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The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

vitalik.ca

151–160 of 465 posts

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#151

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.

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…

   The only missing part is the ability to easily spend this tokenized EURO, but that - I'm hoping - will come later.
I think recent history of crypto has shown this is not possible without KYC/AML/CTF and all the regulatory bells and whistles. Seriously capital flows tied to real economic activity cannot exist without identity, governments won’t allow it.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#152

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.

Imagine if after TCP/IP was invented, people hoarded IP addresses and they became worth millions of dollars, but no one used the internet. If you pointed this out, they got mad at you for being a luddite or a noiper.

That's the situation we're in with crypto.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#153
post #122

The really obvious weakness in any blockchain setup is the software. Whoever controls the software upgrade channel will always have potential control of the blockchain, whether that's the official entity in charge, or some intermediary. If you want really widespread distribution of full nodes, you need to make a consumer-friendly distribution of the node software, and package it and keep it updated in a way that regu…

Most transactions and legitimacy come from exchanges, not individual clients. I think they will have more clout than the client writers.

Then the exchanges will become the point of control (even more so than they are now).

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#154
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes time.

In his own example, it went from patent to useful in a few months. Blockchain has not gone from idea to useful at all yet.

Very very few people were using cars at that time.

If you apply that same low threshold of usefulness to blockchain then it became useful just as fast, if not faster.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Please see some of these sites I shared earlier:

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

Please see this with an open mind. And please see this from the perspective of someone not from privilege, from a third world country, or from someone facing an oppressive regime.

Money is freedom. And making that freely accessible to anyone from anywhere is important.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#156

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.

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…

>> In the serious crypto world, there is a maxim: Code is Law.

Yeah, what's this thing of code is law. I was discussing with a friend today on how governments might have to come in to regulated some financial transactions with crypto based assets. And he vehemently kept repeating that no government can regulate crypto because "code is law". We went down to the physics level to see why it's not impossible to do. Only for me to come here again and start seeing code is law. High time someone explained it better.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#157
post #127

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…

But with fiat there is no trust between the people, the trust is provided by the banks, they act as the arbitrators because humans cannot trust each other. When we used to barter we stopped because it was sometimes unfair (convert bread to chickens?) so we invented money (gold) which is natural occurring and rare so we trust it more. Later on we invented banks which are a third party we use them as arbitrators becaus…

First - the notion that 'we don't trust the banks' is false. We, you, everyone, trusts that system every single day, with all of our financing. There is an incredible amount of oversight in that system, the Fed publishes it's actions and balance sheets. The banks have immense scrutiny.

While we should never trust banks 'infallibly' we have layers and layers of protections.

We have 'backups' for regular people like FDIC insurance so when that trust invariably gets broken here and there - there are backups. How often has FDIC had to be used? Very rarely.

When someone steals your blockchain stash - which happens - where do you turn? Nowhere.

Commerce is subject to the Judicial system meaning that when there is a problem, we can backtrack and make ammends, people can sue one another there is accounting etc..

Second - it's well established that none of the cryptos thus far are usable as forms of currency, and frankly, they are poor stores of value.

Your local corner store does not accept BTC for the same reason they don't take Euros - because prices fluxuate wildly, far beyond their profit margin. To accept BTC is tantamount to wild currency speculation which, over time, is guaranteed to put them out of business. There's a 100% chance that BTC 'will go down' over some period below their operating credit and will kill them.

They could feasibly accept BTC and immediately transfer to USD, but what would be the point? You do that, it's your risk. And then it's 'not a currency'.

Third - the 'never talked about' Elephant in the room is Monetary Policy. The ability to control currency is extremely valuable - it's dangerous, yes - but also powerful. Using 'Gold' implies 'no monetary policy' but arguably more trust, however, we'd probably all be broke.

'Wars and Pandemics' illustrate this quite well - when a nation faces existential calamity, it definitely needs monetary policy above and beyond normal operations. The economic devastation of COVID without monetary policy would have knocked down the economy like a sequence of dominos and left nothing standing.

'No Monetary Policy' is like building 'Brick Homes in San Francisco'. Brick is 'stronger than wood' you say? Hello 7.7 earthquake, which is guaranteed to happen over time, and, which will knock down brick homes and leave the wood framed homes standing. 'Hard' things are often 'brittle' and without flexibility a single 'hard punch' will break it.

And those are just the obvious points.

So - instead of building something which is 'infinitely decentralized', you could feasibly build something that is partially decentralized and gain basically all of the advantages. Viatalin's notion of 'individuals running nodes' is essentially fundamentally flawed. Individuals should be 'running their own nodes' like they should be 'installing their own wiring, flooring, plumbing, adding their own additions without Engineering approved drawings'. Yes - you can do your own electrical work, but nobody does, because we have very effective division of labour and 'electricians' do that very well which is immensely valuable.

Let 3rd parties 'run nodes'. Make it so the tech requires minimal oversight. But there will never be 'no oversight', it's not feasible, and it never was.

I'd go so far as to argue that 'trust based systems' are probably a kind of biological development based on some kind of actual efficiency optimization: we 'trust our electrician' just like we 'trust the authority of the bank'. Neither are infallible, but it's better than doing it all yourself.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah, and imagine further that people were bidding up the price of IP addresses in a speculative frenzy instead of actually using them.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#159

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…

The only missing part is the ability to easily spend this tokenized EURO, but that - I'm hoping - will come later. I think recent history of crypto has shown this is not possible without KYC/AML/CTF and all the regulatory bells and whistles. Seriously capital flows tied to real economic activity cannot exist without identity, governments won’t allow it.

Nothing stopping you from using a P2P exchange to turn that Euro into hard cash if you don't want to go through the KYC/AML. In fact that's exactly how I bought my BTC after the government here banned it.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#160
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because on HN we know that 99% of the blockchain hype is about people discovering asymmetric cryptography and pretending that the blockchain is the only way to use it. The only real difference that blockchain solutions bring is decentralisation. I have to yet hear one single argument about why decentralisation is good. So far I have only heard the typical libertarianesque arguments about states, banks and infl…

Well I’m a libertarian and an Austrian economics / hard money enthusiast so I grant that my love of crypto is influenced by my politics. If you are a statist that loves government authority, its benefits will be be drawbacks as decentralized money is an obvious attack on state power. The power of decentralization is to reduce the power of centralized entities. Even within decentralized networks, centralized nodes (co…

Organized criminal activity is a powerful centralizing force that is always ignored in these discussions.
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