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Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

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Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#171

Post by simias »

alanfalcon wrote: post #110
fxtentacle wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The best smart contracts don't need to be reverse engineered, they've got shared, verified source code. The bugginess is a real problem as you've pointed out. The "impossible to sell anything" couldn't actually be farther than the truth from all my experience buying and selling NFTs. Over $150,000 USD worth of digital collectable game cards have been traded this week alone over at https://opensea.io/recent - everythi…

Digital assets are obviously the best possible use case for blockchains and smart contracts, but can it really work outside of that use case? And even for that use case is it really more convenient than centralized solutions?

From what I can tell browsing through this website those digital "assets" seem to be yet another speculative outlet with some limited gamification on top. It's cool from a technical perspective but where do we go from there?

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#172

Post by rmtech »

arcticbull wrote: post #141

None of these are the actual hard problems in cryptocurrency and the fact this is the focus speaks volumes. The real hard problems are: 1. How do we stop using more power than Switzerland to process 4 transactions per second (lol) 2. How do we stop payments to international terrorists and rogue states. 3. How do we stop money laundering. 4. How do we stop price manipulation by fraudulent actors. 5. How do we allow pe…

> You know, the “currency” problems and not the “crypto” problems.

You seem to be looking for fiat currency, that already exists.

The point of cryptocurrency is that not everyone wants fiat, some people place more of a priority on certain things and less on certain other things.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#173

Post by DennisP »

rsynnott wrote: post #6
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum proof of stake is coming and should fix that elegantly.

I feel like that’s been coming any day now since about 2014. And seems like a TERRIBLE idea, anyway. The rich get richer, built right into the system!

The rich get richer in proof of work, too. It's not like those giant mining rigs are free.

It's also true in bank accounts; the more money deposited, the more interest you earn. At least in proof of stake everybody gets the same interest rate regardless of deposit size. Banks generally give better rates to larger accounts.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#174

Post by jki275 »

arcticbull wrote: post #141

None of these are the actual hard problems in cryptocurrency and the fact this is the focus speaks volumes. The real hard problems are: 1. How do we stop using more power than Switzerland to process 4 transactions per second (lol) 2. How do we stop payments to international terrorists and rogue states. 3. How do we stop money laundering. 4. How do we stop price manipulation by fraudulent actors. 5. How do we allow pe…

These are arguably features not bugs. Except for your 1. which has already been solved by multiple POS cryptocurrencies.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#175

Post by DennisP »

gerikson wrote: post #113
Zamicol wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

32 ETH is ~$4,800 at today's price of $151.07[1]. What's the expected "payout" for this stake? [1] CoinMarketCap used as source.

Expected payout depends on the total amount staked. With a large amount staked it's only a couple percent annually; with a small amount it's up to 18% annually. The idea is an equilibrium will be reached in the middle somewhere.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#176

Post by Avamander »

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…

> Random-X requires code JITting

How can this be a requirement?

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#178

Post by jki275 »

emsimot wrote: post #148
arcticbull wrote: post #141

None of these are the actual hard problems in cryptocurrency and the fact this is the focus speaks volumes. The real hard problems are: 1. How do we stop using more power than Switzerland to process 4 transactions per second (lol) 2. How do we stop payments to international terrorists and rogue states. 3. How do we stop money laundering. 4. How do we stop price manipulation by fraudulent actors. 5. How do we allow pe…

1. I don't know if it will work, but the idea is Proof of Stake (ETH2 in Ethereum-land) 2. You can't -- this is a cultural problem, not a technological one 3. There's no such thing as money laundering 4. Peer-to-peer, transparent finance infrastructure 5. User-money as a layer on top of cryptocurrency

ETH is never going to go POS. There's absolutely zero motivation to do it, and they just keep pushing it off into the future.

POS has been a solved problem for years. RDD did it back in the beginning. XTZ is a current working POS chain.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#179

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#180

Post by DennisP »

sireat wrote: post #128
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…

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…

We can't have real adoption until we have the scaling to support it.
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