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Ethereum Has Issues

blog.dshr.org

171–180 of 377 posts

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#171
post #5

This article goes off the rails for me with this statement: > Their starting point was the observation that Ethereum "smart contract" execution is order-dependent within a block, unlike transaction execution in Bitcoin and similar systems: ... First, Bitcoin runs smart contracts [1]. The lie to the contrary has seeped into almost every discussion of Bitcoin vs. Ethereum, and this author appears to have taken the bait…

You're citing bitcoin sv? Is this a joke?

No, it's a mistake by me and should be changed [1]. The link I got was, strangely, the first for the search I ran. I was in a hurry and didn't double-check. BSV is a scam. It appears I can no longer edit the post. Oh well.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#172
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It could seriously bring down insurance margins if you no longer have drones of people administering policies. Instead you might a bunch of people with zero actuarial experience gambling on policies. I agree, the concept is interesting, no regulation makes everything a crapshoot.

That seems like an insanely good opportunity for people with actual actuarial expertise to profit off any retail investors/gamblers in the market btw. That seems like a market that would professionalize extremely fast.

>That seems like an insanely good opportunity for people with actual ~actuarial~ expertise to profit off any retail investors/gamblers in the market btw.

https://protos.com/tether-papers-crypto-stablecoin-usdt-inve...

If only you knew...

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#173
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.

> The fact that you can take out a loan

Why would any rational actor provide a loan denominated upon an insanely volatile "currency" like bitcoin or ethereum? The lender could loan 100 ethereum bux only to lose big time because the price of ethereum went up 10x in a week making the amount repaid worthless. Or it could go down, in which case the borrower would wind up defaulting because who would want to pay back 10x more than they were lent?

Lending requires a pretty stable currency...

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are actually some insane advancements coming out in the form of zero-knowledge order books, Dusk Network being the most well known. It essentially removes frontrunning as a possibility because buyers and sellers are matched using ZK proofs, but are not able to see any orders before they are matched.

That sounds good for any kind of HFT platform matching buyers and sellers. I don't see how that is an "insane advancement" or has anything to do with blockchains.

Because the miner wouldn't be able to see the order book?..

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds good for any kind of HFT platform matching buyers and sellers. I don't see how that is an "insane advancement" or has anything to do with blockchains.

Because the miner wouldn't be able to see the order book?..

Sure, if you care about HFT you probably want the same guarantee to apply to any market maker, not just ones who operate on blockchains. Unless I missed something here.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#176

Without regulation, the marketplace --- any marketplace --- becomes a platform for scams and extortion. Show me a marketplace without regulation and I will show you a marketplace best avoided if possible.

Show me a regulated marketplace and I'll show you regulations put in place by big players to weed out the competition.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#177

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…

the premise that it will be deflationary forever isn't right. It can't be and it will find an equilibrium or even become inflationary again as dynamics around the burn and staking play out.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#178
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Why don't you respond to the insurance part of my argument? Like I said, I think that's more immediately useful.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#179

Have to agree. Just curios what happens to the whole thing if Ethereum switches to POS.

I don't think Ethereum will ever switch. The miners control the chain now, POS will disrupt that. The miners can't make an orderly exit of resources or to a new coin so they will persist on the dominant PoW-Eth while PoS-Eth loses all chain resources.

"If all miners do not make the switch to Proof of Stake, then there is the danger that ethereum’s blockchain might fork. A similar situation occurred in 2017, when bitcoin miners forced a fork in its blockchain by throwing their weight behind bitcoin cash. Ethereum’s founders, however, foresaw such an eventuality and programmed its blockchain to incorporate increases in difficulty levels for its mining algorithm"

https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-ethereums-difficulty-...

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#180
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.

Is Ethereum PoS yet? Simple Yes or No. That's what people are complaining about they are years behind on what they promised.

What’s New in Eth2 is a biweekly newsletter that's a good resource for tracking progress toward PoS:

https://hackmd.io/@benjaminion/eth2_news

From the current edition:

   Go/no-go decision on doing the Merge or postponing the difficulty bomb to be discussed on the 29th of April [2022] ACD call.
   
   If it’s "go" then start merging the existing testnets at 2 week intervals with a view to doing the real thing in July [2022].
ACD call == AllCoreDevs meeting. Here's a summary of the most recent one (includes a link to a recording of the call):

https://github.com/ethereum/pm/blob/master/AllCoreDevs-Meeti...

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