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Coinbase from YC to DPO

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#231

Post by cwkoss »

greg7mdp wrote: post #209
gonehome wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical of proof-of-stake, proof-of-work seems like the main innovation of cryptocurrencies that differentiates them from the standard financial industry? If you swap out POW for POS (or worse clearing house type trust orgs like Stellar) then aren't you just putting trust into some incentive based system no different than existing financial systems? Just instead a government you're trusting some other entity. Y…

I don't see any reason to be skeptical of proof-of-stake. The ethereum beacon network has been up and running fine for months. And POS negates the power usage objection to POW.

I don't think anyone debates that POS is more power efficient than POW. The controversy over POS is whether the game theory incentives of POS will be sufficient deterrent for bad actors at scale.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#232

Post by delaaxe »

New_California wrote: post #132
toolz wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cardano is completely distributed PoS 46 billion market cap (5th largest crypto) - I'm not sure what you mean by "yet to be proven" it also theoretically supports 1MM tx/second - to put that into perspective VISA does somewhere in the ballpark of 2k tx/second (but theoretically can do much more than that I'm sure)

No, Cardano is still centrally coordinated, with an intention to go actual PoS some day.

Not anymore, it's fully decentralized since recently

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#233

Post by Ekaros »

thinkingkong wrote: post #211
russellbeattie wrote: post #147

I'm not sure what I'm more amazed at: The foresight of Coinbase's founder starting the company so early on, or my personal total lack of foresight having read with interest about Bitcoin from the beginning and yet not bothering to buy a single coin at any point over the past decade.

I know lots of really smart software people who avoided crypto because it didnt and still doesnt “make sense”. But we all didnt invest on the merit of the technology. We forgot the whole “how will people behave” part and lost out on millions.

I feel myself as value investor. That is why cryptos or Tesla and many other tech companies never made sense to me... I might be right one day, but currently it seems that market is what market is.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#234

Post by sireat »

gonehome wrote: post #138
Fede_V wrote: post #35

I'm horrendously worried about crypto gaining more marketshare as long as proof of work crypto remains mainstream. It has significantly worse externalities than just about any company I can think of (including defense contractors/vaping companies), and, if it grows larger before we have clean energy, then we virtually guarantee we won't be able to tackle global warming. We are going to bestow a world that will be sig…

I'm skeptical of proof-of-stake, proof-of-work seems like the main innovation of cryptocurrencies that differentiates them from the standard financial industry? If you swap out POW for POS (or worse clearing house type trust orgs like Stellar) then aren't you just putting trust into some incentive based system no different than existing financial systems? Just instead a government you're trusting some other entity. Y…

I am surprised a workable IPv4 based POS coin has not been produced. The consensus protocols are already using IPv4

That is one IPv4 address -> one unit of vote

Difficulty adjusts based on how many IPv4 addresses participate

Sure, it gives advantage to Apple, MIT or anyone with /8 block and disadvantages citizens from some countries with very small allocations but otherwise it could be scaled to whole world while staying truly green.

I suppose the hard part is figuring out the stake when multiple people on the same IP address want to participate.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#235

Post by praveenperera »

losteric wrote: post #164
praveenperera wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always complain about Bitcoin's environmental effects. What about Gold's, the current financial system's? https://www.zerohedge.com/crypto/critics-claim-bitcoin-threa...

1. whataboutism 2. Most currencies are fiat, not gold-backed

1. No it isn't, not if bitcoin can be a replacement for gold.

2. You didn't read my link

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#236

Post by px43 »

burlesona wrote: post #215
mempko wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet the Producer of Waste here is coinbase no?

Not Coinbase, the miners. The arms race dynamic makes electricity cost the only real limit on mining, and unfortunately the more a single BTC is worth the more kWh you can profitably burn to mine one.

It's not the miners, it's the power companies.

Power companies have been burning shitty fuel to save money forever, and it's astounding that they've managed to shift the blame to consumers.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#237

Post by triceratops »

tovej wrote: post #206
aeternum wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal should not be to discourage consumption, the goal should be carbon neutrality. Any industry such as fossil fuel power plants must buy carbon offset credits/tokens from industries or companies that sequester carbon. Then let the market solve the problem. The credits/tokens may turn out to be very cheap.

No credible way to decouple production/consumption from emissions has been found. So no, we do need to start curbing consumption, especially among people in the top wealth quantiles (because they consume the most).

> we do need to start curbing consumption

You do that by increasing the cost of consumption. Everyone has, even wealthy people, have a price point beyond which something is too expensive for them.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#238

Post by CuriousCosmic »

New_California wrote: post #132
toolz wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cardano is completely distributed PoS 46 billion market cap (5th largest crypto) - I'm not sure what you mean by "yet to be proven" it also theoretically supports 1MM tx/second - to put that into perspective VISA does somewhere in the ballpark of 2k tx/second (but theoretically can do much more than that I'm sure)

No, Cardano is still centrally coordinated, with an intention to go actual PoS some day.

I'd be curious what you mean by centrally coordinated and not PoS?

There are certain ways that Cardano is not yet fully decentralised to be sure but the network is operating as a proper decentralised PoS network.

The network has been transitioning from Federated nodes to Decentralised nodes (transferring by about 2% every 5 to 10 days) for the past few months. The d parameter (marking the transfer from 100% federated(1.0) to 100% decentralised(0.0)) ticked down to 0 at the end of last month and block production is fully decentralised.

Where it is still centralised:

- Peering between block producing nodes is currently manual however automatic peering will be enabled before the end of the quarter.

- Development is largely controlled by the Cardano Foundation, IOG, and EMURGO. This isn't unusual in the decentralised software space however the plan is to transition to handling development/feature contracts via on-chain voting and treasury disbursement (and this is already being trialled through Project Catalyst as a decentralised accelerator program) within a year or so. All feature integration and HFC event mechanics however are properly decentralised.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#239

Post by tovej »

dd36 wrote: post #219
tovej wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No credible way to decouple production/consumption from emissions has been found. So no, we do need to start curbing consumption, especially among people in the top wealth quantiles (because they consume the most).

Cap-n-trade was a very successful program for reducing nox and sox emissions. If you create the right incentives, markets tend to find a way.

They still aren't decoupled from emissions. IIRC Emissions actually grow faster than GDP, so it's actually worse than a simple coupling: it's a feedback coupling.

All studies that have looked at seeming decoupling of emissions from the economy have found that they decoupling was due to outsourcing the emissions to other countries. Markets cannot solve emissions as long as value is a function of production.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#240

Post by danimal88 »

cwkoss wrote: post #226
stormbeta wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is exactly why I'm so skeptical of cryptocurrencies in general. There doesn't appear any viable way to make them work as currencies that doesn't either have horrendous externalities, simply replicate what existing currencies already do (often poorly and with many downsides), or often both. I don't think it's a coincidence that even a decade plus later, the primary use cases for crypto still seem to be grey/b…

Dollar hegemony has many horrendous externalities as well.

While that -might- be true, the question is whether the dollar, the RMB, the CAD, and every other currency have anything like the -direct- pollution cost of bitcoin, which my understanding is that they do not
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