Remember when BTC used to be fun and exciting? Stupid projects being created, tipping widespread all over the internet. It was created to be a "peer-to-peer electronic cash system" (quoting from the whitepaper title)... oh how far it has strayed.
All of this moved over to Ethereum long ago but those outside of the crypto space might not know that. Thousands of hackers have created little neat experiments and projects for others to use and build on and more are released everyday.
Some of my favorites are https://dontbuymeme.com/, https://aavegotchi.com/, and https://quadraticvote.co/. There's too many to list (like the internet itself) but a lot of communities for specialized topics have formed such as art people flocking to NFTs, meme lovers creating self funding and self organized communities, and lots of cool governance tools for voting and organizations like https://daohaus.club/, https://colony.io/, and https://aragon.org/.
It really does feel like the early internet and I can barely keep up with all of the cool stuff being shipped.
Add to that experimental unpegged stablecoin projects[1], and you realize the dream of a "P2P electronic cash system" is alive and well. It's just being worked on by different groups than originally (because if you own a big bitcoin stash now, it's hard to resist the temptation of pushing the SoV/ponzi narrative).
i'll also add in https://clr.fund/ as its relevant to the bigger question of "how do we fund open source public goods" that might be relevant to hackernews readers.
> The continuously high Ethereum gas fees cause betting fees and operation costs to skyrocket. Hence, we decided to postpone the next race until further notice. We're currently working on a 2nd-layer scaling solution.
A shame that Ethereum gas fees are limiting enough to stop such a fun project.
But even then you could see that Bitcoin wouldn't scale. Most people couldn't run full nodes, block sizes were getting bigger and bigger. Bitcoin worked great when you had a few hundred thousand people using it but with 10s of millions it doesn't work well.
Can you elaborate on that? I checked few years ago and it was possible to run full node. What would prevent me from running full node right now?
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is 231 GB, the bitcoin chain is 381 GB.
Call of Duty + Red Dead Redemption 2 = bitcoin's entire chain.
This is about $6 USD of hard drive space. The throughput of bitcoin is about 1.5 -kilobytes- per second. At that speed reddit.com would take 36 minutes to load.
Also no it doesn't. It takes a fraction of a second on a single core for each block. It's 900KB for a full block. The only reason it would take a long time is a particular client using CPUs extremely inefficiently and leaving them idle most of the time.
Even a leftover smartphone from yesteryear should be capable of running a full node, as long as you scale storage appropriately.
I synced a full BTC node from scratch on budget hardware last week, took about 2 days total.
Meanwhile, a full tracing archive ETH node took >4 months on a dedicated 8c16t CPU, 64GiB DDR4 RAM and tiered NVMe + SATA SSD for the 8TiB.