Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

vitalik.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 378 posts

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#331

Post by jgalt212 »

hippich wrote: post #251
Nextgrid wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sta…

> 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.

Crypto doesn't get you away from this. Not to sound like a mediocre Ashton Kutcher film, but it's all connected. In short, too much fiat, cryto prices in terms of fiat will go up and the converse is true as well.

The only way crypto wins or is THE place to put your money is if the entire world stops using fiat money.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#332

Post by commandersaki »

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #45
sincerely wrote: post #7

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

Except let's not forget the DAO hack, where everything was forked because too many rich people lost their money.

http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2017-12-06-manuscri...

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#333

Post by commandersaki »

drcode wrote: post #330
jki275 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they forked the whole thing, and essentially destroyed the concept that cryptocurrency ledgers were immutable.

By installing the fork you agreed to the statement "everything is exactly as before except the balances of two addresses"

http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2017-12-06-manuscri...

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#334

Post by bouncycastle »

v64 wrote: post #329
bouncycastle wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, Maker contracts are not upgradable. Although the main achilles heel with Maker is the governance and the oracle. The new version of maker has minimised the governance, and the new oracle design has better protection against an oracle attack. Ideally, you want as little governance as possible.

> Nope, Maker contracts are not upgradable. This may have been true in the past, but not anymore. Here's [1] an example of a minor bug that was recently discovered in the MCD deployment and how they're going to patch it. The modules in the Maker system have variables that point to which smart contract to call to execute their actions, and the Maker governance is involved in changing these values. [1] https://forum.ma…

TIL, thanks!

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#335

Post by hippich »

jgalt212 wrote: post #331
hippich wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sta…

> 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. Crypto doesn't get you away from this. Not to sound like a mediocre Ashton Kutcher film, but it's all connected. In short, too much fiat, cryto prices in terms of fiat will go up and the converse is true as well. The only way crypto wins or is THE…

Even more than that - crypto developers can decide they want to have more than 21m (or whatever fixed number) of coins out there changing the whole mechanic of it. But it is one fork away if majority disagree. Try to fork USD.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#336

Post by arcticbull »

hanniabu wrote: post #259
hannasanarion wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except the scarcity of digital assets is all pretend, since you can just fork Ethereum and make your own. You can't fork gold.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#337

Post by stobie »

jasonzemos wrote: post #300
_7fvc wrote: post #289

I consider myself fairly knowledgable with cryptocurrency. I create and run a crypto project myself. I read this post and maybe understand 10% of it. This is probably the rate of things I read from Vitalik. Either Vitalik is extremely smart or he just doesn't know what he's talking about. Overall, his opinions are just confusing and distracting like the whole Ethereum ecosystem. A warning for those who think getting…

> Either Vitalik is extremely smart or he just doesn't know what he's talking about. Overall, his opinions are just confusing and distracting like the whole Ethereum ecosystem. Vitalik started out years ago with writings consisting entirely of self-citing the Ethereum echo-chamber. Judging by the citations here he's starting to understand the value in the works of the established institutions, tenured university prof…

He is, that's what Ethereum 2.0 is which is being released over the next couple years. He's also worked with academics from outside the crypto space since the beginning.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#338

Post by untoreh »

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?

there is also gridcoin but they are not useful pow. they are proof of stake where the stake is the amount of contribution towards boinc projects and the likes, and they are affected by the oracle problem

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#339

Post by Jasper_ »

hanniabu wrote: post #106
Bombthecat wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eos is a good a example. It's governance is falling apart. How to solve it? Well, I guess it needs more governance and rules :)

EOS is not really something to use as an example

"It's a spotless track record, if you ignore all the bad examples"

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#340

Post by asdff »

cyphar wrote: post #186
dunkelheit wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? On…

The most obvious example I can think of is when WikiLeaks (or pick your own politically-unfriendly charitable cause) had their PayPal and bank accounts frozen -- people donated using Bitcoin because the transactions couldn't be blocked by private companies. There are also several other examples of completely legal but unfriendly-to-large-corporations transactions -- in the several US states where marijuana has been l…

You are always at the mercy of your platform. But wikileaks could have continued accepting cash in the mail instead of being sidelined by a third party service. And at least with legal pot the tide is quickly shifting to make traditional banking easier; there was talk in LA about opening a municipal bank kinda for this purpose.

For most people, the utility of sticking your money into a volatile and slow system with no recourses is just never going to be there. A municipal credit union would be more useful and offer an out from private for-profit banking for most people.

Post reply on HN