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The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

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Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#171

Post by seibelj »

Judgmentality wrote: post #133
puranjay wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 us…

Curve did $1 billion in volume over the past 24 hours https://curve.fi

That isn’t hypothetical. It’s like you keep getting refuted and then ignore reality because it disagrees with you.

“Blockchain is unused.”

[a bunch of links with billions of dollars in actual daily usage provided]

“Oh, well, I’ve never heard of that before so it doesn’t matter.”

What kind of arguing is this?

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#172

Post by globular-toast »

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.

That's because many of us already have changed our minds. Many of us were big fans of Bitcoin ten years ago and really excited about the prospect of trustless digital cash. We thought it would work. But now that a decade has passed, we've changed our minds.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#173

Post by dehrmann »

mvzvm wrote: post #26

Scam after scam, that's all blockchain is. Just another way to fleece the average consumer. There has not been a single valuable use, a single product, that actually improves anyone's day / process / life / anything. I am very open to changing my stance if someone presents evidence to the contrary.

> Just another way to fleece the average consumer

How? No one credible has claimed it's a good investment. The most you'll get is people suggesting bitcoin as an alternative asset that's a small portion of your portfolio.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#174

Post by puranjay »

idlewords wrote: post #158
Edman274 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People did bid up the price of domain names at least in a speculative frenzy instead of actually using them

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#175

Post by akarma »

puranjay wrote: post #124
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.

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…

> coming from a third world country, the promise of a decentralized, permissionless market seems extremely promising

> A very basic usage: using Curve.fi to swap between tokenized USD (USDC) and tokenized EURO (EURS) with minimal slippage and fees, all permissionless, all freely accessible.

As a sibling comment noted, this is hypothetical usage, and a future 'promise,' not actual usable by or providing value to the average person.

I went to curve.fi, and from a first glance, anyone not first-world, techie, and extremely familiar with crypto would be completely bewildered by this.

"Select a wallet to connect to this dapp" — what is a wallet and what is a dapp?

"Swap using all Curve pools" — what's a Curve pool?

"Trade routed through alusd" — what does this even mean?

"Base APY" — what? I thought I was exchanging currency, not opening a bank account?

"veCRV holder/LP ratio (based on fees): 28.74" — This is where even first-world, college-educated people close the website in confusion.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#176

Post by brazzy »

puranjay wrote: post #124
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.

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…

> I would reckon that alone should make HN bullish on crypto. When was the last time you worked at a tech company where Code was truly the Law?

Hell the fuck no.

Have you seen what kind of code people write?

"Code is law" is the last thing anyone with real tech experience should ever want. It's a terrifying prospect.

Code is buggy. I don't want my laws to be buggy and unfixable.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#177

Post by puranjay »

idlewords wrote: post #169
puranjay wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think money transfer was Blockhain Era 1.0 use case. The use case has advanced - very rapidly - to money automation. This is all really new stuff, much of it barely a year old, and it has come so fast that even I've been surprised. A smart contract can currently take your tokenized USD (we'll use USDC since its backed by Coinbase), use that as collateral to borrow ETH on AAVE.com (a lending protocol), use 50% of th…

This use case is gambling with extra steps, except the software that runs a slot machine is far better vetted for correctness than a smart contract. Without money transfer, this system remains a toy system. With money transfer, it becomes a regulatory bypass. No amount of complexity layered on top fixes this.

Money transfer is impossible to stop as long as P2P exchange exists. My country banned crypto a few years back. I just bought in-person. Nigerian central bank banned crypto recently. Nigerians just exchanged it over Whatsapp

The fact that central bankers are busy banning it should give you an idea how disruptive it is.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#178

Post by puranjay »

gricardo99 wrote: post #164
puranjay wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean on a larger scale. The great promise of crypto, A billion plus “unbanked” people turning to a crypto enabled shadow banking system, will not happen without drawing the attention of the eye of sauron

Shouldn't the fact that central bankers want to ban crypto make you think that maybe there's something here more than ponzis and scams?

If the eye of sauron wants to destroy something, surely it can't be all bad?

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#179

Post by viraptor »

puranjay wrote: post #168
viraptor wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the two never have to know each other, and can interact entirely with a smart contract available 24x7, what's there not to be excited about? I tell you that I'm totally going to follow what a program tells me and you should give me your money to earn interest. Are you excited about the possible interest from this uninsured, pinky-swear promise exchange? > Code is Law "Code is law unless things go really bad." - DAO

> I tell you that I'm totally going to follow what a program tells me and you should give me your money to earn interest. Are you excited about the possible interest from this uninsured, pinky-swear promise exchange? It's a smart contract. You can review it publicly. If there are vulnerabilities, if the ownership is not renounced, it would be visible. Can you say the same about your investment bank? You don't have to…

But the smart contact cannot interact with real world. It's the party on the other side that ultimately gets the funds and acts on your behalf. That party can just take the money and go away.

Unless we're talking about purely on-chain strategies. But in that case why wouldn't you copy their public investment contract and execute it yourself?

> Can you say the same about your investment bank?

My investment bank has a tonne of regulation on it. If they go under and I can't claim insurance on it, then we have bigger issues where "money" may not be an answer anymore.

The workers also would be liable to local laws if they tried to literally walk away with money. (Sure, we have various enforcement issues, but the alternative of none-of-that doesn't sound great)

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#180

Post by puranjay »

akarma wrote: post #175
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…

> coming from a third world country, the promise of a decentralized, permissionless market seems extremely promising > A very basic usage: using Curve.fi to swap between tokenized USD (USDC) and tokenized EURO (EURS) with minimal slippage and fees, all permissionless, all freely accessible. As a sibling comment noted, this is hypothetical usage, and a future 'promise,' not actual usable by or providing value to the a…

Bad UX in early technology is kind of expected, isn't it?

I'm sure lots of first-world, college-educated people were equally bewildered by email in 1995.

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