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The Problem with Ethereum

tomerstrolight.medium.com

131–140 of 321 posts

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#131
Miners are most definitely not the working class and they're not doing any useful work. This sounds harsh because most individual miners aren't hostile in any way - but if miners were a one entity, there would be no exaggeration at all.

Collectively, paying miners is like paying the mob to not destroy the system, as they are only group with the power to do so. Without miners at all attacks would be impossible. 51% attacks on ETC show that the threat is real.

The working class are users - people using and building on ethereum. Their wealth is continuously drained by the mob, but there is hope - a wall staffed by militia is being slowly erected. It's called proof of stake, and once finished, the mob can finally be told to fuck off. In the meantime the absolute value of protection money paid to the mob has grown several times, making it possible to reduce the protection payments percentage rate without impacting security of the people.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#132
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right... and who will be buying and using this money?

People who need fast, cheap, safe transactions rather than a value store.

If a VanishingCoin will lose half its value in a week, and I buy and sell it in a second, using it as a fast cheap safe transaction, then my cost will be at least equal to (1/2)^(1 sec/1 week) of the transaction. VanishingCoin will be outcompeted by SteadyCoin, which is just as fast, cheap and safe, and doesn't lose its value.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#133
I would imagine most Ethereum miners are pretty well off by now, so the "working class" analogy is really off.

Also "the ruling class" can not really force their rules on others.

Everybody participating in cryptocoins right now is hopefully aware that it is an experiment with uncertain outcomes. So the "promises were broken" thing doesn't really convince me, either. I don't think the users of Ethereum were promised a finished product.

"Code is law" also only applies if people accept the law. In the DAO case, people decided to change the law, or stick to Ethereum classic.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#134
> No moral questions are seriously considered about whether changing this rule is a breach of the promise made at the time of the constitution of the community.

This is patently untrue. These questions literally split the community. The majority chose a direction and moved on.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a bad thing? Maybe that's how systems become more efficient.

Depends on which side you're on. The big smart may again take advantage of the rest.

The eternal challenge - improving efficiency in systems while ensuring that those efficiency gains are fairly distributed among participants...

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#136
A lot of comments here criticise the analogies made in the post. While the criticism might be correct, I feel this is like missing the forest because of the trees..

Etherium, and most crypto-currencies for that matter, were initially made to fix a broken financial system, where banks unjustly control too much wealth, and changes the rules so that they will always control too much wealth.

Etherium does not fix this, it merely copies this system, with all its flaws(and some new ones). That is why etherium is pointless. It does not provide value to society, as it utterly fails to solve the problem it identified.

There is no other crypto-currency that does solve this problem, but then I guess some of them never tried to in the first place.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#137

Seems like one of the core arguments of this is that the the core devs have pushed the difficulty bomb multiple times because they've missed their original timelines for switching to PoS without any repercussions. It seems to me that this is actually the correct thing to do. I'd rather the core devs take their time and iron out the issues instead of being incentivized to play fast and loose with a system that manages…

Why have this fake deadline at all then? That sounds like it is playing fast and loose with the system, since it practically requires a nontrivial action to postpone.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#139
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Ethereum's development isn't a simple project that can be rushed, it's massively complicated. This road map comes to mind: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/133392262085774540... It's very outdated now, that's not the point. The point is that every circle on the road map is a very complicated project in and of itself that needs tons of research, development and testing to be implemented properly. Just t…

Absolutely, not to mention Eth just rolled out a major update last week. This rambling, bizarre article boils down to a few very basic, extremely played out arguments. Argument 1: Proof of stake concentrates wealth more than proof of work. You can make that argument, but POS advocates have for a long time argued that proof of work mining has more economies of scale than proof of stake and therefore the opposite is ac…

I'll preface that I somewhat dislike how Ethereum has established their PoS consensus. The lack of first class support for delegated staking poses a problem IMHO as it requires handing control of your coins over to a third party considering this is the only option for people without 32ETH(102k USD) that they can tie up. I also have opinions on locking periods but until we see some extended battle tests proving where the sweet spot is (I'm for no-lock staking personally), I won't consider this a major issue. These aren't criticism of PoS itself but rather critiques of this particular implementation.

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Now that that is out of the way, I don't necessarily believe that Argument 1 is inherently true (I know you aren't necessarily supporting it but I figured I'd throw my 2p in).

Ultimately Proof of Stake is just moving from a system with an external resource to one with an internal resource. This theoretically allows you to largely divorce the system from the harsh realities of the outside world (whose rules those external resources are bound to). By isolating the system you can better structure the rules of the game (from a game theory perspective) without being influenced or bound to rules from the outside system. Of course this isolation is only as strong as the network (larger market cap makes attacks harder) but generally once the network reaches scale it is largely independent of the outside world.

How a system influences the distribution of wealth ultimately depends on those rules in the system and by PoS largely granting the system the ability to decide those rules for itself, you can theoretically design a system with an expected steady state at or around the middle class at which the system can help lift those with less wealth up and weigh those with more wealth down. Balance it incorrectly and you run into issues one way (concentration of wealth) or another (lack of staking support opening up risks for attack) but theoretically it can be done right.

One of the key features of that balance is that wealth is worth the same whether it is held by many people or one person. It should be just as viable for a thousand people to lend 100 dollars as it is for a firm or wealthy individual to lend 100k with both groups exposed to the same amount of risk all other things the same.

Various mechanisms of the network including staking (including delegation), access to a democratically controlled treasury, first class support for governance primitives, and other such features are essential for making such a system work. Proof of Stake on its own may generally provide an accrual of wealth but in combination with the other forces on the network it should be perfectly viable to create a network that promotes distribution towards a reasonable steady state (with deviations due to merit of the individuals or just outright luck and not maintaining such deviations long term).

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/rant

I'm generally pretty cynical but no matter how hard I dig into it, I can't find a reason why PoS shouldn't be one of the last pieces of the puzzle to produce such a system and if it's even just a chance I think it's exceptionally valuable that we pursue it. Or maybe I'm just a crazy Crypto-LibSoc. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#140
post #12

I emphasize with the arguments here but I differ in my conclusion for two reasons. 1. I don't own just Ethereum, its not a boat that I'm riding in, its one of many gambles I'm making. 2. The Ethereum network has generated a ton of really good stuff (Smart Contracts, DEFI, NFTS, IPFS, ENS, etc) despite whatever governance problems it has. Cryptocurrencies are far from mature. There is no guarantee eth and btc will sti…

Even when gambling, I don't gamble on a crooked table.
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