Comment by spir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spir | Hacker News Reader

Let's adopt patio11's criteria to a programmable public blockchain, like ethereum

- Customer UX: crypto wallets built into browsers and phones. Connect your wallet to any webpage to pay. Or, tap your phone to pay via a crypto payment

- Certainty: crypto transactions are, by default, instant and irreversible. Any kind of chargeback scheme, refund policy, or time-delay may be built into the crypto app layer

- Settlement time: per previous remark, crypto transactions settle instantly on a global basis, unless a slower speed is built into the app layer

- Reversibility: again, crypto transactions are irreversible by default, and any kind of reversibility scheme or policy may be built into the app layer

Doubters or critics of ethereum's ability to handle global-scale payments may find the following items to be of interest:

- Scale: ethereum has adopted a rollup scaling architecture where separate physical networks settle on ethereum. These separate networks are known as rollups aka Layer-2s aka L2s aka execution layers,. Some of the most important L2s are Arbitrum, Optimism, StarkNet, zkSync 2.0, and Miden. These L2s will help grow ethereum to billions of daily active users

- Cost: ethereum's rollups may be expected to be cheap enough for everyone in the world, especially using a technology known as "zero-knowledge rollups with off-chain data"

- Environmental impact: ethereum is five and a half years into a six-year upgrade to completely eliminate any negative environmental impact. Ie. Ethereum will stop using proof of work mining

- Customer UX: This really isn't as straightforward as you put it. The main issue for customers is that if they loose their wallet, they loose everything. This has to be accounted as part of UX, even making transactions is simple and straightforward.

- Settlement/Certainty time: Blockchains combine these into one. They depends heavily on the specific chain. For some networks, its basically instant. Eth seems to be around a minute or so. Bitcoin is around 60 minutes.

- Reversibility: Agreed, although whether this is good or bad depends on the user.

I like the way it was said in the article, these are all axes of comparison. Consumers choose products based on a set of criteria. For many, irreversibility or the risk of loosing everything due to a lost wallet is a dealbreaker, even if transfers may be much faster than other methods.

> Customer UX: This really isn't as straightforward as you put it. The main issue for customers is that if they loose their wallet, they loose everything. This has to be accounted as part of UX, even making transactions is simple and straightforward.

At scale people will want to use custodians for large amounts of money. So basically banks will always be a thing. Only the backbone is changing.

If people are using banks at scale, what is the advantage over just using banks currently? I guess international transfers but using blockchain implies all the banks handling most of the digital currencies (or all using the same one) and so I don’t see the appeal above some fast centralised clearing house for transfers.

You keep saying “instant”, but in practice ethereum takes a few minutes for finality and can only handle a maximum of 50 tps. I’ll grant that both of those may improve with as zk tech matures, but even with rollups there’s no way of having better finality than ethereum, which is unlikely to ever be better than 60s

In practice, rollups can offer better finality than ethereum's base layer by using a bonding scheme. Basically, a rollup provider can sign a message that says "I promise that this transaction will become finalized, otherwise I forfeit my bond." Depending on the implementation, the receipt of that message can give the payment recipient pretty good confidence that the transaction will be finalized. I believe some rollup providers are either doing this already or currently researching it.

> - Environmental impact: ethereum is five and a half years into a six-year upgrade to completely eliminate any negative environmental impact. Ie. Ethereum will stop using proof of work mining

Reduce, not eliminate. Maybe, maybe it would stop having additional negative over regular money transfers but "completely eliminate" requires magic (negating effects with credible offsets is viable).

Just to be clear for anyone not familiar with the space, poster is describing the bright future of tomorrow, not the difficult reality of today. So right now an ETH withdrawal on Binance costs ~ $20.

A lot of people have expressed the sentiment that "the GAS price is too damn high". It is so high that interacting with "useful" stuff like swap contracts or liquidity pools costs $50 - $100 per shot and lots of interesting use cases are shut out because network fees render them uneconomic. It is sort of a burning problem that leaves the ETH of today as a network mainly for purists and whales.

I agree with parent that long term the future looks much brighter.

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