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…
Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
601–610 of 650 posts
Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mining/Trading BTC over the counter since 2011. I've never used a darknet market. I read an article on slashdot in 2011 called "Bitcoin Mining for fun and profit" I bought a graphics card, it paid itself off in 21 days. I bought 12 more graphics cards and sucked down 3kW for 24 months. I do not regret this and every single person here that doesn't understand proof of work, doesn't understand a deflating asset with 8…
I don't think one could claim mining bitcoin is the killer app of bitcoin. That's a reason why people would support bitcoin.
The killer app is the combination of economics, sociology, game theory and decentralized ledger blah blah blah
When you take one currency pair with 8 digits of precision that’s PROGRAMMED to deflate and trade that against an inflating currency with 2 digits of precision...
You’re going to need a whole lot of the inflating thing to buy the deflating thing, this is math.
Me personally, my electrical bills and the costs I’ve eaten has yielded tremendous value: for me. I mined, I was rewarded, I stimulated the economy.
Long before there was an economy.
Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
#603Earlier quoted context omitted.
I appreciate the response, but it's still entirely unclear how blockchain would help here. In a supply chain, why would blockchain be better than a centralized process? It seems to be trying to put a square peg in a round hole.
Tampering. Bribes, hacking, idiocy, whatever. A proper blockchain is tamper resistant, so everyone trusts it.
I will bribe people to put wrong information on the blockchain then.
Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
#604Building 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…
Decentralisation is itself the killer app. If you live in the developed world all your life you’ll have a skewed view of this and not understand the true benefit here. As trust decays in the 1st world I sincerely hope you are open minded enough to change your opinion. Some more killer apps; - RENVM decentralized darkpools - Chainlink decentralized oracles - Deco by chainlink labs decentralized private information sha…
Yep RenVM is a big deal. Iirc they had something called Cafe which demonstrated turning your bitcoins into a privacy coin, ZEC. I remember when REN was only 5 cents. Amazing how much it costs to run a darknode now! Truly a successful project.
Also another cool dApp is DyDx, margin trading platform
Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
#605Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm a SIL-4 programmer. If you can find security issues in my code, its because it hasn't .. yet .. been through the rigors of my teams safety certification and validation processes. Check back in a year, and don't forget to start with the code coverage counts.
While I certainly concur with your perspective, the context is, C/C++ vs. Javascript. You have so many low hanging fruit in the npm eco-system, you'd be a fool wasting time on my code. Which, incidentally, is protecting millions of peoples lives in 40 countries, while they commute to work every single day... its not exactly the kind of stuff that teenagers unpack for use in searching strings for things ..
Finance code should be much, much better tested than the Javascript eco-system allows. There is no reason not to write finance/cryptocurrency code with the same vigor as transportation safety modules. You're totally right that, if my C/C++ codebase were treated the same way as the average Javascript module, you'd be having a field day.
But, done properly, you'd have your job cut out for you. And thats exactly what I'm asking for, from those building 'next generation finance software': get it to SIL-4.
Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
#606Earlier quoted context omitted.
> sell the most valuable and appreciating asset ever What happens when it stops appreciating? Or is the premise that bitcoin will alway outpace interest rates?
In the short term it could do anything, in the long term you'd expect it to constantly appreciate. It's a scarce/deflationary/limited supply asset which is compared against an endless money printer.
The 2008 financial crisis in a nutshell
Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
#607Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
#608Earlier quoted context omitted.
Largely agree. It's what makes Bitcoin different. Bitcoin's killer app is the network itself. The fact that you can send money/transfer wealth instantly without a bank to tell you what you can and can't do IS the value of Bitcoin and why it's not some purely speculative ponzhi scheme. As far as I understand, you can't reaaally use Ethereum for the same purpose because of high fees.
You can use Ethereum for the same purpose. The transaction fees for sending Ether in a reasonable amount of time stands at sub $5. To send the same amount in the same time on Bitcoin's network is higher. Ethereum's high fees mainly hinder smart contract usage, which, depending on the complexity of the contract, may incur up to hundreds if not thousands of dollars at current gas prices.
Transaction fees appear to be significantly higher than $5 at the moment (see e.g. https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-transaction-fees-hit-recor...).
Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
Largely agree. It's what makes Bitcoin different. Bitcoin's killer app is the network itself. The fact that you can send money/transfer wealth instantly without a bank to tell you what you can and can't do IS the value of Bitcoin and why it's not some purely speculative ponzhi scheme. As far as I understand, you can't reaaally use Ethereum for the same purpose because of high fees.
>Bitcoin's killer app is the network itself. The fact that you can send money/transfer wealth instantly Instantly? >can't reaaally use Ethereum for the same purpose because of high fees BTC fees are also high?
Yes, that assertion sound like it's coming from someone who has never actually used Bitcoin.
There are cryptos which are instant and without transaction fees (e.g. Nano for payments and maybe in the future IOTA as an alternative to Ethereum). So there is some hope for the technology, but it remains to be seen if any of this actually takes off.
Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore
#610Earlier 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…
> How is that different from any other asset, stocks, land, property. It's all speculation nowadays. Just look at the housing market in London and other places. This is a common talking point but it's not actually true. 99% of London housing is used for living in.
> 99% of London housing is used for living in.
Are they all owners or the owners actually "invested" in a piece of property calculating the rent passive income and the possible increase in market value as part of the overall rentability of their investment?