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Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies

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Re: Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies

#131

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the onus is not on me to hand-deliver you information. I'm just here to say OP is wrong, speaking emotionally/egotistically, and spreading trite arguments that have been debunked time and time again. Go ahead and google "L2 ethereum" and "ethereum proof-of-staking migration". If you want to dive deep into the ecosystem it's all in plain sight for you to do so. There is a lot going behind the scenes and I simply don't…

Let me just preface this by saying that I'm not anti-crypto. From what little I know about it, it's an interesting tech. I just literally don't understand _why_ people use it. So I dug in to what you mentioned. Layer 2 Rollups > Layer 2 is a collective term for solutions designed to help scale your application by handling transactions off the Ethereum mainnet (layer 1), while taking advantage of the robust decentrali…

check out some of the DeFi projects for more hands-on applications (they all have githubs too):

Sushi, yearn, aave.

Right now with the current function invocation costs, ethereum ecosystem cannot support meaningful apps outside of trustless banks which is why L2 is extremely important. It's going to unclog a massive drain if done right.

Re: Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies

#132
post #81

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> Most the bottlenecks right now to why you don't have day-to-day apps deployed on ecosystems like ethereum is because of the gas prices. You have hundreds of very intelligent developers working to decrease this to fractions of a cent. But I can deploy an app on AWS for fractions of a cent right now. What does Ethereum do?

no you cannot deploy an uber-like taxi app on AWS for fractions of a cent. More like billions of dollars and thousands of employees plus regulations. It's not just about the deployment infrastructure, it's also about the actual vendor-client interaction and the cost of running the service, and where the incentives are.

So does Ethereum let me run an uber-like taxi app for fractions of a cent and not pay my employees? How does it do that?

Re: Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies

#134

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Sure, but that means any estimate on clean/dirty energy usage is harder to make now.

If BTC uses clean energy, someone else has to use the dirty energy because BTC took the renewable they could have used. Mining has also driven up costs for communities that had cheap renewables. BTC is a waste of energy because it doesn't do any of the things it claims to do. It's highly centralized, far more wealth imbalance, and trending towards custodial accounts if it ever wants to reach mass adoption.

That would depend on where the financial motivation to produce renewable energy is coming from.

A logical argument could be made that bitcoin encourages the production and advancment of green energy technologies by rewarding such efforts with wealth generation.

Re: Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies

#135
post #119
post #88

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What has been built on Blockchain? Specifically I'm looking for examples of things that solve a problem that couldn't be solved without Blockchain, or at least were unsolved before.

Portable assets is one. You can buy and NFT on one market, use it within a game, display it in your virtual home, then sell it on a different market. Blockchain allows individuals to actually own digital assets. (Whether those digital assets are valued correctly is a totally separate discussion - personally I think there are many that are grossly overvalued...) World of warcraft items, amazon video or ebook purchases…

> You can buy and NFT on one market, use it within a game, display it in your virtual home

Where can I do that? I don't have a virtual home, how can I get one?

Re: Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies

#136

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I'm not OP but this doesn't seem to answer the question. You presented a lot of speculation and mentioned two things that I've never heard of

Proof-of-stake is a strategy being used to make some cryptocurrencies more environmentally friendly. Instead of using lots of compute to compete create new bitcoins, cryptocurrencies using proof-of-stake, like Ethereum 2.0, dole out new coins to people relative to the amount of the currency they already own. Proof-of-stake uses orders of magnitude less compute than proof-of-work, so it's far more environmentally frie…

> cryptocurrencies using proof-of-stake, like Ethereum 2.0, dole out new coins to people relative to the amount of the currency they already own

Doesn't this mean that those who don't have the funds to be able to safely stake their coins see their balance depreciate as the incoming coins go to people who have the ability to stake their wealth, implying that the most efficient way to use the system is to concentrate wealth?

The goal of proof-of-work is to prevent supermajorities from taking over the chain's verification by turning verification into a lottery of labor. Proof of stake doesn't seem like it solves that problem.

Re: Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no you cannot deploy an uber-like taxi app on AWS for fractions of a cent. More like billions of dollars and thousands of employees plus regulations. It's not just about the deployment infrastructure, it's also about the actual vendor-client interaction and the cost of running the service, and where the incentives are.

So does Ethereum let me run an uber-like taxi app for fractions of a cent and not pay my employees? How does it do that?

I think you fundamentally don't understand what Ethereum is trying to do if you are thinking like this. I suggest you read the documentation and learn about what the infrastructure actually allows you to do.

Ethereum will allow you to deploy a smart contract that enables taxi drivers to provide that service to taxi customers. You do not have any employees and rather the taxi drivers will decide whether they wish to use your contract or not.

For making money: you can create a token which allows holders to have shareholder rights. You create a governance board to which the token shareholders vote on matters related to the business (expansion, token buy-back protocols, etc).

You're thinking with a centralized mindset. This decentralizes the service so it's driven by the community rather than a company. No one has employees.

So the service itself runs for pretty much free, and the consumer only pays overhead of staking and any programmatically added fees (which is going to be much, much less overhead than Uber carries).

Re: Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies

#138

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You are on YC's forum! I suggest you learn how the price of a product or service changes based on regulation, cost of employees, the amount of money a business owes in loans, basic stuff! More overhead adds to the cost. A smart contract infrastructure will not have zero overhead, but it will be close to it. Much less than a centralized service provider. There is no "middlemen" but more just one "middleman" which is t…

The miners who charge fees to process transactions, are they not middlemen? Centralized processors have infra costs, perhaps they have found a good price point already You could also be more respectful if you are on HN

yes you are right, but still:

(staking fees && smart contract fees) <<< (overhead of running a multi-billion dollar corporation)

Re: Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The miners who charge fees to process transactions, are they not middlemen? Centralized processors have infra costs, perhaps they have found a good price point already You could also be more respectful if you are on HN

yes you are right, but still: (staking fees && smart contract fees) <<< (overhead of running a multi-billion dollar corporation)

You're still missing a bunch of other skims off the top in crypto.

You are incorrect to make that logical jump since anything crypto is still very early stage and has yet to produce viable, long term business models

Note that hiring devs in crypto is more expensive than other industries, due to its bad rap. There is no amount of money that could get me to work in crypto

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