Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#241

Post by EdwardDiego » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #233

gh55 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real problem in lending is to ensure that the borrower can afford the loan and uses the money on what he says he will. So the lender pays the money into a multisignature 2-of-3 wallet, gives 1 key to the borrower, and if when the borrower signs a transaction with that key to spend the funds is buying what they are authorised to buy, countersigns, else does not. And then you wrap this up in a smart contract, cal…

The repossession is the hard part. Let’s say I lend ten grand to some wallet so they can buy a car. They do so. Now they’ve got a car. They now move all their wealth to other wallets or fiat and refuse to pay me back. I need some mechanism of repossessing their car, which only works if I have state infrastructure and a legal system attached to my contract. “Btc bounty hunters” isn’t a good enough explanation.

Now I'm wondering if software contracts have ever been legally tested. I'd enjoy a lawyer reading out the relevant if statement to the court.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#242

Post by UncleMeat » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:51 PM UTC

EdwardDiego wrote: post #241

UncleMeat wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The repossession is the hard part. Let’s say I lend ten grand to some wallet so they can buy a car. They do so. Now they’ve got a car. They now move all their wealth to other wallets or fiat and refuse to pay me back. I need some mechanism of repossessing their car, which only works if I have state infrastructure and a legal system attached to my contract. “Btc bounty hunters” isn’t a good enough explanation.

Now I'm wondering if software contracts have ever been legally tested. I'd enjoy a lawyer reading out the relevant if statement to the court.

I certainly don't think it is impossible. But the "defi will let everybody make 8% on their savings accounts by loaning cash to people around the world with no barriers" folks need to provide some evidence that I'm not actually going to lose everything to people just refusing to pay me back.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#243

Post by yao420 » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:51 PM UTC

oilbagz wrote: post #71

AgentME wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Go C/C++ native, or GTFO ... I don't think memory-safety issues are the killer app for Ethereum. The lack of C/C++ is one of the best things about the Ethereum ecosystem.

Memory-safety issues are a thing of the 20th century, if you still have them in this day and age as a C/C++ developer you probably should put the real compiler down, kid .. Besides which, you're never going to convince me that Javascript/NPM have fewer issues with leaks and holes than a well engineered C/C++ lib would. I mean, come on ..

As a security guy I love when people have your perspective on memory safety, guarantees my job for a couple more decades.

Memory issues are still the source of the biggest and best bugs. I have no doubt I can find huge security issues in your native code.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#244

Post by charcircuit » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:52 PM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #46

monkeydust wrote: post #32

When do people expect Ethereum gas prices to come down? Right now if I want to move 1ETH its costing me $109 from one exchange.

Right after the Tether/Bitcoin bubble pops.

Tether bubble? As in crashing from $1.002 to $1? USDT can always just be cashed out for regular money.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#245

Post by Majromax » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:58 PM UTC

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.

> You can only know my vote if you have a way to associate an address with an identity.

A secret ballot makes it impossible to verify votes even with collusion between the voter and interested party. That makes vote-purchasing infeasible, since I could take money to vote for you and still defect at the secret ballot box.

A cryptographically-secure secret ballot in this threat model would need to provide the voter with a valid zero-knowledge proof for their actual vote and an imposter zero-knowledge proof for their alternative vote. Something like "if I input A into the system, then it counted vote X; if I input B then it counted vote Y," with A/B remaining private to the voter.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#246

Post by payne92 » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 2:01 PM UTC

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…

There is a killer app for crypto: international money laundering and untraceable transfers.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#247

Post by milchek » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 2:04 PM UTC

>"What's Ethereum's killer app?" we asked ourselves not long ago. Now we know. It's the world's best publicly-accessible settlement platform for financial transactions.

Hit the nail on the head - for now.

Yes, DeFi is what kicked things off last year and people can now trade their favourite altcoins, borrow crypto, and even leverage trade on decentralized exchanges. It's also true that what everyone is trading are mostly other coins and other projects that they're speculating on - and those projects are just newer forms of the same projects that exist now.

We've seen countless projects pop up that are all copies or trying to do similar things; increase throughput, connect blockchains, provide oracles, implement faster and cheaper smart contracts, etc.

So, it's easy to look at all this cynically, but I like to hope that eventually this will end up somewhere good - I mean, there is financial incentive, there is the 'new toy' angle, and there are countless talented people who are genuinely curious and trying to improve the various crypto ecosystems.

I guess we'll see where this all ends up in 5-10 years.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#248

Post by langitbiru » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 2:05 PM UTC

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…

You know what? That makes me think. So I applied for YC with a non-blockchain startup. In the application form, they asked whether I had another idea. So I answered a development tool for smart contracts / blockchain applications. A Jetbrain IDE but for smart contracts.

I already develop Mamba (https://mamba.black). It's like Truffle but for Python instead of JavaScript.

We'll see how it goes.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#249

Post by nootropicat » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

For some reason ethereum devs refuse to (recommend to) increase the gas limit, even though it's the only short-term way to decrease fees while increasing decentralization, in a mistaken idea that if a node doesn't run on a raspberry pi (it does) the network isn't decentralized.

People run nodes when they need them. Decentralization is a function of fees and node costs, not just node costs. Right now deploying a large contract costs more than a good gaming pc while a node to verify blocks can be a pi with a ssd for a small fraction of the cost. As a result normal people just stay away - fees too high decrease decentralization regardless of node costs. The opposite would make much more sense: few dollars for deployment, gaming pc for nodes. More people would actually run nodes in this scenario.

As long as a node only requires a high end pc rather than a server in a datacenter the network can stay decentralized. Even current (very underinvested) geth could handle 50M blocks, which would provide relief until rollups get going and prevent activity from relocating elsewhere.

This is the most dangerous, with the danger completely self-imposed, time for ethereum ever. Maybe everything works out and rollups release soon enough, but the risk calculus is completely bonkers.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#250

Post by koonsolo » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 2:15 PM UTC

martin_a wrote: post #114

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…

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…

I think the decentralized web pieces are starting to fall in place: decentralized file storage, decentralized domain names, decentralized communities and streaming, decentralized payments, etc.

I wouldn't declare it "failed technology" just yet.