Live data from Hacker News

Miners Aren’t Friends

blog.keep.network

241–250 of 256 posts

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#241
post #237
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

World-wide? Can you state 10 of these tech hubs where Bitcoin is widespread? I haven't seen any place in Amsterdam Area (where I live, throughout Europe considered a tech hub) accepting Bitcoin. When I was in Berlin, saw zero Bitcoin as well. C-Base didn't accept it either. They did accept this currency called EUR, though. Bitcoin's slow transaction speed wouldn't be an issue for something like dentist/doctor. Those…

> I haven't seen any place in Amsterdam Area You haven't looked very hard, than. This is a "black swan" thing, by the way. So here's why you are entirely wrong: * thuisbezorgd.nl accepts Bitcoin. Has done that for years. You can order from any snackbar, febo, pizza-joint, sushi-bar and pay with Bitcoin. Literally thousands of places in Amsterdam. * mollie.com has offered a bitcoin-payment option for all their merchan…

his definition of success for bitcoin seems to be only if it supersedes USD in usage.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the whole crypto ecosystem crashes (unlikely in my opinion) graphics cards can be resold and recoup losses.

What could cause such an event? Would coinbase going insolvent cause everything to crash beyond repair? What if satoshi appeared and dumped his entire stake? That is probably the worst case scenario I can think of.

Bug in crypto where every private key is revealed? Not likely, just saying.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#243
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Everytime I see the argument that smart contract allow for no third party payment I always think that people are diminishing the role of third party. In most transaction, the third party also act as an insurance, a safety. If something goes wrong, the third party is supposed to be here to make sure everybody got their fair share without the need to take legal action, which can be difficult to near impossible sometime…

It's almost like you read the two words "third party" in my response, then triggered a canned reply based on the existence of those words.

What insurance would you need when sending a Bitcoin donation to a site where thousands of researchers already benefited by retrieving scientific journal articles?

I didn't write, "cryptocurrencies will replace all third party payment systems." I gave a single example of a situation where third party payment systems don't function and Bitcoin does.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#244
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> a state level actor cannot just stop the contract from being executed simply by putting pressure on a third party. They just haven't gotten around to it yet. The decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies increases the number of entities that need to be pressured, but doesn't make state-level actors completely powerless.

They won't get around to it, because stopping the mining of all cryptocurrencies that sci-hub could use to pay for uptime is more work than stopping sci-hub.

Since stopping cryptocurrencies is harder than freezing third party payments (evidence: see Wikileaks), this is a single, narrow example of the usefulness of cryptocurrencies. Researchers get the convenience of sci-hub's frontend for longer than they would if sci-hub had relied on a third party payment system.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#245
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.

Cool. So it’s a centralised system ran by the rich (which I don’t necessarily have a problem with). Again, what is it that ETH provides society that's new and useful?

In reality, you would be very hard pressed to get 51% of all global wealth to agree on anything. Today, it is pockets of ~1% wealth screwing over their regional 0.00001% constituents.

Ethereum forces a global authority :)

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#246
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares about the language when the very premise of the project "code is law" was proven wrong. When the DAO was "hacked" by a "thief", rather than tell people "whelp, code is law and the code executed perfect" the mob (more accurately, those at the top of the etherium pyramid) decided to change history and roll back the blockchain. Even the language designed to describe the "hack" was garbage. It wasn't a "hack",…

The problem with the "code is law" principle is that it's also the version of history where a single attacker controls 15% of all Eth in existence. I think most participants probably would agree with that principle in general, but the practicalities outweighed principle in this situation. (the fact that the creator of Ethereum was heavily invested in the DAO doubtless played a role as well... it's different when it's…

The point of "code is law" is to replace the legal system.

Laws are, after all, code. Programmers are the new lawyers.

The problem with the "hack" was that our laws/code are still incredibly primitive.

I don't have an issue with the rollback - because that's part of the design, and I really doubt they'll be able to do that again if the ownership of ETH spreads out more.

These problems will work themselves out.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#247
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is similar to the rainbow table attack on password hashes. The defense against that is to use a (public) salt when computing the hash. Maybe something similar will work here, though I'm not clear about the details of your notion of "just in time" hashing. The salt just prevents precomputation of hashes.

It would be better for the salt to be private (and revealed at the same time as the name), otherwise a miner could still try to guess at the name being reserved. Having a public salt only eliminates the possibility of precomputing many hashes, i.e. rainbow tables.

I'm not sure about the idea that a miner could guess -- the point of a cryptographic hash is to make that impractical. We're not talking about CRC32 here. If there was discussion out there about protocols that involve keeping salts private I could be persuaded that it's a valid idea.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#248
post #239
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't seen any place in Amsterdam Area You haven't looked very hard, than. This is a "black swan" thing, by the way. So here's why you are entirely wrong: * thuisbezorgd.nl accepts Bitcoin. Has done that for years. You can order from any snackbar, febo, pizza-joint, sushi-bar and pay with Bitcoin. Literally thousands of places in Amsterdam. * mollie.com has offered a bitcoin-payment option for all their merchan…

Oh I did look very hard. Thuisbezorgd.nl supports Bitcoin, that's not specific to Amsterdam Area though since it is nation-wide, and its a middleman not a local shop. So it isn't an argument for Amsterdam Area being a techhub for Bitcoin. Thuisbezorgd supporting Bitcoin payment is probably the flagship of Bitcoin support in The Netherlands and a solid example because it is basically the Dutch version of Uber Eats, an…

> Two, woah! Blimey the free market provides us two options!

You said there were "no options to pay in the phisical world".

I proved you wrong, because there are. Just one option would have proved you wrong, yet in reality there are far more than one. In Amsterdam alone.

And so your arguments start to move. Now it suddenly needs "a large adoption" and not a "niche" (mollie, btw is one of the largest, if not the largest PSP in the netherlands). And they shift from "no-where where I can pay" to "you can pay, but very few people actually do so".

You could also just admit that you were wrong because you were not aware that there is an actual community out there, even in your hometown, who accepts Bitcoin, pays with it and as such makes it an actual payment system. You could admit that you were not aware of this, but that now you are, you know that Bitcoin is used; just not in the way you envision it, or not by the people and companies that you would like to.

Also note that many people (I'm not aware that you did this!) mention that bitcoin is both a failure because no-one ever pays with it, yet also mention that it is a failure because the confirmation times are high and fees are growing; which is a direct effect of too much people using it.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#249
post #248
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I did look very hard. Thuisbezorgd.nl supports Bitcoin, that's not specific to Amsterdam Area though since it is nation-wide, and its a middleman not a local shop. So it isn't an argument for Amsterdam Area being a techhub for Bitcoin. Thuisbezorgd supporting Bitcoin payment is probably the flagship of Bitcoin support in The Netherlands and a solid example because it is basically the Dutch version of Uber Eats, an…

> Two, woah! Blimey the free market provides us two options! You said there were "no options to pay in the phisical world". I proved you wrong, because there are. Just one option would have proved you wrong, yet in reality there are far more than one. In Amsterdam alone. And so your arguments start to move. Now it suddenly needs "a large adoption" and not a "niche" (mollie, btw is one of the largest, if not the large…

> You said there were "no options to pay in the phisical world".

No, I said I didn't notice them in the physical world (and I still haven't, fwiw). Never seen any physical store say "we accept Bitcoin", never. I was clearly talking about my anecdata which is still, from my perspective, valid.

That has a different meaning than what you make out of it. I never wrote about the online world. You gave as example Thuisbezorgd; that's not the physical world. That's not a brick & mortar store. They're a virtual middleman service.

I avoid them btw, because I can get cheaper deals by cutting them out as middleman and giving a higher tip to the hard working delivery boy instead.

> (mollie, btw is one of the largest, if not the largest PSP in the netherlands)

Really, never heard of. I guess iDEAL and PayPal just went out of business. Good luck competing with iDEAL, btw.

> You could also just admit that you were wrong because you were not aware that there is an actual community out there, even in your hometown, who accepts Bitcoin, pays with it and as such makes it an actual payment system.

The existence of something doesn't describe its state or, in this case, adoption level. The adoption level (or market penetration) is very important in the subject of payment systems, but you prefer to ignore it and spout red herrings like this instead to pursue your character assasination agenda.

> You could admit that you were not aware of this, but that now you are, you know that Bitcoin is used; just not in the way you envision it, or not by the people and companies that you would like to.

I was aware Thuisbezorgd accepted Bitcoin. I was also aware that it wasn't being used much, as I quoted. That article was no news to me. The question whether its used or not is important in the discussion as put forth above. Is it used a lot? No, not really (far less than 1%). The question about transaction costs/time was also still up in the air. I guess you don't know the answer to that either.

> Also note that many people (I'm not aware that you did this!) mention that bitcoin is both a failure because no-one ever pays with it, yet also mention that it is a failure because the confirmation times are high and fees are growing; which is a direct effect of too much people using it.

My orig. point was it doesn't scale.

As for what you wrote here the fact transactions happen doesn't mean people are paying with Bitcoins in the physical world. It might as well be a bunch of astroturfers (the way Reddit came to existence), or a bunch of people buying drugs (the way Silkroad ran). You don't know.

But we do have a statement like the one from Thuisbezorgd.

Now I'd like to see a statement from a serious computer manufacturer like Apple or reseller like Media Markt or Bol.com stating they accept Bitcoin (all I read is businesses like Steam quitting accepting Bitcoin as payment method instead). Things like that are a sign of widespread adoption. What isn't a sign of widespread adoption: 8 bloody restaurants/pubs in the capital city (!!) accepting Bitcoin. That's a sign of a tiny, irrelevant niche.

PS: Oh, and with regards to the bubble, we didn't discuss Tether.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#250
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?'

If any group controlled >50% of the network and also was willing to use that power in a way that would diminish trust in that same network then they'd very quickly end up with 100% of something worthless.

They still own a bunch of hardware, though, which can be repurposed for other networks. If you're a big miner, and something on whattomine.com seems attractive, you'd join the network, mine it, unload via exchanges and leave for greener pastures once the ROI is not that attractive.
Post reply on HN