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Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

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Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#91

Post by stillbourne »

trishmapow2 wrote: post #85
erulabs wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comments violate rule #1 of Hacker News comments. > Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We're discussing ideas here, there is no reason presuppose others ideas or behave snarkily.

I think you replied to the wrong person.

I don't think he's being entirely partial in targeting me. One of my replies was to him, in that reply I was mostly civil with the exception that I accused him of being a libertarian. My comment got downvoted to oblivion anyway.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#92

Post by wpietri »

jnbiche wrote: post #38
wpietri wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ta…

We may be talking about different hate. I think gnarbarian is talking about their current experience, and I'm certainly talking about my current feelings.

That said, the 2011-12 critique that Bitcoin was a pyramid scheme turned out to be approximately correct. Much like Herbalife, the actual product was never good for much, and its actual utility was basically irrelevant to its rise. And as with many pyramid schemes, a collapse came when the supply of new entrants became insufficient. There are differences, of course. Pyramid schemes have a central authority, while Bitcoin doesn't.

I definitely agree that this is a perennial HN problem, though: "And that anyone who believed otherwise was an evil heretic, to be ridiculed." The field necessarily attracts idealists; so much of making software is continuing to insist on an idea until the computer eventually agrees. But it's regrettably easy to go overboard.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#93

Post by thinkmassive »

xiphias2 wrote: post #59
nostrademons wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Were you passing --gcmode=archive --syncmode=full flags? If not, then it's just a light node. Here's an example: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/issues/16237 ,,Seems like it does indeed proceed but very slowly. After 12 days on the 96gig ram machine I am finally at block 4732597... I will report back how long it takes to finish.''

gcmode=archive is not required for a full node. It indexes every transaction in a database, which is unnecessary for most applications. It’s similar to txindex in bitcoind, but the Ethereum db is already much larger, so it takes weeks to sync in this mode.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#95

Post by kev009 »

When reading this I think of my deep knowledge of TCP (especially the pain points) and yet it is "The Internet" for the past while. Compared to simpler protocols like Delta-T and later/better protocols like XTP, TCP still "won" for a variety of reasons (adoption, good enough, numbers of implementation, hardware implementation, etc)

There are a couple reasons I think Ethereum might prevail over bitcoin:

* Vitalik is young and "all in", god willing he will have many decades to refine and improve Ethereum. Think Linus and Linux versus the cabal of Bitcoin and BSD core leadership.

* Most of the criticism in this article are things that have slipped committed or expected dates. The community is aware of the problems and is looking forward to fixing them despite it taking longer than expected. It's ok to be wrong and off on dates if you get it right "just in time" which is only obvious after the fact.

All in all, Bitcoin might be BSD and Ethereum might be Linux. BSD was technically better for a decade, but Linux had the central leadership of a young Linus and scaled better in adding new developers and corporate users into the mix at the right time. That seemed to matter more than quality, stability, and longevity of governance at least up until now.

It's perfectly valid to point out the technical flaws and remind people they missed their commitments. But I'd caution against making financial decisions with too much weight on that alone, which would be about as effective as making them on the expected good will of the community of a cryptocoin :)

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#96

Post by Dylan16807 »

stillbourne wrote: post #44
hackernudes wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I'm not sure what your argument was? But I'll reply with a few points.

Bitcoin mining depends on finding a hash that starts with a whole bunch of zeros, which is more or less equivalent to being just close enough to a jesus that you can sell it for money.

Joining a mining pool gets you a relatively fixed payout, counteracting the lottery nature. You'd only have to burn one box of matches to get a guaranteed payout of 300/730000 of a jesus match.

Yes it's still a waste of power.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#97

Post by rubyn00bie »

sparkie wrote: post #80
stillbourne wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Anything could technically be used as currency. Historically people have always used something that is difficult to forge. It's estimated that $70 million dollars in counterfeit money is in circulation in the US. At an estimate of $0.12 per kWh of electrical use Bitcoin uses approximately 70 tWh of power a year. Lets see that comes out to about $120m. At what point is the cure worse than the disease? Again this is j…

You're missing the "extra dollars" that the central bank prints to fund the government's overspending. They call it "inflation" and tell you it is necessary and good for the economy. Before your government can create its next spending budget, it needs to pay off its debts with interest. A big chunk of every dollar of tax you pay is taken before the government can even think about what it is going to spend the rest on…

What you're saying here goes against any reasonable macroeconomic theory.

Deflation causes spending to stop because people hoard money, as spending stops, economies dry up, and voila... economic stagnation at best. But no one without a formal education is Economics is likely to even be remotely aware of that.

Inflation, and Keynesian economics, have empirically served the world quite well. The government's and social policies that go with them not so consistent BUT and this is the important part-- Economics doesn't give a fuck. Inflation is a tool to allow an economy to grow, deflation is a tool to shrink an economy.

Economics is the science of resource management, it's not an opinion. Your opinion is as depressing to me as it is empirically wrong.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#98

Post by Dylan16807 »

hackernudes wrote: post #61
stillbourne wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

What you have to show at the end of the day is a digital currency that has no central authority and yet still prevents double spending. The cycles are not wasted - they secure a digital currency. Banks and governments use immense resources to secure fiat currency.

> The cycles are not wasted - they secure a digital currency.

If I use a car that gets 1 mile per gallon to visit my grandma, I'm wasting basically all the gas I buy, despite it getting me to my destination.

Proof of work is waste.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#99

Post by alexkcd »

coralreef wrote: post #56
alexkcd wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW will centralize towards cheap energy access. PoS will centralize to majority stake holders. I would bet that such energy access or stake follows a power law distribution. So long as that is true, neither system will ever provide decentralization.

Okay, but what happens to energy prices when enough miners flock to low-cost centers? Prices go up. In a long enough time horizon, opportunity to take advantage of energy prices basically gets competed away. I haven't read much on energy production, but as far as I know there are many places on the planet that cheaply produce renewable energy.

Energy production is heavily regulated and centralized to a few entities. Very much like financial institutions.

It's highly unlikely that the free market somehow sorts this out in the future, considering that it's the free market that gave rise to these power law distributions to begin with.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#100

Post by xiphias2 »

erulabs wrote: post #89
xiphias2 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You did a fast sync, not a real full sync (which verifies the transactions since the genesys block).

Right, but re-verifying every txn (a "full sync") isn't exactly the topic. You do not need to re-verify every txn to run an Ethereum node, which is what the article suggests is extremely difficult. And that's not a "light" node, it's a full node, you're just trusting the network initially (additional "trust" is "built" as transactions are processed by the node, which is the beauty of the merkle tree structure). It ce…

I'm not saying that it's completely bad, but with Bitcoin the devs work really hard to improve the software to make sure that the time for full resync doesn't grow too much, and that it can run on an average laptop that has SSD.

The biggest problem with the fast sync is that sometimes when Ethereum node gets stuck, the devs just suggest to do a new fast sync, which - in my opinion - requires enourmous amount of trust in the developers. Hard forks also require a lot of trust, as old software can't be run side-by-side with new software to validate the blockchain.

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