What about tezos?
Why I’m so “against” Ethereum
41–50 of 272 posts
Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum
#42By 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
Similar experience with geth on an m5.large EC2 instance and 500G SSD.
The SSD vs. hard disk distinction is key. I ran into the "it will literally never complete" issue trying to sync to an external HD on my home MBP - I ran it for about a week and it didn't work. Tried parity as well, same result. Once I decided I'd just rent a big SSD from Amazon I had no problem.
Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum
#43He’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…
Nothing in the _world_ has intrinsic value. Obviously, this an opinion, but I do believe it has strong epistemological backing. An easy overview of the opinion by wired: https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-has-no-intrinsic-value-n..., a 1970s era discussion by a historian economist: https://fee.org/articles/the-fallacy-of-intrinsic-value/, and a deep dive the theory itself: https://mises.org/library/introduction-value-theory
Now i'm not expecting nor wanting to get into a debate about the theory of value. I do not expect to be able to win, nor do I want to, but I do hope some doubt is cast into the proposition:
> Matches have a value, you light them and they produce a certain amount of energy
Matches have a _utility_, not necessarily a value. Additionally, compute is _also_ just "burning resources", only its electricity instead of potassium chlorate. Arguably a more fungible form.
> regardless of the fact that it has no debt instruments, lacks liquidity and is completely unregulated and prone to theft.
Only one of the four accusations stands up to any critical thought - which is that it is "completely unregulated". If that is the core of your argument against distributed, trustless currency, then that argument applies equally to all pre Federal Reserve transactions the world over, and I'm not sure what the implied problem is.
The best quote from the first and most approachable of the links above:
> All new mediums of exchange spawn skepticism, and should. For much of the 19th century, paper money was held in ill repute because it seemed so ephemeral and detached from value that could be easily recognized: land, gold, size of armies.
Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum
#44Earlier 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.
Do crypto coins make patterns of Jesus's face? Man there is something I would never have guessed. Also is counterfeit money really that big of a problem that its debasing the value of the dollar enough that we have to abandon all notions of fiat currency and replace it with an entropic commodity that burns energy to no other end? I mean I get, that the "valuable matches" are the ones that "make a coin" of whatever the jargon is but the problem is to make a "coin" takes 215 kWh to create, lets put that back into match terms, assuming one matchstick has one BTU and we convert BTU to kWh that comes to about 733610 matches at a conversion rate of 0.000293071 kWh per BTU that comes to about 2445 boxes of 300 count matches. Amazon sells a 3 pack of 300 count matches for 6.75 which comes out to about $5501.25 for 733610 count of matches. Now be aware that I'm pulling these number out of my ass, butt every match I burn has a 1 in 733610 chance of being a "Jesus Match" that means that I can burn more than that and still not end up with a match that is a Jesus Match because its a statistical argument much like the lottery. In the end what do I have to show for all of this? A huge fucking pile of used matches, and a real sense that maybe just maybe the Emperor's New Currency has value.
Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum
#45By 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…
> 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 computer."
This is simply untrue. I recently synced an Ethereum node on a 2 year old desktop computer. Took ~1 day.
Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum
#46He’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…
Send matches securely to anybody in the world, you say?
Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum
#47Earlier 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…
Nothing in the _world_ has intrinsic value. Obviously, this an opinion, but I do believe it has strong epistemological backing. An easy overview of the opinion by wired: https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-has-no-intrinsic-value-n... , a 1970s era discussion by a historian economist: https://fee.org/articles/the-fallacy-of-intrinsic-value/ , and a deep dive the theory itself: https://mises.org/library/introduction-va…
Labor is the principal value of a currency. I'm guessing you are a libertarian. Maybe you should learn about how commerce, financial instruments, and debt work before saying money has no intrinsic value. Otherwise, if money has no intrinsic value then why work for it? Maybe we should go be communists. As Labor is the principal value of currency, so is debt the obligations of its members. When you get a loan you are not just getting money for interest over time, a group of loans can be packaged into bonds and the bonds can be sold by the lender as a lien against the debt. You get money, the bank gets interest and the bond holders get a percentage. Tell me, where can I get a loan for bitcoin from a FDIC lender? Someone I know who will be honest and not Gox me. Is spent compute the same as labor? Can a thing that computes a thing that stores a thing that hashes a thing that shows that a transaction for a thing happens have a value greater than the things I do for my career? Because to me blockchain is a waste of energy and Energy used for Compute, aka Entropy, has no value.
Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don’t pay a fee on my credit cards, the merchant does While that may be technically correct, it's ignorant of the fact that costs are always passed down the line in any economic relationship like you're describing. That fraud protection costs the card issuers, which is the basis for that merchant fee, and the merchant passes the cost on in the form of higher prices. (Merchant accounts with higher fraud rates will…
If the price of Good N is Value of N+x where x is a markup to cover the costs you’re talking about, that cost is passed on to people who pay with any means. If I buy a TV with cash, or credit card, it costs the same. Except of course that I can get cash back on my card, but not with cash (or bitcoin). So, credit card or not, the cost is there, even if I pay with bitcoin or ether. Except of course for the benefits of…
>" that cost is passed on to people who pay with any means. If I buy a TV with cash, or credit card, it costs the same."
If people start charging less when paid via methods that have less chargeback risk will you reassess?
Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum
#49Earlier 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…
Send matches securely to anybody in the world, you say?
Yes, sir its part of my Matchchain Bullshit Tech. I can't say that you won't get Goxed though.
Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum
#50He’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…
This is a creative metaphor, but like most metaphors, not all of the novel properties of the original system were preserved in the metaphor.
If you want to improve the metaphor find a way to make it so that as a holder of matches I can have very high confidence that there is an upper limit of N matches that can exist at any given time extending far into the future.
Also add some way for me to transfer my matches to another match holder in ten minutes (or an hour, or whatever reasonable interval) regardless of the physical distance between us.