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Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

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Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#151

Post by BrianOnHN »

maipen wrote: post #146

This constant whining is getting popular nowadays, specially on hn. >ooohh this thing I got in early is now popular Give me a break. Alot of smart people here think they know what matters but they don't. They often point at the technology and this and that, but it doesn't matter, they are all wrong. The price chart is the only thing that matters. Even if you had the best scalable crypto. Would it matter if nobody cou…

> they are all wrong

That's pretty absolutist. So, if one's right, that makes you all wrong?

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#152

Post by bitcoin01 »

yulaow wrote: post #139
bitcoin01 wrote: post #83

And 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 we…

Thanks for your feedback! I guess the grass always seem greener on the other side. I'm the type of guy who don't enjoy spending time around tooling build configs- I think I'll wait until better tools come around. I believe they will, and when the average developer can develop smart contracts easily, it will be a lot of fun then.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#153

Post by Nullabillity »

dgellow wrote: post #143
moomin wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can only know my vote if you have a way to associate an address with an identity. Unless that's the case, you may be able to check the set of votes, but that's it.

Whoever forces you to vote a certain way can force you to reveal your address too.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#154

Post by dgellow »

louwrentius wrote: post #130
mirekrusin wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

System that can't be shut down by governments?

You mean that government that just shuts down internet, making your 'system' totally useless? Yes, right! You can't fix societal problems with tech.

Something to consider: shutting down the internet is very expensive for a government and is likely to results in social unrest and have a lot of other negative side effects.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#155

Post by px43 »

siraben wrote: post #84

> I need a hero, and by that, I mean that I need a usable methodology for building scaleable decentralized apps. Yes, you've heard that right. We don't need more "Ethereum killers" that can do 10x more tx/s than Ethereum. Those are useless. Having worked on large Ethereum smart contracts (running a decentralized auction on chain) over two years, I fully agree with this. Ethereum needs better smart contract languages,…

If you're working on "large Ethereum smart contracts" you've missed the point. On chain logic should always be as minimal as possible. Uniswap v1 was two vyper files. One was 46 lines, and the other was 496 lines[1]. It took like 20 minutes to read through the code thoroughly, and was one of the most impactful contracts ever deployed to the network.

Solidity also matured a lot, which is why Uniswap v2 moved back. If you find yourself writing an EVM assembler from scratch, and you're trying to build something other than a compiler, you have veered way way off course, and need to re-evaluate your system architecture.

Feature creep might work well if you're trying to leech money from a government contract or something, or being paid by line of code you contribute, but it's fatal in the Ethereum world. I consulted for a number of projects that made the exact same mistake, and most of them aren't around anymore.

[1] https://github.com/Uniswap/uniswap-v1/tree/master/contracts

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#156

Post by oilbagz »

samtheprogram wrote: post #137
oilbagz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I would love to be able to incorporate Ethereum features in my apps - which are written in C/C++-friendly languages, and which avoid any and all use of Javascript, at all cost.

I don't think the decision to use Javascript for this kind of functionality was wise, or practical. The cyclomatic complexity of managing a web-installable javascript codebase compared to a C/C++ module is just too damn high.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#157

Post by eswat »

artogahr wrote: post #135
haolez wrote: post #131

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.

How does that even happen?

Congested network + fees dictated by the complexity of smart contracts being used (which would be much higer for something like a DEX transaction).

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#158

Post by Consultant32452 »

aabbcc1241 wrote: post #133
5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

An ACH transfer through my bank takes multiple days. I've only made a few transactions on crypto, but confirmation was more like seconds to minutes.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#159

Post by jlokier »

dgellow wrote: post #126
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #56

Building 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…

> With a public ledger I can check and be sure that my vote is correct

Any voting system with a public ledger where you can later check your vote is a disaster for election integrity. It's probably surprising, and certainly counter-intuitive, but that's a vector for fraud.

That's why we have a long history of secret ballots. And no cameras in the voting booth.

From a comment a few weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25739051):

> you could look up your own vote and the votes of your friends to confirm

You can't do that because visibility causes voting fraud.

By coercion. If votes can be checked by other people, a very large number of people (enough to change the result) will be forced under threat by someone else to "vote correctly".

The same happens if you can check your own vote, because any mechanism that lets you do that can usually be used by someone else - "give me your phone so I can check you voted for X like I told you to" (while holding a gun).

That's why free & fair elections have secret ballots, without personal identification on the ballots. To prevent coercion fraud.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#160

Post by lawn »

maeln wrote: post #64

I really, really don't understand where cryptocurrencies are going. Billions have been poured in this technology for almost no actual return technologically wise. And I understand, because interest are not aligned. It really seems like nobody actually care about advancing the state of art, except actual researcher who work in universities and not in crypto startups... Cryptocurrencies had a goal and a usefulness when…

There's a big difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash: the intent to scale on-chain while Bitcoin has given up that leading to today's ridiculous transaction fees.

Monero is the best approach to actual privacy as it conceals sender, receiver and transaction amount for all transactions.

I do agree that the speculation focus is misguided, but there are cryptos that are useful the way Bitcoin was meant to be.

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