everfree

Solana does not have blobs. It’s really as simple as that.

This post from the ethresearch forum goes over data availability sampling (DAS) in detail.

https://ethresear.ch/t/from-4844-to-danksharding-a-path-to-s...

To transfer assets from L2 to L2, of course the naive implementation is to use a centralized intermediary, of which there are currently many that are reasonably priced. There are ways to go between zk-L2s without any central broker in theory; I’m not sure whether that’s also true of optimistic-L2s.

Oh. That's an uninteresting way to "back up" a statement imo. Crowd wisdom is often wrong.

"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

Distributed validator tech (DVT) has made it so you can participate in PoS voting with much less ETH than was required before, if you choose.

This article isn't about tokens.

If you believe blobs are "nonsense" that should be called out, I think that's an interesting discussion space to enter.

What do you mean?

By that logic, do you consider it immoral to spend lottery winnings?

Right, that’s essentially what I’m advocating for a few replies up. The person I’m discussing it with rejected that premise the sake of argument.

Let's not kid ourselves, bitcoin's dominance is due to network effect. Nobody understands blockchains.

If we start telling people what they can and can't use legitimately-purchased energy for, we go down a dangerous path very quickly. We might as well tell people what they can and can't use wood to build, or what they can and can't use an internet connection to transfer (i.e. net neutrality).

If you purchase gasoline, it's not my right to tell you what to do with it, insofar as it doesn't create additional externalities from that point on, like if you pour it in a river or something. You legally own it now, you get to do whatever you want with it. Same with wood, same with internet bandwidth - this is generally how private property should work.

The burning in the thought experiment is actually the least bad thing imo. The alternative is to seize property from someone who purchased that property legitimately, which is unacceptable.

As a side note, burning gasoline for no reason is pretty close to what billionaires do whenever they fly their private jets. It's a fact of capitalism, and it will exist for as long as capitalism exists.

I would want to make sure their purchase were taxed at a high enough rate to replace that gasoline with renewable energy, on top of the usual sales taxes. If that were the case, I would tell them to go for it, as their purchase would be a net benefit to society.

If the energy used by bitcoin mining is irreplaceable, that just means we're not taxing it enough to replace it properly with renewables. The solution is simple, just tax industrial energy use so that it's not underpriced relative to the externalities it creates. Spend that tax revenue on bulking up the grid with renewables. Then let people buy however much they want and do whatever they want with it, at the right price.

You're right. With that in mind, if Bitcoin were hypothetically shut down, the rest would probably use even less energy.

In one word, externalities. Bitcoin is helping reveal that externalities have never been properly factored into electricity prices in the USA. In other words if you purchase too much electricity at market price, you're using more than your "fair share", which should be impossible in a properly functioning market.

The simple solution of course is to just tax industrial energy use properly, no matter what you're using it for. As you start using so much energy that you're putting real strain on the grid, your energy taxes should go up asymptotically to the point where if you keep paying, the government can afford to meet your energy demands with renewables construction.

From the article:

> So, the EIA decided it needed a better grip on what was going on. To get that, it went through trade publications, financial reports, news articles, and congressional investigation reports to identify as many bitcoin mining operations as it could. With 137 facilities identified, it then inquired about the power supply needed to operate them at full capacity, receiving answers for 101 of those facilities.

> If running all-out, those 101 facilities would consume 2.3 percent of the US's average power demand. That places them on the high side of the Cambridge Center estimates.

This centralizing effect is actually much more powerful in proof-of-work than proof-of-stake.

Anyone can stake and earn the same % rewards, regardless of how much they have. But if you're bankrolled with hundreds of millions of dollars, you get a much higher mining % return than the little guys because you can design and manufacture your own silicon (or get bulk discounts), colocate next to power generation, and buy electricity in bulk.

Interestingly whenever this kind of thing comes up, I also hear cryptocurrency critics use the energy argument to deride blockchains in general.

They don't seem to understand that Bitcoin alone accounts for 98% of all cryptocurrency energy usage due to its uniquely energy-intensive algorithm. Hypothetically if Bitcoin were shut down, crypto would be as energy-efficient as any other distributed/federated technology.

The opposite belief is also held relatively widely.

A politically tenable portion of the USA seems to be of the opinion that tax funds should not be used to help ill people just because they are ill, cash or not. This is not an extreme political opinion, nor something that is unreasonable to ask someone whether they believe.

The other reply to my comment proves that my question wasn't a provocation, but a successful intuition of some people's beliefs in this thread.

Further, the US' lack of universal healthcare shows that it's a societally acceptable stance to not give aid to ill people just because they are ill. I'm not trying to provoke anyone, I'm trying to clarify their belief within a set of beliefs that are socially acceptable.

Cash is sometimes the most efficient way to distribute aid to ill people.

Unless - do you believe we shouldn’t aid ill people at all?

Google does it too, with their proprietary messaging app that extends the RCS protocol.

Maybe this is controversial but I'm not even worried about the people making $2 million per year. At the end of the day that's the salary equivalent to about 27 average employees, a small office worth.

I'm more worried about the people making (net worth increasing) $100 million per year, 1351 times the average income, or as much as an entire town. Or $2 billion per year, which would take twenty seven thousand years for someone to earn at a median wage.

If you're earning as much every year as the average person earns in 27000 years of working, perhaps we should raise taxes on that a bit and not allow reduced-rate capital gains and tax-free loans.

It's not entirely clear to me what you mean by "regime", but it seems most likely to me that if forced with a choice of two hard-forks:

1) Removing the attacker directly (PoS) / changing the hashing algorithm to remove the attacker (PoW)

or

2) Submitting to the whims of the attacker

it would be a no-brainer to just remove the attacker. Embracing an attacker-controlled chain seems like a strictly worse option than removing the attacker, no matter how messy. It seems like a choice between disruption or certain ruin.

An attacker at that scale would certainly understand this game theory, and realize that if they attack, after some potentially very messy shake-out and serious temporary disruption, they will soon have no influence over the chain anymore.

> The last I recall is that the SEC considered all crypto to be a security.

That's not true. "US regulators including the SEC agree that Bitcoin, which is by far the largest digital asset, isn't a security."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/06/09/why-crypt...

The big unanswered question is whether they consider Ethereum to be one.

> Not once in Coinbase's lawsuit did they actually say "We'd love to comply, we just don't know how to".

They seem to say that pretty explicitly on Page 14 of their Wells submission.

https://assets.ctfassets.net/c5bd0wqjc7v0/2pW56ln6rPJ7koLHlu...

> In fact what they did say was that they knew how to comply, "but the cost and effort makes it not profitable for us".

I don't see anywhere where they said that.

> So why didn't they say that in court?

They did say that in court.

"For years, Coinbase has voluntarily submitted to regulation by multiple overlapping regulatory bodies, has adhered to the public and limited formal guidance from the SEC, senior SEC Staff, and the courts about the application of securities law to its industry, and has begged the SEC for guidance about how it thinks the federal securities laws map onto the digital asset industry as the SEC’s actions reflected an escalating but undisclosed change in its own view of its authority."

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.59...

It's a classic blockchain fallacy that a 51% attack allows you to print the underlying crypto at will.

As for the developers, they could write code to print a billion bitcoins if they wanted to, but for it to take effect everyone's gotta agree to run it.

Where has the SEC stated whether they consider the second largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, to be a security or not (and thus under their jurisdiction or not)?

If "missing criteria" is nothing but a PR soundbite, perhaps I missed where the SEC shared that criteria.

Where did you get that definition? It seems to be trivially false because it includes all sorts of classic non-security commodity contracts like corn, oil, etc. And stocks are not negotiable yet they are securities, so the definition seems to fail on that front too.

Again, you're free to hold whatever additional opinions you want. I'll respectfully pass on discussing those, as my original intent was to correct a particular piece of misinformation.

Looking closely, it seems like the lawsuit is purely about bankruptcy clawback.

Genesis wants Gemini to give back all customer withdrawals looking back 90 days from Genesis' bankruptcy. The idea is to add these withdrawals to the bankruptcy to be redistributed to all creditors.

Hm. Their "about" page seems to claim that they are a Qualified Custodian, which means they legally have to segregate their customer deposits from their own operating funds.

> Gemini is a New York trust company regulated by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYSDFS). We are subject to capital reserve requirements, cybersecurity requirements, and banking compliance standards set forth by the NYSDFS and the New York Banking Law. Gemini is also a fiduciary and Qualified Custodian.