Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

Effect of Erabu Sea Snake (Laticauda semifasciata) Lipids on the Swimming Endurance of Mice https://karger.com/anm/article-abstract/51/3/281/41756/Effec...

OPs point is that most cryptocurrency advocates go for "but my token and hold, it is sure to grow 10x in a few months" and I (like probably OP) consider it misleading baseless hope at best, fraud usually.

I've never seen Vitalik or any of the core Ethereum developers talking about the value of Ether being a fundamental metric of any kind. The incentives are made in a way to maximize utility of the blockchain, not the value of its base currency.

I have no idea what Vitalik is funding. Do you?

I guess it helps that its value is relatively stable.

But I still can't realistically use it. I can't walk in a store, buy something, then pay with Monero which is obviously disqualifying on it's own. But in addition to that, if I want to give a friend some Monero I would have to walk them through making a new account with some new app which they won't do because it's pointless anyways.

In Australia, we have instant transfers between bank accounts.

I imagine the US will get to that point soon in which case there is no benefit to crypto for this use case.

That's at least two decimal orders of magnitude away from being a global payment solution. It's a joke.

I worked on OpenBazaar, a decentralized marketplace using bitcoin, and no one wants to spend $5 just to buy something. Artificially reducing block sizes killed adoption.

If you were running a non profit and you wanted people to be able to anonymously contribute to it, but you wanted to prove to your anonymous donors that all of their donations were being spent in accordance with the goals of the nonprofit, you might use ZCash transparent vs shielded addresses as a way to create that division between transparent and opaque.

As for t-addresses having been default, that's a regulatory hack. Exchanges have a better shot at being compliant if they can use the chain as a source of truth. So t-addresses let them create a space where they can do that, and then you as a user can privately move funds out of the exchange's domain and into a black hole without having to get your hands dirty with some other exchange.

Yes I know that monero let's you generate keys for this on a tx by tx basis, but it's not the same. It's just different privacy properties with different use cases.

Monero, however, has the objectively superior CLI. It's fantastic.

You could just as accurately say Zcash has opt-out privacy too. And the privacy is much more than a mixer since you got ZKPs.

Opting out of privacy gives it more plausible deniability, which is why you can find it on coinbase. Not that you should need deniability, since no one has any business knowing what you're doing with your money.

If you have no interest whatsoever and they start explaining to you all the cryptography behind establishing a secure connection to your bank most people would dismiss it as mumbo-jumbo. But now you can tell your grandma to look out for the little green lock on the web that makes her account secure.

Alternatively, because the only way to use the aforementioned distributed world computer is to engage with money.exe and buy more CoinTokens. Imagine all the kids out there who will be delighted to learn a pay-per-use code interpreter. "Hey mom, I need your credit card to cover the gas while I debug my smart contract."

But assuming you have the money to spend, it's a whole universe of possibilities! Just make sure to cash in before actually trying to use any of them.

I'm guessing any "crypto-kinda-currency" is picking eventual consistency as a core mechanic. Think about the word EVENTUAL though.

If the core function of the crypto is a ledger, then it makes sense, it EVENTUALLY gets transacted, and in practical terms you take the faith in the distributed system from a flawless previous record in reconciliation, probably before the actual completion of the transaction.

Now, a distributed major blockchain has ... how many nodes? Thousands or more? That is a long time for reconciliation of the consistency, even with great dedicated internal networks. What? This is over a heterogenous global internet network? That implies EVENTUAL has some bad worst cases.

"Smart contracts" or "distributed trustless computation". Whatever, getting the value of calculation from a node and getting the value stored in the node is essentially the same thing in terms of determining an answer to a query.

It implies a horrendous performance, one you have little control over. I don't think Kubernetes is shaking in its boots.

It's interesting Aphyr never does any crypto analyses, although he makes his bones running a test suite. How do you test a scaled cryptocurrency?

Also I'd challenge 10-20 transactions per month. I think in many near cash-less societies it might be closer to 5 per day.

UPI (Indian market) launched cross border support with a couple countries starting this year. 118 billion transactions happen via UPI annually.

I do think there is some niche market where ethereum payments will shine but hard to beat free and instant systems already in place at far bigger scale.

> the friction of money actually being involved ... makes it not worth it

This is it. There are very few people who live for this level of financialisation.

If there's one useful thing to take from it, it's that I think it does usefully highlight just how critical that perception is for adoption -- specifically, how thoroughly it dominates technical concerns like throughput and latency. Perhaps if shop owners were prepared to eat the bitcoin transaction fee the same way they eat the credit card fee, bitcoin might have a resurgence as a cash alternative. There would still be the transaction speed issue -- I think it would require a third party to step in to provide merchants with guarantees (in exchange for a fee), so that the merchant wouldn't have to wait for the transaction to go through. But that's not a tech problem -- it's the same problem that credit cards already have, and have already solved.

And yet people need only to look down at their smartphone, no matter where in the world they are located, to understand the state of the art in public ledgers.

https://github.com/erthink/libmdbx

Not to mention all of the users banned from social media at the request(pressured) of the government [1][2]?

1: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-bowed-to-white-house-p... 2: https://reason.com/2023/07/28/biden-white-house-pressured-fa...

Alright, I'll bite, here are some projects that use blockchain for things besides trading tokens or improving blockchain technology:

- https://sarcophagus.io/

- https://www.gitcoin.co/

- https://docs.kleros.io/

There's many more. Many don't have a lot of adoption, and I don't know if they will. But at the very least it's often interesting to see how traditional systems are reimagined in order to enable decentralized, trustless, computer programs (with humans interacting at the perimeter) to fulfill roles which would traditionally be filled by centralized, trusted intermediaries (often humans).

If for no other reason than getting a front seat as many of them fall apart spectacularly but also because it's intellectually fascinating to see problems approached in an inverted manner.

Edit: relatedly, not everybody wants to pay their local taxes (and who am I to judge people in various life situations?). This itself is a _massive_ saver for the folks. Send somebody $5k usd a couple times and their bank will start asking complicated questions.

Users dislike paying on the web because it is a security risk. Because of this insane system of credit cards, where you give the other party a "secret" which enables them to take the money from you.

If you could just send the money, the barrier to pay would be 100x lower.

Most websites pay the bills via ads. And make less than $0.001 per visitor. If they could sell a monthly membership for a one-time payment of $1, they would have a way better business model.

Why do you set the bar at $0.001? Even sending $1 reliably and with low fees (which has been doable with crypto since its inception) would be revolutionary in my opinion.

It will change absolutely nothing whatsoever.

> So many ideas are infeasible right now because CC fees are high, and making any payment is extremely high friction.

Making payments will always be, is inherently high friction, and reducing the amount does nothing below a threshold that is much, much higher than $0.001.

There have been lots and lots of micropayment schemes, and they have all failed because the very fact that there is a payment already introduces mental friction that's effectively higher than current CC fees.

Any idea that is infeasible because there is no way to reliably send $0.001 is in fact easily feasible today by monetizing it some other way, usually via ads.

Lower fees are only relevant for high-volume fully automated transactions with a substantial financial incentive behind them, and those can already be done basically for zero marginal cost, see HFT. The only micropayments that people are willing to engage in individually is when they involve addiction, and that as well can and is already done in gambling apps masquerading as games.

It's evident in literally the first line of the bitcoin whitepaper:

"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution"

If paying a random person online was as easy as dropping a quarter in a cup the internet could be a very different place.

Blockchain has nothing to do with "data quality across market participants". Bad data entered into blockchain remains bad data.

And here the press release: https://securitize.io/learn/press/blackrock-launches-first-t...

Capital formation has been occurring this way for at least 12 years on public blockchains.

Satoshidice was one of the first companies and its shareholders created a vibrant secondary market onchain. They did dividends daily and it always went out to every shareholder daily. What happens now is so much more advanced but even more frictionless for crypto native issuers and traders.

One day DTCC and FINRA and the Fed will conform it to their redundant processes so that registered securities can do the same, using the same public utilities as everyone else.

It could be useful for professional licenses, too. Everyone could have a verifiable history of someone's professional license - when it was issued, when it was revoked, again mathematically verifiable. You could be sure that someone's record was never changed or deleted without leaving an audit trail.

Though to be fair, the important part of this is the chain of cryptographically signed and timestamped events. It could work without strictly being a blockchain. You could imagine something that behaves more like a git repository with a flat file database in it.

zkML can be done using general-purpose ZK libraries (since they support arbitrary computations), or there are some specialized tools for proving ML inference, such as https://github.com/ddkang/zkml. It's currently pretty expensive to prove huge models like LLMs, but there's a lot of work being done to make it more practical.

A YT video about this: https://youtu.be/wk3FxuA5DKs

I am still very sceptical about this because it looks very slow, but it seems to work.

Can you post an example of a code that implements either of these? (the fraud proof, not the happy path)

I ask because in the past when I researched L2s such as Optimism, that code was "to be developed".

The contributions that merited his inclusion in a group that includes (in computing alone) people like Charles Babbage KH FRS and Alan Turing OBE FRS are too numerous for any HN comment: he’s got something like 20k citations of hundreds of papers.

His contributions while working at IOHK were IIRC substantially around advanced formal proof systems for typed lambda calculus, the most recent of his IOHK papers I read was describing a System F implementation in the Agda proof system.

I don’t think it’s called an appeal to authority when the topic is the merit of a field of study (I’ve never heard it referred to as a call to authority at all): when an overwhelming consensus of basically every reputable academic and scientific honor and award in the field (some among the highest honors in any field) are attached to research done over decades and reviewed, debated, cited, and recognized by a robust consensus, that’s an argument that the study was important, novel, rigorous, valuable and worthwhile. I cited the consensus of the entire reputable academic and scientific world because that’s how we codify a consensus into a formal recognition that a researcher has in the past, is currently, or is likely to again do important research. I think GP was mistaken to call this research junk or even imply it if someone is going to try to parse it that finely, and I thought that citing the ACM was a better citation than my own opinion.

I agree that git is a blockchain, though not a particularly Byzantine Fault Tolerant one, along with Mercurial and Nix and many other tools many of us use daily.

The broader convergence around previously disparate parts of the digital financial economy is just unambiguously happening: things like FedNow at the high end or Apple Pay / Venmo / Zelle / Wize / WeChat / etc. on a more retail level are arriving faster and faster, placing ever-greater demands on the technology involved, and similar pressures are producing related solutions: the NBBO system in US equities trading to name one example, the consolidated tape that results and the records around it used to be backed by all trades taking place on recorded phone lines, before that by taking place in a room full of witnesses, and before that in coffee shops and other gathering places. All of these systems were workable if imperfect solutions to questions of trust, escrow, reversibility or its converse, and broadly the ways in which Ricardian contracts are generally, in isolation, inadequate to promote a sufficient atmosphere of trust to admit active and reasonably efficient markets.

Cryptographically durable and tamper-resistant ledgers remain in a sort of transitional state where they back non-trivial commerce and much more but still comparatively small amounts of speculation/price discovery: the jury is out on whether or not cryptography and BFT research is going to hit the truly big leagues in terms of notional value: right now they’re somewhere in the rough ballpark of equities transactions daily in the maybe mid tens to low hundreds of billions in notional USD, making both a flea on the ass of an elephant compared to say global forex at something like 5-10 trillion a day, and derivatives are just really hard to estimate, but the notional value of all derivatives contracts is like, easily in the hundreds of trillions and there are days when a lot of that moves quickly.

But I wasn’t making the case that this stuff is like 100% locked-in the future, I was making a much weaker claim: that it’s dismissive and ignorant to call it “junk” and that what limited consequences fraudsters face for financial fraud are tightly clustered in this area.

It’s well-understood that the mechanism design of a combination of a floating transaction fee structure (gas) and a market in that unit of account with a lot of speculative activity in it is problematic to put it mildly: transactions become too expensive to facilitate significant commerce rather often. A lot of things are being tried to improve the emergent incentives, some with more noble motives than others, but that’s finance: if you’re under any illusion that innovation in finance is a constant battle between people trying to generate better outcomes and people trying to game the thing then you can easily disabuse yourself of that notion by learning about the history of finance and I’ll recommend two excellent places to start: the emergence of massive OTC derivatives markets that began in the 1980s but really got big a decade later, and the emergence of fully-digital equities and futures markets around the turn of the millennium.

It’s also why I gave the example of Dr. Wadler FRS FRSE as someone who even more explicitly did extremely sophisticated research well-received by the academic community unambiguously in this context.

I just do not understand what it is about this topic that turns a normally very thoughtful community of people with a generally very high regard for the research agendas of noted computer scientists into spinal-reflex, knee-jerk critics on a dime.

You hear all kinds of arguments but they generally boil down to some version of “blockchain is for cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency is for financial fraud and financial fraud has no place in our society”.

But every link in that chain is either incorrect or selectively tolerant of wrongdoing.

Tamper-resistant ledgers have applications outside of finance.

“Everyone knows I mean crypto.”

Ok, cryptocurrencies have complex outcomes attached to them, some positive, some negative.

“I’m talking about the fraud which is rampant and the main/only use case.”

Eh, not really, speculation isn’t by itself fraud, although it is true that markets (say, OTC derivatives markets) with a high ratio of speculation to other non-speculative activities generally have more fraud in them, so more or less rampant than conventional digital finance?

“More both relatively and absolutely.”

No. Neither. Trivially false. You think that because you have no fucking clue how much fraud happens either relatively or absolutely in conventional financial markets. Furthermore, the fraud that does happen is dramatically more likely to be investigated and prosecuted, and the victims of that fraud are dramatically more likely to be recognized as victims (unlike for example victims of predatory lending in 2005-2007 who lost their homes and got called criminals into the bargain”.

I don’t want to believe that it’s just the banal fact that we all know someone who got stinking rich speculating in crypto markets and we didn’t (I’ve never speculated in crypto markets and am not in the same galaxy as well-off: I went into debt when the tech job market collapsed last year, with uh, a little help).

But I’m really struggling here to find a more charitable conclusion.

Those two separate sentences do not immediately team up to somehow lead to the third sentence.

> After all, most of HN audience lives in developed democratic countries where personal freedoms are considered fundamental pillars and protected.

As do most crypto proponents who imagine the world outside the "enlightened West" as barbaric lawless lands governed by roaming bands Mad Max-style.

Even though than we can take a popular online service that people pay for and see in which countries it's available. For example, Spotify says it's available in 238 countries and territories: https://support.spotify.com/us/article/where-spotify-is-avai.... It does not accept any form of crypto currency as payment. This means that people in these countries have enough financial institutions and methods, and enough security to be able to pay for an international music streaming service [1].

> Maybe one day they will tell you in what you can or cannot spend your money or where you can invest it and how much.

Or some day the Mad Max-style roaming gang will break down your door and steal all your cash. Or break all your fingers until you give them access to all your wallets.

[1] The number of ways people pay in various countries is staggering. See e.g. what Adyen (the payment integrator that companies like Spotify, Uber, eBay etc. use) has integrated with: https://docs.adyen.com/payment-methods/ and https://docs.adyen.com/unified-commerce/pay-by-link/supporte... and https://docs.adyen.com/point-of-sale/what-we-support/payment...

The complete willful ignorance and obliviousness that the absolute various majority of crypto proponents exhibit is no less staggering.

A logic class will suddenly try to teach you "eqvuilance relations", "Equivalence class", "Quotient set", "Projection", "Kernel" (Specifically in the Eqvuilance relation meaning), "partition", and that's only the terms I found in wikipedia. The class I help along has one more under this subject, and this is a first semester topic that is taught in a few weeks. All of those are technical, and all of those build on some other technical terms such as relations, functions, sets...

I concede that crypto has a bad naming scheme. It all sounds silly.

> consensus algorithms are complicated but they solve a hard problem

Ironically, this article is about an algorithm that comes to consensus on and distributes data. Yes it's a hard problem, thus the article.

This is not really an article about cryptocurrency or monkey jpegs, it's a nitty-gritty article about the design of a computer protocol, written for the benefit of protocol researchers and implementers. If it's nonsensical to you, perhaps consider that you're not the target audience.

Ethereum blobs create transaction space that has a 0-of-n trust model (for zk-roll-ups) or a 1-of-n trust model (for optimistic roll-ups). This means that there needs to be either zero or one honest participant who carefully receives, processes and validates every single roll-up transaction in order for an outsider to be able to prove that the chain was not tampered with.

In contrast, Solana achieves throughput by taking the classic blockchain structure (with its n-of-n trust model) and cranking the parameters up to 11. Basically they said "be a standard blockchain, but do everything a hundred times faster on expensive servers with beefy CPUs and datacenter connections". The advantages are that it took less development time and there are less moving parts in the stack. The disadvantage is that the Solana blockchain is not actually verifiable, in the sense that you or I could download a piece of software onto our home computer and follow along with the chain to make sure it's valid. Ethereum is verifiable in this way, even down through all of its (properly-designed and fully implemented) L2s.

To distill the entire situation: In order to scale, Solana gives up some of the fundamental properties that make blockchains powerful. Ethereum, scaling with blobs, retains these fundamental blockchain properties.