Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

vitalik.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 465 posts

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#201

Post by DSingularity »

jeremycarter wrote: post #20
DSingularity wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a network supporting both a decentralized data-store with a consistent view into valuable data and an a distributed computer with consistent results. What is so hard about this?

Yes but what problem is it trying to solve? It's a solution to a non existent problem.

Okay, decentralized currency is one idea. This can be used to implement some money with a monetary policy that is transparent and modified through consensus: eg bitcoin - deflationary via finite supply. Multi-party wallet is another. With this, cryptographic signatures from a majority of the owners is required to transfer currency/digital assets. Non-fungible tokens is another. This can be used to — as an example — publish land deeds and property deeds online and make them easily transferred as opposed to the current systems which are not fool-proof and are not as user friendly (look at selling a house and how expensive it is for no good reason). Or what about decentralized finance? A user can literally borrow money against Bitcoin without the need of an authority which can discriminate against him for no good reason. How nice is it that we can now operate such systems that are robust to censorship.

But you will just dismiss all these ideas. Same way people dismissed all the ideas people were imagining when the internet is young.

If you want to broaden your mind— just detach the idea of blockchain from the price of Bitcoin. Yes, it’s insane to the point of being obscene.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#202

Post by atweiden »

vehementi wrote: post #136
noofen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As anyone who was around to see the advent of “crypto TA” c. 2012 can attest, TA in the Bitcoin space started out as quantitative-themed narrative pumping, and it remains so to this very day. Crypto TA chartists self-promote and advertise coins in a furtive attempt to bolster speculation. They can then point to “trading volume” and speculation-fueled transactions to further boost perceptions of credibility — “$X zillion dollars were settled on this blockchain I’m invested in”.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#203

Post by CryptoPunk »

gricardo99 wrote: post #151
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…

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.

Capital flows are massively rising without this centralized KYC/AML/CTF system of gatekeeping, tracking and surveillance:

https://money-movers.info/

The emerging surveillance system in the traditional finance system, with the creation of FinCEN in the US in 1990, and FinTRAC in Canada in 2000, is massively centralizing power and can exacerbate financial exclusion:

https://reddit.com/r/MakerDAO/comments/de0sys/kyc_is_absolut...

The existence of crime and terrorism does not justify warrantless mass-surveillance. People in a free society have a right to privacy, including in their financial transactions, even if that privacy may facilitate some criminal activity they may choose to engage in.

Absent a criminal conviction, or at least a court's ruling that there is probable cause, they should be presumed innocent and secure in their right to privacy, not presumed suspect, and obligated to disclose private data as a condition for being permitted to engage in interactions with other private citizens.

Beyond this consideration for basic human rights and the foundations of a free society, by some accounts, KYC is the most ineffective policy experiment in history:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#204

Post by qeternity »

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…

Have you tried to convert currency these days? I do it on my credit card for 0% at the Reuters fix window. If you actually go through your process above, it is so much more expensive.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#205

Post by idlewords »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #199
idlewords wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People use Ethereum.. https://etherscan.io/chart/gasused

They use it to speculate. In the words of Mark Cuban, "Traders borrow to buy Eth, used eth to borrow alt/stable coin, used that to LP a high APY Pair, took the SLPs and staked them to maxout yield."

Whatever that means, this is the world they're building.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#206

Post by puranjay »

jeremycarter wrote: post #190
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…

I can see where you're coming from. It is an opinion I have from privilege - I don't live a privileged life but I don't struggle either (middle income bracket). After reading your use cases I do have empathy for people in those situations, where governments and centralized agencies are corrupt etc - just not entirely sure this solves any of that.

man even if you're not a believer in the utility of it all, simply participating in crypto right now is loads of fun. Its a weird space where finance and culture and tech and design come together. For every fraudster, there are 10 people who are genuinely excited about this space and have a true hacker spirit.

I haven't seen that kind of energy on the web in years - so much of it is cleaned up and coporatized. Crypto is still wild and interesting and fun.

You can even consider entering it purely as a hobby - that's how I did, and ended up talking to developers about, say, creating undercollateralized synthetic assets that hold peg to their real world assets by constricting/increasing asset supply at timed intervals.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#207

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#208

Post by qeternity »

seibelj wrote: post #171
Judgmentality wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Curve is just leverage for speculation: deposit token A, withdraw token B, earn the appreciation on both token A and B. Speculation is still the only use case.

DeFi provides absolutely nothing novel. Nobody said it wasn’t used. They asked for a non speculative, “real” use case.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#209

Post by SubiculumCode »

atweiden wrote: post #193
SubiculumCode wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is why scaling solutions like Polygon have a future if Ethereum has a future.

That’s just a narrative, though. The practical reality is cryptocurrency valuation is driven by these narratives 100%. The other practical reality is the people pretending as if this reality doesn’t exist are increasingly perceived to be engaged in biased sophistry. Granted, low information people are still falling for it, but high information people increasingly aren’t, as evidenced by Ethereum failing to get even 3…

I really don't know what you are talking about. ETH hit its all time high a few weeks ago (May 10th) both in terms of USD and BTC. Its still double it's ATH from its peak in 2018, before the crypto crash.

As to your other ramblings, mere snobbish tripe meant to demean and belittle those that disagree with your opinion. In other words, yours is a low information post.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#210

Post by kaladin_1 »

puranjay wrote: post #177
idlewords wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> Nigerian central bank banned crypto recently

The Nigerian central actually prohibited banks from facilitating or participating in crypto based transactions. You can still trade legally however you want.

Post reply on HN