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Ethereum Has Issues

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Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#121

Post by anyfoo »

thebean11 wrote: post #71
cuteboy19 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In DeFi to take out a loan of $100 you need to have collateral worth $200 or more. If the value of the collateral ever goes below $200 then it is immediately autosold. Moreover the collateral has to be on the blockchain as well, so concrete assets like houses cannot be used for this purpose. The main issue with insurance is actually assessment. All smart contracts do is replace execution, which was never a hassle to…

For sure, DeFi loans aren't practical at the moment (for anything but speculation), and may never be practical for something like a mortgage or even a credit card. I still find it pretty mind blowing that an algorithm can loan me money. For insurance I don't agree. Something basic like weather insurance (widely used in agriculture) is already possible. The hardest part is getting the weather information onchain in a…

> I still find it pretty mind blowing that an algorithm can loan me money.

I still find it pretty mind blowing that you can make a Turing complete language with nothing but S and K combinators. Good luck finding a real world application for that, though.

Sometimes the crypto space (the part that isn't just FOMO coin buyers at least) strikes me as folks who have been looking at something technically interesting for the first time in their lives, under the initial lure of money, and haven't figured out yet that "technically interesting" does not necessarily translate into real world applicability.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#123

Post by coderintherye »

rufusroflpunch wrote: post #92

This is not directly related to the content of the post but is about Ethereum. I have been putting this hypothesis out there on twitter for a while now, looking for someone to refute me, but no one has yet. This seems like a place where I might be able to find someone who understand Ethereum enough tell my grasp of the protocol is wrong (or right): Ethereum is going deflationary. Not disinflationary like Bitcoin, but…

You assume everyone always chooses the option of highest return, however not everything in life is about opportunity cost.

I personally know two people running test stake nodes. They've spent the time setting them up, documenting, and really getting to know all the ins and outs of it because they find it interesting. They will run production nodes. You only need some X amount of people to do the same to avoid overt centralization. Then it just comes down to an argument of what is the minimum number for X where things feel properly decentralized.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#124

Post by pshc »

recursive wrote: post #99
pshc wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep seeing this "eternal six months away" FUD, but no one wants to admit the devs delivered on the Beacon Chain which has been running smoothly for 1.5 years, and the Merge testnets are working quite well. Bitcoin maximalists are out there all day grousing about made-up deadlines promised by strawmen and laundered through hearsay. It has nothing to do with reality.

I understand the arguments about how cryptocurrencies use too much electricity, but I understand none of what you've just said.

I can try to contextualize this... at least explain my understanding of the history.

Bitcoin grows popular and its proof of work burns increasing amounts of electricity. Ethereum devs do not want to see Eth go the same way, and prioritize Proof of Stake, which will not require any more waste. The devs sketch out new roadmaps, do research, and make slow but steady progress; software always takes longer than you think.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin has completely fossilized for political reasons and basically cannot be improved at this point. Bitcoin maximalists (diehards) recognize Eth as an existential threat and start pushing this meme of PoS being always 6 months away, despite the actual Eth devs never promising such things.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#125

Post by jmyeet »

thebean11 wrote: post #54
jmyeet wrote: post #51

So Crypto Andys like to hand-wave about the risk of a 51% attack but consider this: > This is in addition to the long-standing concentration of Ethereum mining power, with normally three and sometimes only two mining pools controlling over 50% of the mining power. There is further hand-waving about how Proof-of-Stake (over Proof-of-Waste) will magically fix these problems. But it's actually this PoW computing power t…

I think there's at least some value that can potentially be created. The fact that you can take out a loan or buy insurance and your counterparty is a smart contract is pretty interesting. It could seriously bring down insurance margins if you no longer have drones of people administering policies. Obviously remains to be seen how practical it is.

There are a lot of these theoretical cases but none seem likely to come to fruition anytime soon and pretty much all of them ignore this basic problem: the transactional nature of blockchains falls apart as soon as you interact with the real world.

Let me explain: you can have a smart contract where you get 5-20% of the value whenevder it's sold and that'll work and be guaranteed (assuming the network isn't compromised eg 51% attack). That is wholly continaed with the blockchain.

But what if someone wants to sell that for cash? Now you've introduced the exact same trust issues that exist in every transaction in the traditional finance system: trust in the institutions involved and the potential needs for courts to enforce contracts.

So what exactly have you gained? Nothing. Literally nothing.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#126

Post by throwaway82652 »

thebean11 wrote: post #112
danans wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The hardest part is getting the weather information onchain in a way that's trusted by the buyers and sellers of the insurance. So the hardest part is trust, the very thing that blockchains supposedly make unnecessary?

People get touchy about the word "trust" in blockchain threads. Would it help if I said that the hardest part is creating a way to get the weather data on chain that the buyer and seller can agree on ahead of time? Anyway, I'm obviously not claiming this can work without input from humans off chain. My point is that the infrastructure needed to get clean and honest weather data on to the chain (which requires human i…

>Would it help if I said that the hardest part is creating a way to get the weather data on chain that the buyer and seller can agree on ahead of time?

No, because it's still impossible to do that at scale without solving the oracle problem. Putting some arbitrary data on a chain doesn't mean the data is reliable.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#127

Post by svachalek »

rufusroflpunch wrote: post #101
pshc wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Staking pays all stakers out proportional to their stake, which is as fair as is possible, and more fair than PoW. Distributed staking pools lower the barrier to entry to 0.01 ETH. Ethereum will still be printing ETH in perpetuity; it only becomes deflationary whenever more is burned than printed.

> Staking pays all stakers out proportional to their stake, which is as fair as is possible, and more fair than PoW. Distributed staking pools lower the barrier to entry to 0.01 ETH. This doesn't change the economics of what I said, which are about opportunity cost of staking vs. spending. > Ethereum will still be printing ETH in perpetuity; it only becomes deflationary whenever more is burned than printed. I underst…

Based on current and projected usage vs staking rewards, it looks inevitable. However the rules that Ethereum operates by are not immutable. They have changed, and they will change again. So just because it looks like it will be deflationary this year, doesn't mean it will always be deflationary.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#129

Post by rsync »

bpodgursky wrote: post #55
jmyeet wrote: post #51

So Crypto Andys like to hand-wave about the risk of a 51% attack but consider this: > This is in addition to the long-standing concentration of Ethereum mining power, with normally three and sometimes only two mining pools controlling over 50% of the mining power. There is further hand-waving about how Proof-of-Stake (over Proof-of-Waste) will magically fix these problems. But it's actually this PoW computing power t…

> by getting rich by doing nothing while lauding how smart you are over other people This is exactly how I envision the dream of old world wealth you see on Downton Abbey or similar. Get born into a minor lordship somewhere in England and spend your days educating yourself (maybe leisurely publishing a book or two) and raking in tax revenue from the commoners.

"This is exactly how I envision the dream of old world wealth you see on Downton Abbey or similar."

Then you misunderstand ...

That world you're envisioning is what happens after the "getting rich".

In the case of feudalism - and its remnants - the "getting rich" involved murderous expropriation of the lands and property of anyone that got in the way by sociopaths who hoarded and coveted everything that entered their awareness.

I think it was pretty hard work, actually ...

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#130

Post by layer8 »

jmyeet wrote: post #110
jerry1979 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a Crypto Andy?

It comes from Twitch [1]. While it often refers to streamers, it has transcended that. An andy is someone who is identified by whatever adjective is applied. So a Crypto Andy is someone who is all and only about crypto, basically. Put another way: Andys are indistinguishable from each other apart from one defining characteristic. And those Andys with that characteristic are likewise indistinguishable and interchangea…

I had to laugh at the article’s example of "React Andy", which I first gave a different interpretation.
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