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Miners Aren’t Friends

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Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#181

Post by Iv »

dcow wrote: post #141
epistasis wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, "code is law" is a silly thing to aim for, and by ignoring that saying for the DAO incident proves that Ethereum is more valuable than it would be otherwise. The "code is law" is just hype about how amazing and new and unprecedented this thing is, but it's a truly bad idea. The reversibility of bugs is a good thing. In human law, there are exceptions, and appeals, etc. Aiming for a completely mechanical system…

I'm a little lost. What does ETH provide society if it's just another system for allowing 51% of people to screw over the 49% that dissent?

A system where it is not 0.1% of the people who are allowed to screw over 99.9% of the others?

You argue for purity of a principle. Very few people actually care about such a notion. The majority has more practical concerns. The fact that a theft that would have made the whole currency seem insecure has been reversed was seen as a proof of solidity by many users.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#182

Post by Fnoord »

corford wrote: post #97
wellboy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

108 days and afterwards you make $1,500 income per month and you could travel the world and never have to work again if you don't want to? Sounds like a pretty good deal. What you didn't take into you account as well was the fact that this is $3,000 if Ethereum doubles in price, $4,500 if it tripes like you specified.

That income is not coming from mining Ethereum and, as time goes on, the amount of any coin you can mine diminishes (sometimes rapidly). The only way to avoid diminishing mining returns as difficulty increases is to swap to a new, lesser known coin. Eventually you run out of coins to swap to or the ones you are mining don't go up in value (because if they did, bigger miners would come in and knock you out of the game…

If you want a steady income with arguably a lesser risk profile why not simply invest in low risk stock market?

There's no way all these coins [1] retain proper value compared to NASDAQ [2]. Take AAPL for example: ~48% [3] in one year. GOOGL for example: ~36% [4] on one year.

[1] https://whattomine.com/calculators

[2] http://money.cnn.com/data/hotstocks/index.html

[3] http://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=AAPL

[4] http://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=GOOGL

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#183

Post by keymone »

Mbioguy wrote: post #176
MrBingley wrote: post #66

Can someone explain to me how on earth Ethereum is still a thing? People have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the Ethereum ecosystem, many due to basic flaws in the "Solidity" language. For example, last November $280 million was frozen in Parity wallets because function visibility defaults to external rather than internal (see the previous HN discussion here[0]). Just for fun, I was looking through the Secur…

Sounds like 2 things are getting confused. Think of Ethereum as a very slow decentralized computer. People make mistakes building applications all the time, but this doesn't necessarily mean the underlying language, or for a better comparison, the compiler is at fault. Problems with the underlying language can cause problems with applications, obviously. Programmer error =/= language/compiler error, while both can oc…

I’m not sure who is more clueless - people that trust JavaScripty shit-language to manage their finances or people that built a cryptocurrency around javascripty shit-language.

But I definitely assign some guilt and responsibility for all the money lost in solidity contracts to creators of ethereum.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#184

Post by unsignedinteger »

madeofpalk wrote: post #149
epistasis wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not 51% of people, it's 51% of computing power, or 51% of stake if Ethereum ever switches to proof of stake. Ethereum runs by capitalistic power, not democratic power. I don't know if there's any alternative to that; any such system is going to have some means of enforcing truth and power, and means of gaining or losing it. Cryptocurrencies are not a way of escaping that fundamental fact. They shift where the po…

> It's not 51% of people, it's 51% of computing power, Cool, so in reality a lot less than 51% of people can screw over every else. Again, what is it that ETH provides society that's new and useful?

A decentralized computing network that can be used for anything essentially?

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#185

Post by keymone »

Iv wrote: post #179
MrBingley wrote: post #66

Can someone explain to me how on earth Ethereum is still a thing? People have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the Ethereum ecosystem, many due to basic flaws in the "Solidity" language. For example, last November $280 million was frozen in Parity wallets because function visibility defaults to external rather than internal (see the previous HN discussion here[0]). Just for fun, I was looking through the Secur…

Maybe because that is so fat the largest functioning cryptocurrency based on proof of stake instead of proof of work, and that bitcoin proved that energywise, a global cryptocurrency would not be sustainable?

Ethereum is not based on proof of stake.

Bitcoin proved that global cryptocurrency is absolutely sustainable, it just can’t be cheap.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#186

Post by Fnoord »

alexktz wrote: post #153
corford wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually better than I would have imagined. What's the difficulty growth like with ETH these days? Or, what's a safe estimation of how many ETH a 1060 could mine before Casper lands?

3 months is longer than 108 days ;) I don't mine ETH directly with Nvidia hardware though it is still profitable on AMD gear. I use whattomine.com to get a rough estimate of my daily earnings... I mine to a pool called miningpoolhub which auto exchanges my shitcoins to LTC (or whatever I choose). From there I send to Coinbase -> GDAX -> Sell for ETH or FIAT. So far, since starting mining 1 month ago I have ROI'd 1.8…

> 3 months is longer than 108 days ;)

Following the Gregorian calendar (international defacto standard) this statement is always false, never true.

There's no way all these coins are going to be accepted currencies (literally none are, not even Bitcoin). There's no way all these coins will retain long-term value either.

Anyone who joins in on the mining is doing two things: 1) joining in on the pyramid schemes (on which you as miner and cryptocurrency owner depend) 2) adding to more electricity waste.

As for GPUs. Once the shit hits the fan their price will freefall. If their price falls now, they're pretty much worthless. More so because many of them will be abused. GPUs aren't made to be used 24/7. But yeah, you can play games on all your 1080s...

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#187

Post by cat199 »

weavie wrote: post #136
Pxtl wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, there's a scheme variant for Eth called Pyramid Scheme? That is the best programming language name ever.

http://www.michaelburge.us/2017/11/28/write-your-next-ethere... "Pyramid Scheme is implemented using the appropriately-named Racket."

could have used larceny as well..

http://www.larcenists.org/

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#188

Post by kevingadd »

unsignedinteger wrote: post #184
madeofpalk wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not 51% of people, it's 51% of computing power, Cool, so in reality a lot less than 51% of people can screw over every else. Again, what is it that ETH provides society that's new and useful?

A decentralized computing network that can be used for anything essentially?

As long as "anything" is an algorithm expressible given Solidity's tremendous constraints

And if you're just going to use ETH to pay for real compute hardware in the cloud so you can run real software, at that point why not just use BTC?

Turing-completeness doesn't automatically make something useful.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#189

Post by jancsika »

madeofpalk wrote: post #149
epistasis wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not 51% of people, it's 51% of computing power, or 51% of stake if Ethereum ever switches to proof of stake. Ethereum runs by capitalistic power, not democratic power. I don't know if there's any alternative to that; any such system is going to have some means of enforcing truth and power, and means of gaining or losing it. Cryptocurrencies are not a way of escaping that fundamental fact. They shift where the po…

> It's not 51% of people, it's 51% of computing power, Cool, so in reality a lot less than 51% of people can screw over every else. Again, what is it that ETH provides society that's new and useful?

Here's an easy one: the ability to receive a payment for a service without relying on a third party to deliver that payment.

New: state-level actor(s) cannot stop an organization from receiving payment merely by forcing your third-party payment processor to freeze funds/stop payments.

Example: sci-hub. If they were receiving payments through Mastercard/Visa it would have almost certainly been frozen long ago. However, since they (apparently) get funded by receiving Bitcoin, they continue to operate. In the meantime, grad students and professors get the convenience of using sci-hub's interface to easily retrieve journal articles.

Even if sci-hub eventually gets taken down completely (or a researcher finds a catastrophic bug in all cryptocurrencies), the total time during which sci-hub served documents funded by Bitcoins was a benefit to society.

ETH allows fancier transaction scripts than Bitcoin, but the same argument holds-- a state level actor cannot just stop the contract from being executed simply by putting pressure on a third party.

Based on this article, I'd say there is value in ETH just as there is value in writing a complex, multi-threaded application in a memory-unsafe language. It's a bad idea, but for some special cases it may be better than doing nothing at all.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#190

Post by Fnoord »

jacobush wrote: post #163
jvdizz wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. The richest actually do the work to keep the system running. They need to stake their claim to the system to validate everyone else's trx. If is in their best interest not to mess up, otherwise they lose their stake in the system.

So those who benefit from cemented structures are incentivized to maintain status quo. Sounds like humanity, just a different set of masters.

Sounds like the banking system, but now you can vote with your wallet to buy the cryptocoin of your preference. Pretty much akin to how you can vote for a politician, or vote with your money by buying a product or not buying a product.

Not only do those who designed the cryptocoin plus early adapters (the former are the latter, but not necessarily vice versa) get more rich with thin air generated by electricity, they also get more powerful. No wonder these things rise up like mushrooms from the ground.

Man, if I were into this, I'd just convince people 24/7 to get into these cryptocoins. Best way to get rich doing virtually nothing but some marketing. Right?

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