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Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

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Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#31

Post by hackernudes »

stillbourne wrote: post #30
randomacct3847 wrote: post #3

He’s criticizing Eth for being a “ science experiment”? The entire crypto ecosystem is just an experiment, including bitcoin. It’s all immature and unstable.

I've always tried to tell people that ask me about crypto currencies that not only do they not have any intrinsic value, but the only positive value that they have is entropy. I explained it like this over Christmas dinner, lets say I wanted to start a new commodity, for arguments sake lets say that this new commodity is based on matches. Matches have a value, you light them and they produce a certain amount of energ…

The "valuable" matches would have to do something statistically rare, like make a pattern of Jesus's face or something. And somehow be resistant to counterfeit matches. Then your analogy almost makes sense.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#32

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

hackernudes wrote: post #31
stillbourne wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always tried to tell people that ask me about crypto currencies that not only do they not have any intrinsic value, but the only positive value that they have is entropy. I explained it like this over Christmas dinner, lets say I wanted to start a new commodity, for arguments sake lets say that this new commodity is based on matches. Matches have a value, you light them and they produce a certain amount of energ…

The "valuable" matches would have to do something statistically rare, like make a pattern of Jesus's face or something. And somehow be resistant to counterfeit matches. Then your analogy almost makes sense.

Every match head burnt is required to be slightly larger in diameter than the first, so eventually you're burning massive purpose-built “matches”.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#33

Post by just_one_time_ »

snissn wrote: post #20
apo wrote: post #18

By now the Ethereum bloat is so bad that cheaply running an individual node is practically impossible for a lay person. This is an important yet under-appreciated point. It's now extremely difficult to sync an Ethereum node from scratch. If the processes ever completes on commodity hardware, it takes weeks. And that difficulty will only climb as more and more stuff gets dropped onto the Turing-Complete "world compute…

It takes me about a day to sync parity on a consumer desktop with an ssd and a 7 year old i5 Intel cpu

I worry that disk space will stop increasing and manufacturers will stop producing hard drives one day, what will Ethereum do then?

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#34

Post by just_one_time_ »

stillbourne wrote: post #30
randomacct3847 wrote: post #3

He’s criticizing Eth for being a “ science experiment”? The entire crypto ecosystem is just an experiment, including bitcoin. It’s all immature and unstable.

I've always tried to tell people that ask me about crypto currencies that not only do they not have any intrinsic value, but the only positive value that they have is entropy. I explained it like this over Christmas dinner, lets say I wanted to start a new commodity, for arguments sake lets say that this new commodity is based on matches. Matches have a value, you light them and they produce a certain amount of energ…

Wow, you are stupid.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#35

Post by empath75 »

gnarbarian wrote: post #8
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #2

TL;DR: A long, insightful, and at least partially correct critique of the "state" of Ethereum as of today. My humble 0.02 is that what's current is immature and unstable, but there's a decent chance that Ethereum, or Bitcoin, or both, will at some point in the future provide some interesting technical solutions/services. The fact that Ethereum is not there yet is not a good enough argument for me.

I agree. Your position is reasonable and cautiously stated. Unfortunately the crypto hate here on HN is real and pretty disappointing really. Crypto Currencies are an emerging technology that have value far beyond currencies. IPFS for example, d.tube etc.

This kind of comment sounds more and more like ‘the year of Linux on the desktop’ as time goes by.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#36

Post by nonbel »

maxxxxx wrote: post #15
nonbel wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Programs that don't require brute-force commonly use many times less energy than programs that do rely on brute force." Can you give an example of a program that gives similar results?

Do you think these questions are clever? How about YOU give an example for a crypto use case that can't be achieved with traditional methods?

It is a currency that acts like gold over the internet, ie no chargebacks and (is expected to) appreciate over time as more dollars/etc are created.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#37

Post by nonbel »

antonvs wrote: post #14
nonbel wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Programs that don't require brute-force commonly use many times less energy than programs that do rely on brute force." Can you give an example of a program that gives similar results?

Many of the things that people want to use smart contracts for can be implemented using a model involving some degree of trust between vetted participants. Anything involving a distributed value chain for an industry, for example.

How much energy does generating this trust require?

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#38

Post by jnbiche »

wpietri wrote: post #24
api wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crypto hate comes from a combination of fatigue and a reaction to the incredible number of total scams in the crypto ecosystem.

Exactly I would have absolutely no problem with them if these things were obscure little open source projects like most tech experiments are. When I first read the Bitcoin paper I was skeptical but interested to see where they'd take it. My problem is that these projects are simultaneously treated as humble little experiments and the perfect future of the global financial system, deserving of hundreds of millions of…

> In short, the crypto hate is a reaction to the crypto hype.

Actually, as someone who was very interested in Bitcoin in the early days of 2011-2012, I disagree. If anything, the hate on HN was even greater back then, way before Bitcoin became hyped. So many people were convinced it was a pyramid scheme. It was clear to anyone familiar with the Bitcoin community back then that there were a lot of highly technical, talented people, and very few scammers. But most of HN reflexively despised Bitcoin.

In fact, Bitcoin on HN is actually a lot less hated now, which tells me it has little to do with the hype, and that something else was going on.

Bear in mind that I disassociated myself from Bitcoin once the scammers, con-men, and get-rich-quick types infiltrated the community around 2013 and 2014. But even back in 2011, there was a very high number of HNers who seemed personally affronted by the very idea that money was a social agreement. They seemed to believe that money was some kind of official, government activity, end of story. And that anyone who believed otherwise was an evil heretic, to be ridiculed.

> I have very little sympathy for people who profited from the hype, delivered approximately nothing of use to the rest of the world, and now have a sad that there are consequences.

This I agree with 100%.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#39

Post by DennisP »

> state channels (ETH’s version of Lightning), but it is unclear whether main-chain issued ERC20 type tokens will be portable to this environment.

The Raiden project is the closest thing to Lightning, was recently deployed to the main chain, and explicitly supports any ERC20 token.

The article says Plasma is dead because...Peter Todd, a Bitcoin dev, claims they had a similar idea and rejected it? Meanwhile, on Ethereum a bunch of teams are actively working on it and the Loom project has a version up and running.

The article asks why if proof of stake is so great, didn't Ethereum just start with that? Because proof of stake had widely-recognized security flaws (like "nothing-at-stake"), and it took years of research to fix them all.

The entire article is of similar quality.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#40

Post by erulabs »

snissn wrote: post #20
apo wrote: post #18

By now the Ethereum bloat is so bad that cheaply running an individual node is practically impossible for a lay person. This is an important yet under-appreciated point. It's now extremely difficult to sync an Ethereum node from scratch. If the processes ever completes on commodity hardware, it takes weeks. And that difficulty will only climb as more and more stuff gets dropped onto the Turing-Complete "world compute…

It takes me about a day to sync parity on a consumer desktop with an ssd and a 7 year old i5 Intel cpu

For me, just about 18 hours with parity on a fairly new i7 and fairly fast (200mbps) net and NVMe disks. Haven't repeated enough to be sure, but I can't figure out how to replicate the "weeks" argument I keep hearing. I suppose on average American broadband (~15mbps) and spinning HDDs the week-long numbers start to seem reasonable?
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