Should Ethereum be okay with enshrining more things in the protocol?
vitalik.eth.limo
vitalik.eth.limo
It’s kind of funny because btc had the same issue, where scaling the base protocol was rejected. That decision allowed ethereum to emerge as a competitor. Now eth has followed that same path with predictable results.
It has all the technology to be decentralized, but ultimately it's not -- or in the least, it's not decentralized enough to survive against nation-state attacks/censorship (though you could probably say the same about Ethereum, Tornado Cash, and USA sanctions).
When I'm getting paid by users I care what they want, and when I'm a user I care, but otherwise I'll write the code I feel like writing, and I suppose that's how the ETH devs work too.
Of course it’s great when people experiment on their own hobbies, I’m guilty of that pleasure myself all too often! Just please don’t use it as an excuse to attack people doing something different from you, as we see the btc and eth communities doing sadly too often.
Also, BSC is just one of the numerous Ethereum forks, most nodes seem to be controlled by related parties and linked with high-speed networking, making it (much) more centralized hence a considerably easier problem to solve.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/why-bitcoin-smart-cont...
A perhaps more pernicious problem is liquidity fragmentation. Moving assets between L2s is a tedious friction that leads to fragmentation of liquidity. In that respect, zero-knowledge rollups present a big advantage as you can share liquidity between them as long as they share some zk-circuits that allow to prove statements to both chains. All this is being very actively worked on. And the technology behind it is short of fascinating. The typical HN audience would have a huge hard-on for it, if they didn't have such a strong preconception against crypto-anything.
If anyone is curious to learn more about L2s a good starting point is here: https://l2beat.com/
And if you want to see Ethereum scaling progress you can check it here: https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity
The next major upgrade to the protocol, slated for late this year or early 2024 (date is not finalized yet), will focus on scalability by making L2 activity veeery cheap.
But as you said, it might be the quickest way to explore the solution space. We may just see a lot of unviable branches in the mean time.
I am really not sure it would be better without jargon as each of these terms has a precise meaning.
Besides-which: All of crypto use obfuscated technical and communal terms all through all their material, documentation and writing. Some of this is because the underlying tech is very complicated and the discussions of it's politics are also by virtue of that, some of it is because they like their technobabble because it makes it seem more interesting than it actually is and lends it authority from people who don't know any better, who are their best new investors.
Edits: I swear you could strike text on here but it seems I can't figure out how.
Edited edit: thank you kind stranger
[1] https://capitalizemytitle.com/strikethrough-text-generator/
I see this criticism often, usually leveled at either crypto or AI, even though literally everybody else does this too. Try reading a random excerpt of Intel's X86 architecture manual, the C++ language specification, or even a random physics paper off arXiv. If you're not well-versed in any of these subjects, you will probably understand very little.
If you think that all systems need (or even should) be understandable before being widely deployed, I'd argue crypto is still simpler than what we already have.
In this way, what's sold as this regulatory and authority bucking system is not only not doing that at all, it's if anything, even EASIER for people who aren't you to see what you're doing. The only way to engage with any of these products and keep your anonymity is to do so basically with either your own code, or ways of accessing the chains that are HIGHLY technical.
So which is it? Is this trying to be the hobby horse of gambling-addicted tech bros, or is it a replacement financial system that enables transacting business without governmental or legal oversight? Because it can be one of these but it can't be both, and frankly, BOTH suck in their own ways.
Yeah cults love their lingo, that's how you can tell they're cults. All this overspecialised vocabulary, and of course a massive reliance on endless recruiting which crypto achieves through FOMO and stuff like 'ngmi', 'stay poor' and all the usual BS that cults use.
Bitcoin, I think, achieved a purpose. The latter cryptos... I mean, when you look at some of the stuff they're including and their complexity, they seem to have been written entirely for the purposes of scamming people and obfuscating the fact they're being scammed.
IMO, Ethereum is actually doing a fantastic job at moving itself forward. The issue with Bitcoin has always been the lack of innovation to overcome its fundamental problems. Ethereum isn't afraid to do what needs to be done to become adopted.
Yes, the technology stack is INSANE. As someone who runs a plain text only website, thinks about using Commodore 64s to access the Internet, etc, I can completely ignore the complexity because they are solving an extremely difficult problem.
My hope is when these problems are solved, the teaching and mental model around them will become vastly simplified. Until then, they're in research mode.
Blog post? o.O
My occasional lazy-ass status check: what's the status of non-crypto-collateralized loans at the moment? Can I get a crypto loan to buy a car or house nowadays without having to post crypto as collateral?
(If the answer is yes, I'd be curious to know what aspect of present day crypto makes it competitive to establishment finance.)
To be clear, those products, lending money without fiat collateral are much, much more significant feature of modern financial system than payment settlement. Until crypto solves those somehow, any comparison is meaningless. Like trying to compare wheels with cars.
Services exist to do what you want, but like in fiat institutions the checking process has to be performed "off-chain" in lieu of collateral. If your follow up question is "well then what's the point of crypto?", consider that getting a fiat loan at a bank with collateral still requires human checks in order to ensure that, for example, the collateral exists. In crypto, the collateral check is performed automatically and autonomously, and is therefore immediately more efficient.
Heck, if ownership of other real-world assets was defined onchain, instead of paper, you could post that as collateral. For instance, if the ownership of your house was officially registered onchain, then you could post it as collateral. Because whoever loans you, would know that he would get the official ownership of the asset. Which is for all intents and purposes the same thing that happens when we mortgage our house. Except that with our current systems we involve a lot of lawyers, banks, and notaries, that to a large degree would be dis-intermediated into code. To be noted that, of course, you can refuse to leave the house even if you lose control of its ownerhship, but these happens with both paper ownership and onchain ownership. Both would require the enforcement of private property rights by some authority holding the sanctioned right to forcefully remove you.
I don't quite see how it could be a significant share of workload that would go to code. The parts you can dispatch there just are not that significant in costwaise when running a financial organization.
Furthermore, even the part that could be dispatched to code, won't. See DAO in the early days of etherium.
Last year for the ETHOnline hackathon, I made an app that allows anyone to request a loan in any erc20 token with (optional) collateral in any set of erc20s. In addition, the borrower identity is used to increase confidence: a linked Lens profile and/or verified passport using Coinpassport. The principal is then crowdfunded. [2]
While making this, I learned that Aave was originally called ETHLend and followed a similar model of requesting individual loans but this approach makes it difficult to attract liquidity so when they developed over-collateralized pools, the protocol became much more popular.
It's going to take better identity tools than we currently have. Of course, undercollatorized lending is the basis of traditional banking so replicating it on chain is a massive win for the ecosystem.
There's a few projects working on credit scores on chain: Sprectral [3] and Cred protocol. See this article about using Cred protocol [4]
[1] https://jumpcrypto.com/writing/paradigms-for-on-chain-credit...
[2] https://ethglobal.com/showcase/lwned-75x0f
[3] https://www.spectral.finance/
[4] https://medium.com/chelo-finance/chelo-tech-guide-2-uncollat...
Couldn't disagree more.
Bitcoin evolved like crazy in its younger days - largely removing features in the interest of security. The fact it does one thing really well and has a fantastically simple and clean UI in it's core app is a feature and the reason I prefer it over Ethereum.
I ran an Ethereum full node, but gave up years ago after new versions constantly broke it and it became way too much of a resource hog for an average joe to maintain.
I want a stable and reliable protocol and software, which I can wrap my head around with minimal surprises, and that's exactly what Bitcoin delivers. The risk-averse approach of the Dev team is appreciated, and the update cadence and size of the changelogs are still lean enough to swallow.
Ethereum scratches a completely different itch for me, and that's great. I don't need or want them to try and do the same things.
I'm not into crypto currency but I respect Ethereum for trying to move forwards and solve real actual problems with the field.
In fairness, by some accounts (I can't personally attest to their accuracy) more than 50% of that is already from renewables, eg. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/renewable-energy-sources-tha...
I do know from experience there are mining outfits that have located themselves where the energy was going to waste anyway.
But it doesn't excuse the huge use of power, and I wouldn't be surprised if over the long term a more efficient algorithm like proof-of-stake displaces proof-of-work. It's basic physics once you can do the same thing for less energy, and technologies more efficient than their predecessors tend to win out.
If by that time there's a popular proof-of-whatever coin with a similar focus, lean feature set and works-as-expected usability as Bitcoin I would definitely consider switching to it!
Edit: To be clear I share your admiration for Ethereum migrating to proof-of-work, my concerns and contrasts in the earlier post are more around protocol bloat and client software user-experience.
It is in effect totally from fossil.
50% is self admitted. The other 50% - if no bitcoin mining then that 50% would go to replace fossil fuels in other places. Saving that amount of fossil fuel
Thus bitcoin mining increase total fossil fuel usage (and it is the total that matters not what each thing does) by the full amount of the enrgy minig uses.
This is a myth.
Energy, in a useable-to-humans form, does not generally "go to waste". Harvesting any kind of energy requires resources (windmills, solar panels, gas turbines, heat pumps, ...), many of them non-renewable themselves, as well as labor, that could always be deployed elsewhere.
https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news/2261931-bitcoin-miners-he...
Some will argue it becomes a crutch incentivizing oil to keep producing, but it's not like the plant was uneconomical or likely to close down before the recapture outfit came along.
TeraWulf is another interesting one - they plug directly into a nuclear plant and help smooth the demand curve off-peak (reactors can't quickly ramp up and down so the energy produced would otherwise go unused / unpaid for). Discussed in this article along with a few others:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2023/07/04/4-bit...
Fossil fuels have nothing to do with Bitcoin, but rather how countries manage their electricity production. Bitcoin works just as well with electricity produced by renewable energy. And all other uses of electricity (of which Bitcoin is an insignificant percentage), or even worse, uses of energy in general, are also backed by fossil fuels (even more than electricity alone).
So if you're not happy with how your government manages electricity production (or how they're not taxing emissions enough), go ahead and complain to your elected politicians instead of shifting the blame to those who legitimately want to use electricity for their own purposes, which they have a right to, like anybody else who uses electricity.
The truth or falsehood of the statement is irrelevant, it's politically ludicrous.
Carbon prices last exactly as long as progressive governments, not a day more. The moment a conservative government takes power, they're destroyed. They have no moat. And I'm writing this from a country that has a small, modest carbon price.
Since carbon prices are politically impossible, that means that avoiding spending excessive electrical energy on inefficient vanity projects is a matter of personal responsibility.
As I mentioned, no "wasting" is happening. The "wasting" is all in your head. I can assure you that every watt is being used to its capacity (up to the unavoidable physical and other loss limits, like any electricity use).
> is the free-market equivalent
No, it isn't. That's not what "free-market" means. A carbon tax would have to be enforced by a government or government-regulated authority, it wouldn't be done in a free market. Free markets do not price externalities such as carbon emissions.
It's one of the jobs of governments to regulate markets, so that they work as efficiently as possible. In fact, that's one of their most legitimate and useful jobs. Furthermore, governments are the ones who have a monopoly on regulation. So if they are not regulating correctly, you know exactly who to blame. There's no one else responsible for doing that job.
> The truth or falsehood of the statement is irrelevant, it's politically ludicrous.
Well, I don't think that's true, but even if it were, if you keep blaming Bitcoin and similarly singling out other uses of energy as the culprits of carbon emissions, it would keep being politically ludicrous, because there are always people and businesses who would be affected by the demonization of such uses and would feel personally (or corporately) attacked by being singled out.
Which means that the only real, efficient and fair way of reducing carbon emissions is to tax them all equally. Whatever businesses (or other energy uses) stop being lucrative and go bankrupt, are exactly the businesses that should go bankrupt, because they are not sustainable (as long as the carbon emissions are taxed at an environmentally sustainable level and not more).
If you're going to reduce emissions, and practically all developed countries are working to do it AFAIK, then it should be done this way and I don't see why right-wingers or anyone else should object to such a plan, rather than what is really ludicrous, which is to arbitrarily demonize uses of energy, one by one, until you reach a critical mass of users who eventually are going to say "enough is enough".
Now, if your argument is that right-wing governments are in principle opposed to reducing carbon emissions, that's a completely different argument and again, it has nothing to do with Bitcoin. It's a political issue alone and the blame-shifting is not going to solve it.
> that means that avoiding spending excessive electrical energy on inefficient vanity projects is a matter of personal responsibility.
See, here are the problems with that argument:
1. There's no "excessive" electrical energy being used.
2. The project is not "inefficient".
3. It's not a "vanity" project.
4. It's not a matter of personal responsibility either. Once again, that's blame shifting.
Personal responsibility in the way you are imagining it is not going to solve this problem.
It'd be way, way, way, way easier to actually influence a right-wing government to solve it, once and for all, in the most efficient way possible, for the entire population than to change the behavior of hundreds of millions of people individually (especially by writing unconvincing arguments on the Internet).
Adding complexity to solve problems is mere cleverness. Removing it is intelligence. Huge reductions in complexity without loss of function — or even with gain of function — is the definition of genius.
The more complex a solution is, the less intelligence is evident in its design.
I think this is related to how data compression is central to the way intelligence works.
I've seen this in myself and others: There's a certain rush to creating a system so complex that you can barely master it yourself.
But in a real system (one being actually used by people other than its designers, that have interests other than working on it and admiring the beautiful machinery), there is an infinite supply of complexity in the form of external constraints and internal one-way architectural decisions, and you'll be grateful for every single bit of complexity you can still chip off while keeping the system running.
It takes good engineering to solve a problem, but it takes great engineering to solve a problem without creating three others elsewhere.
Yeah that’s basically what I mean.
There’s essential complexity and incidental complexity. The first is the complexity that comes from the real world. The second is self imposed due to design choices or path dependency effects. Minimizing the latter is good engineering.
I do maintain that every once I a while someone finds a way to radically cut complexity without losing essential capability. That’s genius, and it’s rare.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I'm okay with jargon, but it can be difficult to get the dosage right.
To me, Vitalik’s brain is like 50 years ahead of the rest of us. I also trust him to speak as plainly and concisely as possible. I get the same rush from reading these posts as watching a great sci-fi film, except it’s not fiction. It’s (mostly) real.
However, when scifi-esque terms flow over into the real world and affect the livelihoods of real people, jargon only benefits the few who have the luxury to dabble in its lexicon. Why not make it as accessible by default?
There's a certain appeal to incredibly complex systems, at least to some people, and there can be joy in going so deep in a complex system that you and your peers are creating, you get to forget about any painful interaction points with the larger world in which it exists and by which it will still always be constrained.
Without understanding this emotion and motivation, it can be baffling to see where the ideas of crypto take people, because at face value, it just doesn't make a lot of sense sometimes.
When you don't understand it, it seems inscrutable and anyone who does seems like a genius.
When you understand it, it becomes boring and often trivial.
I can assure you that Vitalik isn't some kind of Uber genius who is 50 years ahead of everyone. Not even Einstein was, and he was much farther away than Vitalik is.
You can enjoy it as some sort of entertainment, but don't extrapolate it too far.
As an engineer I'm 10% fascinated and 90% horrified by the sheer complexity.
I'm not sure that the expensive transactions in ETH are something entrenched interests are willing to do away with.
it seems like these new chains just exist to sustain the illusion of newness, and the creation of new shitcoins on new platforms, giving the idea of opportunity but actually just allowing the same shovel sellers (CEXs/miners/validators) to take in fees on gambling.
and i think decentralization is a meme topic. at best you have a handful of insiders in a PVP stalemate, at worst you end up in a fractured tribal warfare and liquidity vampirism.
The Bitcoin project (BTC) failed and is now call Bitcoin Cash (BCH) which is doing great as p2p cash but it turns out no one cares about p2p cash, just cash.
Oh, wait.
That world does require new tools to ascertain ownership of digital assets (since a lot of people will make their living through creating/selling these assets) and paying for digital assets (global commerce requires global and open payment systems).
At least crypto is trying to fix this problem
It is not. It is pretending to do that. But every single person still in crypto is there mostly for speculation, get rich quick schemes. Or they are holding bags that they hope will go back to a previous value.
The oracle problem has not been solved. Without it, crypto is just an interesting distributed algorithm. But it is not a revolution.
IMO trusting people is fine, good even. The higher trust you have between people the fewer contracts you need, the lower friction you have to cooperate. Blockchain exists only to transact in a zero trust environment, when you don't want to know the people you're transacting with, and you don't want them to know you. This is why it empowers scammers and traffickers more than the average person who isn't trying to participate in an economy without a name or address or liability.
The oracle problem has had an obvious solution all along (for most relevant usecases): the legal system. Just because you need the governments where the real assets are located to play along doesn't diminish the value of open, programmable, transactional transfers of ownership. Indeed, a lot of the process around buying something like a house is to try to emulate software in human institutions. Canonical registers of ownership recognised by legal systems are typically digital anyway these days, just not publicly digital. If the legal system recognises the blockchain as the canonical record of ownership for a class of asset, then there is no oracle problem (I think democracies should be getting their politicians to look at this, but in the meantime, depending on your jurisdiction there are often things that you can do with trusts that amount to the same thing).
On top of that, intellectual assets and digital native assets are increasingly important, and there is no oracle problem for such assets.
> But every single person still in crypto is there mostly for speculation, get rich quick schemes
This is such a weak argument, and thoroughly untrue. Of course, there are many people with those motivations, just as many people engage with the fiat currency world with those motivations, but it doesn't take long to ascertain that that is not the primary motivation of people like myself or the author of this blog.
True.
> That world does require new tools to ascertain ownership of digital assets (since a lot of people will make their living through creating/selling these assets) and paying for digital assets (global commerce requires global and open payment systems).
... Why?
The only things crypto has been truly innovative in paying for is illicit pornography and drugs. And like, the second one I don't have issue with, but the solution there is not to create an entire secondary financial system that burns down rain forests to execute transactions. The solution is to decriminalize drugs and use the existing financial system to pay for them.
And even the owning/selling of digital assets point rests upon a single chain ending up the "winner" of this strange competition they've been holding for decades. Okay, so you "own" this piece of art on the Ethereum network. What if someone contends they own it on the Tezos chain, or any one of the hundreds if not thousands of other ones? Or more fun still, what if someone just mints another of the thing you own on the same chain? Nobody is stopping them.
> At least crypto is trying to fix this problem
No it's not. It's a casino pretending to be a bank and telling you poker chips are money. Step outside said casino and try to buy a hot dog, and you'll realize the problems quite quickly.
When can we expect this utopia to be ushered in? What about paying for abortions? Sex work? Hosting of Kiwi Farms? There is no future where all these contentious decisions will align with your preferences. You can either throw your support behind the prohibitions that the collective enforces, or you can support an escape valve for individuals to defy it.
> What if someone contends they own it on the Tezos chain, or any one of the hundreds if not thousands of other ones? Or more fun still, what if someone just mints another of the thing you own on the same chain? Nobody is stopping them.
NFTs don't work this way; the goal is not for the chain to tell you which token is "real", whatever that means. That's up to you to decide. The chain just ensures that you get to own a token until you decide you no longer want it. No one cares that you print your own versions of valuable pokemon cards at home.
I 100% support individuals defying illegitimate laws. I did so twice in the last few months. I did not require cryptocurrency to do it and presenting either supporting prohibitions I disagree with -OR- supporting cryptocurrency is a false dichotomy.
We already have an untraceable value credit system in place for transacting illicit things. It's called cash, and it predates even the financial markets that crypto alleges to be trying to replace (while tripping over themselves to continue having access to the real financial system which incidentally is the main way crypto becomes non-anonymous because cryptocurrency cannot in fact create wealth it can only move it around from the actual financial system it claims to oppose, but that's a whole other thing entirely).
If it's a release valve as you say, then it is a release valve bolted to the side of an oppressive financial plumbing system, and is therefore reliant upon it. It is not salvation, is it at best, a new set of masters who have different preferences to the old. Perhaps an improvement (sex work) perhaps merely a different sort of monster (hosting kiwifarms) but nevertheless, not freedom. Just a different puppeteer with a different set of strings.
> NFTs don't work this way; the goal is not for the chain to tell you which token is "real", whatever that means. That's up to you to decide.
THEN WHAT DOES IT MATTER!? I have decided I own the Brooklyn Bridge. May I now list it for sale on Zillow?
Ownership as a concept only functions as a social contract with everyone else who shares your reality. I can SAY I own whatever the fuck I want, that is meaningless, utterly without value at all, if the person I'm attempting to sell it to does not recognize my ownership first, which for anything of value requires documentation. I own my home, because my name is on the deed, and it's also worth noting that I don't really, because the property is actually owned by a mortgage company, to whom I pay money. Nevertheless, I could sell my home, and then use the proceeds to pay off that mortgage company, and then take what's left and pocket it. But that entire arrangement depends on a contractual legal system with it's origin of trust in, ultimately, the Federal Government and judicial system, and because cryptocurrency is allergic ideologically to centralization (which isn't to say centralization isn't rife through the entire ecosystem anyway, because as it turns out, you kinda need central resources to use, well, anything) they refuse to do this.
> No one cares that you print your own versions of valuable pokemon cards at home.
In fact people do care! If you sold counterfeit Pokemon cards to a collector, you could be sued in civil court and possibly charged with fraud for misrepresenting goods! Not to mention sued by the holder of that intellectual property for reproducing it without their permission.
Maybe they can't recover their money under this stupid system, perhaps that's true, but that only matters if literally all your assets are in crypto. If you have a car, they can take that. If you have a home, they can take that. If you have $50 to your name in a checking account, they can take that and burden you for life with debt for whatever that doesn't cover. And in the event you manage to somehow crypto your entire life and they "can't touch you," you then go to jail because while everything is else beyond the reach of the feds (kind of) YOU, as in the physical manifestation of you, are not.
Up to the point where you leave this ecosystem, you have "money" in ethereum. Once you cross that threshold, you have *jack shit.* Actually you have less than jack shit, because you're down whatever real money you exchanged for fake money on the promises of whoever convinced you to buy into it.
Sure, cash is great. I hope we get to keep it, but it seems clear we'll need to fight for that. It has advantages over crypto, and but also obvious limitations. Cash and crypto are both tools that provide some measure of freedom to individuals. It's not only about laws you perceive as illegitimate. It's that all laws are unjust to some degree some of the time.
All I am saying is there is no future where drug legalization replaces the need to have cash - or crypto.
> Ownership as a concept only functions as a social contract with everyone else who shares your reality.
Right, and that's exactly how NFTs work? There are a bunch of enthusiasts who share a common belief, namely that tokens minted on a blockchain - by an artist purporting to represent an artwork they created, or a collectible purporting to represent a community - have a value.
If you create your own token purporting to represent someone else's artwork, this community won't value it, nor will they be bothered by it.
I don't fully understand the remainder of your point; if someone sold you a crypto token while making false representations as to what you are getting, you can try to sue them in court, and I would hope you'd win that case. That's a feature of our legal system. If you don't know the identity of the seller, or they aren't in your jurisdictions reach, you may have some trouble getting your judgement enforced. That's a property of a bearer asset.
OH COME OFF IT. There is not a Government on this planet that wants to get rid of cash. We've been TRYING to get rid of the PENNY in the United States for actual decades because it's fucking useless and we can't even manage that, and you think there's a future where we get rid of all of physical currency? Go outside!
Like telling people to touch grass is low-key shitty but Jesus Christ, I will never, ever get over how talking to crypto people is talking to fucking aliens. Y'all are trying to build a new financial sector for the entire economy and you don't know a SINGLE. THING. About doing that. You've build an admittedly quite impressive hammer in the form of cryptography in the form of currency, and based on that, you just assume everything else is merely a simple nail, ready to be driven by it. It is EXHAUSTING.
> All I am saying is there is no future where drug legalization replaces the need to have cash - or crypto.
Crypto is useless as currency! Absolutely useless. It's market volatility makes it PURELY a speculative vehicle as it's liable to change value by orders of magnitude between when you order something and when you pay for it, meaning accepting it as payment for anything is fraught with returns with negotiations with pending balances or refunds, each of which can re-occur in itself. A currency that is more stable and operates with lower fees is only that because of it's lack of adoption. As one gains users and traction and becomes attractive to speculators, it becomes both more expensive to use, slower in operation, and the value begins spiking and crashing because of those things. And that's not an "unfortunate side effect" or whatever, THAT'S what TO THE MOON MEANS. That's the GOAL of all these projects is to drive the value through the ceiling and cash out.
> Right, and that's exactly how NFTs work? There are a bunch of enthusiasts who share a common belief, namely that tokens minted on a blockchain - by an artist purporting to represent an artwork they created, or a collectible purporting to represent a community - have a value.
> If you create your own token purporting to represent someone else's artwork, this community won't value it, nor will they be bothered by it.
Except, again, that's not the situation. The absolute explosion of art theft and the enthusiastic participation of crypto users with it seems to indicate nobody really gives even a slight shit about owning real art, apart from being able to resell it later at a higher price. Tokens minted of the same pieces, tokens minted by people who aren't the artist, tokens minted of work from DECEASED artists, name it, it was made, it was sold and is probably still being traded today.
Like I'm willing to grant you just might not know this because you seem to be quite detached from reality, but I cannot overemphasize the GULF between what you think is happening and what is actually happening. It's PROFOUND.
> I don't fully understand the remainder of your point; if someone sold you a crypto token while making false representations as to what you are getting, you can try to sue them in court, and I would hope you'd win that case.
No, you can't. Because the thing they sold had no value, because they didn't own it. They sold you a receipt for a purchase of a thing that isn't real. Therefore, no court is gonna do shit.
> OH COME OFF IT. There is not a Government on this planet that wants to get rid of cash.
It is a real civil rights concern:
- https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/say-no-cashless...
- https://www.bundesbank.de/resource/blob/710118/6bab368611007...
These aren't exactly cryptobros.
> Tokens minted of the same pieces, tokens minted by people who aren't the artist, tokens minted of work from DECEASED artists, name it, it was made, it was sold and is probably still being traded today.
Not really. Copy-minting did happen extensively, but it's more like phishing emails trying to get someone to click. No one really minted or traded these tokens. There were one or two projects based on stolen artworks that had a modicum of traction, but none that I know that is relevant today.
Feel free to proof your point by citing examples if you think you can.
> No, you can't. Because the thing they sold had no value, because they didn't own it. They sold you a receipt for a purchase of a thing that isn't real. Therefore, no court is gonna do shit.
Just one example: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/are-nfts-property-stol...
This would be very easy to establish - the creator would have a minting hash, and that hash would have a date and time.
If I create a piece of art and mint it on Ethereum with my wallet, it would be easy to prove that I own it, vs someone else copy-pasting the image and minting it two days later on Tezos.
Without an authoritative chain that is the chain, it doesn't matter.
In the real world, you used to authenticate things through signatures. In the digital world, you would do that by signing transactions with your known wallet.
This complaint is out of date for ethereum, the cryptocurrency system under discussion. The carbon footprint of an ethereum transaction is now about the same as watching two hours of youtube according to https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption and that's for the L1 - say you use Argent on Zksync as an example L2, you're most likely saving even more energy.
And before you go to cite crypto using green energy sources: so fucking what? It's wasting energy that wasn't produced with fossil fuels, big fucking deal, now the people who could've used that energy might well need to use fossil fuel-based energy sources to make up what ethereum converted into heat in server rooms which was then cooled by air conditioning to play their monopoly money game. Great, terrific, awesome.
And, while 22/1 is infinitely better than 160,000/1, that's still 22 times more energy used to facilitate the transfer of funds, which we already have methods to do more efficiently.
Whatever blockchains could have been, the establishment prevented actual utility as much as possible while simultaneously scammers and no-value-marketers proliferated.
Vitalik has talked a lot about why he believes L2s to be the best answer to the centralisation-security-scaleability trilemma.
It's absolutely not just sustaining the illusion of newness, the L2s on the ethereum chain are aiming to provide the same security promises of the main chain, but with an order of magnitude reduction in transactions fees [1]. Something that is important for the wide adoption that blockchains originally claimed was their aim.
There are already phenomenal L2 chains for specific purposes (transfers, decentralised exchanges etc), and the next generation of fully flexible L2 chains built on ZK technology are available (but with various 'use at your own risk' / alpha disclaimers for now) [2].
As for decentralisation, there is a spectrum of possibilities, but if the goal is to provide the next financial platform for the world, some level of decentralisation is not optional.
For-profit corporations, subject to the whims of the market, the ego of a CEO and the latest management trend simply cannot guarantee the stability and longevity that a serious attempt at a financial platform would need. On top of that, there needs to be a credible claim that the platform is neutral to the apps that run on it. Can you name a big finance company you'd trust to do that?
[1] https://l2fees.info/
[2] https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary