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Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

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Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#101

Post by cyphar »

stillbourne wrote: post #58
cyphar wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue (though this is getting more philosophical) that time is what has intrinsic value (or rather, time saved ), since we all have a limited amount of time. Labour is how time gets saved -- one person spends their time doing something so that another person doesn't need to spend their time on it, and thus the person spending the time gets some money as a token for the time they spent. (But I agree with your…

I disagree, if time were the intrinsic value then all workers would receive the same disbursement amounts. As Labor also requires Skill and Proficiency those combine to adjust the value of the Labor.

Skill and proficiency took the worker time to attain through training and experience, and more skilled workers can save more time (either now through efficiency, or in the future by doing a better job).

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#102

Post by xiphias2 »

thinkmassive wrote: post #93
xiphias2 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see, the problem was that it's hard to find documentation about what's needed for an Ethereum full node. As I'm just running Bitcoin full node, I don't have any personal experience with it.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#104

Post by sparkie »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #97
sparkie wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Spending does not stop. It may slow. Most arguments against deflation are largely strawmen, and the historical examples of it are usually a result of too much government intervention, or it following a period of high inflation.

Here's an example of deflation: Moore's Law. If computing power is going to double in 18 months, then a computer I buy now will be worth much less in 18 months. If that's the case, best not buy that computer and wait 18 months right?

Another example is a car. It loses 20% of its value on purchase and continues to lose value year on year and is eventually worth nothing.

But nobody would buy a car if that were the case!

Economic theorists are mostly employees or funded by the banks, the central banks and the governments. There's a "consensus" among them that inflation = good because it benefits the industries they work for.

Anyway, it does not matter, because Bitcoin cannot be inflated, and if people now have the choice to hold a deflationary currency or an inflationary one, let them pick! We'll see if those economists were right after all when people actually have a choice.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#105

Post by bouncycastle »

erulabs wrote: post #90
erulabs wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Edit: It seems (based on the conversations in this thread) the argument is versus "full", "fast" and "light" sync methods. Full implies personally reverifying the entire chain and every transaction, which takes a week or more. Fast pulls down the entire chain (and all of its data), and takes ~18 hours (what I mentioned above), but still results in a complete Ethereum node. It becomes a philosophical argument if the "…

My understanding that a full sync in Bitcoin means something different than a full sync on Ethereum. Bitcoin's database is modeled on UTXO (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unspent_transaction_output) therefore all clients need to validate all transactions from genesis to calculate final balances. Meanwhile, Ethereum is account based and state is global, and to determine the balances you only need to check the merkle proof, no need to store or re-validate each and every transaction, just the final result. Source: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Design-Rationale#accou... quote "The benefits of accounts are:Large space savings"

In Ethereum, the closet to a Bitcoin full node would be an 'full archive' node, those are keeping all the transactions, down to the stack traces and events, without pruning. These are usually run by block explorers, but you certainly don't need to store that much detail if you just want to interact with a dapps.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#106

Post by shan224 »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #97
sparkie wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Youre assuming that credit cannot be built on top of bitcoin. With bitcoin backed credit no bank/authority figure would be able to over-extend themselves to the same degree as we have today

Kenysian and austrian concepts are not mutually exclusive

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#107

Post by dlubarov »

> 7/ Recently, a team of reputable developers decided to peer review a widely anticipated Casper / sharding white paper, concluding that it does not live up to its own claims.

That's rather misleading. The critique was about Casper CBC, which is very different from Casper FFG. Casper FFG is the basis of the Ethereum 2.0 design, and it's not very controversial. Casper CBC may be more controversial, but nobody is suggesting that it be deployed any time soon. It's Vlad's ongoing research project.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#108

Post by stillbourne »

cyphar wrote: post #101
stillbourne wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, if time were the intrinsic value then all workers would receive the same disbursement amounts. As Labor also requires Skill and Proficiency those combine to adjust the value of the Labor.

Skill and proficiency took the worker time to attain through training and experience, and more skilled workers can save more time (either now through efficiency, or in the future by doing a better job).

That is not correct. A person who flips burgers and a person who is going to school to learn a trade are both using an equal amount of time. The latter however expended more effort to obtain a skill set and effort and labor are equivalent. A 40 year old who works 12 hour shifts to make ends meet can use more time than an individual who expended effort to train a skill to proficiency and enter a labor market. Additionally, we can have 2 individuals who both spent time training a skill set. One can end up more proficient than the other despite time or effort spent as despite the old adage not everyone is created equal. Some are prodigiously gifted. One person may struggle through his tutelage while the other breezes through. In the end they both put in the same time, 4yrs, do they get paid the same because they put in the same time? On the contrary, I went to school with several people that made it through the program for CS and got the paper, but are working in hospitality, warehouses, or sheet metal. They put in equal time do they all get paid equally?

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#109

Post by pouta »

DennisP wrote: post #39

> 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 Ethere…

Can you share those fixes?

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#110

Post by bouncycastle »

DennisP wrote: post #39

> 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 Ethere…

Besides Raiden, you can even impliment a simple state channel in about 50 lines of solidity & it shouldn't be too hard to adapt it to any token, see “Ethereum Payment Channel in 50 Lines of Code” by Matthew Di Ferrante https://link.medium.com/A4wqDWtj2S
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