Maybe vitalik should focus on preserving decentralization instead. As far as I can see it the biggest flaw in cryptocurrencies — including Bitcoin - is when you look hard enough you realize the decentralization is a facade.
https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/158866978247136870...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FgwVhUjaAAEx_Bb?format=jpg&name=...
It's being worked on multiple fronts by multiple independent teams simultaneously. What you're specifically asking for can be found under "The Scourge" & "The Verge".
They were hard to start for example . You would get your hands dirty and needed some power to turn that hand crank.
When those problems got solved and more cars got on the road it would become dangerous with so many cars, and people suggested you need to learn it properly (and get a driver license). Some thought not many would get such a license to drive a still dangerous machine (no airbags or even ABS at that time).
In the end you are ready to do the work (learn) if it is worth it.
And if it is worth it… that nobody knows (in the western world the answer is mostly “no” right now, at least if one trusts the complex economic systems to work well for the next decades).
If it’s worth the hassle, more technologies will get built to help.
I guess you mean the 20th century?
In any case, those people were actually right. A car for everyone and their daughter is one of the biggest contributing factor for pollution and noise.
At the moment, it's quite clear that current cryptocurrencies are solving problems nobody has (trustless transactions), in a way nobody likes the consequences of (distributed) and are magnets for fraud and grift (too many to list).
Now the idea of giving people cryptographic keys is really attractive and unlocks a bunch of use-cases (most of which crypto proponents have claimed in vain for a decades crypto could solve), but there are a few problems (which crypto doesn't even try to solve): how to restore keys when they lose them or they are stolen, and related how to tie those keys to real-world identity in a meaningful way, how to rollback fraud and punish grifters, etc... for most of these you need a trusted central authority and also trusted, verified identity.
Maybe currencies are just the wrong angle to attack this problem from?
Unfortunately that's a really hard problem - if someone can tackle that and tie it to real world verified identity, there are a gold-mine of opportunities to solve. BUT it will require trusted central services for trust, rolling back transactions in case of fraud and identify verification to keep grifters and scammers out. When you do all that you end up with something far more like our current banking system (though it does have significant problems I don't wish to downplay, it also has hundreds of years of scam protection built-in).
That’s an assumption, not a fact. And trustless transactions might not be the only problem that it tries to solve. What about predictable money supply. Trustless custody (instead of just “trustless transactions), … All these will not appeal to a lot more people today (but nobody and not many is very different, and that ratio can change with future technologies being built)
> how to restore keys when they lose them or they are stolen, and related how to tie those keys to real-world identity in a meaningful way, how to rollback fraud and punish grifters, etc... for most of these you need a trusted central authority and also trusted, verified identity.
The first part (how to restore keys when they lose them or they are stolen) does not necessarily mean that there is no decentralized solution. Social recovery (Shamir Secret Sharing + social recovery; or safer some multisig + social recovery) is being worked on.
The second part “how to tie those keys to real-world identity ” is much harder (specially if one values anonimity to avoid 1984 scenarios).
If a good was regulated to have a stable price nobody would be incentivized to find a clever solution to solve a future crisis with high demand for that good
It's clear that current cryptocurrencies are absolutely not solving that problem either. There's a fact if you like facts, consult the Bitcoin price.
> Trustless custody
Not clear to me that people outside the crypto bubble want this; people want trusted counterparties, not trustless obfuscated counterparties. It is IMO a solution looking for a problem.
I'd be a lot more sympathetic to this space if wasn't full of grifters and fraud. As it is I think the crypto experiment has irreversibly been tainted by that association (and by people losing lots of money), and I would not trust a 'trustless' solution from any of the current crypto companies or individuals.
> how to restore keys when they lose them or they are stolen
This is a v. hard problem, why make it 100x harder by insisting on decentralising the solution? And then 1000x harder by insisting on anonymity? Those may be properties of your chosen solution, which is I suspect why you're insisting they are necessary, but they are a bad design IMO - these are the fundamental design flaws of current cryptocurrencies.
Normal people don't keep backup keys on a second device etc etc, web of trust is a very old idea which has been tried quite a few times (see pgp for example, keybase for another corporate one), and you need a way for a normal person to prove they are who they say they are and regain access via courts or a central authority, take over inherited accounts etc. At some point these systems have to interface with the real world and real world authorities and laws/courts.
Just to propose alternative solutions to safely storing cryptographic keys (note those are useful for all sorts of things and unrelated to cryptocurrencies):
Corporations like Apple, Google could provide such a service, as they already own most of the infrastructure. There are obvious and significant downsides to this.
Enlightened governments could propose such an infrastructure of identity verification and private keys, there are obviously problems with that too, but it could be workable if you trust your government.
Utopian techno-geeks could also provide such an infrastructure, but somebody has to pay for it, and people fundamentally have to trust the people who create and run the system - that's a hard problem without financial incentives for the devs/maintainers. One example of an existing system is DNS and another is certificate authorities - both are not great but do work in the real world for their intended purpose.
I do believe at some point we'll come to solve this problem of digital identity and authentication because it is so fundamental, both for humans and corporate entities. I'm not sure we'll like the solution which ends up winning, and I certainly don't think cryptocurrencies are a contender.
The supply is pretty much math.
Yes, the longterm price trend is an indicator of people valuing that fact (and other properties). Short term is governed a lot more by media, fear, …
Crypto doesn’t do anything faster, cheaper or safer. In fact it’s the opposite: slower, more expensive and brittle. In fact, even if it could advance in those dimensions, it doesn’t seem to offer any competitive advantage over the incumbent technologies.
And there I was thinking that the stupid comparisons of crypto to cars or internet finally stopped.
> And if it is worth it… that nobody knows
Tell me you know nothing about history without telling me you know nothing about history
I can't begin to list all the ways in which comparing the auto industry of the 20th century to crypto of today breaks down. For starters, automobiles promised a massive demonstrable value-add to society from the get-go. Crypto, as others here have pointed out, is a solution looking for a problem.
So far, every application of crypto has actually destroyed value for the process it seeks to replace[1], by adding layers of busy-work on top of an already-working process. If it were of value as a self-contained, isolated ecosystem, then things might be different; but where it interfaces with the existing economic infrastructure within which it needs to operate (and which it seeks to replace), any economic efficiencies bleed out rapidly.
[1] Edit: And I'm not even considering the scams
Exactly this. The entire selling point of crypto is its separation from regulated finance and from the rule of law.
If you don't believe yourself capable of either going toe to toe with the kinds of predators that prefer such an environment and thrive there, or of personally shouldering the risk of losing whatever funds you place into this space to such actors, crypto is not for you.
I would say this is actually true of very nearly everyone, which is why traditional financial systems look like they do.
This isn’t the case with crypto where you can carry potentially all the wealth in the world on a single flash drive.
I think more can be done. An entity with a mobile app like Coinbase that seamlessly carries out transactions and then deposits your coins in your own personal wallet but manages your keys in an encrypted manner so all of the account management is hidden behind a single password. They should charge a monthly subscription for it.
You prefer to have an encrypted number in your pocket which only Coinbase can access over an encrypted number at a regular bank's server?
What % of humanity needs that?
As opposed to crypto where you lose it rather quickly[1]
Number of mining pools - power to hard fork the network, or to attack the network (51% attack is a very real possibility, the only reason it doesn't happen is the lack of general adoption - there are too few places to actually double spend tokens).
Number of people making decisions - power to hard fork at will, change protocol properties etc.
And before you say "but but the banks are also bad!", sure they are often crooks, but proposing to replace them with even worse system, and even less accountable people is weird.
Miners can hard fork but if the economical agents (exchanges, users) don't follow that won't get them anywhere. Their fork will just become an alternative coin and they won't be able to sell their mined coins, or at a lower price. It happened in 2017 with Bitcoin Cash.
> Number of people making decisions - power to hard fork at will, change protocol properties etc.
Same here: if the economical actors don't follow these people would just create a new altcoin.
And these economical actors seem much more decentralized than the people you mention.
How would users and exchanges find out about the alternate chain? Because from what I know the longest chain in existence is the valid chain, unless you are suggesting we trust centralized third parties like Vitalik and the Ethereum foundation to tell us which chain to mine on.
The agents decide which chain to follow be choosing what rules their node applies. They have to actively change their client software to follow a hard fork. Of course users who don't run their own node and rely only on exchanges depend on the decision made by their exchange. But in a controversial fork most exchanges would probably not pick side and handle both chains as two different coins. They would still have to somewhat pick a side by choosing the name of the coins though.
What's also interesting is that anyone owning coins before the fork will have the same amount of coins on both chains. That happened in 2017 and the price almost instantaneously split to about 90 % of the previous value to the previous chain, and 10 % to the new chain. Users rejecting the fork could just sell their Bitcoin Cash for Bitcoin and return to their initial value in Bitcoin.
Take as a simple example of making mining more democratic — ie we can all mining on our CPUs without being completely dwarfed by those who imported Chinese hardware. That’s an easy change to the protocol. Do you think that the current pools will vote for that?
The whole thing is a facade.