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Miners Aren’t Friends

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Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#191

Post by kevingadd »

Iv wrote: post #181
dcow wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What implicitly stops 0.1% of people from controlling 51% of the network? You realize how much of global fiat wealth is currently in the hands of the 0.1%, right?

The current system at least theoretically has democratic (or otherwise) control over who the 0.1% in power are. In a system like BTC or ETH it's just 'who has the most compute?' or in proof of stake, 'who's the richest?'

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#192

Post by kevingadd »

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…

Ethereum and Solidity absolutely bear some of the blame for bad software if the software is only bad because the tooling is garbage. You can't just kick the can down the road, runtime and compiler authors have a responsibility to actually do a good job. PHP cost people tons of time and money in the bad old days and again, you can't just blame people for using PHP. You have to fix it.

At the end of the day of course, the biggest error was on the part of the app developer, #1 because they used a bad platform, #2 because they didn't QA enough to compensate for the platform being bad.

But it still comes down to the fact that Ethereum and Solidity are low quality and the low quality results in more bugs and lost money than we'd see otherwise. It's just like the bad old days of Windows XP (and the modern days of Cryptolockers) except now money is directly vanishing into the ether because bad software is controlling it.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#193

Post by Fnoord »

keymone wrote: post #185
Iv wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Bitcoin proved that global cryptocurrency is absolutely sustainable

It has not.

* Transactions don't scale: they're are expensive, and not instant.

* There are practically no ways to spend Bitcoins in the physical world.

* The electricity costs of mining are not sustainable by mankind. Although some people in China want you to believe otherwise.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#194

Post by mhluongo »

keymone wrote: post #185
Iv wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure why this is getting down voted. It's true- Ethereum is still based on PoW, and hasn't started the transition to PoS (Casper's FFG is still in dev).

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#195

Post by unsignedinteger »

kevingadd wrote: post #188
unsignedinteger wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> why not just use BTC?

By the very nature of your argument if a Turing-complete blockchain isn't inherently worth something than a stack-based language which isn't Turing complete is certainly worthless.

I feel like your arguing with me for the sake of arguing? What's your point ETH isn't perfect, so what, it's relatively new tech which is exploring an interesting problem. The fact it's valued X _may be_ a fair evaluation or even undervalued given it's impact. The upside being possibly a DAO controlled by an AI efficiently providing resources to humanity in a way human's can't given traditional power structures. Or maybe fiat isn't so bad and we don't want robot overlords so we scrap it all. At the end of the day who cares, as long as your smart about the money you've invested into to the ecosystem you won't be hurt by a Black Swan in the cryptosphere. I think anyone working on ETH up to Vitak would have the same sentiment.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#196

Post by keymone »

Fnoord wrote: post #193
keymone wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum is not based on proof of stake. Bitcoin proved that global cryptocurrency is absolutely sustainable, it just can’t be cheap.

> Bitcoin proved that global cryptocurrency is absolutely sustainable It has not. * Transactions don't scale: they're are expensive, and not instant. * There are practically no ways to spend Bitcoins in the physical world. * The electricity costs of mining are not sustainable by mankind. Although some people in China want you to believe otherwise.

> Transactions don't scale: they're are expensive, and not instant

blockchain has limited scalability, second layer doesn't. also blockchain transactions were never supposed to be instant. in fact nothing is instant, check this thing called physics.

> practically no ways to spend Bitcoins in the physical world

there are plenty

> electricity costs of mining are not sustainable by mankind

bitcoin is not even a blip in total world energy spending and less than that in total world energy production.

also if you check the dictionary for word sustainable:

> able to be maintained at a certain rate or level.

miners are profitable at current difficulty at current price of bitcoin. if price goes down - less efficient miners will go out of business and difficulty will decrease until balance is achieved.

bitcoin is sustainable by design.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#197

Post by keymone »

Iv wrote: post #180
keymone wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reversibility of bugs is a good thing. So can I make a purchase, receive the goods and then claim a bug? Reversibility of platform bugs is a good thing, reversibility of contract bugs is basically reversibility of plain transactions, which makes the whole idea of cryptocurrency useless.

If you can convince 51% of the network, then yes.

yeah, the fact that ethereum community was convinced is already a death sentence, because it shows that no principle is sacred. go ahead and try convincing bitcoin community to reverse a transaction, that'll be fun to watch.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#198

Post by kevingadd »

unsignedinteger wrote: post #195
kevingadd wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> why not just use BTC? By the very nature of your argument if a Turing-complete blockchain isn't inherently worth something than a stack-based language which isn't Turing complete is certainly worthless. I feel like your arguing with me for the sake of arguing? What's your point ETH isn't perfect, so what, it's relatively new tech which is exploring an interesting problem. The fact it's valued X _may be_ a fair eval…

"that can be used for anything essentially" is a pretty wild claim to make if you can't actually back it up with useful algorithms to run on the network. This doesn't mean it's useless (you can probably run interesting contracts and stuff on the network), but stop trying to make Ethereum into something it's not.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#199

Post by BMFX »

kevingadd wrote: post #188
unsignedinteger wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you seen the fees associated with BTC... way too high. Plus the time until complete confirmation is so slow.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#200

Post by anjc »

anigbrowl wrote: post #58

IT's capitalism in its purest form. The work done is work n the physical sense of production, but from a labor perspective it ends up as a constant rote of attrition and self negation - people gt interested in coins to make a quick buck and take it easy, but either drop or spend all their time, energy, and money racing for a slice of the pie while producing little of value - in this case, trust tokens which may or ma…

The rewards go to the people who took on the most risk (i.e. the creators, and then the early investors). If Ether didn't have speculative value then the project would not have proceeded.
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