Solana Labs completes a $314M private token sale led by Andreessen Horowitz
solana.com
solana.com
What we want: reflective [2], specific, difference-based [3] responses, coming from slower cognitive processes like absorbing new information and thinking about it. That's what produces a discussion which hasn't been had before, and those are the curious discussions. They may be less exciting in the sensational-indignant way, but that sort of excitement is not the curiosity which HN exists for [4], and we all know it gets boring after a while. Scorched earth is not interesting [5].
p.s. I know nothing and have no opinion about the topic of the story; I just know HN threads and can spot a brewing disaster when I see one. The last 700 (let's say) cryptocurrency-related threads have all been the same flamewar. That's enough of those; we're ready to move to the next exercise now.
Edit: well done everyone! Much better.
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Does contentiousness indicate a passing fad, a long-term paradigm shift, or is it an independent property?
Argument - Monty Python https://youtu.be/ohDB5gbtaEQ
Out of curiosity, is that accurate? Do you need to prewarn of flamewars and clickbait more often than previously?
1) ETH bulls say that Solana is not really decentralized. It achieves scalability by limiting the network to only a handful of validators; why not just use AWS at that point? Why are they wrong?
2) ETH bulls say that security of a proof-of-stake is driven by total coin market cap; the more cap, the more expensive an attack. This makes ETH more secure than Solana. ETH has an unbreakable first mover advantage for this reason, they say.
3) ETH bulls say that ETH plus Polygon (or similar level two solution) is just as scalable as solana, while retaining the above two advantages of ETH. Why is that wrong?
Also, what a confusing choice of words. A distributed system is BFT (or not BFT) regardless of whether or not the underlying message broadcast medium is synchronous/asynchronous, or reliable/unreliable. The "network conditions" being "stable" have no bearing on the voters' ability to reach agreement -- that's solely a function of whether or not f or fewer votes are malicious out of 3f + 1 votes.
Your second paragraph is false also. Different BFT systems have different assumptions. Some work in asynchronous settings, some work in semi-synchronous settings, etc.
Even if you manage to acquire a 51% hash rate for example (which is extremely difficult), it'll be very difficult to keep it over a long enough period of time.
PoS is fundamentally broken in my opinion, it literally says "rich gets richer" and wealthy stakers will get higher (absolute) rewards which they don't have any incentive to sell since they didn't spend any energy to get it. That's even ignoring all the custodians which have large quantities of the said crypto, so they can just keep the rewards to themselves or keep a sizeable % of it.
One of the motivations for the DAO hack hardfork btw was that the attacker would hold significant power under a PoS system.
Same with PoS, you can stake with a pool if you have less than 32eth, but your returns on that are not going to be comparable to what large holders get (same percentage, but very tiny in absolute numbers).
Also worth pointing out, high APRs aren't guaranteed and the network fees are supposed to be significantly decreased post EIP-1559. Also, for those who don't meet 32 eth threshold, there's good chance they are not even remotely close to that threshold.
As for the 32 ETH threshold, if you don't meet it, you can stake through a pool instead, and even a decentralized pool.
At the same time, because of this, you don’t really get finality in Bitcoin. You get some assurance that your transaction is “confirmed” after a number of block but you’re never really sure. In proof of stake you can have consensus protocols with true finality, meaning that there’ll be no forks for sure if a threshold of participants remained honest.
We cannot an-cap our way to a classless society anyways, people. PoS is unquestionably the lesser evil of the two.
PoS is simply worse from every angle and it’s also not cheaper because MR=MC.
This is a big statement without an argument to back it up.
> PoS is simply worse from every angle and it’s also not cheaper because MR=MC.
The difference is that MC in PoS is mainly interest costs, while in PoW it's energy and hardware.
> MC in PoS is mainly interest costs
no, it's also costs of fighting (via politics, marketing and hacking) for that initial pre-mined stake.
it's not cheaper than PoW and has worse security properties due to all sorts of attacks - long range, grinding, etc. ultimately it's flawed because unlike in PoW there is no universally objective measure of geniuneness of a chain (the "work" in PoW).
>>no, it's also costs of fighting (via politics, marketing and hacking) for that initial pre-mined stake.
There is no fight if there was a transition from PoW to PoS, and thus no premine, or if the premine was distributed via an open crowdsale, with revenue allocated to a non-profit foundation.
Your analysis makes too many tenuous assumptions to push one side of the debate.
the market doesn't have enough liquidity for you to gain a meaningful stake and those that organized the pre-mine scam will always remain in control. or they will sell you the stake for exorbitant price and perform a long-range attack against you because they still hold the original keys.
Eth is going through transition and yet it’s the largest pre-mine scam in existence.
Crowd sales are just pre-mines.
Non-profit is just pre-mine beneficiary that people will fight for control over.
And you conveniently ignored all the other problems with PoS: long range and grinding attacks, no ability to reduce power of malicious staker, no universal objective measure for which chain is genuine so you have to rely on third parties, etc.
This is unsupported. There are billions of dollars worth of ETH sold every day. If you intended to hold what you bought, the liquidity would gradually go down as you took what was bought off the market, but you could certainly acquire a significant share of the stake.
>>Non-profit is just pre-mine beneficiary that people will fight for control over.
That assumes zero altuistic oversight from ETH stakeholders at large deterring attempts to corrupt the grant issuing process, which is not a sensible assumption.
>>And you conveniently ignored all the other problems with PoS
Long-range attack is addressed with dependence on weak subjectivity:
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-lov...
The rest of your criticisms have similarly been addressed in state of the art Proof of Stake protocols, in particular for ETH 2.0 PoS.
not nearly enough to purchase a meaningful stake that could protect you from premine scammers that launched the project. not to mention - you'd be giving up your money for their benefit. double rekt.
> zero altuistic oversight from ETH stakeholders at large deterring attempts to corrupt the grant issuing process, which is not a sensible assumption
ah, nice, a system that simply relies on altruistic motives of premine scammers that will be in control and largest beneficiaries of those staking grants. what could possibly go wrong.
> Long-range attack is addressed with dependence on weak subjectivity: ... The rest of your criticisms have similarly been addressed in state of the art Proof of Stake protocols
it's not addressed, it's just partly waved away and partly obfuscated in a non-solutions like slashing or checkpointing.
pos still doesn't work, pow is the only known decentralized and trustless consensus reaching protocol.
There is no need for any protection. Proof of stake doesn't enable stakers to attack non-stakers. Nor would stakers have any incentive to.
Moreover, there was absolutely no scam in the premine. It was publicly announced, and the majority of it was distributed via a programmatic crowdsale.
This characterization of yours is simply an emotional attack.
>>you'd be giving up your money for their benefit. double rekt.
Same with any currency. You provide something of value to acquire some currency. This applies to dealing with early adopters of other currencies, early investors in companies, etc.
This is simply a bad-faith criticism of proof-of-stake that is equally applicable to anything else, unless you make the tortured argument that a publicly announced crowdsale and dev grant is somehow a "scam", and therefore there is some distinct quality about buying currency from those who acquired their stake through a premine over acquiring it through some other method.
>>ah, nice, a system that simply relies on altruistic motives of premine scammers
How can any one can take ETH's critics seriously when you make blatantly libelous accusations that participating in an open premine crowd makes someone a scammer.
yes it does. it allows stakers to prevent non-stakers from becoming stakers. all rewards go to stakers. rich get richer even faster.
> there was absolutely no scam in the premine. It was publicly announced, and the majority of it was distributed via a programmatic crowdsale.
public announcement means nothing if participation is permissioned. there was 12% blatant premine and 60% so called "pre-sale", of which undisclosed amount went to scammers that organized it and didn't have to pay anything.
> applies to dealing with early adopters of other currencies
this doesn't apply to BTC which literally anybody could mine without asking approval and permission. ETH is just another scam.
> dev grant is somehow a "scam"
of course it is.
> open premine crowd
well, at least you used the right word to describe it - premine. any crypto premine is a scam by definition. some of those scams just manage to bamboozle enough people to stay afloat longer and get a chance to scam even more.
good job shifting conversation away from discussing PoS flaws into complaining about randoms on internet being rude to scammers.
No it doesn't. As I already explained, there is no practical way holders can collude to force all holders of the currency to not sell. There will always be significant liquidity for any currency that has as wide a distribution of holders that Ethereum does.
>>public announcement means nothing if participation is permissioned.
The crowdsale was not permissioned. It was completely programmatic.
>>there was 12% blatant premine
Which was publicly disclosed compensation for the developers who created Ethereum, as well as an allocation for grants to further develop Ethereum.
>>and 60% so called "pre-sale", of which undisclosed amount went to scammers that organized it and didn't have to pay anything.
This allegation of the pre-sale being a scam is totally unsubstantiated. It's irresponsible character assassination.
>>randoms on internet being rude to scammers.
The credibility of avowed critics of Ethereum, who make totally unsubstantiated allegations of the organizers of Ethereum's crowdsale of being scammers, is relevant to these discussions.
Moreover, your criticism is not relevant to PoS. It's specifically critical of Ethereum, since Ethereum had a premine and crowdsale. PoS doesn't have to have either. So once again, your analysis seems entirely biased and agenda-driven.
PoS is absolutely driven by rich and helps rich get richer faster than everybody else. If I get 10% stake - I get 10% of any future issuance, meaning my stake can never go below 10%, so my power in the system never dilutes even though I literally don’t have to do anything anymore. Miners in PoW have to participate in mining and their power can get diluted by anyone by simply getting more hardware online.
PoS doesn’t work.
There isn’t a cap on validators so you can’t buy up a fixed percentage of the network. More people can always join. You will be diluted over time unless you choose to reinvest(same as mining).
As we reduce the hardware costs and energy usage costs it becomes easier to participate in the network (especially via pools, same as mining but much much cheaper).
Being able to run a validator on a solar powered raspberry pi is a great improvement to making participation in the network accessible. We should see the exact opposite of what you suggest, anyone who wants to participate not having energy or hardware restrictions should make it less Matthew-effect-like.
PoS increases both the cost of a direct attack on the network as reorganised/51s are more expensive to perform with slashing mechanisms in place, and also removes the threats of supply line disruption by either nation states or cartels forming to control the flow of the hardware.
PoS is great.
you can during a pre-sale or pre-mine event
> More people can always join
joininng as validator means convincing another validator to reduce their stake (sell it to you), which is a form of permission.
> You will be diluted over time unless you choose to reinvest
you can't be diluted if you don't sell you stake and continue staking. that's just by definition how PoS works.
> PoS increases both the cost of a direct attack on the network as reorganised/51s are more expensive to perform with slashing mechanisms in place, and also removes the threats of supply line disruption by either nation states or cartels forming to control the flow of the hardware.
nope, literally none of it is true.
slashing mechanisms only obfuscate the attack, they don't make it more expensive. in fact they reduce security by virtue of piling more and more rules that require more and more code, which inevitably contains bugs.
threats of supply chain attacks are much less scary than threats of long range attacks from hacked / overtaken private keys of early / current validators.
producing more hardware to counter an attack might be expensive and early iterations of hardware can be inefficient, but at least nobody can stop you from producing it. as i've already explained - if somebody gets a stake in pos system, there is nothing you can do to reduce it.
pos simply doesn't work. it's been known a decade before pow and was just never considered seriously because it's not trustless and permissionless.
My understanding is that Polygon supports roll ups.
If you try to run an unlicensed exchange without KYC on AWS, you will get shut down pretty quick.
I think the government will look at Solana and say its too complicated to shut down.
That wouldn't really work for Bitcoin or other PoW coins. They could shut down big mines and new ones would pop up. Of course they could instead invest a lot in both seizing mines and building their own and 51% the network... that's always a risk and any large enough nation state could do it.
If so, where is the line of what they will / won't remove? I fear we get into a Facebook like situation where nobody is happy where that line is drawn. Could legitimate projects be shut down because a government has deemed them illegal because they aren't complying with regulations?
Well potentially if enough validators forked the chain before the material was added and were able to build a longer chain than the one with the classified material, but even then it would be pointless as the previous chain still exists and will have been distributed to every node.
The question is, why would they want to remove it? Solana is a global blockchain, not a US government entity. If they were to abide by US government requests, it would be only fair to also abide by the requests of other governments - but what if North Korea wanted information removed? As you said, where do we draw the line over what is a "valid" request?
And more importantly, who draws the line? There is no single Solana entity, it is a group of validators who would decide this. Achieving consensus on something like this would never happen, especially among a group of people who are trying to be resistant to government censorship.
The next step in cryptocurrency technology is to decentralize the exchanges themselves. Ideally it should be impossible to shut them down, regulate them or even understand what's going on. Governments will either give up or become tyrants in the process of fighting increasingly subversive technology. We'll find their limits.
While requirements are quite high (few $k hardware) it's also possible to rent dedicated hardware for 100/200 a month. Somewhat more accessible.
Or use a managed staking provider (ankr or the likes) to set it up for you.
There was also some incentives from Solana to support new people setting up validators on their own and ensure they stay online for a long time.
AWS is quite expensive, for this, given the compensation you get from validating transactions.
Hetzner is quite popular, it was 15% of capacity at some point, not sure now.
I don’t think it’s as simple as ‘eth or solana.’ I suspect that multiple chains will be useful for different applications.
For example, games which want super low latency will want a solution like solana. Even polygon slows down today and their usage numbers aren’t huge.
Solana has the fastest and cheapest transactions. That makes it my choice when it comes to defi apps.
I’m holding all 3 but I do think Solana has a great community and strong developer support.
I think the concern about centralization of the Solana chain is a real one. I don’t know what to say about the coin distribution in general and frankly that is my biggest concern with Sol. But in regards to validator centralization, I wonder how many validators would be required to assuage these concerns. Thousands? Tens of thousands? Currently there are 632 validators on mainnet Solana with the largest stake holding I see close to 5% (1). Compare that to the ETH mining pools where the top two pools almost have a majority of mining hashrate (2). I’m not trying to make a “whatabout” argument, just pointing out the relative decentralization in comparison to current Eth network.
With regards to the eth2 network, the comparison is a bit more straightforward. If we do a calc of the market cap / #ofvalidators, Sol has about 16M$ market cap per validator. I see 172,920 Eth2 validator deposits (3) so if the Merge happened right now, each validator would represent about 1.7M$ (=300B / 172920). So in this highly oversimplified model, Eth2 has about 10x as many validators as Sol.
This of course means nothing about real world outcomes as you could imagine large staking pools forming and the situation looking more like the BTC or ETH PoW chains with a few large groups dominating either Sol or Eth2
Anyway, for me, that’s actually kind of reassuring. Solana wants to push out more validators but block times are so fast that growing the network has some real technical challenges. If they can overcome those challenges, they’ll be reasonably decentralized with regards to the number of validators, at least compared to ETH.
1. https://solanabeach.io/validators 2. https://etherscan.io/stat/miner?range=7&blocktype=blocks 3. https://etherscan.io/txsBeaconDeposit?ps=50&sort=depositvalu...
2) ETH will be more secure than Solana! Solana requires both higher bandwidth and a beefy machine[1] to run a validator node. https://solanabeach.io/validators
3) Polygon is both less scalable & controlled by a multi-sig(less decentralized) which is also similar to BSC. Polygon is based on EVM, Solana is BPF/Rust based with some unique set of optimizations like Sealevel[2] which enables parallel processing.
[1] https://docs.solana.com/running-validator/validator-reqs
[2] https://medium.com/solana-labs/sealevel-parallel-processing-...
- ability for the system to run entirely in people's home. Anything that requires datacenters can be easily regulated.
- distributed holdings with no entity holding more than few percent at most.
Solana fails on both, most egregiously on the latter. Only 4.3% of coins were even offered in a public sale. The idea that defi can run on a chain controlled entirely by few VCs is ridiculous. Even Libra would be preferable with their Swiss based Libra Association.
https://icodrops.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Solano-token...
What does it matter if solana labs validators run the financial system rather than JP Morgan? Neither are democratic or exist to serve the public. At least with Bitcoin or other PoW systems anyone can participate in the network...
DeFi is necessary because currently only 0.1% of the world has access to the financial tools on Wall Street, and the current financial game is heavily rigged by those with money and power. By open sourcing the process and allowing everyone to partake everyone in the world gets access to massive financial markets and can build interesting products using loans, derivatives, options, futures etc. They also get to play the part of the bank and earn money providing liquidity to trading pools, loans, short-sellers etc.
On the other side, few of the "financial tools" of Wall Street depend on technology. The reason Goldman or some financier can raise a bond to finance something is not related to technology, it's again about trust. Which can't be decentralised. It can perhaps be crowdsourced I suppose.
As to options, futures and other derivates (ha) very few people have any use for them, and that single digit percentage of the population most definitely have no trouble getting a bank account.
Speaking of bank accounts, why do some people in the third world lack them? It's not because of limited bank technology. This "banking the unbanked" argument is heard all the time, but I've never seen any concrete explanations.
Really think hard about what a multi trillion dollar worldwide financial system will mean and you'll see so many new possibilities open up.
For example, how do you start a company to insure farmers in Kenya today? You have to find a large company with a large pool of money available who ALSO has to think investing in farmers in Kenya is a good idea AND is willing to put in the effort to work with you to set this up. This is almost impossible to find, so this is a startup that most likely won't succeed.
Now in 2040, there is a global decentralized insurance marketplace. On this marketplace you can describe the type of insurance you require (perhaps insurance against lack of rain, perhaps cyclone insurance) and put it online. People and companies from all over the world can look at the request, run the numbers, and invest in your project.
Not everyone will be using these tools, but when everyone has access to them startups all over the world can flourish by building real products for real people using this liquidity as their backend.
1. Pooling risk 2. Knowing the customer
By pooling millions of clients they lower the volatility and thereby achieve a sort of risk/reward arbitrage compared to the customer. Insuring a single individual without diversifying the risk doesn’t work, you need the pooling. You also need to know the customer, so you can assess the risk, in order to properly price it, and avoid scammers.
It seems you are proposing a system where both of these are eliminated.
It might be possible to build something, but I have yet to see any convincing attempt. Actually, I haven’t seen any concrete outline how it would even work in theory, only hand waving.
Do you have any suggestions at all?
Btw, what you described not only doesn’t make sense because of my two points above, it isn’t really decentralized, and it doesn’t need crypto.
https://etherisc.com/ is working on many different forms of decentralized insurance atm.
I feel this vision defeats the whole purpose of defi. The Kenyan farmer still needs to sign up with a centralized insurance provider. The insurance provider also now needs to overcollaterize their loans...and at that point why not just cut out the middleman defi pool and use that capital to run as any traditional insurance provider would?
In any scenario you still need a company to vet/insure the farmer.
If I look at my own circle, the people who are vocal proponents of crypto are always invested (which makes a lot of sense) but are often also not generally very informed. They are often people who have spent next to no time investing in traditional markets, nor have they actually read up on any of the technologies beyond promotional white papers.
These people think (and maybe they're right, some clearly were) that this is their chance to be part of a great recalibration, a wealth transfer from the rich to the average. They often aren't even aware that the bulk of the rise in market Cap is beneficial to people like the Winklevoss twins in case of BTC or private investors in case of Solana. If this news even reaches them it'll be in the form of: "the token sale was very successful, which proofs that this technology is going to win the market, so you should invest too!.
Who knows what will happen though, maybe we're just blind to a technology that'll eat the world.
Unfortunately I’ve got my day job to perform and my side projects I really enjoy have nothing to do with crypto.
Programs can be stored on the blockchain. They're written in, of all things, Berkeley Packet Filter bytecode. (No, they don't run inside the Linux kernel. I hope.) Programs can be written in Rust and compiled. How secure this will turn out to be for their "smart contracts" is an open question at this time.
So far, I can't find any working applications for Solana that do something outside the crypto space. Like, say, replacing domain registrars. There's some kind of identity service, but it seems to be tied to Twitter. There's The Media Network, but it doesn't work yet. ("The Media Network is an open source, decentralized and censorship-resistant live streaming hosting protocol. More coming soon.")
Not seeing "AirBnB for Solana", or "Uber for Solana", or "offshore realty for Solana", or even "concert ticket scalping for Solana". This is a problem. It doesn't really do anything yet.
You mean ethereum right?
This remains a fundamental problem with crypto: we're 13 years in and the only practical use cases remain speculation and money laundering. Even DeFi seems to consistent mostly of navel gazing (crypto derivatives etc) and leverage.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/philippsandner/2020/12/02/will-...
Does the oracle problem still apply?
No, it isn’t. There are some pilot projects but more have been abandoned than completed. And you don’t need blockchain for this.
So, for those of us on the outside, DeFi just looks like a bunch of crypto enthusiasts finding exotic new ways to gamble with each other. It's neat and all, but I don't see how it ever really affects the rest of us.
The whole point is that you now have interoperability between many projects and their tokens, data, stablecoins, etc.
that's pretty much what I meant by
> crypto enthusiasts finding exotic new ways to gamble with each other
Interoprability between cryptos is all DeFi can do. What's the other use case? If I said, "I was going to do X, but thanks to the power of DeFi it makes sense to pay the fees and absorb the volatility risk to do it on a blockchain", what's X?
I don't know what kind of remittances you think I'm in a bubble for being unaware of. The best way to explain would be to actually answer my question: what's the non-crypto use case that can be solved better with defi than without it?
Do they though? I recently did the math and people mostly seem to use crypto markets for what you described. Only about 10% of Bitcoin transactions actually have any blockchain involvement, the rest is all handled internally by markets. And that 10% was on a good day, there are many days when that number is much lower.
Depends on how you define bitcoin transaction. The majority of BTC <> USD transactions (or any other currency) has no involvement of the blockchain at all. They happen purely within the databases of the markets.
> the same could be said about nearly any financial instrument
Well, that's kind of my point. People say that Bitcoin, the technology, is being used for lots of transactions already. However, most BTC, the cryptocurrency, transactions don't use the Bitcoin blockchain at all. They use the same basic technology that traditional banks and markets use. So where's the value add in the blockchain if it isn't being used?
Different banks and financial services use different protocols, some instant some deferred, to interoperate.
Tons of people said the internet was a fad too and where are we now? It’s ok if you don’t get it, you will, or your kids will. The main point of crypto is that traditional finance is insanely bad ux. It’s just not internet native and never will be because of the entrenched forces.
Crypto is internet native money and we’re not going back.
FWIW, I was into crypto during the previous peak, and transferring it around involved copy-pasting strings of gibberish and sacrificing chickens to the gods so I wouldn't mess up and nuke it all. As far as I can tell things have gotten worse, not better, since.
Crypto is a big space and there's a lot of variety, but yes. Not that many banks where I am offer effectively free and quick transfers with the ease of scanning a QR code, which I have done with crypto.
Even better is the experience of using ripple on keybase chat, which is far superior to anything I've seen offered by a bank in my area.
Sure, some cryptocurrencies are more painful, but that's not a necessary characteristic of the whole space, and perhaps even more important - we can innovate in the crypto space more easily than we can innovate in the traditional payments space.
Actually traditional banking has got a lot better at payments recently, and I think it's to some extent because they realize that they need to compete.
2. In poor countries where monthly phone bills or lack of banking is an issue they often have prepaid.
3. Almost every adult in the world has a phone, you don’t even need a smartphone for some of these payment systems.
4. If you’re a poor Kenyan farmer that has been using your phone to pay anonymously for over a decade, I highly doubt you care that you need “permission” from Safaricom to do it.
So no, I really really don’t see the point. And I am someone that raised (a tiny amount of) seed money for a crypto based money transfer system for Africa in 2012. There could be improvements on the margins but there’s really no disruptive advantage to it being “decentralised”.
Registering phone numbers with the state is the global standard for a majority of humans, so don’t give me that “I don’t have to register”. Try that in China, Brazil, India, etc. With permissionless systems, as long as I have an internet connection, I can send and receive money.
If you don’t see this value, I’m sorry.
You are arguing for a state run centralized closed system of monetary control, and I am arguing for a non-state open monetary system in which anyone can participate. Do you understand how vastly different these two things are?
I'm not "arguing" for anything, I'm just stating the fact that you can already transfer money peer to peer, and it isn't controlled by "the state" just because in some countries your phone number has to be registered. Or are you saying they also register each transfer?
How would your "permissionless" money transfer system work, do you have any ideas or is it just slogans?
And if you don't want to use a phone, you would presumably need a computer. That seems less inclusive, not more.
I know I’m rare in my beliefs and paranoid understanding of geopolitics. Phones and cellular networks are not technologies to liberate the soul, no, far from it.
By 2000, E-commerce was huge.[1]
This is a textbook example of a "gray swan".
Economy has a risk-free rate of return, that of 1-year treasuries, at 0.05% currently. Anything above that involves risk. A rate of return of 7%/year means there's 7%-0.05% chance of the instrument being worthless after one year, ~14% chance of it losing half its value, ~28% chance of it losing a quarter of it's value, etc. There's no free lunch, and there's no financial arbitrage
However you can't add any metadata to non fungible tokens at present (some dev told me on discord that this feature was coming very soon), which limits its usefulness. Also a reliable and user friendly marketplace for Solana tokens is still lacking (startup opportunity for someone?)
The disruptive potential of the internet was clear even as we sat on dial-up connections, crypto is way past that point but still hasn't produced anything useful. Making ETH a bit better will not fundamentally change that.
It's totally marketing. "Our PoS is so novel it deserves it's own name."
https://tokens-economy.gitbook.io/consensus/chain-based-proo...
https://medium.com/solana-labs/proof-of-history-explained-by...
I agree it doesn’t seem very decentralized at the moment (not many validators and most support coming from the foundation) but that may change if the platform is able to scale.
Solana’s approach to PoS + PoH + optimistic confirmation allows it to scale to an order of magnitude higher throughput than typical PoW blockchains while - they claim - retaining a degree of security & decentralization superior to a PoW mechanism were it to be scaled to the same network throughput (via block size/time adjustments). This is what makes it novel - if their marketing & whitepaper is to be believed.
Obviously, Solana’s throughput is achieved at the expense of security & decentralization compared to say ETH, but I suspect a PoW blockchain with nodes tuned to support 50K tps would not work at all.
so neither in theory nor practice, PoW has nothing to do with throughput, it's all just scammy marketing to sell you shitcoins. And in this case - extremely centralized, extremely censorable, extremely shady shitcoin.
In PoW, each event that is to be published must be accompanied by the hash of the previous event in the sequence. In PoH, the same is true. In PoW, you trust that the chain of events is correct, because work has to be put in to generate each hash, as there are conditions on the digest prefix which determine the difficulty. With PoH… Um… I’m sure I must have missed something, but there’s no inherent reason to trust any chain. It’s just a sequence of hashes, with no difficulty requirement. The actual trust in a certain chain comes from an unrelated proof of stake system, I guess. Very weird, I’d appreciate if anyone could help me get some clarity on this.
It seems similar to how NANO works. I still don't know why it's called proof of history.
As I understand PoH, blocks are instead continually proposed, but block producers are rate-limited by having to show completion of an operation similar to a verifiable delay function. Therefore, block producers avoid having to all compete for the same slot in the blockchain and duplicate lots of work. This is actually a novel Sybil control mechanism that is more efficient than standard PoW/PoS. It's somewhat analogous to the difference between a dedicated communication channel (as in landline phones) and a packet-switched communication channel (as in the internet).
The catch is that the PoH operation approximates a verifiable delay function, but is not currently proven to be equivalent to one. So there's the possibility of a black swan event where someone discovers a clever way to speed up the PoH operation, allowing them to cheaply control the network. Another knock against Solana is that although it has innovated in transaction efficiency, its token distribution/crypto-economics may be less "fair" than competitor blockchains. Please correct me if you spot any mistakes.
It's not novel, it's PoW with a different name. The "verifiable delay function" is hashing, which you can speed up by using faster GPUs or ASICs. Doesn't that sound familiar?
PoW (Proofs of Work)
PoSW (Proofs of Sequential Work)
VDF (Verifiable Delay Function)
PoET (Proof of Elapsed Time)PoET (Proof of Elapsed Time) works differently, there you basically running a sleep or a timer inside an Intel SGX secure enclave, so you have to trust Intel, and also need to hope that there are no security vulnerabilities there.
When used for leader selection, VDF’s offer a substantial improvement over verifiable random functions. Instead of requiring a non-colluding honest majority, VDF-based leader selection only requires the presence of any honest participant. This added robustness is due to the fact that no amount of parallelism will speed up the VDF, and any non-malicious actor can easily verify anyone else’s claimed VDF output is accurate. [1]
[1] https://blog.trailofbits.com/2018/10/12/introduction-to-veri...
how is that different from one miner finding a valid signature faster than the other?
and how is that not parallelization?
Bitcoin miners can parallelize because it's a search problem, so they can probe multiple different candidates simultaneously.
That said, VDF isn't a drop in replacement for Bitcoin style POW. VDF just gives you the ability to say (provably, so no one can cheat) "everyone has to do a 10 minute serialized computation before launching a (parallelizable) POW hash search" so we don't use all the world's available electricity just for mining.
Except it’s going to be worse because VDF is the centralizing factor, it’s like having bitcoin where constructing a block takes really long time. The actor that finishes first has the advantage to start PoW and will win disproportionate amount of blocks by revealing their data at the last possible moment, preferably when or just before another actor publishes their “worse” PoW.
PoSW is a subset of PoW. To say "PoW can be parallelized" isn't necessarily true.
https://lsmod.medium.com/what-makes-solana-the-fastest-publi...
There does seem to be some regulatory testing going on here.
Were they able to segment investments, so that only non-US investor money flowed into the sale? Does having US-based VC organizations participate create a nexus for the SEC to have authority?
It will be interesting to follow the legalities of this, so perhaps others can model the sale and use to successfully float new tokens without scrutiny by the SEC.
Or does the "Duck Rule" not apply to this sale? What say you Gary Gensler?
Here is a quick google search for "Solana Reg D" showing the one from 2018
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1735643/000173564318...
> It will be interesting to follow the legalities of this, so perhaps others can model the sale and use to successfully float new tokens without scrutiny by the SEC.
This has never been an issue. The only issue the SEC has ever had was with token transactions that did not file any regulatory exemption and sold to unaccredited investors. Many people want clarity about the ability to still do that.
Finally, the SEC regulates transactions not assets. The irony is that some transactions create perpetual securities where all transactions of that type of asset is always a securities transaction to the point where the distinction is not useful. But this is important to understand when you are trying to do a securities transaction for something that is not intended to be a security and how the SEC will react. Being deemed a perpetual security is untenable for crypto assets because there had not been liquid places to trade crypto securities and every centralized user needs to be a registered broker dealer (lol). A transaction itself can be a securities transaction while the ensuing asset is not. The SEC has never had an issue with that reality and hasn't penalized anyone for this kind of conversion.
Cheers
Tokens often have dividend (through staking and different risk taking model than shares) and voting rights. You have way less legal protection.
Because the system, e.g. Solana, is decentralised and all information is public (in the optimal case), there is less need for information and litigation rights. All market participants can have, more of less, the same information.
Most of the information related to the value of a share is part of the "real world" and has nothing to do with who owns how much of what.
ICOs aren't really like raising equity, it's more like buying coupons for a service before it exists, in the hope that the service will be extremely popular so that the value of the coupons skyrockets.
It's no different than Nike selling $300 million of shoes to a sneaker flipping hedge fund.
It works, everyone agrees, everyone's liquid, they like liquidity. Everyone spends a fraction of the same amount on marketing and gets to attempt selling the product at a nice profit.
The development organization is still capitalized either way, and still owns a ton more shoes to sell whenever it wants.
Solana looks interesting given it’s high transaction throughput and novel PoH algorithm - assuming it can scale in a decentralized way beyond the support of its foundation.
Though, unfortunately it still seems quite challenging to run a Solana validator (which ultimately defines the health & decentralization of the chain). The current specs and docs are pretty daunting last I checked; hopefully that can be improved in time.
Edit:
I found this article to be a good introduction to the idea of PoH. It appears Solana is a mix of PoH (the novel high throughput validation mechanism) and PoS (used to incentivize validation and penalize negative behaviour).
https://lsmod.medium.com/what-makes-solana-the-fastest-publi...
Does PoH encourages the "excessive" use of hardware and energy like PoW or PoTaS (chia) does?
I'd be very interested in any solution which scales its resource usage with usability/throughput rather than token price.
(I'm probably missing the correct terms)
Just insane. Won't be playing with a lot of the new gen. coins with beer money :-P
The requirements seemed a bit extreme to say the least...
IMHO that's more than enough to provide robust decentralization. I can't speak to Solana's other claims but there seems to have been a ton of thought put into the scalability of the system.
Yeah - cuz no one hacked banks, cut fraudulent POs, or any of the other scams before crypto. It used to be said banks wouldn't report or prosecute hacks for fear losing public trust, so how common it was is speculation.
That was a cheap shot for an otherwise interesting post :-P
P.S. My favorite 'bank hack' was the coder that changed a banks interest calculations to deposit all the factions of pennies of calculated interest to accounts he controlled. Because it was less then a penny, the bank couldn't account for it and he had something like $4 million before he was caught. After that, we had to start using accumulator buckets for calcing the interest..
edit: s/would/wouldn't/
OP was probably referring to attacks such as ransomware, because if you don't have an anonymous way to receive payment, then there is less incentive to do the crime in the first place.
Probably the biggest factor in the recent ransomware attacks has been the 'hacking as a service' sites that have been popping up for everything from botnets to ransomware. You can literally sign up with services that provide all the code and infrastructure required!
edit: There wasn't really less incentive, there was just different types of hacking. like hacking a companies accounting system and creating a vendor account for yourself..so you got paid, automatically every month.
It seems that all (?) of them have moved to crypto only, though. Take that as you will.
Uhhhh, what? The coin that isn't used for anything besides speculation is the one you think isn't? How are you going to say that Ethereum, which beats bitcoin in most metrics and has tons of uses and potential is more speculative?
Speculation on Ethereum is becoming.. well speculation in general. You can speculate on near-anything at this point (commodities, synthetic stocks, crypto, nfts, prediction market outcomes etc.)
https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/103016/european-invest...
You can see a full list at https://defillama.com/
Also:
> biggest crypto hackathon
100, instead of 50 participants I’m sure.
Though I've been personally blown away by the quality of participants' competence in ethereum hackathons. Not sure if solana compares on this front.
It strikes me that a fundamental problem of bitcoin is that it's a deflationary currency, so there's no sense in spending coins if you can just hold them (other than to exit the volatility of the market), because the coin will likely be way more valuable if you just keep it. Whereas with traditional currency, you have an incentive to spend it, because a dollar today is worth more than it would be a year from now. Am I missing something there?
So it seems like as an actual replacement currency it can't work because buying things with it is a bad idea. Is solana different in this regard? It seems with other coins the value is in sending and receiving money based on real currency? Except that transaction happens somewhat publicly if you're not funneling different amounts through different wallets? I'm not trying to be glib, but I feel stumped on what I'd use cryptocurrency for other than a long hold investment or to buy something illegal. I know that's a common complaint, what I'm hoping for is someone to tell me where I am mistaken?
This has nothing to do with Solana or other similar technologies like Ethereum though. It’s like comparing gold to the internet. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s not even apples and oranges, it’s like apples and farari’s.
Staking SOL or ETH can yield money because you’re validating transactions, similar to mining, but without the high energy costs. These technologies are platforms.
So why buy SOL? Well, so you can stake, but also because it’s volatile like many crypto assets. You can make money trading it.
However, this is a different side to the market than the tech. The people actually building software on top of Solana that ideally helps drive the price of the token in the market. It’s not intended to be money. Most crypto currency’s aren’t.
Curious, why did you buy it if you will never sell it?
1.) as collateral. I’ve already taken out and paid off a loan using my BTC as collateral.
2.) to pass on to my children. I see Bitcoin as a generational asset. If we continue on the path we’ve been on the last 10 years, a single Bitcoin could be worth millions in 30 years.
What you’ve neglected to mention is altcoins of every stripe can’t accomplish anything whatsoever — be it running “smart contracts”, acting as a medium of exchange, or securing the value of assets built on top of them — if no one is willing to speculatively hold them as a store of value first.
Touting themselves as the “oil” or the “internet” to Bitcoin’s gold is a rhetorical strategy employed by altcoin promoters to bootstrap speculative value storage on the networks they’re invested in. Without speculative value storage, they have nothing, the blockchain halts, and no one can use it for anything.
It’s all a total confidence game to its very core, without exception, and it irks me to no end when people egregiously misrepresent this reality, particularly for financially motivated reasons.
Case in point: “It’s not intended to be money. Most crypto currency’s aren’t.”
The supply of bitcoin will increase until the year 2140 due to block rewards. Afterwards, the supply will be constant (equal to 21M btc).
A sibling comment compares btc to gold. Well, there are a lot more volatile assets than gold (fiat currencies included). The ratio of the price of gold to world GDP has been pretty constant over time, despite the value of gold at times also being derived from various fad uses.
There is a saying that "Engineering is finding the best compromises". You know about the Crypto Trilemma: Secure (S), Fast (F), Decentralized (D).
Think of it as you have 15 eggs (I show them with 0) and 3 baskets. For Bitcoin/ETH, it may look something like this:
S: 00000
F: 00000
D: 00000
When we say Fast, think of it as "fast for the transaction fee you spend". So a cheaper network is somewhat considered a faster one too. Bitcoin Cash was not happy with the speed of BTC, so they went with:
S: 00000
F: 0000000
D: 000
But not all these 3 are "perceived" equally. Usually people only see speed, so for a new blockchain to "look" impressive, it can do something like:
S: 0
F: 0000000000000
D: 0
EOS and XRP are examples of this approach. Basically, AWS with extra steps (not very decentralized). For EOS, everyone votes for iirc 12 nodes to do all the transaction processing until the next election.
Let's look at Solana's claim on "Proof Of History". Wondering why other networks did not do an update if it's a great idea. Looking at their dev docs, they introduce this concept of "Cluster", initiated by "Leaders" where "Validators" join them and and "Clients" send transactions to.
> [clusters] simply ignore the existence of the other. Transactions sent to the wrong one are quietly rejected.
So they are breaking down the blockchain into small Validator groups. You have to know which Cluster you want to contact. That's... a compromise. It's not even comparable with ETH or the internet where you have this massive pool of validators that all participate over the same network.
But ok, let's go with the compromise. Then the issues start to emerge. When there are clusters, what happens to the network hash rate? is it divided up? then someone can easily come in and 51% the clusters one by one? Well, they have to work around that. Let's see.
> Additional validators then register with any registered member of the cluster.
Ok, so, if I have a cluster where I know all the Validators, I can collude with them to just ignore any new Validators from coming in?
> A validator receives all entries from the leader and submits votes confirming those entries are valid... Clients send transactions to any validator's Transaction Processing Unit (TPU) port. If the node is in the validator role, it forwards the transaction to the designated leader.
If I'm the leader, can I censor a transaction coming from a Validator? Or perhaps I see a transaction that will move the market, can I sneak in a transaction in my own benefit before broadcasting that one to my validators?
This just kind of a bank.
On a more humane note, I listened to Solana's podcast and I am annoyed that they were dunking on ETH and acted so egotistically "we are new like electric car... people say we are so smart". The blockchain speed/scale limitations are just hard to solve the right way, it's disingenuous to discredit truly brilliant people for your own tech. So maybe I'm dismissive of something that's lying underneath. For what it's worth, Vitalik recently has talked about many of these limitations.
Still, good on Solana for providing legible documentation.
From a speculative standpoint these are good if you can sell into the hype cycle, but I've seen enough of them come and go that I wouldn't try to hold. Even a little bit of centralization sucks a lot of air out of the room.
No, the thing you quoted just says that devnet validators ignore transactions intended for mainnet and testnet.
> Ok, so, if I have a cluster where I know all the Validators, I can collude with them to just ignore any new Validators from coming in?
Yes, but "a cluster" is "the whole blockchain." This is analogous to saying that you know every Bitcoin miner or every Ethereum node.
> If I'm the leader, can I censor a transaction coming from a Validator? Or perhaps I see a transaction that will move the market, can I sneak in a transaction in my own benefit before broadcasting that one to my validators?
If you are a leader, you can censor transactions, and there will be another leader 2 seconds later. This is similar to the situation in literally every blockchain. In Ethereum today, miners are inserting transactions to extract value from traders. You can read about this here: http://mev.wiki/
> When two clusters share a common genesis block, they attempt to converge.
More importantly, the cluster is only 150 validators:
> A Solana cluster is capable of subsecond confirmation for up to 150 nodes with plans to scale up to hundreds of thousands of nodes.
This is not comparable to Mempool where it is in your best interest to broadcast a transaction across the network. Yes, everyone sees the mempool but it doesn't allow you to manipulate transaction order as long as the original sender has paid a high enough fee.
This is a situation analogous to conflicting chains during a bitcoin block reorg, made more complex by the fact that validators have opinions about which other validators they are in a cluster with.
> More importantly, the cluster is only 150 validators:
> > A Solana cluster is capable of subsecond confirmation for up to 150 nodes with plans to scale up to hundreds of thousands of nodes.
It's like 700 currently. Larger validator sets lead to logarithmically slower confirmations. At the time that doc was written, one point on that curve was (150 validators, 1 second) or so.
quite the assertion. how does the network guarantee its "cluster" nodes are "independently owned?"
the unsubstantiated assumption that the network will not centralize around one or two obfuscated influence cartels (assuming this isn't already the case from day 1) is _the_ fundamental genetic flaw in every blockchain premise.
https://www.algorand.com/resources/news/arrington-algo-growt...
You know the game's getting serious when the sharky VC's smell their new blood money in the water and start tossing around 9 figure stacks.
If this isn't a sign of a bubble I don't know what is.
"Is Ashton Kutcher's recent investment in Blekko an indicator of a technology bubble in Silicon Valley?"[1]
Turns out that no - 2011 wasn't a bubble in technology in Silicon Valley. For example Amazon stock price was around $200, and is now over $3000.
Blekko was later acquired by IBM.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Is-Ashton-Kutchers-recent-investment-i...
Cryptocurrencies must be stopped, there is absolutely NO benefit to having them.
We seen them all before, ransomware becoming rampant, massive waste of electricity and resources and now the pandora's box can't be closed quicker enough.
The externalities of cryptocurrencies include:
Massive carbon emissions. Funding "rogue states" such as North Korea and Iran. Tax evasion. Laundering the proceeds of crime, including the drug trade, theft and fraud, and armed robbery. An epidemic of ransomware. A wave of securities fraud targeting the greedy and vulnerable. Shortages of products including graphics cards, hard disks, and chips in general as limited fab capacity is diverted to mining ASICS. Abuse of free tiers of Web services. Noise pollution.
Just to pick on one issue, carbon emission is negligible (unless you talk about bitcoin).
Many people also rely on transfers of cryptocurrency. Just not you or your entourage.
And cryptocurrency mining consumes as much electricity annually as the country of Argentina. Country scale emissions is not at all negligible, particularly in light of catastrophic global warming.
The general public are even more oblivious to the tech, all they want. to know is 'How do I 100x my money? When is coin X going to the moon?'.
They all want the 'moon' more than the tech.
Solana uses proof of stake and does not have the energy consumption issue, or does not use graphics card. It is cost and energy efficient alternative for Bitcoin and other proof of work public blockchains.
More about the history of proof of stake here:
You expertly avoid all arguments except that Solana uses proof of stake. Who cares. Prox's point still stands: folks will continue to use blockchain-powered "pseudo-currencies" for illegal drugs, murder-for-hire, money laundering, ransomware, and speculation. No one's buying groceries with BTC.
This thread is not about BTC…
You can't be serious. Ad hoc cash transfers are regulated (can't bring more than $10k across borders without declaring, for example), supply is limited, and bills have literal serial numbers on them.
Yes, there are regulations to make it harder to carry out elicit business, but that doesn’t change history, nor does it invalidate the point I was trying to make.
On one hand, some cryptos (not Solana) are useful for illegal activities. On another, they’re also useful for privacy, censorship resistance, and financial freedom.
It’s no different than the argument against E2EE, but I’d rather live in a society with E2EE than without.
What is your point?
Because I am typing on a mobile.
Happy to answer later if you are genuinely curious and not just ranting.
This happens all the time with these projects most recently ICP (Internet Computer) and just one of the reasons why this is all a complete scam.
There is a name for this type of rinse and repeated scheme.
There is no reason why this can also happen to Solana, rendering cryptocurrencies even more worthless than real money.
Not a big fan of crypto, but this is one of the less convincing arguments against it—as the current situation where the US more or less gets to decide who are the rogue states, because of the global financial system’s dependency on the US dollar, doesn’t seem all that great.
For example, the US have ruled: “Saudi Arabia good, Iran bad” for a long time now. Since the signing of the nuclear treaty with Iran, the EU had been trying to normalise trade relations, but this has proven exceedingly complicated since the US pulled out, since most financial transactions at some point pass through a US based financial institution that are beholden to sanctions towards Iran.
I don’t think crypto is the ideal answer for this problem, I would prefer a financial system that can deal with multiple fiat currencies and has less reliance on the USD, but that won’t happen overnight.
cf https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-finance-idUSKBN29O1ZI
I’m 100% in agreement that some aspects of some crypto currencies are extremely problematic and should/must be stopped.
But generalizing all crypto the way this comment does is not helpful or constructive. Recognize the nuance, and be specific about the issues.
Also, every time a VC comes along and does this with cryptocurrencies, there is almost a guaranteed complete dump in the price coin, only hurting the general public.
You're so unbelievably short sighted about a tech innovation. There's more to crypto than bitcoin & greed is an unsolvable issue in humanity, not a crypto bug,
X is dangerous and must be stopped is not an argument. You need to articulate why it’s dangerous and exactly what you mean when you say that and when you say it must be stopped.
also, crypto is not going anywhere. If you cannot see that maybe you should start looking into it a bit deeper
Crypto advocates' ideas of problems in the financial system have no mapping to the issues that people working in real fintech and its consumers identify.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I absolutely don't mean to pick on you personally—it's a systemic problem. Also, threads are a co-creation of comments and upvotes, and reflexive upvotes are by far the bigger problem.
If you or anyone wants further explanation about what we are/aren't hoping for in HN threads, the following principles and the associated links should help:
Curiosity withers under repetition: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Generic discussion is not interesting, at least not on internet forums: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
We want reflective rather than reflexive conversation: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Diffs are what make an HN conversation interesting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Predictable/generic comments are internet noise. Reducing noise is good for signal/noise ratio.
I ask because if there's one thing I've noticed, it's that these people are unable to tell the difference between low quality arguments and low status arguments. Consistently.
I assume that’s what you mean by low status? Something that may be good, but isn’t of the status quo?
This is a much harder and rarely attacked or solved problem.
EDIT: it is all the harder when people like your sibling play the victim and say they are being oppressed. Which could be true for low status comments, but the oppressed/victim mindset/thinking is true across all quality of posts.
Everybody with ideological passions feels like their enemies always flag them off HN's front page and dominate HN in every other way too. This is not an accurate perception—it's produced by your passions. I don't mean that you're imagining the datapoints you see, but rather that you're filtering out the ones you don't see. Since there are more than enough datapoints to supply any perception, this creates von Neumann elephants (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and false feelings of generality (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
In your case the passions are clear from how you swoop in with guns blazing—"cabal of intersectionalists" and so on. The people with opposite passions—your enemies—are just as shocked and dismayed by what they imagine, which is that you dominate HN. I can give you endless examples, but if you're able to make do with a few dozen, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870. The striking thing, to the rest of us, is how closely you and your enemies resemble each other. The comments and rhetoric are isomorphic—they just have the sign bit flipped.
During the Stallman saga of a couple months ago, we were getting all sorts of "why are RMS stories all being flagged off the front page" (note that word all) in comments and emails, even after 30+ major threads about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713636. Similarly, during the George Floyd aftermath of a year ago, people were saying "any mention gets aggressively removed from discussion" (note that word any), even though it was the single most-discussed topic on HN by a long shot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624916. As I said at the time, when you're 10x bigger than Rust on HN, and someone calls that "aggressively removed from discussion", we seem to have left behind shared reality.
That is why I say that these perceptions are (a) inaccurate; (b) produced by political passions; and (c) isomorphic under ideological flippage.
The bias here is probably that you notice what you dislike and elide the rest (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If you felt differently, you'd notice a different set of stories getting flagged and overlook different ones remaining on the front page. The filters are in you. By "you" I don't mean you personally, of course. We all do this.
There's a serious discussion to be had about how flagging actually works on HN, and I've posted many answers about that too, but when the "question" is so ideologically driven, my experience is that it doesn't help much. For anyone who's interested, you can find some of the past explanations here:
We sometimes turn off flags when an article can support substantive discussion: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
For common topics, significant new information is generally needed: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
(See? More principles!)
I don't think that they're perfect, or that they're good for everything, but your statement is hyperbolic.
There isn't anything wrong with using existing secure and regulated methods (Paypal, Bank Transfer, etc), Cryptocurrencies claim to be decentralised when underneath they ARE still centralised and manipulated, especially Bitcoin.
I will only admit it has been a good run, but now it is time to for the regulators to step in.
You present a strong claim that they "ARE still centralized and manipulated, especially Bitcoin". Please present concrete evidence.
Before you argue about WU fees, Bitcoin's fees are no better than Western Union's, hence Transferwise.
> You present a strong claim that they "ARE still centralized and manipulated, especially Bitcoin". Please present concrete evidence.
Princeton University concluded in a study that the bitcoin network is 50% controlled by 5 of the 6 bitcoin mining companies [0] [1] so how is Bitcoin decentralised If it is becoming more centralised by mining organisations and if most of the hashing power is centralised in China?
That seems to be that means that Bitcoin isn't really decentralised then no?
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-31/bitcoin-s...
> Before you argue about WU fees, Bitcoin's fees are no better than Western Union's, hence Transferwise.
Early in a new technologies adoption there will be pain points. I consider we are still very early on. Work is actively being done to alleviate this.
Still waiting on your response for high-interest countries and the unbanked.
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-taproot-upgrade-dogecoin-te...
So even with concrete evidence, you still cannot even admit this fact that Bitcoin is currently centralised?
Maybe you should read about the 51% attack [0] and then come back to me and say with a straight face about Bitcoin being decentralised.
You mean the 'unbanked' can use digital wallets like M-Pesa and Paytm?
What's wrong with that?
[0] https://academy.binance.com/en/articles/what-is-a-51-percent...
By definition it isn’t centralized. Even in the current state.
Tell that to the Venezeulans who used bitcoin because their local currency is suffering from severe hyperinflation.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47553048
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/venezuela-bitcoin-story-puts-...
I've personally used bitcoin to send money between my brother and myself (he was in Australia at the time, I was in the EU) because it was both faster and cheaper than a bank transfer or western union.
You do realise Bitcoin is unable to scale with a large volume of transactions, grinding it to almost a complete halt.
So even if Bitcoin reaches critical mass, your brother will be waiting a very very long time to receive their funds, all with extremely high fees. Questioning the use of Bitcoin would start and by then the BTC price would have gone down had a mass sell off occurred.
Not hypothetical by the way, actually happened only months ago. [0]
So how is this better than Paypal or Western Union?
https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/massive-bitcoin-selling-sp...
Or are you 'just saying this' because...?
Since you claimed it's a solved problem, I am assuming these coins never had congestion issues which is why you chose them?
Please research the topic more, the Lightning Network solves this problem and is already being used with no issues in El Salvador.
Sounds like this is a huge issue in El Salvador [0].
Oh come on this is absolutely hyperbolic.
> They do way more harm than good.
Well that was quick. Can we start with the more nuanced position next time? Now we can analyse costs and benefits and perhaps learn something.
When you buy something at the store, the cashier doesn't question you how you got the money. They don't care. All they know is the currency is the proof that you did something, or sold something that other people valued.
Valuing a unique crypto hash is no more ridiculous than someone valuing a painting, old baseball cards, ancient pottery and all the other random stuff people collect and trade that are nothing more than a decoration.
Well, except crypto completely mobile, easy to exchange and can't be taken from you like all other the assets we have been exchanging since the beginning of time.
The main goal of bitcoin is to be a decentralised peer to peer cryptocurrency, it has completely failed in its original purpose to become that in 10 years.
And when more people realise how inefficient it is in terms of energy, transactions, fees and utility, the quicker the price will go down.
So it's pointless for me to use something like Cardano only for the price of it to fall because of Bitcoin rendering my holdings significantly less than what it was.
And don't get me started on Ethereum fees due to congestion and networks like Polygon going down all the time, doesn't seem advanced to me if congestion is still going on.
What coin has never been affected by bitcoin's volatility, except for stablecoins?
Do you truly believe this? Or is it tongue in cheek?
Crypto ain't going away. And nothing will stop it. It'll encroach on all industries long term. It's global open competitive darwinism playing out before our eyes.
No domain on earth is as open & competitive as crypto.
YES.