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Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

vitalik.ca

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Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#121

Post by lowracle »

matdehaast wrote: post #83
wlesieutre wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Certain use cases are currently very difficult/too expensive on current payment rails (Card networks, ACH etc.). Whilst I am not bullish on using Crypto directly. I think a clearing layer that can be settled with crypto can create a very interesting space for real time value exchange. We are currently working in the space on Interledger.

Is it a project that hasn't been released yet ? Or by "clearing layer that can be settled with crypto" you simply mean route ILP payments between two currencies with crypto in the middle ?

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#122

Post by heinrichf »

BLanen wrote: post #81
sincerely wrote: post #7

In a space absolutely filled with hucksters and scam artists, vitalik is legit. Good read.

This is the guy that thought you could do Shor's algorithm by emulating a quantum computer and having it be faster than a classical solution.

Hm, sounds worrying, do you have a source for that?

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#123

Post by nootropicat »

jkhdigital wrote: post #16
broodbucket wrote: post #3

It's such a shame that useful proof-of-work is so impractical. The amount of cycles spent mining for the sake of mining is pretty depressing.

From 2015: http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

Incorrect. The supposed MR=MC law means that the entire economy is zero-sum and wealth creation is impossible. His reasoning also directly translates to real world physical security, as in, if you want to protect wealth worth $1000 from theft, according to him you have to spend $1000-epsilon, otherwise someone is going to outspend you and steal it. Fortunately, that's not how the world works.

Visual illustration of the asymmetric security in action: https://www.pohjoiseen.fi/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/2083960...

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#124

Post by dunkelheit »

cyphar wrote: post #72
lawn wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's actually funny is how people still believe that no use cases exist. Here are just some examples: * Uncensorable donations * No way for a third party to freeze your payments (internet is full of horror stories of PayPal) * Not all businesses can accept digital payments (marijuana stores or porn have trouble) * Credit cards and payment processors take a 2-4% cut, of all transactions. * You can use cryptocurrenci…

Excluding the transaction fees problem you mentioned (which cryptocurrencies also have -- while it might not be 4% it's definitely not 0%), all of the uses you listed are really just one use-case -- uncensorable transactions. Don't get me wrong, that's a very good feature of cryptocurrencies (assuming that you have the ability to transform crypto back to real money on the other end), but you should be aware that your…

I'm struggling to understand if uncensorable transactions are a good thing (note: struggling not in a sense of "I actually think it is evil but let's hear your bullshit arguments so that I can easily debunk them", but in a sense of really being undecided). I am not a libertarian so I don't think that laws are just a useless form of violence. So how can uncensorable transactions be useful for a law-abiding citizen? One thing I can think of is when a transaction is in the gray area - you do it without asking anyone and then can argue that it is legitimate from a relative position of power, similar to asking for forgiveness instead of permission. Another thing is that existence of uncensorable money can push nation-states to adopt more equitable and just laws. But of course there are downsides in enabling crime and so on. So is uncensorable money a good thing in aggregate? I don't know.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#125

Post by solveit »

skohan wrote: post #98
wlesieutre wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think there are some use cases where it makes sense. For instance, I have somewhat of a split life between the US and Europe, and I really wanted cryptocurrency to succeed as a cheap way of moving money between currencies. I played around with bitcoin a bit in 2015, and it back then it was a pretty good experience. Transactions were quick and cheap. The problem is it seems to have gotten less usable in almost every…

Bitcoin certainly got enormously slower. But the other major currencies (ethereum, xrp, etc) are both much faster and more liquid than BTC was in 2015.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#126

Post by ses1984 »

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #43
optimiz3 wrote: post #11

Some hubris in this post. Claims ASIC resistant PoW is "Solved as far as we can", with Ethash being the near end-all of hashing. Random-X is a significant step towards ASIC resistance, requiring near general purpose computation to perform efficiently (i.e. if you can build a better CPU than Intel/AMD/ARM, you've already won). https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/blob/master/doc/design.md (Random-X requires code JITting…

This is what I really dislike about owning crypto long term as a store of value. It's a cat-and-mouse game with hardware and software development, and there's a lot of faith in maintainers to stay ahead of the threats.

>there's a lot of faith in maintainers to stay ahead of the threats.

Isn't that true of basically all software?

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#127

Post by spyder »

elamje wrote: post #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…

https://medium.com/@matteozago/50-examples-of-how-blockchain...

https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/solutions

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#128

Post by sireat »

lawn wrote: post #61
beefield wrote: post #49

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.

What's actually funny is how people still believe that no use cases exist. Here are just some examples: * Uncensorable donations * No way for a third party to freeze your payments (internet is full of horror stories of PayPal) * Not all businesses can accept digital payments (marijuana stores or porn have trouble) * Credit cards and payment processors take a 2-4% cut, of all transactions. * You can use cryptocurrenci…

Those are real use cases.

However the adoption is severely lacking.

The problem is that it has gotten worse not better. There has not been a good use case for a Joe NormalCitizen for crypto in a while.

Anecdata: I first mined BTC in 2011 and used BTC quite a bit in 2013 to buy bunch of online and offline services. It was relatively painless since I had my own BTC. (Also it was really pseudo-anonymous since I was only using mining rewards and didn't reuse addresses).

Since I do not own any significant crypto anymore there is no use case for me anymore.

If I want do something shady, I'd have the problem of onramp KYC etc.

If I want to do something legal, crypto costs including onramp is less convenient/costs more than normal SEPA/CC etc.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#129

Post by haakon »

toastal wrote: post #67
wyldfire wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides proof-of-stake, there's also a coin that tries (tried?) a proof-of-work with greater public utility: Primecoin [1]. It creates Cunningham chains of prime numbers [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunningham_chain

Wasn't there also like CureCoin that unfolds proteins for medical application?

Yes, and there's also SolarCoin which rewards users for producing renewable energy. The problem is that these coins are centralised, so while they may be very useful for what they do, they don't solve the same problem as proof-of-work coins which aim to be decentralised.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#130

Post by nootropicat »

joosters wrote: post #64
magma17 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what oracles do.

If you have to trust an oracle, you have essentially thrown away all of the plusses of decentralisation/trustlessness. At that point, the blockchain becomes pointless busywork, useful only for duping mug investors.

The impossibility of a full elimination of trust, for any particular problem, doesn't mean a partial reduction isn't valuable.

If you disagree, would you be fine with changing the political and justice system of your country into a fully opaque black box? As in, you still can vote for the policies you want, but it's impossible to know how the government functions, what are the reasons for its decisions, or even who personally forms the government, to the point it could be run by aliens or an ai. Sometimes people are arrested for crimes, but it's impossible to know what's the evidence or even what the crime was, even after sentencing.

If you don't consider this equivalent to the currently utilized system in your country, you have to agree that there's value in trust minimization.

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