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Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

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Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#181

Post by wslh »

danaos wrote: post #173
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…

> The entire article is of similar quality. You cherry-picked some points and rebuffed them, then proceeded to generalize and dismiss all of them. The reality is that any SQL database would be superior to every blockchain unless your motives are criminal nature. Disclosure: I sold all of my cryptos in Q1 2018, after buying my first bitcoin in the summer of 2013 and loosing a (luckily) small chunk of it in the infamou…

> The reality is that any SQL database would be superior to every blockchain unless your motives are criminal nature.

People in Venezuela and other political or economically opressed people around the world don't agree [1].

It seems you are wrongly extrapolating the context where you live.

[1] https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#182

Post by runeks »

regisg wrote: post #172
aeternus wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a new user in a Proof-of-Stake protocol, how do I determine which chain to follow? With PoW I can choose the 'longest' chain (chain with the most total work).

It's solved for Cardano (Genesis). A new user can determine which chain to follow without relying on third parties.

How?

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#183

Post by DennisP »

danaos wrote: post #173
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…

> The entire article is of similar quality. You cherry-picked some points and rebuffed them, then proceeded to generalize and dismiss all of them. The reality is that any SQL database would be superior to every blockchain unless your motives are criminal nature. Disclosure: I sold all of my cryptos in Q1 2018, after buying my first bitcoin in the summer of 2013 and loosing a (luckily) small chunk of it in the infamou…

I picked a few points, because rebutting all the article's ill-informed points would have meant writing an entire article myself, and I didn't have time for that.

If you hate blockchains in general, fine, but that's a different viewpoint than what the article espouses.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#184

Post by runeks »

rictic wrote: post #157
aeternus wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a new user in a Proof-of-Stake protocol, how do I determine which chain to follow? With PoW I can choose the 'longest' chain (chain with the most total work).

I haven't looked into this in quite some time, but as I recall, a new user can look at the available chains and determine which has the majority of stake behind it. Is there a subtlety that makes that unworkable?

> Is there a subtlety that makes that unworkable?

The reason this can’t work is because it has no cost to create a new chain from scratch. I can create a thousand valid PoS chains in virtually no time, and there’s no decentralized way for you to choose the one everyone else chooses.

The only way to solve this is to give special rights to some set of stakers.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#185

Post by sparkie »

XorNot wrote: post #114
sparkie wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Labor is a sacrifice of ones time, and one expects to receive compensation for that sacrifice. The medium of compensation could be anything, and is certainly not limited to regional monopoly currencies. The key distinction between the currency and Bitcoin is the government's use of force to mandate that people accept the currency as a unit of payment for services (and use it to pay taxes). There is no intrinsic value…

If Bitcoin is not backed by government force, then why is it worth anything? Because no one can be compelled to accept Bitcoin to extinguish my debts to them (i.e. by the courts) and I can't pay my taxes in Bitcoin to my local government (no, "just-in-time currency exchange doesn't count). So given these problems, what is the exchange rate of Bitcoin into anything else supposed to be? Given, again, that eventually, e…

> If Bitcoin is not backed by government force, then why is it worth anything?

> Because no one can be compelled to accept Bitcoin to extinguish my debts to them (i.e. by the courts) and I can't pay my taxes in Bitcoin to my local government (no, "just-in-time currency exchange doesn't count).

Imagine that! People are willing to accept my bitcoin as a payment for their services voluntarily, and not because they are forced to?

Turns out that there are quite a large number of people who like the idea of economic freedom and dislike the idea of this big cartel telling them what they can or can't do, who they can or can't trade with. They might dislike it so much that they're willing to make the hurdles, and take risks, in order to exchange between currencies to meet their obligations under such repressive systems and achieve some level of financial sovereignty outside it.

People want the choice. They want the choice because the government who holds a monopoly over many businesses in the geographical region they reside often does a bloody awful job, and their prices are too high (a giant chunk of ones earnings, then another chunk of everything they buy). Private enterprises could offer far better service at lower costs and have them delivered on time. If they under-perform, people could pull out their money and pay someone else for the services.

The main obstacle for this kind of voluntary trade is the men with guns saying "That kind of business can't operate here because this is our turf."

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#186

Post by naniwaduni »

wslh wrote: post #181
danaos wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The entire article is of similar quality. You cherry-picked some points and rebuffed them, then proceeded to generalize and dismiss all of them. The reality is that any SQL database would be superior to every blockchain unless your motives are criminal nature. Disclosure: I sold all of my cryptos in Q1 2018, after buying my first bitcoin in the summer of 2013 and loosing a (luckily) small chunk of it in the infamou…

> The reality is that any SQL database would be superior to every blockchain unless your motives are criminal nature. People in Venezuela and other political or economically opressed people around the world don't agree [1]. It seems you are wrongly extrapolating the context where you live. [1] https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins

This is, I suppose, very similar to criminal motive, except that we find them sympathetic. A reminder that not all that is (locally, de facto) illegal is wrong.

One man's terrorist &c.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#187

Post by runeks »

phlip9 wrote: post #124
pouta wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share those fixes?

First, some Proof-of-Stake setup: 1. Assume we have some set of "validators" who control the global consensus process. They come to consensus on the current global state of the system. These validators are vaguely analogous to miners in Proof-of-Work consensus. 2. These validators have coins bonded as collateral in exchange for more voting power in the consensus process. One key idea necessary for Proof-of-Stake is t…

> 1. Assume we have some set of "validators" who control the global consensus process.

This setup assumes there’s already consensus on a certain set of validators, but the challenge is arriving at this consensus in the first place.

This is the general problem of proof-of-stake: it assumes the presence of consensus in order to arrive at consensus. This is because consensus is reached by utilizing the scarce resource that is the chain’s token, but without consensus in the first place this token isn’t scarce at all.

Proof-of-work uses something external to its chain as the scarce resource that determines consensus (energy), while proof-of-stake uses something internal to its chain (the chain’s token). This means that when a PoW chain forks, the two chains have to share the external resource, while the resource is copied for PoS chain forks.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#188

Post by wslh »

naniwaduni wrote: post #186
wslh wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reality is that any SQL database would be superior to every blockchain unless your motives are criminal nature. People in Venezuela and other political or economically opressed people around the world don't agree [1]. It seems you are wrongly extrapolating the context where you live. [1] https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins

This is, I suppose, very similar to criminal motive, except that we find them sympathetic. A reminder that not all that is (locally, de facto) illegal is wrong. One man's terrorist &c.

Similar to criminal motives? It seems you never had 0 (zero) dollars and needed to receive a few dollars from your family outside your country with a government fully controlling the flow of capital.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#189

Post by CryptoPunk »

keymone wrote: post #171
CryptoPunk wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're trusting someone on the internet to tell you protocol specifications (and then, since you don't trust the software distributor, doing a full audit of their software or writing your own client). With Proof of Stake, you're trusting someone on the internet to tell you the hash for the most recent valid block. And in practice the difference is even less significant. In reality, very close to every new user of…

The two are very different. Knowing consensus rules I can verify the chain and if I notice something fishy - I go back to figuring out if I’m being attacked. If instead I simply accept what chain I should follow - I have no guarantees I wasn’t attacked. With PoS it’s even worse - I can generate million different chains for zero cost and you have no objective measure to tell which one of them is more genuine and more…

PoS requires that you get the consensus rules AND a hash of the most recent valid block from a trusted source. With PoW, you only get the consensus rules. Either way, you're relying on a trusted third party for bootstrapping.

The risk that the party you trust is defrauding you is infinitesimal in both cases, given you can poll the community widely until you settle a highly credible source of truth, or several credible sources that all agree on the same version of events.

>>That’s exactly the issue PoW solves - gives you such objective measure to compare chains.

That's true, with PoW you can measure the work in each chain. With PoS, you do you have a somewhat similar option: you can measure the market value of the coins of each chain.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#190

Post by mothsonasloth »

xmly wrote: post #111

As a developer, I checked Ethereum's code base. To be honest, it is not that complex in the tech itself. I know it is not fair to just count code lines to compare the complexity. But the Ethereum python code base has only 30K-40K lines code including test while Linux kernel has 15M lines.

Ethereum is predominantly written in C++. The python codebase you are talking about is the Ethereum client / virtual machine of which there are several implementations written in Java, Go etc.
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