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The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

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Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#131

Post by puranjay »

Judgmentality wrote: post #128
puranjay wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm wrong but I see this perspective so often on HN. And I can't help but feel that this is because so many people on HN are already privileged - living in the first world, making software salaries, and generally have a world of opportunities available to them, especially when it comes to their money. But coming from a third world country, the promise of a decentralized, permissionless market seems extremely pr…

> But coming from a third world country, the promise of a decentralized, permissionless market seems extremely promising. Particularly if it doesn't restrict me because of my location or capital or identity. Your entire argument is about the promise of blockchain and not the actual current applications people are using. Your argument is theoretical when OP is asking for practical use cases. You mention many hypotheti…

I literally gave a real world example: Curve.fi that's used to swap between stablecoins. You can literally go right now to swap between tokenized USD and EURO.

Or you can go to the bank and pay their exchange rate. Maybe they'll ask you for your ID too.

Another example of the second kind: www.Ape.tax, where anyone can deploy an investment strategy and beta users can try them out, and if they are successful, they can be integrated - voted on by a DAO - into Yearn.finance, the primary project with several billion $ in investment.

There are existing projects already using the situations I talked about. It's not theory. It's not idealized vision. It's happening right now.

Blockchain is moving so fast that Yearn.finance, the platform with billions in investment, wasn't even a thing a year ago.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#132

Post by puranjay »

seibelj wrote: post #39
jeremycarter wrote: post #16

Blockchain, Decentralization and Smart Contracts have had nearly a decade to prove their value and disrupt the marketplace. So far nothing but whitepapers, pipe dreams and exit scams - nothing my mother can use. What's the point? Nobody is using crypto as an alternative to fiat. Prove me wrong.

I have responded to a thousand versions of your comment on HN. No matter what I write the haters never change their minds. HN is not an enthusiastic place for blockchain devs.

If HN was around in 1997, I bet half the comments would be about "internet is just scams and porn. Where's the use case apart from checking the weather?"

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#133

Post by Judgmentality »

puranjay wrote: post #131
Judgmentality wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But coming from a third world country, the promise of a decentralized, permissionless market seems extremely promising. Particularly if it doesn't restrict me because of my location or capital or identity. Your entire argument is about the promise of blockchain and not the actual current applications people are using. Your argument is theoretical when OP is asking for practical use cases. You mention many hypotheti…

I literally gave a real world example: Curve.fi that's used to swap between stablecoins. You can literally go right now to swap between tokenized USD and EURO. Or you can go to the bank and pay their exchange rate. Maybe they'll ask you for your ID too. Another example of the second kind: www.Ape.tax, where anyone can deploy an investment strategy and beta users can try them out, and if they are successful, they can…

You gave a hypothetical example, not something you use. And to answer your question in your original post - no, blockchain would not be more convenient than using my traditional bank. I can do it entirely on my phone inside an app. And every time I've compared it's significantly cheaper not to use blockchain to send someone actual money.

You're giving me possible applications, not talking about you being an actual user. There are products for lots of things, that doesn't mean they have enough people using them that they're going to last.

> Blockchain is moving so fast that Yearn.finance, the platform with billions in investment, wasn't even a thing a year ago.

You're talking about something I've never heard of before as proof of blockchain having made it. We are on different planes here and I don't see us getting through to each other.

Anyway, agree to disagree. Cheers.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#134

Post by Sleepytime »

jeremycarter wrote: post #16

Blockchain, Decentralization and Smart Contracts have had nearly a decade to prove their value and disrupt the marketplace. So far nothing but whitepapers, pipe dreams and exit scams - nothing my mother can use. What's the point? Nobody is using crypto as an alternative to fiat. Prove me wrong.

The internet was around a lot longer than a decade before aol showed up and started pressing CDs.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#135

Post by sthnblllII »

idlewords wrote: post #109
bpodgursky wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On January 29, 1886, Carl Benz applied for a patent for his “vehicle powered by a gas engine.” The patent – number 37435 – may be regarded as the birth certificate of the automobile. In July 1886 the newspapers reported on the first public outing of the three-wheeled Benz Patent Motor Car, model no. 1.

And over the following years the automobile improved rapidly, becoming more capable, reliable, and gaining users as it went. It didn't spend its first 13 years up on blocks while its supporters yelled at the skeptical and embezzled money from everyone else.

Yea. Its closer to the first 30 years of its existence doing pretty much nothing but being sport for rich people.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#136

Post by vehementi »

noofen wrote: post #12
rapsey wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The price is manipulated by hedge funds and/or whales to fleece unsophisticated investors. Wyckoff pattern has described BTC this tear to a t.

It's genuinely concerning how 1:1 the Wyckoff pattern is for BTC at the moment [1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lhf_2gJJS1I

That was a month ago and it has since diverged, the same youtuber is performing even more mental gymnastics to try to explain the divergence

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#137

Post by DemocracyFTW »

puranjay wrote: post #132
seibelj wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have responded to a thousand versions of your comment on HN. No matter what I write the haters never change their minds. HN is not an enthusiastic place for blockchain devs.

If HN was around in 1997, I bet half the comments would be about "internet is just scams and porn. Where's the use case apart from checking the weather?"

Nonono, you're confounding the internet as it is now with the internet as it was 24 years ago. It's just the other way round.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#138

Post by Edman274 »

puranjay wrote: post #132
seibelj wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have responded to a thousand versions of your comment on HN. No matter what I write the haters never change their minds. HN is not an enthusiastic place for blockchain devs.

If HN was around in 1997, I bet half the comments would be about "internet is just scams and porn. Where's the use case apart from checking the weather?"

Wait, let's keep using this analogy. If the World Wide Web was invented in 1991 and by 2002 no one had created useful websites besides marketing for scams, drug marketplaces and sites to pay ransoms to, and the energy consumption of the World Wide Web was the country of Argentina... Wouldn't the critics have a pretty good point?

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#139

Post by noxer »

jollybean wrote: post #91

The notion of 'decentraliztion' as presented by the blockchain community is basically extremist/absolutist, and it's ruining their own projects. Our entire civilization and everything in it depends on networks of trust. Without it, we'd fall down instantly. To require a system of 'absolute decentralization' when 'partial decentralization' would work just as well, doesn't make sense. We technical people have an odd wa…

The XRPL was invented shortly after some BTC devs saw that BTCs approach was "to extremist" and could never scale. It went online in 2013. To this day most crypto people will tell you it is centralized and some buggy-man can turn it off/delete/revert etc.

While in reality it started as a cluster of nodes run by a single entity (centrally controlled just like BTC did) and moved to continually enlarge the number of entities to the point where the original nodes have absolutely no special permission or power left. There was even a software update amendment that was accepted by all other nodes but the original nodes so they overrules them. The system isn't based solely on trust however the people who run a node can pick trusted nodes[1]. This is important for reliability. If you trust crappy nodes that go offline your node could miss Tx and fork off with no way to detect that and if trusted nodes collude they could halt your node. However the validation is done locally there is no need to trust any other nodes to check if the Tx are valid. You see if a node lies and if you previously trusted that node you would simply remove it. You dont have to trust a single node you have to trust the majority of all nodes you trust. There is no way around the "trust the majority" anyway. In BTC for example you are forced to trust that 51% of hashing comes form honest people who do not collude. the difference here is you dont know who they are and you can neither pick the ones you trust nor exclude the once you dont trust or misbehave. Needless to says the this system outcompetes all the other systems for decentral consensus.

But Guess what. People still says the XRPL its centralized. Most people simply dont understand the tech in this space. They are in it for the gambling.

[1] https://xrpl.org/intro-to-consensus.html#trust-based-validat...

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#140

Post by puranjay »

jeremycarter wrote: post #45
seibelj wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have responded to a thousand versions of your comment on HN. No matter what I write the haters never change their minds. HN is not an enthusiastic place for blockchain devs.

I'm not a hater. I am just applying some critical thinking and design thinking to try to figure out where the value is in all of this to the customer. I am happy to say I'm wrong, and happy to backflip.

Please see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27258671

some links to complement the comment:

https://curve.fi/ - for exchanging different tokenized stable coins (such as USDC > EURO). Already has over $300M in daily volume exchange.

https://yearn.finance/ - a platform where anyone can code and deploy an investment strategy, provided it is voted on by people who hold the platform's governance tokens. Already has over $3B in assets locked in. Good idea to look at their governance platform as well: https://snapshot.org/#/yearn

https://aave.com/ - a platform to borrow or lend your tokenized assets. Already has over $9B in assets invested

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