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Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

vitalik.ca

51–60 of 378 posts

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#51

Funny. Article discussing hard problems of crypto and ignoring the elephants in the room. There is still no actual and relevant use case for crypto outside illegal transactions and gambli^H^H^H^H^Hinvestment purposes. The second elephant is that it brings monetary policy back to medieval times. Third is that in practice the whole concept of credit and ots role in money creation is ignored.

I'll just leave this here:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fed-adds-104-5-billion-to-finan...

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#52
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW is exactly the same. The rich can afford the most hardware and electicity. PoS just short circuits the burning power step. It's also the same as bank interest.

When you put your money in a bank, it doesn’t just sit there. Deposits, while possibly not the most efficient way to do it, support useful economic activity. Proof of work is also terrible, obviously. Proof of stake seems like an awful thing to _aspire_ to, tho.

The minimum stake of 32 eth is probably going to require something like a laptop to run. Those with larger stakes are going to need to devote more computer resources to the network.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#53

Funny. Article discussing hard problems of crypto and ignoring the elephants in the room. There is still no actual and relevant use case for crypto outside illegal transactions and gambli^H^H^H^H^Hinvestment purposes. The second elephant is that it brings monetary policy back to medieval times. Third is that in practice the whole concept of credit and ots role in money creation is ignored.

One legitimate use case for cryptocurrency is so you can transact with individuals who do not have bank accounts. Cryptocurrency allows anyone in the world to get a cryptocurrency "bank account" and that "bank account" allows the individual to transact freely in society. It is important for a free society.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#55
post #19

Whether or not you're aligned with Bitcoin political values and goals, please don't be duped by Ethereum. It may appear as something useful, without the stigma of Bitcoin being black market money. However, you ONLY need black market money. Everything else that's ok with being regulated, does not need a blockchain. The hard problem that Bitcoin solved was "How do we create money that wouldn't collapse and lose value o…

Bitcoin is traceable.

Bitcoin is slow.

There are better alternatives out there.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#56
post #8

The biggest problem is actual uptake for real transactions, as opposed to speculation and black markets. The 2 biggest barriers to be solved are: -lack of trust/ease of use for the layman -volatility These problems may or may not sort themselves out with time.

Even if I could use it for regular transactions, I’d still need a reason to want to.

If the justification is “you don’t need to pay credit processing fees” then things would have to be priced cheaper. But I think you’d have to pay me more than the credit card fee to give up the ability to do chargebacks for a lot of online transactions.

Maybe I’d use it for making donations where I’m not expecting anything back from a transaction that the other party could fail to deliver.

They’re just not solving a problem that I have.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#57
Can some people from the crypto space give a quick tl;dr of what’s going on in the space that’s of note? Seems like I hardly hear about interesting stuff after the bubble burst (kind of at least).

Are there any people using crypto to actually do work for clients and solve fiat currency based businesses problems? I am curious if the crypto start up space is mostly filled with crypto-to-crypto services or if there are many successful crypto-to-regular business cases.

Edit: I’m interested in if there are many people making meaningful money from doing client work or building a business, mostly in the crypto space. There seems to be two camps: crypto idealists that don’t care about making money, and the crypto application people who might be a little idealist, but also want to make money here and now. This is more geared towards the latter.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#58

Funny. Article discussing hard problems of crypto and ignoring the elephants in the room. There is still no actual and relevant use case for crypto outside illegal transactions and gambli^H^H^H^H^Hinvestment purposes. The second elephant is that it brings monetary policy back to medieval times. Third is that in practice the whole concept of credit and ots role in money creation is ignored.

I'll just leave this here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/fed-adds-104-5-billion-to-finan...

How long ago did we almost have a hard fork?

How long ago were the exchanges found to be manipulating prices fraudulently?

As if crypto is immune to systemic issues.

It's not a closed system after all, is it?

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#59

I literally spent the past week reading a couple dozen papers on cryptocurrency attacks, in service of a term paper which should hopefully turn into a master's thesis (and possibly more during my PhD campaign). I'm pretty damn pessimistic as a result. Smart contracts basically throw all of your consensus guarantees out the window because they can cause arbitrary exchanges of value in the application layer, which can…

Plus there's the problem that smart contracts cannot be easily modified if they are found to be buggy and that one can always reverse engineer them, because they're distributed to everyone. These two together have already caused lots of damage https://hackernoon.com/yes-this-kid-really-just-deleted-150-... and they make most real-world uses impossible. It is pretty much impossible to sell anything digital with smart…

That's what oracles do.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#60

Funny. Article discussing hard problems of crypto and ignoring the elephants in the room. There is still no actual and relevant use case for crypto outside illegal transactions and gambli^H^H^H^H^Hinvestment purposes. The second elephant is that it brings monetary policy back to medieval times. Third is that in practice the whole concept of credit and ots role in money creation is ignored.

«There is still no actual and relevant use case for crypto»

What a short-sighted view. Perhaps no use case for you personally. There are 7.7 billion people in this world who have vastly different life circumstances, some of them certainly need crypto to make their lives better. In no particular order: hyperflation, financial censorship, instant low-fee international transfers, etc

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