I was away from the crypto space for a while and I decided to try shorting some currencies yesterday using a DEX based on Ethereum. I wanted to create a position with 1000 dollars. The estimated fee for my transaction was 490 dollars. Something is broken in this environment.
Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
131–140 of 650 posts
Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
After all those years, there's still not a single useful blockchain application around. These days I see lots companies telling me, they put their "supply chain on blockchain" and while I understand what they probably want to tell me ("you can't tamper with where our stuff comes from") I don't see the point in that. If you've got trust issues with your subcontractors you should fix those and not "seal" the willingly…
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bhp-ironore-blockchain-id...
> to digitise a sector that still uses millions of paper documents
So, they now use blockchain where sending documents as a PDF would have been sufficient...
I'm so proud!
edit: Read the article! That's truely their main selling point. Formerly it was done on/with paper, now it's "on the blockchain". This is another great example why we don't need blockchain.
Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
#133Building something useful on something that is primarily used as highly volatile financial speculation instrument always rubbed me the wrong way. The whole crypto scene is just about making quick dough with a technology, that for some reason remains hyped through and wrapped in mysticism. Face it, there is no sexy killer app for the masses. Wait. There is one: Crypto trading to... make quick dough. And the cryptonerd…
> "that is primarily used as highly volatile financial speculation instrument " How is that different from any other asset; stocks, land, property. It's all speculation nowadays. From what I've read there are pretty much three use cases: 1. store of value akin to gold (bitcoin) 2. decentralised privacy money (monero etc, to avoid taxes?) 3. a platform on which to build decentralised technologies (ethereum, ada, thorc…
I don't want to call cryptocurrency as money because they're not circulating as you'd expect from money. Globally limited transaction rate, relatively long confirmation time, and few adoption.
Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
#134Building something useful on something that is primarily used as highly volatile financial speculation instrument always rubbed me the wrong way. The whole crypto scene is just about making quick dough with a technology, that for some reason remains hyped through and wrapped in mysticism. Face it, there is no sexy killer app for the masses. Wait. There is one: Crypto trading to... make quick dough. And the cryptonerd…
> "that is primarily used as highly volatile financial speculation instrument " How is that different from any other asset; stocks, land, property. It's all speculation nowadays. From what I've read there are pretty much three use cases: 1. store of value akin to gold (bitcoin) 2. decentralised privacy money (monero etc, to avoid taxes?) 3. a platform on which to build decentralised technologies (ethereum, ada, thorc…
> 1 store of value akin to gold (bitcoin)
It's not. It has no other popular uses than crypto trading.
> 2 decentralised privacy money (monero etc)
Who quotes prices in only crypto (outside of stablecoins)? Noone. It's not at all useful as unit of account - it doesn't have 2 out of 3 properties of money (store of value, unit of account).
> 3 a platform on which to build decentralised technologies (ethereum, ada, thorchain...countless others - some with specific niches: gaming, streaming etc)
Many of those (probably most) can work just fine with centralized or decentralized non-blockhain apps.
One use case is (relatively) censorship resistant messaging and that's only because no major government has decided to censor it.
Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
#135I was away from the crypto space for a while and I decided to try shorting some currencies yesterday using a DEX based on Ethereum. I wanted to create a position with 1000 dollars. The estimated fee for my transaction was 490 dollars. Something is broken in this environment.
How does that even happen?
Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
#136Building something useful on something that is primarily used as highly volatile financial speculation instrument always rubbed me the wrong way. The whole crypto scene is just about making quick dough with a technology, that for some reason remains hyped through and wrapped in mysticism. Face it, there is no sexy killer app for the masses. Wait. There is one: Crypto trading to... make quick dough. And the cryptonerd…
What about a voting system? That's the only application of a public, decentralized ledger that can kind of makes sense to me. I'm from Switzerland, every few months we have a public voting for various changes to the federal or cantonal laws. I currently do not have a way to be certain that my vote is taken in account. With a public ledger I can check and be sure that my vote is correct. I'm generally opposed to softw…
> I currently do not have a way to be certain that my vote is taken in account.
That is something we do a lot of R&D on @Electis, along with the fine fellows from InfernoRed, Microsoft and others. Because the value of an election is the thrust that voters have in it!
It is part of what the homomorphic encryption protocol we use (electionguard) aims at solving. Your ballot is encrypted with a joint public key, and all the "artifacts" of the election are published after it closes. You can verify that your encrypted ballot is present in the artifacts, and that the whole artifacts archive verifies mathematically.
https://www.electionguard.vote/ https://electionguard-python.readthedocs.io/ https://www.electis.io/ https://electeez.com/
Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Entire industries have been built on top of JavaScript, from rags to the most valuable companies in the world reinvesting back into it. It’s getting mature, too. As someone who 5 years ago refused to learn JavaScript and was firmly in your camp, I don’t really see an “up to snuff” argument to be made anymore. All languages have quirks and JavaScript definitely has them, but it’s not alone in that regard, especially c…
Entire industries have been built on Cobol, and Emacs-as-a-Lisp-host, and Visual Basic too, but that doesn't mean we should be using any of it for a next-generation financial trading scheme. There aren't any good reasons to avoid producing viable C/C++ libraries to implement this kind of technology - only developer complacency and laziness. Want me to adopt your new fintech? Let me embed it in ANY app I might write,…
What do you want to embed? web3.js? My guess is that is low hanging fruit, given that it’s mostly interacting with Ethereum nodes over HTTP and websockets, so if someone wants to do this, they could pretty straightforward. If their primary user of their integration are people on the web and cell phones, I think this was a good, scope limiting decision.
Or is it something else?
Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
#138Building something useful on something that is primarily used as highly volatile financial speculation instrument always rubbed me the wrong way. The whole crypto scene is just about making quick dough with a technology, that for some reason remains hyped through and wrapped in mysticism. Face it, there is no sexy killer app for the masses. Wait. There is one: Crypto trading to... make quick dough. And the cryptonerd…
What about a voting system? That's the only application of a public, decentralized ledger that can kind of makes sense to me. I'm from Switzerland, every few months we have a public voting for various changes to the federal or cantonal laws. I currently do not have a way to be certain that my vote is taken in account. With a public ledger I can check and be sure that my vote is correct. I'm generally opposed to softw…
That destroys plausible deniability, no? How would that system work?
Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
#139And there I was entertaining the idea of becoming a smart contract developer for fun and profit. Programmable money sounds very appealing and I can see so many usecases... if only we could use a proper language like Kotlin to develop smart contracts.. Any solidity dev that can give us some feedback of what it's like to work full time on this platform? P
Short answer: it is Hell.
Long answers:
- "linking libraries" between FE and blockchains are constantly broken, have _a_lot_ of undefined behaviours, and their error codes are few and totally opaque to what's really happening. Bonus part: they also change fast, a lot, and mostly with breaking changes. See web3.js and ether.js issues if you wanna cry
- you mostly will have to use third party services like infura or web browser plugins like metamask to get a working user experience but it will be an extremely poor user experience. We currently use metamask and we had a lot of problems with it, and also it randomly fails making ofc the whole app unresponsive if you don't code defensively of this behaviour. Did I also said they frequently update it deprecating methods and behaviours they suggested just some releases ago? Yeah, enjoy.
- solidity is the standard language to write contracts and it is literally the worst language I ever used, with a lot of undefined behaviours I encounter daily. I cannot count the times I had to spend a dozen of hours to find information in obscure blogposts or issues about "hey don't use this language construct with this evm version while passing this type of parameter or the compiler will put a sort-of-nop instead of what you really want". You better create an internal wiki or you'll lose track of what you have to know to avoid to shoot yourself in the foot constantly.
- The tools around solidity (Eg the whole Truffle suite) are full of major and minor bugs, will fail on you without explicitly telling why and the documentation is basically not existent. The remix ide is barely passable but you have to use a bunch of disconnected plugins to get something useful. The plugins for common ides (webstorm) or text editor (vscode) are useless at the moment of writing.
I'll be honest, I am still working on these dapps just because I believe in the team I am in. If it was for the current state of the technology and the relative constant feeling of burnout I am accumulating, I would have RUN away months ago and moved to a corp job in a super ""boring"" stack (currently thinking about going the .netcore route).
Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
#140Building something useful on something that is primarily used as highly volatile financial speculation instrument always rubbed me the wrong way. The whole crypto scene is just about making quick dough with a technology, that for some reason remains hyped through and wrapped in mysticism. Face it, there is no sexy killer app for the masses. Wait. There is one: Crypto trading to... make quick dough. And the cryptonerd…
What about a voting system? That's the only application of a public, decentralized ledger that can kind of makes sense to me. I'm from Switzerland, every few months we have a public voting for various changes to the federal or cantonal laws. I currently do not have a way to be certain that my vote is taken in account. With a public ledger I can check and be sure that my vote is correct. I'm generally opposed to softw…
This may surprise you, but most voting systems make verification hard deliberately. If you can check your vote at home, others can verify your vote as well, which means you've lost the advantages of a secret ballot.