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

Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

timdaub.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 650 posts

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#341

Post by joshspankit »

rmah wrote: post #299
joshspankit wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about government spending? All the way from taking taxes to paying vendors. Including the spending of all politicians. (Minus a reasonable “dark fund” for military and whatnot simply because it can be important to hide your cards from other countries) If citizens can see exactly where their dollars go it could make corruption very difficult and lead citizens to be far more engaged in their democracies.

You can see where your tax dollars go now (except for the classified items, but even there you can see the totals). You can get detailed breakdowns of nearly everything, including salaries. For example, you can see every NYC employee salary here https://www.seethroughny.net/payrolls . If you want, you can scroll through the massive list of federal, state, local gov contracts on a variety of websites today. For exampl…

Very solid points.

I personally think the engagement part would come instead from "My $5000 in tax went through the system and was eventually spent on a federal initiative I don't agree with" (or since it's all granular: "only $13 of that $5000 went to anything that benefits my community?"). No, I'm not saying that everyone will care, but I think that more people will care.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#342

Post by rawtxapp »

martin_a wrote: post #327
rawtxapp wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know someone who got a 7 figure loan backed by cryptocurrency collateral in a matter of minutes using makerdao. The best part? They didn't even had to provide their name. This is the future folks, I highly recommend that you actually try some of these projects before writing them off.

> The best part? They didn't even had to provide their name. The mafia probably doesn't need your name for a loan, too. They'll find you anyway. But maybe I'm all alone in finding this somewhat shady.

> The mafia probably doesn't need your name for a loan, too.

What? They'll know your name, address and your whole family history usually.

It's just a smart contract execution on the global computer that is Ethereum, how is that shady?

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#343

Post by tastyfreeze »

gh55 wrote: post #206
audunw wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the end of the day, crypto is mountain you can't ignore anymore Is it really? Is there anyone that can say that a company has suffered because it didn't adopt crypto? It seems like it's perfectly safe to ignore crypto completely. You could gain a bit of advantage. You can use it as a marketing tool, or to attract certain kinds of investors, by cashing in on the blockchain hype. But I haven't seen that there's an…

> If the gold price crashed I'd be very interested. Imo central banks are in a tough spot now. They've issued huge amounts of bonds, and cannot raise interest rates. If inflation rises, they will be unable to raise rates - unless they want to pay incredible amounts of interest to the banks. If they do decide to do so, they will need to sell large quantities of gold to help pay for that, which will be a heavy downward…

Rising stock price due to currency devaluation is already happening.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#345

Post by duckfang »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #325
duckfang wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardest pill to swallow is that we already had a very low cost of moving money around between hostile nation-states. And it's been around since the 8th century - read 700ACE-800ACE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala Its money dealer to money dealer, and the money dealers keep scrips. Average fees are from 0.2% to 0.5% . It's definitely un-sexy since its not technology based. No chains of blocks or programmers…

>And the only reason why it's not more massively used is because of the US's adherence that it's "terrorism". I don’t think so. A system with clear record keeping, auditable by third parties, and subject to the judiciary is far better than below: > Trust and extensive use of connections are the components that distinguish it from other remittance systems. Hawaladar networks are often based on membership in the same f…

> I don’t think so. A system with clear record keeping, auditable by third parties, and subject to the judiciary is far better than below:

And we've learned that record-keeping has its own very strong negative side. It alone can establish ties between people, and serve to eliminate privacy all in the names of "transparency". (And I can hear it now too - "Why want privacy if you have done nothing wrong?"). I think we're only at the beginning of crypto-fraud arrests, because the ledger is the log - and that's a liability.

And the auditability is primarily a governmental requirement, usually based around fraud, financing terrorists, or the like. If cheating occurs, the excommunication from the network is the punishment - you are removed from your position of power. And frankly, we can look at our systems of how auditability doesnt stop the various failure modes: blatant financing of terrorism/HBSC, billions of $ transferred away from citizens with usurious fines, overleveraging finance side affecting savings/loan. In the end, auditability is just a way to assign blame. And that blame is never directed towards those at the top who manufacture and use illegal techniques - it is used to blame the rank and file; the cashier, the teller, the engineer, the low middle manager.

And subject to the judiciary is an interesting case you bring up... Because transfers in (I believe) all cryptocurrency is not subject to the judiciary. And in many more popular cryptosystems, that is seen as a strong anti-government bonus, and not a malus. And

Point being, is that the Hawala is the last millenium's Bitcoin.. And when compared to BTC or ETH now, is still strictly better. (And we haven't discussed the barrier to entry, wasted electrical power, e-waste, etc.)

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#346

Post by ashtonkem »

imtringued wrote: post #262
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…

>Or is there even a significant technological difference between Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc ? I would like to argue that the difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash isn't even a technological one. Every dunce can increase the block size. It's purely a political/social difference. It's laughable that cryptocurrencies market themselves as avoiding government control but yet they suffer from the…

Arguably most crypto currencies are run by oligopolies, putting them in a worse place than even the troubled democracies of the west. How small is the pool of people who control 51% of the hashing power for any given currency? Probably not terribly large.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#347

Post by TheMblabla »

martin_a wrote: post #328
miedpo wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... there are a few. Brave (the browser) uses blockchain in their privacy protecting ad technology. Skynet uses a blockchain to allow users to share their extra computer storage space for a CDN. And I'm sure there are a few others. It's just that the amount of use cases send legitimate applications using them are... limited. Most of the ones I'd consider valid uses have a substance-full technical goal, like the…

> Brave (the browser) uses blockchain in their privacy protecting ad technology. uBlock Origin works fine based on txt-files. Not sure how blockchain could improve this.

Iirc the idea behind brave is to create a sustainable alternative to the ad/data collection of big tech. They use blockchain to enable microtransactions for content.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#348

Post by JamesSwift »

imtringued wrote: post #264
globular-toast wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I was super excited for bitcoin ten years ago, but now I've experienced first hand how bad bitcoin is as a currency. Most people aren't even thinking of using it like that. It's just sitting in their coinbase account. So you've just got a bunch of people who all expect to make money from each other. Without any actual value it's a zero sum game, folks!

In practice you are waiting for technologically illiterate people to lose their Bitcoin or old people to pass away without revealing their wallet to anyone. That's a pretty weird form of "investment".

Thats actually pretty similar to people that invest in collectible cards (e.g. sports or trading card games like Magic). One part of the value increasing is due to supply attrition. Existing cards get either damaged or lost.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#349

Post by aww_dang »

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…

It shouldn't need to be said, but preference is individual. If I dislike something, a high price tag won't change my preference.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#350

Post by peter_l_downs »

timdaub wrote: post #20
throw8932894 wrote: post #14

> 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. > Instead, we need an approach for the average Joe developer to create their idea within the Ethereum ecosystem without the need for hardcore unproven technologies. So instead of…

Hey, I think you're making a valid point and I probably should have explained more what I meant by my statement. IMO, there's a middle ground we can go between slow PoW on L1 and scaleability. I think that it can be done by having tools that give us the same guarantees like deploying a smart contract on the main chain. It's difficult to explain: But what I want is Plasma but as a framework to develop dapps. This proj…

You might consider taking a look at Celo. They have ultra-light client support [0], it's proof-of-stake with single-block finality, and they run a true EVM that you can program in Solidity. It's mobile-first but since it's fundamentally a fork of Ethereum it is also web3 compatible -- there's a metamask fork here that should soon be functional [1]. Gas is payable in multiple ERC20 tokens, and should remain cheap as the network scales. Not sure if this falls under your "ethereum killers that can do 10x transactions/second" so apologies for shilling if it's not interesting to you.

[0] https://docs.celo.org/celo-codebase/protocol/plumo

[1] https://github.com/dsrvlabs/celo-extension-wallet

Post reply on HN