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Web3? I have my DAOts

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Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit - my bad, seems like the week wait is from Arbitrum to ETH. Evidently missed that when I was trying to move funds from ETH to Arb. Ah well. Really though, unless these transactions become more obfuscated crosschain this ETH ecosystem feels like an over engineered nightmare on a chain that couldn't scale. I keep hearing from ETH maximalists like you that this is the only way, while hearing it does not have to be…

Ok let's talk about some ethereum competitors. Take Solana for example. It takes a powerful computer with 128gb+ of RAM just to run a Solana node. You can run the ETH software on a raspberry pi. High hardware requirements means fewer people can afford to join the network. This makes Solana more centralized. They also do some sketchy things. For example, in proof-of-stake algorithms the nodes vote on the next block. S…

Thanks for writing up these viewpoints of different chains. I haven't had the chance to check out Cardano, Algorand, or Polkadot, but in regards to the downsides of Solana vs Ethereum, I'll state why I personally am choosing to create applications on Solana compared to something on the Ethereum ecosystem (despite me really liking the tooling that some projects like The Graph provide) -

I'm an applications developer - to me the most important things are lessened complexity, performance, and usability. You can certainly use chains like Polygon, which I might do in the future. However, from my viewpoint, the more complex the ecosystem becomes, the less likely it is to achieve widescale adoption unless there is a lot of masking of the underlying complexities. I've been interested in crypto for years, and been in the space as an engineer for about 6 months, and cannot keep up with how complex the Ethereum ecosystem has grown and how these chains scale. If I cannot keep up, there is no way I can expect for people who've never even touched crypto to be able to wrap their heads around it. I do know that there are efforts to mask crosschain EVM interactions, and personally haven't tried them out too much yet beyond standalone bridges like Synapse. If these projects work out and a year or two from now the ecosystem's complexities are masked, that is fantastic.

For me, I will happily take the tradeoff of making it more difficult / costly to become a validator (in the case of Solana), with the huge performance improvements it provides compared to EVM. While the cost of hardware does mean it is more centralized to entities that can afford to run a Solana validator, to me it is not a concern. It's still decentralized, albeit not as much as Ethereum. I was skeptical of Solana at first until I used it as an end user and am quite happy with the experience, there's a gigantic difference between a 1-5 second transaction time vs 30s - 1 minute (or higher, if you submit a transaction while there's a sudden dip in gas price). I've had transactions stuck on ethereum for an hour and a half because the gas price metamask suggested was too low, there was a 5 minute window I submitted my transaction where the average gas price was super low. Same with Polygon, I've had a transaction stuck in a processing queue for half an hour.

These interactions to me have driven me to look into non-EVM solutions because it truly leaves a bad taste to have to wait helplessly on ETH to process these transactions. Hence, Solana's throughput and promises that they will not need to rely on L2 solutions to achieve scalability (whether that is true is to be tested by time I suppose) are incredibly attractive. It being down for a day was bad, yes, but the mainnet has only been live since last year and is still in beta, and has only happened once to my knowledge. I will still take that downtime given the incredible performance the chain provides. And if it is true that Solana will not require L2 solutions to scale in the same way ETH has, then it's even more attractive to me as an app dev. I think it's likely to be a lot easier to convince the average person to use a platform like this, compared to a complex ecosystem which is multichain only to allow for scalability.

I definitely understand that to a lot of people, decentralization in ETH is the number one driver. However, I do want to emphasize there are certainly reasons to use a chain like Solana, despite having a lessened degree of decentralization.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#622
There are lots of points in the article challenging smart contracts because they need a social contract. Ethereum community also understands that social contract > smart contract. See below:

From Vitalik https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html:

"...What's going on here is a pattern of a similar type to what we saw with the not-yet-issued Bitcoin and Ethereum coin rewards: the coins were ultimately owned not by a cryptographic key, but by some kind of social contract."

"...Once again, millions of dollars of value are being controlled and allocated, not by individuals or cryptographic keys, but by social conceptions of legitimacy."

So the point is a bit moot, money is not flowing to web3 because of immutability per se. For most venture capital, mainly it is an effort to create a levelled playing field for startups –"decentralized x" etc. For retail investors, highly volatile, information symmetric (perceived) assets.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was most likely this computer scientist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scienti...

Hal Finney was not Satoshi, and there's not a single shred of evidence in that wiki article pointing towards him. Instead it's just his grieving family being traumatized by scammers.

The evidence is circumstantial but not conclusive.

Did Finney ever explain how he came to be the recipient of the first ever Bitcoin transaction if he wasn't Satoshi?

Who do you think is Satoshi, if not Finney?

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hal Finney was not Satoshi, and there's not a single shred of evidence in that wiki article pointing towards him. Instead it's just his grieving family being traumatized by scammers.

The evidence is circumstantial but not conclusive. Did Finney ever explain how he came to be the recipient of the first ever Bitcoin transaction if he wasn't Satoshi? Who do you think is Satoshi, if not Finney?

There is nothing to explain, it is public knowledge. The transaction you mention happened after the public announcement of bitcoin on a mailing list which Hal Finney was active on, and after Satoshi reached out directly to Hal (and others).

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#625

There are lots of points in the article challenging smart contracts because they need a social contract. Ethereum community also understands that social contract > smart contract. See below: From Vitalik https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html : "...What's going on here is a pattern of a similar type to what we saw with the not-yet-issued Bitcoin and Ethereum coin rewards: the coins were ultimately owne…

Could you expand on the VC part please? What is their exact interest here?

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d rather get paid in dollars than in JSON metadata and JPGs of apes.

what about getting paid in BTC?

Around 2017, someone asked me if they could pay ~$22 in BTC. I've not touched it since. Percentage wise, it is my best investment ever by a wide margin.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#627
post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm having an honest discussion. You have accused me of being "a gullible idiot", "pompous" and of using "marketing buzzwords" (which words?). You come across as being very emotionally attached to your negative opinion of the space. Value can be transferred between programs through Ethereum. The tokens you mentioned have value, because people are willing to exchange them for money. So it's not an inaccurate statement…

Don't twist my words, I never said that you were a gullible idiot. I said that using the term "transferring value" is inaccurate and pompous, and that you are using marketing buzzwords. And I stand by that, "transferring value" is an example of a marketing buzzword. It's not a descriptive term, because what is being transferred is digital tokens, which may or may not have value. Whether they have value is irrelevant…

If it helps you can read 'transferring value' to 'transferring digital tokens which have value on the market', the distinction is irrelevant to the point.

> Whether they have value is irrelevant as far as the technology itself is concerned.

I'd argue that it's not irrelevant. The whole point of the technology is, at risk of more 'marketing buzzwords', a decentralised way of moving value around (moving digitised tokens which have value on the market, around).

I had a look at your post/comment history. It's almost exclusively cryptocurrency focussed. I'm curious why you spend so much time discussing a technology you clearly don't think has a future.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#628
post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anything about anything, but I see Wikipedia says Tether is 65% "backed by commercial paper". Which as far as I can tell basically means IOUs, but IOUs that are considered somewhat legit. It definitely seems questionable, but I'm not really sure how to assess how bad it is or isn't. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_(cryptocurrency) Edit: I see elsewhere somebody saying "nobody in the commercial pa…

Their commercial paper would make them one of the largest players in the global market if their numbers were true, but nobody knows what they have invested in, they say it is in crypto as well (eek!), they've been found guilty of fraud multiple times, including faking assets by using temporary bank transfers, and the amounts we're talking about make it very hard to believe they could function at that scale without ma…

USDC? and BUSD have been growing faster and are US regulated.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is completely unrelated to tether. Bitcoin is highly decentralised. Bitcoin is not moving to PoS. I'm not sure what your actual gripe is, but you certainly have no idea what you're talking about.

Bitcoin is absolutely related to tether. Tether mints a billion coins and then exchanges them for bitcoin, voila, bitcoin price goes up.

USDT: $77B USDC, 41 + BUSD 14, + TUSD 1.2 + PAX 1 = $57B and growing faster and follow US regulations.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#630
post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't twist my words, I never said that you were a gullible idiot. I said that using the term "transferring value" is inaccurate and pompous, and that you are using marketing buzzwords. And I stand by that, "transferring value" is an example of a marketing buzzword. It's not a descriptive term, because what is being transferred is digital tokens, which may or may not have value. Whether they have value is irrelevant…

If it helps you can read 'transferring value' to 'transferring digital tokens which have value on the market', the distinction is irrelevant to the point. > Whether they have value is irrelevant as far as the technology itself is concerned. I'd argue that it's not irrelevant. The whole point of the technology is, at risk of more 'marketing buzzwords', a decentralised way of moving value around (moving digitised token…

It is irrelevant. An automobile engineer would not describe a truck as a "vehicle that transports value", despite the fact that most of the time trucks are used to transport valuable things. It's ridiculous. Nobody in finance refers to financial assets as "value" either.

Why are my comments focused on cryptocurrency? Because I like to discuss cryptocurrencies. I have thought a lot about them, and I think it's an interesting phenomenon from an sociological point of view. Plus, I like arguing with people who I think are wrong.

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