereum apps you linked to might be interesting from a technological standpoint, but they don’t really add value — they just are [banking function] or [payment function] with cryptocurrency.
The most generous example that I can come up with is that crypto makes it possible to displace PayPal and similar payment processing middlemen, but I’m not sure most people (outside of a few legal outliers) actually want those middlemen replaced. So even then, the issue isn’t that crypto is so great, it’s just that the fiat currency system is slightly inefficient while being incredibly fixable.
I guess I just don’t see the demand in the marketplace for what crypto is providing the supply for (other than as a tool for speculation... it’s really good at that).
They both said some variation of “why would I want to use that?”
The product of crypto does a crappy job of selling itself.
I will offer some criticisms:
Aave - Earning interest on a speculative asset with counter party risk seems a bit silly. Most of the risk is bundled in the asset itself. If you invested $1,000 in a token as a small percentage of your retirement portfolio you're probably hoping the return is 20x. In this incredibly logical scenario 2% is meaningless.
Uniswap - It's cool if you trade tokens because it skips the extra step of sending the asset to a centralized exchange, trading it, and withdrawing it. The centralized scenario might actually be cheaper. Either way it's only impressive if trading tokens is impressive. And at this point it's not.
PoS and derived schemes like DPoS have been sound on paper. Their drawbacks have largely been accepted by the community as a good tradeoff for most usage models. However, it can take years of "production" usage to get a good feeling about the long term macro economics, so I wouldn't expect a straight answer to this. The good news is that there will be plenty of big tier networks like ETH2 and EOS experimenting with different variants.
I think it's fair to say that the current valuation of cryptocurrencies have nothing to do with their tech or use cases. These markets have the same signs as the dot com bubble. However, there are valid use cases if you're willing to search for them. One of them is decentralized DNS name registration without third parties like GoDaddy or ICANN (https://handshake.org/), though this is a market, not a currency per say.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852
The only surprise is that HN is still a terrible place to discuss crypto. Not many posters or commenters seem to have much knowledge, which is strange for HN
So in the spirit of education - what amazing things are there about ethereum or Bitcoin that will change my mind about their intrinsic value that I don't already know? (My current opinion is that the intrinsic value of PoW systems is negative due to low actual utility and very high cost.)
Every year the USD is worth less. Every year BTC is worth more.
Hope that helps.
These are the sort of real-world constraints that you can't just ignore. Attempting to do so makes me less charitable towards other assertions you might make. You come across as an idealist talking about their perfect dream world, not someone describing reality. Now don't get me wrong - it's important to have a perfect dream world. If you aren't working towards something, what are you doing?
But at the same time, you have to accept that "this system is perfect, if you also change these thousand other things" is not compelling to someone who doesn't share your idea of utopia. To convince someone like me, you have to explain how the system improves the world as it exists now.
These constraints were drafted by a handful of rich white bankers in a secret meeting. I have no problem ignoring their constraints. It seems you do.
Can you imagine all the hot-takes HN would generate if email were invented today?
"You can't just encroach on the sovereignty of USPS like that" "Electronic Mail doesn't do anything the pony-express can't do" "If we allow Electron Mail then how do we attach a postage stamp"
Email adoption, like Crypto doesn't require convincing the entire population. The laggards will join eventually.
I think we can do better.
(As for your email counterfactual... Why? Do you find it an effective rhetorical tactic to imagine what people might do instead of looking at what people have done?)
This Jeff guy, what a radical. Probably will never amount to anything.
No one said those things. Why would they?
But really, it kind of feels like the Tether investigation is the only thing shaking up the ecosystem in an interesting way, and it's doing so at a glacial pace. There really isn't much else new to say.
For me in my daily work, this manifests itself as companies that want to use more obscure currencies as a transaction method in games. I say: "That currency is not on a lot of servers, how will you protect against 51% attacks?" They say: "All transactions are also verified by trusted servers.." So does the person understand what they are talking about, or are they used to talking to people (investors / business partners) who don't have a great understanding. Doubts raised.
However: There are times when experts dismiss new things and are wrong. So I try to keep an open mind.
The ideas that Ethereum is innovative, that there are lots of possibilities in cryptocurrencies/blockchain, that at the moment the scene has major environmental issues, and that the current high valuations are unjustified, to my mind can all be true at the same time.
Sure, usually the tokens come with a print, and you support the artist, but those are things you can do via other means. What is the NFT adding? It seems only slightly more authentic than "buying" a star from a star registry.
A lot of times, people just want a limited-supply token from a third-party saying "yes, I paid for this, and that distinguishes me from the hoi polloi who got it for free".
1. What is the value of art?
2. What is the value of money?
When we look for analogues, they're of the industrial era, things about intellectual property, branding, merchandise etc. This is a way of directly speculating on an idea. Is it a good idea? If so, then other people will want it, right? Then, the token must have value. There are no gatekeepers or enforcers to say otherwise.
We have barely begun to grasp what that means.
I know artists that think this is going to be their ticket. But it was never the lack of crypto that kept them from making money. It was the lack of any consumer value to their art.
There are two ways to make money as an artist: you either make a few, huge pieces that sell to very rich people (making your yearly bank on one or two pieces), or you make a huge number of easily reproduceable pieces that sell to the general populace. The difficulty in both is not the creation of the pieces. It's the marketing and sales pipeline. Both rely on selling a purchaser a narrative on what the art will mean to them. Exclusivity in the former, worldliness in the latter.
If you can't crack that marketing problem, you're going to ask equally zero pieces as NFT than as any other medium. And if you can crack that marketing problem, selling it as NFT does nothing for you as the artist.
It’s certainly not fun to contribute to Geth nowadays when every bug can have huge consequences, and the community constantly demands more performance so they can have lower costs. Peter was very clear about the burnout this causes.
You can simplify that to - It’s fun to work on things when there isn’t pressure to work on them.
I’ve run into this multiple times in my life, including in the blockchain space, but it isn’t really anything specific to Ethereum. Though I do feel like the author has a limited view and is attributing this to be something Ethereum specific.
I'm part of a community that's currently being overtaken by the crypto art craze, and I'm still convinced it's "all for a quick buck".
The crypto art economy seems to be driven by "collectors" who will drop thousands of dollars on anyone who can get them more exposure. People who have no followers and aren't tweeting about NFTs every day generally don't get their art bought. Some of these kids who made $10,000 off a png then feel some social pressure to put some of that money back into the community, so they purchase more crypto art with the proceeds.
Some collectors openly advertise their ongoing bids on social media. They want people to see that they're dropping big money on art. If it was a true art collector, wouldn't they not want to be outbid? Wouldn't they be hoping that there were as few people in the auction as possible? None of it smells right to me.
A lot of people buy art not because they like looking at it, but because they want everyone to know that they have lots of money to drop on worthless art purchases. This motivation is reinforced if a.) everybody knows how much money they're dropping on art purchases and b.) the price keeps going up, yet they still win the bid. They want the price to go up, since a higher price just signifies how baller they are.
You get the same veblen bragging rights, the artist (assuming they are not simply your own alter ego) gets a visibility boost and nobody is going to be motivated enough to go digging around the custody trail to prove this was a sham.
This sleight of hand (in a slightly modified form) is standard operating procedure for inflating the value of ICO offerings (and by extension, crypto as a whole); I don't see why people wouldn't do it for NFTs, with the same motivations at work.
They've succeeded in demonstrating their wealth, but no one has any idea who they are, which seems to poke a hole in that theory.
Are we really allowing blockchains to annex the word "crypto"? "Crypto" is "cryptography". HN is not "anti-crypto", it is staunchly pro-encryption.
And yes, people have made a lot of money on pure speculation too. That's not an application.
Until we see some actual real-world uses for crypto - full-time, serious uses, not someone buying a pizza as a demo - that aren't crime, we have every logical reason to be desperately skeptical of this overhyped technology.
The point of Ethereum was to build an open world computer, to decentralize power, to build collective intelligence, and to supersede the corrupt global financial system with non-speculative economic models that served the needs of humanity and the planet.
And I understand, because interest are not aligned. It really seems like nobody actually care about advancing the state of art, except actual researcher who work in universities and not in crypto startups...
Cryptocurrencies had a goal and a usefulness when they were at least used to buy drugs online and send a few bucks to your friends. Now you cannot even use them for that. Everybody saw the rise of the bitcoin valuation and since then, all that matter is how much you can make by trading crypto. The actual usefulness of the crypto, what it can do, is utterly irrelevant. This is proven by btc being one of the most traded and valuable crypto even though it is one of the crypto with the less feature. Most btc trade are not even going through the bitcoin network but through third party, so btc even fail at its own goal.
And because crypto are seen as an investment, everybody is holding, and nobody is using it, and you would be a fool to do so, since tomorrow, your 1 shitcoin might be worth 3 times what you brought it for. And no, "stable coin" is not an answer since the only thing they have been used for is to trade between crypto...
Then, to make matter even worse, the crypto community is its own worst enemy. Since it has been proven that, to make a few buck, all it takes is "creating" your own crypto and mining the first few block before other get in on it, you get thousand of startup coming out of nowhere proposing new crypto that are literally clone of other crypto. Tell me, what is the difference between Polkadot and Kusama ? Or is there even a significant technological difference between Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc ?
We are more than 5 years into this crypto mania with an ungodly amount of money being thrown at it and there has been no significant technological progress, no crypto that is useful enough to be used by anybody else but crypto-fanatic trying to pump and dump it, and this is now becoming one of the worse climate disaster in a while. And all the while, every people invested in crypto will just talk about price, valuation, investment, hodling, etc. It is clear what is their real purpose.
If you want to see actual progress in distributed computing, look for scientific paper coming from universities.
It is not, and never will be, a serious investment. The problem is, there are still fish that will believe it is a serious "opportunity" if they're shown the right kind of profit figures, truthful or otherwise.
Monero is the best approach to actual privacy as it conceals sender, receiver and transaction amount for all transactions.
I do agree that the speculation focus is misguided, but there are cryptos that are useful the way Bitcoin was meant to be.
Monero is at least designed to be anonymous. It’s possible that some flaw or mistake will eventually be uncovered that will break its privacy, but the underlying structure is better.
It's still very experimental and yes, there are no clear applications yet, but there is some genuine research being made.
I don't think you're actually expecting an answer, but the main difference is that Kusama is a "canary chain" with faster iteration speed (governance votes last 7 days instead of 28 days for Polkadot).
https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/en/learn-kusama-vs-polkad...
You can see it as a long-living testnet.
It's less than zero-sum. A significant portion of what's being put into the system, is just being burned, in the form of converting electricity to heat without doing much if any useful work.
This is just ignorance. There are plenty of projects out there that are building off each other, improving, and trying new things. Later in your post you mention several projects yet there you are claiming there is no new technology being done?
>It really seems like nobody actually care about advancing the state of art, except actual researcher who work in universities and not in crypto startups...
So researchers are doing research as opposed to startups. I am falling to see the problem with your statement. Yes, people intentionally trying to find new solutions to problems cryptocurrency offers will be the ones finding solutions.
>This is proven by btc being one of the most traded and valuable crypto even though it is one of the crypto with the less feature.
I am sure you can find plenty of companies that had better technology but are doing worse than their competitors whether it be because of bad marketing, first mover advantage / network effects, etc.
>And because crypto are seen as an investment, everybody is holding, and nobody is using it
Oh please. You can go to any block explore and see tons of transactions going on. People are using smart contracts all the time.
>And no, "stable coin" is not an answer since the only thing they have been used for is to trade between crypto...
This is short sighted. There is a desire for being able to know that your money isn't going to crash before you have to pay your bills. It will be easier to onboard people to using crypto if it is just using something like dollars. It also gets lid of problems like buying crypto to buy something then the price crashes and you can no longer afford what you wanted to bought. Or the opposite where you buy something and then the crypto doubles and you get mad for "overpaying."
>you get thousand of startup coming out of nowhere proposing new crypto that are literally clone of other crypto
So what? If you don't want to use a fork, then don't use it. This is how open source works. Anyone can take your code and create a company around it.
>Tell me, what is the difference between Polkadot and Kusama ? Or is there even a significant technological difference between Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc ?
How about you look up the differences yourself. Not everyone agrees with what design decisions get made so forks are created that are free to make different decisions.
I would like to argue that the difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash isn't even a technological one. Every dunce can increase the block size. It's purely a political/social difference. It's laughable that cryptocurrencies market themselves as avoiding government control but yet they suffer from the exact same problems.
Our (blockchain-adjacent) company received millions in equity investment in the form of stablecoin transfers. Those investors were so heavily “in” crypto, that they didn’t have any liquidity of useful size in any actual fiat currency, so they wouldn’t have been able to invest in us in “real money.” We only got those investments by being willing to accept stablecoins.
Compounding that advantage, there were no exchange fees at any point during the transaction for accepting investments from foreign holders (as they were already holding USDC—where a foreign investor would find it a lot harder to hold actual USD in their local banks); and there were only minimal, flat transfer fees (i.e. gas) to get the whole investment done, as opposed to the percentile fees charged for international wire transfers. I would say that that was a pretty useful use-case for stablecoins.
Of course, when we received these stablecoin investments, we gradually offramped them for actual fiat money. What were we going to do, pay our employees in stablecoins? And at that point we had to pay exchange fees, because we aren’t even a US company ourselves, and so we were off-ramping for our own local currency, not USD. (Though this was cheaper than expected, as we directly off-ramped the USDC to our local currency through a provider that kept liquidity in our local currency. We never needed to get the regular banking infrastructure involved until the final step—depositing fiat money already denominated in our local currency, into our local banks.)
But just because we didn’t have a reason to keep/spend the original stablecoins, doesn’t mean it wasn’t useful for the asset to remain in stablecoin form until it reached us. It was certainly more useful to our investors to hold USDC than to hold fiat currency.
> Tell me, what is the difference between Polkadot and Kusama ? Or is there even a significant technological difference between Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc ?
Is there a significant technological difference between the central banks of the US, India, China, Canada, Japan, the UK, etc.? Not really. The difference is that different countries are running them, and those countries are effectively different “political technologies.” The choice comes down to the relative merits of the political technology driving the progress and decision-making in the monetary technology.
In this sense, it’s sort of like if there’s a single open-source project that was originally BSD/MIT-licensed, that has been forked a bunch of times, with each fork replacing that license with something else and establishing a separate “structure” to its maintainership (e.g. one fork being an Apache Software Foundation project; one fork being a reference implementation governed by an enterprise “open-membership” body; one fork being GPLed, run by a BDFL who accepts PRs, but is very opinionated, and suggests you fork their fork if you want to go a different way; etc.) Those are all different “political technologies” driving the same project forward in different directions!
But you are right, there are way too many attempts at new networks and currencies, when we need to be consolidating around the best of those and building up the application layer. I think there are huge opportunities for people who create the killer apps for crypto.
> Instead, we need an approach for the average Joe developer to create their idea within the Ethereum ecosystem without the need for hardcore unproven technologies.
So instead of fixing the actual problem, Ethereum scalability, we will do what? This technology was developed by a few guys, most of them already left. It was meant to fix Bitcoin "smart contracts" (there is a such thing).
Tech behind Ethereum is outdated. Even newer versions rehash the same broken idea with sharding. We got 10 years and billions poured into consensus research. There are actual papers and universities doing this stuff. There are github projects that do stuff like decentralized auctions, mixers...
IMO, there's a middle ground we can go between slow PoW on L1 and scaleability. I think that it can be done by having tools that give us the same guarantees like deploying a smart contract on the main chain. It's difficult to explain: But what I want is Plasma but as a framework to develop dapps.
This project is going that route: https://github.com/hoytech/quadrable
Honestly, I see no use for Ethereum (or other Turing Complete L1s) looking forward — smart contracts can be purely peer-to-peer, with the only pressure applied to L1 being dispute resolution. By pushing complex contracts up into Layer 2, we can keep the dangerous, money-destroying, theft-enabling Turing machines away from the main chain.
[0]: https://fabric.pub
For the same reason that a startup with duct-tape code, scrambling to scale is better than a startup with no genuine demand.
Well Eth 2.0 is applying the latest and the greatest in Crypto research to a real coin.
In terms of scalabliltiy Ethereum is already way past bitcoin slow transaction rates.
Eth2 isn't a different currency, it's a replacement system that links with Eth1 to provide continuity. The ETH coins are not being replaced; both systems transact in ETH and are linked. That's why they are being careful with how it's evolved and how the economic links and incentives, and smart contracts and data sources, are set up in the transition.
There are many changes being implemented through this evolution. From PoW to PoS, single chain to cross-linked sharding (while managing the incentives to maintain the integrity of the network), various improvements to faster synchronisation, lower storage requirements, distributed storage of the state.
Being able to release v2, v3, v4 of software while staying compatible with all the work you did using v1 is a good thing. Same idea with evolving Ethereum.
Contrast it with the numerous new coin networks that use newer cryptographic ideas but each start their own separate networks. That's also evolution, but they don't provide continuity in the same way; instead they are a series of competing products.
I think your feelings are perfectly valid and you should listen to yourself, but also realize that you'd do best in not generalizing it to be anything but personal.
...And from someone who was deep into Ethereum tech starting 2014-2015, I recently got surprisingly really hooked again on Bitcoin. Lightning is fun and addictive, and it feels like we're close to some kind of watershed there.
Hopefully you'll find something new to be excited about soon (or take a break from it all, sometimes that's what we need as well).
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The reason I'm fed up with Ethereum right now is mostly the "defi" hype where it's mostly anything but decentralized in any way if you look just a bit closer. This goes for pretty much all the projects with significant traction today. So many corners are cut just to be able to ride the wave of the hype train. "The admin with full control is only until we are out of beta, for safety", "The centralized coordinator on AWS will be replaced with a gossip protocol by V2", "The owner multisig will be replaced by a DAO", "the project leads will do all the coordination for now" and other BS rationalizations all completely antithetical to the ideology.
One major strength of Ethereum for many years have been the community. Recently I feel like greed has taken over.
It took so many years for Ethereum 2 to be deployed, and even now it's deployed it's a weak shell of what it should have been.
An argument against that could be that it's simply a hard problem to solve, but then the question becomes if they've solved any other easier problems, and it seems to me like they haven't.
This is their page on smart contracts, arguably the only justification for Ethereum's existance:
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/smart-contracts/lang...
It not only still mentions Solidity, a language which is one of the worst mistakes in IT history, it lists it as the first choice in a set of 2 options, of which the latter is only marginally superior to it. This was acceptable in 2017, a year after the realization of how huge a fuckup Solidity is, since a year might be a short time for a language to be developed and matured enough, but it's now 2021, 5 years later!
It makes me feel Ethereum just isn't managed adequately, despite being a multi-billion dollar operation.
It seems that the Ethereum core development community puts overly high value on cleverness and not nearly enough on hardcore engineering fundamentals.
With hindsight, it seems pretty naive to make the early core devs multimillionaires, then expect them to do anything except retire.
I don't see any evidence of this being true.
NFTs aren’t exclusively art. For example, I previously worked at https://unlock-protocol.com/ which uses NFTs to signify membership
But...
Right now, Etheriums soaring 'gas' prices are basically freezing new entrants into the market. The cost of 'minting' a token on the blockchain right now - say an image or animation on rarible.com, is enormous. Worse, the gas cost of purchasing an NFT can be triple the sale price. It's the equivalent of a varying, unpredictable rate of VAT in the hundreds of percent. This is having a knock on effect on all the NFT markets. Maybe it can be solved by Etherium 2.0, but right now Ether isn't fit for purpose for NFTs. Tying the cost of smart contract 'gas' to the value of the digital currency made this inevitable.
Article you linked the artists issue is that he couldn't find a market for his art. Which kind of misses the point.
"Then I asked around if anyone wanted to buy it. The boys in the groupchat weren't interested. Neither were any of my twitter followers. Damn."
Sure you could get lucky with being early into a highly speculative market, but by and large this is like patreon or kickstarter or anything else online. If there's a potential market for what you're making or doing, it's a new (and potentially lucrative) way to tap into it. It doesn't generate a new demand for work that doesn't have (or can't generate) an audience on its own. NFTs aren't a form of advertising, certainly not a particularly effective one.
Also the artist initially used Zora (which I've never heard of), rather than Rarible or Opensea, or Mintable or Snark or any of the better known open markets.
On rarible he set his royalties to 25% (rather than the usual 10%) which obviously discourages speculative investment. He also set the cost of his first art piece to 1 ETH! Crazy high for an unknown artist.
The article kind of seems like a snarky joke, but if it is one I'm not sure what the punchline is, given he really did spend the money and really does seem to want to sell the NFTs. I think it's more likely a case of irony employed as a defence mechanism.
We have someone who self confesses he doesn't understand the market, making a remix piece quickly and half assedly, selling it at a high rate across multiple markets, without an audience or any interest in what is popular there. I mean I get it, who wants to miss the gold rush? But it's not a useful barometer of NFTs.
Currently all the real money is being made by selective services who primarily work with digital artists who have an existing following, or make work they think will reach an audience - sites like niftygateway.com or superrare.co
The work that's selling well is generally excellent. And sure, there is something inherently ridiculous in the idea of 'owning' a piece of digital art. But no more so that owning a numbered print or piece of video art by a renowned artist, or hell a cardigan owned by Kurt Cobain. All of which have real, established and ongoing value.
NFT for gaming is going to be huge industry eg pro-gamers could sell their character skins same way now eg basketball players sell their jerseys or you could import that Hearthstone deck to complete new game.
How would this work in a way that takes gas/fees into consideration?
For the second: Just go with gumroad or Paypal or whatnot.
Your points just prove, that there's no need for blockchain after all.
But yeah, it would be nice if you could set a fixed amount per button, like 10 Cent for an article or something like that.
There's this story from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26196027
I'm not sure whether it's a good sign or a bad sign. On one hand it shows NFTs being serious because there's a huge ($500+k) transaction behind it. On the other hand it shows how frothy the market is given how someone just dropped $500k for a few hundred bits.
Art is probably the worst use-case for NFT. NFT work well for memberships, tickets, virtual land in games, etc. For art, not so much.
It doesn't solve ownership: any one else can "own" the same piece of art, it's only the NFT that is unique. It doesn't solve scarcity: the author can make more copies and wrap them into other NFTs. It doesn't solve authenticity: any one can wrap existing art into an NFT and sell it.
Basically the only thing NFT art solve is anteriority and possibly authorship: you can prove that you made a piece of art before a certain date, and that you published it first.
I think the author is equating ethereum with stable coins?
Isn't that SEPA? Or Paypal?
I read both "Digital Gold" by Nathaniel Popper about the early days of Bitcoin and "The Infinite Machine" by Camila Russo about the inception of Ethereum and the difference between the early sentiment in those two projects is striking.
Bitcoin came from a cypherpunk background and was very anti establishment whereas Ethereum seems to have been setup and conducted like a startup company. There was much more money involved starting the latter project.
I can relate to the sentiment of the author though, money sucks the fun out of many things. But finance is at the heart of both projects, so it's too be expected that they get more professional and more business-like while they grow.
It certainly isn't useful as "the world computer" or whatever: have you seen gwei lately??
Having worked on large Ethereum smart contracts (running a decentralized auction on chain) over two years, I fully agree with this. Ethereum needs better smart contract languages, better compilers and better dev tooling.
As our smart contract written in Vyper (for ease of auditing) grew larger and larger, eventually we failed to deploy on the testnet, and closer inspection reveal that the compiler was blowing up code size which I had to patch[0]. Down the line upstream further increased gas costs by emitting code that zeroed out every member of an array (note the EVM already has all memory set to 0). To support efficient insertion/deletion of bids we had to handroll a skip list on the blockchain(!), because there are no Vyper libraries.
On the language development side, things don't look too pretty either, I ended up having to write an EVM assembler from scratch[1], but deeper still are problems such as a lack of a separate call stack in EVM, so procedure calls always end up clunky and implementation-dependent. LLVM to EVM[2] is still experimental, so anyone who is writing a compiler will have to write codegen from scratch.
Perhaps eWASM will alleviate some of these concerns. But until then, the entire dev process for writing smart contracts is painful.
[0] https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper/pull/1488
[1] https://github.com/ActorForth/evm-assembler/blob/master/docs...
Solidity also matured a lot, which is why Uniswap v2 moved back. If you find yourself writing an EVM assembler from scratch, and you're trying to build something other than a compiler, you have veered way way off course, and need to re-evaluate your system architecture.
Feature creep might work well if you're trying to leech money from a government contract or something, or being paid by line of code you contribute, but it's fatal in the Ethereum world. I consulted for a number of projects that made the exact same mistake, and most of them aren't around anymore.
[1] https://github.com/Uniswap/uniswap-v1/tree/master/contracts
The goal of the project was to make the auction as transparent as possible, doesn't that imply moving as much of the logic on chain as possible?
> If you find yourself writing an EVM assembler from scratch, and you're trying to build something other than a compiler, you have veered way way off course, and need to re-evaluate your system architecture.
This was a different project aimed at implementing a new smart contract language. Didn't take off internally though because of shift in direction.
Not really. Unsure of the specifics of the project that you were working on, but a standard auction house type interface shouldn't be that much code. You have listings, and bids. A listing should only be a timestamp for when the listing was placed, a timestamp for when the listing should end, maybe a minimum bid, and then a hash pointing to IPFS with all the less relevant meta-details. Bids would just be a price and a timestamp, though the timestamp probabally isn't even needed. You could just keep a record of the highest bid in the listing itself, and any time a new bid comes in, refund the previous bid to the previous highest bidder, and lock the current bid, so bids don't even need to allocate any new memory.
If you really really need on-chain arbitration, you can do it with a simple ownership contract for starters, then switch over to a governance contract as the arbitration needs become more complex for whatever reason.
The only reason it's this expensive is that there's enough capital willing to pay the price.
1. The contract in questions is doing a lot more on chain logic than it should be doing.
2. The network is currently incredibly active, pushing up the average gas cost per transaction.
3. The price of Ethereum itself, in which gas price is denominated, has risen about 10x in the past few months.
Usually the prices die down in a couple weeks, but if there is concern that people are being priced out of the network for an extended period of time, miners will raise the global gas limit, and things will rapidly go back to "normal".
The thing is though, people are paying the high fees. This chart has a really great breakdown of where all the fees have been going to in the past 30 days: https://ethgasstation.info/
People run nodes when they need them. Decentralization is a function of fees and node costs, not just node costs. Right now deploying a large contract costs more than a good gaming pc while a node to verify blocks can be a pi with a ssd for a small fraction of the cost. As a result normal people just stay away - fees too high decrease decentralization regardless of node costs. The opposite would make much more sense: few dollars for deployment, gaming pc for nodes. More people would actually run nodes in this scenario.
As long as a node only requires a high end pc rather than a server in a datacenter the network can stay decentralized. Even current (very underinvested) geth could handle 50M blocks, which would provide relief until rollups get going and prevent activity from relocating elsewhere.
This is the most dangerous, with the danger completely self-imposed, time for ethereum ever. Maybe everything works out and rollups release soon enough, but the risk calculus is completely bonkers.
Simple answer - no, it does not.
That's pretty absolutist. So, if one's right, that makes you all wrong?
IMO, if you are going to write a smart-contract or "invest" in crypto, you should have an extremely good reason to do it anywhere but ETH/BTC.
The price and value of the chain give an signal of security.
You can illuminate your home cheaply with electricity or expensively with candles. Yet the lower priced version is more effective.
Technology advances. Technology is a means to an end. Examine the merits of the technology to determine if it provides utility to help you achieve the ends you desire.
Unfortunately the majority of people investing just want to make a buck more than they care about the tech involved.
That's when you realise this has more to do with money, than tech.
I have had more fun learning about finance and creating indices than I have ever had coding on ethereum.
The ethereum foundation should focus far far far more in tools implementation
I originally got into it for the technical aspects of mining being interesting. Then all the speculators came in, then I realized that (perhaps due to my Psych major) I was pretty good at predicting local price maxima, but then after a time that felt too much like stealing from the dumber, which is not a vibe that brings happiness to me, so I got out of it. I'd rather use my intelligence to produce value by coding.
Call me crazy, but I'd bet on the "under" here.
"high gas fees are ruining ethereum for me. Other people need to quit using it for things that I personally don't get value from, to free up block space. Or the devs need to scale capacity. I'm a dev, but I don't like contributing to projects which have grown as large as ethereum, or I don't want to do that work. Somebody else please do it for me."
Sure, there's truth to it. And if the author reflected more before writing their rant, maybe they could have gotten to some interesting ideas worth discussing:
- How do you design a base layer which is general enough to do all the things author enjoys doing with Ethereum? - How do you make this base layer capable of scaling as more people want to use it?
These are the existential questions that blockchains like Ethereum have been facing for years. Ethereum has some paths forward: rollups and sharding, and there's a lot of active work on both of these right now. Maybe there's room for useful discussion around why these are taking relatively long to ship, and how can we ship them faster or avoid hitting these same limitations in the future?
But I feel like these discussions are already happening, every day in this space and in a hundred different forums. There are hundreds of people all working to address the author's pain points across dozens of different projects. These things are being worked on. It just takes time. Nothing happens overnight.
My take away from dabbling in Ethereum land is that Ethereans, and crypto folks in general, got their values mixed up. They hold decentralization to the highest standard above all else. But upon close inspection, virtually nothing in the Ethereum ecosystem actually lives up to the standard of decentralization. The kinds of decentralization you see are very superficial and largely seem to be intended to dodge regulation above all else (which I have no problem with, but we need to be honest with ourselves).
After using the tech, you realize that whats really valuable about these systems is open APIs for value exchange, permissionlessness, and censorship resistance. The decentralization is not a value add. It is a hedge against counter-party risk. And that is important, especially as we go head first into an increasingly dystopic looking global financial system. But teasing apart these different aspects gives you a much better idea of what to focus on if you want to build the next generation of blockchain technology.
Why is Monero useless? Is because of transaction fee too high?
I feel like there's a project that already solves most of ethereum problems now, but it's been slept on for a while.
The more I've read about Stacks, the more I like it. But I haven't done a deep dive into Algorand. Do you know offhand how they differ / what they're going for?
Hit the nail on the head - for now.
Yes, DeFi is what kicked things off last year and people can now trade their favourite altcoins, borrow crypto, and even leverage trade on decentralized exchanges. It's also true that what everyone is trading are mostly other coins and other projects that they're speculating on - and those projects are just newer forms of the same projects that exist now.
We've seen countless projects pop up that are all copies or trying to do similar things; increase throughput, connect blockchains, provide oracles, implement faster and cheaper smart contracts, etc.
So, it's easy to look at all this cynically, but I like to hope that eventually this will end up somewhere good - I mean, there is financial incentive, there is the 'new toy' angle, and there are countless talented people who are genuinely curious and trying to improve the various crypto ecosystems.
I guess we'll see where this all ends up in 5-10 years.
But sure, it's all taking very long.
It seems much of Tim's arguments revolve around the expense of transactions. But what about building on Nano if the cost on etherium is too high? Or any other lower cost alternatives? I'll admit, I have no idea what the transaction cost on Polkadot is, but there are lots of other interesting projects.
I agree with Tim's disappointment that the cost has risen to the point where it is likely hindering experimentation, which is probably what the crypto space still requires, but if that is the problem, let's focus on that.
> it is one of the Ethereum applications that have provided to me the most concrete value.
I did actually buy some DOT on Kraken today though. Because that also looks like an amazing project. And in the end, everything is basically a popularity contest. So regardless of technicals, momentum, or anything else, Ethereum could actually become completely uncool in X months or years. And PolkaDOT or something no one knows about could be what everyone uses. Maybe after WWIII its the digitual yuan for a few years.. but then the superintelligent robots take over a few years later and everyone has to use metashekels or whatever that human brains can't even comprehend.
libp2p looks really useful by the way.
Can you name a few? I don't know much about this space, just curious
Yes, sure: Avalanche [1], Algorand [2], Solana [3], DFINITY [4], Conflux [5]
Ethereum should focus on innovation (desperately) whilst other smart people and entrepreneurs should be working layers on top of ethereum so its more accessable to people like us.
That died right about the time when it was going to cost me ~$135 in fees to mint the artwork[1]. While I followed through and completed the one artwork, most of the successful artworks are a series of collections.
Minting those was prohibitively expensive at the time of writing.
My prediction is that it will go the way of internet in that a set of orgs that are transparent will form the centralized structure to scale it at live-able terms and scaling.
Does that mean pure P2P is not a scalable solve-able solution?
It's a 5 systems level problem which means it takes more time, money, and sacrifice than people think to reach a discoverable solution.
IMHO
The Sydney Ethereum meetup I started in 2014 suddenly jumped in numbers and became full of wankers in suits wanting to discuss the price, wanting to apply the tech inside financial institutions and explore new regulations.
2017 was worrying. 2018 solidified that Ethereum was merely going to serve the interests of the established financial apparatus.
There's no revolution or cryptoanarchy here; only power grabs and new oligarchies.
One would think so, but people in the space are calling each other "degens", one of the best Ethereum devs joked about "testing in production", and for the past year there have been dozens of +1M USD hacks in the space.
So yeah, projects are already launching based on zk-rollups and other complex cryptography without "serious cryptographic specialist by their side".
All the fun of the ETH network with none of the crazy fees and high barrier of entry.
Not trying to shill anything. I missed the boat on early Ethereum and never got a chance to really experiment with the network. I've been doing that with cheapETH and its been a great learning experience.
Given that we are more than ever moving toward a centalised society where corporations have an increasingly tightened grip over the people, decentalised technologies are in my opinion a glimmer of technological hope.
The advantage of ethereum over zeronet is it support more flexible verification (via smart contract) while zeronet mainly verify by signature without customizable logics.
Any solidity dev that can give us some feedback of what it's like to work full time on this platform? P
Long answers:
- "linking libraries" between FE and blockchains are constantly broken, have _a_lot_ of undefined behaviours, and their error codes are few and totally opaque to what's really happening. Bonus part: they also change fast, a lot, and mostly with breaking changes. See web3.js and ether.js issues if you wanna cry
- you mostly will have to use third party services like infura or web browser plugins like metamask to get a working user experience but it will be an extremely poor user experience. We currently use metamask and we had a lot of problems with it, and also it randomly fails making ofc the whole app unresponsive if you don't code defensively of this behaviour. Did I also said they frequently update it deprecating methods and behaviours they suggested just some releases ago? Yeah, enjoy.
- solidity is the standard language to write contracts and it is literally the worst language I ever used, with a lot of undefined behaviours I encounter daily. I cannot count the times I had to spend a dozen of hours to find information in obscure blogposts or issues about "hey don't use this language construct with this evm version while passing this type of parameter or the compiler will put a sort-of-nop instead of what you really want". You better create an internal wiki or you'll lose track of what you have to know to avoid to shoot yourself in the foot constantly.
- The tools around solidity (Eg the whole Truffle suite) are full of major and minor bugs, will fail on you without explicitly telling why and the documentation is basically not existent. The remix ide is barely passable but you have to use a bunch of disconnected plugins to get something useful. The plugins for common ides (webstorm) or text editor (vscode) are useless at the moment of writing.
I'll be honest, I am still working on these dapps just because I believe in the team I am in. If it was for the current state of the technology and the relative constant feeling of burnout I am accumulating, I would have RUN away months ago and moved to a corp job in a super ""boring"" stack (currently thinking about going the .netcore route).
I already develop Mamba (https://mamba.black). It's like Truffle but for Python instead of JavaScript.
We'll see how it goes.
I even knew a few non-techies acquaintances that almost got roped into it (in the figure of thousands of USD) with the same pyramid scheme manipulation techniques and terminology.
Are you familiar with "The Island, The Ocean and the Pond" presentation by Charles Hoskinson?
Or mainstream is what kills actually kills it?
I also like the idea of forming a treasury from a cut of the transaction fees to fund proposals for future projects from within the community as Cardano and Polkadot have done.
Agreed. Their mitigation approach is somewhat interesting as well though (dynamic PoW [1]). Thanks to the independent nature of the blocks, signing difficulty of the transactions can be raised and lowered dynamically making spam incrementally more expensive for the spammers.
[1] https://medium.com/nanocurrency/dynamic-proof-of-work-priori...
The speed comes from the fact that spends from A to B can be processed independently of spends from C to D. So all independent transactions occur in parallel (and as you can imagine most transactions are independent).
Every block addition is voted on by all participating nodes, and they vote as quickly as possible, so they're limited by internet bandwidth/latency, as well public/private key signature verification and generation. Most transactions complete within less than a second.
New blocks do need a PoW signature, but these are much much smaller than other PoW signatures. Additionally, they are usually generated by the account performing the transaction, so they will typically run on your phone or browser wallet app.
Finally, the entire system was feeless from inception. That's just a design decision. I guess people run nodes because they want the whole thing to live.
[1] https://github.com/cheapETH/go-ethereum/commit/412c38434d8d8...
If I even have to think about using npm or javascript to join the new hipster cult, I'm out. These tools are not up to snuff.
C'mon crypto guys, give us systems programmers the libs we need. Javascript is OUT. Your fancy DSL is OUT. Go C/C++ native, or GTFO ...
As someone who 5 years ago refused to learn JavaScript and was firmly in your camp, I don’t really see an “up to snuff” argument to be made anymore. All languages have quirks and JavaScript definitely has them, but it’s not alone in that regard, especially comparing to C/C++/Go. Besides, you don’t want a systems programming language to write code that runs in the EVM, or when running others untrusted code.
Use the right tool for the right job.
This is a fallacy argument. Because other users it, doens't mean its good.
It’s single threaded, but again, right tool for the right job.
It doesn’t affect my argument that it is a thriving ecosystem that has made it worth much more than the negative sentiment it has received in the past, and that it is not a bad choice.
Collective adoption of a technology doesn't make it 'good'. It makes it 'available'. Those things are not always equivalent.
There aren't any good reasons to avoid producing viable C/C++ libraries to implement this kind of technology - only developer complacency and laziness.
Want me to adopt your new fintech? Let me embed it in ANY app I might write, not just the browser, not just cli-Javascript ..
Or is it something else?
I don't think the decision to use Javascript for this kind of functionality was wise, or practical. The cyclomatic complexity of managing a web-installable javascript codebase compared to a C/C++ module is just too damn high.
I don't think memory-safety issues are the killer app for Ethereum. The lack of C/C++ is one of the best things about the Ethereum ecosystem.
Besides which, you're never going to convince me that Javascript/NPM have fewer issues with leaks and holes than a well engineered C/C++ lib would. I mean, come on ..
Memory issues are still the source of the biggest and best bugs. I have no doubt I can find huge security issues in your native code.
While I certainly concur with your perspective, the context is, C/C++ vs. Javascript. You have so many low hanging fruit in the npm eco-system, you'd be a fool wasting time on my code. Which, incidentally, is protecting millions of peoples lives in 40 countries, while they commute to work every single day... its not exactly the kind of stuff that teenagers unpack for use in searching strings for things ..
Finance code should be much, much better tested than the Javascript eco-system allows. There is no reason not to write finance/cryptocurrency code with the same vigor as transportation safety modules. You're totally right that, if my C/C++ codebase were treated the same way as the average Javascript module, you'd be having a field day.
But, done properly, you'd have your job cut out for you. And thats exactly what I'm asking for, from those building 'next generation finance software': get it to SIL-4.
0x9a31DDDC8ddD0949a4Ee6aA6c297e5f517E62d59
Especially in 2009 and 2010 before bitcoin proved it could have value, but even up to about 2016, a lot of people still seemed to be attracted due to the fun.
And a lot of those people ended up in leadership positions.
you can pre-purchase gas when gas prices are low and use it when gas prices are high like now
there are a lot of currently advanced ways to use Ethereum, and all EVMs
The EVM is the thing to learn, being aware of the decentralization ideology is a nice to have and really irrelevant
(which is hilarious argument to have with Ethereum bulls regarding other less secured EVMs because the bitcoiners and no-coiners and general Ethereum detractors don't even consider Ethereum decentralized)