Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, I hate everything about this future internet. Let's just have a world where every single Internet transaction involves burning absurd amounts of energy to perform proof-of-work. It'll be great. Yes, sure, sure, ETH is trying to move to something else less absurdly wasteful, get back to me when that's not being pushed back on by miners who're pissed they'll make less money if that happens.

Not only memes but individuals’ identities can become speculative assets via platforms like Clout Market and BitClout, which allow creators to mint themselves as NFTs.

I especially hate this part of it. Ye gods.

Oh and the part where the current web is dismissed as largely controlled by large corporate entities, with absolutely no words spared as to why the future all-crypto hellscape will be a perfect utopia inherently resistant to the sticky, hungry fingers of corporations, is a good part to hate too. We all thought "Internet 1.0" was going to be gloriously free forever, then corporations stepped in. "Internet 2.0" was gonna save us from them and now we just have new corporations mining our eyeballs for ad profits forever. "Web3 is decentralized and inherently monetized at its core through tokenization" - well that sure looks like a great place to build a middleman who provides part of that service, with their hands out for their take on both sides of every transaction, doesn't it? How much of every "art" "sale" on an NFT platform goes to the platform?

I'll stick to putting my stuff online for free and having enough folks supporting me on Patreon to pay my bills, thanks anyway.

> Yes, sure, sure, ETH is trying to move to something else less absurdly wasteful, get back to me when that's not being pushed back on by miners who're pissed they'll make less money if that happens.

ETH proof of stake is already live since December 1st, 2020, and it runs as a separate chain at the moment. There will be a "docking process" in which the state of the current proof of work chain will be moved to use this new chain's consensus algorithm. This cannot be stopped by miners. https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-2-0-beacon-chain-goes-live...

Maybe a stupid question: PoS means mining will make 0 money instead of a little less, right? Maybe you meant the pruning update, but I'm curious about later this summer. They're turning a 3-body problem of stakeholders (owners, users, and miners) into a 2-body problem (owners, users) which is owned either by early adoption or early wealth, from my amateur viewpoint. I'm not sure that this is a great thing long-term, but I also don't know what alternatives exist for Eth given that PoW has a lot of issues!

I do have a stake in mostly Eth but it is sized for fun.

You can use layer 2 technologies like state channels to boost the efficiency of the market, you don't need every single transaction to happen on-chain. Skynet is a platform that does this already - every upload and download makes between 30 and 300 crypto transactions, including downloads that are only fetching a few kilobytes of data.

It ends up being efficient enough to run at scale. Skynet currently has over 100,000 active users, and is doing something like 300,000,000 crypto transactions per month. This could easily scale another 100x without increasing the energy footprint of the system, and quite possibly 10,000x as well.

The promise of crypto isn't that there won't be any middlemen, it's that you'll be in control of your own relationship with the people you follow. Right now your relationship with the content creators you follow on YouTube is under the management of the YouTube platform itself. YouTube decides what counts as acceptable, what needs to be de-monetized, and what needs to be de-platformed. In the crypto world, those decisions are left in the hands of the content creators and their viewership, which imo creates a much healthier public grounds for free speech.

The best part is that it's all opt-in. If Patreon + YouTube is what works for you, then more power to you; there's no pressure to switch.

Why not just self host if the goal is to get off something like youtube? Not sure what crypto gets the creator other than the off chance the speculators cause it to surge and the creator with large holdings sees a huge payday. Even then, an opportunity for the creator to gamble is a poor argument, that coin might never bear much fruit compared to a bet that's more certain, like betting on the continued success of the global economy, which has managed to pay off even in a global pandemic.

Self hosting takes a large amount of effort and can't reach the same uptime guarantees that something like YouTube or Skynet can achieve.

There's nothing about gambling here, the crypto tokens are liquid, you can sell them as you receive them and get fair value for your content.

Are you referring to this Skynet? https://skynet.co/index.html

The parked website with an invalid SSL certificate?

Unlikely.

They probably mean Skynet by Sia[0], which is (according to their website):

> Decentralized Internet for a Free Future

> Skynet is a content and application hosting platform bringing decentralized storage to users, creators and app developers.

[0]: https://siasky.net/

I just draw comics and post them online. Youtube's not involved in any stage of this. I'm pretty much in control of my relationship with my followers without any blockchain already.

The differentiating factor here will ultimately be about quantifying how much energy is spent, and therefore how "official" such an interaction is. Less energy = very unofficial, a lot of energy = very official. This has a lot of implications, but also makes the quality of data much more apparent and therefore allows markets to openly buy and sell on such metrics. This is already done, but very opaquely and you're not being paid for it. In other words we're already burning energy to verify the quality of data in one form or another.

As an aside this also reflects how money is now arriving at a point where it's more closely reflecting its nature as a measure of stored energy. This also has interesting implications for organization, and how money is spent.

As a fellow human who says “ye gods” so much I have a keyboard shortcut for it, I just want to say how delighted I was to read someone else use the phrase. :)

I think I need to up my shortcut game, I just have shortcuts for shit like "the basic advice I have given out on the Illustrator subreddit several thousand times" and "my website". :)

Why not proof of stake?

PoS is drastically cheaper to do a 51% attack than PoW as the attack only costs the 51% cost of carry and insignificant transaction fees to enter and leave the position compared to having to organize the purchase of and rental fee for 51% of the hash rate for the target block time.

Then maybe crypto isn't actually a feasible technology. Just because people get a dopamine hit from the money they make off it doesn't mean it's good for society when your burning energy the size of a small country to do sub par amounts of transactions per minute.

I've seen crypto be used largely for flash money grabs and little else since the entire thing started and I'm largely convinced that until volatility, speed and energy consumption are fixed it will only remain in that realm until it's inevitably cracked down on by various governments.

Those are some pretty big issues to solve and personally I think ETH is poised with PoS to solve those issues, or so I've been led to believe, and offer utility in those every day transactions but I'm not holding my breath because of issues like that that you've pointed out and people who only view it to be used for that aforementioned money grabs.

When I've used crypto I've used ETH exclusively for my beliefs there, but I'm really not all that convinced this will ever be more than a novelty in current form.

I'm no expert in the field and I don't even generally follow crypto more than the passing news article, but this continues to be my general perception, especially when things like Doge are surging in value with really no discernable economic basis.

Let the crypto hoards now rain down upon me.

GP is wrong about the security of PoS. It is slightly less secure in favour of being more energy efficient, however it’s not that much more insecure.

https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000219ab540356cbb839cbe0... shows the current total value staked for ETH2 at about $10B USD (4M ETH); 51% is $5.1B USD (2M ETH) with around 115M ETH in existence. Aave has about 0.6M ETH available to loan out at 0.76% APR (https://app.aave.com/reserve-overview/ETH-0xc02aaa39b223fe8d...) This is about a 0.01% interest rate per hr (8760 compound periods per yr) https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/financial/periodi... Assuming the rest of the (1.4M) ETH to be staked could be obtained by loaning and converting from other staked Aave assets currently totaling at around $7.5B USD for the same rate and same period, then the interest fee for a 1 hr 2M ETH loan is: $5.1B USD * 0.0001 = $5(10)K USD. Over 50 hedge funds have the $6.375B USD or more in assets (https://www.pionline.com/interactive/largest-hedge-fund-mana...) that could provide for Aave's max LTV of 80% to borrow the $5.1B USD of ETH. Alternatively, a PoW attack on ETH assuming NiceHash, which currently only has 7% of the total ETH hash rate available, rates for 1 hr is ~$2M USD (https://www.crypto51.app note out of date figures). So, relatively the current ETH2 PoS attack cost is around 4 times smaller than the ETH PoW attack cost or an absolute difference of about $1.5M USD, which seems like a drastic difference in cost, but YMMV, especially considering your relationship with Cardano.

Another case considering the requirement that the existing 51% could not be loaned would require just over doubling the outstanding staked assets, which is more than Aave's current $7.5B available to loan, to a total staked ETH2 of $20B USD again assuming no previously controlled stake. But, assuming the same the interest rate, the fee for a 1 hr 4M ETH loan is: $10B USD * 0.0001 = $1M USD. Still, half the amount compared to the PoW.

https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

On the other hand PoS can provide protection against some 51% attacks, go read the Avalanche whitepapers. It can uphold safety (but not liveness) guarantees even when the attacker exceeds 51%.

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