Algorand – Fast, low fees and sustainable blockchain | Hacker News Reader

Algorand – Fast, low fees and sustainable blockchain

algorand.com

46 pointscapableweb85 comments

Surprisingly, Algorand hasn't come up on Hacker News a lot judging by (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), only finding one previous submission with comments:

- Algorand Consensus Protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24809391

A lot of critique against various blockchains seems solved with Algorand, including environmental damage, high fees for making transactions and slow block times. Thanks to the lightweight and cleverly designed consensus protocol, you can run nodes that participate in the consensus on just a Raspberry Pi if you want to.

On HN, the lack of enthusiasm for blockchain certainly has those factors.

It also has another factor that Algorand doesn't solve: no one has found a problem that blockchains uniquely solve (other than making cryptocurrencies).

There is debate about whether cryptocurrencies are useful or just a speculative market for gambling on useless digital assets, but even if you think cryptocurrencies are truly useful, Satoshi's underlying breakthrough isn't that novel or exciting anymore.

NFTs have created a global liquid permissionless marketplace for digital art.

This never existed before. Ever.

It created a market for something. I don’t think it was art though. Unless you consider the whole concept to be some kind of performance art.

You can consider whatever you like but eventually it will cross into reality denial. It’s a marketplace for digitally watermarked digital art.

Being anti-crypto like this is similar to being an anti-vaxxer for tech. You’re analysing everything through an ideological reality-confirmation bias instead of acting like a scientist and looking for the truth. You don’t want something to be true because you don’t like mRNA/Bill Gates or Bitcoin/Libertarians are at its origin.

Instead you should face the truth that this is a marketplace for digital art and that it works. Far simpler than concocting wild theories about 5G or NFTs being performance art.

It just works, it’s real and people are using it. Saying “NFTs have no value” is like saying “Bitcoin is not money”. It has been the equivalent of money for 10 years now, so when are you going to give it up?

I was very skeptical of ICOs a few years ago, and they now disappeared. Is was like a permissionless stock exchange. Is any of them still worth something?

The ICOs were mostly trash. That was obvious. But yes, Ethereum is still around that was ICO. Polkadot. Algorand. Lots of serious projects with interesting solutions.

You’re clearly out of the loop so. Just do more research.

There are still ICOs for instance there are auctions happening right now on Polkadot.

ICOs disappeared because the SEC stepped into what had been a kind of legal gray area and said “Lol, no. All of this is illegal.” They didn’t really go away on their own.

> ICOs disappeared because the SEC stepped into what had been a kind of legal gray area and said “Lol, no. All of this is illegal.”

This demonstrates that the blockchain promises of decentralization and avoidance of government is generally impossible in countries with functioning governments.

Oh yeah, a proper great power could snuff out Bitcoin, to say nothing of the smaller coins, if they put their mind to it.

If there's a real non-bubble use case, it will have to be around making a bad but much less expensive version of something that's already possible offline, but that requires lots of lawyers to set up.

I’d argue that the US government has done a great job at leaving crypto alone. SEC jumped on ICOs because they were scamming people left and right making promises that made the tokens securities.

ICOs still happen though - there’s coins getting launched almost every day. They just went the DEX route, and for some reason the SEC isn’t as active stopping them as in 2017. But they didn’t go away.

> It has been the equivalent of money for 10 years now

Can I buy my groceries with it? I haven't seen an option to pay my rent, either. What about my water bill?

I wouldn't exactly say it's the equivalent of money.

It's also deflationary, which means you'd be stupid to spend it as money if you had an inflationary asset (like, you know, actual money) to spend instead.

Depends on the crypto asset.

Yes — there are debit cards that will deduct from your crypto balance. These were traditionally not so helpful since crypto is volatile and each transaction incurred a capital gain/loss, but new cards can be backed by stable coins like USDC.

Also, can you pay your rent with Euros? Does that make it not money? That’s not a very principled definition.

> Also, can you pay your rent with Euros?

Uh, yes?

I mean, assuming the rent is for a place somewhere in the Eurozone, I imagine that's usually preferred.

I can’t do any of those things with Euros here in the states… does it make the Euro not money? Go down the equator and it’s an official currency

It’s wishful thinking that NFTs solve any real problem. For one, “digital watermarking” (if you can call it that) is useless without DRM.

They do provide another mechanism for signaling riches, so cryptocurrency holders, who tangibly profit from the inflow of money into the pyramid, are understandably all over them.

It’s wishful thinking to think that NFTs haven’t solved a problem considering tens of thousands of artists are using it and it’s changed a significant amount of lives in the space.

It’s getting to the point where saying “NFTs don’t work” is like saying “ebooks aren’t real books”. It’s just a philosophical position that ignores reality.

> It’s a marketplace for digitally watermarked digital art.

I think you deeply misunderstand how NFTs work, as most people seem to. They're not digitally watermarked.

The only thing you buy with an NFT is the watermark itself (so to speak). It's very similar to buying a trading card of a certain work of art. There is no ownership involved (digital or otherwise). You just get your "name" on a list of "owners" that is public and non-editable.

Among the problems with NFTs is that you can copy the art bit-for-bit. It's not like the Mona Lisa -- you can't take a real painting a copy molecules that are 300 years old.

Worse, you can also just copy the list of "owners"! You have no way of knowing if you "own" the "official" NFT or not.

You buy the right to sell that digital piece - others can copy as they please, but only the owner of the NFT can sell/transfer/destroy it (depending on the contract, of course). So it’s closer to a “deed” to a digital asset than a “watermark”. Digital art has always been copyable bit for bit, and that property will likely never change. You can’t compare it to a physical painting, and saying clonability invalidates something as art would also invalidate music, video, and any other fork of digital content.

You can’t “copy the list of owners” either, not sure where you got that from.

> You buy the right to sell that digital piece - others can copy as they please, but only the owner of the NFT can sell/transfer/destroy it (depending on the contract, of course).

You can copy the digital piece and distribute it as much as you want. An NFT is just a record on a blockchain saying that [wallet address] is the current owner of [URL]. It has absolutely nothing to do with ownership.

The creator of an NFT can legally create a contract saying "whoever the blockchain says owns [URL] is the owner of [piece of art]," but that is a minority of cases and it also depends on the legal system. Ownership relying on a legal system is not new and it doesn't require NFTs.

> saying clonability invalidates something as art would also invalidate music, video, and any other fork of digital content

I didn't say clonability invalidates something as art. I said clonability invalidates NFTs as a meaningful form of ownership in and of themselves.

> You can’t “copy the list of owners” either, not sure where you got that from.

You can sell an NFT of the Mona Lisa. I can also sell it. That means there are two NFT ownership records for Mona Lisa.

In fact, there can be infinite ownership records. The only way to tell that a certain ownership chain is the original is by checking timestamps, but that doesn't tell you anything about whether the original seller of the NFT is also the owner of the work of art.

This reminds me of the case with Simon Stålenhag—when he got hassled by token enthusiasts trying to convince him to join (to lend their space such direly needed credibility), and later found somebody else selling his art as on some NFT marketplace.

Direly needed credibility ? Not sure when what you’re describing happened. NFTs are in every major art auction house, major world art exhibit (Venice, Basel, etc)

In the art world NFTs are now ubiquitous.

Well, the reality is that token promoters came to Simon, not Simon to token promoters, so…

By the way, care to support with any links at all? So far these are empty words. Googling Venice NFT does not point to some reputable gallery adopting tokens, just a post from some cryptocurrency promoting media outlet about some token promoters who set up their own gallery on a beach.

https://fadmagazine.com/2021/11/18/nft-now-x-christies-prese...

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/11/09/tezos-brings-arti...

My bad for thinking NFTs were in Venice officially.

Here’s a good overview of what’s happening even though it’s an article critizing Frieze London - https://www.google.com/amp/s/decrypt.co/84466/london-nft-sce...

There was of course the huge gathering in NYC a short time ago. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/11/05/tech...

Christie’s, Sotheby’s are selling NFTs. The art fairs are adopting. Visa has purchased a major NFT for their art collection (Cryptopunk). Multiple major brands and celebrities are minting and joining NFT platforms ie Pharell in Music. As far as artists go I’m finding that most have heard of NFTs and many are adopting.

So why are you personally spending so much energy on here trying to convince everyone NFTs are worthwhile, if you believe it is established reality?

I broke my foot. I have a lot of free time right now! Spending a lot of it online.

But partially I hope that some people here see the problems not as "this is never going to work" and more as "hey this seems like an interesting challenge to solve". The space needs developers, so if I convince one person a week to take a look at it, that's a big win. If it doesn't happen, well my foot is still broken.

I used to work in the art auction world. Christie's and Sotheby's will sell anything that there is a market for, especially if it burnishes their brand and relevance.

> An NFT is just a record on a blockchain saying that [wallet address] is the current owner of [URL]. It has absolutely nothing to do with ownership.

That’s literally a _record of ownership_.

> You can sell an NFT of the Mona Lisa. I can also sell it. That means there are two NFT ownership records for Mona Lisa.

You don’t seem to grasp the concept of digital content. The Mona Lisa you sell as part of contract A is not the same you sell as part of contract B. Even if you’re selling two exactly identical jpegs, they’re different _digital objects_.

Very simple example: there’s many clones of the Bored Apes across many blockchains, including Ethereum itself. Only ONE of these contracts grants you access to their bar in Miami. That person is also the only one who can sell their Bored Ape for hundreds of thousands of dollars - nobody will pay that for the copies in other contracts, because _they’re not the original_. How is that not a proof of ownership?

Ownership of an NFT is, in general,, ownership of the token, no more, no less.

The creator of the artwork could legally assign rights to the tokenholder. But that would be a special case, and that is extra.

Anyone is free to give privileges to tokenholders of specific contract that they recognize as authentic, but that is not the same as ownership of the artwork.

Correct. Ownership is an ambiguous concept, when you “own” something, it comes with terms of what that “ownership” entails. An NFT is an entry in a ledger that says who owns that entry - it’s a _proof of ownership_, not _ownership itself_. Whether that includes copyright ownership of the artwork, right to modify or distribute, etc, it’s all contractual aspects that are external to the ledger/entry.

Smart Contract maximalists may argue it should all be code - and maybe we’ll see more and more becoming code, including TOS, DRM, etc. Maybe one day there’ll be a way to fully model and enforce ownership of a digital object, but I’m not holding my breath for that.

How do you decide which of the many proofs of ownership are The Proof Of Ownership? By asking the Bored Apes bar folks? How do you know if they're the right owners? What if I open a Bored Apes bar in Tampa and let people in only based on another copy?

The same way you verify if a deed is authentic: asking an appointed “Oracle”. In this case, sites like OpenSea act as verifiers. Who tells you the Louis Vuitton bag you’re buying is authentic? Do you ask the shopkeeper? How do you know they’re not selling you a copy?

If you opened a bar in Tampa and called it the same as someone else named theirs, and stole their branding, you’d be exposed to the same copyright laws one would in Florida, with or without NFTs involved. That’s a completely orthogonal issue, NFTs aren’t a mechanism for copyright enforcement, they’re just a ledger that’s easier to verify because it’s public and distributed.

I don't think OpenSea can vouch anything for things outside their ledger, and even in there they can only check the timestamps, which cannot tell anything about proof of real-life ownership (where those copyright laws work). So the ledger can vouch for my timestamp in this ledger as long everybody trusts only this ledger and not this other ledger. So while I agree NFTs are not meant to enforce copyright, I think also they don't go much in the direction of proving it either as long you still need some real-world oracle like the artist themselves or such. You can just check the artist website at this point, it can be more trustworthy than a timestamp in a ledger and just as open.

OpenSea verifies ownership off-chain, they "verify" projects, prevent fake Bored Apes from proliferating, etc. Same sort of "proof" you'd expect on any digital property, from Twitter's identity verification to Spotify's. You're overcycling on something about "timestamps in a ledger" that's not really relevant to what we're talking here.

> You can just check the artist website at this point, it can be more trustworthy than a timestamp in a ledger and just as open.

How do you know the artist's website you're visiting is the actual artist? How do you decide which of the many sites is The Real One? By asking the artist? How do you know if they're the right owners? What if I open a site and claim I'm the artist, and sell a copy of their content?

So NFTs are something which makes sense only because of the rules which are not intrinsic - off-chain verification, off-chain trust, off-chain property laws... thank you for taking your time to explain to me. (ps: I'm not ironic)

Bitcoin is valuable, but it ain't close to "money," at least for now. Money is the thing you can use to facilitate transactions easily, and Bitcoin is absolutely not that.

As for NFT's, sure - a lot of things have value to some people. Right now it appears as if NFT's are valuable for luring in suckers and enabling very stupid people to try to launder money. Now, will NFT's be widely valuable to a lot of people in the future? Perhaps, but it strikes me as far from a sure bet.

Lightening network ?

I'll believe it when it happens.

It has already happened?

sure has, it’s already in full swing and nodes are growing.

El Salvador is also using Algorand to build upon.

All of these things are pointed in the right direction; but again, I'll believe it when I see e.g. "For the first time, 10% (low number, right) of El Salvadoreans bought their groceries with Bitcoin this month."

It’s a sure bet. It’s such a sure bet that I would bet on it.

Claims like “it just works” appear to turn the tables on the anti-vax analogy. There is no need to believe the vaccines work, it can be demonstrated. Here, we are required to believe nft-s work. And they don’t. Given the amount of people selling things they don’t own and the amount of nft-s just being a url with a hash on a blockchain, a lot more has to be shown to claim “it just works”. NFTs are a way to digitally sign files (which has existed in mainstream for 20+ years) and then trade these signatures. Which has also been possible since day one. Also, copyrights have been a thing for a while along with transferring rights. So, in addition to “they just work” claim the claim of them being novel would need to be justified.

Adjacency with cryptocurrencies makes any claim about NFT fitness-for-purpose dubious, for practical purposes there is no distinguishing an honest opinion from an attempt to manipulate the public into increasing the USD value of some coins or tokens held by the author of said opinion.

Who talked about crypto? Not me. Tezos which is widely used for NFTs has barely any price volatility (in comparison to the rest of the crypto market).

It works because people are using it. Every problem you can list has a technical solution that is actively being worked on already.

Quite often that 'permissionless marketplace' is happening without the permission of the artists.

This is a shame but technical solutions are possible and being worked on. A quick verification can also be done in any of the major markets to determine the art is being sold by the artists, which is something I always do.

What's the technical solution? That seems intractable.

intractable? how? If it's possible to detect fakes in the real world, it's possible to detect duplicates in digital art. Eventually some sort of image scraping through all the major art networks - Artboard, Behance - will be integrated into NFT platforms to prevent most of this.

That all sounds very hypothetical. Content-based de-duplication is an unsolved problem facing many known tradeoffs that can't satisfy the demands of all digital artists in a fair way. The use of sheer automation for this task will fail - humans need to be in the loop. If you're positing a solution with deep learning - again, you're going to have false positives/negatives and humans will need to be in the loop. As in - humans with eyeballs visually examining and verifying claims made by NFT platforms using automated tools.

I am not saying any of this is uncertain. But assuming it as a guarantee (unless you are personally working to help create this tech, which I gather you are not) is naive.

The system in the real world requires a lot of humans in the loop as well. What's your point? We just need to make it harder for people to do it, you will never be able to make it impossible.

That's holding the digital world to a far higher standard than meatspace, where fraud happens.

Youtube has a huge problem with re-uploading of videos where multiple accounts will download and re-upload a video of anything they can get away with. Does that make Youtube useless?

My point is that a system which claims to be highly decentralized ultimately has similar flaws to existing implementations when it becomes dependent on centralized trust in the real-world e.g. "humans manually verifying things".

I'm aware of YouTube's specific issues and almost brought it up as a point against NFT's. YouTube is not useless, no. But, its automated copyright system is draconian and serves elites and lawyers more than it does individual content creators (who it often actively harms). This issue arises specifically because YouTube operates at massive scale and because Google refuses to hire enough people to deal with content moderation and copyright complaints _properly_ and would prefer to automate things as much as possible.

I don't think NFT's would present these exact problems; but I guarantee you similarly horrible inequities surface in NFT markets.

I don't believe currency should be less regulated. I believe financial regulation should be drastically increased as e.g. tax loopholes is one method that the ultra-wealthy use to remain that way - at the expense of everyone else.

I would be _substantially_ more interested in cryptocurrencies if institutions were up to the task of regulating it to prevent abuse. I've seen a bit of this lately but it's honestly not enough.

I’m afraid you’re right. I’m not a crypto utopian - I think the dystopian outcome for crypto is equally likely.

In fact it’s likely that both utopian and dystopian outcomes will all happen simultaneously.

I do like NFTs as a way to support digital artists and I think they’ve gotten a really bad rap in the press. But they’re not going to empower some kind of utopia. They just allow digital artists to profit from their work directly in a novel way.

That’s good to me. The fact that they have problems doesn’t stop them from being an innovative solution with real usage.

The decentralisation aspect of it is only interesting from my POV insofar that it’s allowed this market to exist.

What? You email a gallery and they reply with a price and you pay them and your art is shipped to you.

NFT people act like art is some unattainable mythical artifact that their JPEGs have somehow liberated.

You’re literally ignoring half of what I said.

Digital art couldn’t be “shipped” to anyone. Having a gallery means you have to be featured in one in the first place - ie gatekeepers. Not permissionless.

You have to be not working in the arts to think like this. NFTs were a revolution for digital artists.

Ah, I did skim over the “digital” part.

I know a lot of people (including myself) that find blockchain/cryptocurrencies to be great for international money transfers and as a way of saving money using stablecoins with better rates than what we could get on a regular bank.

And yes we know about transferwise and such, it would be cool if it could be used in our countries.

No, de savings are not insured in crypto, but the insurance we get at local financial institutions aren’t that safe either, it only protects up to a certain amount and years can pass before they pay you back if they pay you at all.

Consider the following, say in the context of BC: (1) conversion to or from fiat not possible (2) the number of entities accepting BC unchanged.

Question: how would your interest in BC change?

The best recent case that couldn't happen without a blockchain is ConstitutionDAO.

Kickstarter exists

Just like MySpace existed when Facebook launched, and no one is using Facebook today.

Seems the biggest Kickstarter ever was Pebble, which raised 20 million USD, while ConsititutionDAO seems to have raised ~49 million USD. That's more than double the funds, even while being on a shorter deadline.

Star Citizen raised hundreds of millions without the use of a blockchain.

And so does the multiple of IPOs that happen every day. Does that mean blockchain is useless for that purpose?

Why couldn't it?

There have absolutely been rapid meme based crowd funding of projects in the past. Crypto enhances it because there are a lot of people who’ve made so much money that handing it out like candy is something they can do, but that really wasn’t new.

Also, they lost.

Algorand is used by Lofty.AI to track fractional ownership of investment rental properties. It makes transferring ownership (in the LLC that owns the property) easy, in case the lofty.ai company weren't trusted or available to complete the transaction.

Algorand is great but the developer community has (almost completely) converged on Solidity and EVM as the dev platform of choice.

A lot of chains have made been made EVM compatible recently. Not sure if this is possible in Algorand yet. But I fear that any alternative will have a hard time.

Meh, if the boosters are right, it’s very very early in the space, and we see turnover in frameworks, languages, and operating systems in regular tech all the time. Ethereum has a big first-mover advantage, but at least when I dabbled in Solidity a couple of years ago, didn’t seem very well-run?

Have you used it alongside truffle suite recently? https://www.trufflesuite.com/tutorial I was pleasantly surprised how well put together the development tools felt.

The tooling system was ok even then, but core development seemed listless. Vitalik gave a keynote at a conference I went to and talked about why it was actually good for the ecosystem that he and all the core contributors spent all their time traveling to conferences.

Since then, transactions per day on the network have doubled, but gas costs are up 10X in gwei and some truly ludicrous multiplier in dollars. I suspected then that the switch to Proof of Stake and other scaling fixes was the fusion power of ETH, always six months away, and that concern looks really vindicated.

Vitalik is less technical than people think. He’s more of an evangelist.

It is very early. But I was at one of the bug conferences recently (Lisbon) and it was surprising how much tooling has been built or is being built for EVM. Felt like it’s becoming the natural choice and all the young devs all they talked about was Solidity.

Solana is in Rust so that’s smart I suppose.

Perhaps that's why Avalanche is doing so well. They get rid of many of the current problems of Ethereum and offer an EVM.

Yes it is IMO.

There is no such thing as "the developer community" converging.

> Algorand created the world’s first pure proof-of-stake foundational blockchain designed for the future of finance. Beyond the elementary requirement of an open, public network, Algorand’s technology enables a set of high performing Layer-1 blockchains that provide security, scalability, complete transaction finality, built in privacy, Co-Chains, and advanced smart contracts that are essential in a FutureFi world.

Crypto has a serious marketing/comms problem. I work in tech, have dabbled in crypto and I still do not understand what half of this means.

That’s because it doesn’t mean much of anything really. It’s jargon intended to appear meaningful.

Could you share what specific parts of that statement you don't understand?

Here is a short glossary:

- Pure Proof of Stake - https://www.algorand.com/technology/pure-proof-of-stake

- Blockchain - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blockchain.asp

- Open, public network - "arbitrarily many users are allowed to join the system at any time, without any vetting or permission of any kind" - https://algorandcom.cdn.prismic.io/algorandcom%2Fece77f38-75...

- Layer-1 https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/layer-1-blockc...

- Transaction finality - https://www.algorand.com/technology/immediate-transaction-fi...

- Co-chains - https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/algorand-co-chains

- Smart Contracts - https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-details/dapps/smart-...

Sure, some words in that statement is "marketing jargon", but most of it is actually technical.

I like Algorand. It was the first blockchain I used without knowing it (https://chessarena.com/) use/used it for storing game results for official Online FIDE games.

Does anyone know the differences, pros and cons of algorand consensus vs avalanche consensus?

What's it backed by? Who decides the inflation rate?

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