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Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

vitalik.ca

251–260 of 378 posts

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I‘d rather put my trust in an open source community than in centralized banks.

Just wondering, unless you’re doing something illegal or are targeted by the government and your money is at risk of seizure, why would you keep it in crypto with all its associated risks instead of in a bank? Banks are highly regulated and so can’t just run away with your money.

Couple points:

1) If we are talking about central banks such as FED - non-QE QE happening right now in the USA could be good example of why one would not be want to be part of the game.

2) If we are talking about centralized banking as a group of banks operating under the rule of the government - similar question to yours could apply to the general cryptography - why you need it (unless you are a criminal) if the state protects your rights? We seen countless examples where it doesn't quite work like that.

I really want you to consider that desire to not be forced to use the only one available medium of exchange does not mean someone wants to do something illegal (also, try to define illegal in the very general way, that would apply equally in the USA and in Venezuela, and in Russia, and in Somalia =))

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#252

Your site's SSL cert has just expired at November 24, 2019 at 1:00:59 AM Eastern Standard Time Safari, Chrome give errors now.

It is throwing an error for me too, but the certificate doesn't seem expired:

>Issued by: Let's Encrypt Authority X3

>Expires: Thursday, 23January, 2020, 0:16:50 Central Standard Time

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#253

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.

Bitcoin's software development could completely freeze right now, and it would still be useful. Most other projects require constant upgrades and tweaks, since they are very far from the stage they promised when they started. This is especially true for Ethereum.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#254

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?

The name itself might give you a clue, or just look at the code: https://github.com/tevador/RandomX

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>there's a lot of faith in maintainers to stay ahead of the threats. Isn't that true of basically all software?

Not all software purports to be a store of value

Banking software and all the algorithms that power the global economy are vulnerable. Every 10 years or so there's a major crash because of dinne oversight and the result is "this will never happen again", yet it continues to happen again.

At least here we can build an economy off an economic model instead of what we do now which is build an economic model off of the economy.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#256
post #6

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!

Decred set up it's mixed PoS/PoW so that there is an opportunity cost to staking - your funds are locked for a random amount of time up to several months. The staking rewards are also not enough to keep indefinitely staking. Your share of stake will continuously decrease, and, aside from ticket splitting, you would need to acquire more decred along the way to continue staking at the same level.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#257
post #6

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!

Ethereum wasn't launched until July 2015 so there's one inaccuracy. Also given you're on HN you should likely be aware that (a) timelines are difficult to estimate and often things take much longer than you thought, even more so with being the first to do something, (b) there's a lot of discussion and review for financial software, (c) it's much harder to change the carriage of a moving train

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#258
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether you disagree or not, sometimes the best solution is analog, or paper. Everything scales too easily and massively when you digitize things. Especially money and voting.

Paper money already was a level of abstraction above the physical assets like gold and silver. The problem with paper money is that it can be devalued very easily. You are also not going to have a say about paper money getting banned in the coming years. You'll have a choice between different digital currencies, most of them centralized and some that are not.

Gold and silver are already a level of abstraction over the things you are buying with them or selling for them. Gold and silver's value as commodities have little to do with their values as useful for anything practical, although gold happens to have become useful for electronics.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#259
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't think you know what the word "fiat" means. Crypto is fiat currency. It's backed by nothing but wasted electricity and a lucky guess. You can't trade it in for anything of value.

Gold is backed by nothing but scarcity, high energy costs to mine it, and utility. That's no different than ethereum.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#260

Oh shut up already with big block phobia. BSV proves that big blocks is the most rational way to scale. The small block mantra started by blockstream completely rotted the crypto space

I agree, although I’d say BCH proved it first. :P

BSV is a fork of BCH
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