Bored Ape virtual land sale breaks Ethereum | Hacker News Reader

Bored Ape virtual land sale breaks Ethereum

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218 pointsdanso404 comments

No, Ethereum didn't "break", it worked exactly as designed.

No fees were "wasted". If people were willing to make a transaction knowing that this was going to be the cost, it is a reflection of people's time preferences.

A transaction for $25 that costs $3,000 to complete seems pretty plainly broken. Imagine that happening with your credit card.

Except that if you knew your CC transaction would cost that much, you'd probably use a different card or use cash.

And, indeed, most people do.

Those who submitted the transactions _knew_ the transaction fees before submitting.

They voluntarily and intentionally paid these fees.

This is not broken.

Sorry, but nobody signed up for their transaction to fail, this is a bullshit excuse.

> Besides high fees, the transaction load resulted in a bottleneck that resulted in failed transactions that people still had to pay fees for—now in the thousands of dollars for nothing in return, not even an NFT.

They obviously did sign up for the transaction to 'fail'. In this case, it just means others paid more for their place in the line than they did.

They absolutely picked the price they were willing to pay and lose, in the hopes it was more than the others trying to get a place in line.

So yes, they absolutely knew their transaction could fail if others paid more than them.

"fail" here is not just being outbid, but still paying most of the money you bid. That's not acceptable.

Yes they did. They knew that transaction failure is a risk and they accounted for it.

I don't feel bad if they did not do their due diligence before attempting to transfer thousands of dollars of ETH.

Why are they [0] offering a return of the gas spent, then?

[0] https://twitter.com/yugalabs/status/1520612364839661568

Marketing and brand.

Because it's profitable for Yuga Labs to do that? They're a business making a business decision. They know users are more likely to participate in the community in the future if Yuga is willing to cover costs out-of-pocket.

Again, assess the risks yourself. Assume responsibility for your own actions. Especially in an environment like crypto today.

So what you're telling us is, as far as I can see, that if you're someone who might want to execute payments on a time-sensitive basis without accepting the risk of losing huge fees to transactions that fail anyway ... if that is not within your risk appetite ... you better stay away from the Ethereum Mainnet. Right?

This same user is arguing that Crypto is justified because it helps people in dictatorial or corrupt nations protect their money.

I really can't stand this hypocrisy - "it's working as intended to drop transactions even after charging exorbitant transaction fees - by the way it also is protecting impoverished people's money". You cannot tell me this is a good-faith argument.

No one held a gun to their head and said "you have to bet thousands of dollars of ETH."

If you want to move lots of money for the purposes of escaping authoritarian regimes, there are other chains which have extremely negligible transaction fees.

Context matters.

- No one is forced to use the blockchain when it is congested. Quite the opposite. The high prices are supposed to be a self-correcting mechanism and to put a back-off signal for all those that can wait.

- "holding" assets do not cost anything on the blockchain.

- There are ways to dial the "perfomance/cost/decentralization" trade-off knobs. There are off-chain systems to move funds. Use centralized exchanges when possible, and you can avoid paying anything. Pool your resources with people that you can trust/cooperate, and you can have a separate ledger [0] that can abstract the different blockchains into one single "balance" and only interacts with the blockchain when you need to actually move the funds.

[0] https://hub20.io/about

> Pool your resources with people that you can trust/cooperate

How do I find this group of people I trust? I suppose you mean a larger group of people than my closest family and a bunch of friends?

Can I possibly trust a group of anonymous people on blockchain more than an established physical bank?

> I suppose you mean a larger group of people than my closest family and a bunch of friends?

No. I mean exactly on that scale. It could be friends and family, it could be your employer and your co-workers. It could be you and some members of your church.

My recommendation on Hub20 is "don't open an account in any instance unless you and the operator could knock on each other's doors".

> more than an established physical bank?

Trust is a sliding scale. It's up to you to know how comfortable you'll be by leaving funds on the hands of each.

This is broken for anyone attempting to use ETH beyond a speculative asset. Consider if we get into the "crypto wins" future where it takes over as a payment method and replaces/live beside and equal to USD or traditional currencies. People can't just wait hours to buy random things there's a certain amount of transactions that are time sensitive. It's even worse when you think about the future where other record keeping has moved on chain because that too has a certain immediacy. Go to the doctor at the wrong time and suddenly it's thousands of dollars in fees to add to your on-chain medical records.

It was intentional. They paid that amount to move in front of others trying to get the same thing.

Something similar to starting to wait in line hours ago in front of Apple Store to buy a new iPhone: you are sacrificing something to get something that you think is more valuable from what you've sacrificed, earlier than others, to avoid a potential unavailability.

Yeah it looks ridiculous, but that was paid to get something that might potentially be valued 1000x the current price (at least, the buyer believes in so, which isn't impossible to be fair) so that they will make more money than they've "wasted".

Maybe a good comparison would be to high speed trading companies who pay exorbitant rent to get their servers as close to the stock market servers as possible and reduce latency that way and get their orders in before others.

In this case they understand what they are getting into, here most Eth users will just be saying wtf

It's not the duty of anyone except myself to understand the risks of my own actions.

or how I wish markets actually worked.

This is a good maxim for oneself, but a poor one when trying to understand or improve systems.

Such a great point! I wish more people embraced having two philosophies. One for them as an individual and one for policy making/discussion. E.g. I never want to myself rely on the social safety net. Yet at the same time, I want nobody, no matter how bad their decisions are to die because their basic human needs like food and shelter aren't met. I think a functioning society, especially a democracy, requires these two mindsets from their citizenry.

Honestly, I agree. It can both be true that 1) a system could be improved so as to reduce harm to the average user and 2) ultimately the users are responsible for assessing risks before participating in the system.

The problem is as soon as you argue for (2) everyone reacts like you're the most evil, heartless person on the planet.

Because the system you're passionately defending via the "personal responsibility" angle has so far demonstrably shown itself to be susceptible to the same externalizes of greed, avarice and "fuck you I got mine" misbehavior as the current system and people are lining up in droves to have their chance turning the grinder as long as it means they get a ticket to the sweepstakes.

And the responses you're giving of "just be risk aware/just read the source code/just know what you're getting into" doesn't change that, doesn't educate the people who probably and realistically could benefit, and it doesn't change the fact that there is a LOT of obfuscation, misinformation and mishandling of trust going on in order to separate people from their actual fungible money.

I just feel like they're not incompatible. I think we can help these people who get screwed without assigning the costs to unknowing, unrelated passers-by.

I think we can too.

I just don't trust....90% of the people, platforms and providers who claim that's what they're doing via crypto.

I agree! It's a huge problem and it's right for people to point it out.

Hope you don’t use public transit, electricity, plumbing, or breathe central air.

I don't understand how that contradicts what I said. I'm not arguing against public goods. And I'm not arguing against improving systems for those who don't do due diligence.

I'm just saying take responsibility for your own actions and your own decisions. The world doesn't owe you anything. Such statements are not incompatible with improving the standard of living for everyone, even those who are actively liabilities.

What the responses that people are sending to you are trying to point out, is that while this is an honorable rule of thumb, it doesn't scale. You cannot build a society this way, or none of us would be able to function reasonably.

It is unreasonable to build tools for other people to use, that will break the user's expectation of consistent, reliable and safe use.

This is a not an abstract idea, this is a fundamental legal concept in the west.

If everyone using Ethereum was expecting these fees, and are fine with it, then good for them, and no harm no foul. But this approach will not scale to larger communities, and it is unreasonable, cruel, and legally wrong to put the burden of "they should have known how to avoid this" on the larger populace, which is, of course, what crypto evangelizes the ultimate end-goal to be.

This is where comments like soared comes in. "I hope you don't use public transit, electricity, plumbing, or breathe central air." A human being simply cannot function in society if we have to study local EPA data to know whether its safe to breathe along our commute to work, that our electricity will be safe to use with all of our devices, that my car won't explode if I press a button in a different way, and that I won't go bankrupt if I use my crypto card to pay for a meal.

Expecting everyone to research how every tool works before they use it fails Kants categorical imperative, because it is simply impossible for everyone one of us to research every tool we use given a finite lifetime. Hence the responses you are receiving here.

> Imagine if you had to...

Given the historical context of these systems working reasonably well for decades, I've decided to take for granted that I won't get rugged by my public transit, or my electricity company, or the food in the grocery store. Still, I do assess tap water before I drink it, even in the US.

If you're the type of person who likes to blindly trust systems without studying them, that's fine; you can wait to partake in crypto until this sense of trust has been built. No one is holding a gun to your head and saying "run arbitrary code against your crypto holdings." Yet people do it. This is their fault. If they don't want to take the time to study the code, then they should have waited until the community did the due diligence for them to whatever is their own personal level of satisfaction.

I believe you have missed the point of my post. I have updated it in the hope that perhaps I have made the point clearer.

But I believe it is the duty of everyone to not cheat/scam other people

Sure. No contradiction.

There is no risk really, it’s just a bad experience to have to deal with sometimes 50$ tx fees, and sometimes 5000$. Just when I really need to send Eth you never know if you can afford a tx

I think GP's example of the Apple store line matches a lot better. The high fees on Ethereum were for 2 or 3 hours, similar to Apple's line when they sell a new phone. If you don't absolutely need to run a transaction during that time period, you just.. wait.

For example - I was looking to move some USDC, but I saw the fees, and just came back a few hours later and submitted it with no problems.

Wait… so you were doing nothing at all involved with Bored Apes purchasing, just wanting to use your crypto coins for an ordinary thing, but would have paid an exorbitant fee to have done it at that time?

So if you had just finished shopping at IKEA, which we all know is a time sink beyond compare, and unloaded your burdened cart onto the conveyor, and went to pay … you’d have been dinged by an enormous gas fee or abandon the goods and piss everyone off? Have them hold it for a few hours? Have you seen those lineups, they can’t stash everyone’s crap until gas fees return to some sort of reasonable charge.

That is nuts. Unworkable. I must be misunderstanding.

I think shopping on Amazon would be a better comparison.

When you pay things with your credit card at Ikea, the transaction is not being settled at the exact instant. It's not like your bank is sending money to Ikea's bank directly.

When/If people get to be using crypto to pay for things at Ikea, it will be the same. They won't be using the blockchain directly. They will be using "layer-2" systems. These systems will be more efficient because they can batch multiple transactions into one.

(With decentralized tech, there is also the possibility that IKEA itself can provide banking/financing services separate from their furniture retail business and that people might be using their "IKEA card" to pay for things anywhere.)

IKEA are already moving towards the latter with normal banking. Large retailers offering banking services is fairly common in some places.

> When you pay things with your credit card at Ikea, the transaction is not being settled at the exact instant.

For all intents and purposes, it very much is. When I use my credit card to purchase something from a foreign supplier, the current exchange rate is used. It isn’t the exchange rate a few days later, nor the exchange rate when I settle the my account: it’s the exchange rate at the time of purchase.

Further, some cards do settle near immediately: https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/visa-direct/small-bus...

Now, please explain the “layer 2” solution: on the day that BApes drove wth gas fees sky-high, did layer 2 charges remain stable and low-cost? Who foots the bill for the difference? Is settlement delayed until the price comes back down? What happens if eth gas fees remain sky-high for days?

> Further, some cards do settle near immediately: https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/visa-direct/small-bus...

I'd argue that isn't really "settlement" though. The funds do arrive (which is at least better than the status code), but they can still be clawed back for any number of reasons at that point.

> (With decentralized tech, there is also the possibility that IKEA itself can provide banking/financing services separate from their furniture retail business and that people might be using their "IKEA card" to pay for things anywhere.)

IKEA has already been running a regular bank for years FWIW: https://ikanobank.se/

The idea of blockchain is prevention of double spending. How will those "layer-2" systems are supposed to achieve it?

Sorry, I missed this question last week.

A short way to explain is that every participant of a layer-2 system locks funds into a smart contract, which gives you a balance in the system. The off-chain system them keeps its own separate accounting and settlement mechanisms, which do not require the blockchain and can be done cheaply. You only need to use the blockchain when you want to withdraw your funds from the layer-2 back to the main chain.

The different systems have their own approach for this off-chain tracking of the funds, but the important characteristic of all of them is that the users are in control of the funds at all times. Unlike sidechains, l2 systems all have mechanisms for users to prove the ownership of the funds and are allowed to unilaterally withdraw.

That works when crypto is just a speculative asset but in the "crypto wins" future where everything gets piled into crypto like evangelists claim will happen and is desirable it's an absolute nightmare. You're out of gas and need to get home but oh no some crazy new NFT has spiked the gas price now it's thousands of dollars to fill up. Any transaction processing that does that is unusable for anything touching real life.

Customers shouldn’t need to understand why suddenly the tx fees are jack to high heavens. The UX is broken.

Fair point. Metamask might add a notice mechanism on top like "because of current network traffic is high, your transaction might take a longer time to clear" with a "speed up" button which unlocks higher gas fee options with a warning that it might cost too much.

If this is the system working as intended, and you think that is a good thing, then I don't think there is any way to convince you otherwise.

To, on one hand, talk about helping the unbanked in Africa while at the same time justifying thousand dollar fees as "working as intended" is farcical.

> If this is the system working as intended, and you think that is a good thing, then I don't think there is any way to convince you otherwise.

They have just admitted that Ethereum is a millionaires playground, and it isn't useful for the 98% of users. If it wasn't a problem, why are many users complaining about it?

Also, if a bunch of rich whales wanted to rush and mint hundreds of JPEG apes or virtual land, that would mean 98% of all transactions for wallets on the platform would either fail or take their left over ETH to spend it all on fees for a single transaction. That could be bots with over >100k worth of ETH to snipe and mint these NFTs quicker than most.

If that is 'working as intended' then they are also saying that it is designed not to globally scale be useful at all. If you wanted to send payments or buy something at the supermarket store using a crypto debit card with ETH, the unpredictable fees will make the transaction fail or use up all your ETH for the fees; paying thousands for a $10 purchase at the supermarket which is wORKiNG aS iNTEndeD; even in the real world.

The banks are really scared and shaking in their boots over Ethereum's absurd and unpredictable gas prices. /s

The problem with your rant is that you are comparing apples with oranges.

Ethereum's base layer is not meant to compete with credit cards. Ethereum's base layer is not even meant to be a bank.

If you want to compare with "credit cards", then you need to look at the layer-2 systems, which (a) already exist and (b) are cheaper than most credit card transactions (cents on the dollar for Loopring) and (c) are just as permissionless and accessible as the base layer.

The fact that a bunch of "rich whales" decided to play with their money did not make the layer-2 systems less secure or less efficient. Quite the opposite.

The system is working as designed.

So there are two issues here.

The first is the fee market. That's working exactly as intended. Ethereum didn't exactly "break," it just didn't have the scaling to handle the traffic, and prices rose accordingly.

The second issue is the scaling, and everyone in the community agrees that Ethereum needs to scale a lot better. There's a lot of work being done on that front, including rollups and sharding.

the unbanked stuff is a lie, the working as intended part is the truth

The system sucks. It isn't broken.

one could argue that surge pricing on Uber during the holidays feels 'broken' in the same respect, but the characteristically high costs during those times are precisely the indicator that the system is working as intended.

If someone tried to pitch to me that we should replace the existing car, taxi, and bus infrastructure with 'transit 3.0' that sometimes has the cost of a ride increase by ~500,000% - I'd laugh them out of the room.

Even if their system were 'working as intended'. A footgun is working as intended when it sends you to the hospital - and it's defective by design.

This is exactly what happens with "surge pricing" on Uber.

with those 500,000% prices?

list price + tx fee = market price. Vitalik summed up up well - https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/152062181320978432...

I think a more apt analogy would be paying $3,000 to fill your tank for ~$6/gallon gas for your car

If you do mining for your own transaction, you don't need to pay transaction fee.

If you ask others to mine for you, you're not a direct member of the blockchain network.

The additional cost to incentify others to help you depends on the demand and supply.

If many people wants to develop their own app but not able to program themselves, they may hire developers to serve them, but if the global population are relying on a few developers, they either have to wait for a long time, or need to pay more to get "premium service" in higher priority (and making others paying less to wait longer because the throughput is mostly fixed)

It completely destroys the mechanism of an auction. Especially an online auction

During an auction you always know the price and hence the bids are somewhat incremental. You can bid in 1$ increments or even lesser increments.

When the network is congested people put a fee on their transaction without knowing anything except that more = better.

It is a market failure. The time preference BS is something made up by "true believers" who think that "bad news is good news" because it supposedly supports the winner take all mindset that crypto enthusiast love.

Except when the winner is Ken Griffin, in that case we should stop playing , throw a tantrum and ask the refs for a redo lmao

Since EIP-1155, people submitting transactions knew exactly how much the gas fee is going to be and how much the transaction would cost. The "auction" mechanism for the miners to select the transactions to get into the block is basically irrelevant compared with network congestion itself.

'Code is law' must be the new 'the free market is always right'. The starting assumption is that any interaction that happens is a priori 'as designed' merely because it happened and we just reason back from there to justify any insanity.

"Besides high fees, the transaction load resulted in a bottleneck that resulted in failed transactions that people still had to pay fees for—now in the thousands of dollars for nothing in return, not even an NFT."

If someone designed Ethereum with this in mind I have to assume masochism is pretty high up on their list of design goals

This isn’t completely true. There are 2 types of gas fees - the first is the type you are discussing. The 2nd is the inherent fee of executing the smart contract. $100MM of the fees went to contract execution, over half of which could have been avoided with a more efficiently coded smart contract.

If this is the type of discussion you'd like to have, one could argue that they could've launched their NFTs on layer-2 systems like Loopring/Immutable and avoided all of these fees.

Transaction fees can change while you're in the middle of a transaction that you initiated when the fees were lower, so no.

This isn't really true. You submit a transaction with a maximum gas price. All wallets that I know of will show a maximum transaction fee based on this before you submit the transaction, and you can manually lock in any arbitrary gas limit you would like. If gas prices suddenly go up right as you submit your transaction (read: other network users outbid you for use of the network), your transaction will stay pending and either eventually process at the gas price specified, or fail and you will pay either nothing or a partial fee based on your maximum gas price * computation steps used.

Gas is basically a means to ensure all computation on ethereum halts.

not since EIP-1155, no.

Unfortunately HN is so vehemently anti-crypto that articles like this get upvoted regardless of the accuracy of their content.

I don’t like crypto either for many of the same reasons - most notably crypto’s horrendous environmental impact. But we need to stick to facts when we criticise crypto, and avoid mindless bandwagoning just because it’s currently the in thing to hate on all things crypto.

Usurious and predatory loans also work as intended. The person signing the document knows what they are getting into it, and presumably have done the cost/benefit analysis.

Usurious loans are bad because they effectively enslave borrowers through ever increasing debts that can never be paid off. Nothing of the sort is happening here, it's just people speculating on an asset. They paid 4k in fees because they expected their returns to be greater than that.

Rational actors acting rationally

I will agree that the "broke Ethereum" rhetoric is stupid. It relies on elevating Yuga Lab's tweets to a level of credibility that they lost, their community should turn on them for deflecting responsibility.

But I would say that there are unintended consequences of Ethereum's EIP1559 burning. A lot of tokens sold off as people were positioning for this sale. In the past, this money would have been recirculated from miners back into these leading tokens and projects and economy. This time it hasn't really happened because it was burned. Ethereum hasn't "priced in" any scarcity based on this burning, its still swung by the general tech sector swinging. Not a fan of this outcome personally. But yes, I'm all for letting the burns continue, just want communities and projects to be more discerning.

> No, Ethereum didn't "break", it worked exactly as designed.

These aren't mutually exclusive. The design sucks.

> No fees were "wasted". If people were willing to make a transaction knowing that this was going to be the cost, it is a reflection of people's time preferences.

On the contrary, money spent over nothing but FOMO is absolutely wasted.

Another thing to consider is that, if it were real money*, the gas fees incurred by Otherside could have bought 6 million Covid vaccines. We ought to pause and raise at least some ethical questions, because even pro-crypto folks are saying this was money people knew they were burning.

* Lately I'm of the opinion that assigning USD amounts to large ETH amounts is overlooking how much of ETH is house money. The miners are mining ETH, rewarded in ETH, by people who already have ETH. It's monopoly money going in a circle and 64K ETH ≠ $180 million in any real sense.

Except some transactions didn't go through, so gas and your "money" just evaporated.

So Yuga sold 55,000 deeds to parcels in "Otherside", a virtual world that doesn't exist yet. 45,000 deeds were distributed to insiders.

So what happened? 96,000 of those "Otherdeeds" are now for sale on OpenSea.[1] Some of the rest are for sale on Rareable. Few buyers.

[1] https://opensea.io/collection/otherdeed

Are we looking at the same thing? I'm seeing 6,000 sales just today, with an average price of 9.8 Eth [1]. That looks like a lot of buying and selling to me.

[1]: https://opensea.io/collection/otherdeed?tab=activity

This will have to wait on chain analysis, but many of those transactions involve the same addresses. We may be watching wash sales.

This was supposed to be an item people would hold. That's not happening. Almost all the items are on the market.

wow double misunderstanding. OpenSea reads the blockchain for all NFTs. You have to explicitly delist for it not to show.

and then back with the wash trading assumption. it only takes you trying to buy or sell a popular NFT once for you to know that you didn't trade it between your own address, even if those that would yell "source thats its not wash trading!?" won't believe you

I'm an outsider to the whole NFT thing but I'm pretty sure you're misreading this.

I clicked the "on auction" filter and see 192 'parcels' or w/e for sale right now, the rest are listed on OpenSea but that doesn't imply that someone can buy them.

The ones that aren't on auction have a "Buy Now" button. It's like eBay.

12,969 items in "Buy Now" status. So, not all of them, just 20% of the number sold in the "minting".

The person I’m commenting to doesn’t understand even the most basic elements of OpenSea so trusting them on anything related to crypto would be foolish

I pray that the inevitable nft/crypto bubble pop does not trickle into the rest of the economy. I’d love to believe the ape nft stuff is also mid 20s kids like me messing around, but I’d imagine there is a whole lot of institutional money fooling around with similar projects.

Considering Fidelity is literally starting to offer crypto trading in 401k accounts, that ship might have sailed already

True. Fidelity was mining bitcoins for years before other institutional investors were involved and they likely hold massive reserves. I just hope they’ve insulated themselves against the risk.

Most banks do. They are transferring the risks to their customers.

Cryptocurrency trading can be a legitimate way to diversify risk. Of course people should know what they're getting into before they start and it's very likely to fail but I trust institutional traders more than anyone else to actually make money off of cryptocurrencies.

I believe that Fidelity allows investing in bitcoin, not crypto in general.

I figure NFTs are an attempt to materialize cryptocurrency so that it does trickle into the rest of the economy.

>I’d imagine there is a whole lot of institutional money fooling around with similar projects.

If it's your trashcoin/NFT/whatever, you're at the top of the pyramid no matter what. There's no downside in convincing people to contribute cold hard cash to your new soared-coin.

Nothing broke, the dynamic fee market worked exactly as intended. Contrast with Solana which actually went offline for 7 hours that same day.

So it essentially means that Ethereum is unable to globally scale or to be usable for anything on-chain at all except for millionaires wasting (and losing) $10k - $100k in fees for silly JPEG images, otherwise why are these same Ethereum proponents complaining that it is a problem?

Regardless, Both Ethereum, and Solana were unusable on that day and as it stands are still unsuitable for anything 'high demand'.

Except that anyone with a minimal involvement with Ethereum already knows that the base layer is not meant to be used on day-to-day operations.

We already learned about the decentralization trillema. The strategy to scale Ethereum through will be through the adoption of "layer-2" systems, where users are expected to be doing their transactions and avoid these costly transactions altogether.

There are roll-ups already dealing with NFT marketplaces [0]. There are roll-ups that can execute any type of ethereum smart contract [1] [2]. There are payment channels that allow completely decentralized and gas-less transfers of ERC-20 tokens [3].

[0] https://loopring.io

[1] https://optimism.io/

[2] https://offchainlabs.com/

[3] https://raiden.network

This comment is hilarious from an outsider's perspective. For all I know, you may as well be describing the turboencabulator.

I'm not saying that the system has a good UX, or that it's ready for mass-consumption. I am just saying that if you are minimally involved with it, you should be aware of the issues and the alternatives in development.

Serious question because you seem to have a very good handle on this.

Thirteen years after the release of bitcoin. Seven for Ethereum. Both of these technologies had the benefit of building on each other (and many others), ubiquitous internet connectivity, social media, mobile, etc.

Yet all of it is still nowhere near ready for mass-consumption. How is it possible that technologies/platforms with all of the advantages I mentioned are significantly underperforming mass adoption compared to any other significant technology created over the past 30 years?

Reminds me of “the year of the Linux desktop”.

The difficult part of decentralized tech like this is that we can not hide its complexity into any kind of abstraction. Decentralization, by definition, means that no node in the network is different from each other. Because of this lack of specialization, the system as a whole is more robust but the failure modes for each individual node multiply.

Decentralized systems do not benefit from "efficiencies of scale", but the opposite, they force every actor to duplicate work, execute functions, etc, etc.

> Reminds me of “the year of the Linux desktop”.

You know what? I think it is a good analogy, but not in the way you think it is. I think using "mass-adoption" as a measure of success for web3 is as stupid as using to measure "Desktop Linux" as a measure for FOSS success.

I think what makes web3 interesting is that it gives options, even if most people think that it is not the "ideal" alternative.

Centralized alternatives can and should be used whenever possible. They are cheaper, more efficient and do not require everyone to become an expert. But there will always be cases where the centralized alternatives are broken (Google's algorithmic approach to solve problems at scale), corrupt (governments/institutions that abuse their power) or hostile to the users (Big Tech exploitation of data privacy to optimize for eyeballs, Apple's "my way or the highway" when it comes to consumer electronics, etc).

I'm using "Linux on the desktop" for 15 years already, but it's not because I think it was a "better desktop". I am using it to because it is the only alternative that doesn't force me to sacrifice some principles and because it lets me avoid dealing with MS/Apple shit.

Similarly, this is why we should work on web3: not to try to replace the existing web, but to have an option that lets us avoid systems created (and controlled) by centralized institutions that might not be working in our best interests.

Fair enough. I’ve been using Linux on the desktop since 1997, FYI.

As long as you have reasonable expectations web3 exists as a choice that makes sense to me and, at the rate things are going, Web3 as a choice looks to me a lot like Linux on the desktop.

Problem is there is going to be a lot of heartbreak if web3 tops out at 2.5% market share in 30+ years like Linux on the desktop has. That said 2.5% is a lot better than the <1% anything blockchain related sees today (after 13 years).

> Problem is there is going to be a lot of heartbreak if web3

Heartbreak by whom? Bitcoin maxis? Superstonks losers who all parrot things about the inevitable dominance from "their" pet project? ICO/NFT "investors"?

There is no shortage of people like me who are working on web3 and keep warning (or trying to warn) the general public that web3 is not about getting rich. If people don't want to listen, it's on them.

> Except that anyone with a minimal involvement with Ethereum already knows that the base layer is not meant to be used on day-to-day operations.

Despite all those contraptions existing for years, BAYC still chose the Ethereum L1 since that has the most liquidity there and all the millionaires will certainly congest and grind the network to a halt just like they did with the CryptoKitties hype years ago. Here we are, this is no different.

Anything 'on-chain' is the whole point of Ethereum. These contraptions that you are showing are all off-chain, once again defeating the point of using the Ethereum blockchain for on-chain activities in the first place. Not only it has been admitted that Ethereum cannot scale properly and is useless for anything on-chain it needs an entire ecosystem of insecure, fragmented and beyond complicated layer 2 contraptions to 'speed it up'.

These tools also have a tendency to go down or halt, hinting that they are not as 'decentralized' as they say they are either.

> contraptions existing for years

No, they did not. Loopring NFT marketplace was launched just a couple of months ago. The optimistic roll-ups are just now getting out of alpha/beta status. Raiden finally got their mainnet release in March.

> Ethereum L1 since that has the most liquidity there

- It's not going to be an overnight transition.

- It shouldn't be

- "Liquidity" does not need to relate to usage.

Sort like "savings" vs "checking" accounts, the base-layer will hold the majority of the assets, and people should keep on the layer-2 system "just enough" for what they plan to use in the short term.

> the base layer is not meant to be used on day-to-day operations

The whole point of cryptocurrencies was to use the blockchain for everything. Everyone should be able to use normal cryptocurrency wallets for all transactions. Anything else means cryptocurrencies have failed.

Why?

Layer-2 have a very precise definition. They are systems that depend on the base-layer to guarantee the integrity and security of the transactions, but that through some mechanism can be executed outside of the blockchain.

A roll-up does not violate the security of the blockchain and users are in control of their assets at all times. What is the practical problem of using it? Just because some purist says so?

> Everyone should be able to use normal cryptocurrency wallets for all transactions. Anything else means cryptocurrencies have failed.

Ethereum is designed to replace governments and banks. Use whatever you want as your barter tokens. Nobody cares.

> Regardless, Both Ethereum, and Solana were unusable on that day and as it stands are still unsuitable for anything 'high demand'.

"its too crowded so nobody goes there"

yes, if you want to launch a premium product right now, you launch it on the chain people will pay to go to

you can play with the "poors" on Polygon and BSC. The lower barrier of entry makes it even more cluttered with ignorable projects. (Solana is cheap too but is attracting large premium projects and communities as well)

"burned nearly $200 million worth of Ethereum"

I wouldn't say it was "wasted" - some people made a lot of money out of it.

Also, it's not like Ethereum is a physical good that can be destroyed. It's just a bookkeeping tool and what happened is people trying to mint NFTs gave up their portion of the total supply in exchange for having their transactions go first. The "wasted" fees were in effect distributed equally to every other ETH in existence.

Did ~$200 million dollars worth of electricity & hardware depreciation get burnt as part of this land sale?

If so, I'd say that it's close to 'wasted', given that as I understand, the only thing of value that has been created is only useful for financial speculation.

We're paying people to dig ditches, and then fill them. Just because the ditchdiggers got paid doesn't mean their effort isn't wasted!

I don't think the way it works is that every blockchain transaction of value X requires an equivalent cost X (denominated in USD) of electricity usage and hardware depreciation.

... Right. Duh.

If this was simply a surprise pay-day for miners (as opposed to the real cost of running the network), you are right, in that extent. In that case, yes, from a productivity & resource usage point of view, this wasn't a waste of $200 million.

No, it didn't. The amount of electricity used doesn't increase because of network congestion, and with Ethereum's mining reward system, there is no incentive for miners to increase their hash rate just for high-congestion moments.

Lastly, these reports really need to stop denominating things in USD. 64k ETH were burned, the dollar amount is not related to it.

Not going to comment on the specific claims here, but "speculation" is often a useful activity if we care about planning for the long-term and adequately allocating resources.

It is, if it actually results in useful, productive, real-world work to be done more efficiently. I understand why people may want to trade futures, or hedge against instability in FOREX or interest rates, and how this spawns a side-industry of derivatives traders and speculators, etc, etc.

Unfortunately, the ratio of speculation to productive real-world work done by the crypto space seems to be ~0, compared to speculation in most of the real-world economy. If all of these ICOs and NFTs were producing valuable goods (food, medicine, shelter, widgets, entertainment[1]) left and right, more efficiently than the traditional economy, I wouldn't accuse the space of being purely speculative.

[1] Well, it does produce some entertainment...

Stablecoin adoption in the developing world seems to be of value. Compensating artists and thus incentivizing artwork seems probably good too.

But I'm not very familiar with the space as I've said.

Right, “burned” suggests it was destroyed. Instead this was paid to miners.

The service the miners are providing is auctioning off time-slots in the network. This is load-shedding in action; if you don’t think your transaction is worth the fee, wait until the network is less congested. (Sure, this is probably an indictment of Ethereum-as-currency, but I don’t think that’s a use-case that is seriously contemplated by most market participants right now.)

Edit: this first part may be false, fees are apparently actually burned now. Sorry. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241054#31241311

so is it like a share buyback, incrementally increasing the value of all held etc?

I don't really understand how a "$25 NFT with a $3300 transaction fee" can exist. Isn't that a $3325 NFT? The purchaser was willing to pay that.

It seems like the main difference is that the seller didn't receive what the purchaser was willing to pay, creating a rather unique dead-weight loss. Wouldn't it be better if the seller received the additional $3300?

The purchaser paid that fee to the protocol (miner + burn), not the seller, to have their transaction processed before others in the mempool and settle the trade in < ~30 sec. They could have set a smaller fee ($10-100) and gone for lunch, and their transaction would have been accepted within an hour or two.

This is most likely a UX issue. Users aren’t aware they can set normal fees even during congested periods.

So it's more like me announcing that, if everyone in line lets me cut to the front, I will burn a $100 bill and enrich them all slightly through deflation. I wonder if any transactions ever just never get confirmed because they never pay enough gas fee to not be pre-empted?

Yes, and eventually drop out of the group of unprocessed transactions (mempool). You can cheaply try this for yourself. No permission needed to learn!

The burn is one part (and in many cases the majority of the transaction fee) but there is also an optional tip directed to miners which may incentivize them to include your transaction first.

Transactions that are below the market fee will just sit in mempool waiting for a miner to pick it up. Eventually these 'stuck' transactions will be pruned by nodes to free up room for more rewarding transactions.

I recently wrote a thread on how UI design changes could likely mitigate most of the overpaying that the Vice article is reporting on.[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/mattdesl/status/1521427065437884417

>A Twitter thread by Molly White, creator of Web3 Is Going Great, documented how exorbitant fees affected people buying NFTs from different projects, often outstripping the underlying asset: a $3,500 fee for a $500 NFT, a $3,800 fee for a $270 NFT, a $3,950 transaction fee for a $260 NFT, and a $3,300 transaction fee for a $25 NFT were just some of the many ridiculous trades executed during the gas war caused by Otherdeed's NFT launch.

Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. I'm 100% serious.

All of this, over gifs, jpgs and fake land in a theoretically infinite digital universe that was probably procedurally generated anyway.

When's the President going to do something to fix these gas prices?

Anyway, I thought crypto currencies were meant to be inflation-proof.

It's kind of like trying to outwit other traders in the stock market, isn't it? Just a bunch of people building elaborate systems to gamble.

Stock market trading is actually super efficient energy wise, comparatively, due to its centralized nature in a trusted environment. No need for proof of work or proof of stake, so no need to spin cycles for crypto trust theater (because you can still be prosecuted and sued if you steal crypto and it’s worth someone’s time to obtain justice; code as law until the cuffs are on or wallets are blacklisted at exchanges).

In this example, Ethereum is this enormous, slow distributed runtime moving image receipts and tokens around.

You can expand and contract the 'stock market' to whatever shape and energy density your argument requires. Does it include all the energy required to keep alive the people who work to sustain it? Does it include investors, the wealth it generates and all the super yachts bought with it? Or on the othet side, is it just the near energy free idea of what the stock market is?

If ethereum ever achieved adoption even close to a fraction of what stock trading has, then you'd have the same problems and overhead.

As it stands, the apples to apples comparison has any centralized, trusted network being more efficient than [attempted] trustless, proof of work like ethereum.

There are already a hundred different crypto exchanges (more than regular ones, possibly)

We do not count the people working on these exchanges as a part of crypto energy cost. So your argument is wrong, actually.

That's because you don't need the same scale of people to run a cryptocoin. It does it itself, more or less, with some maintainers. You can trade value with anyone anywhere in the world without all those banks and people. So in this case, it's an extremely important point.

etherium solves 0 of those problems so it’s a moot point

>> No need for proof of work or proof of stake

Yeah, I mean naked shorts and all.

1. Naked shorts are illegal except in very special circumstances for a market maker.

2. You don't need naked shorts for a stock to be >100% shorted.

We'd all have been better off if people took the GME frenzy as an opportunity to better understand how stock trades work, as opposed to an opportunity to reinforce their pre-existing misunderstanding.

Naked shorts are not possible with crypto unless I'm very mistaken. You could do it in some secondary market, but the blockchain AFAICT only works on "real" assets.

Which is irrelevant, we should judge things as they are and not as they "should be". Exchanges are part and parcel of the crypto ecosystem. We cannot ignore them in this discussion.

Naked shorts do exist in the crypto market and they do affect the prices of those currencies.

But of course why would anyone do that when there are a hundred easier ways to manipulate the crypto market? Buy a few influencers and UFC athletes to shill your crypto and you get a much better return on investment.

Naked shorts can and do exist on crypto exchanges

On an exchange, but not on a blockchain.

Exchanges are a convenience, and go against the entire concept of a distributed ledger. That part of what makes the whole thing a joke.

>.. a trusted environment ..

There is a term called circuit-breaker. How would it possible to trust a system if it has a "feature" called circuit-breaker ?

Crypto proponents and libertarians taking issue with the rules of the capital markets is different than the system having no trust. The US capital markets are some of the most regulated, trusted markets in the world; it’s why capital flows into it (versus say, Russia, China, LATAM, etc). Some poorly written smart contract isn’t going to nuke their (potentially hundreds of millions of dollars) capital on a whim, and if there is an issue, there is a resolution path through industry, government, and the courts. That is “revealed trust” if you will.

Importantly, the belief of an individual can be drastically different than the consensus of market participants. Based on the capital allocation in US capital markets (tens of trillions of dollars), what does that signal regarding trust?

https://www.sifma.org/resources/research/fact-book/

You could instead lose $625M to poorly written code [0]. Crypto is just rediscovering the reason we have financial regulations, at a higher speed.

https://crypto.news/axie-infinity-ronin-network-hack-625m-us...

Knight lost $400m due to a code bug in traffic.

what's wrong with having a circuit-breaker? My house has many and they come in handy. Same with the stock market, it helps slow down emotional trading and limit certain attacks.

Meh, we "waste" all sorts of energy, and what constitutes as waste is something to be debated and something that probably hits philosophical/ethical bedrock much like talking about, say, meat consumption.

We're not talking about abstract metaphysics here. These are objectively measured metrics that correlate to direct physical impact on the planet.

Yes, so does meat eating. Nobody said anything about metaphysics, but whether something is wasteful is a normative question.

There is research demonstrating that the lowest-impact meat produces significantly more greenhouse gas than the worst, highest-impact vegetable. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216

If you're arguing that excess greenhouse gas emissions is not a waste product, then it seems like you're either embracing climate change or you know something about greenhouse gasses that nobody else knows.

> There is research demonstrating that the lowest-impact meat produces significantly more greenhouse gas than the worst, highest-impact vegetable. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216

Yes, that is my point.

> either embracing climate change

I'm making the very basic claim that all of these are based on normative facts, not metaphysics.

"Murder isn't a problem because people die all the time."

I don't think analogies are helpful, but if murder were rampant while we narrowly focused on the murders of a single subset group, mainly due to visibility reasons because they've only started murdering recently, then I would have the same problem with that inconsistency.

To reverse out of the analogy, we've decided that the solution is to simply illegalize murder, and it generalizes over any group doing any kind of murdering.

But what is the equivalent for energy waste? Illegalizing energy waste, for example, isn't quite as open-and-shut as murder.

Imagine how hard it would be to actually etch out the details (operationally, ethically) of an energy policy that generalizes over waste in the crypto space but also any other place we waste energy for things we don't actually need.

> Imagine how hard it would be to actually etch out the details (operationally, ethically) of an energy policy that generalizes over waste in the crypto space but also any other place we waste energy for things we don't actually need.

Does the fact that this is hard somehow make the problem go away? Yes, it will be hard. Like many factors contributing to climate change, changes are required that will make people unhappy.

The only question is whether humanity will take the steps to change on their own, or if the Earth will make those decisions for us.

It's also not necessary to implement an all-encompassing policy about every possible form of energy waste to take aim at emerging trends that are a clear threat to the climate.

Taking just one example, unwinding the problems with the meat industry is going to be incredibly difficult because of hundreds of years of precedent and expectations of the population. In that regard, focusing on curbing new threats first while still in their early stages sounds a lot more viable and at least in the short term, valuable.

> but if murder were rampant

I didn't say murder was rampant.

When I eat meat, it nourishes me, and keeps me alive for a period of time. There are valid criticisms of the meat industry for sure, but generally speaking, meat keeps humans alive.

The power consumption of the crypto ecosystem is not comparable. The power consumption of the crypto ecosystem is sobering when you dig into the details.

Now, couple that with the very dubious value of the things built on top of that ecosystem, and this is not a "meh, just a little more waste" kind of conversation.

Your meat consumption is excessive to your needs and produces excess GHG. It is a want.

And that is why I mentioned there are valid criticisms of the industry.

I personally don't eat meat often, but that's not the point. The broader point is that meat, while wasteful, still provides clear value. That doesn't mean emissions aren't also a problem.

> The broader point is that meat, while wasteful, still provides clear value

What clear value compared to a less emitting alternative?

Meat has a history going back to the dawn of man as a primary source of sustenance. It's delicious, and thousands of millennia of evolution predisposes me to enjoy it more than less emitting alternatives.

The fact that meat has value is unrelated to the current state of the industry, which as I have said, is problematic.

The point I'm making is about the intrinsic value of the thing, because the GP wants to compare meat to cryptocurrency.

My point is that they're not comparable, regardless of the realities of mass produced meat and that industry's sustainability problems.

Dismissing issues with crypto as "meh, meat is a problem too" is a little bit like watching the Amazon burn down and concluding "meh, driving cars are a problem too".

Let's say I enjoy trading crypto. What puts that enjoyment as lesser to an equivalent amount of meat consumption that creates the same GHG emissions compared to alternative?

This time without appeal to the naturalism fallacy.

Admittedly not my greatest comment, and my point was lost in the shuffle. But since we're shifting the goalposts now and comparing activities to commodities, let's say the only meat I choose to eat is sourced by hunting wild game. Let's say I did the hunting myself with my own bow.

Will you at least acknowledge the value of meat as a basic form of sustenance?

Are you saying that trading crypto as a hobby (or crypto itself) is equivalent somehow?

> Will you at least acknowledge the value of meat as a basic form of sustenance?

Given that you can sustain yourself with alternatives that are less GHG emitting, you are basically trading GHG for your own personal satisfaction/enjoyment. How is that different from me trading an equivalent GHG to get some enjoyment out of my hypothetical crypto hobby?

> Are you saying that trading crypto as a hobby is equivalent somehow?

Both things that you only do because they make you happy and something you want, not something you need to survive.

What makes a unit of enjoyment gained from trading crypto somehow a less worthy preference than the unit of enjoyment gained from eating a steak rather than a plant-based alternative?

> Given that you can sustain yourself with alternatives that are less GHG emitting...

You and I can, sure, since I assume we're both having this conversation from our smartphones or computers and don't have to hunt for our food.

But again, that was not the point, nor was it the foundation of the question I asked.

If you're interested in having the same conversation, I'm happy to continue, but until then, I'm out. Ciao.

even a vegan should see the value of the resulting nutritional calories from meat consumption, even if they tout alternatives.

I haven't yet been pointed at the value with regards to the thread topic (except in vague 'it's art!' kind of ways), even by extremely enthusiastic crypto-nuts -- so it makes the 'waste' w.r.t the thread topic a bit more egregious feeling, personally.

Well, a vegan and an honest meat eater would bring up trophic levels and needs vs. wants, though I don't want to get into that.

But I liken that incendiary debate to this one over who is "allowed" to waste energy and for what reason. It doesn't seem as simple of an argument as people in these comments suggest.

If I buy $100 of energy, what exactly am I allowed to do and not do with it? Can I not use all of it to power my vibrating butt plug? I think anyone who wants to go down the route should be ready for a much bigger conversation than the (seemingly) kneejerk, narrow-focused reaction lets on.

I mean, if the point of bringing up energy waste wrt crypto is to just marvel at the waste, then fine.

Let's say you have a friend who is always in debt. He knows it. You know it. Everyone you both know knows it.

He has a few friends, also deeply in debt, who try to pretend it's not an issue, but most people roll their eyes in frustration at that subgroup.

One day, your friend comes over in a brand new high-end Mercedes. You and all of their friends are appalled. Why on earth would they buy a Mercedes when they are already so far underwater that it's unclear if they'll ever be debt free.

To me, this is the problem with the crypto space. The world is full of problems that are threatening the planet. The world can't yet agree on how to solve those problems, (and some people pretend that problem doesn't even exist).

And along comes this new thing that consumes more energy than entire countries. And it's not really clear if it'll ever provide enough value to warrant the cost.

Yes, this will require some difficult conversations along the way, but people are quick to jump all over this because quite frankly, it's exactly the kind of problem the world doesn't need on top of the existing problems that still haven't been solved. There's a kind of exasperation that comes with the feeling.

When people bring up climate change, it's rarely just to marvel.

It is wasted. I can send you a JPG without using more energy than a EU resident will go through in several years. This isn't a philosophical or moral question. We have ownership models and financial systems that are flawed but at least on paper accountable to democracies and not mining consortiums.

Meat consumption is wasteful, sure, but at least the end product feeds humans. I don't get why we have to burn more energy than entire countries to power a speculative asset. Or buy contraband online.

I'm admittedly not very knowledgeable about the Web3/Crypto space beyond the basics - are all of these fees also publicly visible on a ledger?

It seems like someone could build a pretty sobering dashboard that shows exactly what you describe if this data is readily available.

I've wanted to dabble in the space purely so I could understand it more deeply, but am not really interested in the hype. However, building visualizations to help people understand the insanity...sounds like an interesting project.

Yes, it is publicly available. The blockchain keeps a record of every transaction, which includes how much gas was spent.

The gas fees don't really correlate to any energy usage. They're actually a fee for computation on the block. It's no different than the Bitcoin miner fee, except it's based upon how much code is being included and the current network demand. It still blows my mind people think it is acceptable that the network eat their transaction fee if the transaction doesn't go through, especially when these fees are so high (as if now it can cost $2k to do any sort of NFT stuff).

Imagine sending $100 to your mom with your bank and then the bank charges you $2,000 and then the transaction doesn't go through because someone sneezed on the keyboard at the bank and forgot to press send and then the bank keeps the $2000 and your mom doesn't get the $100. Only in this case they didn't sneeze on the keyboard, the transaction calculation actively changed to be $3000 and if only you had $3000 in your account your transaction would've gone through so it's your fault your bank didn't have enough money to send your mom $100.

Or more like someone is depositing millions into their bank account in small coins and it’s occupied all the tellers in the bank and no one is available to deposit your granny’s 20€ check

> It still blows my mind people think it is acceptable that the network eat their transaction fee if the transaction doesn't go through, especially when these fees are so high (as if now it can cost $2k to do any sort of NFT stuff).

I agree that this is ludicrous, but I don’t think that people so much accept it as that they tolerate it. Since, for most people (albeit not all), the only utility of cryptocurrencies today is to get rich, it doesn’t really make any sense to abandon a network that sucks from a UX point of view in favor of a much better network, if you believe that the alternative network will net you much less money.

Gas fees are publicly visible on the ledger, but not necessarily their value in USD or other irl currency. But you can get that easily enough from exchange APIs and other sources.

Here are a few https://etherchain.org/burn https://ultrasound.money/ https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_supply

Platforms don't show this to people because they want people to trade. People that trade don't look for this information/live in blissful ignorance because they would feel bad otherwise.

If anything, by now we should accept that showing people numbers isn't the right way to make them aware of climate change.

> It seems like someone could build a pretty sobering dashboard that shows exactly what you describe if this data is readily available.

Crypto relies on people who don't know to look at dashboards.

Even if you think the main reason crypto is bad is the environmental damage I think it's probably more convincing to normal people to talk about how stupid it is ala these fees than to talk about the environmental damage.

The best way to get people to care about carbon emissions as a cost is to tax carbon emissions. But unfortunately, we live in a world where increasing gas prices immediately cause calls for gas subsidies even from supposedly progressives.

People get upset because it effectively becomes a regressive tax structure. The end game of taxing carbon has poorer people spending a larger percentage of their income paying taxes...even if they're consuming the same amount of resources as the rich.

So when Exxon gets hit with a carbon tax, what do you think happens? Gas and Oil prices stay the same? Absolutely not! They increase, and consumers end up paying the difference. This doesn't just affect residential energy prices either. Production and distribution prices increase for every good/service consumed. Normal every day citizens end up footing the bill for corporations.

…and those citizens would be incentivized to pursue alternatives: car-pooling, biking, public transit, walking, EVs, along with the public/private investment in those modes.

Making it costlier for consumers and corporations to pollute the environment so that they change their practices to more sustainable options is the whole point of the carbon tax.

You're missing the point. It would deeply widen the already large gap between the upper and lower classes. And the worst part: it still wouldn't fix the problem. The really carbon expensive aspects of society come from industrialization. Fossil fuels are not "optional". Without them none of the global supply chains would function. VERY few would have electricity in their homes.

Building infrastructure would be insanely expensive to build with a carbon tax.

Which is why the most suggested thing I've seen is taxing carbon and then distributing that evenly to all citizens. Anyone using less than the mean would benefit (which would cover the lowest earners because they're least likely to have cars and high energy use), while also having everyone incentivised to lower usage (which also means you can set the rates even higher).

> Normal every day citizens end up footing the bill for corporations.

Corporations are made of people. It's all just people doing things. Taxing anything is always taxing people which is a non-interesting statement.

Redistribution would not nearly be enough to offset the economic damage to the lower class. A big percentage will be lost to bureaucracy. Inflation would skyrocket. Those with assets see all the benefit of inflation, while the poor people with no assets have their purchasing power eroded away. Housing will become even less affordable. There's no free lunch.

> Corporations are made of people. It's all just people doing things. Taxing anything is always taxing people which is a non-interesting statement.

This is a ridiculous point. Surely you understand the different between things like income, sales, estate, capital gains, and corporate taxes? They all affect radically different individuals. I absolutely do not think that poor people should pay to clean the earth for the elites.

> Production and distribution prices increase for every good/service consumed

That sounds like a feature as consumption is one of the core problems.

> Normal every day citizens end up footing the bill for corporations

Corporations are serving demand. You could say citizens end up paying a more accurate cost for their consumption, with environmental costs properly accounted for.

And we could redistribute the tax revenue back to the citizens, starting with those who are suffering most and are least responsible for the climate emergency.

That's trivial to fix by giving poor folks $5K each and then it's their choice if they want to spend it on gas. Aka a subsidy for not buying gas.

You can (and should) debate what the exact numbers should be, but we already do this today with tax credits and welfare for the poor. It's a a solved problem.

> That's trivial to fix by giving poor folks $5K each and then it's their choice if they want to spend it on gas. Aka a subsidy for not buying gas.

See my sibling comment. This is dramatically underestimating the economic damage to those with lower income. Literally everything will become more expensive. Things like food, housing, infrastructure, medical care...

> ...but we already do this today with tax credits and welfare for the poor. It's a a solved problem.

Hey man, if you've solved our carbon emissions problem no strings attached you'll have changed the world. How are the current tax credits and welfare systems "solved"? Social Security is expected to collapse in the within 15 years.

> Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. I'm 100% serious.

That's.. not how this works. The miner receives a block reward which is a combination of a fixed reward (2 ETH right now) + tips from people trying to get their transaction (typically ~0.2 ETH) [0]. The rest of the transaction fees are burned by the network.

In effect this means that miners are motivated to mine (and hence use CO2) based upon the block rewards. During periods of high network usage, they aren't magically procurring more miners, and hence they aren't actually using more electricity. And since the vast majority of the reward is burnt anyways, during high periods of usage, the miner reward doesn't actually go up that much.

Regardless of all of that, Ethereum will be on proof of stake within a year (wouldn't be surprised if it's 3 or 4 months at this point), at which point the CO2 argument will go away altogether).

[0] https://etherscan.io/block/14700751

> And regardless of all of that, Ethereum will be on proof of stake within a year

I’ve been hearing this since 2017. I won’t believe it until I see it.

Yup.

> The ultimate goal of the Ethereum Foundation for 2017 is to follow the vision of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and make a move from a proof of work to a proof of stake protocol

https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereums-2017-roadmap-flexib...

There's a site made to track the details of what needs to happen before the merge. https://wenmerge.com/ it still lacks specific date commitments. The focus is on "when it's ready" given that ~0.5 trillion dollars are in the system.

I believe the date it currently counts down had been planned as the merge date/deadline but has explicitly been postponed already.

ethmerge.com still says Q2 too, but a prediction market https://polymarket.com/market-group/ethereum-merge-pos sees only a 75% chance of it happening this year, and a 61% chance of it happening by the end of Q3.

I don't think it'll ever happen because the miners don't want it. They've invested millions into GPUs and they'll all become worthless once Eth switches to PoS.

Or they'll find another coin to mine.

$30 billion in ETH locked on the PoS network will be worthless if they don't switch.

Meanwhile, there's no technical way for the miners to keep the switch from happening.

>Meanwhile, there's no technical way for the miners to keep the switch from happening.

Right, because it’s never happened that miners disagree with a change and split into a different chain…

They can certainly do that, but that doesn't keep the merge from happening. It just means there might be a PoW chain on the side. It'll be up to the market to decide whether it's worth anything, and if it's not worth much, it won't support much mining activity.

So far, the miners don't appear to be organizing a chain split. And it would take some organizing; they'd need to defuse the difficulty bomb, get exchange support, try to get support from the people running tokens backed by custodied assets, etc. Perhaps most critically, they'd need to get a large portion of the user community to believe that PoW is better and worth sticking with. That's not happening either, and Ethereum users are very much looking forward to PoS.

Remind me how many existing splits there are?

One. In that case, unlike today, a large portion of the user community believed that the alternate approach was a better idea.

And the market did make a pretty definite decision on the two forks' relative worth. ETH today is worth $2800 and ETC is at $26.

More than one, but alright. The point is the mechanism exists to just fucking ignore PoS and if miners don’t think there is enough in it for them, it won’t happen.

Of course miners can keep their PoW chain going. That doesn't mean anyone else will care about it, or that they can stop the PoS chain from going live.

There have been lots of Ethereum forks, but ETC is the only case where the old chain stayed active. In every other case the old chain was abandoned. (Bitcoin on the other hand has multiple active chain splits.)

Yes and in 2017 there hadn't been a proof of stake network running in parallel for a year and a half, with 10% of all ETH deposited and locked in place until after proof of work is killed off. Nor had there been multiple public testnets for the merge process.

I'm just an outsider, but to OP's point, in 2017 they had none of what you just cited yet they were making the "within a year" claims, and continued to do so year after year. One can't help but draw a comparison to the boy who cried wolf.

Edit: This isn't me taking a position, just observing.

I'm also skeptical, but let's remember that the point of the fable is not "the boy's repeated claims lost credibility because the wolf never came", but rather "the people eventually learned to ignore the boy's claims and were caught by surprise when the wolf finally came" ツ

But if PoS comes after everyone stops caring about ETH (or PoS), it still fails. PoS isn't the hard part. Getting ETH successfully onto PoS is the hard part.

According to the people designing and building this stuff, PoS itself was a lot harder than merging it with the rest of the network.

For PoS there was all sorts of complicated game theory, a whole new protocol, and trying to figure out every possible way to attack it.

For the merge, it's basically just changing the fork choice rule of the existing network, so instead of going with the fork with the most work, it goes with the one being chosen by the PoS network.

They still haven’t solved the nothing at stake issue. I don’t see any progress being made regarding game theory.

Locked deposits and slashing solve nothing-at-stake.

Is ETH actually going to be PoS within a year? It feels like ETH has been “about to be PoS within a year” for like five years now.

They're waiting on Tesla to deliver on FSD first. But that's going to be within the next two years.

I think the FSD requires PoS first.

After the Year of the Linux Desktop

Just in time for the tenth anniversary of the year of luigi

That’s about when fusion is going to be commercially viable I think?

At this point, it could be possible to get Duke Nukem Forever to run on the Hurd, so never say never.

The heartbeat PoS network is running today and has been running for over a year now. The next step is to merge the PoW consensus model onto the PoS network.

The last date was supposed to be around June, but seems like that will get pushed to August (or later) now. Yes, it is comical that the dates keep slipping.

That said, changing the consensus model for a network with multi billion $'s worth of value stored in it, isn't something you just do with a lot of thoughts and prayers. I don't blame them for taking their time with this transition.

At this point I can't help but feel like the main deliverable of "ETH going PoS" is being able to dismiss claims about the obvious wastefulness of the system, not the actual transition.

I feel like it's obvious that the goal of the the transition wouldn't just be the transition itself? I'm confused.

There's some difference between "so they can dismiss claims about wastefulness" and "so it isn't wasteful" but that's a pretty small distinction. I don't really care which of those two is a bigger motivator.

Sorry that was unclear. I mean that by claiming that PoS is ready and just around the corner, one can have the cake and eat it too by claiming that the waste issues will be solved soon, without actually having to make the risky political decision to do so. Just delay it every half year to allay the concerns of people that are considering buying in, and hope nobody cares anymore by the time the bubble pops.

Or perhaps the bust is a great time to generate some credulous positive news coverage.

The difference is that if they're greenwashing then they don't need to actually deliver.

I think they're talking about the same year when Linux will become mainstream for desktops.

> It feels like ETH has been “about to be PoS within a year” for like five years now.

Except that it is.

Imagine promising your clients and telling them to wait 'for a year' for the team to fix these fundamental issues in your product and have them lose millions on your missed estimates whilst you keep postponing and delaying the fixes for 5 years.

At some point, these clients will give up waiting and move elsewhere. Happened to the first NFT project on Ethereum (CryptoKitties) and now BAYC is considering doing the same.

So given that situation, the longer they delay and postpone it the worse it gets.

> Imagine promising your clients and telling them to wait 'for a year' for the team to fix these fundamental issues in your product and have them lose millions on your missed estimates whilst you keep postponing and delaying the fixes for 5 years.

Basically any large organization IT project, defense project or anything which a politician touches after the sign off, then.

Close, but even worse.

Except there are no regulations around it or legally-binding contracts to protect these projects and we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars lost with little to no way for compensation or any legal case. Not even suing the creators would do anything for those losses.

Since Crypto is still a wild-west, projects like Ethereum are free to mislead their investors into loses and when they did eventually lose millions over a hack, suing them was futile. So the creators reversed the entire chain, defeating the whole point of immutability of Ethereum.

It's been more than 5 years since the move to PoS was expected for 2016. Everyone knows how both expensive, slow and inefficient Ethereum still is today for anything on-chain and even some have given up waiting on this sunken cost contraption to improve and looked else where.

BAYC is moving off ETH?

The merge (end of PoW) won't fix gas prices [1], which is why these projects move onto other (theoretically less secure) networks.

The transition to ETH2 (which is also now called something else [2]) is still an undefined date target.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=eth+merge+gas+prices

[2] https://blog.ethereum.org/2022/01/24/the-great-eth2-renaming...

> It feels like ETH has been “about to be PoS within a year” for like five years now

Likely because you don't actually follow the development milestones, and are just synthesizing a conclusion based on social media headlines/comments.

Successful testnets for the merge have been launched and merge execution from a shadow-fork of the mainnet to a PoS testnet have been completed in the last 2 months. As far as I am aware, no merge date has ever been set and all previous timelines were speculation, not missed deadlines.

I would recommend people sign up for an ETH feed or newsletter (e.g. the ETH Foundation blog https://blog.ethereum.org/2022/03/23/finalized-no-34/) and stop letting naive comments on hacker news/reddit/twitter dictate their opinions on the state of things like crypto.

> As far as I am aware, no merge date has ever been set and all previous timelines were speculation, not missed deadlines.

I'm not deep in that world, but as far as I can tell (from wandering on the blog you posted) there still aren't any deadlines to miss.

As we all know, strategic ambiguity is a hallmark of any good financial system.

I'd say I'm 95% confident that it will be within a year. The code is written, and multiple waves of simulated merges have occurred. The last 2 found small, non-blocking bugs that were fixed, so it's a matter of when, not if at this point.

What makes you think the POS change will happen within a year at this point? Its been continually delayed, and the last word is that it will be "a few months after June"

Because of the constant consistent progress, the second "shadow merge" completing successfully (testing the change to POS), the little to no bugs found in the various POS clients during these tests, etc.

The slowness is a feature, an upgrade like this has to go perfectly, too much money is at stake.

>Regardless of all of that, Ethereum will be on proof of stake within a year (wouldn't be surprised if it's 3 or 4 months at this point), at which point the CO2 argument will go away altogether).

Quoting for posterity.

Do you think this is too optimistic?

https://manifold.markets/LarsDoucet/will-ethereum-switch-to-...

I have no position.

It looks like it changed pretty dramatically since you posted (it's now at a 24% chance of occurring before the end of the year). This site [0] uses actual money, and more closely lines up with what I expect (although still more pessimistic than I am).

[0] https://polymarket.com/market-group/ethereum-merge-pos

I'd be happy to make a bet based upon this statement.

See my sister comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241852 you can bet there, using free paper money and if you win donate (via conversion) to charity which is cool.

Thanks for this explanation. It helps to hear that about ETH.

Your position seems to be that CO2 isn't linked to computing specific transactions, it's just the amount of mining on the network at any given time. But that could still very easily be expressed in terms of CO2. I.e. "during the time these transactions were monopolizing the network, the carbon equivalent of n acres of rainforest were burnt".

Proof of stake doesn't actually eliminate the carbon impact of these systems, it just improves the efficiency. There are still many computers running for the express purpose of buying autographed drawings of monkeys.

It improves the efficiency 10000-fold. You can run a Ethereum validator node on a 10W celeron, underclock it, and still be fine.

There are ~380k validators on the beacon chain now. There are 20M PS5 + Xbox sold already. A video game console consumes as much as 300W during usage, and even on idle can consume as much as a validator.

Seems like someone should go update the wikipedia article then

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake

> In 2021 a study by the University of London found that in general the energy consumption of the Proof-of Work based Bitcoin was about 1,000 times higher than that of the highest consuming proof of stake system that was studied

1,000x is not 10,000x

> They also couldn't find the energy consumption of a proof of stake system on a large scale as such a system does not exist at the time of the report.[16][17]

Big systems have big side effects. As others have said, I'll believe it when I see it.

You can see it already [0].

Eth PoS network already exists, what is missing is for the transition to be completed (aka, the "Merge")

[0]: https://beaconscan.com/statistics

The 380k validators concerns me a little, that's a lot of computing power burnt making sure we know who owns the monkey jpg. But I don't expect you would see the true reality of unexpected side effects until a system like this goes live and there is $$ to be made.

That's not just a "monkey jpg", and your comment would be a lot more valid if you dropped the sarcasm.

Anyway: 380k validators at 10W and assuming the cost of the kwH to be $0.25 (which is more than the world's average cost) amounts to ~8 million USD /year. That seems to me more than acceptable if it means that we are securing a blockchain that is already holding more than ~500B in assets.

I can not, and I will not, drop the sarcasm. If blockchain is the future, it deserves to be mocked every bit as much as the bits of paper it replaces, probably more. If it's not the future, then it's even funnier (in a sickening way) that humans decided to create 500B worth of monkey jpgs while the climate imploded around them.

Also, for the record, your back-of-the-envelope estimate - 32,000,000 kwh assuming I reversed it correctly - corresponds to about 27,200,000 lbs of carbon @ 0.85lbs/kwh - the average for all US electricity production in 2020.

Convert from lbs to 12337.7125 metric tons, divided by the 141 mT of carbon stored per acre of rainforest. Which makes the answer:

87.5 acres of rainforest burnt per year by PoS, before full adoption.

Adoption of the network is not related to its electricity consumption. The number of validators is a function of how many people want to invest (capital and resources) to secure the network.

And forgive me if I don't act all-too-shocked by your numbers, judging from all your posts about iOS and Apple stuff, I can easily see that your talk is cheap. Come back when your consumer habits actually match your concern about the environment.

> The number of validators is a function of how many people want to invest (capital and resources) to secure the network.

My point isn’t that every new user adds n new validators. My point is that larger the network and the more money involved, the more reasons there are to be a validator. They’re linked, just not directly.

As for my own activities, first - my carbon output doesn’t negate your carbon output, they’re both something we need to tackle. Second - I’d be the first one to say that the apple tech ecosystem has huge carbon costs that haven’t been reckoned with. That’s a big part of why I’ve been refocusing my attentions in the 6 years since 2016 when I last posted something about iOS.

> My point is that larger the network and the more money involved, the more reasons there are to be a validator.

Not exactly. Even for PoS, there will be a threshold where it is not as profitable to be a validator, leading people to rebalance their ETH allocation.

The entire ETH VM is running at about 0.8 MIPS right now. Yes. That is not an exaggeration, current gas limit is 30 million / 3 gas for simpliest add instruction / 12 seconds per block. The calculation power of the network is absolutely inconsequential to the operation of the network. 99.999% of all the energy used is just for Proof of Work. Once they move to Proof of Stake, if they even do, most of the power usage will be to run the hard drives to hold the increasingly massive ledger that will spawn from it.

For humour sake, if I had time i would set up a raspberry pi to run psql and node and provide an alternative centralised blockchain that would compete computationally.

If you manage to convince all the millions of people that the data on your raspberry pi is valid and you pinky-swear that you are not going to manipulate their funds, go for it.

Works for binance and many other centralized chains!

The issue isn't how much computing power (aka carbon) does the network NEED. The issue is how much computing power the network consumes.

Depending on the implementation of PoS, there could be all kinds of incentives or pressures for a lot of distributed computing power to get thrown at it, despite it only needing a fraction of that.

None of that is a problem if the system is #1 displacing other higher consuming systems and #2 not actively harming people.

Re: #1 So far most of what I've seen out of blockchain seems additive - it's not replacing old systems, it's layering on new systems. But it's still early days, maybe that'll change.

As for #2, well, it's hard to trace the exact benefits and harms of blockchain we've seen so far. Which leaves me to fall back on history. You can call me a commie if you want to, but a system that benefits capital over labour usually shakes out to benefit a few while harming many ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Still nothing compared to the amount of CO2 and environmental destruction caused by tourists competing for likes on their social media posts.

That is a bit like saying Amazon shareholders are only going to buy for the AWS revenue and not the Amazon.com sales.

Miners of all people do detailed calculations to the nth degree. “Gas war”s will make more incentive for people to start buying up more cards and heating their basements.

I'm not a fan of Yuga or "land" sales on blockchains, but this argument comes out every time there is something even tangentially related to proof of work blockchains. There is not a significant marginal expenditure of electricity per nft minted or transferred. The same order of magnitude of energy is expended to ensure the security of the blockchain whether a large NFT mint happens or not so long as the blockchain exists.

What really happened here was that the company that launched this did it in a way that congested the ethereum network and an auction essentially occurred in "gas" to use the network for this purpose for a couple hours. Instead, the company should have pre-allocated guaranteed minting on a lottery basis so it didn't devolve into a "gas" auction or, increased supply to match demand, which they knew in advance (like you said, limits here are artificial).

A better way to look at the gas price is that is the cost of decentralization.

One single entity being the source of truth will always be cheaper than a blockchain verifying a transaction. The caveat is if that cost is worth it.

For buying tangible goods, the gas price might be worth it since Visa/MC control what you can sell online and payment processors can be circumvented using crypto. That is a pain point.

For intangible goods, the gas price is simply not worth it. What pain point exists for owning digital goods that would require decentralization? In my opinion, none.

Something like BOYC couldn't have been build in a traditional centralized manner. 4 founders had the idea of this club and were able to build it up on the back of Ethereum without any permission needed or their own infrastructure. It might not be worth it, but that's something unique that hasn't been possible before.

Serious question: what did they actually build?

They create images and sell them on someone else's network. I could list a JPG on eBay without having to run any infrastructure either.

They built a weird business that made them rich.

If it wasn't built on crypto hype, it wouldn't have been popular.

Listing jpg’s on eBay wouldn’t get you a cut every time one of those jpgs was sold. You couldn’t easily airdrop items to holders of your apes, etc.

> The same order of magnitude of energy is expended to ensure the security of the blockchain whether a large NFT mint happens or not so long as the blockchain exists.

That's not completely true. The amount of resources wasted per hour are proportional to the value of the coin. Lacking any genuine uses for for cryptocurrencies, people determine coin value by things like transaction volume, market capitalization, influencer endorsements and active wallets instead. Thus every additional user, transaction and especially the common million-dollar wash trades designed to pump their respective projects, contribute significantly to the waste that is generated.

That's only true in the long term. It's not true as applied to this particular sale.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_network_hash_rate

Perhaps instead of all of these feel-good blaming the end user for systemic issues we could actually solve of the low hanging fruit surrounding climate change?

I'm tired of the blaming of regular people for not composting or recycling instead of the corporations who routinely behave poorly on a global scale.

Instead of CO2 generated by computers we could talk about CO2 generated by heavy industry? Which is actually a large emitter?

Or maybe we could talk about regulating corporate giants who routinely abuse environmental regulations by doing them in the 3rd world such as Conagra, Shell, or Dupont? These are companies which release untested chemicals and incentivize rainforest burning and yet we give them a free pass to focus on trivialities.

CO2 generated by Facebook and Amazon would be interesting to see. Worldwide computing usage too.

Fair point though: companies should be embargoed for wrecking the environment at this point. Even a handful of big western countries doing it would likely make waves, even without the US.

0.1 % of the world's energy is used by this, and growing. It is no longer ignorable.

And anyways most mining is inaccessible to regular people. It is gigantic corporations doing all the mining these days. Etherium runs mostly on AWS.

E: AWS claims that 25% of ETH workloads run on AWS

https://aws.amazon.com/blockchain/

> The industrial sector accounts for 30% of global emissions and roughly 37% of global energy consumption. This huge share of climate-changing emissions from one sector is an equally huge opportunity for emissions reduction on a global scale.

It's quite literally a rounding error. You're focusing on trivialities compared to actual polluters.

It doesn't really matter whether it's accessible to regular people. Container ships aren't exactly accessible to regular people either.

Eth most definitely doesn't run off AWS. Way too expensive lol.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/decarbonizing-heavy-i...

Replacing cryptocurrency can literally be done overnight. That's not true of international shipping.

Yes, it could, if you don’t account for the psychology of humans who might be caught in tragedy of the commons situations, stuck in local maxima, or simply have irrational thoughts across the board. That’s a big if though. For example, we have already “solved” global warming with the invention of nuclear power. The only thing holding us back is the psychology of people who thinks that using nuclear power is bad.

> Eth most definitely doesn't run off AWS. Way too expensive lol.

Then what are all of these Ethereum nodes doing on Amazon.com then? [0][1][2]

The evidence here satisfies the claim that >25% of ETH workloads are running on AWS. Worse than the original claim of just 25%.

Don't bother denying it.

[0] https://coinful.net/amazon-managed-blockchain-supports-ether...

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/03/announcin...

[2] https://ethernodes.org/networkType/Hosting

Is crypto mining heavy industry?

All those poor miners with black lung and cave-ins and such…

This 100% falls into the category of low hanging fruit. It's merely a far less efficient way of doing things we already know how to do. No worthwhile functionality would be lost.

An increase in gas fees doesn't correspond to an increase in energy consumed/CO2 produced. The network was chugging along at its usual hash rate like always, but this sudden demand for transactions creates a bidding war for the existing gas (computation) available. The fact that the gas rates rose so high shows that the network's energy consumption didn't increase.

Of course, in the long term, exorbitant gas fees produce some incentive for more miners to join and burn more CO2.

This is wrong though. During the sale, the fees were much higher, but the CO2 emissions remained constant.

It's just not the case that you can "talk about gas fees in terms of tons of CO2".

You should talk about the CO2 emissions of the Ethereum network. It's not 1:1 with fees in any sensible way.

This is a temporary state of things due to proof of work. Proof of stake is coming, and already bored apes et al should be running on a Layer 2 like Polygon. Harping on the environmental consequences is a bit disingenuous.

Blockchains use the same energy whether there are transactions or not.

This bolsters the anti Proof of Work/blockchain argument if you understood it. Which ironically means understanding blockchains instead of just finding the nearest convenient reason to not bother understanding them.

>> Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. I'm 100% serious.

We don’t do it with anything else, so why do it with this? Other than to virtue signal of course.

We do with tons of stuff? Articles have been written about CO2 costs for literally every aspect of life at this point.

That being said Proof of Work is a slightly different beast because the consumption of resources is the goal in and of itself. Efficiency gains are antithesis to it as the cost is what keeps the network safe.

Yes, but we don’t do it and ignore monetary value. We can and do discuss both.

When was the last time you read an article about the CO2 output of the finance industry?

I can first hand assure you there are a lot of very expensive CPU cores sitting in datacenters all over the world shuffling money back and forward for fractions of cents on the dollar.

huh? people talk about it all the time on this very site in the past. ALthough it's usually about how much VISA and mastercard uses, or how much is used by money flowing through the american banks.

I am so annoyed by this argument. The question we should be asking ourselves is how electricity is being generated in the first place. Fighting crypto is the wrong fight for environmentalists: the right fight is transitioning to healthier and cleaner source of energy in a world that will inevitably consume more and more electricity as part of our organic progress, with or without crypto.

If anything, use crypto and electric cars as a driver to enact these changes, not as blockers, since they drive more electric consumption and therefore they help making a stronger case for cleaner source of energy.

That’s like saying drunk drivers are actually lobbyists for funding more police sobriety checkpoints.

No. It's like saying that we need more food (and technology to produce it) to sustain an ever growing population, rather than saying we should mass-murder our population to bring it back within an acceptable boundary. This will bring investments, technology advancements, and trigger a race to generate energy in a better way.

We will always consume more energy (and food!) as our civilization progresses, I am embracing that without blocking that. Also, even without crypto we still need to find better energy sources anyways, so what's the pushback all about? We are just kicking the can down the road with no action other than "criminalizing" crypto.

The incentives don't match. No matter how efficient we make our power generation, PoW will simply scale up and consume more, making those gains moot. It will use up cheaper renewable energy and force everyone else to keep relying on fossil fuels. Of course I should not forget to mention the e waste which is a concern regardless of how much greenwashing is done

PoW will scale up to match, be vigilant about which sources it uses, which sources an enterpriser wants to try to use. Be vigilant about the coal plants coming online, while non-grid connected methane-reducing sources are applauded.

Large scale miners allowed this argument to get out of control because they didn't want people to know their sources of energy (extending their lead in front of other miners), and now this ESG boogeyman has taken an inaccurate life of its own.

At the end of the day, if you really think you have another economical use of energy because proof of work can't possibly be "it", then you still have to thank Proof of Work for making you notice an energy source and use case that everyone else failed to notice for decades.

I think PoW's incentives to grow are something that needs a lot of vigilance to curb, as it will be governments eventually using it in the most economical and polluting way, in order to control the network. But I think enough people can see through the "I just want any other thing to use energy waaah" argument that the private sector ban is never going to happen.

Cryptocurrency is worse than electric cars because cryptocurrency can be mined everywhere in the world, whereas electric cars require the use of the electrical grid near the location they're being driven. This means that local governments can mandate cleaner sources of energy and actually have an effect on electric cars, as you can't just import electricity from overseas as easily, while cryptocurrency mining can just move to more favorable jurisdictions in response to any inconvenient regulations. The incentives of cryptocurrency mining create a race to the bottom, where mining operations simply relocate around the world to wherever the regulations are laxest.

While the low-effort statements stemming from the obsession with crypto carbon output annoy me as well, energy budget is an essentially zero-sum game (ignoring anomalous areas like those with net excess geothermal), and zero-carbon energy can be achieved by increasing 0C production or decreasing consumption.

As with almost every ecological issue, decreasing consumption is the more economically and logistically viable part of the solution, especially when it comes to cryptocurrency where the value-per-unit-energy is so many orders of magnitude lower than traditional systems.

I suggest scaling nuclear power all the way, while still innovating and investing in non-nuclear clean energy in the meantime.

You're assuming that the proponents of this argument are convinced that crypto is a worthwhile burn of energy in the first place, which is - off course - exactly the opposite of what's being implied.

Here's how your opponents see this exchange :

>> Instead of talking about <<<Burning skyscrapers for fun>>> in terms of their monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. I'm 100% serious.

> I am so annoyed by this argument. The question we should be asking ourselves is how <<<Gasoline>>> is being generated in the first place. Fighting <<<Burning skyscrapers for fun>>> is the wrong fight for environmentalists: the right fight is transitioning to healthier and cleaner source of <<<Gasoline>>> in a world that will inevitably consume more and more <<<Petroleum>>> as part of our organic progress, with or without <<<Burning skyscrapers for fun>>>.

I replaced some words (marked by <<<.>>>) to make an analogy that will stand out to you and let you see how the other side uses the argument: they're not implying that enviromental disasters can be totally averted by banning crypto, they're simply stating that crypto is such a monumental waste of energy, the equivalent of burning skyscrapers for fun, that banning it will deprieve us of nothing valuable while saving up valuable time in our _continued_ fight for the enviroment. If you're stuck in the desert with limited water, you search for more water *and* punish those who waste existing water. The more extravagant the waste and far away the alternative sources, the more you should divide your attention between finding new sources and punishing those who waste.

I'm personally moderately on the anti-crypto side (just barely, and very reluctantly) in this, distributed trustless blockchains is a A)Theoretically beautiful B)But extremly, hugely, unimaginably inefficient-in-practice idea that only kinda sorta work when you use it for what plain old bitcoin was used for in the early days and only under extreme circumstances (e.g. circumventing governoment censorship). It's like communism (ironic given the stereotypical libertarianism of it's proponents), it's beautiful that somebody thought of this as an alternative to what we currently do and it's fascinating to imagine what we can do with it. But it's just not ready, maybe a better humanity in a better time and place could make it work, but not here and not now. Rushing not-ready things into production then "fixing it later" is how you do hacky scripts and shitty CRUD apps, not economic and financial systems.

The reason I also hate anti-crypto discourse is the extreme religiousness (almost of the same caliber as the fanatically pro-crypto side) that people treat this matter with, no amount of anger and insults will make reasonable pro-crypto people see the error of their ways, and unreasonable folks will not listen to the fiery screeds in the first place, so all this screaming going back and forth is for nothing.

Aren't both things true from an environmentalists perspective?

1) We need to "transition[] to healthier and cleaner source of energy" 2) We need to use less energy overall

We do not produce enough clean energy to meet the total demand for energy. Until that is true, using less energy is a valid path to reducing the total impact of climate change.

> we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire.

The marginal cost of a transaction is zero.

For example, if half the block was used, and half was completely empty, it would cost nothing extra to the environment to fill the empty half with random noise, NFTs, or Cryptokitty spam. Maybe long-term the storage, but nothing extra to mine that block like you're saying.

This comment is a good example of trolling. How did this get to the top of the thread?

> All of this, over gifs, jpgs and fake land in a theoretically infinite digital universe

No good faith here. Can we flag this?

Equating CO2 emission with Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire is deliberately inflammatory and grossly misleading.

If anything, higher atmospheric CO2 is probably locally better for the Amazon.

There's no reasoning about (lack of) fundamentals or e-waste with crypto loyalists.

Just let it play out naturally: let the scammers scam, the gamblers gamble, the bag holders hold bags and the vanity coins go boom and bust. Can't do a thing about it; accepting this is much better for your sanity.

And well, all the electronics that are wasted on digital La-La land? It's a tell tale sign of the decadence of our times.

That too will come to an end, when earth finally forces us to get our priorities straight. It can only continue for so long...

>"All of this, over gifs, jpgs and fake land in a theoretically infinite digital universe that was probably procedurally generated anyway."

Sorry if this a naive question but what does "procedurally generated" mean here?

The "world" is algorithmically generated, rather than being deliberately designed.

Implying low quality art-wise, probably. Borrowed from videogames industry, where Elden Ring reviews outperformed No Man's Sky, but not only because the latter had 2^64 different planets, one for each seed value, while the former had the world pretty much handcrafted. In fact there are good games with procedural generation, too.

> And a gas war did begin, as soon as the 9 PM ET sale kicked off. 64,219 ETH was burned over the weekend on transaction fees according to Etherscan—that's over $180 million at today's prices, most of which is now gone forever due to Ethereum’s burn.

Probably impossible to know, but I wonder how much actual gas (or other fossil fuel) got burned to power this episode.

The exact same amount that got burnt on a slow cheap day. Miners don't suddenly spin up hundreds more GPUs when the network gets congested.

Creating a block costs the exact same energy whether it's full of high fees, low fees, or completely empty.

And orders of magnitude less energy than bitcoin uses.

> The exact same amount that got burnt on a slow cheap day

How much is that? And what percentage of it went toward powering this event vs the value in $ created by it?

> And orders of magnitude less energy than bitcoin uses.

It's not even 1 order of magnitude less. More like 1/2 of bitcoin's energy consumption.

https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

Impossible to know because this is not how mining works.

Please explain how it works with respect to energy consumption then?

Perhaps there is no way to isolate and characterize the power consumed for this event exactly, but that doesn't mean that one can't characterize the power consumption of crypto.

This is already described in terms of energy used per transaction [1]. So the next question is can we characterize events like these similarly, by i.e. the # of transactions or some other descriptive statistics, and multiply that by the source-weighted energy mix of transactions.

That's not to suggest that this event's energy consumption is higher than the regular rate, but interesting nonetheless.

1. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

A significant source of waste in Ethereum/Bitcoin is transaction tips in order to process a transaction within a certain timeframe. This is in turn tied to the notion of wanting a consistent global state for everyone to operate under.

If there was not a global state, but a set of transactions that flow across nodes this would significantly improve the throughput of the overall system. In other words, the state of an account gradually flows across the system of nodes. Are there any projects out there like that?

The problem with such a system is the opportunities for arbitrage, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_clearing_house

A specific project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network

got one that I can extract value from myself? tonight? for fun and profit?

ha, I meant as a distributed low trust computing environment.

This invites double spends.

Bitcoin's lightning network achieves this by using the base transactions stored on the blockchain only as a fall-back, so that many transactions can be performed without needing to be globally synchronized. Only in the case that a partner fails to follow the established rules of engagement between nodes, a transaction must be created on chain, to "force" the correct outcome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network

You'd think that after Dan Olson had excoriated NFTs in his viral 2-hour video rant with now 7.4 million views that they might have lost their allure just a little bit.

But no, it looks like people are still falling for this billion dollar scam.

Link: https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g

I always wondered why a gas fee future or option never was developed to mitigate gas fees indirectly. Since gas fees are heavily dependent on smart contract conplexity, a secondary market based on gas fees, and not on ETH spot price, seems like it would be a useful financial innovation in this space

It did. The last Ethereum upgrade specifically targeted and killed them (amongst a variety of other changes). There were a lot of smart contracts that would end with exercising the owner's gas option for a gas refund. It was glorious to see, like the icing on the cake after a massive frontrunning flash loan.

Here are two-three implementations of that concept:

https://blog.1inch.io/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-ch...

https://gastoken.io/

and last year's reporting on the planned changelog

https://decrypt.co/77345/ethereum-london-hard-fork-make-some...

It's amazing how much people care how other people spend their money. It's their money, if they want to spend it on ape pictures so be it. Nothing to see here, move along.

Because most of them down the line will shell their ponzi assets to other unsuspecting general public in lure of ludicrous returns.

We are boiling the oceans with this pointless shit, too.

Fees rising isn't the same as 'breaking'. Also this was clearly intentional marketing to promote their chain.

Fees would get that high on every single blockchain because the mint price was below the empirical market price, leaving gas prices as the only remaining market. The only difference is that it would be over faster on something with more tps. That's why it's obvious it was intentional.

Most of the spike in gas prices here was caused by their contract being horrendously un-optimized. If they had done even basic optimization of their contract, gas prices would've been a tiny fraction of what they were, and they would be orders of magnitude smaller if they used ERC-721A. Here's an estimate of what would have happened if they just optimized their damn contract: https://twitter.com/gioperalto/status/1520751524070187010

919.96 ETH would have been saved if they optimized it and stayed on ERC-721, and 39194.05 ETH would have been safed if they also switched ot ERC-721A.

I'm convinced that Yuga is just technically incompetent. All of the people I pay attention to in the crypto space are incensed by everything Yuga is doing here, from the un-optimized contracts to blaming ETH for their own incompetence to their pricing model that excludes everyone except for whales who are already wealthy. The people I follow in the space are small-time independent artists who use NFTs as a way to make a living off their original art, and none of them are happy with Yuga at all.

What's preventing an actor from deliberately designing the slowest or most resource intensive contracts in order to break the system ?

It's all limited by fees. Typically, users would see the high fees and choose not to interact with the contract. It seems during this sale, FOMO outstripped the incredibly (negligently) high expense.

Consumers normally won't tolerate insane prices.

Mistakes happens

Inefficiency costs money. Every operation on the Ethereum Virtual Machine costs “gas”. They’d have to get someone to pay for all that gas used.

Yuga is able to get people to pay because they have the top “brand” in NFT’s currently.

A more optimal contract would just mean it would happen faster, with a higher gas price while the sale is ongoing.

I think this was also intentional - as a way to make the congestion last longer.

With a more optimized contract, the same number of transactions would have been submitted, and the aggregate computational load would have been smaller, leading to less congestion.

There would be less congestion on that day, but the total fee amount would be roughly the same.

I look at these projects in amazement that anyone would waste such significant amounts of time and money on them.

Cryptocurrency really is a cult isn't it.

Many people make an obscene amount of money from this. I think that answers your question why many also put so much time and effort into it.

> Many people make an obscene amount of money from this.

It really is a cult, isn't it?

Prepare for all of justifications and cognitive dissonance, all these centralized projects (I won't use the s-word)

I wonder at what point you might call these NFTs a successful DDoS on the eth blockchain.

That money is not exactly wasted, it's gone to miners.

And how does Ethereum "break" exactly? It was just bloated with many transactions, creating a bottleneck, which is perfectly expected for a hyped project like this.

> it's gone to miners.

No, the base fee is burned (i.e, removed from the available supply). Since Ethereum's EIP-1155 (which changed the rules for pricing and mining rewards, miners only get to keep a "tip")

Anyway, I'd also say that they were not wasted. Worst case scenario, these gigantic token burns reduce the supply and make all the token holders a bit richer.

Oops, missed that, right.

Yeah, even though miners get only a part of the ether, it still valuates the currency when it's burned.

Just wondering... Weren't they going to move to proof of stake?

Etherium's move to proof of stake is expected to happen shortly after Godot shows up.

Recently it was delayed but supposedly still on track before EOY

Same as last year?

and every year for the last 5

"supposedly still on track before EOY"

Nice way to say "never".

Just history repeating itself, honestly. It's been delayed so many times, even the optimist in me is starting to doubt this is really it.

Pretty sure ethereum pos is going to show up around the same time tesla's FSD does.

Ie, "next year", every year.

No conversation about BAYC is complete without this context imo http://gordongoner.com/

So why did this need to be a gas war? Couldn't they have run the sale such that a race isn't necessary, eg waiting longer for transactions to complete?

What was the point?

More previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31224513

There are other cryptocurrencies. For example Algorand could handle the traffic and the fees are less than a penny per transaction.

True. But nobody wants to use that because the price performance is horrible. And price performance is the only utility that most people care about in crypto.

Maybe the Bored Ape fees fiasco is an example of why "price performance" isn't the only "utility" that matters for cryptocurrency.

I wished people would care more for the real world than virtual land and racing to Mars ... awful times we live in ..

With that money I could have financed clinical trials with PNC-27 + thymalin and therefore solved cancer. I'm not even joking, people don't have the erudition to realize it but it's true.

The US has almost 1000 billionaires. Any one of them could decide to mobilize researchers for this purpose, but instead they have decided it's not worth doing that. In fact they have decided it's not worth mobilizing anybody to do anything with that extra money. Why?

Ignorance and mediocrity have much more explanative power than malice

I don't think it's malice. I think wealthy people are predominantly focused on keeping their fortune in-tact, and growing. I don't think they feel a great responsibility to spend it.

But, in my view, the whole point of capitalism is to allocate decision-making authority to those who make good decisions. If it gets allocated to people who choose to defer those decisions indefinitely (by not spending the money), then I think that's a major failure of the system.

It may be that not spending the money is the best decision. But, as someone who see's opportunities for improvement literally everywhere, I fail to see how that's possible.

Your argument resembles that of frauds and quacks everywhere.

I hope I know less about cancer research than you do -- because I know very little, and you want us to believe that you know more than that.

However your presentation style will convince no one.

No one can be convinced by a few lines argumentation and the attention span of the average joe does not allow for lengthier argumentation, do you see the problem? Therefore I can only trigger attention/interest as a way for those people to allocate higher attention span in order to then receive real explanations if interested.

The actual evidence is here https://touroscholar.touro.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1... and it has semantic strength

That is 2 years old at this point. It sounds like mRNA might be more promising now.

https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2022...

I see, so you think you're performing for the uneducated masses.

You're deluding yourself. This is fraudulent argumentation.

If you have something to say that you want people to pay attention to, you can work up a few sentences plus a few corroborating links.

If you have nothing to say, you intimate at great revelation held back by the ignorance of lessers, and tell inquirers to do their own research.

If you don't like the categorization you've self-selected into, then you need to select differently.

Otherwise, you just appear to be clueless but aspirational, condescending and clearly not worth engaging.

create and sell some NFTs collections. the market is telling you what to do. I'm not even joking, people don't have the erudition to realize it but it's true.

in the past year you could have

- launched an "Ohm-fork DAO" for this specific purpose and accumulated a treasury of $700mm just because they were in vogue for a few months

- launched a premium NFT collection of randomly generated profile pictures, just because that was in vogue for a few months

- done a "land sale" like this article is about, just because thats in vogue now

what did you do over the last year? chase a bunch of "promising leads" for weekly meetings that never amount to anything? this particular world is moving fast, its up to you.

Right but I'm not smart enough to have done that and now the market is saturated with scammers. Also, I wonder if DALLE-2 will have a non-negligible impact, although nowadays creating NFTs is not longer sufficent to scamm many people, you need to build a brand, like a virus to infect and gain mind-share.

it's saturated, but not oversaturated

if you looked at any aggregator's "upcoming NFT launch calendar" 8 months ago you could have easily came to the same conclusion that its saturated and too hard to stand out

instead the space has grown by two orders of magnitude since

last week the "amazing sale du jour" was Moonbirds. Some articles were saying "this may look like an overnight success but it really built off of an existing community" read between the lines and you'll find that the existing community (Proof Collective) was formed in January

it does require some meticulousness, but you can learn it

This is the type of stuff that makes me laugh.

"cryptocurrency" hah! It's not a viable currency until its transaction costs are comparable with me using a $20 note at the corner store

They should rebrand to dumb apes.

Algorand fees are very low

The final paragraph sums it up nicely:

>We’ve seen this story a million times before: Crypto project is launched. Something goes wrong. Founders, investors, whales, and some of the community make out like bandits. Most people are left out on the cold, only to be offered another, even greater opportunity with an upcoming token or project. Surely this time will be different.

I don't see how anyone can read about these crypto projects and see anything other than an extremely elaborate scam.

At least with regards to one person I previously thought was someone who would otherwise “know better” after an incredibly confusing conversation about their NFT Group “recruiting” people from poor communities (their definition of recruiting meant nothing more than getting them to create accounts on OpenSea and buying shit)…they don’t care.

The greater fool theory handcuffs has them locked in TIGHT. I mean the fact that they call what they’re doing “recruiting” is full of all kinds of ugly signals.

I don’t talk to them anymore.

Because they know more than surface-level details and understand that trustless, permission-less financial systems offer a huge amount of value, especially to those in less-developed and authoritarian countries, who are regularly abused by a small group of people running their country's financial affairs.

But that doesn't apply to you because you live in the developed world, where you've never had to deal with not being allowed a bank account or extortionist fees or the government simply coming and seizing your assets for an arbitrary, amoral reason.

I'm sure these authoritarian governments are definitely just going to sit by while some foreign technology disrupts their control of the financial system.

The Security XKCD says it better - it even uses the term "crypto"!

https://xkcd.com/538/

You make a good point, but this is still a step in the right direction.

This offers users the chance to flee their country and retain their assets. Good luck getting your assets out of a legacy banking system in such a country.

Yup that's a good point, and one I haven't seen before.

or the government simply coming and seizing your assets for an arbitrary, amoral reason.

You mean people don’t like it when the large amorphous and powerful body that asks its constituents to trust it pulls the rug, and all of their currency out from under them?

Red herring.

I'm not arguing for any system that has the power to rug their constituents, crypto systems included.

Crypto at least enables systems to be built. It's up to you to either trust it without any due diligence or read the source code yourself.

This is a step in the right direction for people who like to assume their own risk and don't like to pay for the bad decision-making of others.

It's up to you to either trust it without any due diligence or read the source code yourself.

I suppose so, but given that your entire conceit started off with a defense of people in under-developed nations, and their access to capital and money, is this really about serving those people? If so, how are people in a country with heavily-devalued currencies under authoritarian regimes served by reading source code for cryptocurrencies? How many people in these countries are you expecting to pop open a laptop and start reading the ETH source before they can buy these digital coins and buy their next meal with it?

I'm sorry but the response here of "just read the source code", given you yourself are holding up impoverished nations, where people are not even "allowed a bank account" as beneficiaries of cryptocurrencies is some LOUD hubris.

This is a step in the right direction for people who like to assume their own risk

Isn't this something someone can already do on established markets in the physical world?

don't like to pay for the bad decision-making of others

Isn't this exactly what just happened in the article we're discussing right now in this thread?

>Isn't this something someone can already do on established markets in the physical world?

Name one trustless, permission-less system that avoids the double spending problem. I would love to know about it.

>Isn't this exactly what just happened in the article we're discussing right now in this thread?

I don't know what you're saying. Participants could do their due diligence and fully understand the risks before participating. Who paid for someone else's screw up?

The “developed world” is who is holding the values up. Crypto is not a savings account for poor people to avoid authoritarian governments. It has no use. It’s nothing more than gambling at this point.

> Because they know more than surface-level details

Implying those who criticize a project or idea simply lack knowledge is facile; you mightaswell just write "because they're haters"

> you've never had to deal with not being allowed a bank account or extortionist fees or the government simply coming and seizing your assets for an arbitrary, amoral reason

So, you argue some value exists in Bitcoin as a political tool to subvert dictatorial influence; what exactly does that do to justify massive compute requiring fees 10-100x greater than the transaction value and associated use of real-world energy? Why would another system not serve this same idea in a better way? What guarantees do people using this as a financial system that it will deliver this value?

Ultimately, what you're saying is "this absurdly compute- and energy-heavy system serves an unintended purpose slightly better than the status quo it competes against in some circumstances, and that justifies all its downsides". I don't really agree with that, and I don't understand why you can't have an honest conversation with nuance about it

> what exactly does that do to justify massive compute requiring fees 10-100x greater than the transaction value and associated use of real-world energy?

You're confused. Bitcoin does not have such fees. Ethereum, while it does have such fees, is moving to proof-of-stake and the energy argument no longer holds up. There are numerous non-PoW chains already actively used, for which the energy argument does not hold up.

This is the only way we know how to avoid double-spending in a trustless, permission-less way. If you know of another way that maintains those two properties, I would love to learn about it.

> You're confused. Bitcoin does not have such fees

This is an Ethereum thread, is it not?

> Ethereum, while it does have such fees, is moving to proof-of-stake and the energy argument no longer holds up.

Um, excuse me, Ethereum very much has these fees still, so the argument is extremely valid in the moment; additionally, this "proof of stake" movement was meant to occur in 2019 no? They are 3 years late and at best 1/3 complete, 9 years of delay sounds about right - this space is full of speculation and grifters treating that speculation as truth to grift.

> There are numerous non-PoW chains

That have extremely unstable financial valuations, destroying the credibility of them as alternatives to existing financial systems.

Your arguments hold no water, they require hypothetical futures and blatantly false things to hold, so why are you making them?

> This is the only way we know how to avoid double-spending in a trustless, permission-less way

The value prop of this is 0 today. Maybe it's even a net negative on the world, with the transactions on these chains having an extremely significant scam rate while also using more energy than entire mid-sized countries do to literally exist. You need to justify why "trustless and permissionless" are important before you can just say "we need systems with these properties!". I can only feel that you are financially deep into these systems and rationalizing to hold your position, you seem like you'd be perfectly capable of constructing good arguments when not emotionally compromised by the topic.

You literally said

> So, you argue some value exists in __Bitcoin__ as a political tool to subvert dictatorial influence; what exactly does that do to justify massive compute requiring fees 10-100x greater than the transaction value and associated use of real-world energy?

So yes, you're wrong about Bitcoin having such fees.

> the transactions on these chains having an extremely significant scam rate

Sure, let's re-assert the power of authoritarian regimes over their people because some people don't do their due diligence. Once again, someone argues that completely unrelated individuals should be punished for the bad-decision making of others.

> You literally said

My mistake, I meant Ethereum of course.

> Sure, let's re-assert the power of authoritarian regimes over their people because some people don't do their due diligence

Your argument is that people subjected to dictatorial misgivings in the financial realm should become internet and tech literate enough to... pick a chain with a stable valuation and guaranteed low fees and no scammers? You must be joking me, or literally paid to write what you are writing.

> pick a chain with a stable valuation and guaranteed low fees

There are numerous chains with sub one-cent transaction fees which have tokens pegged to the dollar.

I can move arbitrary amounts of an asset which is 99% correlated with the US dollar at any time I want with only an internet connection. No governments or regulators need to give me the go ahead. Granted, I wouldn't want to evade regulations or break laws in a developed country. But it's a nice escape hatch for when you really, truly disagree with such laws and regulations and you need to GTFO of your country forever.

It seems as though you're arguing that, if crypto existed during WWII, refugees should be forced to give up all their assets and life savings in order to save their own life. Why?

> There are numerous chains with sub one-cent transaction fees which have tokens pegged to the dollar.

Alright, so we agree - most chains are useless for monetary protection, and require you to use a "pegged to the dollar" token which implies centralization, links with the financial system, and more, such that the claim "[n]o governments or regulators need to give me the go ahead" is true for your particular transactions but in no way true of the overall chain which is susceptible to real-world enforcement. Cool, you've admitted 99% of blockchains are useless, it's a start

> It seems as though you're arguing that, if crypto existed during WWII, refugees should be forced to give up all their assets and life savings in order to save their own life. Why?

You'll really have to walk me thru this line of reasoning step by step LOL, you've lost the plot

There's a lot of people who haven't played the game yet or think they know it better this time.

> even greater opportunity with an upcoming token or project. Surely this time will be different.

Get in on the ground floor now! Be the next whale.

> I don't see how anyone can read about these crypto projects and see anything other than an extremely elaborate scam.

My theory is that we live in a society that has long glamorized the get-rich-quick scheme (until it is revealed as a scam), and there a lot of people who have seen other people getting rich through technology investments (as opposed to technology work), and they don't want to "miss the boat" this time.

I wonder what would happen if we (as a society) took each case of got-rich-through-a-get-rich-quick-scheme and analyzed it like we do post-mortems--with "the social contract failed here, what went wrong?" kind of twist. No one's to blame. We just want it to be more effective and productive for everyone next time.

We go further than that: we glamorize the get-rich-quick schemes even after they're revealed as scams. The scammers get to keep their money, and launch successful careers as motivational speakers / authors (of books detailing their crimes) / etc.

The Wolf of Wall Street was widely admired even though he was a criminal.

Yeah, I think of it as the "what can you get away with" mentality, and it feels like it's gotten more pervasive.

I mean, that kind of gets at the fundamental conceit of Marxist critiques of capitalism, doesn't it? That there are two classes of individual, an upper class of those who primarily get their income by owning assets and not doing work (the titular capitalists) and an underclass of those get their income for doing actual work (the proletariat).

Everyone is incentivized to join to the upper class by easiest and most accessible means possible, and get-rich-quick schemes are the natural endpoint of that incentive.

> that kind of gets at the fundamental conceit of Marxist critiques of capitalism,

Sure, Marx's critiques have stood the test of time pretty well.

> Everyone is incentivized to join to the upper class by easiest and most accessible means possible, and get-rich-quick schemes are the natural endpoint of that incentive.

I agree, but there is generally a inverse correlation between easy/accessible and real/successful. Sure, some people got a truly easy path to "rich" (massive inheritance, lucky bet on the right stock, seizing previously state-owned industries because of your connections), but they are statistically rare. So I'd argue that by the time we get to the get-rich scam scenario, very fewer are entering the upper class (or even the middle class) via these schemes.

Also, by "rich" here I don't mean "comfortable and able to pay the mortgage, an annual vacation, etc", but rather the more contemporary definition of "F-you money".

Oh, agreed upon on all points. I should have emphasized that I meant the attractiveness of those methods is based on whether they appear easy and accessible, regardless of their actual efficacy. By the nature of capitalism, which relies on there being many proletariat and few capitalists, any method that was actually easy, accessible, and effective would quickly have the ladder pulled up as the market corrects (or in many cases, legislates away) the "error", indeed leading to that inverse correlation.

> I don't see how anyone can read about these crypto projects and see anything other than an extremely elaborate scam.

Maybe they read The Billion Dollar Mistake paper and were like “meh, that’s peanuts, we can do much better!”

It's very profitable to create a token, pump up the price and run with the money, rather than building something actually useful. Combine that with the fact that it's incredibly hard or impossible to build something useful on a blockchain. This means that the incentives simply aren't there for non-scam projects. All currently functioning products are directly or indirectly just fueling this broken incentive model.

In 2017, people tried to innovate and imagine new applications for blockchain. There was AirBnB on blockchain, Uber on blockchain, dentists on blockchain, and thousands of other projects. All of these failed (their founders got rich), and now the whole space has devolved into just JPGs and blatant Ponzi-schemes with imaginary yields and elaborate "tokenomics". They aren't even trying to build anything useful anymore.

Just to be clear, I'm talking about these "crypto", "blockchain", and "Web 3.0" products, which are nothing but false promises. Bitcoin, and some stablecoins are working as intended, and are certainly useful as money.

With Bitcoin there was the promise (and to a tiny extent still is) the promise of it becoming a disruptive technology.

With the apes there is no illusion of this being a greater fool scheme.

I wonder how close they are skirting to illegally running a ponzi or pyramid scheme?

The only source of income or growth for this investment is new people buying in. It is worse than amway, herbilife, penny stocks. Probably similar to madoff except the idiots who buy will not be angry at the creators when they lose their shirts. See safemoon exit scam for an early view, or indeed any other crypto ponzi since 2008.

I think the real discussion is what kind of launch is best. Yuga Labs specifically decided against a Dutch auction, lending on their credibility to make it seem like that something to believe in, and then they did this fiasco instead. Some people are saying "false dilemma, a raffle would have been better!" okay, would a raffle be better?

What about a raffle and dutch auction?

What about a dutch auction at 5 ether instead of 2.5 ether in Ape coin, which is the floor price of the "Land" now.

Even if you don't want to have a conversation that nuanced, it would be the most productive conversation to have now.

The cryptocurrencies themselves aren't scams. BTC and ETH are here to stay and there are other good coins like XMR.

It's the shitcoin casino that's bad. All people have to do is avoid it.

how do these ignorant takes get upvoted on a tech board like this

I don't understand why or how they think resources were wasted.

I mean, it might be true, since I don't know how Ethereum works.

But I don't see where it says or implies or explains that the fees represented real resources lost - rather than money transferred.

Some of the transaction fee is literally burned/ceases to exist. Some fraction of it is also printed but some goes away completely. As I understand it.

Sounds like currency deflation. There are winners in deflation too.

The mistake is in pretending that 64K Eth has a USD value that means anything. It doesn't.

So give me at least 1 eth, please.

I have to agree. It starts with irresponsible journalism that is misrepresenting what actually happened. Nothing broke.

Kadena is probably the only proof of work blockchain that's infinitely scalable, has low gas fees, even introduces the concept of gas stations. They just announced a $100M fund for development.

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